Amerikaanse verkiezingen # 56

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"Mike Thompson has been a baaaaaad boy. We all said no to the bailout, but Thompson backed Bush. Just like he did with the Patriot act, uhhhhhh, vote YESSSSSSSSS! for Zane."

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(...)
I take the credit or the blame for the statement that went out today. The unpaid staffer who recorded and submitted the message may have been a little overly enthusiastic in the delivery, but I believe it is good to get enthusiasm back into politics.
(...)

http://www.huffingtonpost(...)e-laun_n_138193.html

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Two women walk out of John McCain’s Mid-West headquarters carrying a pile of voter canvassing sheets, one sports a baseball hat declaring her a “team leader” of the Republican campaign. And both are black — an unusual sight in an election where Barack Obama’s support among African Americans is almost monolithic.

Are they volunteers? They look at each other sheepishly. “Not exactly,” replies one. “We work for an employment agency,” says the other. Who are they voting for? “I don’t want to say,” says the first woman. “Obama — of course!” whispers the braver of the pair.

They laugh, then look over their shoulders at the office behind them. “Don’t give him your name, he’ll put it in the paper,” says the cautious one, explaining that they cannot afford to lose their $10-an-hour (£6) jobs. “This is embarrassing. We’re doing this because we have to live. At least none of our friends can see us. We’re from Chicago — like Obama.”

(...)

http://www.timesonline.co(...)s/article5019585.ece

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Republikeinen likken nu al wonden



ACHTERGROND, Van onze correspondent Philippe Remarque
gepubliceerd op 27 oktober 2008 04:59, bijgewerkt op 27 oktober 2008 11:45

WASHINGTON - Acht dagen voor de Amerikaanse presidentsverkiezingen wordt het Republikeinse kamp geplaagd door desertie. Ook is er een onderlinge strijd losgebarsten over wat er fout is gegaan in de campagne.

Op televisie verschijnen na Colin Powell nu ook andere Republikeinen die Barack Obama aanprijzen. Zoals William Weld, ex-gouverneur van Massachusetts: ‘Senator Obama is een once-in-a-lifetime-kandidaat die onze politiek zal transformeren en Amerika’s reputatie in de wereld zal herstellen.’

Ex-gouverneur van Minnesota Arne Carlson denkt dat Obama ‘de potentie heeft een waarlijk grote president te worden’. Hij bekritiseert de keuze voor running mate Sarah Palin, en de ‘oppervlakkige campagne, gebaseerd op angst en verdachtmaking die eruit voort is gekomen’.

Havik
De veteraan en defensie-havik Ken Adelman vindt dat John McCain zijn twee belangrijkste pluspunten – ervaring en het vooropstellen van het landsbelang – door Palin onbruikbaar heeft gemaakt. McCain was tijdens de economische crisis volgens hem ‘stormachtig, inconsistent en onvoorzichtig, op het einde gewoon maf’.

Terwijl president George W. Bush en zijn vrouw Laura hun stem afgelopen week vervroegd uitbrachten op John McCain, vertelde Bush’ afvallige ex-perssecretaris Scott McClellan dat hij op Obama gaat stemmen omdat die Washington kan veranderen.

Op 4 november vinden ook verkiezingen plaats voor het Huis van Afgevaardigden en voor een deel van de Senaat. De Republikeinse kandidaten voor die zetels beginnen zich te distantiëren van presidentskandidaat McCain.

Hun laatste argument is dat er geen één-partijregering in Washington mag ontstaan. In televisiespotjes waarschuwt Elizabeth Dole, een senator die haar zetel dreigt te verliezen, dat de Democraten een ‘blanco cheque’ krijgen als haar opponent wint.

Defaitisme
In het McCain-kamp wordt intussen tegen defaitisme gestreden. Campagnestrateeg Steve Schmidt hield twee weken geleden zijn medewerkers op het McCain-hoofdkwartier voor dat je geen verliezer bent als je strijdt voor iets dat mislukt. ‘Een verliezer ben je pas als je in een foetus-houding gaat liggen bij tegenslag en opgeeft voordat alles voorbij is.’

Maar volgens het goed geïnformeerde Politico.com wordt op het hoofdkwartier in de verleden tijd over de campagne gesproken. Een Republikein in het bedrijfsleven meldt dat hij al telefoontjes en cv’s van McCain-medewerkers krijgt.

En de verwijten vliegen over en weer – uiteraard anoniem. ‘Onze campagne voerde van de ene tactiek naar de volgende’, zegt een hoge medewerker in de New York Times. De krant biedt in een groot magazineverhaal alvast een desolate terugblik op de improvisaties van McCains campagnestaf.

Slecht geadviseerd
Sarah Palins getrouwen laten uitlekken dat ze ‘volledig verkeerd begeleid en slecht geadviseerd’ is door McCains medewerkers, die haar te veel hebben weggehouden van de media. McCain-loyalisten vuren terug: Palin stelt zich op als een ‘diva’. ‘Haar gebrek aan basiskennis van sommige belangrijke thema’s was dramatisch.’

We komen in de ‘zwartepieten-en-jezelf-positioneren-voor-de-geschiedenis-fase van de campagne’, stelt een ex-adviseur van McCain. ‘Het is nu iedereen voor zichzelf.’

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Op maandag 27 oktober 2008 21:35 schreef Fokski het volgende:
Zittende Alaska senator Stevens schuldig bevonden in corruptieproces.

http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=6088781&page=1

Zijn naam kan niet van de ballot af dus bijna zeker een Democratische senator erbij.

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Op maandag 27 oktober 2008 21:40 schreef Monidique het volgende:
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives

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Op maandag 27 oktober 2008 21:56 schreef Fokski het volgende:

[..]

Stevens is een heel sterke kandidaat. Als hij werd vrijgesproken dan zou hij gewoon gewonnen hebben. De peilingen hebben natuurlijk in het achterhoofd dat hij schuldig zou zijn. Dit zijn alle peilingen in oktober:

Ivan Moore 10/17-19/08 500 LV 45-46 +1D
DailyKos.com (D)/Research 2000 10/14-16/08 600 LV 46-48 +2D
Rasmussen 10/6/08 500 LV 49-48 +1R
Ivan Moore 10/3-6/08 500 LV 45-49 +4D

Rasmussen had Stevens licht aan de leiding. Stevens zit al 40 jaar in de senaat en heeft straten die zijn naam dragen in Alaska. Een senator is relatief veel belangrijker voor een kleine staat dan een governeur en als je dat 40 jaar vol houdt dan doe je het goed.

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If Ted Stevens refuses to resign upon his conviction, he faces expulsion, which has been extremely rare in the history of the U.S. Senate.

Only four senators have been convicted of crimes in the 200 plus years of the chamber's history.

Here's a handy backgrounder from the Senate Web site:

Expulsion:

"Article I, Section 5, of the United States Constitution provides that "Each House [of Congress] may determine the Rules of its proceedings, punish its members for disorderly behavior, and, with the concurrence of two-thirds, expel a member."

Since 1789, the Senate has expelled only 15 of its entire membership. Of that number, fourteen were charged with support of the Confederacy during the Civil War. In several other cases, the Senate considered expulsion proceedings but either found the member not guilty or failed to act before the member left office. In those cases, corruption was the primary cause of complaint."

In the entire course of the Senate's history, only four members have been convicted of crimes. They were: Joseph R. Burton (1905), John Hipple Mitchell (1905), Truman H. Newberry (1920), and Harrison Williams (1981). Newberry's conviction was later overturned. Mitchell died. Burton, Newberry, and Williams resigned before the Senate could act on their expulsion."

http://www.politico.com/b(...)expulsion_rules.html

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Op maandag 27 oktober 2008 22:23 schreef Caesu het volgende:

Series of Tubes

die gaan ze wel missen in de senaat.
Stevens was namelijk de internet-expert daar.

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Hagel: Palin "Arguably The Thinnest-Résumé Candidate" For VP In U.S. History

In early June, Senators Chuck Hagel and John McCain met in Hagel's office on Capitol Hill. McCain, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, considered Hagel--a fellow-Republican and the senior senator from Nebraska--among his closest friends in Congress. Six months earlier, in December, 2007, McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, had asked Hagel to endorse McCain and campaign with him in the upcoming primaries. Hagel had demurred. ...

Hagel skipped the Republican Convention, choosing instead to go, with two aides, on a fact-finding trip to Latin America. He did hear McCain's speech, which, in its evocation of the need to bridge a disabling partisan divide, echoed the theme of his discussion with McCain in their meeting in June. But, Hagel said, he's been "very disappointed" by McCain's campaign. "He gave one unifying speech and then has spent fifty million dollars to destroy his opponent."

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Dozens Of Call Center Workers Walk Off Job In Protest Rather Than Read McCain Script Attacking Obama

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Nina Williams, a stay-at-home mom in Lake County, Indiana, tells us that her daughter recently called her from her job at the center, upset that she had been asked to read a script attacking Obama for being "dangerously weak on crime," "coddling criminals," and for voting against "protecting children from danger."

Williams' daughter told her that up to 40 of her co-workers had refused to read the script, and had left the call center after supervisors told them that they would have to either read the call or leave, Williams says. The call center is called Americall, and it's located in Hobart, IN.

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"We were asked to read something saying [Obama and Democrats] were against protecting children from danger," this worker said. "I wouldn't do it. A lot of people left. They thought it was disgusting."

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Op maandag 27 oktober 2008 23:28 schreef IedeK. het volgende:
mooi stuk op nederland 2 over John McCain

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Sarah Palin's War on ScienceThe GOP ticket's appalling contempt for knowledge and learning.
By Christopher HitchensPosted Monday, Oct. 27, 2008, at 11:43 AM ET

Sarah Palin. Click image to expand.Sarah PalinIn an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and intellectual level, with both candidates pretending that tax cuts can go like peaches and cream with the staggering new levels of federal deficit, and paltry charges being traded in petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber becoming the emblematic stupidity of the campaign, it didn't seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place "in Paris, France" and winding up with a folksy "I kid you not."

It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly. Scientists of various sorts continue to find it a very useful resource, since it can be easily and plentifully "cultured" in a laboratory, has a very short generation time, and displays a great variety of mutation. This makes it useful in studying disease, and since Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh to talk about her signature "issue" of disability and special needs, she might even have had some researcher tell her that there is a Drosophila-based center for research into autism at the University of North Carolina. The fruit fly can also be a menace to American agriculture, so any financing of research into its habits and mutations is money well-spent. It's especially ridiculous and unfortunate that the governor chose to make such a fool of herself in Pittsburgh, a great city that remade itself after the decline of coal and steel into a center of high-tech medical research.
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In this case, it could be argued, Palin was not just being a fool in her own right but was following a demagogic lead set by the man who appointed her as his running mate. Sen. John McCain has made repeated use of an anti-waste and anti-pork ad (several times repeated and elaborated in his increasingly witless speeches) in which the expenditure of $3 million to study the DNA of grizzly bears in Montana was derided as "unbelievable." As an excellent article in the Feb. 8, 2008, Scientific American pointed out, there is no way to enforce the Endangered Species Act without getting some sort of estimate of numbers, and the best way of tracking and tracing the elusive grizzly is by setting up barbed-wire hair-snagging stations that painlessly take samples from the bears as they lumber by and then running the DNA samples through a laboratory. The cost is almost trivial compared with the importance of understanding this species, and I dare say the project will yield results in the measurement of other animal populations as well, but all McCain could do was be flippant and say that he wondered whether it was a "paternity" or "criminal" issue that the Fish and Wildlife Service was investigating. (Perhaps those really are the only things that he associates in his mind with DNA.)

With Palin, however, the contempt for science may be something a little more sinister than the bluff, empty-headed plain-man's philistinism of McCain. We never get a chance to ask her in detail about these things, but she is known to favor the teaching of creationism in schools (smuggling this crazy idea through customs in the innocent disguise of "teaching the argument," as if there was an argument), and so it is at least probable that she believes all creatures from humans to fruit flies were created just as they are now. This would make DNA or any other kind of research pointless, whether conducted in Paris or not. Projects such as sequencing the DNA of the flu virus, the better to inoculate against it, would not need to be funded. We could all expire happily in the name of God. Gov. Palin also says that she doesn't think humans are responsible for global warming; again, one would like to ask her whether, like some of her co-religionists, she is a "premillenial dispensationalist"—in other words, someone who believes that there is no point in protecting and preserving the natural world, since the end of days will soon be upon us.

Videos taken in the Assembly of God church in Wasilla, Alaska, which she used to attend, show her nodding as a preacher says that Alaska will be "one of the refuge states in the Last Days." For the uninitiated, this is a reference to a crackpot belief, widely held among those who brood on the "End Times," that some parts of the world will end at different times from others, and Alaska will be a big draw as the heavens darken on account of its wide open spaces. An article by Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times gives further gruesome details of the extreme Pentecostalism with which Palin has been associated in the past (perhaps moderating herself, at least in public, as a political career became more attractive). High points, also available on YouTube, show her being "anointed" by an African bishop who claims to cast out witches. The term used in the trade for this hysterical superstitious nonsense is "spiritual warfare," in which true Christian soldiers are trained to fight demons. Palin has spoken at "spiritual warfare" events as recently as June. And only last week the chiller from Wasilla spoke of "prayer warriors" in a radio interview with James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who said that he and his lovely wife, Shirley, had convened a prayer meeting to beseech that "God's perfect will be done on Nov. 4."

This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just "people of faith" but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.
klik

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Op dinsdag 28 oktober 2008 04:34 schreef Dr.Daggla het volgende:

Barack Obama: Closing Argument (Full Speech)

Iets meer dan een half uur duurt ie

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Op dinsdag 28 oktober 2008 07:18 schreef MikeyMo het volgende:
nog een weekje, ik ben heeeel erg benieuwd...

toch kan ik er niet bij dat toch nog 40% van de Amerikanen op zo'n McPalin gaan stemmen. Nog vreemder dat men Mccain gaat stemmen omdat Hilary de voorverkiezingen heeft verloren

Uiteindelijk zou het om ideeen moeten gaan, maar uiteindelijk draait het voor een boel toch nog om poppetjes

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Op dinsdag 28 oktober 2008 07:18 schreef MikeyMo het volgende:
toch kan ik er niet bij dat toch nog 40% van de Amerikanen op zo'n McPalin gaan stemmen.

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Op dinsdag 28 oktober 2008 08:18 schreef Re het volgende:
nog 1 weektje

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Op dinsdag 28 oktober 2008 08:38 schreef Caesu het volgende:
deze campagne duurde ook zo'n 22 maanden.
dus over 2 jaar zal Palin wel weer haar dingetje gaan doen hier en daar.

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Op dinsdag 28 oktober 2008 08:36 schreef Boze_Appel het volgende:

[..]

Dan zijn we eindelijk weer voor vier jaar van al dat gejankbek af.

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Op dinsdag 28 oktober 2008 08:43 schreef Montov het volgende:
Over twee jaar weer verkiezingen, en de campagnes duren twee jaar.