A diarist over on the Kos is following the story of the Baptist minister who expelled those who voted for Kerry with a little citizen journalism, specifically an interview with Deacon Lewis R. Inman. Inman and his wife left the church on Monday night along with seven other longtime members because of an attempt by Rev. Chan Chandler and 40 others to have eleven members kicked out of the church. It seems the Rev. Chandler brought in his youth brigade to get the necessary votes to push the politically incorrect believers out of the congregation:

"Monday night was a lynching," said Lewis Inman. "He [Chandler] had forty people with him, twelve adults and the rest teenagers, and said they were going to vote us eleven out. In other words, if you had voted for John Kerry for President, you were going to be voted out of the church. And he only needed a two-thirds majority to do it. I guess he thought that 40 against 11 would do it.

...
Lewis Inman made it clear that the teens and adults were new members brought in (recruited) over the last year or so by Chandler. The teens, according to Inman, were fired up and ready to expel the older eleven members. And when the nine got up and left, the teens jumped up and clapped and shouted in triumph.

At this point, the macro-trends for youth political attitudes seem to be headed in the right direction, which I like to think I've had something to do with. However, the population wave that is the follow-up to Generation-X it it's birth peak in 1990, meaning the crest of the generation's wave are teenagers now. Politically speaking, they are very much up for grabs.

Both right-wing fundimentalists and the GOP machine are cognizant of this and have poured serious resources and energy into indocrinating and organizing young Americans. The left has for many years relied on the general progressivism of popular culture to continue bringing in young people, but this is a loosing strategy, if you could even call it that.

The weakening role of mass media over popular culture has weakened MTV and Hollywood's political mojo apace. No serious, established organizations exist which seek to open up civic culture to young Americans. There are no credible "youth opinion leaders," and prominant Democratic politicians have a maddening tendency to showcase just how out of touch they are with contemporary culture(s).

I can go on like this, but hopefully you understand that the progressive tilt of my generation is fragile. It is under organized and well-funded attack from the right as well as being slowly killed from within by the creeping cynicism and nihilism that inevitably accompany an awareness of problems for which no solutions are being posed. I firmly believe in the potential of my generation to revitalize this country and set the tone for genuine progress in the 21st century, but for that to happen these twin threats must be met with a sustained campaign over the next ten years (at least).

This is another topic I will be writing more seriously about in the coming month.

A diarist over on the Kos is following the story of the Baptist minister who expelled those who voted for Kerry with a little citizen journalism, specifically an interview with Deacon Lewis R. Inman. Inman and his wife left the church on Monday night along with seven other longtime members because of an attempt by Rev. Chan Chandler and 40 others to have eleven members kicked out of the church. It seems the Rev. Chandler brought in his youth brigade to get the necessary votes to push the politically incorrect believers out of the congregation:

"Monday night was a lynching," said Lewis Inman. "He [Chandler] had forty people with him, twelve adults and the rest teenagers, and said they were going to vote us eleven out. In other words, if you had voted for John Kerry for President, you were going to be voted out of the church. And he only needed a two-thirds majority to do it. I guess he thought that 40 against 11 would do it.

...
Lewis Inman made it clear that the teens and adults were new members brought in (recruited) over the last year or so by Chandler. The teens, according to Inman, were fired up and ready to expel the older eleven members. And when the nine got up and left, the teens jumped up and clapped and shouted in triumph.

At this point, the macro-trends for youth political attitudes seem to be headed in the right direction, which I like to think I've had something to do with. However, the population wave that is the follow-up to Generation-X it it's birth peak in 1990, meaning the crest of the generation's wave are teenagers now. Politically speaking, they are very much up for grabs.

Both right-wing fundimentalists and the GOP machine are cognizant of this and have poured serious resources and energy into indocrinating and organizing young Americans. The left has for many years relied on the general progressivism of popular culture to continue bringing in young people, but this is a loosing strategy, if you could even call it that.

The weakening role of mass media over popular culture has weakened MTV and Hollywood's political mojo apace. No serious, established organizations exist which seek to open up civic culture to young Americans. There are no credible "youth opinion leaders," and prominant Democratic politicians have a maddening tendency to showcase just how out of touch they are with contemporary culture(s).

I can go on like this, but hopefully you understand that the progressive tilt of my generation is fragile. It is under organized and well-funded attack from the right as well as being slowly killed from within by the creeping cynicism and nihilism that inevitably accompany an awareness of problems for which no solutions are being posed. I firmly believe in the potential of my generation to revitalize this country and set the tone for genuine progress in the 21st century, but for that to happen these twin threats must be met with a sustained campaign over the next ten years (at least).

This is another topic I will be writing more seriously about in the coming month.

I got linked over to Robert C. Koehler, who's a columnist for the Tribune syndicate, who's written a few things about the "irregularities" in the last election and had them refused by a number of syndicating papers. Had a piece, called The silent scream of numbers, which was spiked by his home paper.

The issue of election fraud is both enormously important and complex, and it's' a shame that Progressives in America made a lot of wrong moves politically in response to what happened on November 2nd.

Koeler had one good segment in the piece he wrote:

Was the election of 2004 stolen? Thus is the question framed by those who don’t want to know the answer. Anyone who says yes is immediately a conspiracy nut, and the listener’s eyeballs roll. So let’s not ask that question.

Let’s simply ask why the lines were so long and the voting machines so few in Columbus and Cleveland and inner-city and college precincts across the country, especially in the swing states...

This would be great, if the fucking subtitle of the piece weren't "
The 2004 election was stolen — will someone please tell the media?"

I watched a lot of people who were supposed to be cool completely blow their credibility by making irresponsible, unsubstantiated and patently false claims about what happened on November 2nd. Koehler is the latest.

Which isn't to say there wasn't fraud and abuse in the last election. I believe there most certainly was. I don't think it should be legal for someone who's serving as an overseer of an election (e.g. a Secretary of State) to have any relationship -- let alone a chairmanship -- with one of the campaigns involved. It's a clear-cut conflict of interest, there's clearly solid evidence to be gathered there, and it could become a gripping drama.

As I see it there are principally three avenues of investigation to undertake. The first is, as I've said, Attacking Kenneth Blackwell and Preventing Future Conflicts of Interest by getting laws passed which prevent public servants overseeing elections from coordinating in any way with any campaign that will be contesting under their jurisdiction. Blackwell is planning on Running for Governor. He must not escape justice the way former Florida's Sec. of State Katherine Harris did. There are two clear-cut objectives: forcing Blackwell out of the Governor's race, and using that public drama to highlight the legal changes that need to be made.

The second area of opportunity is in securing the actual systems that record and count votes. We must Attack Diebold and Build A Secure Election System. The current situation is untenable: entrusting the vote to private corporations who are selling insecure products and who's ownership and management may have personal connections to various political parties is irresponsible. It's a weak link in our Democracy. There's no strong evidence that any organized electronic tampering took place in 2004, but there were glitches a-plenty, and the system was so easy to hack you could literally train monkeys to do it. Additionally, the fact that the CEO of Diebold actually said, he'd deliver Ohio's votes doesn't inspire faith in the statis quo.

Finally, a national campaign to make Same-Day Voter Registration available in every state would do a lot to mitigate most low-level forms of fraud. Same-day has also boosted participation by up to 10% in states which have adopted it, an undeniable plus.

These three memes can be woven together into a comprehensive national campaign if the will exists to do it. It could be a real winner on a number of levels. However, a lot of established players are gun-shy on the issue because it has already been bungled.

The Democratic party and Kerry campaigns dropped the ball early. They realized that they democratically lost the election -- in the grand scheme of things, the Bush campaign won the popular vote by a larger margin than Gore did in 2000 -- and that fighting the result would have been politically risky, so they didn't. This created a power vacuum.

And then a bunch of unfortunate actors filled it in. Greg Palast blew what credibility he had right out the window writing a Nov. 3rd column called "Kerry Won." Bev Harris who's outfit Black Box Voting had been doing really well (they pushed the video of the monkey hacking the vote) took a bunch of donations, supposedly for Freedom of Information Act requests, which may have partly gone to her own bank account. Statements, rhetorical softballs, coming out from untrained lefties to the effect that "It's impossible that 62 million Americans voted for Bush" were crushed by the Right Wing Noise Machine.

In short, the cause of reforming our electoral system is already a step behind because it has not been waged as an effective political or legal or marketing campaign. There's time to turn it around, but we've got to focus down on what our goals are, make sure we're using only unimpeachable evidence.

This is one of a host of issue, along with Health Care, Small Business, Bankruptcy and Lending, Energy Independence which could fuse with a serious National Security candidate and a culturally-driven populist movement to create a true governing consensus again in this country.

I will be writing more in this vein over the next month before I go on the road. I have several idea project

I got linked over to Robert C. Koehler, who's a columnist for the Tribune syndicate, who's written a few things about the "irregularities" in the last election and had them refused by a number of syndicating papers. Had a piece, called The silent scream of numbers, which was spiked by his home paper.

The issue of election fraud is both enormously important and complex, and it's' a shame that Progressives in America made a lot of wrong moves politically in response to what happened on November 2nd.

Koeler had one good segment in the piece he wrote:

Was the election of 2004 stolen? Thus is the question framed by those who don’t want to know the answer. Anyone who says yes is immediately a conspiracy nut, and the listener’s eyeballs roll. So let’s not ask that question.

Let’s simply ask why the lines were so long and the voting machines so few in Columbus and Cleveland and inner-city and college precincts across the country, especially in the swing states...

This would be great, if the fucking subtitle of the piece weren't "
The 2004 election was stolen — will someone please tell the media?"

I watched a lot of people who were supposed to be cool completely blow their credibility by making irresponsible, unsubstantiated and patently false claims about what happened on November 2nd. Koehler is the latest.

Which isn't to say there wasn't fraud and abuse in the last election. I believe there most certainly was. I don't think it should be legal for someone who's serving as an overseer of an election (e.g. a Secretary of State) to have any relationship -- let alone a chairmanship -- with one of the campaigns involved. It's a clear-cut conflict of interest, there's clearly solid evidence to be gathered there, and it could become a gripping drama.

As I see it there are principally three avenues of investigation to undertake. The first is, as I've said, Attacking Kenneth Blackwell and Preventing Future Conflicts of Interest by getting laws passed which prevent public servants overseeing elections from coordinating in any way with any campaign that will be contesting under their jurisdiction. Blackwell is planning on Running for Governor. He must not escape justice the way former Florida's Sec. of State Katherine Harris did. There are two clear-cut objectives: forcing Blackwell out of the Governor's race, and using that public drama to highlight the legal changes that need to be made.

The second area of opportunity is in securing the actual systems that record and count votes. We must Attack Diebold and Build A Secure Election System. The current situation is untenable: entrusting the vote to private corporations who are selling insecure products and who's ownership and management may have personal connections to various political parties is irresponsible. It's a weak link in our Democracy. There's no strong evidence that any organized electronic tampering took place in 2004, but there were glitches a-plenty, and the system was so easy to hack you could literally train monkeys to do it. Additionally, the fact that the CEO of Diebold actually said, he'd deliver Ohio's votes doesn't inspire faith in the statis quo.

Finally, a national campaign to make Same-Day Voter Registration available in every state would do a lot to mitigate most low-level forms of fraud. Same-day has also boosted participation by up to 10% in states which have adopted it, an undeniable plus.

These three memes can be woven together into a comprehensive national campaign if the will exists to do it. It could be a real winner on a number of levels. However, a lot of established players are gun-shy on the issue because it has already been bungled.

The Democratic party and Kerry campaigns dropped the ball early. They realized that they democratically lost the election -- in the grand scheme of things, the Bush campaign won the popular vote by a larger margin than Gore did in 2000 -- and that fighting the result would have been politically risky, so they didn't. This created a power vacuum.

And then a bunch of unfortunate actors filled it in. Greg Palast blew what credibility he had right out the window writing a Nov. 3rd column called "Kerry Won." Bev Harris who's outfit Black Box Voting had been doing really well (they pushed the video of the monkey hacking the vote) took a bunch of donations, supposedly for Freedom of Information Act requests, which may have partly gone to her own bank account. Statements, rhetorical softballs, coming out from untrained lefties to the effect that "It's impossible that 62 million Americans voted for Bush" were crushed by the Right Wing Noise Machine.

In short, the cause of reforming our electoral system is already a step behind because it has not been waged as an effective political or legal or marketing campaign. There's time to turn it around, but we've got to focus down on what our goals are, make sure we're using only unimpeachable evidence.

This is one of a host of issue, along with Health Care, Small Business, Bankruptcy and Lending, Energy Independence which could fuse with a serious National Security candidate and a culturally-driven populist movement to create a true governing consensus again in this country.

I will be writing more in this vein over the next month before I go on the road. I have several idea project