BP brother Woodfox, FREE!

(read)

the bridge to Nowhere

(for the record...this is Kwaz's last 2008 politically related post~ GO VOTE!)

http://thisfuckingelection.com

the Choice is Yours

Dres of the platinum-selling hip hop group Black Sheep has revitalized the1991 hit The Choice is Yours, rewriting lyrics and donating his time and services to create an innovative pro-Obama voter initiative video. Partnered with Austin based creative teams at Voodoo Cowboy Entertainmentand Super!Alright! Media in an all-volunteer effort, Dres re-recorded and shot the updated version of TheChoice is Yours in Austin, Texas in just under two days.

ATF: Plot by skinheads to kill Obama is foiled

Two Neo-Nazis held in Tennessee, charged with attempted mass murder

By BREAKING NEWS
NBC News and news services
updated 4 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - A plot by two Neo-Nazi skinheads to assassinate Barack Obama and kill dozens of other African Americans has been foiled, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms said Monday.

Daniel Cowart, 20, of Bells, Tenn., and Paul Schlesselman, 18, of West Helena, Ark., were charged Friday with making threats against a presidential candidate, illegal possession of a sawed-off shotgun and conspiracy to rob a gun store.

In court records unsealed Monday, agents said they disrupted plans that included robbing a gun store and targeting an unnamed but predominantly African-American high school.

The two men were arrested in Crockett County, Tenn., and have already made a court appearance.

The plot unraveled when one of the men was arrested on other charges and in the course of interviews he revealed plans for the plot.


According to the court records, the pair discussed robbing a gun shop in order to gather weapons and ammunition to use in a "killing spree."

The defendants allegedly further discussed their killing spree to include targeting a predominately African-American school, and to continue their spree until it culminated with an attempt to assassinate Obama.

Check back for details on this breaking news report

Block the Vote:Will the GOP's campaign to deter new voters and discard Democratic ballots determine the next president

These days, the old west rail hub of Las Vegas, New Mexico, is little more than a dusty economic dead zone amid a boneyard of bare mesas. In national elections, the town overwhelmingly votes Democratic: More than 80 percent of all residents are Hispanic, and one in four lives below the poverty line. On February 5th, the day of the Super Tuesday caucus, a school-bus driver named Paul Maez arrived at his local polling station to cast his ballot. To his surprise, Maez found that his name had vanished from the list of registered voters, thanks to a statewide effort to deter fraudulent voting. For Maez, the shock was especially acute: He is the supervisor of elections in Las Vegas.

Maez was not alone in being denied his right to vote. On Super Tuesday, one in nine Democrats who tried to cast ballots in New Mexico found their names missing from the registration lists. The numbers were even higher in precincts like Las Vegas, where nearly 20 percent of the county's voters were absent from the rolls. With their status in limbo, the voters were forced to cast "provisional" ballots, which can be reviewed and discarded by election officials without explanation. On Super Tuesday, more than half of all provisional ballots cast were thrown out statewide.

This November, what happened to Maez will happen to hundreds of thousands of voters across the country. In state after state, Republican operatives — the party's elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics — are wielding new federal legislation to systematically disenfranchise Democrats. If this year's race is as close as the past two elections, the GOP's nationwide campaign could be large enough to determine the presidency in November. "I don't think the Democrats get it," says John Boyd, a voting-rights attorney in Albuquerque who has taken on the Republican Party for impeding access to the ballot. "All these new rules and games are turning voting into an obstacle course that could flip the vote to the GOP in half a dozen states."
(click here for the full story)

The RNC has spent nearly $150,000 on Palin's clothes

The man behind Palin's style transformation is Jeff Larson, is Karl Rover's former protégé and the principal robocaller who smeared John McCain in 2000.

Politico reports that the RNC has been shelling out the big bucks--over $150,000--on Sarah Palin and her family's wardrobe since she joined the McCain ticket in late August.

According to financial disclosure records, the accessorizing began in early September and included bills from Saks Fifth Avenue in St. Louis and New York for a combined $49,425.74.

The records also document a couple of big-time shopping trips to Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis, including one $75,062.63 spree in early September.

The RNC also spent $4,716.49 on hair and makeup through September after reporting no such costs in August.

This news follows an AP report that Governor Palin charged the state of Alaska for her kids' travel.

Palin also came under fire in September for splurging on a $2,500 Valentino jacket for her speech at the RNC and buying $400 glasses. Both fashion statements seem at odds with her "Joe Six-Pack" image.

And all this follows on the heels of a report that Cindy McCain donned an ensemble at the RNC that may have cost $313,000. Additionally, her husband, John McCain, spent the summer sporting a pair of $520 Ferragamo loafers and reportedly paid 'American Idol' makeup artist, Tifanie White, $5,500 for her services.

More Nuts out of the Nut-Jar

It could be "more nuts out of the nut-jar", or not, to each his/her own, right?
Personally, I can't wait til' November 5th when this election is all over. But will it ever be over? We'll still have to wait until January for the inauguration.

Internet Voting Begins This Friday

Internet Voting in Florida Raises Security Concerns: Geek the Vote
Beginning this week, Internet voting is getting its first prime-time test, for overseas voters from Okaloosa County, Florida. Our Geek the Vote reporter investigates and finds that experts remain skeptical about the operation, and that we won't be voting from home any time soon.
By Erik Sofge

This Friday, Internet voting will become a reality. Between Oct. 24 and Nov. 2, an estimated 600 to 700 United States citizens will use hardened laptops—PCs with no hard drive, and various other components either turned off or removed in advance to reduce security risks—located at special kiosks in Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom to cast their votes for president. It will be no more difficult than ordering a candidate's autobiography on Amazon. The Okaloosa Distance Ballot Piloting (ODBP) test program could help dismantle the bureaucratic obstacle course that now affects roughly 6 million overseas residents who must register earlier than other voters, and whose mail-in absentee ballots could be mishandled.
(click here for full story)

Grand Theft Bailout

(click the title & peep the story)
"A wave of financial grief has spread across the United States and far beyond as homeowners are unable to pay spiking variable mortgages and are losing homes to foreclosure. Financial institutions, as a result, lost their shirts on bundled toxic mortgage investments. And stocks have plummeted, retirement accounts losing 35 percent of their value and counting.

Add it all together, and you have some unpopular tourists in San Francisco this week."

Bear found dumped at WCU with Obama signs

CULLOWHEE – A dead bear was found dumped this morning on the Western Carolina University campus, draped with a pair of Obama campaign signs, university police said.

Maintenance workers reported about 7:45 a.m. finding a 75-pound bear cub dumped at the roundabout near the Catamount statute at the entrance to campus, said Tom Johnson, chief of university police.

“It looked like it had been shot in the head as best we can tell. A couple of Obama campaign signs had been stapled together and stuck over its head,” Johnson said.

University police called in N.C. Wildlife Resources officials to remove the body and help in the investigation. Bear season is currently under way in Western North Carolina.

“This is certainly unacceptable,” Johnson said. “Someone was wanting to draw attention to the election. If we find out who they are, we’ll make sure they’ll get some attention themselves.”

"Western Carolina University deplores the inappropriate behavior that led to this troubling incident," said Leila Tvedt, associate vice chancellor "We cannot speculate on the motives of the people involved, nor who those people might be. Campus police are cooperating with authorities to investigate this matter."

the Roast

SNL>palin

'Secret Life of Bees' brings issues of love, redemption and racism to the screen.

By Jackie Burrell Contra Costa Times

On Friday, the indie movie based on Kidd's story about a motherless child and a trio of honey-making sisters will finally make its way to the silver screen. But despite its book-club-favorite status and a star-studded cast — headed by Dakota Fanning, Queen Latifah and Jennifer Hudson — the movie's path has been nearly as poignant and serendipitous as the book itself.

Sitting in a plush lounge in San Francisco's Ritz-Carlton Hotel recently, director/screenwriter Gina Prince-Bythewood relaxed with her young star before the Mill Valley Film Festival opening. The novel, which sold 4.5 million copies, is on many schools' reading lists. Fanning, 14, calls it "a great book for people my age."

She and her director talked about what it was like filming a story set against powerful civil rights-era themes just as Barack Obama was racking up his first big triumphs. Prince-Bythewood also addressed the motifs of motherlessness, abandonment and redemption that run through the characters' lives — and her own.

"The Secret Lives of Bees" tells the story of a young girl, 14-year-old Lily Owens, who runs from an abusive father and the deeply held belief that she is, somehow, "unlovable."


Prince-Bythewood, a Pacific Grove native, was on a journey of her own, seeking her birth

mother and trying to understand why she had been given up as a child when her older brother had not. But when she was offered the project seven years ago, she hadn't read the book and turned the picture down.


Two years ago she heard that another director had signed on, and suddenly she was consumed with "this overwhelming feeling of 'That's my movie!'" She read the novel that night.

"The book just wrecked me," she says. "Oh my God, I gave up this opportunity. It's about motherhood, sisters, learning to love yourself. I said those same words — 'I'm unlovable' — when I found my birth mother."

Then, almost miraculously, everything fell into place. The movie's director walked, and all that was left was the book and its star, Fanning, who was finally old enough to play the role.

"In retrospect, it happened at the right time," she says. "You grow a lot in five, six years. Being adopted was part of my journey. To pour myself into this script (helped me) get over the last vestiges of that tough time."



In a matter of weeks, Prince-Bythewood had her stars — all working for virtually no pay — and a steady stream of cast and crew showing up with dog-eared copies of the book.

"Construction guys coming in with the book," the filmmaker says. "You don't expect that at all. Everyone came in with this love of the project." The idea was to merge Kidd's vision as a white woman who grew up in the South, with Prince- Bythewood's African-American perspective, while remaining true to the book.

And it's all there, from the Pepto-Bismol-pink Boatwright house to the Black Madonna honey jar labels, designed by renowned African-American artist Charles Bibbs. The one noticeable change is in the character of June Boatwright, the tightly controlled, cello-playing sister portrayed by Alicia Keys as a younger, more politically savvy character living in this pivotal time in American history.

"I really infused myself into June," says Prince- Bythewood.

She worked to get her young cast into the mind-set of a historical period most of them were too young to have experienced firsthand. She sent her actors giant gift bags crammed with study materials, including Spike Lee's documentary, "4 Little Girls," about the racially motivated 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church.

"'4 Little Girls' was an amazing, amazing film," says Fanning. "You can't help but feel it."

And then there was the matter of bees, who play a recurring role in the book and movie. It was so cold, says Prince-Bythewood, the crew had to truck in 60,000 bees from Florida and stash the hives in a greenhouse.

"We called it Bee-lagio," she says.

Intellectually, there were plenty of reasons not to worry about being surrounded by swarms of buzzing, hovering bees. Bees don't sting unless they feel threatened.

"I can say all this," says Prince-Bythewood, "but it's still bees."

So Fanning, Latifah and Tristan Wilds, who plays August Boatwright's godson, Zachary Taylor, were sent to bee school to train with Julian Wooten — dubbed "the bee whisperer" on the set — to prepare them for their scenes working with hives, honey and 60,000 fuzzy, buzzing extras.

"They threw me in," says Fanning, with a grin. "You kind of separate yourself from your body. They can't get to you."

Fanning was fine with it, but Latifah and Wilds had to learn to work with the bees barehanded.

"All my research," says Prince-Bythewood, "said that real beekeepers did not wear gloves. Latifah and Tristan were like, 'Yeah, right.'"

Wooten had Tristan's gloves off in a matter of days, and Latifah's hands were bare within an hour. In the end, only three people were ever stung at Bee-lagio. And the scenes that unfold onscreen are ethereal and magical. Bees swirl and spiral around Fanning's face as her eyes fill with wonder.

But stinging insects were nothing compared with the challenges facing the cast in a drugstore-improv exercise in 1960s racism. Despite her Oscar for "Dream Girls" and her role in "Sex in the City," Hudson is still a newcomer to acting. She didn't know what "improv" meant and had no idea that the extras hired by Prince-Bythewood were behaving according to a harsh 1964 script.

"She was getting more and more upset," says Fanning. "She didn't know it wasn't real."

It was only the director's strict admonition not to hit anyone that saved an extra who used the N-word when he told Hudson to get down from the whites-only ice cream counter. It was a potent exercise in ostracism and being demeaned, not only for Hudson but for everyone who watched.

But what occurred in the real world during the whirlwind 34 days of filming in North Carolina was pure serendipity. As Obama racked up his South Carolina primary triumph, suddenly the set came alive with the same sense of possibility that took place with the signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 — the idea, says Prince-Bythewood, that "someday" might be "today."

They weren't just making a movie about a girl and the nurturing women aided her, says Prince-Bythewood, they were "making a film about a time when the world was changing, at a time when the world is changing."

Contact Jackie Burrell at jburrell@bayareanewsgroup.com.

Democrats call for massive U.S. economic stimulus plan

By David Lawder

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States needs a new economic stimulus plan that pumps billions of dollars into infrastructure projects and budget relief for cash-strapped state and local governments, Democratic lawmakers said on Sunday.

U.S. Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, told ABC television he will put together an economic stimulus bill when Congress returns to Washington after the November 4 elections, while a key Republican said he would support an effort that "makes sense."

Rep. Roy Blunt, the Missouri Republican who serves as House minority leader, said he would support a stimulus plan if it did not include massive public works spending and budget bailouts for states that overspent on health care and other social programs.

"A stimulus plan that makes sense is something that I'll be helpful with," Blunt said, also on ABC television.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last week said a $150 billion economic stimulus plan was needed to help counteract a faltering economy shaken by a paralyzed banking system and steep stock market falls.

On Monday, Pelosi and House Democratic leaders will meet with key economists to discuss a jobs creation and recovery plan that will complement the recently passed $700 billion rescue legislation for financial institutions. Participants will include former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Arthur Levitt and former Federal Reserve vice chairman Alice Rivlin.

The Congress earlier this year passed a $152 billion stimulus package that provided tax rebates of up to $600 per adult to support consumer spending at a time of rising energy and food costs.

Most of that money has already been spent, and many economists say financial turmoil will squeeze the economy into recession in the fourth quarter.

"Not only is Wall Street frozen, but Main Street is in real trouble. A stimulus aimed at Main Street makes sense," New York Sen. Charles Schumer told CNN.

He said the plan should "get into the guts of the economy" by boosting spending on infrastructure such as roads, sewer and water projects.

Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who served under President Bill Clinton, told CNN that an infrastructure plan that could quickly pump money into the economy was the most important action that U.S. authorities could take to help deal with the current economic crisis.

"I would put in place an infrastructure piece... bridges, water systems roads, highways, but not new projects that are going to take a long time to set up," Rubin said. "There are a lot of existing projects where states and cities are having a hard time finding a lot of financing where you could funnel that money right into existing activities where you would be able to act very very quickly."

Schumer also urged the Treasury to move quickly on its plan to buy equity stakes in banks.

"I am hopeful that tomorrow the Treasury will announce that they're doing it. And they have to do it quickly," said Schumer, a New York Democrat.

"This cannot be two, three, four weeks. The markets are waiting, the country is waiting, and we're beginning a downward spiral, not just in finance ... but in the whole economy. We need quick action," he added.

(Reporting by David Lawder, Editing by Andrea Ricci)

The Man Behind the Whispers About Obama

The most persistent falsehood about Senator Barack Obama’s background first hit in 2004 just two weeks after the Democratic convention speech that arguably set him on the path to his presidential candidacy: “Obama is a Muslim who has concealed his religion.”

That statement was contained in a press release and it spun a complex tale about the alleged ancestry of Mr. Obama, who is Christian.

The press release was picked up by the conservative FreeRepublic.com Web site and spread virally and steadily as others elaborated on its claims over the years in e-mail messages, Web sites and, ultimately, books. It continues to be an engine that drives other false rumors about Mr. Obama’s background to this day, with one finding national, public voice on Friday, when a woman told Senator John McCain at a town-hall-style meeting, “I have read about him,” and “he’s an Arab.” Mr. McCain corrected her.

Until this month, the man who is widely credited with starting the cyber-whisper campaign that still dogs Mr. Obama was a secondary character in news reports, with deep explorations of his background largely confined to liberal blogs where he is a bête noir.

But an appearance in a documentary-style program on the Fox News Channel watched by three million people last week thrust the man, Andy Martin, and his past into the foreground. The Fox program allowed Mr. Martin to assert falsely and without challenge that Mr. Obama had once trained to overthrow the government.

An examination of legal documents and election filings, and interviews with those from Mr. Martin’s past, revealed a man with a history of scintillating if not always factual claims, who has left a trail of animosity – including anti-Jewish comments -- among political leaders, lawyers and judges in three states over the course of more than 30 years.

A law school graduate, his admission to the Illinois state bar was blocked in the 1970s after a psychiatric finding of “moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.” Though he is not a licensed lawyer, Mr. Martin went on to become a prodigious filer of lawsuits, and he also made various unsuccessful attempts to run for public office in three states, as well as for president at least twice, in 1988 and 2000. Based in Chicago, he now identifies himself as an author and writer who focuses on his anti-Obama Web site and press releases.

Mr. Martin, in a series of interviews, did not dispute his influence in Obama rumors.

“Everybody uses my research as a take off point,” Mr. Martin said, adding, however, that some take his writings “and exaggerate them to suit their own fantasies.”

As to his background, he said, “I’m a colorful person, there’s always somebody who has a legitimate cause in their mind to be angry with me.”

When questions were raised last week about Mr. Martin’s appearance and claims on “Hannity’s America” on Fox News, the program’s producer said his views were expressed as his opinion and not necessarily fact, and, as such, were not unwarranted.

It was not his first turn on national television.

The CBS News program “48 Hours” devoted an hour-long program to his legal prowess in 1993 entitled, “See You in Court; Civil War, Anthony Martin Clogs Legal System with Frivolous Lawsuits.” He has filed so many lawsuits – and paperwork containing anti-Semitic slurs – a judge barred him from doing so in any federal court house without preliminary approval.

He prepared a run for Congress in Connecticut – where paperwork for one of his campaign committees listed as one purpose “to exterminate Jew Power.” He ran for the Florida State Senate and the United States Senate in Illinois. When running for president in 1999, he showed a television advertisement in New Hampshire that accused George W. Bush of cocaine use.

In the mid-1990s he was jailed in relation to an assault case in Florida.

His newfound prominence, and the persistence of his line of political attack -- updated regularly on his Web site and through press releases -- amazes those from his past.

“Well, that’s just a bookend for me,” said Tom Slade, a former chairman of the Florida Republican Party who says the party spent hundreds of thousands of dollars defending against lawsuits Mr. Martin brought for Mr. Slade’s refusal to support his bid for state office. “He’s crazy as a run-over dog. But he’s fearless.”

Given Mr. Obama’s unique background, which was the focus of his first book, it was perhaps bound to become fodder for some opposed to his candidacy.

Mr. Obama was raised mostly by his white mother, an atheist, and his grandparents, who were Protestant, in Hawaii. He hardly knew his father, a Kenyan from a Muslim family who variously considered himself atheist or agnostic, Mr. Obama wrote. For a few childhood years Mr. Obama lived in Indonesia with a stepfather he described as a nonpracticing Muslim.

Theories about Mr. Obama’s background have taken on a life of their own. But every independent analyst seeking the origins of the cyberspace attack winds up back at Mr. Martin’s first press release, posted on the Free Republic Web site in August 2004.

Its general outlines have turned up in a host of works that have expounded falsely on Mr. Obama’s heritage or supposed attempts to conceal it, including “Obama Nation,” the widely discredited best-seller about Mr. Obama by Jerome S. Corsi. Mr. Corsi, who has made anti-Muslim and anti-Catholic slurs for which he later apologized, opens with a quote from Mr. Martin.

“Martin gets credit for the idea of, call it ‘the sound bite narrative mien,”’ said Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University who has investigated the e-mail campaign’s circulation and origins. “What he’s generating gets picked up in other places, and it’s an example of how the Internet has given power to sources we would have never taken seriously at another point in time.”

Ms. Allen said that Mr. Martin’s original work found amplification in 2006, when a man named Ted Sampley wrote an article painting Mr. Obama as a secret practitioner of Islam. Quoting liberally from Mr. Martin, the article circulated on the Internet, and its contents eventually found their way into various e-mail messages, particularly an added claim that Mr. Obama had attended “Jakarta’s Muslim Wahabbi schools. Wahabbism is the radical teaching that created the Muslim terrorists who are now waging jihad on the rest of the world.”

Mr. Obama for two years attended a Catholic school in Indonesia, where he was taught about the Bible, he wrote in “Dreams of My Father,” and for two years went to an Indonesian public school open to all religions where he was taught about the Koran.

Mr. Sampley, coincidentally, is a Vietnam veteran and longtime opponent of Senator John McCain and Senator John Kerry, both of whom he accused of ignoring his claims that American prisoners were left behind in Vietnam. He previously portrayed Mr. McCain as a “Manchurian candidate” and again opposed him this year in a primary-season campaign that was roundly denounced as a smear.

Speaking of Mr. Martin’s influence on his Obama writings, Mr. Sampley said, “I keyed off of his work.”

It is perhaps ironic that Mr. Martin’s depictions of Mr. Obama as a secret Muslim have found resonance among some Jewish voters who have received e-mail messages containing various versions of his initial theory, often by new authors and with new twists.

In his original press release Mr. Martin wrote that he was personally “a strong supporter of the Muslim community.” But, he wrote of Mr. Obama, “It may well be that his concealment is meant to endanger Israel,” and, “His Muslim religion would obviously raise serious questions in many Jewish circles.”

Yet in various court cases, Mr. Martin had impugned Jews.

A motion he filed in a 1983 bankruptcy case called the overseeing judge “a crooked, slimy Jew who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race.”

In another motion, filed in 1983, Mr. Martin wrote, “I am able to understand how the Holocaust took place, and with every passing day feel less and less sorry that it did.”

During an interview, Mr. Martin denied some statements against Jews attributed to him in court papers, blaming malicious judges for inserting them.

But in his “48 Hours” interview in 1993 he affirmed a different anti-Semitic portion of the affidavit that included the line about the Holocaust, saying, “The record speaks for itself.”

On Friday, when asked about an assertion in his court papers that “Jews, historically and in daily living, act through clans and in wolf pack syndrome,” he said, “That one sort of rings a bell.”

He said he was not anti-Semitic. “I was trying to show that everybody in the bankruptcy court was Jewish and I was not Jewish,” he said, “and I was being victimized by religious bias.”

In discussing his denied admission to the Illinois bar, Mr. Martin said the psychiatric exam listing him as having a “moderately severe personality defect” was spitefully written by an evaluator he clashed with.

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