"By the way we have to fix that"
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"By the way we have to fix that"
I guess President Obama's victory was the headline coming out of yesterday (barely beating out this story) but the most interesting comment was this off-hand remark by the current and future leader of the free world:
As he spoke in Chicago, he thanked everyone who cast a ballot "whether you voted for the first time, or waited in line for a very long time" -- then he quickly added, in an evident ad lib, "by the way we have to fix that."
By "that," the president was referring to long lines, confusion over early voting and other issues, thousands of voters who should have been on the books but weren't (full disclosure: including my 18-year-old son casting his first ballot, although he was able to vote eventually), and a slew of recent laws aimed at making it harder for people to vote instead of easier. The resulting chaos made a mockery of American exceptionalism, unless "exceptionalism" is now synonymous with "what you might find in a faraway banana republic."
Now, three things about the president's comment:
1) "By the way", you've been president for the last almost four years -- this is just occurring to you now? Amazing. It's almost like that Ragu commercial..."I wonder what other bad decisions I've made.."
2) If he's serious, Step 1 is to roll back all the voter suppression laws -- like Pennsylvania's outrageous voter ID measure -- that have passed in the last couple of years.
3) More importantly, I hope America can think outside the box for real solutions to encourage as close to universal voting as we can get. That means things like day-of-voting registration, early voting in every state (including, gasp, Pennsylvania), and moving the final Election Day from Tuesday to Saturday. I heard on the radio yesterday that Tuesday elections were to coordinate with farmers' trips to market. I don't think we'd be crushing too many succotash growers by moving the vote to the weekend.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said on Wednesday that if the $16.394 trillion current legal limit on the federal government's debt must be raised in the next few months by another $2.4 trillion, “We’ll raise it." That would set the debt limit at $18.794 trillion. -> WOW that was fast. They should put a budget in place first. But you democrats, just spend with no results, except for your cronnie friends. Hope you all received some change. However, this needs to shutdown the government until straightened out. Of course you voted for free, and if you took all of US citizen worth over 500 million, you would have enough to cover 2.8 trillion.
— Fisher- Will, you continue to bash the voter ID law, your best arguments are some people cant get IDs (which has been proven false) and that they arent needed because voter fraud doesnt happen. I am a poll changer. During my small 3 hour window of work on Tuesday I saw voter fraud in a small suburban polling place of only 500+ voters (800+ registered there). A woman came in to vote, only to find someone had already voted under her name. The signature they used didnt match and was even spelled wrong! Needless to say she was pissed and the board of election was called, she had to fill out a provisional ballot. You know what would prevent this... showing a photo ID which most people already have and EVERYONE else can easily get if they put in the tiniest bit of effort over the next 12 months. There is no reason not require ID when fraud occurs on what is certainly a yearly basis.— Greg S
- "The signature they used didnt match and was even spelled wrong!" . . . . Which suggests it was an error by the poll worker, not intentional fraud, and sure, showing ID may have prevented it. There's nothing wrong with asking for ID to confirm identity, but failure to have it shouldn't deny one the right to vote.— montani semper liberi
- Hows about a little more schadenfreudin'? "A study Wednesday by the Sunlight Foundation, which tracks political spending, concluded that Rove's super PAC, American Crossroads, had a success rate of just 1 percent on $103 million in attack ads -- one of the lowest "returns on investment" (ROIs) of any outside spending group in this year's elections."— montani semper liberi
- "The Republicans have a mix of political ideologues and survivalists. When the ideologues realize they better become survivalists, maybe, just maybe, they'll be able to garner enough votes to strike a deal."
No, I'm already hearing that the Republicans think they lost because they weren't right wing enough. At least for now, they seem to be lining up the circular firing squad.— Hamlet - I'm not an Obama supporter, but this is funny, and a bit sad. The right is already promising doom because they lost any grip on politics and have depended on fear for so long that they can't make it back. The sad part is they'll hunker down in certain areas while the national elections tilt liberal, and it'll just be deadlock with the right waiting for the sky to fall and the liberals patting themselves on the back for winning instead of actually doing something to help.— HandNik
I think it's funny how certain Republicans are now saying that they need to "be more inclusive of other demographics - especially Hispanics". Wtf? Wouldn't that take away one of the Right's favorite boogeymen? I mean, then you would have to depend completely on African Americans and gays to scare the base into voting.— wokmaster- Then what is the remedy when you can't confirm identity due to lack of ID? Just let them vote anyway?— urkidnmepal
- Of course. I suggested an ID (any reasonable form of it, not the Voter ID) would help where two persons have similar names, to prevent the error Greg S describes.
- Well MSL, if someone submitted a false name it was fraud on their part, whether the poll workers caught it or not. Thats the point, how often can this be done where you vote as someone else and that person never comes in, so its never caught? And these poll workers are part time, I've never seen them actually double check signatures, more often than not they even admit that with a lot of people their signature doesn't match whats on record anyway. Getting ID is not difficult, and its free, and everyone has a year to do so. If you dont have an ID you could still cast a provisional ballot. In my mind its better to have those provisional ballots for people who dont want to get an ID than to have fraud votes because we don't ask for ID.— Greg S
- You're assuming fraud, but maybe the person had the same name spelled differently? And getting ID is very easy for you or I, but don't kid yourself, it can be torture for some folks who never needed one before.
- oops...the comment about ID was directed at MSL. It sounds like you can support the need to be able to confirm identity, however you dont need an ID to vote? That sounds like wording that would come out of a Supreme Court decision.— urkidnmepal
- How about the signature? — The Fundamentals of the Economy are Fine
- What republican leaders will now realize is that they can't win a national election by playing to the extreme right base. As fiscally conservative / social moderate republican I'll feel a lot more comfortable when the extremist lose power in the party. Though this year remains a bit of an illusion, a very weak canidate in Romney (pretty much the republicans version of Kerry) vs Obama, who success or failure as president, was still going to get higher numbers of african americans to turn out based on his race alone. All things being equal, if Obama was white and the republicans put out a legit canidate they would have won. So while demographics continue to move, I don't know that this year proved elections are "unwinable" for republicans. And I am certain in 2016 Christie will be making victory speech.— Greg S
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