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A general election absentee ballot from Rensselaer County, N.Y. misspelling the name of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is seen, Friday, Oct. 10, 2008 in Sand Lake, N.Y. The absentee ballots sent to voters in Rensselaer County identified the two presidential candidates as 'Barack Osama' and 'John McCain.' In the United States, the best-known individual named Osama is Osama bin Laden, leader of the al Qaida terrorist group behind the 2001 attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center in New York City. (AP Photo/The Albany Times Union, Michael P. Farrell)

About vote caging.

VelvetRevolution.US Election Strike Force blog

Candidates' pledge: Standing for Voters

Voters Unite: Check maximum legal error rates for various voting machines.

The Nation: Suppressing the Youth Vote

Defense Secretary Gates said Thursday that the U.S. could "ultimately" contemplate the idea of negotiating with the Taliban to secure a political settlement in Afghanistan, if the Afghan government were to pursue such talks, the Financial Times reports. Gates said a political settlement with the Taliban was "conceivable."

"There has to be ultimately, and I'll underscore ultimately, reconciliation as part of a political outcome to this," Gates said.

Insider’s Projects Drained Missile-Defense Millions
By Eric Lipton | NYTimes.com

They huddled in a quiet corner at the US Airways lounge at Ronald Reagan National Airport, sipping bottomless cups of coffee as they plotted to turn America’s missile defense program into a personal cash machine.

Michael Cantrell, an engineer at the Army Space and Missile Defense Command headquarters in Huntsville, Ala., along with his deputy, Doug Ennis, had lined up millions of dollars from Congress for defense companies. Now, Mr. Cantrell decided, it was time to take a cut.

“The contractors are making a killing,” Mr. Cantrell recalled thinking at the meeting, in 2000. “The lobbyists are getting their fees, and the contractors and lobbyists are writing out campaign checks to the politicians. Everybody is making money here — except us.”

Within months, Mr. Cantrell began getting personal checks from contractors and later returned to the airport with Mr. Ennis to pick up a briefcase stuffed with $75,000. The two men eventually collected more than $1.6 million in kickbacks, through 2007, prompting them to plead guilty this year to corruption charges.

Mr. Cantrell readily acknowledges concocting the crime. But what has drawn little scrutiny are his activities leading up to it. Thanks to important allies in Congress, he extracted nearly $350 million for projects the Pentagon did not want, wasting taxpayer money on what would become dead-end ventures.

Recent scandals involving former Representative Randy Cunningham, Republican of California, and the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, both now in prison, provided a glimpse into how special interests manipulate the federal government.

From Uncounted The Movie

Another Israeli West Bank Land Grab Scheme
by Stephen Lendman

Since 1967, Israel has systematically and relentlessly sought control of the entire "Holy Land" by seizing Gaza, the West Bank and all of Jerusalem. The entire area remains occupied and, according to Israeli professor and activist Jeff Halper, the aggressive "Nishul" agenda continues. It entraps and commits genocide against 1.5 million Gazans under siege in the world's largest open-air prison. It also displaces Israeli Arabs inside Israel and West Bank Palestinians for expanding Jewish settlements.

The Smithfield and Wackenhut RICO Suits: Forward into the Past
Global Labor Strategies
(part 2 in a series - read part 1)

In our last post we described how the RICO suits filed by Smithfield Packing and Wackenhut Corporation represent a sharp escalation in the long standing corporate assault on human and labor rights. Not content with stripping workers and their organizations of fundamental labor rights, big corporations are now going after basic constitutional rights. We argued that these suits threaten the civil rights not just of unions but of everyone.

New Evidence of Systemic Bias in Guantánamo Trials
By Andy Worthington | AndyWorthington.com

Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, continues his analysis of the corrupt command structure of the Military Commissions at Guantánamo, with new information from Maj. David Frakt, one of the Commissions’ military defense lawyers.

Here's Tom D'Antoni.

Here's Rick Hasen.

Is anybody listening?

Tony Anderson fights uphill conscientious objector battle

"As more troops refuse to deploy, getting conscientious objector status is an uphill battle"

By Sarah Lazare, Courage to Resist Project Coordinator, for Alternet.

"I don't feel that it's right to take someone else's life," said 19 year-old Tony Anderson, Private in the U.S. Army, in a quiet voice on the phone. "I felt that if it came down to it, I couldn't kill someone, in Iraq or anywhere."

Anderson was speaking while under the line-of-sight supervision of his commanding officer at Ft. Carson, Colorado where he is stationed. The young soldier, who refused to deploy to Iraq in July of this year, is under close restriction by the military and has been threatened with a prison sentence for refusing to fight. Despite these dire consequences, Anderson has decided to join the growing ranks of troops who are openly resisting service in the Iraq War.

Iran attack more likely with low oil prices
By Nick Mottern | UPI.com

If the Bush administration is hawkish enough to attack Iran or support an Israeli attack before it leaves office, the drop in world oil prices to the $80 to $90 a barrel range may give it enough of a cushion against the consequence of skyrocketing oil prices.

The administration may gamble that a quick, tightly targeted strike against Iran's nuclear facilities would bring only a brief, modest spike in oil prices, with the price settling back down in a week's time given the apparent downward trend in world oil demand.

Official: 3,000 Christians Flee Iraq's Mosul
Official: 3,000 Christians flee 'killing campaign' in northern Iraq city of Mosul
By Bradley S. Klapper | ABCNews.com

Hundreds of terrified Christian families have fled Mosul to escape extremist attacks that have increased despite months of U.S. and Iraqi military operations to secure the northern Iraqi city, political and religious officials said Saturday.

Some 3,000 Christians have fled the city over the past week alone in a "major displacement," said Duraid Mohammed Kashmoula, the governor of northern Iraq's Ninevah province. He said most have left for churches, monasteries and the homes of relatives in nearby Christian villages and towns.

"The Christians were subjected to abduction attempts and paid ransom, but now they are subjected to a killing campaign," Kashmoula said, adding he believed "al-Qaida" elements were to blame and called for a renewed drive to root them out.

Political and religious leaders interviewed said the change in tactics may reflect a desire on the part of extremists to forcibly evict all Christians from Iraq's third largest city.

Earlier this week, Chaldean Archbishop Louis Sako said he was worried about what he termed a "campaign of killings and deportations against the Christian citizens in Mosul."

Mosul police have reported finding the bullet-riddled bodies of seven Christians in separate attacks so far this month, the latest a day laborer found on Wednesday. On Saturday, militants blew up three abandoned Christian homes in eastern Mosul, police said.

See how Representatives voted on H.R. 1955.

By David Swanson

I get the impression that a great many people are upset by all the news about McCain-Palin supporters who believe Obama is an Arab, a Muslim, a terrorist, and a baby killer. I find it the most encouraging thing that's happened in eight years.

Why? Because these sorts of lies and fear-mongering are nothing new. What's new is that the U.S. corporate media is covering them. The most unaccountable, antidemocratic communications cartel outside of China has decided to cover in a major way a story it has brushed aside since September 12, 2001.

By David Swanson

Newsweek thinks the new legislation on nukes in India could start an arms race. And yet, hideous as this bill was, Bush was unable to sign it without adding a signing statement, which however nobody will notice.

By Lloyd Hart

You may have noticed over the last week the word acorn or to be more
exact A.C.O.R.N. which stands for the Association of Community
Organizations for Reform Now. I personally have known about this group
for many years and nearly fell off my couch when I began to hear the
accusations coming out of the McCain campaign that poor black people
(A.C.O.R.N.) held a gun to Congress's head (cause black people, you
know, they can get guns. (wink) ) and forced it to pass a law that
forced rich white guys to stop redlining minority neighborhoods and to
stop predatory lending practices in minority neighborhoods - a
deliberate practice of banks not providing equal access to credit
products like loans and mortgages at the same fare market value in
terms of interest rates that the white folks recieved who were forced
into the terrible exodus of white flight when they had to relocate to
the suburbs when they were afraid their children might have sex with

By Joel McNally, Capital Times

One Bush administration cover story for going to war in Iraq to provide hundreds of billions of dollars in no-bid contracts for Halliburton and other corporate cronies was that it was to spread democracy in the Mideast.

Meanwhile, the president's party continues to battle the spread of democracy in the Midwest.

With less than a month to go before the election, the collateral damage from Republican efforts to fight the spread of democracy continues to pile up.

The latest victims are convicted felons who are looking to get jobs to support themselves and their families without resorting to crime.

A Republican National Committee official has attacked voter registration groups in Wisconsin for employing convicted felons. The party's chief lawyer said the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) hired seven convicted felons to register voters.

By David Swanson

According to an Associated Press story on Friday, more than a half-million people have toured the creationism museum in Kentucky since it opened in May 2007. However, at least one of those people was there to make fun of it with a video camera.

In fact, a lot of what Bill Maher's new film, "Religulous", does is make fun of people. But by no means does Maher single out fringe religious believers. He interviews one of the few top scientists in the world who believes, a priest at the Vatican who believes, and plenty of random typical believers in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Maher's conclusion: these people (including the vast majority of Americans) are all enablers of neurologically disordered killers who are going to destroy the planet.

By Steve Gonzalez, Madison Record

EAST ST. LOUIS-A Belleville doctor is asking a federal judge to bar President George W. Bush from enforcing the congressionally-approved financial industry bailout bill.

Dr. Randy J. Jung filed the request for a restraining order Friday, arguing Congress and Bush exceeded their constitutional authority when passing H.R. 1424, otherwise known as the bailout bill.

ACORN President Maude Hurd released the following statement today in response to the McCain campaign's new ad claiming that, among other things, ACORN is responsible for the mortgage crisis:

”For almost a decade, ACORN, a community organization of 400,000 families in neighborhoods across the country, has been fighting against the predatory lending practices that have robbed our members of their homes, destabilized neighborhoods, and roiled the global economy.”

“In his newest ad, John McCain’s campaign bizarrely claims, “ACORN forced banks to issue risky home loans, the same types of loans that caused the financial crisis we're in today.”  Nothing could be further from the truth.  In fact, ACORN has worked successfully to help working class families get good home loans on fair terms from legitimate banks and has fought vigorously against predatory lenders who have ripped off families in our communities. These predatory loans caused the crisis.”

Pentagon Wants $450 Billion Increase Over Next Five Years
By Josh Rogin, Congressional Quarterly

Pentagon officials have prepared a new estimate for defense spending that is $450 billion more over the next five years than previously announced figures.

The new estimate, which the Pentagon plans to release shortly before President Bush leaves office, would serve as a marker for the new president and is meant to place pressure on him to either drastically increase the size of the defense budget or defend any reluctance to do so, according to several former senior budget officials who are close to the discussions.

Experts note that releasing such documents in the twilight of an administration is a well-worn tactic, and that incoming presidents often disregard such guidance in order to pursue their own priorities.