A lot of strange things are going on beneath the surface this election year.
On the bright side, newpaper endorsements usually favor the Republicans. Four years ago, after George Bush had already proven his bona fides as a candidate for worse ever, John Kerry managed only a slim margin of editorial endorsements, and even that was unusual. Editor and Publisher has been following developments this year, and right now it looks like a landslide:
[Recent endorsements] brings [Obama’s] lead over McCain-Palin by this measure of daily papers to well over 3-1, at 64-18, including most of the major papers that have decided so far. In contrast, John Kerry barely edged George W. Bush in endorsements in 2004, by about 213 to 205.
Of course, this could turn around, and I’ve never believed editorial endorsements have much effect, though I suppose they might confirm some undecideds who might be leaning one way or another.
On a darker note, and once again under the surface, the Republicans are once again planning to steal the election. One more sign from Colorado, where Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. have found the following:
Republican Secretaries of State of swing-state Colorado have quietly purged one in six names from their voter rolls.
Over several months, the GOP politicos in Colorado stonewalled every attempt by Rolling Stone to get an answer to the massive purge—ten times the average state’s rate of removal.
– While Obama dreams of riding to the White House on a wave of new voters, more then 2.7 million have had their registrations REJECTED under new procedures signed into law by George Bush. Kennedy, a voting rights lawyer, charges this is a resurgence of ‘Jim Crow’ tactics to wrongly block Black and Hispanic voters.
– A fired US prosecutor levels new charges—accusing leaders of his own party, Republicans, with criminal acts in an attempt to block legal voters as “fraudulent.”
It is practically a law of nature that Republicans always loudly accuse Democrats of the crimes in which they themselves engage. Palast has been covering these issues since 2000, but he is widely ignored by the mainstream. Were this sort of thing exposed to widespread media scrutiny, it would probably stop. If Palast’s report is true, and there’s no reason to think it’s not, we can probably kiss-off Colorado.
It is an odd thing that the due process clause requires notice and hearings before a person can be deprived of their rights or property, but there does not appear to be any due process rights for people stricken from the voting rolls.
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