A few minutes ago I left this comment for she who Writes Like She Talks:

Shalom Jill,

I ask this question seriously.

Why do we care what less than 3,000 men and women (assuming a maximum board of maybe 10 people at a newspaper, many will have much less) on some 285 newspapers when newspaper circulation is swirling down the toilet?

The idea of newspaper endorsement is so 20th century.

B”shalom,

Jeff

And then I popped open my morning news read — Slate — and found that it had published the political endorsement of not the magazine, but of every single person on the staff, including its contributors.

Now that’s new media.

Personally? I think the state should turn each and every one of these machines over to a crew of hackers who will lay the code out for the world to see. And then the officers and boards of the companies that manufactured the machines and wrote the code should be stripped of their citizenship and given tent space on an obscure corner of Cuba.

And from the Charleston Gazette…

Via I See Invisible People…

Jill at Writes Like She Talks wrote a post on 6 September offering brief insights into why she and seven women she knows are voting for their candidate come 4 November.

I liked the no-judgment style of the post and have challenged Jill to do more. Since I’d never ask anyone to act in a way I would not act myself, I told Jill that beginning 6 September and until 3 November I will post this open-thread question to my readers:

Why are you voting for your candidate for President of the United States?

I impose only two restrictions:

First, I’m not going to comment in the open thread. This is not about me debating or supporting my readers, I honestly want to know why you are voting the way you are.

Second, in your comment, you may only offer positive reasons why you are voting for your candidate. Negative reasons why you are not voting for your candidate’s opponent will be redacted or removed.

So, what are your reasons? Make your case.

I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is How To Write an Effective Thank You Note.

Greg Sargent writes:

Some three dozen workers at a telemarketing call center in Indiana walked off the job rather than read an incendiary McCain campaign script attacking Barack Obama, according to two workers at the center and one of their parents.

Nina Williams, a stay-at-home mom in Lake County, Indiana, tells us that her daughter recently called her from her job at the center, upset that she had been asked to read a script attacking Obama for being “dangerously weak on crime,” “coddling criminals,” and for voting against “protecting children from danger.”

Williams’ daughter told her that up to 40 of her co-workers had refused to read the script, and had left the call center after supervisors told them that they would have to either read the call or leave, Williams says. The call center is called Americall, and it’s located in Hobart, IN.

“They walked out,” Williams says of her daughter and her co-workers, adding that they weren’t fired but willingly sacrificed pay rather than read the lines. “They were told [by supervisors], `If you all leave, you’re not gonna get paid for the rest of the day.”

This morning I left a comment at Blogger Interrupted essentially saying that to be progressive means to question all assumptions, especially our own.

0726: The bogus “redistribution” devolution – Are We Not Men?

0710: More on Dickensian Issue 6 – we”re all beggars now

I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is Back to Healthy Eating: Steps to Post-Vacation Recovery.

From Haaretz:

A new poll released by the Gallup organization on Thursday shows Jewish voters favor Barack Obama over John McCain by more than 3 to 1, with 74% saying they will vote for Obama over 22% for McCain.

The poll, which has interviewed over 650 Jewish registered voters each month since June, shows American Jews growing increasingly comfortable with Obama since July, when the Illinois Senator tied up the Democratic Party nomination. The poll shows support for McCain among Jews stood at a high of 34% in June, before beginning its downward turn in July after Obama’s nomination.

The highest level of support for Obama according to the poll is among Jews over the age of 55, 74% of which have said they’re voting for Obama over 67% of Jews 18 to 34. The Gallup organization says the disparity could be based on a greater inclination among Jews 18 to 34 to call themselves Conservative, but says a similar inclination isn’t apparent among Jews aged 35 to 54, 68% of which polled by Gallup have said they’re voting Obama.

And that 22 percent are voting for McCain because of irrational fear?

1035: More on Dickensian Issue 6 – we”re all beggars now

1018: My appearance on Poetry Over Music – smoked.

Thanks to Len for alerting me to this TED Talk.

I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is All The Best Tips on Getting In Shape, In One Handy List.

0701: Issue 6 – Dickensian sentence to parasitism. Vote NO.

“Small Mayors”

You know,
Small mayors,
Mayors of small towns-
Quote, unquote-
They’re on the front lines.

(To S. Hannity, Fox News, Sept. 19, 2008)

Via Slate…

In 2002, President George Bush signed into law the Help America Vote Act, a bill first introduced by Ohio’s own Representative Robert W. Ney. You remember Rep. Bob, “we don’t eat no French fries” Ney don’t you? While the bill contained many well-meant and intelligent reforms, events in Ohio in recent weeks have shown that the law has become the bludgeon with which the Republican party expects to engineer the theft of yet another election.

The Republican Party want the United States to look like Las Vegas, New Mexico.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast write:

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.”

Don’t let it happen in your precinct. Check your registration. Check it again. Vote a real ballot on Tuesday, 4 November.

From The New Yorker:

The exhaustingly, sometimes infuriatingly long campaign of 2008 (and 2007) has had at least one virtue: it has demonstrated that Obama”s intelligence and steady temperament are not just figments of the writer”s craft. He has made mistakes, to be sure. (His failure to accept McCain”s imaginative proposal for a series of unmediated joint appearances was among them.)

But, on the whole, his campaign has been marked by patience, planning, discipline, organization, technological proficiency, and strategic astuteness. Obama has often looked two or three moves ahead, relatively impervious to the permanent hysteria of the hourly news cycle and the cable-news shouters.

And when crisis has struck, as it did when the divisive antics of his ex-pastor threatened to bring down his campaign, he has proved equal to the moment, rescuing himself with a speech that not only drew the poison but also demonstrated a profound respect for the electorate. Although his opponents have tried to attack him as a man of “mere” words, Obama has returned eloquence to its essential place in American politics.

The choice between experience and eloquence is a false one–something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama”s “mere” speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern.

We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy. So much of the Presidency, as they say, is a matter of waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant. In the quiet of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate demands can be deafening. And yet Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential.

The election of Obama-a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America-would, at a stroke, reverse our country”s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them.

It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness.

It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader”s name is Barack Obama.

From Roldo Bartimole:

There is probably no one in the world that I respect more than Ralph Nader. No one I trust more. But I’m telling every Ohio voter, don’t vote for Ralph Nader.

The reason is simple. We cannot afford to have President John McCain.

[snip]

Personally, I think Barack Obama represents a wise choice, a choice I can make in good conscience.

I hope that Obama early in his term will seek out Nader’s advice on a whole host of issues. I hope he will not, as other Democrats unwisely have done, shun Nader. It would be a bad mistake.

We don’t have the luxury of many more political blunders.

Anyone who has doubts about Obama should read the endorsement of The New Yorker magazine. It is a masterful critique of the candidates.

So please, this one is very important. It will be important also to keep the pressure on President Obama to end the war in Iraq, and Afghanistan, too… and give him the popular support to redirect America to be the hope it once represented to the world.

Vote early on Tuesday, 4 November on a real ballot. And then take your friends to vote; take your neighbors to vote and volunteer to take strangers to vote.