The Guide questions Congressional candidates about the following set of issues:

• Increased penalties for porn on TV;
• Repeal of the “Marriage Penalty”;
• School Vouchers;
• Legalization of Prostitution;
• Abstinence Education;
• Human Cloning;
• Repeal of the “Death Tax”;
• U.N. Review of U.S. elections;
• Federal “Hate Crimes” Legislation;
• Reinstatement of the “Fairness Doctrine.”

“It’s not clear what many of these issues have to do with ‘building families,’ which the Forum says is its main mission,” said John Daigle, a Grassroots Baton Rouge Dems committee member. “They are all obsessions of rightwing interests, but the links between the ‘Fairness Doctrine’ and building families is pretty tenuous, unless you think it is a family value to only have access to the hate mongering of conservative talk radio 24/7 and no access to the other side of the issues.”

The methodology used by the LFF is highly questionable as well. They say that they submitted questionnaires to candidates and for those who did not respond, took responses from their federal party platform. This assumes that the candidates are in total agreement with their party platforms, but it also suggests that party platforms have positions on issues like legalizing prostitution.

Because Congressman Don Cazayoux did not respond to the LFF questionnaire, they list his answer to the prostitution legalization question as “unknown.” “This is extremely misleading,” said Daigle. “Does anyone seriously think Don Cazayoux favors legalizing prostitution? Is any candidate promoting that position? It’s particularly unfair in the case of Don Cazayoux, a family man and prosecutor with a strong pro-family record.

“He is also ‘pro-life,’ yet the Guide never mentions this FACT – one would think this is an issue that the Forum has an interest in. But Congressman Cazayoux is a Democrat, and the Forum’s questions – and their self-selected answers – are slanted to favor Republicans.” (The Guide also manages to give the wrong website for Congressman Cazayoux, including “.com” instead of “.org.”)

State Senator Michael Jackson’s comments are all listed as “no response,” presumably because as an Independent he has no party platform positions. But Jackson was a Democrat until a few months ago, and has supported Democratic Party positions on many issues.

Strangely, this “Family Forum” Voter Guide has no mention of the main challenge facing American families – health care. Medical problems were a leading cause of bankruptcies in America before the mortgage meltdown. A key concern of Congressman Cazayoux, meeting our obligations to America’s veterans, is also absent from the Guide, yet the strains put on families of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts should be a concern for all Americans.

“The narrow set of rightwing issues that the Family Forum has highlighted is of little value to most American families,” said Daigle, “and their underhanded methodology and misleading presentation of the candidates’ positions sets a very bad example for Louisiana’s youth.”

Is America Ready to Vote? Preparations for Voting Machine Problems in 2008, a report released October 16 by the Brennan Center for Justice, ranks Louisiana as inadequate in the following areas:

• Having no state-mandated requirement for emergency paper ballots to be available in precincts that use voting machines;
• Not having software independent voter-verifiable paper records for all voters;
• Having inadequate preparation for voter-verifiable paper records for post-election audits.

The Brennan Center report states, “There is widespread agreement among security experts that some form of independent voter-verified record is critical for voting system security; voter verified records also provide a check against potential electronic miscounts… We urge each state to take steps necessary to insure that inevitable voting machine problems do not undermine either the individual right to vote, or our ability to accurately count each vote cast.”

Citizens who want their votes to count should back this report, urging Louisiana to print back-up paper ballots if that step is necessary to ensure the integrity of this election.

The Republican party is grasping on to the ACORN story as a way to delegitimize what now looks like the probable outcome of the November election. It is also a way to stoke the paranoia of their base, lay the groundwork for legal challenges of close outcomes in various states and promote new legal restrictions on legitimate voting by lower income voters and minorities. The big picture is that these claims of ‘voter fraud’ are themselves a fraud, a tool to aid in suppressing Democratic voter turnout. But I want give readers a bit more detail to understand what is going because the right-wing freak out about ACORN happens pretty much on schedule every two years. The whole scam is premised on having enough people who don’t remember when they tried it before who they can then confuse and lie to. And this is clearly important because I’m hearing from a lot of people whose heart is in the right place thinking some real voter fraud conspiracy has been uncovered and that Obama has to distance himself from it post-haste.

ACORN registers lots of lower income and/or minority voters. They operate all across the country and do a lot of things beside voter registration. What’s key to understand is their method. By and large they do not rely on volunteers to register voters. They hire people — often people with low incomes or even the unemployed. This has the dual effect of not only registering people but also providing some work and income for people who are out of work. But because a lot of these people are doing it for the money, inevitably, a few of them cut corners or even cheat. So someone will end up filling out cards for nonexistent names and some of those slip through ACORN’s own efforts to catch errors. (It’s important to note that in many of the recent ACORN cases that have gotten the most attention it’s ACORN itself that has turned the people in who did the fake registrations.) These reports start buzzing through the right-wing media every two years and every time the anecdotal reports of ‘thousands’ of fraudulent registrations turns out, on closer inspection, to be either totally bogus themselves or wildly exaggerated. So thousands of phony registrations ends up being, like, twelve.

I’ve always had questions about whether this is a good way to do voter registration. And Democratic campaigns usually keep their distance. But here’s the key. This is fraud against ACORN. They end up paying people for registering more people then they actually signed up. If you register me three times to vote, the registrar will see two new registrations of an already registered person and the ones won’t count. If I successfully register Mickey Mouse to vote, on election day, Mickey Mouse will still be a cartoon character who cannot go to the local voting station and vote. Logically speaking there’s very little way a few phony names on the voting rolls could be used to commit actual vote fraud. And much more importantly, numerous studies and investigations have shown no evidence of anything more than a handful of isolated cases of actual instances of vote fraud.

To expand on this point let me quote from Richard Hasen, one of the most experienced and concise commentators on this question, from a June 2007 column in the Dallas Morning News …

At least in hindsight, the center’s line of argument is easily deconstructed. First, arguing by anecdote is dangerous business. A new report by Lorraine Minnite of Barnard College looks at these anecdotes and shows them to be, for the most part, wholly spurious. Sure, one can find a rare case of someone voting in two jurisdictions, but nothing extensive or systematic has been unearthed or documented.But perhaps most importantly, the idea of massive polling-place fraud (through the use of inflated voter rolls) is inherently incredible. Suppose I want to swing the Missouri election for my preferred presidential candidate. I would have to figure out who the fake, dead or missing people on the registration rolls are, then pay a lot of other individuals to go to the polling place and claim to be that person, without any return guarantee - thanks to the secret ballot - that any of them will cast a vote for my preferred candidate.

Those who do show up at the polls run the risk of being detected and charged with a felony. And for what - $10? Polling-place fraud, in short, makes no sense.

The Justice Department devoted unprecedented resources to ferreting out fraud over five years and appears to have found not a single prosecutable case across the country. Of the many experts consulted, the only dissenter from that position was a representative of the now-evaporated American Center for Voting Rights.

Again, there have been numerous investigations of this. Often by people with at least a mild political interest in finding wrongdoing. But they never find it. It always ends up being right-wing hype and lies. Remember, most of those now-famous fired US Attorneys from 2007 were Republican appointees who were canned after they got tasked with investigating allegations of widespread vote fraud, did everything they could to find it, but came up with nothing. That was the wrong answer so Karl Rove and his crew at the Justice Department fired them.

Vote registration fraud is a limited and relatively minor problem in the US today. But it is principally an administrative and efficiency issue. It is has little or nothing to do with people casting illegitimate votes to affect an actual election. That’s the key. What you’re hearing right now from Fox News, the New York Post, John Fund and the rest of the right-wing bamboozlement chorus is a just another effort to exploit, confuse and lie in an effort to put more severe restrictions on legitimate voting and lay the groundwork to steal elections.

It’s that simple.

From Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo.

“VP Cheney represents the disasters and excesses of the Bush administration even more than President Bush in some respects,” said Grassroots Baton Rouge Democrats Steering Committee member Irv Peckham. “His contempt for the Constitution has been demonstrated and documented repeatedly for the last eight years. He has played a major role in every disaster that the Bush administration has inflicted on America.”

Interestingly, Cheney’s Baton Rouge visit comes after the publication of a new book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency by Barton Gellman, a reporter for the Washington Post. Gellman interviewed former Congressman Dick Armey (R-TX), who states clearly that Cheney lied to him about Iraq’s supposed development of weapons of mass destruction, resulting in Armey’s reluctant vote to support the war resolution in the House. Subsequent events showed this to be a fabrication. Armey’s vote could have changed history.

The book also details Cheney’s unprecedented concentration of power in the Vice President’s office, promoting the bizarre and radical theories of the “Unitary Executive” developed by neo-conservative lawyers; and the VP is part of the legislative branch of government.

Cheney also played a decisive role in development of the Bush administration’s energy and fiscal policies, both of which have been disastrous for America.

“Cheney and Bush entered office knowing that global oil production was going to peak in a few years, and did nothing to prepare the country for it,” says Peckham. “He also famously told more fiscally astute members of the Cabinet that ‘Reagan showed that deficits don’t matter,’ when they expressed concern about the irresponsible budgets being put forward by the White House.”

“The Republican-led Congress was totally complicit in these policies, which have almost doubled the national debt, now approaching $10 trillion, as well as left America in an energy crisis. By inviting Mr. Cheney to help him raise money, Dr. Cassidy has sadly embraced his legacy and its consequences,”
said Committee member Barbara Nielsen. “It shows his campaign against ‘pork-barrel spending’ in a new light.”

On September 22, 2008, the Baton Rouge Advocate ran a column by rightwing pundit Thomas Sowell that compared Democratic Presidential Nominee Senator Barack Obama to Hitler (”Talk alone won’t get job done,” 9/22/08.) Sowel’’s column was inaccurate, outrageous, and highly misleading - all par for the course for him. His attempt to be somewhat oblique by making the point that Obama and Hitler both drew large crowds is merely a way for him to play the “Hitler card,” a tactic that generally means that the writer has no case to make.

We are more disturbed, however, that the Advocate chose to run this column. You have a choice of syndicated columns to print. You chose to print one comparing Obama to Hitler. You chose to provide a forum for the “Hitler card” to be played. In the process you are providing legitimacy to this propaganda tactic by serving as a willing venue for such rhetoric. Many of our families had members who were either victimized by fascism, or sacrificed to oppose it during World War II and other conflicts. We therefore do not see providing a forum for comparisons of the Democratic candidate to Hitler as a trivial matter.

This is not a free speech issue. We are not challenging the Advocate’s right to print whatever it wants, and we realize that printing an opinion piece does not necessarily entail agreement with it. We are questioning, however, why this particular choice was made. Free speech does not entail immunity from being questioned or challenged, especially for media outlets with the capacity to influence many people. Printing an opinion that should be out of the mainstream of American political discourse generally requires some explanation. If the Advocate felt that Sowell’s column was the best one available, then that indicates a more serious problem.

Sincerely,

Barbara Nielsen
Baton Rouge

Janice Bonner-Davis
Slaughter

Christine Bruno
Baton Rouge

John Daigle
Baton Rouge

Eleanor Earle
Baton Rouge

Darla Edwards
Baton Rouge

Sonya Feeney
Baton Rouge

Carla Florsheim
Monroe

Mark Gonzalez
New Orleans

Tina Henderson
Lacombe

Lisa Hubbard
New Orleans

Michele & Ulrick Jean-Pierre
Baton Rouge

Givonna Joseph
Baton Rouge

Vicki Lancaster
Baton Rouge

Martha Martin
Baton Rouge

Alicia McLaughlin
Baton Rouge

Ashley Michel
Baton Rouge

Maisha Nash
Baton Rouge

Bonnie Porter
Baton Rouge

Lynn Schlossberger
Baton Rouge

Owen Scott
Baton Rouge

Joseph Stern
Baton Rouge

Brandon Thornhill
Baton Rouge

Rachel Coleman-Thornhill
Baton Rouge

Eboni Townsend
New Orleans

Aglaia Venters
Baton Rouge

Charmaine Venters
Baton Rouge

Matthew Weaver
New Orleans

Stacie Williams
Baton Rouge

Beatrice Winkler
Baton Rouge

Susan Spillman
Baton Rouge

Jimmie Brackin
Walker

The original column in the Washington Post was titled “Obama’s Altitude Sickness.” The Times-Picayune ran the column with the title “There’s a new rock star in town.” It’s common for local newspapers to change titles of national columns that they run, but their choice of words can raise questions for just that reason.

Why this title? The original title was more subtle, and clearly didn’t convey the message that the Advocate wanted to promote by choosing to run the column. This is an editorial decision – and a political one. It’s also nothing new for the Advocate.

Krauthammer’s contentions are highly questionable, as usual. He dismisses Barack Obama’s abilities and substantive policy proposals to focus on the “celebrity candidate” and “Obama movement” mantras that the GOP adopted some time back. He likewise ignores the real questions about Governor Palin’s qualifications for the Vice Presidency, and misses the irony of referring to her as a “new celebrity.” His closing line referring to politics as a game is a reminder that the GOP has not only lost touch with reality, but any sense of the seriousness or value of America’s system of representative government. Those considerations are particularly relevant for Louisiana, which is facing increasing challenges that require a national investment of resources – and the substantive, informed national debate that such decisions demand.

For some sense of the critical issues in the campaign that are being ignored, and their critical importance to Louisiana, see Barack Obama: Rebuilding the Gulf Coast.

• Sabotage by Design: Thomas Frank on the Bush Administration

• “Starving the Beast” - Ed Kilgore, Blueprint Magazine, June 30, 2003

• “How Karl Rove played politics while people drowned”, Paul Alexander, Salon.com, June 6, 2008

• Senator Landrieu Comments on the President’s Plan to Privatize Social Security

• Obama’s Fiscal Plan
• “Obama and Coburn Introduce Strengthening Transparency and Accountability in Federal Spending Act of 2008”
• “What Is McCain’s Economic Agenda?“