North Carolina Has "Jumped the Shark"

Yes, I know you've been told that North Carolina is a red state, and that although the race has tightened recently, it still could be an easy win that the Rethugli-Cons will take without breaking much of a sweat due to the prevalence of the Charlie Black-run Jesse Helms mob that still wields major clout throughout the area. But . . . I've got some news for you. You better think (again)! I'm predicting that North Carolina "jumped the shark*," three weeks before the election, and it won't even be close. Remember the shark that Fonzie jumped and why it was important enough to coin a phrase meaning something that has passed its peak? I may be stretching the definition a little (okay, I am (it's a cute video!)), but I don't believe North Carolina will return to unwitting allegiance to the Repugni-Cons' fold in the immediate future. I'm writing today to alert you about the effort being made by the organizations that have banded together throughout North Carolina to campaign en masse for Obama (my membership to MoveOn.org is finally paying off!). So many organizations, so little time. I've had a visit every few days by people from different organizations "just making sure" that I'm "registered and know where and when" I "may vote," and "if I'm not registered, not to worry, because North Carolina let's you register and vote at the same time up to the Saturday (November 1) before election day (November 4)." Oh yes, and one more rather impressive news flash: Liddy Dole is being sent back to D.C. . . . to live with her husband without the title Senator before her name (and a lot less of the gold in her campaign chest if her recent "desperation" ad campaign is any sign)! North Carolina five-term state Senator Kay Hagen is kicking some Repugno-they-can't-*ss with her ads of the two old-timers who trade Liddy barbs with one saying she's "92 - votes with Bush 92% of the time" and the other saying "No, she's 93 - she is rated 93rd in effectiveness in the Senate." Cute. Deadly. So, North Carolina's red period is over: a result of a change in demographics leaving a voting populace who are no longer fooled by the Rethugli-Con.

Jumping the shark is a colloquialism used by TV critics and fans to denote that point in a TV show or movie series' history where the plot veers off into absurd story lines or out-of-the-ordinary characterizations, undergoing too many changes to retain the original appeal of the series. Shows that have "jumped the shark" are typically deemed to have passed their peak.

And the North Carolina Rephewni-Con days will soon be in the past. Please take a look at the problems inherent in this election that were so intelligently dissected by Mark Crispin Miller on Bill Moyers Journal earlier this evening as they discussed the standards for voter verification. Topics discussed were: "interfering with registration drives," "caging voters," "vote suppression" and a huge menu of extremely ingenious devices to try to make the turnout small (Rethug inspired), and, of course, "election fraud" by companies like Diebold with close ties to the Rethugs. We learn that "touchscreens are the worst" and that "optical scanners are just as insecure as the paperless machines;" that "oversight is lax to nonexistent" and that the "capacity for stealing elections today is infinitely greater than it has ever been." There is extensive treatment of the fraudulent Acorn nonscandal, and Mark personally vouches that Acorn has been quite scrupulous about the verification procedures accorded to its voter registration. Also of note is that as of 2007, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has prosecuted only 120 cases of voter fraud, so who would interpret that as a great problem? Right. The DOJ (Bush/Cheney-infected). The latest breaking news is the investigation by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Greg Palast released today in Rolling Stone that if the Democrats expect to win the election they must win "by a margin that exceeds the level of GOP vote tampering."

Block the Vote Rolling Stone (#1064) Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Greg Palast Don’t worry about Mickey Mouse or ACORN stealing the election. According to an investigative report out today in Rolling Stone magazine, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast, after a year-long investigation, reveal a systematic program of "GOP vote tampering" on a massive scale. - 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 - 10 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.' - Digging through government records, the Kennedy-Palast team discovered that, in 2004, a GOP scheme called "caging” ultimately took away the rights of 1.1 million voters. The Rolling Stone duo predict that, this November 4, it will be far worse. There's more: - Since the last presidential race, "States used dubious 'list management' rules to scrub at least 10 million voters from their rolls." Among those was Paul Maez of Las Vegas, New Mexico - a victim of an unreported but devastating purge of voters in that state that left as many as one in nine Democrats without a vote. For Maez, the state's purging his registration was particularly shocking - he's the County Elections supervisor. The Kennedy-Palast revelations go far beyond the sum of questionably purged voters recently reported by the New York Times. "Republican operatives - the party's elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics," report Kennedy and Palast, under the cover of fighting fraudulent voting, are "systematically disenfranchis[ing] Democrats." The investigators level a deadly serious charge: "If Democrats are to win the 2008 election, they must not simply beat McCain at the polls - they must beat him by a margin that exceeds the level of GOP vote tampering." (Note - Kennedy and Palast are releasing, simultaneously with the Rolling Stone investigative report what they call, the vote-theft 'antidote': a 24-page full-color comic book, Steal Back Your Vote, which can be downloaded or obtained in print from their non-partisan website, Steal Back Your Vote.) (For updates and video reports, go to Rolling Stone, Greg Palast and Steal Back Your Vote.)

So Go Vote NOW! (And report any suspicious activity to your polling officials.) Remember, "How North Carolina goes, so goes the nation!" (Yes, I know it's coining a new phrase, but who'd a thunk it before now? Suzan