WilliamPitt
WilliamPitt's JournalAn epitaph for the GOP's 2012 campaign season
"The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."
- George Orwell, "In Front of Your Nose"
Found here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/post/a-reality-check-for-the-ages/2012/11/07/7047ce10-2907-11e2-b4e0-346287b7e56c_blog.html?hpid=z4
One day after an election that proved the rights of women are not to be trifled with...
...I find out that we are having a daughter.
To all of you who voted to preserve and defend those rights for my little girl, thank you from my soul.
My Bleary-Eyed Beauty...
I always pick a "victory song" before an election to play, just in case. Usually I don't get to play them.
This one I picked for tonight. Seems appropriate...and anyway, I get to play it.
If you play it, play it LOUD.
I've herded the horses, done chores from the field
Disquieted chickens for what they would yield
Brought fresh cream and berries to fashion a meal
To be fickle and fat in the morning...
For I love ya my darlin', my name I desire
To fall from your sweet lips when asked of your squire
And curl your fine toes as we sit by my fire
Till all the wee hours of the morning...
When all the world will anxiously welcome your new brave plan...
And it's off to bed my bleary-eyed beauty
The angels trust to me
And I won't leave you dry when you're closing your eyes
Just sip from your sea of dreams
And it's off to bed my starry-eyed polly
The angels smile on thee
When I kiss you all over and over again
And trip on your sea of dreams...
Thank you, DU. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
2002.
2004.
2006.
2008.
2010.
...and now 2012.
Been here for all of it.
Thank you so much, DU. I owe you my sanity, a debt that can never be repaid.
Fired up.
Ready to go.
I FUCKING HATE THESE PEOPLE.
Tea Party Group Blocks Florida Voters, Stops Water Handouts at PollsBrentin Mock and Voting Rights Watch 2012
The Nation
November 5, 2012 - 12:11 PM ET
Tea Party activists in Florida’s largely black and electorally significant Interstate 4 corridor have worked furiously to put a damper on what has been a record-setting turnout thus far. In one of the most striking examples of voter suppression to emerge, Voting Rights Watch obtained a list of several dozen Hillsborough County voters who will be surprised to learn they cannot vote regular ballots thanks to last-minute challenges filed against them.
I’ve requested similar information from Miami-Dade, Orange, Pinellas and Seminole counties, but officials have not responded. A spokesperson for the Secretary of State’s Office, Chris Cate, said the state does not track voter challenges, so there is no way of knowing how widespread these sorts of challenges may be.
In Hillsborough County, seventy-seven people—forty of them in Tampa—won’t be able to file a regular ballot because the True the Vote–affiliated group Tampa Vote Fair has challenged their voting status. Of those, sixty-eight have been challenged because Tampa Vote Fair asserts they are ineligible due to a felony conviction. These people will not know that their vote has been challenged until they reach the polls and are forced to cast a provisional ballot. (Some of them may have already attempted to vote during the early voting period.)
According to documents provided to Voting Rights Watch by Hillsborough County Attorney’s office, all seventy-seven of the voter challenges were filed by Kimberly Kelley, Tampa Vote Fair’s president, and all are dated October 16, 2012—a full week after voter registration ended in Florida. Earlier this year, Kelley sent to the Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections multiple lists of people she suspected were ineligible to vote because of felony convictions. One of those lists had 1,375 names on it, which the county supervisor forwarded on to the state to investigate, but which turned up no names yet of people improperly registered.
The rest: http://www.thenation.com/blog/171030/tea-party-group-blocks-florida-voters-stops-water-handouts-polls?rel=emailNation%22
Nate Silver's Final Word (Hint: get ready to smile)
Nov. 5: Late Poll Gains for Obama Leave Romney With Longer OddsBy NATE SILVER
Mitt Romney has always had difficulty drawing a winning Electoral College hand. Even during his best period of polling, in the week or two after the first presidential debate in Denver, he never quite pulled ahead in the polling averages in Ohio and other states that would allow him to secure 270 electoral votes.
But the most recent set of polls suggest another problem for Mr. Romney, whose momentum in the polls stalled out in mid-October. Instead, it is President Obama who is making gains.
Among 12 national polls published on Monday, Mr. Obama led by an average of 1.6 percentage points. Perhaps more important is the trend in the surveys. On average, Mr. Obama gained 1.5 percentage points from the prior edition of the same polls, improving his standing in nine of the surveys while losing ground in just one.
Because these surveys had large sample sizes, the trend is both statistically and practically meaningful. Whether because of Hurricane Sandy, the relatively good economic news of late, or other factors, Mr. Obama appears to have gained ground in the closing days of the race.
The rest: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/06/nov-5-late-poll-gains-for-obama-leave-romney-with-longer-odds/?hp
Final odds: Obama 91.6% to Romney 8.4%
Eight Point Four Percent.
Go vote.
Mitt Romney talk-radio interview on Mormonism...he didn't know he was being videotaped...wow.
http://theimmoralminority.blogspot.com/2012/11/mitt-romney-seriously-loses-his-cool.html?spref=fb
The Salvation Army, LGBT rights, and a little something you can do
Well, the time is upon us again...Christmas sales, Christmas lights, Christmas music, Christmas shopping, and hordes of Salvation Army Santas fanned out with their (ceaseless, insipid) bell-ringing and buckets for collecting donations.
I'm not going to argue that the Salvation Army does not do good works - they do - but those works come at a heavy anti-gay rights price that Americans, in the 21st fa-chrissakes century, should not have to pay any more.
A little background if you're not up on the Army's rotten history with LGBT Americans: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2011/12/01/9143097-gay-groups-boycott-salvation-army-red-kettle-drive?lite
Several years ago, some inspired activists came up with a clever way to bring the point home to the Army that their anti-American anti-rights activities belong to the past. Rather than simply boycot the Salvation Army's Christmas-time collection drive, they printed up scads of flyers crafted to look like dollar bills. They handed those bills out to people who object to the Army's anti-LGBT activities, and those people dropped the flyers into the collection buckets as they went about their business.
An example of one such:
It's not just a boycott. It's a boycott with a message that every Salvation Army donation center will have to sift through as they count their collected coin.
I'm going to print a bunch out and carry them with me. Might be you can do the same.
T'is the season, after all.
An answer to the "Voting is for suckers/doesn't matter" mindset in 32 quick seconds.
If you happen to be afflicted with an acquaintance, friend or family member who subscribes to the "Voting is for suckers" school of thought, do me a favor and share this with them. 32 seconds of their life that might wind up making all the difference in the world.
"537 Votes"
Occupy Sandy: OWS Comes to the Rockaways
Belle Harbor, Queens, about half way along the Rockaway peninsula, is four blocks across at its widest point—a splinter of East-West streets on a spit of land between the bay and the sea. Now that land is beach again. The roads are so densely packed under sand hardened into foot-high ruts and deep puddles that they seem like dirt paths, never paved. A car is suspended diagonally across the sidewalk of one of the main roads, its rear impaled on a low wall. A mangled wood fence lies in the street. In front of nearly every house is a massive pile of debris—chairs, tables, mattresses, torn bits of cloth, and garbage bags stuffed, presumably, with smaller, flimsier, more rotten things. Some of the houses have been inspected for safety by the city and have paper signs posted on their doors: green for safe, yellow for partly safe, red for not safe at all. Cloth and wood signs along Rockaway Beach Boulevard yesterday: “F.U. Sandy, Survivor beach party … BYO … GOD BLESS USA, Rockaway”; “U LOOT, WE SHOOT.”
At the St. Francis de Sales church on B-129th Street, the church hall has been taken over by Occupy Sandy—an offshoot of the still-active networks of Occupy Wall Street. Supplies have been driven here from all over Brooklyn: back there are piles of blankets; on the tables here are diapers, baby food, and cleaning supplies; over there, clothes (grownup, child, baby); more than a hundred pairs of shoes lined up neatly on the bleachers. Residents of the neighborhood wander around the hall, filling bags. In the front entranceway Occupy volunteers are unloading cases of bottled water from a truck, handing the heavy cases one to the next, a bucket brigade to the back of the church. The volunteers move fast but the job lasts more than half an hour—it’s a big truck. In front of the church, long tables have been set up on the sidewalk, where volunteers are serving hot food and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.
(snip)
Meanwhile, organizing was going on: we need to make food, we need a kitchen. The Red Hook Initiative has a kitchen but it’s too small. Phone calls. There’s a church on Fourth Avenue at 55th Street in Sunset Park, St. Jacobi, whose pastor likes Occupy—they have a big kitchen. They also have a hall that can be used as a headquarters to receive donations. Done—meet there. Get in the car. Somebody set up a website, there needs to be a short, clear list of what is needed and where to take it. Make sure it stays updated. Phone calls. We need volunteers to sort donations. We need sandwiches made. We need tinfoil to wrap the sandwiches in. We need people to drive out to Zone A to deliver supplies. People are running low on gas, not everyone can get to Sunset Park. Phone calls. Satellite drop-off centers for donations established in Fort Greene, Park Slope, Williamsburg, and Bed-Stuy. Phone calls. Coordinate with people in Manhattan—CAAAV, an Asian American organization on Hester Street, is asking for volunteers in Chinatown. Can anyone get to Chinatown? The people at Good Old Lower East Side need volunteers to knock on doors in housing projects to see if old or sick people need help—they’re doing it between twelve and six every day and they need as many people as they can get (we’re sending hundreds). Someone needs to go out to the Rockaways and figure out a distribution center. Maybe St. Francis de Sales. It’s on 129th Street. Remember, phones don’t work there. Neither do traffic lights.
On Rockaway Beach Boulevard, a Polish woman walked away from St. Francis de Sales carrying full bags. She and her son had a place to stay right now, with her husband’s family, and it was a Polish building so they took them in, but they couldn’t stay there for much longer. She wasn’t sure where they would go next. She had lived in a basement—everything was ruined. She knew that a lot of other people were in the same situation. She knew that. But what got her was, on the street where she was staying, some people had clean driveways. Not just cleared of debris—no. Perfectly clean. Swept. Clean as a floor inside your house. That was what got her.
The rest: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/11/occupy-sandy.html
Profile Information
Name: William Rivers PittGender: Male
Hometown: Boston
Member since: 2001
Number of posts: 58,179
