Sooner Blue

...in last night's presidential debate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l63SRpGXBHE

This classic clip from the 60's Batman movie is so spot on, so funny...and exactly John McCain's tactics, right down to the "my friends."

How The Penguin tapped into the deep and troubled future mind of McCain is beyond me....

The beauty of this is that it not only hits McCain back for all his smears, but it also forces his campaign to go on the defensive...they'll have to talk about McCain's economic policy and attitudes towards regulation.

From politico.com: "Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) on Monday will launch a multimedia campaign to draw attention to the involvement of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the "Keating Five" savings-and-loan scandal of 1989-91, which blemished McCain's public image and set him on his course as a self-styled reformer.

Pushing back against what it calls McCain's "guilt-by-association" tactics, the Obama campaign is e-mailing millions of supporters a link to a website, KeatingEconomics.com, which will have a 13-minute documentary on the scandal beginning at noon Eastern time on Monday. The overnight e-mails urge recipients to pass the link on to friends.[..]"

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1008/14302.html

http://www.keatingeconomics.com/

We all remember The Keating Five story -- about a crooked bank, Lincoln Savings, trying to keep regulators off its back while it was losing its investors' money. Charles Keating, who ran the bank, had contributed a lot of money to McCain (and the other four Senators)...he had flown McCain and his family to vacations in the Bahamas, vacations McCain paid for only AFTER they were made public...he had invested with Cindy McCain and her father as partners.

Regulators discovered that, by the end of 1986, Lincoln Savings had exceeded the investment regulation by $600 million, and had unreported losses of more than $130 million. Keating was worried that his bank might be seized. So McCain and other Senators met with regulators to urge them to back off. The regulators refused...the bank failed.

Seems to me that people with good judgment don't try to persuade regulators to back off bankers who are in business with their wives... people with good judgment don't support putting foxes in charge of guarding henhouses.

Imagine what McCain's judgment could do for us in the next few years, if we give him the chance.

You know, there is a long list of stories that the Obama campaign has not used against McCain. One is the fact that McCain's father-in-law, whose fortune helped finance his political career, someone he described as a role model, was a convicted criminal who had ties to organized crime.

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=0fd7470d-a41f-4d9e-9328-fd079b476a0a&p=3

To me, this father-in-law-was-a-criminal story is not relevant. But, when you think of today's economic crisis, the Keating Five story has more red meat than the weak story of Obama's acquaintance with Ayers.

See how much politics is like war. Obama's plan is to drown the Ayers-Rezko-Wright rollout in a barrage of counter-attacks...and hopefully attention will return to the economy once the stories have run the news cycle.

Also, if Obama is going to directly challenge McCain's credibility and honor today, hopefully McCain will turn up at the debate tomorrow with a beet red face, stewing and snarling. After all, his response to any journalist challenging his veracity has been snappy red faced anger. Hopefully, his famous temper will be on national teevee for all to see.

In a perfect world, I would prefer that the Obama campaign stick to the high road...but taking that high road always leads us Democrats down into a political cul-de-sac.

No, if Obama wants to win this election, he has to show voters that he has both the will and smarts to fight for it...just like he would for our country. There's nothing wrong with using the Keating story purely as defense.

With McCain being a loose cannon and Palin a landmine, for the sake of our country, he can't afford not to...

It's normal for states to periodically review lists of voters and remove any who have moved, died, or been convicted of felonies. BUT, something has to be done to oversee and control this process so it doesn't become easy to manipulate for partisan purposes.

A new study by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice reports that secret voter purges were conducted this year, including 10,000 voters knocked off the rolls in Mississippi and another 21,000 purged in Louisiana...areas hit hard by recent hurricanes.

And at least 19 states are disregarding a federal law banning systematic voter purges within 90 days of a federal election.

The U.S. Public Interest Research Group says that massive purges of registered voters have occurred recently in Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Texas and Washington.

The Brennan Center reports:
* In Columbus, an official purged 700 people from the voter lists, according to the study, because they were ineligible to vote due to criminal convictions. The list included people who had never even received a parking ticket.

* And in Wisconsin, some voters discovered they had been purged after they tried to cast ballots in September’s primary election.

* In Mississippi earlier this year, a local election official discovered that another official had wrongly purged 10,000 voters from her home computer just a week before the presidential primary.

* In Muscogee, Georgia this year, a county official purged 700 people from the voter lists, supposedly because they were ineligible to vote due to criminal convictions. The list included people who had never even received a parking ticket.

The purges happen in secret with no public accountability...voters are being improperly removed from the rolls because of clerical errors, or small mismatches in names or addresses and don't know about their removal from the rolls until they show up at the polls and are denied a ballot.

Read about it here:

http://www.brennancenter.org/content/resource/voter_purges

And CBS did a piece on it:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/09/30/eveningnews/main4490682.shtml

Voters can check their registration status and confirm their polling place here:

http://www.votersunite.org/info/RegInfo.asp

http://www.canivote.org/

As a solution, the Brennan Center recommends that we need the government to start a nationwide universal voter-registration system.

Waldman said: "...when you register once, you stay registered. The government keeps the list. You can prevent fraud. You can prevent people who aren't eligible from voting. But everybody who's eligible gets to vote."

Doing something like this could add up to 50 million more people to the voter rolls every year.

Hey, the government keeps track of our taxes and social security...why not voters too?

There's the possibility of voter purges being used to target minorities or other groups for partisan purposes. "We don't know all the problems, but we know that there's a huge potential for partisan mischief," Waldman stated.

The Republicans will try to steal this election any way they can. For examples of this see www.republicantricks.com

Remember back in 2004, when Florida tried to remove 48,000 "suspected felons" from its voter rolls...even though many of them were eligible to vote? They compiled a list of 22,000 African Americans (who usually vote Democratic) to be purged and -- get this -- only 61 voters with Hispanic surnames, in spite of Florida’s large Hispanic population. Voting rights groups finally pressured Florida officials to not use the purge list.

The last arrow in the GOP quiver is vote suppression.