Phoenix fights the big freeze
By Matt McGrath Science reporter, BBC World Service
The Mars Phoenix Lander is in a race against time and temperatures as it struggles to resolve some key questions about the Red Planet.
The onset of the harsh Martian winter means that there is now less Sun to charge Phoenix's batteries.
Researchers at the University of Arizona who are in charge of the mission are also struggling with the soil conditions as they try to sift the dirt for evidence of organic chemicals.
But they hope soon to activate the lander's microphone and record the sounds of Mars for the first time.
Housed in a building that could easily pass as a tax office or library, the mission headquarters in Tucson is carving out a little piece of history: Phoenix marks the first time that a Mars Lander has been controlled by a university scientist, not by the boys at Nasa.
That scientist is Professor Peter Smith, the principal investigator on the mission.
This giant of a man, with a wit as dry as the Arizona desert, is hopeful that Phoenix can tackle two remaining problems before its batteries peter out.
"We are still valiantly searching for organic molecules. We'd love to be able to claim that we had found organic materials in the northern plains of Mars. And that's a key and most important ingredient of our search.
"But it's also the hardest thing to find. We are pushed right down to the wire in our last samples to try to make that case. So I don't know if that will happen or not, I hope so. That would be big."
Indeed it would. Organics can be considered the "feedstock" of biochemistry. In its endeavour to try to show the northern plains could be "habitable", these carbon-rich molecules would represent a big tick mark.
"We are also trying to find the isotopic clues that we can find in water in terms of the deuterium to hydrogen ratio," added Professor Smith.
That's a real key signature in telling us a lot about the history of water. So if we can get the ratio of the ice and the water vapour just above it, we can see what the connection is between the atmospheric water and the ice underneath the surface.
"We think they are in equilibrium and that's why there is ice under the surface.
"It's my fervent hope to solve these two questions. Will it happen? I don't know, I'm going to have to live the life and find out."
Since it landed on the 25 May, Phoenix has twice had its mission extended. But while it was able to operate for eight or 10 hours a day during the summer, the decline of the Sun in the Martian sky means the lander will struggle to recharge its batteries.
"We're pretty sure we can limp along through mid-November," said Professor Smith.
"At some point towards the end of that month, we will not be able to heat our batteries - we will not have enough solar energy to heat them and as they get colder and colder they don't work as well. Pretty soon, you can't store any more energy in them; when that happens you are in the death knells.
"It's like going to the hospital with someone who is terribly sick and seeing their vital signs getting less and less every day.
"It's the same for this spacecraft. If we can make it to the end of the year that would be a great Christmas present; it's nip and tuck."
Even as the Sun sets on this mission, Phoenix is still sending back some amazing detail, recently detecting snow falling from the Martian skies.
The more we glean about the planet the more Earth-like it seems - and that inevitably raises the question of life on Mars. A question that Peter Smith has grown a little tired of answering.
"Who do you think I am? I'm not Nostradamus here, how do I know what's going to happen in 10 years..."
I ask him about the idea that life on Earth may have originated on Mars, or perhaps life on Mars might have started from here. Professor Smith is disinclined to speculate, and becomes playful. "You don't ask any of the easy questions do you? How the hell do I know... was God left-handed? How do I know?"
The Arizona science team will also be hoping to mark another unique achievement for a mission to Mars. The scientists intend to activate the microphone on the Lander and record the sounds of the planet for the first time.
The microphone was originally intended to record the descent of Phoenix but was switched off because of the risk that it could trip a critical landing system. Engineers will now send computer code to the lander to try to activate it. Peter Smith said he hoped it was still in working order.
"We'll start slowly, just turn it on and make sure it records sound, and we'll try and make some noise to make sure it's working. We'll try scraping ice with our robotic arm blade and we can bang a few pots or something. Then we'll listen just for the Mars sounds by themselves."
When I ask him what he thinks we'll hear on Mars, he responds with tongue firmly planted in his cheek. "I think it's an interesting noise. There may be music. I don't know."
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Sunday, October 19, 2008
"Why not in America?" If you get a chance listen to his complete explaination of why he is voting FOR Obama....
WASHINGTON - Former Secretary of State Colin Powell is voting FOR Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., for president on Sunday, criticizing his own Republican Party for what he called its narrow focus on irrelevant personal attacks over a serious approach to challenges he called unprecedented.
Powell, who for many years was considered the most likely candidate to become the first African-American president, said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he was not supporting Obama because of his race. He said he had watched both Obama and his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, for many months and thought “either one of them would be a good president.”
But he said McCain’s choices in the last few weeks — especially his selection of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his vice presidential running mate — had raised questions in his mind about McCain’s judgment.
“I don’t believe [Palin] is ready to be president of the United States,” Powell said flatly. By contrast, Obama’s running mate, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, “is ready to be president on day one.”
Powell also said he was “troubled” by Republican personal attacks on Obama, especially false intimations that Obama was Muslim and Republicans’ recent focus on Obama’s alleged connections to William Ayers, the founder of the radical ’60 Weather Underground.
Stressing that Obama was a lifelong Christian, Powell denounced Republican tactics that he said were insulting not only to to Obama but also to Muslims.
“The really right answer is what if he is?” Powell said, praising the contributions of millions of Muslim citizens to American society.
“I look at these kind of approaches to the campaign, and they trouble me,” Powell said. “Over the last seven weeks, the approach of the Republican Party has become narrower and narrower.”
In an interview Sunday on Fox News, McCain said he was not surprised by the announcement.
“I’ve always admired and respected General Powell,” said McCain, who cited the endorsements he had received from former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, James Baker and Lawrence Eagleburger. “We have a respectful disagreement.”
Bolstering Obama’s international credentialsPowell, a retired Army general who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the first President Bush before becoming secretary of state in the current administration, is one of the most highly decorated military officers of modern times and an admired figure in both parties. The Obama campaign is likely to cite the endorsement as an answer to critics and undecided voters who have questioned the foreign policy credential of Obama, a first-term senator whose national experience amounts to four years in the Senate.
Powell said a major part of his decision to turn his back on his own party was his conclusion that Obama was the better option to repair frayed U.S. relations with allies overseas.
“This is the time for outreach,” Powell said, saying the next president would have to “reach out and show the world there is a new administration that is willing to reach out.”
In particular, he said, he welcomed Obama’s president to “talk to people we haven’t talked to,” a reference to Obama’s controversial statement that he would be open to direct diplomacy with Iranian leaders.
“I think that [Obama] has a definite way of doing business that will serve us well,” Powell said.
Click for related content
Read the full transcript of the interview
Won’t campaign for ObamaAs recently as a month ago, Powell said that electing an African-American president would be “electrifying” for the world but that he remained undecided. The unsteadiness of the Republican campaign in recent weeks, especially on the economic crisis, went a long way toward pushing him off the fence, he said.
“It isn’t easy for me to disappoint Senator McCain as I have this morning,” said Powell, who emphasized that he would not campaign for Obama because of his admiration for McCain’s long record of service in the military and in Congress.
But as he examined both campaigns in the last few weeks, he said, he became “concerned” that “in the case of Mr. McCain, he was a little unsure how to deal with the economic problems.”
“Every day, there was a different approach,” he said, adding that he also “would have difficulty with two more conservative appointments to the Supreme Court.”
McCain would be a good president, Powell said, but Obama is “a transformational figure” who would be an “exceptional” leader.
“I truly believe that at this point in Amserica’s history we need a president who will not just continue ... basically the policies we have followed in recent years,” he said. “We need a president with transformational qualities.”
For that reason, he said, “I will be voting for Barack Obama.”
Powell, who for many years was considered the most likely candidate to become the first African-American president, said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he was not supporting Obama because of his race. He said he had watched both Obama and his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, for many months and thought “either one of them would be a good president.”
But he said McCain’s choices in the last few weeks — especially his selection of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his vice presidential running mate — had raised questions in his mind about McCain’s judgment.
“I don’t believe [Palin] is ready to be president of the United States,” Powell said flatly. By contrast, Obama’s running mate, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, “is ready to be president on day one.”
Powell also said he was “troubled” by Republican personal attacks on Obama, especially false intimations that Obama was Muslim and Republicans’ recent focus on Obama’s alleged connections to William Ayers, the founder of the radical ’60 Weather Underground.
Stressing that Obama was a lifelong Christian, Powell denounced Republican tactics that he said were insulting not only to to Obama but also to Muslims.
“The really right answer is what if he is?” Powell said, praising the contributions of millions of Muslim citizens to American society.
“I look at these kind of approaches to the campaign, and they trouble me,” Powell said. “Over the last seven weeks, the approach of the Republican Party has become narrower and narrower.”
In an interview Sunday on Fox News, McCain said he was not surprised by the announcement.
“I’ve always admired and respected General Powell,” said McCain, who cited the endorsements he had received from former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, James Baker and Lawrence Eagleburger. “We have a respectful disagreement.”
Bolstering Obama’s international credentialsPowell, a retired Army general who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the first President Bush before becoming secretary of state in the current administration, is one of the most highly decorated military officers of modern times and an admired figure in both parties. The Obama campaign is likely to cite the endorsement as an answer to critics and undecided voters who have questioned the foreign policy credential of Obama, a first-term senator whose national experience amounts to four years in the Senate.
Powell said a major part of his decision to turn his back on his own party was his conclusion that Obama was the better option to repair frayed U.S. relations with allies overseas.
“This is the time for outreach,” Powell said, saying the next president would have to “reach out and show the world there is a new administration that is willing to reach out.”
In particular, he said, he welcomed Obama’s president to “talk to people we haven’t talked to,” a reference to Obama’s controversial statement that he would be open to direct diplomacy with Iranian leaders.
“I think that [Obama] has a definite way of doing business that will serve us well,” Powell said.
Click for related content
Read the full transcript of the interview
Won’t campaign for ObamaAs recently as a month ago, Powell said that electing an African-American president would be “electrifying” for the world but that he remained undecided. The unsteadiness of the Republican campaign in recent weeks, especially on the economic crisis, went a long way toward pushing him off the fence, he said.
“It isn’t easy for me to disappoint Senator McCain as I have this morning,” said Powell, who emphasized that he would not campaign for Obama because of his admiration for McCain’s long record of service in the military and in Congress.
But as he examined both campaigns in the last few weeks, he said, he became “concerned” that “in the case of Mr. McCain, he was a little unsure how to deal with the economic problems.”
“Every day, there was a different approach,” he said, adding that he also “would have difficulty with two more conservative appointments to the Supreme Court.”
McCain would be a good president, Powell said, but Obama is “a transformational figure” who would be an “exceptional” leader.
“I truly believe that at this point in Amserica’s history we need a president who will not just continue ... basically the policies we have followed in recent years,” he said. “We need a president with transformational qualities.”
For that reason, he said, “I will be voting for Barack Obama.”
Saturday, October 18, 2008
I doubt that we will see or hear this stuff in Texas ...
Report Negative Mailings and Phone Calls
The McCain campaign has orchestrated a vicious “robocall” and direct mail smear campaign against Barack.
Fight the Smears is an online resource to help correct the record. More frequently now, Fight the Smears addresses the baseless accusations from John McCain’s 100% negative campaign.
You can help fight back by reporting one or more of the smears they are spreading.
Report smear literature -- Create a digital copy
There are three ways to create a copy. Once the copy is created, upload it using the form to the right.
If you have a computer scanner, you can scan the mail piece to create a digital copy on your computer. Then upload the file using the form to the right.
Go to a nearby print shop to scan the mailing. They should be able to email you the digital versions of the mailings or put them on a CD or USB drive.
The UPS Store, FedEx, or any major office supplies store should be able to create a digital copy.
Take a picture with a digital camera.
Set your camera to its highest quality setting and take the photo in good lighting -- preferably outside in the daytime or with a flash.
Notify the campaign of "Robocall" smears
If you can create a recording of the automated phone call on your computer in .mp3 format, you can upload it directly using the form to the right.
If you have a recording of the negative phone call (on an answering machine or other device), you can report the call over the phone. Call 312-506-8685 and then replay the attack message into the receiver of the phone.
Before you play the message into the phone, be sure to clearly state your name, location and phone number so that the campaign can reach you with any questions.
If you've received a smear email, forward it to watchdog@barackobama.com.
The McCain campaign has orchestrated a vicious “robocall” and direct mail smear campaign against Barack.
Fight the Smears is an online resource to help correct the record. More frequently now, Fight the Smears addresses the baseless accusations from John McCain’s 100% negative campaign.
You can help fight back by reporting one or more of the smears they are spreading.
Report smear literature -- Create a digital copy
There are three ways to create a copy. Once the copy is created, upload it using the form to the right.
If you have a computer scanner, you can scan the mail piece to create a digital copy on your computer. Then upload the file using the form to the right.
Go to a nearby print shop to scan the mailing. They should be able to email you the digital versions of the mailings or put them on a CD or USB drive.
The UPS Store, FedEx, or any major office supplies store should be able to create a digital copy.
Take a picture with a digital camera.
Set your camera to its highest quality setting and take the photo in good lighting -- preferably outside in the daytime or with a flash.
Notify the campaign of "Robocall" smears
If you can create a recording of the automated phone call on your computer in .mp3 format, you can upload it directly using the form to the right.
If you have a recording of the negative phone call (on an answering machine or other device), you can report the call over the phone. Call 312-506-8685 and then replay the attack message into the receiver of the phone.
Before you play the message into the phone, be sure to clearly state your name, location and phone number so that the campaign can reach you with any questions.
If you've received a smear email, forward it to watchdog@barackobama.com.
Acorn is just the first step in the GOP End Game....
The Democrats in this age have no reason to pretend that voter fraud is a serious issue, but the Republicans, particularly this year, have a very good reason to say that voter fraud is rampant. It is a simple three-step process. Fraud allegations lead to restrictive voter laws, which lead to a class-skewed electorate. As the Democrats try to get out the vote, Republicans will try to stop it.
Behind the GOP's voter fraud hysteria
As Republicans warn of catastrophe at the polls, an expert on election fraud explains the real partisan hoax -- the suppression of Democratic votes.
By Andrew Burmon
Oct. 15, 2008
Warnings about voter fraud prior to a U.S. presidential election are nothing new. But to listen to conservative Republicans lately, you might expect Nov. 4 to bring a voting catastrophe of epic proportions. Writing in the New York Post in early October, Ken Blackwell -- yes, the former Ohio secretary of state of 2004 election infamy -- warned about "the kind of chaos you expect from a category-five hurricane -- with radical groups sending the nation into a protracted legal battle even worse than the mess back in 2000."
"To prevent it," Blackwell urged, "we must act now." Many Republicans, including operatives from the McCain campaign, have indeed been raising the specter of voter fraud across battleground states, from Nevada to Michigan to Pennsylvania, and pushing for action by government authorities.
But according to Lori Minnite, a professor of political science at Barnard College, who has spent the last eight years studying the role of fraud in U.S. elections, the Republican crusade against voter fraud is a strategic ruse. Rather than protecting the election process from voter fraud -- a problem that barely exists -- Minnite says the true aim of Republican efforts appears to be voter suppression across the partisan divide. According to Minnite, investigating voter fraud has become a Republican cottage industry over the last 20 years because it justifies questioning the eligibility of thousands of would-be voters -- often targeting poor and minority citizens in urban areas that lean Democratic. Playing the role of vigilant watchdog gives GOP bureaucrats a pretext for obstructing the path of marginalized and first-time voters headed for the polls.
On Sept. 10, the 240,000 Wisconsin voters who had registered by mail since 2006 found their voting status up in the air as the state's attorney general, J.B. Van Hollen -- a McCain campaign co-chair -- sued the state’s Government Accountability Board. In Michigan that same week, Macomb County GOP party chairman James Carabelli allegedly told a reporter that he would use publicly available lists of foreclosed home addresses to “make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses.” In early October, the Montana Republican Party challenged the eligibility of 6,000 voters in university towns and heavily Native American counties.
And last week, Nevada officials raided a Las Vegas office of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a 38-year-old grass-roots political group known as ACORN that advocates on behalf of low-income Americans. News of the raid, following allegations that ACORN workers had submitted fraudulent voter registrations, prompted cheers from many on the right and objections from many on the left -- as did an announcement last Friday, by ACORN itself, that 2,100 of 5,000 registrations forms submitted by ACORN workers in Lake County, Ind., were invalid.
But Minnite says that the latest Republican uproar over ACORN is part of "a far broader effort to corrode public confidence in the electoral process." Minnite is a co-author of the forthcoming book “Keeping Down the Black Vote: Race and the Demobilization of American Voters" and a research fellow at Demos, a public policy think tank based in New York. She predicts that as Nov. 4 approaches, Republican allegations about voter fraud are certain to continue. Minnite spoke with Salon by phone recently from her office in Manhattan.
Do you believe that voter fraud poses a threat to the validity of American elections?
No. No threat.
The statistics bear me out. From 2002 to 2005 only one person was found guilty of registration fraud. Twenty people were found guilty of voting while ineligible and five people were found guilty of voting more than once. That’s 26 criminal voters -- voters who vote twice, impersonate other people, vote without being a resident -- the voters that Republicans warn about. Meanwhile thousands of people are getting turned away at the polls.
Political parties and corrupt election officials, on the other hand, do seem to present a potential problem. We should be a great deal more worried about who has access to the ballots. In terms of illegal aliens voting and people voting twice -- the popular images of voter fraud -- no I don’t think that there is any risk at all.
How did you come to this conclusion?
It is very difficult to find information on voter fraud. I’m quite fluent with political science data sets, but the more I would look, the less I would find. There was simply no information.
People were also uncooperative. Starting in late 2000 -- under state open-election laws -- I sent letters to all the attorneys general and secretaries of state in the U.S. asking them for statistics on voter fraud and those sorts of election crimes. Pennsylvania said they wouldn’t respond to me because I wasn’t a citizen [of the state]. I got the same from Virginia and Oklahoma. The attorney general of Michigan wanted me to pay $1,400 for the information because "it was going to take this many hours and this outrageous copying fee." I started to realize why there were no studies on the incidence of voter fraud, no criminal justice statistics. I also sent Freedom of Information requests to the Department of Justice. That became a two-year deal of delay and obstruction as well.
Under the “Voting Rights Act of 1965,” the Department of Justice’s Voting Section is legally bound to stop “voting practices and procedures ... that discriminate on the basis of race, color or membership in a language minority group.” Do you think the Bush administration's Justice Department has fulfilled this mission?
Threatening localities for not taking enough names off voter rolls in reaction to nothing and based on no evidence of fraud -- while increasing the possibility of disenfranchisement -- suggests a department more interested in furthering a political agenda than following that legal outline.
Let’s talk about the Ballot Access and Voting Integrity initiative that was started under Ashcroft in 2002. It was advertised as a program that would combat voter fraud and voter suppression equally. But if you look at the program, it actually was geared almost entirely toward voter fraud. They wanted to see if they could bring cases against individual voters. The [federal] government has spent a lot of money pursuing this over the years and convicted almost no one. Then we hear all this propaganda about how much voter fraud there is.
At the very least the Department of Justice has had its priorities backward. There are thousands of people having trouble casting ballots and the federal government has decided to go after poor people in Milwaukee and Florida to create the impression that there is voter fraud. The U.S. attorney firing scandal made it hard for anyone to claim that the Bush Justice Department wasn’t politicizing voter fraud.
In Michigan, the GOP has been using foreclosure lists to challenge the eligibility of voters in Macomb County, according to a recent news report, questioning whether voters are actually local residents. What do you make of this strategy?
Republican Party officials have denied that there was any plan to do this, but I think that the genie is out of the bottle. Raising the specter of fraud and threatening new rules can create confusion among voters, election officials and poll workers. Just the possibility of getting turned away -- of humiliation and inconvenience at the polls -- could have been the only effect they wanted to achieve.
It is statistically hard to prove that allegations of voter fraud keep people away from the polls because the census data we use to determine voter turnout is not extremely accurate. If 2 percent of people decided not to go, we wouldn’t be able to tell. But I have talked to people who have told me -- after being turned away by poll workers who claimed that they weren’t eligible to vote -- that they would never try to vote again. Most people don’t entirely understand their rights.
Those most likely to be affected are new voters, less educated voters and marginal voters, whose decision to vote might be more easily swayed by rumor and misinformation.
So, under the guise of protecting elections from voter fraud, the GOP is seeking to disenfranchise new, poor and minority voters?
Most newly registered voters, especially this year, are Democrats. African-Americans give 90 percent of their votes to the Democratic Party. I think it has proven irresistible for the GOP to attempt to suppress the votes of blacks in places like Cleveland and Milwaukee and Jacksonville, Fla.
Is it a racist strategy? Yes, absolutely -- but I am by no means saying that Republicans are [overtly] racist, because prejudice isn’t the motivation here. It is simply easier to target minorities because they are the more recognizable Democratic voters and because neighborhood segregation allows Republicans to quite effectively focus their voter suppression efforts. In short, African-Americans and Latinos are perfect targets.
The McCain campaign and Republican pundits have been trumpeting the threat of ACORN over the last few weeks. Do you think that ACORN presents a real threat of voter fraud?
I am struck by the ferocity of the attack on ACORN. I am not privy to the campaign strategy of the Republican Party, but I have to assume that it is the result of a coordinated disinformation campaign aimed not only at undermining ACORN's work, but also as a part of a far broader effort to corrode public confidence in the electoral process.
We see the repetition of wildly exaggerated allegations about ACORN's "criminality" by people like Michelle Malkin, a right-wing blogger; John Fund, who's been attacking ACORN for years from his vantage as a Wall Street Journal columnist; and Roger Stone, a longtime Republican operative so devoted to Nixonian dirty tricks that he's tattooed an image of Nixon's face on his back. His blog, by the way, is sponsored by the same law firm that launched a phony voter fraud attack on ACORN in Florida during the last presidential election.
These are the people that seize on faulty registrations as proof that massive voter fraud is going on. This is an obviously faulty assumption. Do fake registrations equal fake ballots? No. They waste election officials' time ... we don’t elect people through registration. Confusion, on the part of election officials, while unfortunate, still has more to do with our convoluted laws than with any effort to deceive or manipulate by ACORN.
Let’s remember, as the Republicans make a furor over the Indiana registrations, that ACORN itself separated out those registrations -- found the 2,000 faulty ones and flagged them for election officials -- in the first place. They try to work with elected officials. The fact is that ACORN has been smeared by the Republican Party. Some of their employees do seem to fake registrations, sure, but when Macy’s has some of their employees stealing from them, we would not call them a quasi-criminal organization -- we still call them a department store. ACORN is trying to help underprivileged people vote.
I believe that what we are seeing are efforts to create mass public confusion, to turn people off, and to create chaos on Election Day. This is a campaign strategy to distract people from the voter suppression efforts that actually distort electoral outcomes and to preemptively discredit the potential Obama presidency as fraudulent.
What can Barack Obama’s campaign do to counteract GOP suppression efforts?
The Democrats should be watching urban black working-class neighborhoods in key states where the Obama and McCain campaigns are running strong field operations -- Cleveland being a good example. These are prime spots for voter suppression. College students will also be targeted, especially minority students. College towns in places like North Carolina, Indiana and Florida may come into play. Election officials in Blacksburg and Fredericksburg, Va., and El Paso County, Colo., have already spread some disinformation about student voting. Similarly, areas that have added large numbers of new Latino voters might be challenged if they are in key states where anti-immigrant fervor is high, which could open the door in New Mexico and Texas.
The Obama campaign should also expect long lines and confusion at the polls and try to figure out where confusion is most likely to arise -- where voting process rules have changed most recently, and where there are likely to be equipment shortages. They need to know which cities and towns have disproportionately high numbers of new voters and those places where election officials are likely to challenge legal ballots. They should watch places like Milwaukee, Seattle, St. Louis and Cleveland, which were labeled as voter fraud "hot spots” by the discredited and now defunct American Center for Voting Rights that spread disinformation during the 2006 election. These places should receive extra attention and efforts now to resolve predictable problems before they occur on Election Day.
Most importantly, the Democrats should devote resources to mobilizing vulnerable voters in particular -- newly registered and first-time voters, students, minorities -- so that if they do face challenges or problems at the polls they will be motivated to stick it out and work through them.
How did you become interested in voter fraud as an issue?
After the 2000 election; that was a bit of an eye opener, even for a political scientist. I was struck by how the issue of voter fraud seemed to be given so much weight, even more weight than other potentially more serious issues. In Florida thousands of ballots weren’t counted and then Caltech came out with a study that said 3 to 5 million ballots hadn’t been counted for various reasons -- but everyone was talking about voter fraud. I couldn’t help but feel like that was the wrong conversation. I started looking into voter fraud and began a large-scale study.
Why do you think the incidence of fraud is so low?
I’ll give two reasons. First of all, what is the motivation for someone to vote twice when we often have a hard time getting people to vote once? There is no rational basis for someone to risk getting arrested for a crime like that. Additionally, I think that a lot of the cases that get labeled fraud can be explained in other ways. Election officials make mistakes and so do voters. I think we don’t have a clear conception of how confusing and mismanaged the whole voting process is. Confusion is often a better excuse for the irregularities that are seized upon and used to convince the public that fraud is taking place.
Have there always been voter suppression efforts?
Voter suppression has long been an issue. This is what I will be arguing in “The Politics of Voter Fraud,” a book I’ll have coming out next year. There is a well-reasoned argument in favor of party competition, but political scientists may be wrong when they say that political parties mobilize voters. There is a logic that suggests that demobilizing your opponent’s voters is actually more efficient than building up your base. When you get new voters you run the risk of destabilizing your coalition, whereas there is less of a hazard in depressing your opponent’s voter turnout.
Republicans may be the ones doing this right now, but Democrats certainly did it in the past. You mix that with race, and the role race has had with voters' rights in the United States, and the underrepresentation of minorities doesn’t exactly come as a great surprise. It was actually the Democratic Party that stripped freed slaves of their right to vote after the Civil War. Now African-Americans are a standard bearer for the party.
-- By Andrew Burmon
Behind the GOP's voter fraud hysteria
As Republicans warn of catastrophe at the polls, an expert on election fraud explains the real partisan hoax -- the suppression of Democratic votes.
By Andrew Burmon
Oct. 15, 2008
Warnings about voter fraud prior to a U.S. presidential election are nothing new. But to listen to conservative Republicans lately, you might expect Nov. 4 to bring a voting catastrophe of epic proportions. Writing in the New York Post in early October, Ken Blackwell -- yes, the former Ohio secretary of state of 2004 election infamy -- warned about "the kind of chaos you expect from a category-five hurricane -- with radical groups sending the nation into a protracted legal battle even worse than the mess back in 2000."
"To prevent it," Blackwell urged, "we must act now." Many Republicans, including operatives from the McCain campaign, have indeed been raising the specter of voter fraud across battleground states, from Nevada to Michigan to Pennsylvania, and pushing for action by government authorities.
But according to Lori Minnite, a professor of political science at Barnard College, who has spent the last eight years studying the role of fraud in U.S. elections, the Republican crusade against voter fraud is a strategic ruse. Rather than protecting the election process from voter fraud -- a problem that barely exists -- Minnite says the true aim of Republican efforts appears to be voter suppression across the partisan divide. According to Minnite, investigating voter fraud has become a Republican cottage industry over the last 20 years because it justifies questioning the eligibility of thousands of would-be voters -- often targeting poor and minority citizens in urban areas that lean Democratic. Playing the role of vigilant watchdog gives GOP bureaucrats a pretext for obstructing the path of marginalized and first-time voters headed for the polls.
On Sept. 10, the 240,000 Wisconsin voters who had registered by mail since 2006 found their voting status up in the air as the state's attorney general, J.B. Van Hollen -- a McCain campaign co-chair -- sued the state’s Government Accountability Board. In Michigan that same week, Macomb County GOP party chairman James Carabelli allegedly told a reporter that he would use publicly available lists of foreclosed home addresses to “make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses.” In early October, the Montana Republican Party challenged the eligibility of 6,000 voters in university towns and heavily Native American counties.
And last week, Nevada officials raided a Las Vegas office of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a 38-year-old grass-roots political group known as ACORN that advocates on behalf of low-income Americans. News of the raid, following allegations that ACORN workers had submitted fraudulent voter registrations, prompted cheers from many on the right and objections from many on the left -- as did an announcement last Friday, by ACORN itself, that 2,100 of 5,000 registrations forms submitted by ACORN workers in Lake County, Ind., were invalid.
But Minnite says that the latest Republican uproar over ACORN is part of "a far broader effort to corrode public confidence in the electoral process." Minnite is a co-author of the forthcoming book “Keeping Down the Black Vote: Race and the Demobilization of American Voters" and a research fellow at Demos, a public policy think tank based in New York. She predicts that as Nov. 4 approaches, Republican allegations about voter fraud are certain to continue. Minnite spoke with Salon by phone recently from her office in Manhattan.
Do you believe that voter fraud poses a threat to the validity of American elections?
No. No threat.
The statistics bear me out. From 2002 to 2005 only one person was found guilty of registration fraud. Twenty people were found guilty of voting while ineligible and five people were found guilty of voting more than once. That’s 26 criminal voters -- voters who vote twice, impersonate other people, vote without being a resident -- the voters that Republicans warn about. Meanwhile thousands of people are getting turned away at the polls.
Political parties and corrupt election officials, on the other hand, do seem to present a potential problem. We should be a great deal more worried about who has access to the ballots. In terms of illegal aliens voting and people voting twice -- the popular images of voter fraud -- no I don’t think that there is any risk at all.
How did you come to this conclusion?
It is very difficult to find information on voter fraud. I’m quite fluent with political science data sets, but the more I would look, the less I would find. There was simply no information.
People were also uncooperative. Starting in late 2000 -- under state open-election laws -- I sent letters to all the attorneys general and secretaries of state in the U.S. asking them for statistics on voter fraud and those sorts of election crimes. Pennsylvania said they wouldn’t respond to me because I wasn’t a citizen [of the state]. I got the same from Virginia and Oklahoma. The attorney general of Michigan wanted me to pay $1,400 for the information because "it was going to take this many hours and this outrageous copying fee." I started to realize why there were no studies on the incidence of voter fraud, no criminal justice statistics. I also sent Freedom of Information requests to the Department of Justice. That became a two-year deal of delay and obstruction as well.
Under the “Voting Rights Act of 1965,” the Department of Justice’s Voting Section is legally bound to stop “voting practices and procedures ... that discriminate on the basis of race, color or membership in a language minority group.” Do you think the Bush administration's Justice Department has fulfilled this mission?
Threatening localities for not taking enough names off voter rolls in reaction to nothing and based on no evidence of fraud -- while increasing the possibility of disenfranchisement -- suggests a department more interested in furthering a political agenda than following that legal outline.
Let’s talk about the Ballot Access and Voting Integrity initiative that was started under Ashcroft in 2002. It was advertised as a program that would combat voter fraud and voter suppression equally. But if you look at the program, it actually was geared almost entirely toward voter fraud. They wanted to see if they could bring cases against individual voters. The [federal] government has spent a lot of money pursuing this over the years and convicted almost no one. Then we hear all this propaganda about how much voter fraud there is.
At the very least the Department of Justice has had its priorities backward. There are thousands of people having trouble casting ballots and the federal government has decided to go after poor people in Milwaukee and Florida to create the impression that there is voter fraud. The U.S. attorney firing scandal made it hard for anyone to claim that the Bush Justice Department wasn’t politicizing voter fraud.
In Michigan, the GOP has been using foreclosure lists to challenge the eligibility of voters in Macomb County, according to a recent news report, questioning whether voters are actually local residents. What do you make of this strategy?
Republican Party officials have denied that there was any plan to do this, but I think that the genie is out of the bottle. Raising the specter of fraud and threatening new rules can create confusion among voters, election officials and poll workers. Just the possibility of getting turned away -- of humiliation and inconvenience at the polls -- could have been the only effect they wanted to achieve.
It is statistically hard to prove that allegations of voter fraud keep people away from the polls because the census data we use to determine voter turnout is not extremely accurate. If 2 percent of people decided not to go, we wouldn’t be able to tell. But I have talked to people who have told me -- after being turned away by poll workers who claimed that they weren’t eligible to vote -- that they would never try to vote again. Most people don’t entirely understand their rights.
Those most likely to be affected are new voters, less educated voters and marginal voters, whose decision to vote might be more easily swayed by rumor and misinformation.
So, under the guise of protecting elections from voter fraud, the GOP is seeking to disenfranchise new, poor and minority voters?
Most newly registered voters, especially this year, are Democrats. African-Americans give 90 percent of their votes to the Democratic Party. I think it has proven irresistible for the GOP to attempt to suppress the votes of blacks in places like Cleveland and Milwaukee and Jacksonville, Fla.
Is it a racist strategy? Yes, absolutely -- but I am by no means saying that Republicans are [overtly] racist, because prejudice isn’t the motivation here. It is simply easier to target minorities because they are the more recognizable Democratic voters and because neighborhood segregation allows Republicans to quite effectively focus their voter suppression efforts. In short, African-Americans and Latinos are perfect targets.
The McCain campaign and Republican pundits have been trumpeting the threat of ACORN over the last few weeks. Do you think that ACORN presents a real threat of voter fraud?
I am struck by the ferocity of the attack on ACORN. I am not privy to the campaign strategy of the Republican Party, but I have to assume that it is the result of a coordinated disinformation campaign aimed not only at undermining ACORN's work, but also as a part of a far broader effort to corrode public confidence in the electoral process.
We see the repetition of wildly exaggerated allegations about ACORN's "criminality" by people like Michelle Malkin, a right-wing blogger; John Fund, who's been attacking ACORN for years from his vantage as a Wall Street Journal columnist; and Roger Stone, a longtime Republican operative so devoted to Nixonian dirty tricks that he's tattooed an image of Nixon's face on his back. His blog, by the way, is sponsored by the same law firm that launched a phony voter fraud attack on ACORN in Florida during the last presidential election.
These are the people that seize on faulty registrations as proof that massive voter fraud is going on. This is an obviously faulty assumption. Do fake registrations equal fake ballots? No. They waste election officials' time ... we don’t elect people through registration. Confusion, on the part of election officials, while unfortunate, still has more to do with our convoluted laws than with any effort to deceive or manipulate by ACORN.
Let’s remember, as the Republicans make a furor over the Indiana registrations, that ACORN itself separated out those registrations -- found the 2,000 faulty ones and flagged them for election officials -- in the first place. They try to work with elected officials. The fact is that ACORN has been smeared by the Republican Party. Some of their employees do seem to fake registrations, sure, but when Macy’s has some of their employees stealing from them, we would not call them a quasi-criminal organization -- we still call them a department store. ACORN is trying to help underprivileged people vote.
I believe that what we are seeing are efforts to create mass public confusion, to turn people off, and to create chaos on Election Day. This is a campaign strategy to distract people from the voter suppression efforts that actually distort electoral outcomes and to preemptively discredit the potential Obama presidency as fraudulent.
What can Barack Obama’s campaign do to counteract GOP suppression efforts?
The Democrats should be watching urban black working-class neighborhoods in key states where the Obama and McCain campaigns are running strong field operations -- Cleveland being a good example. These are prime spots for voter suppression. College students will also be targeted, especially minority students. College towns in places like North Carolina, Indiana and Florida may come into play. Election officials in Blacksburg and Fredericksburg, Va., and El Paso County, Colo., have already spread some disinformation about student voting. Similarly, areas that have added large numbers of new Latino voters might be challenged if they are in key states where anti-immigrant fervor is high, which could open the door in New Mexico and Texas.
The Obama campaign should also expect long lines and confusion at the polls and try to figure out where confusion is most likely to arise -- where voting process rules have changed most recently, and where there are likely to be equipment shortages. They need to know which cities and towns have disproportionately high numbers of new voters and those places where election officials are likely to challenge legal ballots. They should watch places like Milwaukee, Seattle, St. Louis and Cleveland, which were labeled as voter fraud "hot spots” by the discredited and now defunct American Center for Voting Rights that spread disinformation during the 2006 election. These places should receive extra attention and efforts now to resolve predictable problems before they occur on Election Day.
Most importantly, the Democrats should devote resources to mobilizing vulnerable voters in particular -- newly registered and first-time voters, students, minorities -- so that if they do face challenges or problems at the polls they will be motivated to stick it out and work through them.
How did you become interested in voter fraud as an issue?
After the 2000 election; that was a bit of an eye opener, even for a political scientist. I was struck by how the issue of voter fraud seemed to be given so much weight, even more weight than other potentially more serious issues. In Florida thousands of ballots weren’t counted and then Caltech came out with a study that said 3 to 5 million ballots hadn’t been counted for various reasons -- but everyone was talking about voter fraud. I couldn’t help but feel like that was the wrong conversation. I started looking into voter fraud and began a large-scale study.
Why do you think the incidence of fraud is so low?
I’ll give two reasons. First of all, what is the motivation for someone to vote twice when we often have a hard time getting people to vote once? There is no rational basis for someone to risk getting arrested for a crime like that. Additionally, I think that a lot of the cases that get labeled fraud can be explained in other ways. Election officials make mistakes and so do voters. I think we don’t have a clear conception of how confusing and mismanaged the whole voting process is. Confusion is often a better excuse for the irregularities that are seized upon and used to convince the public that fraud is taking place.
Have there always been voter suppression efforts?
Voter suppression has long been an issue. This is what I will be arguing in “The Politics of Voter Fraud,” a book I’ll have coming out next year. There is a well-reasoned argument in favor of party competition, but political scientists may be wrong when they say that political parties mobilize voters. There is a logic that suggests that demobilizing your opponent’s voters is actually more efficient than building up your base. When you get new voters you run the risk of destabilizing your coalition, whereas there is less of a hazard in depressing your opponent’s voter turnout.
Republicans may be the ones doing this right now, but Democrats certainly did it in the past. You mix that with race, and the role race has had with voters' rights in the United States, and the underrepresentation of minorities doesn’t exactly come as a great surprise. It was actually the Democratic Party that stripped freed slaves of their right to vote after the Civil War. Now African-Americans are a standard bearer for the party.
-- By Andrew Burmon
Friday, October 17, 2008
Just and Update on Oil and Gasoline Prices.....
today's papers
Black Gold Down
By Daniel PolitiPosted Friday, Oct. 17, 2008, at 6:26 AM ET
The Los Angeles Times and New York Times lead with, while the Wall Street Journal fronts, the continuing downward spiral of oil prices, which dropped below $70 a barrel for the first time in 14 months. Some predict oil could fall to as low as $50 a barrel before the end of the year, although that seems unlikely considering that OPEC has called for an emergency meeting next week. The LAT's cites an analyst who says OPEC would like prices to stabilize around $70 a barrel, though the NYT and WSJ say $80 a barrel is more likely. Regardless, either number is quite a change from a few months ago when some were predicting oil prices would reach $200 a barrel next year.
USA Today leads with a look at how the recent increase in mortgage rates could put in doubt whether the housing market will improve in the near future. Home buyers have been encouraged by the drop in prices but could be turned off by the higher interest rates. This week, the average interest rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage soared to 6.46 percent, which essentially amounts to a half-point increase from last week and represents the "biggest weekly jump since 1987." Many are blaming the bailout plan for the jump, although some say it's just temporary and insist rates should go down once the markets calm down a bit. The Washington Post leads with a look at how "countless companies" are adjusting to the credit crisis and what some predict will be a long recession by cutting spending, postponing expansion plans, and looking for "cash-rich partners." The general lack of credit means that hundreds of companies could default on their debt obligations over the next year.
To continue reading, click here.
Black Gold Down
By Daniel PolitiPosted Friday, Oct. 17, 2008, at 6:26 AM ET
The Los Angeles Times and New York Times lead with, while the Wall Street Journal fronts, the continuing downward spiral of oil prices, which dropped below $70 a barrel for the first time in 14 months. Some predict oil could fall to as low as $50 a barrel before the end of the year, although that seems unlikely considering that OPEC has called for an emergency meeting next week. The LAT's cites an analyst who says OPEC would like prices to stabilize around $70 a barrel, though the NYT and WSJ say $80 a barrel is more likely. Regardless, either number is quite a change from a few months ago when some were predicting oil prices would reach $200 a barrel next year.
USA Today leads with a look at how the recent increase in mortgage rates could put in doubt whether the housing market will improve in the near future. Home buyers have been encouraged by the drop in prices but could be turned off by the higher interest rates. This week, the average interest rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage soared to 6.46 percent, which essentially amounts to a half-point increase from last week and represents the "biggest weekly jump since 1987." Many are blaming the bailout plan for the jump, although some say it's just temporary and insist rates should go down once the markets calm down a bit. The Washington Post leads with a look at how "countless companies" are adjusting to the credit crisis and what some predict will be a long recession by cutting spending, postponing expansion plans, and looking for "cash-rich partners." The general lack of credit means that hundreds of companies could default on their debt obligations over the next year.
To continue reading, click here.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
HEY! JOE! JOE? JOE? Which Joe?
TOLEDO, Ohio -
“Joe the plumber,” the new face of middle-class America after Sen. John McCain made him famous in Wednesday night’s presidential debate, isn’t technically a plumber, and he probably wouldn’t be adversely affected by Sen. Barack Obama’s tax plan.
But the issues he raises are important and worth examining for their impact on small businesses.
Joe the plumber — Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, 34, of suburban Toledo, Ohio — is the first to say that he’s not the story and that no one should listen to him when it comes to tax policy.
“I just hope I’m not making too much of a fool of myself and can get some type of message out there as far as, you know, really watch actions and learn for yourself,” Wurzelbacher said Thursday outside his home. “Don’t take other people’s opinions.”
Wurzelbacher first came to attention over the weekend, when he engaged Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, in a six-minute discussion of tax policy at a rally in Holland, Ohio.
He told Obama that he was a plumber and was hoping to buy his boss’s business, which he said made $250,000 to $280,000 a year. He was concerned, he said, that Obama’s economic proposals would mean he’d be kicked into a higher tax bracket.
Wednesday night, McCain adopted Wurzelbacher as the representative of struggling middle-class Americans, addressing many of his comments directly to “Joe the plumber,” whom he misidentified as “Joe Wurzelburger.”
“The real winner last night was Joe the plumber. Joe’s the man,” McCain said Thursday at a campaign rally in Downington, Pa. “He won, and small businesses won across America. They won because Americans are not going to let Senator Obama raise taxes in a tough economy.”
‘There’s a lot I’ve got to learn’Legally speaking, Wurzelbacher isn’t a plumber, because he isn’t licensed by Toledo, Lucas County or the state of Ohio. A representative of the Toledo Building Inspection Division said a plumber must be registered with the state and only then can apply for a city plumbing contractor’s license.
Wurzelbacher said he worked under the license held by his boss, Al Newell of Newell Plumbing and Heating Co. of Toledo. Newell is a licensed plumbing contractor in Toledo, records show. But anyone working under Newell should have a journeyman’s plumbing license or an apprenticeship license, officials said.
Building Inspection officials said Newell was responsible for making sure that anyone working under him was licensed. The Toledo Plumbing Board of Control may consider sanctions against Wurzelbacher or Newell, officials told NBC affiliate WNWO of Toledo.
“There’s a lot I’ve got to learn” about the plumbing business, Wurzelbacher said Thursday.
Wurzelbacher also acknowledged that he had no specific plans for buying Newell’s business, saying he and Newell had simply talked about the idea from time to time. He might have difficulty making the purchase: Court records from his divorce show that Wurzelbacher made $40,000 in 2006.
Even if he did buy Newell Plumbing and Heating, Obama’s tax plan wouldn’t affect him. While Wurzelbacher told Obama that he would be taxed at a higher rate because the company grossed more than $250,000 a year, Ohio business records show the company’s estimated total annual revenue as only $100,000. Actual taxable income would be even less than that.
In any event, Obama’s tax plan specifies that the higher rate would apply only to income above the $250,000 threshold. Assuming Wurzelbacher’s income as owner somehow hit $280,000 — the top end of his supposition of the company’s revenue — only the extra $30,000 would be taxed at a higher rate.
Joe says Obama would be ‘hurting others’Analysts calculated that the extra tax would amount to $900, which would likely be more than offset by separate provisions of Obama’s plan: a 50 percent tax credit for health care and elimination of the capital gains tax for small businesses.
By Alex Johnson of msnbc.com and Ryan Fowler of NBC affiliate WNWO of Toledo, Ohio. Steve Handelsman, Athena Jones and Kevin Tibbles of NBC News contributed to this report.
“I’d have to look at your particular business, but you might end up paying lower taxes under my plan and my approach than under John McCain’s,” Obama told Wurzelbacher during their exchange last weekend.
At the time, Wurzelbacher replied, “Oh, yeah, I understand that.” But by Thursday, he had reconsidered.
“If you believed [Obama], I’d be receiving his tax cuts, but I don’t look at it that way,” he said. “He’d still be hurting others.”
Wurzelbacher, a registered Republican, refused to say whom he would vote for, insisting that “I want the American people to vote for who they want to vote for. I just want them to be informed when they make that vote.”
Click for related content (hope these still work....)
McCain, Obama spar on economy in final debate
Fact check: Both candidates muddy truth
First Read: He will remodel your kitchen!
Trick or treating for tidbits on 'Joe the Plumber'
First Read: Palin's shoutout to Joe (and Jane) the plumber
Where the candidates stand on small business
But he hinted that his choice would be McCain, the Republican standard-bearer, whom he said it would be “an honor” to meet. Asked about other issues by a covey of curious reporters, Wurzelbacher voiced strongly Republican opinions.
“Social Security’s a joke,” he said. “I have parents. I don’t need another set of parents called the government. Let me take my money and invest it how I please.”
On immigration: “I wish our borders were closed.”
And on the war in Iraq, which McCain has strongly supported: “I’m not sorry we’re in Iraq. ... It’s made us safer. I absolutely believe that.”
=========================================================
FD:
In the closing weeks of this historic election campaign, one thing has become all too clear: if your name's not Joe, neither candidate has any interest whatsoever in winning your vote.
Only Joe knows how it feels to be hurting for money; only Joe understands exactly how disastrous a course the nation is currently pursuing. Joe is tired of the last eight year of Bush rule, tired of negative campaigning, and just generally tired. But Joe isn't just Joe: he stands for many others who are not so fortunate as to be called Joe.
Joe is you and me. Joe is America. There are, however, several Joes, and sometimes it can get confusing. So here, as a public service, is what you might call an encycjoepedia. Don't thank me; thank Joe. He deserves it.
JOE THE PLUMBER: Toledo's Ur-pipefitter is one of several Joes the Plumber; see also here and here. Last night, John McCain seemed to think Joe the Plumber could fix all his election woes. And the truth is that he could, but he needs a special part that he'll have to order, which could take six weeks to arrive, by which time it'll be too late for McCain. Plus, it's gonna cost you. Maybe a bit less if you're OK to pay in cash.
JOEY DANKO: A man Joe Biden met at his local gas station the other day, who told him he never has enough money to fill up his car anymore -- or so Biden claimed in the vice-presidential debate the week before last. Widely believed to be a figment of Biden's imagination until he was woken in the early morning by the conservative talk-radio host Curtis Sliwa. Given the circumstances, it has to be said Danko responded with extraordinary good humour, explaining that he was an old friend of Biden -- hey, Joes have got to look out for each other -- and causing Sliwa's anti-Biden efforts to backfire amusingly.
JOE BIDEN: Fictional character frequently evoked in US politics as a proxy for the ordinary working-class American. 'Biden' is often described as having to work two jobs in order to make ends meet, for example by serving in the Senate and running for vice-president. Travels everywhere by train and, when he can muster a small amount of disposable income, enjoys eating out in low-budget restaurants that closed 20 years ago.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Easily irritated conservative MSNBC presenter, host of the show Morning Joe, the title of which is a clever play on words because "Joe" also means "coffee". Original title, "Good Morning Scarborough!", rejected following copyright infringement claim by Yorkshire Television.
JOE SIXPACK: Senior consultant to the vice-presidential campaign of Sarah Palin, Sixpack is a prolific beer-drinker, though he's also working on developing rock-hard abs. Married to Jane Sixpack. Not to be confused with Joe Sixpack, a Philadelphia beer columnist who supports Obama.
JOE LIEBERMAN: Connecticut senator-everyman who left the Democratic party in order to exercise his independent-spirited desire to vote with the Republicans on absolutely everything. Performs important service for Americans short on cash and losing sleep in the current economic climate by enabling them to use his speeches on C-SPAN as a free alternative to Tylenol PM. Inventor of Joementum.
BARACK JOEBAMA AND JOEHN MCCAIN: Rivals for the title of Ultimate American Everyman, though they face a difficult challenge from Bob Burns, a school maintenance supervisor from Connecticut, who isn't called Joe but is, officially, the Average American. Oh, and he's voting for Obama (scroll down). Say it ain't so, Bob!
REVEREND JOEREMIAH WRIGHT: Fiery pastor of Chicago's Trinity Church, famed for his pulpit-thumping 1992 sermon 'God Damn Joe the Plumber', delivered in a rage after discovering that he'd paid several hundred dollars for incredibly shoddy work on his boiler.
“Joe the plumber,” the new face of middle-class America after Sen. John McCain made him famous in Wednesday night’s presidential debate, isn’t technically a plumber, and he probably wouldn’t be adversely affected by Sen. Barack Obama’s tax plan.
But the issues he raises are important and worth examining for their impact on small businesses.
Joe the plumber — Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, 34, of suburban Toledo, Ohio — is the first to say that he’s not the story and that no one should listen to him when it comes to tax policy.
“I just hope I’m not making too much of a fool of myself and can get some type of message out there as far as, you know, really watch actions and learn for yourself,” Wurzelbacher said Thursday outside his home. “Don’t take other people’s opinions.”
Wurzelbacher first came to attention over the weekend, when he engaged Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, in a six-minute discussion of tax policy at a rally in Holland, Ohio.
He told Obama that he was a plumber and was hoping to buy his boss’s business, which he said made $250,000 to $280,000 a year. He was concerned, he said, that Obama’s economic proposals would mean he’d be kicked into a higher tax bracket.
Wednesday night, McCain adopted Wurzelbacher as the representative of struggling middle-class Americans, addressing many of his comments directly to “Joe the plumber,” whom he misidentified as “Joe Wurzelburger.”
“The real winner last night was Joe the plumber. Joe’s the man,” McCain said Thursday at a campaign rally in Downington, Pa. “He won, and small businesses won across America. They won because Americans are not going to let Senator Obama raise taxes in a tough economy.”
‘There’s a lot I’ve got to learn’Legally speaking, Wurzelbacher isn’t a plumber, because he isn’t licensed by Toledo, Lucas County or the state of Ohio. A representative of the Toledo Building Inspection Division said a plumber must be registered with the state and only then can apply for a city plumbing contractor’s license.
Wurzelbacher said he worked under the license held by his boss, Al Newell of Newell Plumbing and Heating Co. of Toledo. Newell is a licensed plumbing contractor in Toledo, records show. But anyone working under Newell should have a journeyman’s plumbing license or an apprenticeship license, officials said.
Building Inspection officials said Newell was responsible for making sure that anyone working under him was licensed. The Toledo Plumbing Board of Control may consider sanctions against Wurzelbacher or Newell, officials told NBC affiliate WNWO of Toledo.
“There’s a lot I’ve got to learn” about the plumbing business, Wurzelbacher said Thursday.
Wurzelbacher also acknowledged that he had no specific plans for buying Newell’s business, saying he and Newell had simply talked about the idea from time to time. He might have difficulty making the purchase: Court records from his divorce show that Wurzelbacher made $40,000 in 2006.
Even if he did buy Newell Plumbing and Heating, Obama’s tax plan wouldn’t affect him. While Wurzelbacher told Obama that he would be taxed at a higher rate because the company grossed more than $250,000 a year, Ohio business records show the company’s estimated total annual revenue as only $100,000. Actual taxable income would be even less than that.
In any event, Obama’s tax plan specifies that the higher rate would apply only to income above the $250,000 threshold. Assuming Wurzelbacher’s income as owner somehow hit $280,000 — the top end of his supposition of the company’s revenue — only the extra $30,000 would be taxed at a higher rate.
Joe says Obama would be ‘hurting others’Analysts calculated that the extra tax would amount to $900, which would likely be more than offset by separate provisions of Obama’s plan: a 50 percent tax credit for health care and elimination of the capital gains tax for small businesses.
By Alex Johnson of msnbc.com and Ryan Fowler of NBC affiliate WNWO of Toledo, Ohio. Steve Handelsman, Athena Jones and Kevin Tibbles of NBC News contributed to this report.
“I’d have to look at your particular business, but you might end up paying lower taxes under my plan and my approach than under John McCain’s,” Obama told Wurzelbacher during their exchange last weekend.
At the time, Wurzelbacher replied, “Oh, yeah, I understand that.” But by Thursday, he had reconsidered.
“If you believed [Obama], I’d be receiving his tax cuts, but I don’t look at it that way,” he said. “He’d still be hurting others.”
Wurzelbacher, a registered Republican, refused to say whom he would vote for, insisting that “I want the American people to vote for who they want to vote for. I just want them to be informed when they make that vote.”
Click for related content (hope these still work....)
McCain, Obama spar on economy in final debate
Fact check: Both candidates muddy truth
First Read: He will remodel your kitchen!
Trick or treating for tidbits on 'Joe the Plumber'
First Read: Palin's shoutout to Joe (and Jane) the plumber
Where the candidates stand on small business
But he hinted that his choice would be McCain, the Republican standard-bearer, whom he said it would be “an honor” to meet. Asked about other issues by a covey of curious reporters, Wurzelbacher voiced strongly Republican opinions.
“Social Security’s a joke,” he said. “I have parents. I don’t need another set of parents called the government. Let me take my money and invest it how I please.”
On immigration: “I wish our borders were closed.”
And on the war in Iraq, which McCain has strongly supported: “I’m not sorry we’re in Iraq. ... It’s made us safer. I absolutely believe that.”
=========================================================
FD:
In the closing weeks of this historic election campaign, one thing has become all too clear: if your name's not Joe, neither candidate has any interest whatsoever in winning your vote.
Only Joe knows how it feels to be hurting for money; only Joe understands exactly how disastrous a course the nation is currently pursuing. Joe is tired of the last eight year of Bush rule, tired of negative campaigning, and just generally tired. But Joe isn't just Joe: he stands for many others who are not so fortunate as to be called Joe.
Joe is you and me. Joe is America. There are, however, several Joes, and sometimes it can get confusing. So here, as a public service, is what you might call an encycjoepedia. Don't thank me; thank Joe. He deserves it.
JOE THE PLUMBER: Toledo's Ur-pipefitter is one of several Joes the Plumber; see also here and here. Last night, John McCain seemed to think Joe the Plumber could fix all his election woes. And the truth is that he could, but he needs a special part that he'll have to order, which could take six weeks to arrive, by which time it'll be too late for McCain. Plus, it's gonna cost you. Maybe a bit less if you're OK to pay in cash.
JOEY DANKO: A man Joe Biden met at his local gas station the other day, who told him he never has enough money to fill up his car anymore -- or so Biden claimed in the vice-presidential debate the week before last. Widely believed to be a figment of Biden's imagination until he was woken in the early morning by the conservative talk-radio host Curtis Sliwa. Given the circumstances, it has to be said Danko responded with extraordinary good humour, explaining that he was an old friend of Biden -- hey, Joes have got to look out for each other -- and causing Sliwa's anti-Biden efforts to backfire amusingly.
JOE BIDEN: Fictional character frequently evoked in US politics as a proxy for the ordinary working-class American. 'Biden' is often described as having to work two jobs in order to make ends meet, for example by serving in the Senate and running for vice-president. Travels everywhere by train and, when he can muster a small amount of disposable income, enjoys eating out in low-budget restaurants that closed 20 years ago.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Easily irritated conservative MSNBC presenter, host of the show Morning Joe, the title of which is a clever play on words because "Joe" also means "coffee". Original title, "Good Morning Scarborough!", rejected following copyright infringement claim by Yorkshire Television.
JOE SIXPACK: Senior consultant to the vice-presidential campaign of Sarah Palin, Sixpack is a prolific beer-drinker, though he's also working on developing rock-hard abs. Married to Jane Sixpack. Not to be confused with Joe Sixpack, a Philadelphia beer columnist who supports Obama.
JOE LIEBERMAN: Connecticut senator-everyman who left the Democratic party in order to exercise his independent-spirited desire to vote with the Republicans on absolutely everything. Performs important service for Americans short on cash and losing sleep in the current economic climate by enabling them to use his speeches on C-SPAN as a free alternative to Tylenol PM. Inventor of Joementum.
BARACK JOEBAMA AND JOEHN MCCAIN: Rivals for the title of Ultimate American Everyman, though they face a difficult challenge from Bob Burns, a school maintenance supervisor from Connecticut, who isn't called Joe but is, officially, the Average American. Oh, and he's voting for Obama (scroll down). Say it ain't so, Bob!
REVEREND JOEREMIAH WRIGHT: Fiery pastor of Chicago's Trinity Church, famed for his pulpit-thumping 1992 sermon 'God Damn Joe the Plumber', delivered in a rage after discovering that he'd paid several hundred dollars for incredibly shoddy work on his boiler.
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