Thank You, Sisters; and Wake Up, Sisters!

I have been wanting to write this post for a while. Since we are taking a breath to regroup and determine our goals for the PUMA movement going forward, I think it’s finally time to say:

Hillary Clinton

Thank you.

Thank you to all the women who braved the buzzsaw of sexism in order to run for President and Vice President. Since 1884, you have been trying to break that highest, hardest glass ceiling, and this year, Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin came the closest anyone has come in 24 years. Because of their work, and all the sisters who have come before, American women are one step closer to having a sister in the White House for the very first time. Your courage and strength is mindboggling, and if we keep working to push women forward in all levels of government, one day we, too, will be saying, “Yes We Did!” on Election Night.

Sarah Palin

But our work is not done. I shudder to read the mindless, uninformed drivel that comes out of the mouths of high-profile women these days. Melissa Etheridge, a gay woman who supported Barack Obama, was devastated when Proposition 8 passed in California. But she soon found comfort in her new Messiah of Unity and Rainbows:

…I tell myself to take a breath, okay take another one… Obama has been elected president. This crazy fearful insanity will end soon. This great state and this great country of ours will finally come to the understanding that there is no “them”. We are one. We are united. What you do to someone else you do to yourself. That “judge not, lest ye yourself be judged” are truthful words and not Christian rhetoric.

Melissa. Honey. Without the overwhelming support of Barack Obama’s oh-so-Christian, non-judgmental voters in California, Proposition 8 would never have passed. Moreover, your beloved Precious is on record saying he does not think you have the right to marry the woman you love, and his voice was used in robocalls on Election Day, saying that very thing, to encourage his supporters to vote for this “crazy fearful insanity.”

So, wake up, sister. The election of Barack Obama has actually made your rosy little scenario LESS LIKELY.

Zombie Lies

 

So I’m making a Wedneday morning hangover tour of Left Blogistan and I see this in a comment at TGW:

As for KO, telling Hillary that there was no mathmatical way for her to win without the superdelagates did not strike me as rhetoric but sense. She lost a long time before she conceded, to my point of view.

Well that just made the swollen cut above my right eye start throbbing like it had it’s own pulse.  How many times are we going to keep hearing the same zombie lie?  You can shoot it, stab it, chop off it’s head, burn it to a crisp and blow it to smithereens and then you turn around and here it comes again, shuffling along in search of brains to eat. 

I did what I always do when I see a zombie lie – I blasted it with truth and gave it both barrels:

Obama needed the SD’s to win just as much as Hillary did.

Hillary won the popular vote, and if the the RBC hadn’t given Obama all the undecided votes in Michigan (plus some of Hillary’s delegates) she would have had the pledged delegate lead too.

But as I was typing out my response I was thinking how sick and tired I am of zapping zombie lies.  I’ve also believed that most advances in human history were not the result of hard work, they were the result of lazy guys like me trying to avoid hard work.  Then it struck me that we need to fight zombie lies with zombie truths.

We’ve known for a long time that Obama trolls are incapable of thought in the Cartesian sense (“Cogito, ergo sum”) so they rely on Axelrovian talking points (aka zombie lies) to provide semi-coherent content to their inane postings.  But those same zombie lies form the Kool-aid katechism of the sippy-kup kingdom that all Obama cultists undergo during indoctrination (“coming to Obama”)

Many of us have been engaged in discussions online or in real life and seen the sippy-kup kidz recite the same rote zombie lie, word-for-word.  A few of the more creative Obamanationals change a word or two but usually it’s spoken or typed in a memorized cut & paste monotone.  What we need is a set of zombie truths that are easy to access and effective.  If you see a zombie lie, go to your bookmarks, click on the zombie truth page, copy the appropriate zombie truth and paste it into your reply.  A printable version would be handy for those of us who aren’t surgically grafted to a computer.

But like I said, I’m lazy.  So I want y’all to do the hard work for me.  Tell me what zombie lies you keep seeing and your standard response (if you have one.)  Then I can compile and edit (cut & paste) them into a single post that you can bookmark.  Depending on the zombie lie, we might want a short and long zombie truth response.

We don’t need to reinvent the wheel.  If someone else has already come up with a good answer, we can use it (giving them proper cred) but let’s try to make this our thing.  If the zombie lie is something like these:

I didn’t see the misogyny. I still don’t see it from KO.

[…]

As for Obama , I don’t think there wasn’t sexism from many people in the process but the fact that Obama said Hillary was likeable enough was not a strike at her gender.

the appropriate response may include a link to a site like Shakesville where examples of misogyny by KO and BO are detailed. 

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wasted time trying to relocate stories or sources so I can cite them in a post.  Many times the search has ended in frustration because the info has been moved or scrubbed.  Teh Google is not always your friend, sometimes it provides too much information. a virtual haystack containing a single needle.

Although the campaign is over we will be seeing the same old zombie lies for years, as well as lots of new ones.  Let’s create and maintain a one-stop reference for countering the propaganda, lies and spin that will be fed to us by Obamanation.  As I write this in a stream of semi-conciousness it occurs to me that this should be a PUMA priority.  This is not a one-person, one-post project, it’s a project that will take time and dedication and will utilize a variety of skills.  Some of you may not enjoy writing but you have mad skills at cataloging or organizing databases. 

What do you think?

Tuesday: Serenity Prayer

Gov. Jon Corzine used his divine right to change NJs primary results

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Learn this prayer because we are going to be reciting it a lot in the next four years.  There’s nothing we can do about Obama as our president.  What we *can* do is make sure that the way he got to be president, ie. by cheating and corruption, never happens again.

One of the things we need to work on to prevent cheating is the primary election system.  As a New Jersey resident I can say without a doubt that if the primary problem isn’t fixed, I see absolutely no reason why anyone in this state would ever bother to vote in one.  The idea that the party machine in this state could invalidate my primary vote after the state legislature wasted time moving the date of the primary up by four months, allocated  millions of dollars for the election and after candidates and their volunteers worked their butts off, well, it just infuriates me.  It can NEVER happen again.  So, going forward, I’m going to want to see a real lobbying effort to pass legislation that will require delegations to stick to the primary results on the first vote at the convention.  State party committees that violate this law should be required to pay the state for the primary.  Maybe delegates need to be fined as well. perhaps in proportion to the number of people they represent.  In NJ, the densest state in the nation (in more ways than one), the resulting fine could be quite substantial.  But if we don’t make the penalties steep, there will be no way to hold the delegates accountable and the primaries will become meaningless.

The other issue we need to address is how the primaries are conducted in the first place.  I think we can all agree that caucuses need to be eliminated.  I realize that this means that some smaller, less populated states may have a harder time funding a primary.  Why not use revenue sharing like the National Football League?  The party committees from larger or richer states could help fund states like Iowa and Kansas.   There are a couple of other proposals on the web that are worth looking at.  Will Bower has a proposal at Huffington Post that focuses on regional primaries.  Several monts ago, Anglachel wrote a more detailed proposal that addressed issues most of us probably hadn’t considered, like delegate allocation based on proportional turnout.   In other words, urban areas wouldn’t be awarded more delegates based on some past election results or to correct for some historical injustice, real or imagined.  Delegates would be awarded based on how many people actually showed up for the primary:

Allocate delegates on the basis of proportional turn out. This means that a delgate is granted for every 100,000 or 15,000 or 250,000 or whatever the threshold number is no matter what state you are in. No gerrymandered districts with the voter in precint 1 counting for more than those in precinct 4. States that want to hold caucuses can do so, but the low turnouts for caucuses will result in a lower delegate count and thuis voice at the national convention. Want more voice at a national level? GET OUT YOUR VOTE.

There’s a lot of wonky goodness in both of these posts so let’s get to it. We’ve got to be quick though.  The DNC is going to elect a new Obama friendly chair and it will be an uphill fight from now until 2012.  But what is the alternative?  This is one thing we *can* change.

Occam’s Razor cuts like a knife

E. Nelson at OpEdNews suspects election fraud by the GOP:

Evidence of Republican Election Fraud in the Al Franken, Norm Coleman Senate Race?

[…]

Could cyber-attacks and manipulation of transmitted vote tallies still have occurred in Minnesota – like what was described during Mike Connell’s testimony the day before – altering vote tallies in the Presidential and Senate elections as they were tabulated throughout the early morning hours of November 5th? Of course the Presidential election turned out to be a landslide and so attempts at fraud would have been overwhelmed by the lopsided victory for Barack Obama. However, the Senate race between Republican incumbent Norm Coleman and Democratic challenger Al Franken was always expected to be very close.

[…]

An Associated Press story over the weekend discovered there were as many as 25,000 “undervotes” where voters picked a President but apparently did not vote in the Senate race and many of these “undervotes” occurred in heavily democratic voting precincts. While some of these “undervotes” are expected to occur, especially in a bitter mud-slinging contest such as the Franken – Coleman race, it is also possible that many other ballots might have been incorrectly marked or were misread by the optical scanning machines.

From the AP story cited above:

The ballots that showed a presidential vote but no Senate vote are called the “undervote.” Statewide, more than 18,000 of those ballots came from counties won by Obama. About 6,100 were in counties won by Republican John McCain.

Occam’s razor is a principle that says that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible.  Another way to put it is that the simplest answer is most likely the correct one.  What is the simplest answer for undervotes in Minnesota?

The simplest answer is that 25,000 voters did not cast votes in the Minnesota Senate race.  Does that sound implausible?  The primary results in Texas showed that Obama supporters were less likely to vote in downticket races than Hillary supporters.  Add to that the fact that Obama campaigned for Obama, not for the Democratic party.