I just finished reading an article in the Gainesville Sun about how Sarah Palin is employing the same means to squash “troopergate” as the Republicans did in the 2000 election in Florida.

But there’s a couple of paragraphs at the end of the article that has me shaking my head. The entire article is here. But the excerpt I’m concerned about is this: (Note that Branchflower is the investigator and Colberg is the Attorney General appointed by Palin.)

When Branchflower sought to subpoena 10 employees of Palin’s administration, Colberg responded with a letter that said they had been placed in a untenable position.

“As state employees, our clients have taken an oath to uphold the Alaska Constitution,” he wrote.

Yet, he added, “our clients are also loyal employees subject to the supervision of the Governor” whom he said has stated that the subpoenas were of questionable validity.

“We respectfully ask that you withdraw the subpoenas directed to our clients and thereby relieve them from the circumstance of having to choose where their loyalties lie,” he added.

Choose where their loyalties lie? Seriously? This is a reason to dismiss the subpoenas? Because these employees would have to choose between upholding the state constitution or protecting Palin? Isn’t that why they took an oath to uphold the constitution? It’s not a choice, people. Are you kidding me?

From Courthouse News Service:

Obama Campaign Sues Over Republican Suppression Effort

DETROIT (CN) – Barack Obama’s campaign has filed a class action to try to stop the Republican Party’s effort to prevent voting by those who have lost homes to foreclosure. The complaint calls the Republican plan the “lose your home, lose your vote” vote-suppression program. (see filing here)
The suit says Michigan seeks “to strip the right to vote of individuals who reside in homes for which a notice of foreclosure has been issued.”
Obama for America and the Democratic National Committee sued the Macomb County Republican Party, the Michigan Republican Party and the Republican National Committee in Macomb County Court.

“This complaint seeks declaratory and injunctive relief to challenge the ‘lose your home, lose your vote’ vote-suppression program adopted by the Macomb County Republican Party, in concert with the Michigan Republican Party and the Republican National Committee, as well as unnamed Defendants who will implement the scheme at polling places in Macomb County and throughout the State,” the complaint states.

“Republican operatives have announced that they will seek to strip the right to vote of individuals who reside in homes for which a notice of foreclosure has been issued by making challenges on Election Day to each such citizen’s right to vote. This ‘lose your home, lose your vote’ program is part of a broader scheme – misnamed an ‘election integrity’ program – to harass voters and suppress the vote throughout the State of Michigan in the upcoming election on November 4.”

The three individual plaintiffs are longtime homeowners in Macomb County whose homes are in foreclosure proceedings.

Plaintiff Duane Maletski was laid off from his job making auto parts and his home entered foreclosure proceedings in late July but he still lives there legally.
Plaintiff Sharon Lopez, 61, owns her home and is buying the home next door. That home entered foreclosure after the renter, her son, broke his leg in five places, lost his job and could not work, and Lopez’s husband was laid off from his job as a welder. The interest rate on her rental home jumped from 2 percent to 10 percent and it has entered foreclosure. So her name is on the foreclosure list, though she lives in her own home, which is not in foreclosure.

Plaintiff Frances Zick lives in the home she bought from her parents 15 years ago. Its adjustable rate mortgage rate jumped to 10%, her monthly payment rose from $1,100 to $1,800 and the lender foreclosed after she got two months behind. She works, and has worked for 17 years, as a cashier in a supermarket. She still lives in the home legally, though it is in foreclosure and may be sold.

The complaint states: “The mass and systematic challenge of voters under the Defendant Republicans’ ‘lose your home, lose your vote’ scheme will impair the right to vote of Individual Plaintiffs and all others similarly situated. The presence of an address on a list of foreclosures provides no legitimate basis for challenging a voter’s eligibility to vote, and use of such foreclosure lists for mass and systematic challenges can have but one purpose: to threaten, harass, and intimidate voters whom Defendant Republicans believe are unlikely to vote for their candidates. The result of the mass challenges envisioned by the ‘lose your home, lose your vote’ scheme will be denial and/or abridgement of the right to vote, indeterminate and inordinate delays at polling places affecting Individual Plaintiffs and all others similarly situated who must suffer through a baseless challenge process, as well as others affected by the diversion of election resources compelled by the mass, baseless challenges of the ‘lose your home, lose your vote’ scheme, and the subjection of Individual Plaintiffs and similarly situated voters to potentially harassing public questioning that is unrelated to their eligibility to vote.”

Plaintiffs are represented by James Bruinsma of Grand Rapids.

This Saturday, September 20th, please join Barack Obama in Jacksonville, where he will talk about his vision for creating the kind of change we need.

Change We Need Rally with Barack Obama

Metropolitan Park
1410 Gator Bowl Blvd.
Jacksonville, FL 32202

Saturday, September 20th
Doors Open: 12:30 p.m.
Program Begins: 2:30 p.m.

Not required, but you can RSVP at: RSVP Here

The event is free and open to the public. Space is limited and is available on a first-come, first-served basis. Tickets are not required. However, an RSVP is strongly encouraged.

For security reasons, do not bring bags. Please limit personal items. No signs or banners allowed.

Hmmmm.., who moves around a lot? Oh, of course, young student voters, many of whom would support Obama…yes, the trend is becoming very clear…read on…

Michigan Is Disenfranchising ‘Thousands Of Voters,’ ACLU Says

DETROIT (CN) – The Michigan Secretary of State has disenfranchised “thousands of voters” and continues to do so by striking them from the rolls “upon notice that original voter identification cards have been returned as undeliverable,” the United States Student Association Foundation and the ACLU claim in Federal Court. Plaintiffs say the state violates its own laws and federal law by the hasty disenfranchisements.

They say they notified Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land of this by letter on July 8, and she responded, on Aug. 29, that she is canceling voter registrations in the manner the plaintiffs described, “and that the onus lies with the voter to ‘correct the record.'”

Plaintiffs say the state’s purging procedure is illegal. They want it enjoined, and the people whose names were stricken from the roles illegally reinstated.Their lead counsel is Matthew Lund with Pepper Hamilton.

Read the filing

I was listening to the Diane Rehm show this evening and the subject was the new book “The Invisible Constitution” written by Laurence Tribe. It was a fascinating discussion – Tribe offers his opinion as to what kinds of justices Obama and McCain would appoint to the Supreme Court. Tribe taught Justice Roberts and Barack Obama at Harvard. For those of you who like to say that there’s really no difference between the candidates – this discussion will change your mind. I urge you to listen to the show and read the book.

These are the two ads both campaigns put out regarding the financial crisis. Which is more substantive? You decide.

The following is from D Magazine (D for Dallas). The writer is a former publisher of National Review.

My party has slipped its moorings. It’s time for a true pragmatist to lead the country.
By Wick Allison, Editor In Chief

THE MORE I LISTEN TO AND READ ABOUT “the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate,” the more I like him. Barack Obama strikes a chord with me like no political figure since Ronald Reagan. To explain why, I need to explain why I am a conservative and what it means to me.

In 1964, at the age of 16, I organized the Dallas County Youth for Goldwater. My senior thesis at the University of Texas was on the conservative intellectual revival in America. Twenty years later, I was invited by William F. Buckley Jr. to join the board of National Review. I later became its publisher.

Conservatism to me is less a political philosophy than a stance, a recognition of the fallibility of man and of man’s institutions. Conservatives respect the past not for its antiquity but because it represents, as G.K. Chesterton said, the democracy of the dead; it gives the benefit of the doubt to customs and laws tried and tested in the crucible of time. Conservatives are skeptical of abstract theories and utopian schemes, doubtful that government is wiser than its citizens, and always ready to test any political program against actual results.

Liberalism always seemed to me to be a system of “oughts.” We ought to do this or that because it’s the right thing to do, regardless of whether it works or not. It is a doctrine based on intentions, not results, on feeling good rather than doing good.

But today it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political programs when they clearly don’t work. The Bush tax cuts—a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war—led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his “conservative” credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of government in our history. That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask.

Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America’s job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.

This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.

Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.

Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened.

“Every great cause,” Eric Hoffer wrote, “begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” As a cause, conservatism may be dead. But as a stance, as a way of making judgments in a complex and difficult world, I believe it is very much alive in the instincts and predispositions of a liberal named Barack Obama.

Over the weekend there was an Obama rally at the Hipp. Rep Maloney and Deidre Hall from the soap “Days of our Lives” was there to speak. The Hipp filled up so some of us had to sit outside – but both guests gave their speeches inside and outside. The first pic is Deidre Hall giving her talk. FYI – the pics were taken with my camera phone, so the quality is diminished a bit.

In the other picture both Deidre and Rep Maloney were posing for pictures. They were both very nice and approachable. Now, we just need Barack to come – although the crowd said it would settle for Michele Obama. Yes We Can!

My sister lives in Kemah, Texas.

If you look at the above pic you can see her privacy fence going under water – the chain link fence at the end of the yard is completely submerged. They were fortunate – the water never got up to the house – but she was worried there for a while.

This next pic shows the water receding. The chain link fence begins to appear.