Here’s a Halloween treat courtesy of Tom Neely. Click on the picture below to see George W. Bush get treated the way he’s been treating the rest of the world. (Warning : It ain’t pretty…)

Our (soon to be ex-) governor sure does have a knack for predicting problems before they happen :

Just as the Southern California wildfires were beginning late last week, the Bush administration quietly turned down a six-month-old emergency request by Gov. Gray Davis for help in removing dead and dying trees in the same forests now being consumed by flame.

In April, Davis asked for a federal emergency declaration in three counties where bark beetle infestation had left thousands of acres of dense woodland vulnerable to fire.

If approved, the presidential proclamation would have paved the way for millions of dollars in federal support for clearing dead trees in San Diego, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

“We made the request in the hope of making a horrific situation less serious and we were turned down,” Davis spokesman Steve Maviglio said.

Of course, that’s not the first time the pleas of our embattled governor have fallen on the deaf ears of the White House. Remember the energy crisis? Not only did Davis forsee the troubles to come back in 2000, but like with these fires, but he was also rebuked during the peak of the crisis :

Last week, Cheney said conservation is a “sign of personal virtue” but not a sufficient basis for a “sound, comprehensive energy policy.”

Davis said the new administration has “helped us on every matter I have asked, except for the biggest” — helping reduce wholesale electricity prices, which he said increased by 450 percent from 1999 to 2000.

“We need help from Washington today to reduce the extraordinary prices for power we are paying,” he said. “The product isn’t any better. We aren’t using any more electrons. It’s just Texas and Southwest energy companies charging outrageous prices to our utilities that eventually get passed onto our customers.”

Of course, Davis ended up being, what Gephardt would call, a “miserable failure”. Now that it’s out with the old and in with the new, our Governor-elect will surely have some bold new ideas on how to help California :

The day after his election, Schwarzenegger promised that when they met this week, he would ask for “a lot of favors” in an attempt to get more federal money, particularly to pay for incarceration and services to undocumented immigrants.

Those comments mirrored vows Schwarzenegger made repeatedly during the recall campaign. He said he would be the “Collectinator” who delivers California more bang for its tax buck from the federal government. “For each dollar that we have been paying in federal taxes, we only have been getting back 77 cents. So I want to collect some of that money,” he said often.

Even after his first post-election congratulatory phone call from Bush, Schwarzenegger emphasized to reporters that “I need the federal government’s help. They have to come in and really help us straighten out California.”

But Schwarzenegger’s eager tone apparently irritated White House aides, putting the president on the defensive and appearing to shake down a cash- strapped federal government.

By Thursday morning, White House insiders were downplaying the sit-down to “a greeting, a congratulations meeting,” and they stressed that no lists of demands would be delivered by the governor-elect.

“There will not be any bags of money,” said one. “The ability of the federal government to hand out money is limited.”

I guess when Arnold was saying “California needs leadership” he meant “California needs someone to kiss the President’s ass.”

This one is so weird, I’m just going to reprint the entire article here :

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he does not know whether or not he has lost his mojo, as a leading news magazine suggested, because he doesn’t really know what mojo is.

“Is Rumsfeld Losing His Mojo?” was the headline in Time magazine above a story about Rumsfeld’s recent difficulties concerning Iraq policy and differences with U.S. lawmakers.

“Have you lost your mojo?” a reporter asked Rumsfeld during a Pentagon briefing.

Rumsfeld said he did not consult a dictionary — as he has for words like slog about which he has sparred with reporters — but he spoke with an aide who had.

“And they asked me that, and I said, ‘I don’t know what it means.’ And they said, ‘In 1926 or something, it had to do with jazz music.’”

The Webster’s New World Dictionary defines mojo as “a charm or amulet thought to have magic powers,” or “power, luck, etc., as of magical or supernatural origin.” The word is thought to be of Creole origin.

Mojo has most recently come into popular culture in connection with the “Austin Powers” movies, starring Mike Myers, in which mojo was portrayed as the secret behind the title character’s libido. At one point, Myers complains, “Crikey, I’ve lost my mojo!”

Honestly, folks, just by looking at this picture, you can tell that Rumsfeld never even had a mojo to lose :

As of this Sunday, we’re exactly one year away from the next Presidential election. With that in mind, I’m posing the following question to fellow bloggers/commenters :

If you had the undivided attention of every voter in America for five minutes the night before election day, what would you say?

For what it’s worth, here’s what I’d say (forgive me for the pedantic, speech-y way this is written) :

In the past four years, Americans have had some tough times. From the terror of September 11th, which brought the world together against a common enemy, to the war in Iraq, which polarized the world and turned best friends into bitter rivals. We’ve gone from the soaring economy of the late-90s to a crippling recession to the stagnant recovery that we’re stuck in today. Throughout it all, George Bush has been in complete control. Unfortunately, he’s been a failure in almost every area that he has governed.

One of the great tools that is at the disposal of the President is the veto. Since the time of George Washington, the Presidential veto has been the best way for the executive branch to ensure that the Congress doesn’t stray from the President’s agenda. Of course, since the Congress and President have rarely agreed on much of anything, the use of the veto isn’t exactly rare. FDR used it a whopping 635 times. During Ronald Reagan’s presidency, he issued 78 vetoes. Even during George Bush Sr.’s four years in office, he issued 44 vetoes.

Why do I mention this? Because over the last four years of the Bush presidency, he has never issued a single veto. Not even once. With a virtually unprecedented level of cooperation between the Congress and President, there’s only one conclusion we can come to : This president has gotten everything he’s wanted.

With that being the case, why do we still have millions of people out of work? Why are there millions of children living in poverty with no health care? Why do we have the largest deficit in our nation’s history, with no end in sight? Why has the world become more and more united in the fear and hatred of the United States? Why does the president continue to advocate his “steal from the poor and give to the rich”, Robin Hood in reverse, tax cuts?

When Harry Truman was president, he had a plaque on his desk that said “The buck stops here”. When you’re in that voting booth tomorrow, keep that in mind. For the past four years, the buck has stopped on the desk of George W. Bush. If you’re unsatisfied with the direction this country is headed, if you feel like the only people living the American dream are people whose last names are Enron or Halliburton, or if you’re just not doing as well today as you were four years ago, then I urge you to vote against the man who’s been in charge.

What would you guys say during your hypothetical five minutes?

In case you hadn’t noticed, the Talent Show has kinda sucked for the last two weeks. For various reasons, my heart hasn’t exactly been in it lately. I’m starting to get back into the swing of things though. I’m thinking of making a few changes to the site and I’d love to get some input from you guys. I’m looking into adding a “Recent Comments” area to the left here (possibly replacing the calendar) as well as finally implementing the fixes to try to solve the Blog Spammer problem. Are there any other features you’ve noticed on other sites that you’d like to see here? Are there any great sites that are missing from my links section? Should I get rid of the anti-Bush button in the upper corner? If so, what should I put there instead?

The History News Network had an interesting series of posts last year under the heading “Where Have All the Voters Gone?” which had some really great conclusions about what could be done to increase voter turnout :

Lengthy campaigns tax voters’ attention. Although it might be thought a long campaign would serve citizens’ needs by giving them more time to study the candidates, the long campaign actually works against an informed electorate. Most citizens are not psychologically prepared to pay close attention to a campaign when Election Day is months away. Yet, because it has been going on for months, they are also not highly attentive when it is only weeks away. By campaign’s end, they will even have forgotten much of what they had learned earlier. In 2000, for example, Americans knew less about George W. Bush’s position on gun control in October than they had known in February. Overall, our research indicates that the college-educated electorate of today is no better informed and, by some indicators, is less informed than the high-school-educated electorate of fifty years ago.

Changes in the voting laws would also help. For one thing, polling hours should be extended. Amidst the uproar over ballot irregularities in Florida in 2000, no commentator saw fit to ask why the polls in that state closed at 7 p.m. local time. Florida is one of twenty-six states that shut down their polls before 8 p.m. Not surprisingly, turnout in these states is several percentage points below that of states where the polls are open until 8 p.m. or later. Limits on polling hours go back decades and have been a convenient way to discourage the participation of lower-income workers who are stuck at their jobs during the day.

Turnout would likely also increase if Election Day was declared a national holiday, as the National Commission on Federal Election Reform has recommended. The United States is nearly alone among western democracies in holding its elections on a work day instead of on a holiday or weekend. Turnout is depressed by the fact that most people have little choice but to vote before or after work, and then within limited polling hours.

The major legal obstacle to voting, however, is the registration requirement. In nearly all European democracies, registration is virtually automatic. Government assumes the responsibility for placing eligible citizens on the registration rolls. In the United States, the responsibility rests with the individual. Americans no longer have to face the imposing obstacles, such as literacy tests and poll taxes, which once kept many of them from registering.

While we’re on the subject of “election reforms that will never happen”, here’s a few additional ideas :

Alternate methods of voting - Why are we only allowed to vote in person? I’ve never been ID’ed at a polling place. If security is that weak, why not allow us to vote via telephone or internet? When we register to vote, we should be assigned a pin number that we use in addition to our social security number to log into a system that will allow us to vote from just about anywhere.

Why only one day? - Seriously, is there some law that says there has to be an “election day”? Why can’t the polls be open for two weeks prior to the election? I got to vote early this year and I thought it was incredibly convenient.

Volunteers?? - Why are polling places staffed by volunteers? After every election, I always hear horror stories about poll workers who didn’t know what the hell they were doing.

We need a new system - Simply put, the current “first past the post” voting system sucks. It marginalizes fringe candidates, encourages tactical voting, and turns our elections into a lesser of two evils proposition. Although Instant Runoff Voting is the most popular alternative voting system in this country, there are a ton of alternative voting systems out there each with their own strengths and weaknesses. There’s so many criteria out there that I don’t have a strong opinion on it (Instant Runoff, Condorcet, and Approval Voting all seem pretty good), but it’s clear that most alternative systems are preferable to the one we’ve got now.

Try enforcing corruption laws - The worst-kept secret in this country is that politicians do the bidding of whomever pays for their campaigns. Campaign finance reform is a good start, but there’s already so much corruption going on through legal loopholes that it’s ridiculous. Seeing Bush and Cheney getting arrested on the evening news for giving away billions of dollars worth of no-competition contracts to Halliburton would do more to restore people’s faith in Democracy than any other reform listed here.

Of course, this is all a moot point. As the HNN article said, there’s a pretty big roadblock standing between us and any real electoral reform :

Republican lawmakers have opposed Election Day registration, just as for more than a century, as Paul Kleppner documented in his study, they have followed a strategy of selective disenfranchisement. The 1993 Motor Voter Act, for example, was passed despite Republican opposition and then only when senate lawmakers agreed to remove automatic registration provisions from the legislation. Even then, Republican governors in seven states refused to implement the Motor Voter Act until forced by legal action to do so.

Ironically, our study found that Republicans have gained as many votes as the Democrats from the Motor Voter Act. Even though more of the new registrants have been Democrats, those who have registered Republican are more likely to cast a ballot on Election Day.

Oh well….I guess we can either bite our tongues and support the less savory candidates (”Lieberman/Sharpton in 2004!”) or just stay home and watch TV.

Wow. Christmas came early for Bush today :

The economy grew at a blistering 7.2 percent annual rate in the third quarter in the strongest pace in nearly two decades. Consumers spent with abandon and businesses ramped up investment, compelling new evidence of an economic resurgence.

The increase in gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the economy’s performance, in the July-September quarter was more than double the 3.3 percent rate registered in the second quarter, the Commerce Department reported Thursday.

The 7.2 percent pace marked the best showing since the first quarter of 1984. It exceeded analysts’ forecasts for a 6 percent growth rate for third-quarter GDP, which measures the value of all goods and services produced within the United States.

“This is a gangbuster number. Everything came together for the economy in the third quarter,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com. “The key challenge now is jobs,” he said.
. . .
Democrats, however, argue that the tax cuts contributed to a record budget deficit in the recently ended 2003 fiscal year and have done little to spur significant job growth.

“This has largely been a jobless recovery,” said Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D.

The GDP is up, which is good, but without significant increases in jobs it ain’t gonna last. These numbers may be promising, but let’s not forget what happened to the last president named George Bush who was saddled with a jobless recovery….

Sure, we wanted tax cuts, but nobody told us that taxes pay for firefighters too!

Exactly a decade ago, between Oct. 26 and Nov. 7, firestorms fanned by Santa Anas destroyed more than a thousand homes in Pasadena, Malibu, and Laguna Beach. In the last century, nearly half the great Southern California fires have occurred in October.

This time climate, ecology, and stupid urbanization have conspired to create the ingredients for one of the most perfect firestorms in history. Experts have seen it coming for months.

These dead forests represent an almost apocalyptic hazard to more than 100,000 mountain and foothill residents, many of whom depend on a single, narrow road for their fire escape.
. . .
The best preventive measure, of course, is to return to the native-Californian practice of regular, small-scale burning of old brush and chaparral. This is now textbook policy, but the suburbanization of the fire terrain makes it almost impossible to implement it on any adequate scale. Homeowners despise the temporary pollution of “controlled burns” and local officials fear the legal consequences of escaped fires.

As a result, huge plantations of old, highly flammable brush accumulate along the peripheries and in the interstices of new, sprawled-out suburbs. Since the devastating 1993 fires, tens of thousands of new homes have pushed their way into the furthest recesses of Southern California’s coastal and inland fire-belts. Each new homeowner, moreover, expects heroic levels of protection from underfunded county and state fire agencies.

Fire, as a result, is politically ironic. Right now, as I watch San Diego’s wealthiest new suburb, Scripps Ranch, in flames, I recall the Schwarzenegger fund-raising parties hosted there a few weeks ago. This was an epicenter of the recent recall and gilded voices roared to the skies against the oppression of an out-of-control public sector. Now Arnold’s wealthy supporters are screaming for fire engines, and “big government” is the only thing standing between their $3 million homes and the ash pile.

Halloween fires, of course, burn shacks as well as mansions, but Republicans tend to disproportionately concentrate themselves in the wrong altitudes and ecologies. Indeed it is striking to what extent the current fire map (Rancho Cucamonga, north Fontana, La Verne, Simi Valley, Vista, Ramona, Eucalyptus Hills, Scripps Ranch, and so on) recapitulates geographic patterns of heaviest voter support for the recall.

The fires also cruelly illuminate the new governor’s essential dilemma: how to service simultaneous middle-class demands for reduced spending and more public services. The white-flight gated suburbs insist on impossible standards of fire protection, but refuse to pay either higher insurance premiums (fire insurance in California is “cross-subsidized” by all homeowners) or higher property taxes. Even a Hollywood superhero will have difficulty squaring that circle.

This is what happens when we short-change the government with your low property taxes and bitching about any new taxation (car tax anyone??). Yeah, paying taxes sucks, but, like insurance, we’re all paying now in case we need it later.

Have you been blacklisted by the NRA yet? If not, you should. All the cool kids are doing it.

Most blacklists are designed to intimidate. But thousands of Americans are clamoring to join one drawn up by the National Rifle Association.

Actor Dustin Hoffman was so dismayed to find his name missing from the NRA’s shadowy 19-page list of U.S. companies, celebrities, and news organizations seen as lending support to anti-gun policies that he wrote to the powerful pro-gun lobby group begging to be included.

“As a supporter of comprehensive anti-gun safety measures, I was deeply disappointed when I discovered my name was not on the list,” Hoffman wrote in a letter to the NRA that was released on Tuesday.

“I was particularly surprised by the omission given my opposition to the loophole that makes it legal for 18- to 20-year-olds to buy handguns at gun shows,” he added.

Hoffman’s name has now been added to the list which reads like a Who’s Who of American business, culture and religion and which ranges from the American Jewish Congress to A&M Records, ABC News and talk show queen Oprah Winfrey.

If you want to join the blacklist, you can sign up for it at NRAblacklist.com

The NRA is out of control!

The NRA hopes you’ll keep your mouth shut — while it buys and bullies Congress into two outrageous favors :

Outrage #1 Ending the Assault Weapons Ban that’s made our streets safer for the last decade. The NRA wants Congress to legalize military-style semi-automatic weapons — lethal killing machines that can put 12 slugs in a cop’s body in 2 seconds.

Outrage #2 Slamming the courthouse door shut on the victims of gun crimes. The NRA wants to protect gun makers and dealers from virtually all civil lawsuits — even when they put guns in the hand of criminals and terrorists. That means notorious dealers like Bull’s Eye Shooter Supply — which managed to “lose” 238 guns, armed the DC snipers and sold guns used by thugs in at least 52 other crimes — will go scot-free.

This reminds me of my favorite bit of “freeway blogging” :

You can have my gun when you pry it from the fingers of my cold dead child.

Like Kos, I was pretty shocked to hear this in Bush’s press conference today :

Q Mr. President, if I may take you back to May 1st when you stood on the USS Lincoln under a huge banner that said, “Mission Accomplished.” At that time you declared major combat operations were over, but since that time there have been over 1,000 wounded, many of them amputees who are recovering at Walter Reed, 217 killed in action since that date. Will you acknowledge now that you were premature in making those remarks?

THE PRESIDENT: Nora, I think you ought to look at my speech. I said, Iraq is a dangerous place and we’ve still got hard work to do, there’s still more to be done. And we had just come off a very successful military operation. I was there to thank the troops.

The “Mission Accomplished” sign, of course, was put up by the members of the USS Abraham Lincoln, saying that their mission was accomplished. I know it was attributed some how to some ingenious advance man from my staff — they weren’t that ingenious, by the way

Like so many Bush lies, he’s technically telling the truth. I’m sure the Bush Administration really did make some troops physically hang the sign, but does he really expect us to believe that the sign was provided by the sailors? Did they make sure to swing by Hawaii on their way home from the Persian Gulf so they could stop by “Signs ‘R’ Us”?

This is as ludicrous as when they were trying to claim that Bush had to fly onto the aircraft carrier on a jet, because they were too far away to get there by helicopter. I guess if he admitted that he was patting himself on the back in May then it would distract from his current attempts to avoid getting blamed for the subsequent failures of his Iraq policies.