Friday Reads

Good Morning!

Every time I see anything having to do with Mitt Romney, it feels like we’ve time tripped back to some awful period in the past where women don’t have access to the pill unless they live in certain states and are married, where black people are no where to be seen on TV and they can’t vote without facing extreme tests and poll taxes, and where GLBT have been shoved back in the closet.

We’re getting voter suppression by the GOP that’s horrifying.  I expect to see people being hosed in the streets again for trying to eat in public places.  This election just has been really bringing out the worst in a lot of people and by that I basically mean white Republican people.  Here’s a story from Virginia that’s shocking. A 31 year old white male of GOP persuasion was caught throwing away voter registrations for democrats.

The Rockingham County Sheriff’s office has arrested a Pennsylvania man and charged him with attempting to throw away filled out voter registration forms.

Colin Small, 31 year old male from Phoenixville, PA has been charged with 8 felonies and 5 misdemeanors in connection with the controversy. He is employed by Pinpoint, a company that was hired by the Republican Party of Virginia to help with voter registration.

UPDATE:  The Republican Party of Virginia Chairman Pat Mullins released the following statement in reaction to the arrest of Small:

“We were alarmed by allegations recently made regarding an individual in Harrisonburg. The actions taken by this individual are a direct contradiction of both his training and explicit instructions given to him. The Republican Party of Virginia will not tolerate any action by any person that could threaten the integrity of our electoral process.

The individual in question was fired immediately after we learned of his alleged actions. We are grateful to the local sheriff’s office and Registrar for acting so quickly to protect our democratic process and will fully cooperate with any requests made by them.  However, since there is currently an investigation underway, we will refrain from any further comments until they have concluded their inquiry. “

Not surprisingly, democratic bloggers are on fire with this news tonight. The initial scuttle came from Ben Tribbet at Not Larry Sabato, who with help discovered Small’s LinkedIn pagewhich says he is a current employee of the Republican National Committee.

Arizona has been handing out voter cards to Hispanic voters with the wrong date on it.  

Arizona’s Maricopa county listed the wrong date in the Spanish version of voter registration cards, a development likely to further complicate tense relations between local authorities and Latino residents.

The county’s elections office says it mailed out nearly 2 million new voter registration cards. Only about 50 of the cards — handed out over-the-counter at its offices — had the error, it said.

Instead of November 6, the Spanish translation said the election would take place on November 8.

“The program has been updated so it reflects the correct dates in both English and Spanish,” the county said in a statement.

A local rights group said the damage has already been done.

“It’s a mistake that should not have happened,” Petra Falcon, the executive director of Promise Arizona in Action, told CNN affiliate KNXV-TV. “To know that there’s information out there that’s wrong, it’s going to take a lot of work to make sure that people know the correct date.”

Promise Arizona describes itself as “a nonprofit organization dedicated to expanding civic participation in Arizona, particularly among Latinos and youth.”

County officials and local Hispanics have long had an adversarial relationship, particularly over the subject of illegal immigration.

Those disputes have landed in court.

Here’s a film the Romney Campaign is probably following closely.  It’s a 1950s documentary training film on how to deal with those troubling women in the work place.

“I can remember the good old days, when there were all men in my department, and we didn’t have these problems!” a male manager complains to his boss. “You didn’t have the production output you’ve got now either!” the boss counters. Through this anecdote, the McGraw-Hill instructional film below sets out to teach male managers how to “cope” with female employees.

Long before anyone was slinging binders full of women, men were forced to accept female coworkers out of sheer need. Women joining the workforce during World War II seems to have spawned a cottage industry in educational material about gender and work. Don’t miss this 1944 gem, Supervising Women Workers, or this manual of management tips.

“Look Brad, you’ve got a new bearings inspector who happens to be a woman. You need someone, and there isn’t a man available. It seems to me that whether the gal ads up to trouble or not is pretty much up to you,” the boss explains at the end of the film. Brad is in for an attitude adjustment. He arches an eyebrow but says nothing.

Go look at the film and see if you don’t see a few Romney men wandering around.

The one thing you won’t find is any Romney men wandering around the military.  They have their own special form of “service”.  Here’s Queen Ann talking about the princes and their public service (i.e. harassing people to become mormon) on the view.

The wife of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney on Thursday said that her husband and sons had not joined the U.S. military but had found “different ways of serving” by going onreligious missions in France, England, Australia and Chile as part of their obligation to the Mormon church.

During an interview on ABC’s The View, co-host Whoopi Goldberg asked Ann Romney how she would explain to the families of fallen soldiers why her husband and sons had not served their country.

“When I read about your husband, what I had read — and maybe you can correct this — is that the reason he didn’t serve in Vietnam was because it was against the religion,” Goldberg said.

“That’s not correct,” Ann Romney insisted. “He was serving his mission, and my five sons have also served missions. None served in the military, but I do have one son that feels that he’s giving back to his country in a significant way where he is now a doctor and he is taking care of veterans.”

“So, you know, we find different ways of serving,” she added. “And my husband and my five boys did serve missions, did not serve in the military.”

The candidate’s wife explained that Mormon missions were like military service in that “you’re going outside of yourself, you’re working and you’re helping others. And it changes you. And are we so grateful in this country for those people — men and women — that are volunteering, they’re sacrificing their life for us, and we cannot forget that or we have to acknowledge that always.”

Yup, irritating people with religious spiels is akin to fighting wars abroad.  At least it is the weird world of the Romneys.  Joe Walsh inhabits that world too.

Republican Rep. Joe Walsh, running against Democratic challenger Tammy Duckworth in Illinois, told reporters Thursday night that there should be no abortion exception for the “life of the mother” because “with modern technology and science, you can’t find one instance” in which a woman would actually die, according to a radio station. Walsh, of course, is flat wrong.

“There is no such exception as life of the mother, and as far as health of the mother, same thing,” Walsh continued. The comments were first reported by the Illinois radio station WGN.

“There is no such exception as life of the mother, and as far as health of the mother, same thing, with advances in science and technology,” Walsh said, according to the video above. CREDO superPAC, which is opposing Walsh, tipped HuffPost to the comments.

You should hear Dr. Daughter go off on this.  She delivers babies every day and is seeing an increasing number of high risk pregnancies due to obesity and mothers than come in that are already diabetic and have blood pressure issues from obesity.  Of course, most of the women are also on medicare or are unable to get medicare because of their status so their babies tend to be born compromised.  But hey, Joe says no one dies any more because science won’t let them.

Yes, there’s some weird Stepford wife reality going on there in Republican land.

It’s really hard to know these guys come up with this crap, isn’t it?

I still can’t believe that Dr. Jill Stein and her running mate were subject to arrest and detention for basically showing up at the debates the other night.  Amy Goodman has interviewed the two. Nothing like shutting out alternatives to the two party political duopoly.

I interviewed Stein the day after the debate, after their imprisonment (which ended, not surprisingly, not long after the debate ended). She told me: “We are on the ballot for 85 percent of voters. Americans deserve to know what their choices are. The police said they were only doing job. I said, ‘This is about everyone’s jobs, whether we can afford health care, whether students will be indentured.’ There are critical issues left out of the debate. Ninety million voters are predicted to stay home and vote with their feet that neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney represent them. That’s twice as many voters than expected for either of them.”

Even if Stein and Honkala hadn’t been hauled off a public street and handcuffed to those chairs for eight hours, Stein’s exclusion from the debate was certain. The debates are very closely controlled by the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), which excludes third-party candidates, among other things. George Farah is the founder and executive director of Open Debates, and author of “No Debate: How the Republican and Democratic Parties Secretly Control the Presidential Debates.” Farah told me on the morning of the Hofstra debate about how the CPD gained control over the debates from the nonpartisan League of Women Voters: “We have a private corporation that was created by the Republican and Democratic parties called the Commission on Presidential Debates. It seized control of the presidential debates precisely because the League was independent, precisely because this women’s organization had the guts to stand up to the candidates that the major parties had nominated.”

Okay, so I’ve had it with all things Republican this election.  What about you?  And, what’s on your reading and blogging list this today?