The PCTC Blog

Politics 101 for the Far Left: The Right Doesn't Win, We Lose!

One of the keys to our overall strategy of turning the United States into a progressive nation has to do with our understanding that we are being dominated by a group that represents a significant minority of the American population. The far right in this country represents about 25% of its inhabitants, at most. Yet, for 32 years -- an entire generation -- they’ve been running the government, and we've been increasingly locked out of the government altogether. We even have the most progressive president in the modern era and the single best pure politician in the last 50 yeas lashing out at "the professional left."

And before you professional lefties start laughing at me, consider this; Barack Obama got a black man elected president of the United States, and you think the surest way to a progressive majority is by replacing "Blue Dogs" with teabaggers. We've been in the wilderness for 40 years; how much longer do we shoot ourselves in the foot before we figure out to aim the gun elsewhere?

If we're so great at politics, how is it that a distinct minority of the population can come to dominate the policymaking apparatus in a democratic republic for an entire generation? 

The answer is, we help them.  We actually do more to damage our own prospects than they do. They don't win, we lose. 

Once again, let me explain how we help them.

The Real Meaning of "Investment"

Under the current president's leadership, we're starting to get a little better, in that it's very unlikely that we'll see a major bubble pop up in the economy anytime soon. But oil prices still go up and down, depending on where speculators want to manipulate them, and the price of an ounce of gold as of today is $1673, which really should be seen as absurd. Even some aspects of the stock market's rise to 13,000 should be worrisome. 

 

At some point, we have to learn that our biggest problem, economically speaking, is rooted in our tendency to demand huge, quick returns on our investments, instead of investing in a solid, workable future. Our parents built the greatest economic engine in the world through investment in ourselves, and by having enormous patience. The stock market didn't double in five years; it rose steadily. Likewise, inflation was very modest for many years; people knew how much a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk was going to cost from year to year. But these days, Instead of putting our money aside for a rainy day, everything's become a bet of sorts, and the end result is an economy that is largely scary and unpredictable. Our notion of investment has become somewhat bastardized over the years, and it's high time we changed our attitude; otherwise, we'll never get out of the doldrums completely. 

Mr Obama is IN Washington; Help Him Help You!

Over the last week or so, I have heard a large number of progressives cite "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" as their ideal political movie. Ya know, cuz they wish President Obama was more like Jimmy Stewart’s character, Jefferson Smith. 

As an old movie buff, I love this film. I love watching almost everything Frank Capra ever did. But the progressives who "wish Obama was like him" miss the point of the film. If you think the film is about an idealistic individual who rises up and upsets the corrupt old guard, Frank Capra is up there looking down on you and wishes he could slap you, because you're way off. Senator Smith didn’t win by himself. In fact, when he was taking the corruption on by himself, he was losing, and losing badly. For some reason, some people think the ending has him “winning” the filibuster by making his opposition crack.

Um, not quite.

Learning the Right Lessons From the Budget Battle

In reading leftie blogs and watching my Twitter feed over the weekend, I’m afraid a lot of progressives are taking the wrong lessons away from the first stage of the budget battle in Washington this year. 

The issue isn’t that so many useful programs were cut and that the GOP are bastards. If you didn’t know the GOP are bastards going in, turn in your membership card.  We should already KNOW that when the denizens of the current incarnation of the GOP get into office, they will screw the poor and anyone else they can, in order to funnel money to their rich benefactors. That is not a shocker.  What’s shocking is that we keep letting them do it.

And that’s the issue. In a nutshell, what you should be learning from this budget fiasco is that allowing the current incarnation of the Republican Party to hold office right now is a very dangerous thing. And we should be looking at the only solution available to us at the moment; electing more Democrats.

Yeah, I know the drill; a lot of Democrats are “too conservative.” Those “Blue Dogs” screw up everything.  And if I hear “Obama doesn’t fight enough” one more time, I think I’ll scream.

What the hell do you expect from him? Do you expect him to go on TV and call Republicans ugly and insult their mothers? He's the President of the United States, for Chrissakes. 

Obama’s Created More jobs in Two years Than Bush Did in Eight

On April 1, I Tweeted the following statement, and it was not a joke:

More jobs created under Obama in 2 years than were created in eight under Bush.

When I made the initial statement last Friday, some silly person (by the tone of the messages, I suspect this was a male, but I could be wrong) who claimed expertise on the subject because his anonymous handle included the word “math” immediately jumped on it and threw up some numbers of his own. Here’s his reply:

137M employed when Bush took office, 142M when he left. We're now at 139M. Where's your math?

He kept on me, even after I explained that it was pretty much impossible to cite “my math” in 140 characters or less. Seriously, some folks think they can “prove” their statements simply by declaring them true in less than 140 characters. He claims he was getting his numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and his simplistic answer was actually stunning. His claim of 142 million employed? He got that from the January 2009 report, which indeed lists the total number of employed individuals as 142 million.I give him a little credit for at least blaming Bush for January. Many folks basically use the December number as the cutoff. 

But he’s looking at the wrong number, anyway. The number to look at is “non-farm payroll.” That is the number the BLS uses. When they claim the economy grew by 216,000 jobs in March, they’re using non-farm payroll numbers, not the total number of employed. 

But regardless of which numbers he cites, he’s still wrong, because he doesn't understand what I said. The first mistake he makes is his false assumption regarding time. I said “in 2 years,” not “since January 20, 2009.” I also don’t use BLS raw (easy) numbers as my sole source, because they don't tell the whole story. But just for the hell of it, let’s start off with BLS numbers. I refuse to cite numbers beginning with February 2001 and ending with February 2009, though, because presidents aren’t magicians. They don’t take office and immediately influence job creation. I think a more accurate measure is to use fiscal years, especially since the stimulus, passed by Democrats with ZERO Republican support, didn’t become law until April 1, 2009, and nothing but the tax cuts actually took effect then, anyway. The first stimulus money started being distributed in June.  But since I’m being fair, I’m not going to give Bush credit/blame for the first months of his administration, either. I was going to use the beginning of each fiscal year as a comparison, but then I realized that October 2001 was right after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which might be unfair to Bush. We’re not talking about his incompetence with regard to security, but rather his incompetence with the economy. So, I’m going to go with July 2001. That works, because the numbers aren’t influenced by 9/11, and July 2009 is about when the stimulus money started reaching its recipients. I would also note that most economists agree that the Bush Recession ended in June 2009, so July seems like a relatively fair beginning and ending period.

In the July 2001 report, the total nonfarm payroll was 132.4 million. Eight years later, in the July 2009 report, it was 131.4 million. So, even without giving Bush credit for the rest of the fiscal year, the net loss of jobs under Bush in eight years was over 1 million, even just using raw BLS numbers. The number in the March 2011 report, which was just issued last Friday, is 130.7 million. I know what you’re thinking; it’s still a negative, right?

Wrong. First, I’ll remind you, I’m using the July numbers as a courtesy to Bush. But you can’t simply use raw BLS numbers and compare one month to another month, because it doesn’t tell the whole story. That brings up the second false assumption my critic makes. I spoke of “the number of jobs created,” not the net jobs gained. There is a difference.The fact that some folks can’t read basic English, or insist on jerking their knee when they’ve been told something they don’t believe, doesn’t make me wrong. Even using the pure raw numbers, Bush shows a net loss of 1 million, and Obama’s shows a net loss of 700,000, and that number is shrinking rapidly, and will probably be in the positive territory by early summer. So, even using the simple-minded math this guy seems to prefer, I’m still correct. But there’s more.

See, at no point in Bush’s eight years could it be said that the economy added a net of more than 4 million jobs, even using just the BLS raw numbers. At one point, at the height of the bubble economy, there were 135.3 million non-farm employees, which means in the last two years of the Bush fiasco, the economy overall LOST 5 million jobs. If I wanted to be a real prick, I could point to just private sector employment. If I did that, then the economy lost 7 million jobs during the last two years of the Bush era. In fact, though, it was the public sector jobs that Obama created and/or saved with the initial part of the stimulus package that prevented us from hurtling toward 15% unemployment, and which set the stage for a boom in private sector jobs. At the time, some local districts were looking at laying off half their teachers, as well as lots of police officers and firefighters, until the stimulus bailed them out. If you don’t think that had an overall positive effect on private sector jobs, than you must be a Right Winger. Those teachers, police and firefighters spend a lot of money in the economy. That’s why it’s just too simplistic to simply add and subtract one number from another and declare "well, that's the truth. Period."

Obama deserves credit for the jobs the stimulus created, even as the rest of the economy was shedding others. For example, according to most economists NOT hired by the Fox News Channel, the stimulus package alone was responsible for 2.5-3 million jobs. In addition to the teachers, police and firefighters who got to keep their jobs, it’s estimated that the Cash for Clunkers resulted in nearly 500,000 jobs. The fact that many of those jobs were offset by the continued loss of jobs in other areas of the economy caused by the Bush recession does not change that fact. 

If I use annual figures, the only positive Bush years were 2004, 2005, 2006 and (barely) 2007.  And 2006 and 2007 were only positive because he was having the Fed print money in the hope that he could hide the mortgage meltdown that actually started in late 2005 (and which I predicted on my old blog back in 2003). That means half of his Administration found the economy in the shitter. Using just numbers from FY 2010 and FY 2011 so far, Obama beats that track record by a mile, even if you subtract temporary census workers from the mix. In fact, when you remove the census workers from the mix altogether, Obama has seen 13 straight months of positive job growth; a record Bush didn’t accomplish until September 2004. Between March 2010 and March 2011, the private sector has seen its first positive annual job growth in more than four years, adding nearly 3 million jobs, all told. If Obama had continued doing the same things Bush was doing in the last year of his presidency, we would have lost 2.5-3 million jobs more than we did, and most economists estimate that the unemployment rate would have ended up north of 15%.

But Obama and the Democrats acted fast, and they stopped the bleeding. (Yes, I know; in a perfect world, the stimulus should have been larger.) He has also turned the economy into a job producer again. It’s not enough to just count the number of jobs that were created; it’s also necessary to count jobs that weren’t lost. I will grant you, the overall job numbers still look anemic, but the fact that nearly 3 million jobs have been created in the private sector over the past year alone points to major progress. Companies are making more profit than ever, and they have begun hiring again. I’m still feeling a little wary, especially with the GOP bozos who are in charge of the House, but the positive growth should start feeding itself as the employment picture catches up to the economy. And the 3 million private sector jobs created in the last year, combined with the 2.5-3 million jobs created with the stimulus package put him up near Bill Clinton in job creation territory, even though he’s just started his third year.

Once again, George Bush’s record on jobs was an overall negative, when you look at his record honestly. The effects of the Bush recession didn’t magically end on January 20, 2009. As you can see if you look at the actual numbers, job numbers bottomed out in late 2009, just as the stimulus was taking effect, and they have been showing a positive trend since. When you add in the jobs that were proven to have been created by the stimulus package, there is no doubt that Obama’s job creation numbers are better in the last two years than Bush’s were in eight years. Every job created under Bush disappeared, while the jobs created during the Obama era seem to be here to stay. He’s created new jobs and new industries that promise enormous growth in the future, so that record will get even better.

Like I said:

More jobs created under Obama in 2 years than were created in eight under Bush.

Why Are Progressives So Politically Tone-Deaf?

You may get sick of reading this from me, but one of the main reasons progressives are always on the outside looking in is because we don’t seem to know anything about how politics works. I will repeat it until it's no longer the case. I don't know about you, but I'm sick of waiting for a large portion of the progressive movement to get their heads out of each other's asses, and start doing things that benefit the poor, working and middle classes, instead of whining about shit that simply doesn't matter. 

Yesterday presented us with a prime example, when President Obama penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, entitled “Toward a 21^st-Century Regulatory System."

The liberal blogosphere went batshit. First, they lamented the fact that he would pen a column for The Wall Street Journal in the first place. How DARE he put some of his writing in the newspaper of record of the enemy? I'm waiting for the pissing and moaning that awaits when they find out Obama's being interviewed by Bill O'Reilly during Super Bowl coverage. 

Who's More Conservative Between Obama and REAGAN? Are You Kidding Me?

There is a truly disturbing column in today's HuffPost from a guy I normally think makes a lot of sense, Cenk Uyger. The article is HERE, and this is how he starts it off:

 

Who is more conservative - Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama?

 

If you think that's an absurd question, you're not alone. We had this discussion on The Dylan Ratigan Show when I was filling in for him on MSNBC and both of my guests thought it was absurd. A conservative website led with the headline that it was absurd (though they did not present one single fact to back up their claim). Except as it turns out, based on the facts, it is a really hard question to answer. And it would be absurd to claim otherwise.

 

Please, Cenk, add me to the chorus of those who think the very question is absurd. 

Come On President Obama -- Show Some Leadership!

I think we have the best president in office than we could have possibly hoped for in many ways. But I have to part ways with him when it comes to his approach to the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. We need singular leadership on this, and his Administration is simply dropping the ball, big time.

Look, folks; maybe I’m a dreamer, but it seems to me that when it became clear that BP and the Coast Guard are in over their heads, the government has no choice but to step into the void and work to fix the problem. I know that concept irks people like Rand Paul, but this is why you have government in the first place. I don’t know what the solution is, and neither do any of you. But I know what the solution is not, and that is to allow BP to run around like Moe, Larry and Curly trying to fix the plumbing.  I might have been okay with two weeks of this, but for Chrissakes, folks, this hole has been gushing over a month now; it’s obvious that BP, Transocean and the Coast Guard don’t know how to fix this, which means Obama should have been on the phone with everyone he can think of with even the smallest bit of expertise, to put their heads together and come up with a way to stop the flow of oil.

If this was above ground, the answer is rather simple; you actually create a small explosion, and allow the hole to fall in on itself and plug the leak. That may or may not work here; I don’t know the physics in play a mile below the surface of the ocean. I don’t know whether that could make it worse.  But that’s why you gather together everyone smarter than you, to come up with a solution. We need a solution.

Obama Gets It

President Obama really does get it.

It really would be nice to go back to the old days, when the Republican minority represented “the loyal opposition,” but it’s just not going to happen until we push it, and push it hard. The “loyal opposition” concept is foreign to the far right wing that dominates the Republican Party today; if you don’t believe exactly as they do, you’re the enemy; even if 60% of your enemy’s agenda is the same as yours. In fact, that’s what Republicans found so vexing about Bill Clinton back in the day, and what they find so vexing about Obama now. Clinton and Obama are actually quite conservative, ideologically speaking.

The “loyal opposition” concept is how our country was created, it’s how we operated for two centuries, and it’s how we became the most powerful nation on earth. The two major parties, whatever they were, had differences of opinion, held spirited campaigns in which they fought tooth and nail, and sometimes got a little too personal. But in the end, when they took the oath of office, they understood that they work for the people who put them there, and they work for the good of the country above all else.

We Have to Be Patient, Progressives

I know there's a growing impatience with the Obama Administration among progressives.  And I see a lot of articles and blog posts out there expressing a growing sense that he's abandoning his principles for political expediency. There's this crazy notion that 30 years of neocon politics can be made to go away with a wave of his hand; that he can simply bring everyone in this often bipolar country together for a chorus of Kumbaya, which all of us who have ever had a brush with the wingnuts knows is pretty much impossible. But if he's going to keep the moderates on his side -- and make no mistake; we need them on our side -- he has to at least look like he's including Republicans in the process, even if they choose to bite his hand.

 

Believe me, my son sits in a tent in Kandahar as I write this. He joined the Army because he felt as if the only way he could pay for college would have been that way, or to leave college with a six-figure debt. I truly wish the president could snap his fingers and all of our bad neocon dreams will go away immediately.But that's not how life works. A lot of things about the neocon view of things have seeped into the culture, and it will take a phenomenal amount of work to reverse them.

 

I hereby beg progressives to have patience. President Obama hasn't abandoned his principles; at all; if anything, he's done just the opposite. He's living by them, and the end result of his presidency will be something pretty special. Don't let your ADD get the best of you; it's better to do something right than to do something fast.

Obama Gets It: A Plan To Start Fixing the Foreclosure Mess

The number one problem at the heart of our economic meltdown is the mortgage problem. The key to fixing the economy on the short term is to stop the bleeding in the housing market. This is step Number one, and proof that President Obama gets it.

Obama Plans to Spend $75 Billion to Fight Foreclosures - NYTimes.com.

Seeking to stabilize the foundering housing market, President Obama is offering a plan to help as many as nine million families refinance their mortgages or avoid foreclosure, according to a summary released by the White House on Wednesday morning.

The plan, which is more ambitious than expected, would spend $75 billion to help keep as many as four million families in their homes, and would help as many as five million more refinance their mortgages to take advantage of lower interest rates.

“The plan not only helps responsible homeowners on the verge of defaulting, but prevents neighborhoods and communities from being pulled over the edge too,” the White House said in a fact sheet.

Mr. Obama is set to detail the plan later Wednesday at a high school in Phoenix, a city emblematic of housing’s boom and bust in the last nine years. The administration laid out the proposal as a new report offered more evidence that the housing market remained caught in a free-fall. New-home construction fell to its lowest level on record in January, the Commerce Department reported, amid falling demand, tightened credit markets and a flood of foreclosure properties. Privately owned housing starts in January fell 16.8 percent from December, to an annual rate of 466,000. That was their lowest pace since at least 1959.

The administration’s initiative, called the Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan, is an effort to slow the decline in the housing market. As the economy drops deeper into a recession, home values are falling faster and faster, and more Americans are losing their houses to foreclosures or distressed sales.

The plan would allow four million to five million homeowners refinance mortgages guaranteed by the government-controlled housing giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. The administration said allowing people to refinance at lower mortgage rates would reduce monthly payments and save families thousands of dollars every year.

This is a great first step, and will ease a lot of pain out there in the housing market. The next step will be to do what Bush promised to do back when he insisted that Congress approve the original bailout plan in September, and that would be to buy up the mortgage backed securities and move that market out of the private sector, and back to Fannie and Freddie, where they belong.

Investigation and Due Process of the Bushies: Are we Americans or are We Mice?

I am excited at the prospects offered by the Obama Administration, and I am looking forward to a future that is much brighter than anything we've seen since we ceded the government to the neocons 28 years ago, culminating in the last eight years of pure hell on earth.

The Obama Administration is like a breath of fresh air, when compared to the governments of our recent past. There is already an air of openness and transparency that we haven't seen in many years, even when Clinton was president. Even when a mistake is made, there is an easiness about admitting it and moving on with a solution.

But while I do agree with them on most issues, there is one issue on which we seem to stand on different sides of the fence.I say "seem," because I have a feeling we can find ourselves on the same side of the fence with a little prodding. But for now, the Obama Administration seems to be far too willing to let bygones be bygones, and let the previous administration slide on its sins.

That's just a crock, and we cannot be allow that attitude to stand.

I don't care who does the investigation, as long as the people involved are impartial, but a complete investigation of the last eight years has to be conducted. And if we care at all about the concept of justice for all, we simply cannot allow anyone responsible for the crimes committed in our name to slide, without prosecution, and a payment for their crimes. If that means we have to watch a former president and vice president and/or a bunch of their underlings be frog marched to jail for the cameras, and repeatedly interviewed from a jail cell by Fox News and Inside Edition, then so be it.

Why David Sirota is Wrong...

I saw this article, and because it was written by David Sirota, I read it. But this isn't exactly vintage Sirota, and its premise is not only weak, but demonstrably false. This is surprising, since I am usually a big fan of David's, and usually find his reasoning to be sound.

I am not just offering the opinion that he's wrong. I'll demonstrate exactly what I mean...

From Salon.com | Obama's team of zombies, by David Sirota.

Only weeks ago, the political world was buzzing about a "team of rivals." America was told that finally, after years of yes men running the government, we were getting a president who would follow Abraham Lincoln’s lead, fill his administration with varying viewpoints, and glean empirically sound policy from the clash of ideas. Little did we know that "team of rivals" was what George Orwell calls "newspeak": an empty slogan "claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts."

Obama's national security team, for instance, includes not a single Iraq war opponent. The president has not only retained George W. Bush's defense secretary, Robert Gates, but also 150 other Bush Pentagon appointees. The only "rivalry" is between those who back increasing the already bloated defense budget by an absurd amount and those who aim to boost it by a ludicrous amount.

Okay, here's the first mistake. First of all, we have no way of knowing which of Bush's people were actually pro-war or anti-war, since no one in his right wind who is working for a president will publicly speak out against him. It's also quite possible that they might refuse to quit, because while they can't stop the occupation, they might be able to mitigate its effects somehow. Not only that, but the only person whose opinion matters was Bush's, and is now Obama's.

Does Sirota understand what caused the Democrats to lose everything in 1994? It was the Clinton Administration's decision to replace every ReaganBush official with a green Democratic official. who saw his same "vision." In short, Clinton didn't appoint anyone who knew his ass from a hole in the ground, and it showed, as his administration sputtered for the first two years, despite having a majority in Congress. It doesn't help to have a vision, but hire a bunch of people who don't know how to implement it.

Gregg: Example of Obama Political Genius or...??

Okay, so President Obama is about to appoint Judd Gregg as Commerce Secretary. When this was first announced, many liberals were giddy at the prospect of getting a 60th Democratic vote in the Senate, despite the reality that there is no such thing as a "filibuster-proof majority" in a Senate with at least a half dozen Democrats who are practically Republicans. But Gregg whined, and stated that he wouldn't serve his country as Commerce Secretary if it meant it changed the make up of the Senate, thus putting party ahead of country, as Republicans are wont to do. So, Governor Lynch will be appointing a Republican to replace Gregg, thus denying Democrats the magical 60 seats so many think they need.

 

Judd Gregg seems like a bad fit with the Obama Administration, but Barack Obama has amazing instincts as a politician; I don't think anyone should question his political motives quite  yet. So, what is he doing, nominating so many Republicans to his administration?

 

Here's what I think he's doing.

 

The two most contentious issues Obama will deal with during his first year or two in office are the two occupations, In Iraq and Afghanistan, and the economy. And these are the issues on which the far right will most likely try to oppose him, and do so quite strongly.  Since public opinion will have a lot of influence  on these issues, and will either strengthen or weaken the opposition to things such as the stimulus.

 

So, what better way to blunt the Republicans' criticism of the measures Obama will have to take regarding the occupations and the economy, than to have Republicans in charge of both Commerce and Defense?  What can the wingnuts in Congress say? Can they claim "partisanship" when the leaders of both efforts are being undertaken by fellow Republicans, Gates and Gregg?

 

I may be off base here, but Obama seems to be demonstrating some incredible political agility here. He's knocking the wind out of the Republicans' sails, by walking the walk, and creating a truly bipartisan administration, and making Republicans who would oppose him on look like fools. How can they possibly oppose  him, and not look like fools, when members of their own party are actually implementing the laws the Democrats "make" them pass?

 

Of course, if Republicans were smart, they could use this as a  way to improve their standing with voters. When the stimulus package works -- and it will -- they can claim a measure of credit, since one of theirs -- Gregg -- helped make it work. When the two occupations  end, and the entire Middle east doesn't dissolve into pure chaos, one of theirs -- Gates --was a major player in that effort.

 

But right wing Republicans aren't smart, so Obama's the one who will benefit, when he looks like the bipartisan reformer, and they just look like petulant children.

 

I think I get this now…

President Obama's First Orders of Business

What are the first things President Obama should do upon taking office?

 

I’ve had some time to ponder this question since the landslide win last week, and I have some serious suggestions, and the reasons for each.

 

Fix the economic ship, but do so for the average American, and in an intelligent way, that will have long-lasting effect, not just a quick fix. . Sure we need to bail out the economy on some level, but we have to do so in a way that will allow people to keep their homes, and that will create and keep jobs. Bail out the auto industry, but create conditions, and make them use the money to retool their plants to make vehicles people want to buy. You could even take the money we now use to subsidize the oil companies to accomplish that. Earmark billions for public works projects all over the country; it will create jobs, and repair an infrastructure that has been falling apart for decades. You can take money from the defense budget that is now being used for weapons systems we don't need and will never use.

 

Fix the electoral system.  By most reasonable "conservative" estimates, at least 6 million votes were lost this election, and it's a dead cinch that most of those lost votes were Democrats. Does anyone really think that, in a year when the Republican Party was in complete disarray, in which everyone pretty much blamed them for ruining the country, in which the standard bearer for their party has a 75% disapproval rating, the lamest Republican candidate in a generation actually received 46% of the vote?

 

In a democratic system, the vote is the key to absolutely everything, and it should be absolutely impossible to deny anyone their vote, without due process, at the very least. Yet, we hear story after story of state officials (usually Republican) "purging" voter rolls of people with odd names or who live in "certain parts of town," participating in illegal caging exercises, etc., in addition to the constant fiascos involving voting machines.

 

Some states forbid the vote to convicted felons. Some also have strict rules with regard to registration. Fine. But just as you can't convict that felon without advising him of the charges and putting him on trial, because to do so would be a denial of his rights, neither should you be able to simply and effectively take away someone's right to vote, without advising them of that, and offering them a process by which to fight it. Under the Constitution, it's not a citizen's duty to prove that he's eligible to vote; it's the state's duty to prove they he isn't.

 

Now, the federal government is limited with regard to voting; the process is a state issue. But as they did with the Voting Rights Act, the feds should be able to step in, and put forth some minimum standards for voting. First off, there should be no purging of any voter less than 90 days before an election, and never without the registrar or Secretary of State making a good faith effort to advise said voter of their pending removal, and giving them  a reasonable time to respond. Second, the voting process should be more open; it should be impossible for the manufacturer of a voting machine to deny local officials access to software code, in order to certify each machine. If manufacturers don't want to reveal their code, they don't want to be providing public voting machines. Third, and most importantly, all elections must have a mechanism in place for a manual vote recount, should it become necessary.  That probably means paper. There must be a verifiable paper trail for every vote.