Anyway Colin Powell has come out to endorse Barack Obama.
Colin Powell doesn't just simply endorse Barack Obama's bid for the presidency but also rejects the negativity of the Palin/McCain campaign. He also states that he does not believe Sarah Palin is ready to take over the presidency if McCain is unable to serve as president due to health issues. He then goes further to question the attacks being made against Obama on the question of Ayers or on questions about Obama being characterized as a Muslim or Arab and attempting to suggest that Barack Obama is not a real American or that Obama is not a loyal American .
Colin Powell - Endorses Barack Obama For President
Colin Powell Slams McCain After Endorsing Obama
by Steve Benen, Washington Monthly October 20, 2008.
"Taxes are necessary for the common good."
After his "Meet the Press" appearance, during which he endorsed Barack Obama, Colin Powell stopped to answer reporters' questions outside the studio. As it happens, his remarks were nearly as interesting after the program as they were during.
Powell was asked about the relentless negativity of the McCain campaign, and Powell made no effort to hide his disappointment. Perhaps most importantly, Powell noted that the constant right-wing efforts to a) falsely label Obama as a Muslim; and b) make "Muslim" some kind of slur, not only undermines national unity, but also damages America's standing in the world. "Those types of images going out on Al Jazeera are killing us around the world," Powell said.
He went on to express his disgust for Rep. Michele Bachmann's (R-Minn.) neo-McCarthyism. "We have got to stop this kind of nonsense," Powell said, "pull ourselves together, and remember that our great strength is in our unity and in our diversity."
Colin Powell Eviscerates McCain's Negative Smear Campaign
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So here's more on the ACORN issue :
Michael Winship A Mighty Hoax From Acorn grows
Saturday 18 October 2008
by: Michael Winship, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
All of this distracts from several important points. ACORN has registered 1.3 million voters and maintains that in virtually every instance it is ACORN that has reported the incidents of fraud.
As the organization asserted in a response to Senator McCain, "ACORN hired 13,000 field workers to register people to vote. In any endeavor of this size, some people will engage in inappropriate conduct. ACORN has a zero tolerance policy and terminated any field workers caught engaging in questionable activity. At the end of the day, as ACORN is paying these people to register voters, it is ACORN that is defrauded."
Arrests have been made, as well they should be.
Add to this the simple fact that registration fraud is not election fraud. Seventy-five made-up people who are registered as, say, "Brad Pitt," are not likely going to show up at some polling place on November 4 to vote in the election. Because they don't exist. (Besides, Angelina would never give them time off from babysitting duties.)
...What's equally if not more scary are continued allegations of Republican attempts at "caging" minority voters - making challenge lists of African- and Hispanic-Americans registered in heavily Democratic districts. Just this week, a federal judge in Michigan ruled that voters could not be purged from the rolls in that state simply because their mailing address was invalid - this followed a failed attempt by a Michigan Republican county chairman to use a list of foreclosed homes as the basis of voter challenges.
This comes on the heels of a recent report from the Brennan Center at New York University documenting how state officials - often with the best of intentions - purge huge numbers of perfectly legal voters from the rolls.
As my colleague Bill Moyers reported, "Hundreds of thousands of legal voters may have been dumped in recent years, many without ever being notified." The report describes a "process that is shrouded in secrecy, prone to error, and vulnerable to manipulation."
Hardly reassuring words if you want democracy to work, and sadly, not an urban legend, but the simple truth.
In case you missed it check out Amy Goodman's interview of Frank Schaeffer a former McCain supporter :
Former McCain Supporter: McCain Is "Unleashing the Monster of American Prejudice"
By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!. Posted October 13, 2008.
Lifelong Republican Frank Schaeffer says McCain is "deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate."
Frank Schaeffer on Democracy Now! Part 1 of 2
And here's an interesting article in which the writer tracks down the rumors and lies about Obama's ethnicity to one particular writer and blogger Kenneth E. Lamb who's information is less than reliable yet his little lies have been picked up and passed on to the public by an unquestioning media which is hostile to Barack Obama.
Of course part of the problem is as Colin Powell and others have pointed out Obama is an American and his ethnicity shouldn't be used to question his loyalty or patriotism.
The Little Lie, and How It Grew By David Benjamin October 18, 2008 "Common Dreams" -- GREAT NECK, N.Y
GREAT NECK, N.Y. - Last week, Gayle Quinnell, a septuagenarian reactionary from Shakopee, Minnesota, confessed - on TV - to G.O.P. candidate John McCain that she fears Democratic candidate Barack Obama because "he's an Arab." McCain replied that, no, Obama's no Arab at all, but a "decent family man" (implying that the two depictions are mutually exclusive).
To me, the more intriguing element of this bizarre exchange was the word "Arab," rather than the more common Obama epithets, "Muslim," "terrorist" and "Osama." Mrs. Quinnell's "Arab" formulation was just enough off-key to make me wonder where she picked it up. In a subsequent YouTube video, Mrs. Quinnell helpfully elaborated, explaining that she possesses pages and pages of corroboration, plumbed from the Shakopee Public Library. Since it's unlikely that there's much info on Obama's ethnicity in the Shakopee stacks, I figured what Gayle had done was surf the Web.
So I decided to try tracing her steps. It wasn't hard. No matter where I landed after Googling "obama, arab," I inevitably returned to the same damning quote. It goes: "Mr. Obama is 50% Caucasian from his mother's side. He is 43.75% Arabic, and 6.25% African Negro from his father's side." Also: "Obama is not legally African-American. It is impossible for him to be, in truth, America's first African-American president."
As I continued searching, I unearthed this shocker, verbatim, on a dozen websites, including Yahoo!Answers. I found it cited by conservative superstars Rush Limbaugh, Monica Crowley and Laura Ingraham. Every repetition of this statistical proof that Barack Obama is "legally" Arab-American circles back to a Web blogger named Kenneth E. Lamb, a self-described journalist who claims a career of "writing and researching" for such august media outlets as the New York Times, the Miami Herald, the Pentecostal Herald and the Jewish Information Network.
and the writer ends on this note about the " little Lie" which becomes accepted as the truth:
One of the Third Reich's lasting contributions to Western culture was the articulation by Nazi propaganda guru Joseph Paul Goebbels of a strategy he called the Big Lie - a whopper told so often, so brazenly and with such conviction that it morphs magically into Gospel in the minds of the masses. Today, the Big Lie remains alive and well, but - judging by Ken Lamb's blog, the Drudge Report and other Internet travesties - it's evident that the Web has spun a 21st-century subspecies of Goebbels' brainstorm: the Little Lie.
The Little Lie, ideally, is uttered but once - weakly - and released like a plankton speck into the Internet's vast soup of words. A typical Little Lie is credible, at first, to only a handful of its author's co-religionists. These believers might be crazier than the aunt in the attic. But they also have the Web. They echo the Little Lie until it loses all contact with its source. Ken Lamb disappears. Second- and third-circulation consumers have no idea that the author's assertions are both groundless and easily debunked.
The Little Lie takes on the cast of verisimilitude. It swells effulgently; it makes its debut on Talk Radio. Pretty soon, it's on national TV, spouted by a cocksure bigot from just south of Lake Riley. Fed by YouTube, it grows, from a once-tiny microorganism, into a myth so smug that it ends up, finally, mocking the very words of its originator, Kenneth E. Lamb, who has said, "Racist presumptions coupled with sloppy vetting don't turn a lie into the truth."
For more on misconceptions and lies about Obama see:
Barack Obama: This Improbable Quest by John K. Wilson, pub. 2008.
and so it goes ,
GORD.
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