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Is there a point where the Get Out the Vote (GOTV) drive becomes counter-productive? Eight phone calls and two people knocking on my door on Saturday, reminding me to vote tomorrow; lots of messages waiting when I got home from an out-of-town trip yesterday; at least seven calls so far today. Hey, I’m eager to vote this year, but I’m so annoyed by the calls I’m thinking of disconnecting my phone for a couple days.

In Philadelphia, voters are being inundated with annoying calls that appear to be from Democrat Lois Murphy. The calls are actually from the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), and they’re calculated to make voters slam down the phone before they hear the required attribution at the end of the long call. The same tactic is being used across the country. From Talking Points Memo:

[S]he got the call again and again and 18 more times, making for a total of about 21 calls since October 24…

But the calls aren’t paid for by [Democratic candidates] or even the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, they are paid for by the National Republican Congressional Committee.

The GOP response to Democratic efforts to get voters to the polls is called Voter Suppression. It takes many forms. From the Washington Post:

A recently distributed guide for Republican poll watchers in Maryland spells out how to aggressively challenge the credentials of voters and urges these volunteers to tell election judges they could face jail time if a challenge is ignored.

Intimidation doesn’t work on everyone, but in a close election it doesn’t have to. If even a small fraction of improperly challenged voters are frightened or discouraged from voting, that may be enough to keep power in the hands of the thugs and their cronies.

In Houston, Texas, Republicans demanded the city stop providing flu shots at polling places. They were concerned that the availability of the shots would bring Democratic voters to the polls.

Across the nation, Republicans have imposed new voter ID rules calculated less to ensure the integrity of the vote than to frustrate and discourage voters who might want the GOP out. The rules have been challenged in some states as a form of “poll tax.” From the Boston Globe:

These days, every basic protection seems up for grabs. When the national conversation turns to the merits of torture and the need to track private telephone calls, chipping away at the bedrock of democratic government — one man, one vote — can’t be far behind.

At least nine states are waging battles over voter ID laws. Last month, a Georgia judge ruled that a law passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature was unconstitutional because it put up too many hurdles for citizens otherwise qualified to vote. A judge in Missouri came to a similar conclusion, offering a pointed reminder that, unlike driver’s licenses, voter ballots should never involve bureaucratic hassle. “The photo ID burden on the voter may seem minor … to the mainstream of our society for whom automobiles, driver’s licenses, and even passports are a natural part of everyday life,” the judge wrote. “However, for the elderly, the poor, the undereducated or otherwise disadvantaged, the burden can be great, if not insurmountable.”

That, of course, is the idea.

It can cost anywhere from $5 to $23 to get a birth certificate; a passport costs between $87 and $97. To a lot of people, $97 might be the cost of a night out on the town. But any price tag on voting amounts to a poll tax, which is still illegal in this country.

Illegality doesn’t stop these Republicans. It doesn’t even slow them down.

An angry friend living in a small town says all the poll workers there know him. If they make him show ID to vote, he says he’ll just walk out.

Exactly according to The Plan. They win, you lose.

Do you think Karl Rove worries about your icy fury or your white-hot rage? The thing that worries Karl is your vote. Why do you suppose they’ve gone to such lengths to keep you from casting it?

Tomorrow is Election Day. I’m taking my icy fury; I’m taking my white-hot rage. I’m getting into that voting booth, by God, and I’m doing my part to wipe the smirk off Rove’s and Bush’s faces.

Let’s take this country back.

Ever since my experiments to make contact with parallel universes a few weeks ago, my cable TV has been acting up.

Take last night: I saw a World War II documentary on the History Channel. It started with familiar footage of the carnage at Pearl Harbor, followed by grainy black-and-white film of the President addressing a joint session of Congress. “Yesterday, December 7th, 1941,” he declared, “a date which will live in in-fa-my.” It wasn’t FDR — it was George W. Bush!

In response to the shocking surprise attack by Japanese forces, the President demanded a declaration of war against… Mexico.

This caused quite a stir — a presidential advisor named Richard A. Clarke had privately told Bush it would be “like responding to mad bombers from Saudi Arabia with an invasion of the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq” — but the president was resolute. Japan, he pointed out, was way over on the far side of the Pacific Ocean, “one of our largest oceans,” while Mexico sat menacingly close, right on our southern border. “We cannot afford to wait for Montezuma’s revenge, which may come in the form of a smoking gun,” he said.

Partisan politics was set aside. “We have been attacked by a foreign power,” said two-term former President Franklin D. Roosevelt, “and we must have confidence that our elected leaders will act in good faith, and will act wisely, in the interest of all Americans.” A reluctant Congress granted Bush the authority to use force against Mexico if he deemed it necessary.

He did.

There was film of U.S. forces rolling triumphantly into Mexico City after an invasion that met only limited resistance, and smashing pictures of Mexican President Manuel Ávila Camacho. Then there was footage of Mexican insurgents. They were emboldened when they realized that many U.S. soldiers were poorly equipped, some armed with broom handles instead of rifles. “You go to war with the army you have,” said Secretary of War Donald H. Rumsfeld.

U.S. forces held on in Mexico City, but an animated map showed how province after province fell under the control of Mexican insurgents — from Durango to Sinaloa, Coahuila, and Chihuahua. From Veracruz to Puebla, Hidalgo, and Tamaulipas. From Nuevo León and Coahuila and Tamaulipas into southern Texas.

When New Mexico and Arizona fell to the Mexicans, some Democrats in Congress called for a change in Administration war policies. Vice-President Richard B. Cheney said, “You see these pictures of Mexican troops in Austin and Santa Fe and Tucson, and you have to ask why the Roosevelt Administration never took the Mexican threat seriously.”

When the Japanese invasion overran most of California, Oregon and Washington state, Democrats renewed their call for change. “If we change course now, we’re just giving aid and comfort to those who attacked us,” Bush said. “We’re fighting them here so we don’t have to fight them all the way over there.”

On June 6, 1944, in the largest amphibious assault in history, German forces crossed the English Channel and invaded England in an operation remembered as “Der Tag.” England had struggled ever since their U.S. allies had diverted all their resources to the war on Mexico and a series of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. With England’s collapse, the fate of all of Europe was sealed.

The cable guy’s coming out on Tuesday — hey, that’s Election Day. I sure hope he can fix this, because I don’t think I can stand much more of this version of history.

Republican Congressman Bob Ney, who pleaded guilty to two felony charges on October 13, finally resigned from Congress on Friday. Why the delay? I think TPMmuckraker has it figured out:

[H]e just needed to hang around Congress until November 1st to get his last paycheck of $13,000.

You’ve gotta think these things through, see.

Dan Froomkin in the Washington Post:

President Bush’s foremost political liability going into the mid-term elections is that the American people aren’t happy he took the nation to war in Iraq and don’t believe he has a way out.

In other words, they think Bush made a mess and has no idea how to clean it up.

Now, in what may be the ultimate show of Karl Rovian chutzpah, Bush is righteously attacking Democrats for not having a plan to clean up the mess he himself made.

Let’s see: if Democrats say what they will do if they win the election, they’re prematurely “measuring their drapes.”

If Democrats don’t say, unanimously and in great detail, exactly what they will do if they win, they have “no plan.”

Oh, no! The Democrats have walked straight into another brilliant Rove trap! (He is a genius, you know.)

Linda Ellerbee of Nick News, Nickelodeon’s news show for kids, on the NewsHour:

If we have “messages” on Nick News, it comes down to three:

One: Ignorance is not bliss…

Two: That wherever you find bad things happening, you will always find good people trying to make it better.

And the last one is that we are probably all more alike than we are different.

Nick News will air a special election report called “Cheap Shots and Low Blows” on Sunday evening at 8:30 eastern time. The discussion should be more enlightening than most of the cable news shows.

Ron Reagan, who supports stem cell research, put forth a really whacky idea on The Colbert Report:

Most scientists who are working this field will tell you that embryonic stem cell research is the way to go, and I tend to trust people who know what they’re talking about.

That’s never gonna fly in the modern Republican Party.

Reagan: President Bush does seem to like the idea of pretending to be someone else, and that somebody else seems to be my father.

Colbert: Isn’t the president, in some ways, all of our fathers? And he’s driving us to freedom, and we’re in the back seat, and he’s saying, “Shut up and let me drive!”

Democracy is for Iraqis. We’re just not ready for it here.

Via Boing Boing: Chirag Mehta visually maps out “the popularity, frequency, and trends in the usages of words within speeches, official documents, declarations, and letters written by the Presidents of the US between 1776 – 2006 AD.” The results are enlightening and sometimes — but not always –surprising.

A government auditor in Iraq will have to close up shop:

Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces.

And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Mr. Bowen’s supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip.

The order comes in the form of an obscure provision that terminates his federal oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, on Oct. 1, 2007. The clause was inserted by the Republican side of the House Armed Services Committee over the objections of Democratic counterparts during a closed-door conference, and it has generated surprise and some outrage among lawmakers who say they had no idea it was in the final legislation.

What an oversight! Somehow, a tiny bit of oversight got into Iraq. Well, nobody is allowed to shed light on this administration’s handling of Iraq. Not Congress, not an auditor, not anybody.

See, the kind of tyranny the Bush administration is trying to establish is very delicate. It can’t flourish in the light.

A campaign ad for Ned Lamont:

It’s not just Lieberman repeatedly making the same disastrous mistakes.

George W. Bush says Democrats have no plan:

Weakened by the unpopular Iraq war, President George W. Bush accused Democrats of lacking a plan to win it on Monday as he opened a weeklong drive to maintain Republican control of the U.S. Congress.

He wants Donald Rumsfeld to stay to the bitter end:

President Bush said Wednesday he wants Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney to remain in his administration until the end of his presidency, extending a job guarantee to two of the most-criticized members of his team.

In case you forgot, Rumsfeld is the man with no plan:

Long before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forbade military strategists to develop plans for securing a postwar Iraq, the retiring commander of the Army Transportation Corps said [in September].

In fact, said Brig. Gen. Mark Scheid, Rumsfeld said “he would fire the next person” who talked about the need for a postwar plan.

Well, uh… let’s see. Rumsfeld’s “no plan” is better than the Democrats’ lack of a plan because it’s intentional — that’s it! And Rumsfeld’s No Plan Plan has a track record. Why, just look at how well it’s working out:

A classified briefing prepared two weeks ago by the United States Central Command portrays Iraq as edging toward chaos, in a chart that the military is using as a barometer of civil conflict. …

It shows a sharp escalation in sectarian violence since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February, and tracks a further worsening this month despite a concerted American push to tamp down the violence in Baghdad.

In fashioning the index, the military is weighing factors like the ineffectual Iraqi police and the dwindling influence of moderate religious and political figures, rather than more traditional military measures such as the enemy’s fighting strength and the control of territory.

The conclusions the Central Command has drawn from these trends are not encouraging, according to a copy of the slide that was obtained by The New York Times. The slide shows Iraq as moving sharply away from “peace,” an ideal on the far left side of the chart, to a point much closer to the right side of the spectrum, a red zone marked “chaos.” As depicted in the command’s chart, the needle has been moving steadily toward the far right of the chart.

Considering this track record, and Bush’s determination to stick with the author of the No Plan Plan, our course now is clear: we’ve got to lame these ducks!

The current MAD magazine caught my eye.

Follow the link and you can click the image to see a bigger version of the cover, or download a PDF file with a full-sized version of the cover.

(Their Fanatic Four poster is worth checking out, too.)

This is an old one, but also appropriate in this election season: If Bush Was Running Against Jesus.

From This Modern World, an exceedingly timely cartoon by Tom Tomorrow:

Via Coyote Gulch: Should you vote next Tuesday? DontVote.org has a test for you.

DontVote.org’s mission is to combat the “Get out the Vote” movement that is pushed by organizations that would like to increase the number of uneducated voters to help their cause. DontVote.org encourages people to Vote, but only AFTER they have educated themselves on the policies and individuals for which they are voting. Voting should be considered a privilege and exercised with responsibility and discretion. Just like a final exam, responsible voting requires self-education and thought. When the time comes to cast your ballot, if you don’t know for what or whom you’re voting, then DON’T VOTE.

When you finish the test, check out the percentages who got each question right.

You have to wonder how the nearly two per cent who didn’t recognize the first picture are voting.

This enormous sculpture of a Native American listening to an iPod is proof positive that Mars was once home to an advanced culture. Only a superior technological society could have formed such a vast — huh? — it’s not on Mars? It’s a rock formation in Alberta, Canada, not far from Medicine Hat?

Wow. That Martian civilization was more advanced that I thought. Just imagine — flying all the way from Mars to Canada to carve that mountain sculpture.

NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day today has a ghostly look fitting for Halloween.

Pretty scary, huh, kids?