There were 9 million more female voters in the last two elections than males. Typically, female voters tend to vote their hearts and minds over party affiliation, even though their husbands may vote a straight party line.

Currently, 51% of all adult females in the United States are single, with a sizeable portion of that comprised by unwed or divorced mothers.

Say what you will about support for Hillary Clinton, those numbers mean that she instantly connects with roughly half of the marginal difference in the last two Presidential elections, and that she has a starting base of supporters that no other candidate in either party has.

Over the course of the last several months I have heard numerous antidotes about “conservative” voters turning their backs on the GOP in the upcoming mid-term elections. NBC Nightly News did a story back in August about a registered Republican voter who said she was voting Democrat in the next election because she did not think the current party and leadership was doing enough for her daughter’s generation. She was particularly alarmed by the rising level of spending and little attention to the budget deficits accumulated since 9/11. Then there are the growing numbers of Iraq war veterans returning home and running as Democrats in various state and federal elections.

But the comments posted on the Washington Monthly blog site “Showdown ’06″ by one self-described “conservative” really gives reason to hope that this year may be the year to turn the tide:

If the Democrats take the disgusting moral hypocrisy of a Republican Party that aids child predators, and use the awareness of that hypocrisy to bring credibility in the public’s eyes to the true concept that the Republican elite are hypocrites on all sorts of issues, than the Democrats can be the majority Party that Rove wishes his Coalition of Hypocrites could be.

And my favorite part:

I’m not a Democrat, and I am a conservative. But because I am a conservative, I will vote Democrat in the coming mid term election and hope that the Republican Hypocrites lose this election in a landslide.

For all of the talk surrounding political scandals throughout our government (torture bills, domestic spying programs, flawed intelligence leading up to war, etc.) the single most important topic that the MSM has failed to cover is that of electronic voting equipment.

In the wake of the butterfly ballot system that brought us G.W. Bush and Company, most states have moved to the more “secure and accurate” electronic voting format. Unfortunately, the electronic form of voting is no more accurate or secure than the old paper or punch card systems.

For months now there has been chatter on the Internet about the ease of hacking the electronic ballot systems and the lack of good security methods on the ballot boxes themselves. To make the point of how vulnerable these machines, and Democracy itself, Freedom To Tinker brings us news that the key securing a number of Diebold machines is the same key employed on a number of office furniture desks, filing cabinets and hotel mini-bar systems. What makes this even more frightening is that “replacement” keys are widely available on the Internet:

The access panel door on a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine — the door that protects the memory card that stores the votes, and is the main barrier to the injection of a virus — can be opened with a standard key that is widely available on the Internet.

A little research revealed that the exact same key is used widely in office furniture, electronic equipment, jukeboxes, and hotel minibars. It’s a standard part, and like most standard parts it’s easily purchased on the Internet. We bought several keys from an office furniture key shop — they open the voting machine too. We ordered another key on eBay from a jukebox supply shop. The keys can be purchased from many online merchants.

Each and every voter in this country should be concerned with this story, regardless of party affiliation.

Rick Perry (Governor Good Hair) is back to his old tactics now by promising to do what he said he would do four years ago. The problem now is finding a way to pay for his empty and shallow promises.

Perry now says that he will be fiscally conservative in his next term and that his priorities are (and have been, according to his account) education, health care and transportation.

Let’s take a look at these priorities and Perry’s stance on them:

1. Education was only a priority to Perry after Tom DeLay stuck his big head into state redistricting to keep Republicans in power for years to come. By having an unbelievable margin of control in both state houses, Perry was able to ram-rod his form of education finance reform through. The problem is, his education reform brought property tax cuts that the state cannot afford.

From the Houston Chronicle today we have:

And the GOP chairman of the budget-writing House Appropriations Committee noted lawmakers next year will need to come up with billions of dollars to pay for a cut in local school property tax rates approved this year.

His own stinking party is sweating his plan. How crazy is this? The school finance system needed to be fixed, that is for sure. But the plan put forth by Perry is fiscally irresponsible.

2. Health Care is not a priority for Rick Perry. It never has been and never will be. He is too closely aligned with the lobbyists representing HMO’s and pharmaceutical companies. According to the Dallas Morning News, Texas has the highest uninsured rate of any state at 25%. He has tinkered with Medicaid enhancements over the years, but has really done nothing to correct the uninsured problem.

There have been attempts by Perry and Washington Republicans to tie the debate for health care woes in Texas to illegal immigration, but the DMN article indicates otherwise:

Uninsured Americans don’t get the preventive medical care they need. Once they’re really sick, they enter the health care system through the most expensive pathway – hospital emergency rooms – where their treatment tends to be passed on to insured patients and taxpayers.

Undocumented workers, particularly from Mexico, are often seen as the major reason that uninsured patients cost everyone else so much money. Last month, Parkland Memorial Hospital estimated uninsured illegal immigrants are costing $22.4 million a year.

But in fact, working Texans, not immigrants, are the vast majority of the state’s uninsured.

“Seventy percent are U.S.-born, 6 percent are nationalized, and the rest are immigrants – a large percentage of whom are documented,” Dr. Malinow said. “So to say the problem of the uninsured in Texas is a problem of the undocumented or even of all immigrants is really not true.”

The article concludes by pointing out that uninsured medical treatment cost [Dallas County Hospital] Parkland $410 million in 2005, with illegal immigrants representing only $22.4 million of that number (5.5%). That is a clear demonstration that Perry has done very little about health care, and gives us little hope that he is serious about it now.

But Perry’s real priority, transportation, is likely his worst political strategy.

3. Transportation in the mind of Rick Perry means creating lucrative deals with big construction companies to build a network of massive toll roads that criss-cross Texas. Toll roads are a poor decision on the part of the governor because it creates an additional tax on taxpayers, and is more harmful to those citizens who can’t afford another form of taxation. As we just witnessed, 25% of our citizens work in such low-paying jobs that they cannot get health insurance. How does Perry expect people to afford the expansion of toll roads? It would be one thing if new roads were constructed to ease congestion and made into toll roads, but the Perry plan takes existing highways and converts them back into toll roads as a way to pay for additional construction on a different road entirely. So, if you are in South Dallas Perry wants to convert certain roads into toll roads and use those funds for highway projects in North Dallas. That is just not fair and it’s not ethical.

At the peak of this toll road plan is Perry’s beloved TransTexas Corridor system. The Houston Chronicle recently detailed the plans of the road after a court ruled that the state must release all records of negotiations with private contractors to build the system:

Perry announced the corridor plan in 2002, calling for a $175 billion, 4,000-mile limited-access transportation network built mostly with private dollars for profit but owned by the state.

 

TTC-35 generally would run east of Interstate 35 from Oklahoma to Mexico and would include an $8.8 billion toll road from Oklahoma to San Antonio.

The proposal has received continual criticism, despite efforts by TxDOT to reassure the public.

Farmers and ranchers have expressed concern that their property would be divided or taken by eminent domain.

Local officials feared that the corridor would draw business away from existing routes.

Others were concerned that negotiating a 50-year contract for a project of such size was being done behind the scenes.

Despite its bulk — 1,600 pages — and the numerous maps included, the master plan does not include the actual route of TTC-35.

 

TxDOT says that will depend on the same federally required environmental process, including public hearings, as any other road project.

If all the hurdles are jumped, TxDOT says, construction could begin in 2011.

Because the master plan supersedes earlier “conceptual” development and financial plans that TxDOT declined to reveal in March 2005, these were released Thursday as well.

The Houston Chronicle and others had filed open-records requests to see the documents, and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott agreed they should be released.

TxDOT and Cintra-Zachry then sued Abbott, asking an Austin court to exempt the plans from disclosure on grounds that they would reveal proprietary information, give competitors unfair advantage and have a “chilling effect” on future proposers’ willingness to reveal their ideas.

The lawsuit was dismissed Thursday by agreement.

The campaign manager for gubernatorial candidate and state Comptroller Carol Keeton Strayhorn had urged that the plans be made public.

Strayhorn said Gov. Rick Perry had “fought to keep Texans in the dark and his contract with a foreign-owned company to build toll roads across Texas a secret.”

Perry’s plan for transportation has all of the same characteristics of Dick Cheney’s energy plan of 2001 that to this day remains top secret.

For all this governor claims that he wants to accomplish, there is little reason believe that he will do any of it in an ethcical way, and even less evidence that he will do anything that is in the best interest of the vast majority of Texans.

Many more years ago than I really want to admit, I learned a valuable lesson about people and their value systems. Fear, you see, is the underlying emotion that controls everything a person is or does in life. It is fear that keeps a person loyal to their God. Break God’s rules and you will have to face God’s consequences. Fear is a wonderful tool used throughout the Bible to prove how powerful the Almighty is.

Fear is the one thing that keeps us from doing all the things we want to do, but are afraid of the consequences. About a decade ago a common bumper sticker was “No Fear”, indicating that the person in the car simply had no bounds. For a parent the mere presence of such a symbol would create it’s own state of fear and anguish. Think of how convenient is fear during child development. Promises of getting your mouth washed out with soap, or making funny faces and never looking normal again, or…well, there is the going blind thing. Fear is quite useful in all of these cases.

The “fear” entry on Wikipedia constructs a nice definition of fear within the context of terror:

“Terror” refers to a pronounced state of fear, which usually occurs after the state of horror, when someone becomes overwhelmed with a sense of immediate danger. Also, it can be caused by seeing the (sometimes extreme) phobia. Thus, terror overwhelms the person to the point of making irrational choices and non-typical behavior.

Our government is another great abuser of fear. We are afraid that what we have today is the best we can do, and that without it we are all doomed to die. (Newsflash: We are all going to die someday and there is nothing any of us can do about it.) The Republicants knows this all too well, and are governed by the principles that they are able to control elections and the emotions of voters by constantly speaking to their fears and governing by default and “irrational choices”.

Do you remember what you were doing in the summer of 2001? More importantly, do you remember what your President and his Congress were doing in the summer of 2001? I do.

Just a few short weeks before 9/11 our President was perched at his Crawford, Texas ranch enjoying a very long vacation (5 weeks if I remember correctly). His attention was focused on the moral dilemma of stem cell research and how he could use the Christian cloth he had wrapped himself in to suppress promising research for curing diseases. This topic was so important that he took time away from chopping wood and barbecuing to address the nation in primetime.

If the Bush administration was so focused on terrorists (namely al Qaeda) why did he never once speak to the American people about the problem? After all, Bush knew that al Qaeda was responsible for the attack on the USS Cole in the Fall of 2000. Why did he not go on national television to the tell the American people that he knew who attacked our service men and women? Why did the President not speak directly and openly to the American people and our enemies alike and say that the United States was not going to take it and that he would develop a master plan for eliminating terror from the face of the Earth? Why was Bush and Company not more proactive in their approach to the war on terror?

This is the kind of questioning that conspiracy theorists love to hear, because it is so easy to say that the President wanted to be attacked. Personally, I just think the President was distracted with giving tax breaks to the most wealthy and in becoming our moral leader on deeply personal issues and that he simply could not be bothered with the big picture.

Five plus years is a long time ago for some of us. Perhaps our memories have been clouded over with more recent events. So I ask then, what were the Republicans (Bush and Company) concerned with in the Spring of 2005? Was it the war in Iraq? Was it Afghanistan? Osama bin Laden? Was it on protecting our borders? Was it beefing up security on freight shipments and cargo ships that enter our ports everyday? The answer is no. The Republicans were worried about the obviously brain-dead Terri Schiavo and having her feeding tube removed. They [Republicans] simply could not stand to have a moral and personal decision go with intervening by creating bogus laws for one specific case. Once again the GOP decided to wrap itself in the Christian cloth of morality in hopes of undermining the personal freedoms and personal relationship between an individual choice and their belief system.

How is that related to the war on terror? Does this demonstrate that the Republicans are the party of protecting the American people? Again, no. But as long as the “war on terror” is being fought, the Republicans know that they have a banner to wave that proclaims them as the gladiators that are going to save us all.

In 2004 the GOP pulled out all of the stops and forced the same-sex marriage debate front and center for the general election. The plan was to stir fear that the American family was somehow threatened by two loving people sharing in the same rights (not privileges, but rights) as everyone else. The summer of 2006 started out the same way. The GOP was down in the polls and it needed a boost, so twice the House of Representatives passed bills to amend the Constitution to ensure that same-sex couples never receive any rights at all, and twice the Senate rejected the same initiative. When that didn’t work, the GOP turned to protecting our borders. The President even went before the nation on primetime (something he likes to do for political reasons and seldom out of the collective interest of the citizenry) to spell out his plan for protecting the border with Mexico and to lay out his plans for immigration. But in the spirit of true Republicanism, the House has spent the entire summer touring the country talking about the issue but doing little else. Now there isn’t enough time to act on any legislation, so Congress has delayed the vote until after the election.

How is any of this serving the needs of this country in the war on terror? The Republicans are not about protecting anyone but themselves and their financial supporters. Good people with good common sense and the ability to think critically should remember all of this as they head to the polls in November.

Bill Clinton’s appearence on the Fox News Sunday program this past weekend did more than make for great political entertainment. It served as a rallying calls for Democrats to wakeup and start fighting the GOP and their spin control machines. Clinton’s appearence brings full-circle the role the once-President served within the party and our nation.

First it reminds us that the defeats we have suffered at the hands of manipulated elections, and whacked-out political strategies by Rove and friends does not mean becoming meek little lap dogs, it means fighting harder and louder than before. Second, not since the 1992 election have we seen “this” Bill Clinton. His actions as President offended many in the party due to his strange twist of bringing corporate-types into the party of FDR and LBJ with often dangerous results (NAFTA, welfare reform, etc.), so for the first time in many years it is time that the Democrats had a real candidate out front and center for the American voters.

Is Bill Clinton running? No, of course not. The Republicans made sure that no President could continue to serve the nation as long as FDR ever again. But Hillary Clinton is running in New York (a cake walk for sure), and may run in ’08 for the White House, and that means she will have the best political maestro in history working on her side. But more importantly, Bill Clinton has brought the terror issue out and said ‘hell no, we won’t take it anymore’, and for that Mr. President, we say “Thank You”.

John Dickerson at Slate says it best:

Bill Clinton wasn’t sandbagged, because he is a smart politician. He just spent several weeks fighting ABC over its interpretation of his administration’s hunt for Bin Laden. He knew the question was coming and he took advantage of it. Forty-three days before the election, he has provided a moment to rally party activists and attack the GOP at the heart of its perceived strength on handling terrorism.

If nothing else happens as a result of Clinton’s appearence, I hope that Pelosi and Reid learn a thing or two about being outspoken and larger than life in fighting the GOP. This party needed a wakeup call, and I think they just got it.