War against Iran - “Economic sanctions are, at their core, a war against public health.”

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InfoClearingHouse

While campaigns are organized to deter the United States and Israel from acting on threats to launch an air war against Iran, both countries, in league with the European Union (winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize) carry on a low-intensity war against Iran that is likely to be causing more human suffering and death than strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities would. This is a war against public health, aimed at the most vulnerable: cancer patients, hemophiliacs, kidney dialysis patients, and those awaiting transplants. Its victims are unseen, dying anonymously in hospitals, not incinerated in spectacular explosions touched off by cruise missiles and bunker buster bombs. But ordinary Iranians who can’t get needed medications are every bit as much victims of war as those blown apart by bombs. And yet, we think, that as long as the bombs don’t rain down, that peace has been preserved. Perhaps it has, in formal terms, but bleeding to death in the crater of a bomb, or bleeding to death because you can’t get hemophilia drugs, is, in either case, death.

In Iran today there is an acute shortage of pharmaceuticals for kidney dialysis and transplants and for treating cancer, hemophilia, thalessemia, multiple sclerosis, and other disorders. Hospital equipment is breaking down for want of spare parts. And raw materials used by domestic pharmaceutical manufacturers—blocked by Western sanctions—are in short supply. It adds up to a healthcare crisis. The United States and European Union say their sanctions don’t apply to drugs and medical equipment, but US and European banks are unwilling to handle financial transactions with Iran. If they do, the US Treasury Department will deny them access to the US banking system. Since isolation from the world’s largest economy would guarantee their demise, banks comply and shun Iran. As a consequence, few goods from the West make their way into the country, the exemptions for drugs and medical equipment being nothing more than a public relations ruse to disguise the barbarity of the sanctions. Not that Washington is denying that its sanctions are hurting ordinary Iranians. It’s just that responsibility for their consequences is denied. US president Barak Obama “has said the Iranian people should blame their own leaders.” [2] For what—failing to knuckle under?

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Donald Trump Tweets A Call For "Revolution" After Obama Victory - then deletes it

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MediaMatters

In a pair of tweets, Donald Trump called for a "revolution" in the wake of President Obama's re-election.

In the first tweet, shortly after TV networks called the election for Obama, Trump tweeted, "He lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country!"

trump1

Eleven minutes later, Trump tweeted, "More votes equals a loss...revolution!"

trump2

Trump is a frequent guest on Fox News, where he peddles anti-Obama conspiracy theories.

UPDATE: After this item was posted, the tweets were deleted from Trump's account.

Dick Morris Done - time to sell refrigerators

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MediaMatters

Fox News political analyst Dick Morris, who repeatedly predicted a "landslide" victory for Mitt Romney, is officially "through" according to the standard set by Bill O'Reilly earlier this year.

During a May appearance on The O'Reilly Factor, O'Reilly told Morris that he was "so far out on the limb" for a Romney win, that if Obama was re-elected, Morris would be"through" and would be "selling refrigerators in Topeka."

Major media outlets, including Fox News, are now projecting that Obama will win re-election. 

In February, Morris appeared on Hannity and declared that there was "no chance that Obama will get re-elected." When Hannity disagreed, Morris said "zilch, zone, zip nada," prompting Hannity to tell Morris that he would hold the analyst to his prediction.

Gore on long Florida voter lines: ‘Disgrace,’ ‘un-American,’ result of Jim Crow tactics

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YahooNews

Al Gore is having a flashback to 2000 watching the 2012 presidential election returns from Florida.

"At some point after this election, I hope there will be a reckoning for these governors and state legislators that have intentionally tried to prevent people from voting," Gore said on Current TV on Tuesday night while looking at video clips of the long lines facing voters in Dade County. "This is a disgrace to this country."

Gore—who eventually lost the 2000 election to George W. Bush after a divisive recount in Florida—compared the reported voter suppression in the state to Jim Crow tactics that prevented blacks from voting in the wake of the Civil War.

"It's more sophisticated now. It's dressed up in different types of language," Gore said. "But it is un-American, it is wrong, it is a disgrace to this country—and there ought to be a bipartisan movement to say, 'Enough of this.'"

Fox News obsessed with lone bootleg Black Panther

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Politico 

On the most important day in American politics, one of Fox News’s biggest stories has been about a lone New Black Panther Party member standing outside a Philadelphia polling place.

Fox News has featured several segments today on Jerry Jackson, who was charged in 2008 for voter intimidation, although the charges against him were later dropped. Jackson was spotted outside a Philadelphia polling place Tuesday morning, and Fox News confirmed Jackson is a designated poll watcher.

Fox News's "Fox & Friends" kicked off the coverage of the New Black Panther Party today at 8 a.m. with an interview with Get Out The Vet's Ben Brink about how Navy SEALs and other veterans will "fight back" against such voter intimidation from the New Black Panther Party. About 10 minutes later, Fox News's Gretchen Carlson introduced video of the man standing outside the polling place.

"This is a member of the Black Panthers standing guard outside a polling place in Philadelphia. Does it look reminiscent? Remember this from four years ago? The organization said it was thinking about monitoring the election. Critics say it's more like intimidation. The Black Panthers also stood guard at polling places in 2008 in Philly, the group's leader with a night stick in his hand. It looks very similar," she said.

 

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Explainer: How the US president is elected

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Aljazeera

Presidents in the United States are chosen not by the popular vote, but through a system called the Electoral College.

Each of the 50 states and Washington DC has a set number of Electoral College votes that go to the candidate who wins a plurality of the popular vote there. The winner of the majority of the Electoral College’s 538 votes becomes the next president.

The number of electors in each state is determined by the number of officeholders that state has in the House of Representatives - proportional to the state’s population - added to the number of senators from that state. Each state has two senators, irrespective of population.

For example, California has the largest population of any state, 37 million people. It sends 53 members to the House of Representatives and two to the Senate; thus it has 55 electors.

The least populous state, Wyoming, with its 568,000 people, has only 3 electoral votes.

This indirect system of electing the president is enshrined in the US Constitution. It was instituted more than 200 years ago because the framers of the Constitution wanted elders to provide a check to the popular vote.

Consequently, the electoral system does not always reflect the will of the people. In 2000, Democrat Al Gore received more votes than Republican George W Bush, but Bush won in the Electoral College: 271 to Gore’s 266. Bush became the next president.

In all but two states, the candidate who wins the popular vote takes all that state’s electoral votes. Nebraska and Maine use proportional representation, allocating one electoral vote to the winner of each congressional district and two more to the winner of the statewide vote. In 2008, Nebraska actually split its electors for the first time, giving four electoral votes to Republican John McCain and one to Democrat Barack Obama.

The process of selecting electors varies from state to state, but generally, electors are party loyalists chosen at the state party conventions. The electors will meet on December 17 in their individual states to hold a ceremonial vote. Then the 113th US Congress will meet on January 3, 2013, to officially count up the electoral votes.

Each elector casts one vote for president and one for vice president. Twenty-seven states and Washington DC require electors to vote the way the people of that state vote.

In the unlikely event that the Electoral College ties 269-269, the House of Representatives would decide the next president and the Senate would vote for vice president.

But after 56 presidential elections, the Electoral College has only tied once. In 1800, the House of Representatives voted to make Thomas Jefferson the next president.

The Serious Flaw With Ohio’s Plan To Count Provisional Ballots

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Thinkprogress

Thousands of Ohio voters have been falsely notified that they are not registered to vote due to a database error in Ohio’s voter rolls. An Ohio voter advocacy group alerted Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted (R) to this major system problem on October 30. But instead of fixing it, Husted issued a directive instructing local boards to use the same flawed search method to count provisional ballots after Election Day.

Ohio’s computer search of the voter registration database will only find exact matches, meaning that voters could come up as unregistered due to typos, abbreviations, or partial entries. This flawed search mechanism missed huge numbers of registered voters in Franklin and Cuyahoga Counties, incorrectly rejecting 33,000 requests for absentee ballots. These two counties corrected the error, but thousands of others may have slipped through the cracks in the rest of the state. These voters were told they are not registered to vote and may be forced to use provisional ballots at the polls.

But if they do decide to file provisional ballots, along with a growing number of other legal voters in the state, the very same search method could disenfranchise their vote entirely. Husted has ignored warnings that the system is missing large numbers of registered voters. As the Northeast Ohio Voter Advocates, who first discovered the problem, explain:

Worse yet, Sec. Husted last night released a Directive with a proposed search method for Boards of Elections to verify registration status on provisional ballots. Yet Sec. Husted’s latest recommendations for search are entirely inadequate, likely to miss thousands of voters because of mis-spelling of names, variation in form of ID, failure to use all available tools for a reasonable search and other reasons. Once again, our warnings and suggestions, sent this morning, have gone unanswered. Unless this inadequacy is corrected, several thousand provisional ballots could be wrongfully rejected as “not registered.” If the election is close, this could be a source of endless legal battles.

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Florida Closes Polls on People in Line in Miami

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WashPost

Steaming, hundreds of voters in line watch polls close on them. Some 300 people were still in line at Ronald Reagan High School in the Miami suburb of Doral when the polls closed. Hundreds more waited in other parts of Miami-Dade County, standing in lines for hours without restroom facilities, the Miami Herald reported. Some precincts in Broward County, to the north, halted voting when ballots ran out. Many voters gave up rather than weather six-hour lines. People who arrived at 6:30 at Miami-Dade election headquarters to pick up an absentee ballot could not get one before they were due in at 7, the Herald reported. The votes were crucial in a state where the difference between Obama and Romney was razor-thin. See the full story. 

Robocall in Pinellas County, FL Tells 12,500 Voters Absentee Deadline is 'Tomorrow'

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BradBlog

Luckily, it's "only" Florida.

More than 12,500 voters received robocalls this morning from the Pinellas County, FL Supervisor of Elections office, letting them know that the deadline for turning in their absentee ballot was "tomorrow", the day after the election. Unfortunately, the real deadline for turning in absentee ballots is 7pm today, Election Day, Tuesday, November 6th.

Pinellas County is home to Tampa and St. Petersburg. So here's why this monumental screw-up, presuming that's what it was, seems to have happened...

According to the Tampa Bay Times [1]...

ST. PETERSBURG — Pinellas elections officials now say that 12,525 people were wrongly telephoned this morning with a message that they had until 7 p.m. "tomorrow" to turn in their absentee ballots.

Here's what happened, according to Nancy Whitlock, a spokeswoman for supervisor Deb Clark:

Pinellas officials used a Internet phone system called CallFire.com, to record messages reminding people of the deadline to turn in mail-in ballots.

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Bill O'Reilly: 'The white establishment is now the minority'

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Politico 

Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly said tonight that if President Barack Obama wins re-election, it’s because the demographics of the country have changed and “it’s not a traditional America anymore.”

“The white establishment is now the minority,” O'Reilly said. “And the voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff. You are going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama. Overwhelming black vote for President Obama. And women will probably break President Obama's way. People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?”

“The demographics are changing,” he said. “It’s not a traditional America anymore.”

O’Reilly said 50 percent of the voting public are people who “want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama. He knows it, and he ran on it.”

Twenty years ago, an establishment candidate like Mitt Romney would have trounced Obama, O’Reilly said.

O’Reilly also criticized Romney for his response to Hurricane Sandy and said his campaign took “no chances” in recent days.

“[Hurricane Sandy] just wiped the governor’s campaign off the map for five days. Five days Mitt Romney disappeared from the national debate and from the media headline,” O’Reilly said. “Now, it's interesting, because I told their campaign, and this is not self-aggrandizement, but I was speaking to some of the Romney people and I said do you have any idea that you are now invisible? Alright, no one is paying attention to you.”

Obama, on the other hand, was seen out there trying to help victims, O’Reilly said.

“I don't think that registered on the Romney people. But, in the exit polls tonight, that is a factor that President Obama looked bipartisan and presidential during that storm,” he said.

And the Romney campaign coasted far too much on his debate performances in these last days, he added.

“The strategy was we did better than we thought we were going to do in the debates. We're going to roll that into election day and take no chances,” O’Reilly said. “And that's exactly what the Romney campaign did. They took no chances. They didn't go on talk radio. They didn't go on national programs outside of football game interviews which mean nothing. They thought that they did well enough in the debates to roll in. And, you know what? They were right, except for Hurricane Sandy.”

Mittens wins Georgia, Tennessee

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SunChronicle

Mitt Romney has won in Georgia. It’s a state that had appeared to be a potential battleground early in the campaign, but ended up being part of Romney’s Southern base.  

Romney also added Tennessee’s 11 electoral votes to his total, putting him ahead of President Barack Obama so far. Romney has 67 electoral votes so far, to Obama’s 64.   

Romney had been far ahead of Obama in the polls in Tennessee, with strong support from white evangelical voters. Romney lost his party’s primary in Tennessee earlier this year to Rick Santorum.   

Tennessee voters also re-elected Republican Sen. Bob Corker.  

In Connecticut, Democratic Rep. Chris Murphy has defeated Republican former wrestling executive Linda McMahon in the race for the Senate seat that had been held by retiring independent Joe Lieberman. McMahon spent more than $42 million of her own money on the Senate bid.  

Early Virginia exits: Racial makeup identical to ’08

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From [HERE] Early exit polling from Virginia is out. The highlights:

* Party ID is +4 Democrats, was +6 Democrats in 2008. President Obama is losing independents to Mitt Romney; they were split evenly in 2008. 

* The racial makeup almost identical to 2008  –  seven in 10 voters are white, 21 percent are African American and 4 percent are Hispanic.

* The white evangelical vote is down. 

* Obama is losing men; he won them in 2008. 

Again, take all of this with a big grain of salt, as these numbers are preliminary and likely to change. 

Senior Obama Adviser Leads Secret Talks With Iran

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Antiwar

President Obama’s close confidant and long-time friend of First Lady Michelle Obama, Chicago lawyer Valerie Jarrett, is leading behind the scenes negotiations with representatives of Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei, Israeli officials with knowledge of the effort say.

Jarret, who was born in the Iranian city of Shiraz to American parents, is a senior advisor to US President Barack Obama and, Israeli officials claim, initiated and led secret talks with Iran in Bahrain, although she does not have any past experience with such high-stakes diplomacy.

Last month, the New York Times reported that the US and Iran have agreed to one-on-one negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program immediately following the US presidential elections. Officials later tried to deny this, but admitted the secret talks took place for a meeting in principle.

Such high-level, one-on-one negotiations between the Iranian regime and Washington would be unprecedented, and many have hopes that a grand bargain will be agreed up.

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