Coming To A Gas Station Near You?

Police: Things get ugly at California gas pumps

CYPRESS, Calif. (AP) - Violence broke out at the gas pumps in Orange County. Police say a La Palma doctor waiting in line to buy gas at the Costco warehouse store in Cypress grabbed a tire iron and confronted a motorist who cut into the line. Sgt. Tom Bruce said the doctor was arrested and booked for investigation of brandishing a deadly weapon in a rude, angry or threatening manner, a misdemeanor.

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Will California Be The Fla. of 2008

We doubt it, although, as we have all seen, anything is possible and the people should be vigilant. Election manipulation is not a Democratic nor a Republican issue. It is an American issue.

Will the Supreme Court Steal the Election for the Republicans in 2008? Will California Become the Next Florida? BF Editor's Blog

Submitted by mark karlin on Sat, 11/24/2007 - 11:44pm. EditorBlog

BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

Mark Karlin, Editor and Publisher, BuzzFlash.com

November 23, 2007

To begin the BuzzFlash editor’s blog, I ran a series on how the Republican blitzkrieg to fill the federal bench with partisan hacks – beginning seriously with the Reagan Administration – has profoundly and negatively impacted the Constitutional balance of powers. We used the example of how D.C U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge David Sentelle (and we have one or more installments on him to come) has been a Zelig at protecting the interests of Republican executive branch powers and illegalities, and how just one jurist can alter the course of democracy to serve partisan interests.

But for many of us, we need only go back to election 2000 to remember how despite lower court rulings to the contrary, Nino Scalia led a Supreme Court coup to put George W. Bush in power even though he had lost the national election by more than 540,000 votes and would have lost the Florida race if all the votes had been counted. Scalia’s original explanation of why the recount in Florida should be halted was based, he wrote, on the absurd and mind-boggling "concern" that, in essence, if all the votes were counted it might undercut the credibility of the presumed winner, George W. Bush.

In short, Scalia halted the right of a state to run its own election count because the results might make Al Gore the victor and, therefore, make it harder for Bush to assume the presidency once the Supreme Court made a decision to rule that the recount was not valid. So Scalia nullified the votes of American citizens so that he and the other felonious four could appoint Bush and Cheney before it could be determined that they had actually lost the election.

And so, after Scalia’s bizarrely illogical and legally untenable court order, the Supreme Court issued a ruling – in the dark of the night – that Gore had lost, but that the ruling would only apply to that particular case and would not set a precedent. In short, for Bush and Cheney, "we will make a partisan exception to the role of state’s rights in elections and the right of every vote to be counted." [BuzzFlash's quotation marks]

(This ruling was unconstitutional in and of itself, since the Supreme Court, under the constitution, is to rule only on the law as applied to the case, not on the facts of the case and therefore its ruling must apply to all similar cases in the future. In other words, the Supremes should not have taken the case and should have allowed the Fla. Supreme Court ruling to stand.)

That brings us to the on-again, off-again, on-again effort (initiated and originally funded by a Giuliani backer) in California to place a referendum on the June ballot to proportionally award the electoral votes of the largest state in the Union. The inevitable result would be to give the Republican presidential candidate approximately as many electoral votes from the State of California as – let’s say – Ohio. Of course, as it currently stands without the passage of the proposition -- short of some GOP miracle -- California, the largest state in the Union, will award all its electoral votes to the Democratic nominee, whoever that might be.

So let’s say that the GOP's latest dirty trick (petition signatures are currently being collected, with charges that many people are being deceived about what they are signing) succeeds in getting the electoral split on the ballot in the California primary (some say that it might have to wait to be on the ballot until the November presidential election, but with wording that it would be effective for that election). And let’s assume that it passes (if it makes it to the ballot), which is a distinct possibility according to some polling.

Well, using a referendum process to alter the allocation of electoral votes by a proposition could become a Constitutional question, because it can be legally argued that such a decision is solely the province of a state legislature, as one possible challenge would contend.

So then let’s say that the Democratic Party or another plaintiff -- the Democratic Presidential Candidate -- asks the courts to declare such a referendum, if passed, as not legally enforceable. And let’s assume that the lower courts agree with the plaintiffs and award all the California electoral votes to the Democratic candidate for president.

So we are back to the end of 2000. The Republican candidate makes an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court to hear the case. Nino Scalia – or Roberts, Alito or Thomas – accepts the petition. Kennedy, one of the felonious five, is still on the court.

You got it; now a slightly altered majority (Alito replaced O’Connor) declare that the referendum process was legal and that the Republican candidate for president should be given a proportional share of the California electoral votes – and that allocation would potentially – considering the close electoral split between Dems and Republicans -- be enough to put the GOP candidate in the White House.

Of course, such a ruling would apply to this specific case in California in 2008, right?

Such things are not implausible. It happened in 2000.

It is what occurs when the Democrats confirm Federalist Society hacks whose loyalty is to the extreme right wing and the Republican Party, not to the Constitution.

It is, unfortunately, not a scenario for 2008 that can be easily dismissed.

Democracy can’t survive when one party controls the umpires.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

GOP Gets Smack-down in CA.

State Dem Group Played Hardball to Kill GOP Election System Plan
By Carla Marinucci
The San Francisco Chronicle

Sunday 07 October 2007

They called themselves "The Lincoln Brigade."

Even as Democrats feared having to spend as much as $40 million for a bruising, bloody fight expected to drag on for months, this makeshift group of California Democratic operatives needed just weeks to pummel a Republican-funded push for a ballot measure that threatened to change the outcome of the 2008 presidential election.

The ruthlessly effective battle plan of the California Democrats' group raises the specter that, as the 2008 election looms, Republicans may have to confront a far more aggressive Democratic ground game that has revived the old "Clinton war room" philosophy.

"We need to fight back and not be reluctant - that if they come after you with a knife, to pull out a gun," said California Democratic strategist Chris Lehane, former spokesman for President Bill Clinton's White House and Vice President Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign.

The group took aim at the Presidential Election Reform Act, a proposed California ballot measure that would change the way the state apportions its Electoral College votes and likely benefit the Republican nominee.

After two terms of Republican control of the White House - and angered by what they perceived as a history of electoral "dirty tricks" by GOP strategists such as President Bush's key adviser Karl Rove - the Democrats' response in California could serve as an indication of what lies ahead in the 2008 battle for the White House.

"We ran it like a military operation," says Margie Sullivan, a former chief of staff to three Clinton Cabinet secretaries who was closely involved in the effort. "You had this SWAT team of talented, hyper-engaged people. ... It was: boom, boom, boom."

Lehane and Sullivan are some of the lead players in the group, which includes many former insiders from the Clinton administration. They named their group after the brigade of American volunteers who fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War.

After events such as the 2000 Florida presidential election recount, the 2003 California recall election that ousted Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, the 2004 "Swift Boat" campaign against Sen. John Kerry, "Democrats are waking up to reality, " said Doug Boxer, the son of U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer and a Bay Area consultant who was political director for the effort against the ballot measure.

"It doesn't mean (Democrats are) jettisoning their values system ... but the Clinton administration played hardball on a lot of things, and we'd gotten away from that," Boxer said. "We're back to the Clinton era."

Veteran California Republican strategist Dan Schnur conceded that the recent Democratic effort against the ballot measure was astonishingly effective. But he argued that the result - Republican supporters have for the most part backed away from the measure - may have been due more to the high stakes and a hunger to get back into the White House than brilliant campaign strategy.

"There's an old saying: Nothing concentrates your attention like the prospect of your own destruction," Schnur said. "They correctly identified this as a mortal blow to their Electoral College prospects next year. If they hadn't mobilized with everything they had, they would have been signing their own death warrant."

Interviews with lead players in the effort last week reinforced that scenario: Democrats from local to national levels shifted into gear almost as soon as rumors surfaced in May that Republicans might try to "steal the election" in the Democratic-leaning state with a ballot measure to benefit the GOP nominee.

Instead of the winner-take-all system used in all but two states, the measure provided that 53 of California's 55 electoral colleges votes would go one-by-one to the presidential candidate who wins each of the state's 53 congressional districts.

Analysts said such a change could swing about 20 of California's Electoral College votes - about as many as key states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania - from the Democratic candidate, who would be favored to win the statewide popular vote, to the Republican candidate who could win Republican-dominated congressional districts.

By the time the GOP-backed group called "Californians for Equal Representation," led by attorney Thomas Hiltachk - who has represented Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the state GOP - submitted the ballot measure to the state attorney general's office on July 17, the ad-hoc Democratic group was already engaged in a flurry of action.

Lehane had contacted Sullivan and Tom Steyer, a longtime major party donor and lead fundraiser for Kerry who heads San Francisco-based Farallon Capitol.

"He said, 'We've got to stop this - now' ... and immediately kicked in $150,000," Lehane recalled.

They roused a crew of party operatives including Peter Ragone, longtime aide to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who acknowledged that many believed the GOP effort was a longshot.

But "we'd seen that movie before," Ragone said. "We had learned ... that when Republicans start with these shenanigans, you have to hit them hard. Our attitude was: Not in our state."

The goal, Sullivan said, was to "strangle the baby in the cradle" and kill the ballot measure early, rather than let it qualify for the ballot - where it would be much tougher and more expensive to beat.

As the campaign in favor of the measure prepared to circulate the petitions and get the voter signatures needed to qualify it for the ballot, Doug Boxer contacted every major Democratic elected official from mayors to state legislators to California's U.S. senators and urged them to speak publicly against the Electoral College plan.

Steyer and Sullivan hit the phones, rounding up financial backing and commitments from deep-pocketed donors like Nancy Parrish, a leading supporter of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign and Hollywood producer Norman Lear, who put up $50,000. Also at the ready: producer Steven Bing and major Democratic donor and developer Walter Shorenstein, Sullivan said.

Pollster Paul Maslin's early focus groups found that a slim majority of Californians initially backed the Republicans' call for an end to "winner take all," so the Democrats began a daily drumbeat aimed at the media - press conferences, meeting with the state's leading editorial boards and outreach to Internet Web sites and blogs.

The Democrats wanted to "tell our side of the story" additionally through TV and radio ads to erode public support and scare off potential GOP donors, Lehane said.

At one point, "Norman Lear pitched in on a script change," Lehane said. "That made us nervous ... it's was kind of like Picasso giving you advice on painting."

Frank Russo, publisher of the California Progress Report, a popular Democratic Web site, said the strategy achieved "a clarion call that went out to all the troops," prompting netroots activists such as the Courage Campaign and Daily Kos loyalists to pound the issue to the grassroots. "It was like the old Who song: We won't get fooled again," he said.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean flew to San Francisco for a press conference with labor leaders to "make it very clear from the beginning that the new Democratic Party is not going to take it lying down - we still stand and fight," said DNC spokesman Karen Finney.

Editorial boards lined up against the measure. Then came a turning point - Schwarzenegger's public slap at the measure, which he said suggested a "loser mentality" by his party and an attempt to change election rules in the middle of the game.

Democrats still felt they had a big challenge: unmasking the money people behind Hiltachk's group - which by early September had said it had collected 40,000 signatures to put the measure on the June 2008 ballot.

Many of the original backers of the GOP ballot measure also were supporters of GOP presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani. Then came the news that the single $175,000 contribution to Hiltachk's Sacramento group was from a separate organization run by a Missouri GOP attorney named Charles Hurtt III - another Giuliani donor. But Hurtt's group wouldn't reveal its donors.

Democratic attorney James Harrison announced the party would file a complaint with federal election officials alleging money laundering - and the state's Fair Political Practices Commission acknowledged looking into the issue.

Quickly, the GOP ballot measure drive collapsed. Hiltachk resigned - as did his group's spokesman, Kevin Eckery and the chief fundraiser, Marty Wilson. They said they didn't want to accept money from anonymous donors - and support and funding had dried up for the measure.

In the last week, the money man behind the Missouri group was revealed to be Giuliani policy adviser and top fundraiser, billionaire New York hedge fund executive Paul Singer. That has prompted Harrison to pledge that Democrats will continue demanding answers regarding Giuliani's links to the effort - right into the 2008 primary season.

Eckery, the former spokesman for the ballot measure group, said that while the experience served as "a tune-up for the Clinton machine in California," Democrats shouldn't get overconfident from the result.

"Politics is a contact sport," he said, "and the presidential election is the Super Bowl."

Cast of Characters

Some of the key Lincoln Brigade players and their Clinton connections:

Chris Lehane: former White House spokesman for President Bill Clinton and 2000 spokesman for Al Gore's presidential campaign. Lehane is supporting Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential effort.

Doug Boxer: consultant and son of U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer of California.

Tom Steyer: founder of San Francisco's Farallon Capital Management, one of Sen. Clinton's biggest donors and a leading fundraiser for 2004 John Kerry campaign.

Margie Sullivan: Farallon Capital management analyst, Democratic fundraiser and former chief of staff to three U.S. Cabinet secretaries during the Clinton administration.

Ari Swiller: Democratic fundraiser and "kitchen cabinet" insider of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a Hillary Clinton backer.

Peter Ragone: a former aide in the Clinton administration and Gore spokesman. He is former spokesman for San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, a Clinton endorser.

Bill Carrick: longtime Democratic strategist for U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who has endorsed Hillary Clinton.

Paul Maslin: veteran Democratic pollster, formerly for Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean and now for New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democratic presidential candidate.

Sean Sullivan: opposition researcher formerly with the San Francisco firm of Averell "Ace" Smith, who is now Hillary Clinton's California campaign manager.

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E-mail Carla Marinucci at cmarinucci@sfchronicle.com.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Rethugs Lose on California Electoral Vote Splitting Scheme

They lost because the voters cannot change the rules. It takes action on the part of the California legislature. In California, Dems. Hold the majority...a real one.

Tom Hiltachk, a California Republican political legal hack, apparently can't even throw a spit ball with a straight arm. He wanted to put a measure on the California ballot that would have taken twenty or more Electoral College votes away from the Democrats by changing the way we allocate those electors from winner take all to proportional by Congressional district.

So much for the sucker punch from the right hook of the Republican Party. After tens of thousands of people joined together in the netroots and grassroots to just say no, the initiative seems to have fallen apart. Courage Campaign worked with civilian leaders such as Brad Whitford (see his video here) and joined with the leading bloggers in California and across the country to make sure that if this got on the ballot, it would fail and that the conspirators would know that the more they cheated, the more they helped us to organize.

As Howie Klein says," It ('s defeat) has more to do with the grassroots action against it, the organizing efforts of the Courage Campaign and the fact that the shady Republicans behind it, Californians For Equal Representation are a bunch of cronies of David Dreier's from Missouri." Paul Kumar , Vice President of SEIU'S United Healthcare Workers West, one of the online community's best friends in labor, said, "Your work made it too hot for Schwarzenegger and other leading Republicans to handle and dried up our opponents' access to money. The netroots was way out in front of the party regulars and big institutional players on this one and you deserve the credit for it."

Courage Campaign and our online colleagues had support from a huge cross section of prominent leaders ranging from members of congress such as California Congressional delegation chair Zoe Lofgren, Hilda Solis and Jane Harman, members of the state legislature such as Karen Bass and Mark Leno, labor leaders such as Sal Roselli at SEIU and bloggers ranging from Arianna Huffington to John Amato and Jane Hamsher. We had folks from Hollywood such as Brad Whitford, Sherry Lansing and Judith Light as well as literally over ten thousand others.

It's not polite to toot one's own horn, but there's a lesson here. As Jane Hamsher noted here on HuffPost, the House and Senate took the time over the past week to attack MoveOn.org, the largest progressive on line organization in the country, for pushing them to end the war in Iraq. It's obvious that this attack, too eagerly joined by many supposed progressives, was meant to diminish the online communities. My guess is that those presidential candidates who joined in the condemnation on television or in votes or both were only too happy to feel that MoveOn was knocked down a peg or two in advance of what they hope will be their ascension to power. That way, when those who claim to be progressives act otherwise, they'll be able to say, "See? Those guys out there in the "blogosphere" are just not to be taken seriously. Both houses of Congress said so."

Not so fast. Had this initiative gotten on the ballot and passed, a Democratic White House victory would have been almost impossible. That explains why so many of Hillary Clinton's expectant operatives were hard at work on this (and they were very effective). And it explains why so many in the online community got on board so quickly. So let's note now that the online community is an ally to most Democrats in times of need. That's all good. Keep in mind what we do when you need us and keep in mind that we'll not be taken for granted.

We beat the right wingnuts on this one. As the Los Angeles Times reports this morning, we demonstrated that with discipline, organization and speed we can defeat the bad stuff. As we build power, we'll be there to support other progressives and remind those who claim to be what it really means to make progress.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

California GOP's Plan For Divying Up the Electoral Vote is Unconstitutional

It is past time to do away with the Electoral College. It has out lived its usefulness to voters and has become just another tool for the hijacking of democracy.

For a more pure democracy, if we ever hope to have one again, count the popular vote and let it stand as representative of the peoples' will.

California voters can't change the 2008 election rules on their own.

By Doug Kendall
Posted Thursday, Sept. 13, 2007, at 7:34 AM ET

Republican presidential candidates are crossing the country promising voters that they'll pick judges who will be "strict constructionists" of the U.S. Constitution. Meanwhile, Republican activists in California are trying to flout the Constitution in order to change the rules for the 2008 election. Last week, their bid to change the state's method for meting out its electoral votes was endorsed by the state GOP and cleared by the California secretary of state, moving it closer to a place on the June 2008 ballot.

It's easy to see the allure for Republicans of this voter referendum, which has a predictably misleading name, the Presidential Election Reform Act. The initiative aims to replace the state's current "winner-take-all" allocation of its trove of 55 Electoral College votes. Instead of going to a single candidate, the state's electoral votes would be divvied up among multiple ones, based on the popular vote outcomes in California's 53 congressional districts. As several commentators have pointed out, including Jamin Raskin in Slate, this is all about political gamesmanship. (Bush won 22 of California's congressional districts in 2004, and assuming that voting trend holds, the proposed referendum would shift approximately 20 electoral votes into the Republican column. That's enough to determine the outcome of a close election.)

But there's a big problem with this referendum that has so far gone unnoticed: It's patently unconstitutional. The U.S. Constitution prohibits a ballot measure that would trump a state legislature's chosen method of appointing electors. In Article II, Section 1, the Constitution declares that electors shall be appointed by states "in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct." That's legislature. California's could scrap its current winner-take-all approach and adopt a district-by-district system for allocating electors (as only Maine and Nebraska currently do). But the voters—whom the initiative supporters have turned to because they don't have the support of the Democratic-controlled legislature—cannot do this on their own.

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Some of the Constitution's provisions are famously elusive. But "the Legislature thereof" is not one of them. In the 1920 case Hawke v. Smith, the Supreme Court ruled that a ballot initiative could not be used to undo a state legislature's decision to ratify the Constitution's 18^th Amendment. The court found that the term legislatures is "plain, and admits no doubt in its interpretation." Justice William Day wrote, "The framers of the Constitution clearly understood and carefully used the terms in which that instrument referred to the action of the legislatures of the states. When they intended that direct action by the people be had they were no less accurate in the use of apt phraseology to carry out such purpose."

The Supreme Court had previously been clear about the power the Constitution delegates to state legislatures in choosing electors. In 1892, in McPherson v. Blacker, the court held that Article II grants "plenary power to the state legislatures in the matter of the appointment of electors." Quoting a 1874 Senate report, the majority stated: "The appointment of these electors is thus absolutely and wholly with the legislatures of the several states."

While Hawke and McPherson may seem like ancient history, California Republicans will surely recall the last time these issues came up: a little dispute known as Bush v. Gore. In the case that ended the battle over the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, the majority reaffirmed McPherson, stressing that state legislatures have plenary power to choose the manner of appointment of federal electors. In a concurring opinion, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, opined that the power the Constitution gives to state legislatures is so absolute that it divested the Florida Supreme Court of most of its power to review the Florida legislature's handiwork.

Rehnquist's reading is an aggressive one. One need not accept it, however, to see the flat-out unconstitutionality of the Presidential Election Reform Act. Indeed, in the course of a 150-page law journal article that is relentlessly critical of the majority and concurring opinions in Bush v. Gore, Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe, one of Gore's lead lawyers, writes that "at least some state constitutional assignments of responsibility away from the state legislature—specifying that the manner of choosing presidential electors was to be fixed by the state's highest court, say, or by the state's chief executive, or by the people in a statewide plebiscite—obviously would not be consistent with Article II." (My italics.)

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(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Sorry To Say We Told You So, But......

People keep lapsing back into an odd state of denial, in which, even after all they have seen and heard about the Bushites and The GOP, they still think that the Goopers are gonna be content to risk handing over the kind of power they have accrued to a Democratic President and Congress.

The GOP has no intention of giving up the White House, no matter what they have to do to maintain their presence in it. Letting the White House go now, would mean the end of the Republican party, unless a Democrat moved in and said, " all is forgiven, let's look toward the future." I certainly wouldn't rule that out, as that is exactly what Bill Clinton did for Poppy.

More and more, it is obvious that our government, for the most part, is not with the people, and hasn't been for well over a year now.

The sky really is falling.....

GOP Power Grab Scheme in California Could Swing 2008 Election If It's Not Stopped

By Barbara Boxer

The Huffington Post

Monday 20 August 2007

Just when you thought it was safe to start thinking about having a Democrat in the White House, along comes a cynical power grab by Republican operatives. And unfortunately, it's happening right here in my own state of California.

If you haven't heard already, Republican strategists recently announced plans to begin raising money for a dangerous initiative that would radically change the way California apportions our electoral votes in presidential elections.

Rather than awarding all of California's electoral votes to the candidate that wins the popular vote - the way it works in every single state except the small states of Maine and Nebraska - their scheme would divvy up California's electoral votes based on the number of congressional districts each candidate wins.

What does this mean? Well, if the last few elections are any guide, rather than the Democratic nominee winning all 55 of California's electoral votes in 2008, this new partisan scheme could hand 20 of California's electoral votes to the Republican candidate and only 35 to the Democrat.

Don't get me wrong: After the 2000 and 2004 election debacles, I'm a strong advocate for election reform. But it's absolutely wrong for California to go it alone. It's just patently unfair for a large "blue" state like California to change our system for awarding electoral votes while other large states which trend "red" like Texas and Florida don't change their system at the same time.

This isn't reform - this is a partisan power grab by Republican operatives in the Karl Rove tradition.

The initiative's sponsors claim that their plan will make the presidential candidates spend more time campaigning in California. That's nonsense. Their scheme won't make candidates come to California during a general election any more than they do now - which is rarely, and only to raise money.

Just look at the 2006 election. In 2006, only 2 of California's 53 Congressional districts were truly in play. In the remaining 51 districts, the margin of victory for the winning Republican or Democratic House candidate was always more than 6% - and in most cases, the difference was 20 or 30 percentage points or more.

The number of competitive districts in the 2008 election will not be much different than what we saw in 2006 - so apportioning our electoral votes based on the winner of each Congressional district would clearly do nothing to bring the presidential candidates to California more often.

If America wants real election reform - and I know I do - we need to elect our President directly by the national popular vote, plain and simple. Then the candidate who receives the most votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia would be elected President. That's the fair thing to do.

If you're interested in joining the fight against this power grab by Republican operatives, I hope you'll check out FairElectionReform.com. You don't have to live in California to get involved, because by skewing the results of the 2008 presidential election, this initiative clearly will affect all Americans.

Please join me in fighting for real, fair election reform - and rejecting this cynical partisan power grab.

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Democrat Barbara Boxer is the junior senator for the state of California.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

A Red Play For Electoral Votes In California

Electoral evil is afoot in the Golden State.

Wake up Dems! Fight like hell in California and stop acting like Republicans in N.C.

What we really need to do is get rid of the out-dated electoral college altogether. It serves no good purpose and is so easily manipulated by election hackers

By Jonathan Alter

Newsweek

Aug. 13, 2007 issue - Our way of electing presidents has always been fertile ground for mischief. But there's sensible mischief—toying with existing laws and the Constitution to reflect popular will—and then there's the other kind, which tries to rig admission to the Electoral College for strictly partisan purposes. Mischief-makers in California (Republicans) and North Carolina (Democrats) are at work on changes that would subvert the system for momentary advantage and—in ways the political world is only beginning to understand—dramatically increase the odds that a Republican will be elected president in 2008.

Story continues ↓

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.