Results tagged “Barack Obama” from Ultimate Politics

In this article, I wrote about how the Secretary of State of Colorado, Mike Coffman is engaging in activities that would make it easy to steal Colorado's votes, and the national election, for McCain.
Now, in the state that has been compared to 2004's Ohio, Coffman is throwing out thousands of new voter registration forms through a minor technicality.
While this may anger you in a general way, it angers me personally even more. You see, while working on a voter registration drive to get Obama elected,my team and even me personally have registered numerous voters, and have heard from many voters, especially in our African American communities "this will be my first time voting", and to know now that they are going to be turned away at the polls, along with all of the other people registered by Rock the Vote, ACORN, the Obama Campaign and the Democratic party, makes me sick to my stomach.
Read more for the background on this story and Coffman's outrageous ruling to disenfranchise voters.

In what I previously covered:

1. Colorado, according to Stu Rothenberg's  What's the Top Electoral College State This Year?, Colorado is now THE swing state as Florida and Ohio were in 2000 and 2004.

2. Secretary of State Mike Coffman broke the law last year by allowing his database manager Dan Kopelman to manage the database while he was running a Republican voter database company on the side. See story by Dan Whipple

3. Coffman's State Elections Director was discovered to be staying at a loft owned by the software salesman who manages the Voting Machines for our state, machines that have already been de-certified, then re-certified by Coffman. She resigned pending an investigation, and it calls into question the veracity of our voting machine process.

4. Now, Coffman has ruled on new voter registrations and decided this:

(from Colorado Pols' Dan Willis)

At Issue: Forms used by Voter Registration Drives. They include a place for people to include their Driver's License Number, State ID Card Number or Social Security Number (only requires last 4 digits). There is a box present which states "I do not have a Colorado Driver's license or Dept. of Revenue identification number" which people are supposed to mark if they are going to only give an SSN.
The Secretary of State has included in his Rules (dated July 2008) that any new voter who does not mark that box and only gives their SSN shall not be registered to vote.  In mid-September he issued a memo to the County Clerks telling them specifically to not register anyone who does this.
Consequence: Thousands of new voters are attempting to register to vote, thinking they are successful because they signed up through some organization such as ACORN or any of the political parties, but are not registered and will not be allowed to vote if they do not correct their forms.

When I say thousands, I am not over-exaggerating. In Denver County alone (the only one I have numbers for so far) this ruling has resulting in approx. 3000 denied voter registrations! And that is just one county, and one with thousands of more forms to even look at!

The SoS's sorry excuse? They claim to upholding the law, specifically CRS 1-2-204(f.5) which states:
"In the case of an elector who has been issued a current and valid Colorado driver's license, the elector's Colorado driver's license number. If, instead of a driver's license, the elector has been issued a current and valid identification card by the department of revenue in accordance with part 3 of article 2 of title 42, C.R.S., the elector shall provide the number of the identification card. If the elector has not been issued a current and valid Colorado driver's license or identification card, the elector shall answer that he or she does not have a driver's license or identification card and shall provide the last four digits of the elector's social security number. If the elector does not have a social security number, the elector shall answer that he or she does not have a social security number."

I have looked at our copies of Voter Registrations. Thousands of them. And the majority of these people who think they are registered to vote are going to be disenfranchised by this devious, deceptive, and underhanded ruling.
This may cost us the state for Obama, maybe even the entire general election.

(Here is the interview with Colorado Ethic's Watch Chantel Taylor and Colorado Media Matter's Bill Menezes on these issues and the failure of the media to report these criminal activities.)

Please continue to forward this to any lawyers you know or contact the Secretary of State's office here,
or the Denver District Attorney's office.

This past week there has been a lot of talk from both Bush and McCain about the necessity for the Congress to start permitting new drilling sites for Oil companies in the face of high oil prices, as seen in this video from the BBC, even though there is plenty of evidence that the real reason for the high prices are the insiders and speculators that Randi Rhodes first documented this week. If these revelations of inflated fuel prices anger you, then I hope you won't be fooled by the rhetoric to drill, drill, drill. Part 1 of 6: No new drilling: we have 25 times the renewable energy needed to run our country. That's right, while we are debating how much to drill, where to drill and if we should drill ANWR, we are sitting on untapped energy sources: in this case, solar and wind. First up: Coal, fossil fuels, and the untapped abundance... Nancy LaPlaca from Energy Justice:

Coal has the same CO2 emission rate as the entire transportation sector. Coal emits 40% of all CO2, 2/3rds of all sulfur dioxide, 1/3rd of all mercury. These fossil fuels have hidden costs in terms of CO2. Now fossil fuels like oil and natural gas are escalating at a rate of 15% a year. The exciting thing about renewable energy like wind and solar is that when we look at their costs in 2020, we don't have to think about what they will cost.

Costs of energy are felt by us in many ways, whether it is at the pump, or heating your house in the winter or the electricity to run your business. Each of our states uses the 'basket of energy' approaches, which as of now, is usually a basket of fossil fuels, like natural gas or oil or coal. These fossil fuels fill up the 'grid' for electricity for the nation, state by state, region by region, and grid by grid. Grid by grid, you say? Yes, the country is broken down into grids (more on that later) and each state has a grid capacity (remember Enron and California's grid fiasco that ultimately caused Gray Davis to be recalled. But that is another scandal... Colorado,for instance, uses a grid of 12 gigawatts of electricity. That is like needing to plan a trip for the summer and you know that you will always need 12 gallons of gas. So in peak moments in the hot of the summer sun or coldest of winter nights, the full capacity of 12 gigawatts is being supplied by oil, natural gas and oil. The trick is, what if we had a more plentiful source that was cheaper and had no harming effects to the earth. What if you knew that just in Colorado alone there is enough energy to run the entire state and many others as well, over 296 gigawatts of electricity from wind and solar resources. With other states in the west participating, we could achieve total energy independence for the entire nation. We could haved a completely electric automobile and transportation sector. Listen to this... Leslie Glustrom from Clean Energy: Just in Colorado alone, we have:

In Colorado, Colorado has 96 gigawatts of wind energy. In terms of Solar energy, Colorado has 200 gigawatts of energy. (me) enough to power the Midwest...? Yes more than enough. We have to give credit to Xcel who has made great gains to become a leader among utility companies.

Websites: Nancy LaPlaca nancy@energyjustice.net http://www.energyjustice.net/ Leslie Glustrom lglustrom@gmail.com http://www.cleanenergyaction.org/html/about_us.html For students and their teachers who want to get involved in renewable energy: www.ausra.com This first part is just to show you what is already here and waiting. There is no need to drill. none. whatsoever. It is time for our leaders to stop denying science and bowing to big oil pressures and embrace the future. This concludes part 1. Part 2 tomorrow - Local energy initiatives, how your town, city or state can start investing in renewable energy.