One Person One Vote Died a Year Ago today

In an important landmark case Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964), the Supreme Court established one of the most significant voting rights rulings impacting our Republic since the enfranchisement of woman and the election of U.S. senators by popular vote. Both of these occurred earlier in the century.  Basically, Reynolds v Sims established the means to ensure  that the United States was a truly representative form of government.  It provided a legal way to enforce the idea that legislatures are those instruments of government elected directly by and directly as representatives of the people. Because of this, all elected officials should be elected in a free and unimpaired fashion. One Person one vote is a bedrock of our political system.

That was until one year ago today, when the Democratic Rules and Bylaws Committee declared the voters of Michigan and Florida to be one half of a person. This decision, done in a closed room behind close doors, was done in the name of party unity and led to the famous “party unity my ass” uttered at The Confluence that led to the PUMA movement. It led to spontaneous outrage across the country.

What began as a Democratic Party initiative to change the caucus and primary schedule to appease some special interest groups, wound up as a means to disenfranchise two states as Florida and Michigan were selectively punished for their decisions to change the dates of their primary caucuses. While other states similarly changed their dates, these two states were singled out for retribution. This was a stinging indictment of our entire political system for those of us that supported Hillary Clinton and were still stinging from the earlier disenfranchisement of Florida under the Bush v. Gore ruling that essentially gave us a President who mostly likely did not win the election. Every one knows how well that worked out.

Here are some reports from the day. This one is from MSNBC’s Chuck Todd called Nothing is fair about Florida and Michigan. Here was his suggestion for the situation at the time.

Why not consider punishing the party leaders and not the voters? Couldn’t the committee take away the states’ superdelegate votes? After all, it wasn’t the voters who demanded the states break party rules, but rather the leaders of the respective state parties.

Of course, this is too logical. The likely ruling on Saturday will probably highlight the party’s inability or reluctance to punish the superdelegates. There is a challenge from a Florida superdelegate claiming the party violated its own charter by stripping the state of both pledged delegates and superdelegates. Most members of the Rules Committee I’ve talked to indicate that he may be right. Keep in mind members of the Rules committee are all superdelegates themselves.

The Golden Rule could apply: Do unto other superdelegates as you would want done unto you.

The second idea the committee should be considering but isn’t reflects everything we’ve learned throughout this long primary season.

As many have noted, census data for each state have been remarkably determinative of results since Super Tuesday. In fact, the support groups for the two candidates have been incredibly stable. Why not apply what we’ve learned about the support groups of both candidates and split the delegates accordingly?

Of course, we found out soon enough that the party leaders did have their agenda and it was to ensure that we had their Candidate. We’re still unraveling the reasons for this travesty. We endured sexism, misogyny, and race-baiting through out the entire election cycle. We will be paying for this most undemocratic of decisions for years to come. We could have had a President that supports Abortion Rights and Universal Health Care. We could have had a President that refused to vote for FISA. We could have had a President that wasn’t controlled by lobbyists, Wall Street Fat Cats, and was a policy wonk extraordinaire. Instead, as Ted Ralls of Common Dreams, puts it, we got this:

We expected broken promises. But the gap between the soaring expectations that accompanied Barack Obama’s inauguration and his wretched performance is the broadest such chasm in recent historical memory …From healthcare to torture to the economy to war, Obama has reneged on pledges real and implied …Obama is useless. Worse than that, he’s dangerous. Which is why, if he has any patriotism left after the thousands of meetings he has sat through with corporate contributors, blood-sucking lobbyists and corrupt politicians, he ought to step down now–before he drags us further into the abyss.

I don’t know about you, but I WILL NEVER FORGET THIS DAY OF INFAMY.

PUMA forward

You think it’s too late to plan some kind of commemorative/commiserative event for the 5.31 rules committee meeting that led to the birth of PUMA? Maybe make it net/blog based? Any interest?

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The “Incompetence Crisis”

All last year,  ALL  I heard was how experience didn’t matter.  I heard that being ‘ready on day one’  was a meaningless campaign slogan.  I was told that what mattered was perceived good judgment, intelligence, and speaking skills.  I remember watching the first Democratic Debates and thinking, this guy isn’t ready to be dogcatcher, let alone President. There were no wonky answers on economics or foreign policy.  There was never a show of any detailed plan.  There was always just a nice speech read from a teleprompter with a preacher’s patois, incredible (somewhat contradictory) promises, and messages that could have come from a motivational seminar instead of a political campaign.  I never got on the bandwagon.

I finally found a home over here in the Pumasphere with people of similar thought after being treated like a scourge by other sites (blog or MSM) that had gone over to the hope side.  I’ve been getting used to my role as pariah. I was thinking I’d have to live with it for at least a year.  I figured I’d start getting the you were so right calls sometime in the fall.

Boy, was I wrong!

I figured that because of my experience during the early calls for the Iraq war.  I was the one saying “Iraq has nothing to do with 9/11.  Iraq is a different agenda.  Iraq is a bad idea.”   I actually had some one get up in a restaurant to tell me what a lousy, unpatriotic American I was that didn’t deserve to live in the US. I became a the scourge of all true American patriots.  I’ve been thinking that my 9/11 protest was just a character building experience that would serve me well during the Obama fascination period and that it would probably take a few years of, yet again, being a scourge to all true American patriots before the worm would turn.  Luckily, I found a other like minded out in the Pumasphere so I don’t have to be quite alone as I was with my opinion on the Iraq Invasion.

I think I can honestly speak for a number of us around here.  We didn’t expect to be proven so right so quickly.  At least I didn’t. I was hoping that maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as my gut and head had deduced.  So many of my friends said, he’s not Dubya, so he’s got to be better, you’ll see.   After all, we’d get rid of a lot of really evil signing statements that restrict women’s reproductive choices, the right of all people to love and marry whom they wish, and we’d move ahead on science again.  I’ve said this before, but nearly any democrat would have done any of those things–including Joe Lieberman. Lieberman is one of those folks that I consider marginally a democrat, but even he would have done those things if he were POTUS.  We certainly wouldn’t see any nasty supreme court appointments either.  These were marginal hopes and small changes that I could cling to while knowing that eventually, I would be proven right.  I just didn’t even imagine it would wind up quite like this, quite so fast.

So, if I haven’t made myself clear here, Rush Limbaugh and Governor Jindal may be cheering for a failure.  I’m not in that camp at all.  I’ve just been quietly sitting here telling myself that with all the beautiful things written into the constitution as well as the resiliency of the American people, that perhaps it won’t be quite as bad as I thought it would be.   After all, we survived the incompetency of George Bush and the lunacy of Dick Cheney. Things can’t fall apart that fast!

Boy, was I wrong!

Pumas are the new Cassandras.  Our warnings, unheeded, demonized, and marginalized, are now the stuff of MSM op ed pieces.  I’d like to point you to a few that are searing Obama with legitimate criticisms.   I would think they came from one of the edgier Puma sites but they don’t.  One is from CNN. The other from the UK’s Prospect.  I also have two from the NY Times.  These comments are simply alarming.

Astronauts for a Flat Earth vs. The Barbarian Hordes

There are many things I’ve read in history that show how an unruly mob can change the direction of things.  The blogosphere is watching an unruly mob in action right now as Wonkette is trying to stack the WebBlog awards against all things PUMA.  I’ve started reading some of the threads coming in to The Confluence (example: here) and there’s a sense among some of the other folks in the other categories that they are the innocent victims of an unruly mob.  I’m sure that’s how the other Hun tribes felt when Attila assimilated them.

All you have to do is take a look back at the entire dark ages and the crusades and get a pretty good answer as to how this type of thing gets its start .  It basically starts with some ‘character’ who may or may not exist who gets an incredible amount of buzz placed around them that is clearly not based in history or fact or anything.   Thus, a mythical hero is born.  Some one to rape and pillage for … some one to use to justify an attack on other tribes, other religions, any other. It just builds and builds until you get a Spanish Inquisition or something similar.  

The King Arthur legends come to mind also.  A tribal king who may or may not exist turns into the great fictional hero just because tons of unruly mobs need some kind of  legend to mob around.  All kinds of morality plays develop to show that our legendary hero is just that mythical, legendary, and grounded more in a game of rumor than history and reality.  I know I just gave some examples of things way back when.  Why would I think that in an age of  ‘information’ we could possibly see the same kind of history repeat itself?

While many of the blogs are now upset that they’ve been caught up in the raping and pillaging which was no fault of their own, they too, now have been caught up in the creating the legends that turn the truth into a nice mythical legend that gets WAY out of hand.  In my first case, about 2000 years way out of hand.

MYTH NUMBER ONE:  It’s all about Hillary losing.  PUMAs just won’t get over it.  They are like Astronauts for a Flat Earth or WW2 Japanese Soldiers trapped up in the Hills refusing to believe the Emperor gave in.

While Hillary Clinton eventually wound up to be the candidate of choice for me, one year ago I had no preference.  What really drove me to the PUMA realization wasn’t Hillary loosing, it was HOW she lost or rather HOW the DNC went around constructing an OBAMA win.   If anything PUMA is about holding the DNC accountable for cheating that occurred in caucuses, how the distributions of delegates was determined, how lopsided the punishment of Florida and Michigan was compared to other states that moved their primaries up also against DNC ‘rules’, and the railroading of the democratic convention process.  If you think all of this is just one big conspiracy theory on the part of PUMAS either do some research or take up residency in the bat cave with Cheney.  I’m not certain he’s turning that over to Biden even though I know the Obama administration will want to lock him up there eventually. So that’s it, it’s not about HILLARY losing it’s about HOW Obama  “won”.  Yes, the “win”  (sic) is in quotes.

MYTH NUMBER TWO:  All Pumas are conspiracy theorists.  In every population there’s the average and there’s the extremes and outliers.  Yes, you can find the folks that went searching for that Holy Whitey Tape and the Kenyan Birth certificate, but the majority of the PUMA sites (especially The Confluence)  never jumped on to the wingnut stories. Again, I’ll go back to the basic reason PUMAs exist and that is how positively fucked up the primaries and caucuses were and how they were completely mishandled by the DNC and the DRC.

MYTH NUMBER THREE:  ALL Pumas are Racists and just can’t deal with the idea of a Black Man being president.  I’ll again point to the Bell Curve.  Of course there are Pumas that are racists but the majority are not.  The problems that PUMAs have with Obama has to do with his extremely small level of accomplishments and his overblown and now mythic intelligence and academic records (which by the way, the public has never seen).  It’s been debunked that he was the first black on the Harvard Review by Harvard themselves although mysteriously in Obama’s senate site there was a resume that said that he was.  It was  sitting there for the two years he pretended to be the Senator from Illinois.  The man has never been in an election where extremely weird things haven’t happened–like getting all your opponents thrown out on technicalities, having sealed divorce records of your opponents magically show up in public, or having the delegates to your caucuses in places like Texas leave the process with tons of forms in their arms.  I’ve looked and as far as I can tell, the man has never even had a full time job.  There are PUMAs of color. It’s not his skin color.  It’s his Chicago political career and his appalling lack of experience. For me it was, oh no, not another person who got into Harvard as a legacy.  I’m frankly tired of legacy Ivy Leaguers.  The hardest thing about the Ivy Leagues is getting in there if you’re anything but a legacy.  Getting out is nearly guaranteed.  Think DUBYA.

MYTH NUMBER FOUR:  PUMAS are bitter old white women who find sexism everywhere.  Considering the number of times during 2008 racism was found EVERYWHERE,  I just gasp at the total lack of awareness on the part of people on the obvious sexism.   If some one stood up  in a room and asked Obama if he’d shine their shoes, that would be such obvious racism that I doubt the KKK would rise to debate.  If every where he went there were folks wearing t-shirts with the N word emblazoned across them, there would have been riots.  If effigies of Obama hanging from trees on Halloween or  Little Black Sambo dolls were being manufactured with his face on them, the outrage from every where would have been swift and justified.  These things happened to the two women candidates in the white house races using language from sexist instead of racist tomes.  The outrage was nonexistent.

Side myth to this:  ALL Pumas are uneducated.  Just having spent time on any of the PUMA sites, I have to say this is really not true.  If anything, especially at the Confluence, there are a large number of PUMAS with advanced educations.  Not that this really matters because having worked for universities for years I can attest that there are some miserably stupid people out there with Phds.  I really get tired of the elitist meme.  Believe me, some times I really wish I was kat the plumber instead of kat the economist.  Last week would have been a perfect time for that in my house.

MYTH NUMBER FIVE:  PUMAS voted enthusiastically for Mcain and Palin, were basically Republicans all along and were just spoilers.   All you have to do is go back to The Confluence’s voting strategy series to see that there were very few PUMAS that fell into the enthusiastic Republican voters categories.  Yes, there were folks who eventually decided they felt more at home as Republicans.  Many decided to re-register independent.  But most of the PUMAS I’ve met are still your basic democrat with no party home any more because they feel the party has abandoned its root principles including, most importantly the ONE man ONE vote principle.  Most PUMAs I know disagreed with everything Sarah except for the fact that as a sitting governor, she didn’t deserve to be treated like a bimbo.

Now you can continue to rewrite history out there in the blogosphere, much like Constantine the high priest of the Sun God decided to invent Christianity, create the Jesus myth, and control slaves, women, pagans, children, barbarians and other Roman property or you can sit back and use the Internet to find the facts.  This is after all, the information age or have  you decided to ignore science and just restart the Spanish inquisition?

and Time’s #8 Buzzword of the year 2008 is …

Top 10 Buzzwords

8. PUMA

By John Cloud

Louise Ma
An acronym for “party unity my ass,” this term was the rallying cry of Clinton supporters who backed her candidacy even after many party leaders called for consensus around Obama in order to ensure a unified Democratic front going into the general election. As Barrett of doubletongued.org points out, PUMAs hoped to bring the Clinton-Obama fight “to a head-to-head smackdown vote at the [Democratic] convention.” Instead, Clinton threw her support to Obama well before the convention. This word, which disproportionately described female voters, recalls TIME’s 2007 buzzword of the year: cougar, i.e., an older woman seeking younger men.

Howls from the The Progressive Wilderness

I continue to be amazed by the number of progressive bloggers that are rationalizing their votes for Obama while experiencing one jaw-dropping Obama appointment after another.  Today, I read David Sirota’s addendum to the latest progressive hissy-fit.  That is, it must be we haven’t had enough hissy-fits because the one is obviously not listening to us.  Read it all here.

Did Obama really run on a progressive agenda?  If you’ve read any of us Cassandras on The Confluence or other Puma places, you’ll see that we’ve been saying he’s not a progressive for a long time.  My favorite description of the one is opportunistic chameleon.  Let’s face it progressives, ever since you were had on FISA, the one realized it wasn’t his platform but his hopey changey say nothing of substance speeches that would get him elected.  Why would you think that would change now? 

 

Never Surrender the Pink!

I was driving across the bayous today listening to NPR on my way to campuswhen the most empowering and delightful story happened.  It was about the “Gulabi Gang”  or the Pink Sari Ladies that have decided to take on the corrupt and ineffective men running Northern India.  They wear bright pink saris and carry sticks.  These gangs of empowered women not only go after corrupt officials but men who abandon or beat their wives.

My thought is we’re seeing the Indian equivalent of PUMAs.  They have no political party affiliation and even refuse to work with NGOS.  Leader Sampt Pal Devi refuses to to deal with them because ” they are always looking for kickbacks when they offer to fund us.”

The movement is about two years old and has gained ground to the point that Ms. Devi can push to the front of a line of local men to complain to officials about lack of electricity or corruption in the distribution of grain to the poor.  They even stormed a police station to free an untouchable man that they felt was being held only for purposes of getting money for his release.

Another interesting pink lady movement in India is the pink cabs in Bombay driven by women for women.  This has started an entire movement of entrepreneurial women.

“This is an unmet need,” Renuka Chowdhary, the Minister of Women and Children in India, said as the service started yesterday. “We have had a higher reporting of crime against women passengers. This is also a non-traditional job for women, so they are breaking out and becoming earning members for their families. We are confident it will catch on.”

Many of the women overcame the disapproval of friends and neighbours who thought that they should stay at home to look after their husbands and children.

Shweta Shinde, 42, applied for the job with the backing of her family and said that it had fulfilled her ambition to learn to drive. “For so many years, I wanted to have a car,” she said.

In the scheme, each woman puts down a 19,000 rupee (£232) deposit on a 369,000 rupee air-conditioned car, subsidised by Tata, the Indian conglomerate.

By paying off the balance on the low-interest loans, the women will own their taxis. They are expected to earn about 25,000 rupees a month, nearly three times the salary of a chauffeur and five times the pay of a domestic maid.

Read both the links up top to learn more about the pink ladies of India seeking to empower themselves and other women. I think it will make you smile and know that there is a worldwide sisterhood of pumas out there.

Reframe, Reform, Regroup

There is a general consensus out there in the Pumasphere that we need to regroup and continue to voice our issues.  I have found that it is much easier, at this point, for me to list the issues that made me a Puma.  It’s much harder for me to suggest a blueprint for the regrouping.

Our political process needs reform.  Both parties have now won elections by perpetrating ugliness, fraud, and lies. Tactics used by Democrats this year were the source of much frustration and anger in the past when used by Republicans.  How can you claim higher ground while stooping to conquer?  We have to find a way to stop the parties from using the deep pockets of special interest constituencies to game an election.  I’ve been amazed at how the same blogs that howled at Rovian tricks have borrowed some of the same plays and chortled in glee when these nasty strategies work in their favor.

One of the nasty strategies is the hyperpartisanship that allows candidate surrogates to demonize opponents and their supporters.  This year’s Judas goat appeared to be women candidates and women in general.  I was horrified at the level of misogyny given a pass by the DNC.  I was even more horrified that much of this was done by women.  I now have a list of women’s groups and women’s activists whom I no longer consider feminist.  This includes NARAL, Emily’s List, Gloria Steinham, and many others.  We cannot allow the parties to use us to beat up on women who disagree with us on an issue or so.  The progress of women depends on not allowing any one to define the weakest ones in the herd so that the predators can weed them out for destruction.  My guess is that women’s rights as well as GLBT rights will not achieve anything with the new congress and the new president.  We will be used once more to place the usual suspects in power so they can enrich themselves and further legislation that has nothing to do with anything we value.  Yes, I will be happy to see all those nasty, birth control phobic executive orders go away.  I doubt we will see legislation, however, demanding insurance providers cover all forms of women’s reproductive care let alone laws enabling federal funding.  So how much are marginal differences worth to us?

 To further the Obama cause, we will see more Prop 8s.  As long as it advances Obama’s status, they will support laws that winnow out the least powerful among us.  We need to reframe what it means to be “for” us and “against” us.  Lip service and proxy misspeaks should not be so easily forgiven or forgotten.  We need to reframe them so that folks see them for what they are–nonsupportive of women’s rights and a disservice to our self-esteems and our causes.

So, can we reform either party?  Will the Republicans give up their love of controlling women’s bodies while curbing corporations that run amok?  I don’t think so.  Now that the Democratic Party has learned they can fool enough of the people enough of the time, will they show some respect to those of us that loathe this new process and their new flunkies?  Dream on.  We can choose to be a segment that can select a few kings or we can try to coordinate with others to forge a new independent way that could possibly lead to a third party.  I’m still drawn to the latter as a long term strategy.  I think Bloomberg may take a run at the presidency in 4 years and he’ll need some voting blocs.  We should keep all of our options open because I have no doubt we will be in exhile for some time.

It is likely for election reform we will have to work state by state.  If we want more women’s voices in the process, we will have to run or put women candidates into office.  The blogosphere continues to be our best weapon.  We can connect, reframe the issues, demand reform where we can, and look for the best possible structure to regroup.  I think that’s all I can offer up for debate at this point.  I will say that I am willing to stick it out and work for it because the problem is at the very heart of all that is the promise of democracy.

NOTE:  This is my contribution to the The Confluence’s The Way Forward Series: Pondering our future as P.U.M.A.s.  If you follow this link and look in the upper right hand comment, you will find the ideas of others in the PUMA movement.

Just Cast my Puma Vote!

Those of you that know me, know I live in the ninth ward in New Orleans. I live in the inner city and we have the usual inner city problems including gang violence, a lot of drug-related crimes, and not enough money to rebuild our infrastructure and schools just for regular wear and tear. Let’s not even go  into the Hurricane Katrina wear and tear. My neighborhood is close to the river, so when the city filled up, we stayed high and dry.  However, they still haven’t rebuilt our police station.   We also don’t have banks or grocery stores any more.  That’s the upper ninth.  The lower ninth has less, if that’s possible.

I vote in the local fire house.  It was built in the 1920s and the old stables that used to house the horses that pulled the street car named desire and the fire carriages stand silently next to it.  There are two precincts that vote in this building.  I see the same little southern church ladies each time I vote.  The know me because I vote in every election–even the odd ones with just a charter change or replacement for the latest politician caught up and drug off to jail.  That’s the thing that makes me most sad about where I live at the moment. 

 My state senator just resigned for laundering money.  Two school board members and a popular city councilman at large are sitting in jail for bribery.  The entire country knows about Congressman Dollar Bill Jefferson.  He looks like he’ll be re-elected pretty much along straight racial lines.  Black folk seem to be mighty forgiving down here. It seems they’ll take any black face over a Hispanic, white or other face no matter what the circumstances.  The mistrust of white hegemony makes me feel like the Jim Crow Laws disappeared just yesterday. Black politicians get a wide berth. I’ve learned that lesson over and over down here.  In fact, our Mayor Ray Nagin lives more in Dallas than he does here. He comes in late on Monday and is out of here by Thursday night.  That says something about the living conditions in your city when your own mayor won’t live in it full time.  I have to say that I voted for him the first time, but I didn’t make that mistake again.  We call him Mayor Na-GONE for a very good reason.  I also think that he’ll eventually run for the Jefferson seat once the federal court finally throws the book at Ol’ Dollar bill.  My guess is he’ll be just as worthless of a congressman as he was as a mayor until they wind up having to redraw the state of Louisiana to eliminate one congressional district.  Then it might be another ball game. 

Until then, we’ll suffer because very few of our leaders actually care about the city or the state it is in.  They care about their political career and ability to live large.  We’ll also suffer because a lot of the electorate thinks the only qualification one needs here to be effective is the right demographic.  It has got me questioning the nature of racism these days.  I think it’s all about who is in power and abusing that power for the benefit of ’your own’.  I now see that folks that once suffered from this can inflict it without much thought.

It makes voting disheartening when you’re actually interested in good government.  I get tired of watching one person after another get hauled off to jail.  I guess ex-Governor Edwards is getting a lot of new company.  There’s plenty of folks from the various Louisiana political machines still running for office as well as sitting in jails right now.  If you’ve never lived in a realm of political machines, there is no way you know what that does to the folks on the outs.  It’s thuggery plain and simple.

Thuggery, abusing racial identities, and machines brings me to the topic of voting in the National Election for obvious reasons. I wore my orange sweater to show my unity with Pumas voting all over our country.  I was really surprised that I didn’t have to wait in line.  There were only two suprises awaiting me.  The first one was this:  after voting election after election, the church ladies had this conversation before I entered the booth.  The one whose job it always is to clear out the previous vote, turned to the others and asked:  “Should I ask her the question?’  Since voting here has become extremely routine, this gave me a bit of a jolt.  The ladies nodded and I was asked “Democrat or Republican”?  Since there are not two seperate ballots for this election, I found this a very odd question but smiled and said “Democrat”.  I secretly smiled and thought, if you’re asking me if i voted Democrat at the top of the ticket, the answer would’ve been no.  I guess folks are still thinking we will vote along party lines.

The next thing that happened when I walked out of the fire station was also unique for me.  I was asked to fill out an exit poll form for the news agencies.  I never vote really early in the morning as a rule but I was trying to avoid lines so I got out the door the minute I’d walked the dog.  It was a simple one sheet form with the logos of nearly all the news affiliates across the top.  I was asked the usual demographic questions, age, sex, religion, income level, party affiliation, and education level.  I was also asked which issues most concerned me ( I said energy policy) and when I made my decision to vote (within the last three days).  I was asked to rank what I thought of the George Bush presidency. (Disaster wasn’t available so I had to settle for saying I was extremely dissatisfied). I said I was very worried about the future of the economy–another situation I had to rank.  There were also the candidate listing of President, Senator, and House Rep. I put McCain, Landrieu, and Moreno.  So when they are slicing and dicing the last minute voters … and they find the democrats for McCain in the exit polls, you will find me in that number.  I hope you find me representin’ in the ninth ward for a lot of you out there.

Politics Make for Strange Bedfellows

I’ve been watching some of the links showing up here at my blog and also at The Confluence.  Something really STRANGE is going on.  The Republicans are abuzz with praises for Pumas.  I’m reading blog after blog on the right saying that PUMAS may very  well save the country.  Check out these links.  It will make you a believer in the old saying that politics make strange bedfellows.

 

From Redstate:  More on Why McCain should Win:  The Puma Factor

From McCain Democrat Clinton Republican:  People Want to know about Puma

From Death by a 1000 papercuts:  Pumas the Democrats the Media Doesn’t Want to Talk About

To be real honest, I’ve had a feeling that folks have been reading many of our sites for some time.  This includes the media.  I also know that some of the things that have been discussed here on The Confluence and on other Puma sites have shown up a few days after the topic was completely dissected by the PUMA community.  Several times we’ve been accused of passing right wing memes when I swear the points were discussed here prior to being tossed around on right wing blogs and even right wing radio shows.

Several stories broken here (including SimoFish’s posting of the Hillary Fundraiser where Hillary says she thinks that putting her name up for a roll call vote would help her supporters gain closure) and on No Quarter. ( Think ACORN  and most of the ACORN threads including the Obama expenditure on “lights, etc” which turned out to be voter-registration related .)  These were first discoverd in the PUMA world.

You may feel discouraged and think that we’re not making a difference, but you really shouldn’t.  This should tell you that our voices are being heard and that our cause has been well-argued.  Now is the time for us to finally decide where to put our final action: OUR VOTE.  As for me, I’ve gone into a voting pack with SM77 who lives in the swing state of Florida.  I will be voting for Cynthia McKinney for her, here in New Orleans, LA.  Louisiana is a red state.  She will be casting my vote for John McCain in Florida.  

Please, PUMAs, stick to your guns and cast your vote in accordance with our principles.  It is up to us to show the DNC that denying one-man one vote to TWO states, stacking primaries so that small states out count large swing sates, and allowing rampant caucus frauds are not behaviors we wish the democratic party to undertake.  Let them know that we don’t appreciate them putting a candidate with no accomplishments and a race-baiting, misogynistic campaign to the front of the line.  Vote your conscious!  Vote like a PUMA!  Even the Republicans know that we can make a difference!