Ross is love.

Boo, baby. Boo.

Video the vote.

Here's why it's fun to live in good ol' NY, with our creaky, old, flawlessly accurate, mechanical voting machines that they'll need to pry from our cold, dead hands. Vid courtesy of Jake.

Problems? Video here.

Video the Vote is a non-partisan network of citizen journalists working to document voter suppression and disenfranchisement. I have my training tonight, though, again, New York generally has its stuff together. Learn more here.

Birthday girl.

It's a very special anniversary of the 29th birthday of our buddy, favorite radio babe, belly-dancer, and rock-n-roll stunt drummer Heather Z. If you know what's good fer ya, you'll make some friendly birthday wishes on her behalf.

Don't let this be you.

Make your own video here.

I'm not aware of any similarly clever right-wing equivalent, but you crazy coconuts for McCain get out there and vote, too. For on election day, our differences fall apart and we all get a sticker. I'll do just about anything for a sticker.

Speaking of which, I figured out all of the people that I'm voting for, and realized that I'm voting for four Republicans and five Democrats next Tuesday, a ratio that shocked me, but there you have it.

Redistribution of wealth.

OK, I have about two hours before I've promised to sound a few positive notes about this campaign as we head into the endgame. Before I go to bed, I had to mention this new talking point of the McCain campaign, begin with the discovery of an audio interview from 2001 with Obama on the Odyssey program in his role as a professor. Here was the headline on Drudge this morning:

2001 OBAMA: TRAGEDY THAT 'REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH' NOT PURSUED BY SUPREME COURT

This goes along with the socialist, Marxist, thing that the McCain campaign has been trying to pin on Obama and has thus become a major talking point (in yet another turn toward the type of meaningful, thoughtful campaign that McCain promised us, he's now calling Obama: "Barack the Redistributor"). Jack Cafferty was even on CNN discussing it using the Drudge Report wording. The thing is, if you listen to the interview...he's clearly not saying anything of the kind. He talks somewhat objectively and academically about Supreme Court litigation with regard to dispossesed blacks immediately following the civil war. He mentions "redistribution of wealth" as something that wasn't pursued, and the "tragedy" part he mentions is the tragedy of activists focusing too much on the courts during the civil rights movement, which is something on which he and conservatives agree. He later tells a caller that the courts aren't very good at bringing economic change. You only get a "tragedy of redistribution of wealth if you take the word "tragedy" from one part and stick it on to th part about how freed slaves had no money. All this: "Is Obama really a Communist?" talk makes me feel like my brains is being sucked out of my ears...

OBAMA: "You know, if you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples, so that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order - as long as I could pay for it I’d be okay.

But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical.

It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers and the Constitution, at least as it has been interpreted, and the Warren Court interpreted it in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.

And that hasn’t shifted, and one of the, I think, the tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways we still suffer from that."

More here.

True.

By the way, Dahlia Lithwick, Slate.com and NPR legal writer, has a very succinct, straight-forward, and fact-filledtake on all this talk of voter fraud and ACORN, and Senator McCain's claim that Obama and ACORN are primed for "destroying the fabric of democracy." It's nonsense, it's misleading, and it's part of a strategy to keep voters from the polls through intimidation and draconian efforts at purging the rolls. Between 2002 and 2006, twenty-six people were convicted of some form of voter fraud, compared with tens of thousands of eligible voters that the New York Times has been able to verify who have been deprived of their votes improperly. Read it here.

It can happen to anyone.

   

It was awful. I just stopped for gas. This white lady with an accent that made no sense and $4,000 shoes pulled up...I think she saw my 'Boston Legal Fans for Obama' pin...

Money angreez gone.

From our buddy Sarah Smart.

See more

Trouble? Video here.

Now that I've gotten your attention with puppies, here's a slavery-free chocolate table for your Halloween-candy buying consideration. It's all kind of expensive to hand out to the neighborhood rugrats, so I suggest getting some for yourselves and giving the kids jelly beans or some shit like that.

The candidates on education.

This has clearly not been an election with a strong focus on education, sadly. It's been virtually a non-issue in the debates, and it's not high on the radar of voters in polling. As a result, pinning down either candidate on education is pretty tricky. I've scrabbled together what information I could on both McCain and Obama's proposals.

Both candidates either support or accept No Child Left Behind, though both are deliberately vague on how it could be improved. Obama feels that the biggest problem is that the federal government has not provided the proper funding for NCLB, and proposes an additional 14 B dollars in education funding. McCain, who has proposed an across the board spending freeze, is more concerned with using the resources that are already available in different ways.

Neither candidate has been willing to take a strong stance on NCLB. Teachers and teacher's unions (who strongly support Obama) hate it, seeing it as overly conformist, and creating an atmosphere of rote memorization and obsession with standardized tests. Conservatives don't like it because they see it as too much of a federal government intrusion into the educational system. Independents tend to favor the emphasis on standards and accountability. As a result, neither candidate has been willing to excessively praise or criticize it. McCain has called the programming "A great first beginning," while Obama feels that reform is needed. The practical difference between those positions being pretty much nothing.

Here are a few semi-specific points, mostly from the candidates' own materials:

Barack Obama wants to:

• "Quadruple Early Head Start, increase Head Start funding and improve quality for both". Wants universal Pre-K (this seems to be a signature issue).
• Double funding for charter schools, and set procedures for closing underperforming charter schools.
• Provide funding for intervention strategies to lower dropout rates.Double funding for after school programs.Provide grants for for high school students seeking college level credit.
• Create the American Opportunity Tax Credit to cover the first $4,000 of higher education for students agreeing to perform 100 hours of community service.
• Make it possible to apply for student aid by checking a box on the tax form, rather than filling out a separate form.

John McCain wants to:

• Designate certain Head Start programs "Centers of Excellence"- these centers would receive an additional $200,000 per year to expand programs.

• "Ensure that there are no federal prohibitions against preschool programs offering basic healthcare screenings to children (with parental consent) in their care.
• "Direct 5% of Title II funding to states to recruit teachers in the top 25% of their classes. Direct 60% of Title II funding for high-performing teachers in underperforming schools.
• Ensure that most school funding is allocated by the principal.
• Give low income students up to $4,000 to take online courses.
• Create "Troops to teachers" program to expedite teaching credentials for veterans.

I'm not a fan of No Child Left Behind: I understand the desire to ensure that all children in the United States meet minimum standards, but the evidence seems to be that, in trying to squeeze all teachers and students into the same box, high-achieving students and exceptional teachers are not given opportunities to excel. Students varying talents, aptitudes, and abilities aren't accounted for. However, it appears that the lowest achieving students have made gains, so it's hard to make a case that there aren't any positives. I think that one of the biggest and best changes that we could make would be to decouple property taxes from school funding. Currently, the federal government is a very small piece of the funding pie for schools. The vast majority comes from a community's property taxes. As a result, wealthier communities with fancier houses get way better schools. I'd like to see a more egalitarian method of distributing school resources, so that an inner-city student would get something approaching the opportunities of a wealthy suburban kid, at least when they get to school. Research indicates that even a poor student who goes home to a crappy house has much better outcomes when they get the chance to attend a middle-class school. Alas, the last president to suggest something like that was your hero, and mine, Richard Nixon. I'd also like to see more parent education, to teach parents how to prepare their children for education and to advocate effectively for them. But enough about me.

The biggest difference between the candidates on education is pretty much in the dollars: Obama proposes billions of dollars in new spending, while McCain wants to spend money in different ways. In that, I'm left a bit cold: McCain's plans seem to point toward a strategy of pulling money away from underperforming schools in favor of more successful ones. On paper, it sounds good, but when good schools get richer and bad schools get poorer, it's not the schools that suffer, but the kids. Obama's greater emphasis on early education rings true with me, and we know that learning gaps between poor and middle-class students begin very early. Also, as a practical matter, McCain will have greater difficulty moving any new programs through a Democratic congress. Still, Obama's plans are likely to cost a boatload of money. For better or worse, neither candidate is proposing any dramatic changes, though, so you'd have to consider this one something like a tie, depending on your priorities.

Paul Wellstone, six years ago.

Liberal icon, Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota was killed in a plane crash six years ago, today. On Novermber 4th, Al Franken will be competing in a very close race with Republican Norm Coleman, who took over the seat. Helluva thing.