Fold/Spindle/Mutilate 2.1

Rip Van America will soon awake in a world that changed as the campaign spun. After a yearlong political binge that has consumed billions of dollars, oceans of national energy and attention, and the credibility of the country’s two major political parties, old Rip has adjustments to make.

Peering out through a pulsating election hangover, Rip will perceive that while the United States was so self-absorbed, China accelerated its breathtaking run to become a global financial center, the world’s manufacturing hub and the price-setting consumer of oil and other commodities.

China, India and Japan have been creating an economic platform to make this the Asian century, while U.S. resources, manpower and policy initiatives have been poured into the dangerous conflicts of the greater Middle East.

Vladimir Putin used his timeout from American scrutiny to bog down deeper in Chechnya and to knock the props out from a promising Russian financial recovery by dismembering the Yukos oil group. Western and much of Eastern Europe came together in a historic if still untested union of political equals.

These developments got a passing nod, if that, from the candidates. Even on Iraq, George W. Bush and John Kerry were neither comprehensive nor candid with the electorate. They covered over the centrality of Israel to American policy and international standing with competing platitudes or silence. While the Great Satan was navel-gazing, Iran and North Korea pursued their nuclear ambitions without hindrance.

As if things weren’t complicated enough, here comes the dirt.

Registered voters who have been somehow unregistered. Democrats who suddenly find they’ve been re-registered as Republicans. A flier announcing that Election Day has been extended through Wednesday.

Dirty tricks are a staple of campaigns, but election officials say this year’s could achieve new highs in numbers and new lows in scope, especially in key battleground states such as Florida and Ohio, where special-interest groups have poured in to influence the neck-and-neck race between President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry.

“In my 16 years as an election administrator, I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Ion Sancho, supervisor of elections in Leon County, Fla. “I see it as an expression of a political culture that has evolved in the United States of win at any cost. It’s not partisan, but it’s just lie, cheat and steal, and ethics be damned.”

The problem in Leon County: Students at Florida State and Florida A&M universities, some of whom signed petitions to legalize medical marijuana or impose stiffer penalties for child molesters, unknowingly had their party registration switched to Republican and their addresses changed.

Officials say students at the University of Florida in Alachua County have made similar complaints and that about 4,000 potential voters in all have been affected. Local papers have traced some of the problems to a group hired by the Florida Republican Party, which has denounced the shenanigans. Switching voters’ party affiliations does not affect their ability to vote, but changing addresses does, because when voters shows up at their proper polling places, they will not be registered there.

cross the Judean desert, over the opal waves of the Mediterranean, along stone-paved roads that scored the plains of Syria and Asia Minor and carried into the heart of Rome, the Word spread 20 centuries ago. And as it did, it transmitted itself less in houses of worship than in the tents of carpet sellers, in wine shops and bakeries and maybe most of all at the tables found in every market town where stacks of coins signaled the indispensable presence of the moneylender. The market was the central place of human interaction. It was where change happened, where ideas lighted from one mind to the next.

And so it remains. Chuck Ripka is a moneylender — that is to say, a mortgage banker — and his institution, the Riverview Community Bank in Otsego, Minn., is a way station for Christ. When he’s not approving mortgages, or rather especially when he is, Ripka lays his hands on customers and colleagues, bows his head and prays: ”Lord, I pray that you will bring Matt and Jaimie the best buyer for their house so that they have the money to purchase the new home they feel called to. And I pray, Lord, that you grant me the wisdom to give them the best advice to meet their financial needs.”

cross the Judean desert, over the opal waves of the Mediterranean, along stone-paved roads that scored the plains of Syria and Asia Minor and carried into the heart of Rome, the Word spread 20 centuries ago. And as it did, it transmitted itself less in houses of worship than in the tents of carpet sellers, in wine shops and bakeries and maybe most of all at the tables found in every market town where stacks of coins signaled the indispensable presence of the moneylender. The market was the central place of human interaction. It was where change happened, where ideas lighted from one mind to the next.

And so it remains. Chuck Ripka is a moneylender — that is to say, a mortgage banker — and his institution, the Riverview Community Bank in Otsego, Minn., is a way station for Christ. When he’s not approving mortgages, or rather especially when he is, Ripka lays his hands on customers and colleagues, bows his head and prays: ”Lord, I pray that you will bring Matt and Jaimie the best buyer for their house so that they have the money to purchase the new home they feel called to. And I pray, Lord, that you grant me the wisdom to give them the best advice to meet their financial needs.”

cross the Judean desert, over the opal waves of the Mediterranean, along stone-paved roads that scored the plains of Syria and Asia Minor and carried into the heart of Rome, the Word spread 20 centuries ago. And as it did, it transmitted itself less in houses of worship than in the tents of carpet sellers, in wine shops and bakeries and maybe most of all at the tables found in every market town where stacks of coins signaled the indispensable presence of the moneylender. The market was the central place of human interaction. It was where change happened, where ideas lighted from one mind to the next.

And so it remains. Chuck Ripka is a moneylender — that is to say, a mortgage banker — and his institution, the Riverview Community Bank in Otsego, Minn., is a way station for Christ. When he’s not approving mortgages, or rather especially when he is, Ripka lays his hands on customers and colleagues, bows his head and prays: ”Lord, I pray that you will bring Matt and Jaimie the best buyer for their house so that they have the money to purchase the new home they feel called to. And I pray, Lord, that you grant me the wisdom to give them the best advice to meet their financial needs.”

When Andreas Schafer was released from a prison in Iraq earlier this year, the Iraqi police apologized abjectly for having inconvenienced him for three months. They made sure he knew that if ever he wanted to get back at the arresting officer by, say, slaying the man’s brother, it would be all right by them. And he could expect not to be prosecuted for the crime.

It says something about Iraqi justice and the American-led occupation that Iraq’s finest viewed an invitation to murder as a triumph of decency and due process. Schafer, a hapless, idealistic 26-year-old New Zealander who had gone to Iraq in search of a job with a nongovernmental organization, ended up languishing in a prison in southern Iraq as an unacknowledged prisoner of the U.S.-led coalition. By keeping Schafer in an Iraqi-run prison, rather than in a prison monitored by Americans or international observers, the United States avoided putting him on the books and having to account for his treatment, even to his own government.

It took nearly three months of diplomatic wangling to get him released, and in those three months he observed startling ineptitude on the part of coalition soldiers. He also observed the private life of a segment of Iraqi society that has gone mostly unreported on during the occupation.

The claims come as both Republicans and Democrats put in place up to 2,000 lawyers across the country to challenge attempts to manipulate the vote in swing states.

Although allegations of misconduct have been levelled at both parties recently, the majority of complaints that have been identified in The Observer’ s investigation involved claims against local Republicans.

What exactly is racially-based vote suppression? Simply defined, it is the targeting of potential voters, based on their race, in an attempt to suppress the exercise of their right to vote for the candidate of their choice.

Following the Civil War and passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed African-American men the franchise, suppression and intimidation tactics often included physical violence. But actual violence (or explicit threats of violence) were not then, and are not now, essential to the effective suppression of African-American votes.

As I will explain, the practice of racially-based vote suppression is not only morally despicable and illegal. It is also profoundly racist, in a variety of respects.

News of the confidential meeting comes as the campaign enters its final 48 hours, with the candidates running neck and neck. Mr Blair is concerned that he will appear isolated if George Bush loses in Tuesday’s poll, because of his support for the Iraq war.

The Prime Minister authorised Philip Gould, his polling guru, to seek a meeting with Mary Beth Cahill, Mr Kerry’s campaign manager. Lord Gould, a co-founder of New Labour, is one of Mr Blair’s closest confidants who keeps him in constantly in touch with floating voters.

Ms Cahill is tipped to be chief of staff in a Kerry administration. The meeting, which took place 10 days ago in Washington, is being seen by aides to the Kerry campaign as an olive branch by Mr Blair.

There has been considerable anger in the Democrat camp at the lack of support from the Prime Minister. Lord Gould, who helped Bill Clinton win his 1992 election, has until now been conspicuous by his absence from the Democrat campaign.

A source close to Mr Blair said that it was “valid” to report Mr Gould’s visit but stressed that he is not employed by the Government.

Peace protesters will gather in Trafalgar Square at 5pm on Tuesday, where they will read out the names of 5,000 Iraqi men, women and children known to have died in the conflict.

The full death toll was put last week as high as 100,000.

Playwrights Harold Pinter and David Hare, actress Juliet Stevenson, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, and relatives of British soldiers killed in action in Iraq have all agreed to take part.

Professor Hawking, the author of the best-selling book A Brief History of Time, is wheelchair-bound as a sufferer from motor neurone disease. He recorded a message on Friday that will be broadcast at the start of the rally.

The oldest protester in Trafalgar Square is likely to be a fellow scientist, the Nobel Peace Prize winner Sir Joseph Rotblat. In the 1940s, he resigned from his job developing the world’s first atomic bomb on moral grounds.

The environment has been a virtual non-issue in this year’s election campaign, with even the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — such a hot topic in the 2000 race — off the radar for now. So, with the public focused on terrorism, war, taxes and healthcare, a small group of government officials and oil executives has seized the moment to close in on a deal to open one of Alaska’s biggest wildlife refuges to oil drilling.

Government scientists, environmentalists, and Native Americans in the area say the arrangement — which has the support of Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens and which won preliminary approval last week from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — will be a precedent-setting erosion of historic environmental protections of Alaska wildlands, and could open the way to widespread oil exploration in the nation’s wildest places, starting with the 9 million-acre Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge.

Even if Kerry manages to win, American conservatism will remain the most dynamic component in American political life. Although a Kerry victory (for which I hope) is conceivable, it is already clear that the race is so tight that the Republicans will retain their grip on the House of Representatives – with little prospect of an early reversal. Talk to Republicans and they regard their control of the House together with more state legislatures as the heart of their power base; in the checked and balanced US political system the presidency is the necessary but insufficient condition for political leadership.

Indeed, Bush has already imposed stage one of a new draft. Many soldiers whose enlistment period is up are not being allowed to leave the service, and those who left the service years ago are being forced to put on the uniform again against their wills. It is clear that we already have a back-door draft. Bush has effectively ended the all-volunteer military.

And stage two of a reinstated draft would be easy to implement. Draft boards are already in place in every county in the United States, and young men who turn 18 are already required to register with their local draft board. A major terrorist attack could easily serve as the pretext for flipping the switch and setting this apparatus in motion.

2. Disdain for the importance of human rights. The regimes themselves viewed human rights as of little value and a hindrance to realizing the objectives of the ruling elite. Through clever use of propaganda, the population was brought to accept these human rights abuses by marginalizing, even demonizing, those being targeted. When abuse was egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy, denial, and disinformation.

3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause. The most significant common thread among these regimes was the use of scapegoating as a means to divert the people

“It was misconduct, and part of that misconduct was blatant,” said Bunny Greenhouse, in an interview on NBC’s Nightly News program.

Lisa Dupler, a 33-year-old from Columbus, held up a rainbow-striped John Kerry sign outside the Nationwide Arena on Friday, as Republicans streamed out after being rallied by George W. Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger. A thickset woman with very short, dark hair, Dupler was silent and barely flinched as people passing her hissed “faggot” into her ear. An old lady looked at her and said, “You people are sick!” A kid who looked to be about 10 or 11 affected a limp wrist and mincing voice and said, “Oh, I’m gay.” Rather than restraining him, his squat mother guffawed and then turned to Dupler and sneered, “Why don’t you go marry your girlfriend?” Encouraged, her son yelled, “We don’t want faggots in the White House!”

The throngs of Republicans were pumped after seeing the president and the action hero. But there was an angry edge to their elation. They shrieked at the dozen or so protesters standing on the concrete plaza outside the auditorium. “Kerry’s a terrorist!” yelled a stocky kid in baggy jeans and braces. “Communists for Kerry! Go back to Russia,” someone else screamed. Many of them took up the chant “Kerry sucks”; old women and teenage boys shouting with equal ferocity.

“It was misconduct, and part of that misconduct was blatant,” said Bunny Greenhouse, in an interview on NBC’s Nightly News program.