Students, take a look at Salon's Walter Shapiro and McClatchy's Greg Gordon prognostications. See if you can find something good to take home.
Walter Shapiro writes in Salon today, "It is time to face the blunt truth: This Congress, despite its nominal Democratic majorities, is not going to hasten the end of the Iraq war." Therefore, Shapiro writes, "the date that is most important to keep in mind is Feb. 6, the morning after the Super-Duper Party-Pooper orgy of primaries when both parties are likely to have de facto presidential nominees. The victorious Democrat in particular will want nothing to happen in Congress that could possibly jeopardize winning back the White House. And congressional leaders (along with most back-benchers) will be shrewd enough to understand that electing a Democratic president is the only surefire route to ending this debilitating war.
"That is why angry antiwar activists should realize that their targets are no longer skittish congressional Democrats and Beltway insiders who are their counselors in caution. This is not the moment for guerrilla theater and mau-mauing the moderates. For the true struggle on the home front to end the Iraq war is no longer going to be waged in the chambers of Congress. The coming battleground instead is the familiar terrain of Ohio and Florida -- and the hearts and minds of the swing voters who will decide the 2008 election."
Ohio! Florida! We can do that, can't we? Should be easy by now! Here's part of Greg Gordon's report on election law changes.
"Ohio and Florida, which provided the decisive electoral votes for President Bush's two razor-thin national election triumphs, have enacted laws that election experts say will help Republicans impede Democratic-leaning minorities from voting in 2008.
"Backers of the new laws say they're aimed at curbing vote fraud. But the statutes also could facilitate a controversial Republican tactic known as 'vote caging,'' which the GOP attempted in Ohio and Florida in 2004 before public disclosures foiled the efforts, said Joseph Rich, a former Justice Department voting rights chief in the Bush administration who's now with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights.
"Caging, used in the past to target poor minorities in heavily Democratic precincts, entails sending mass mailings to certain voters and then using the undelivered letters to compile lists of voters for eligibility challenges.
"As the high-stakes ground war escalates heading into next year's elections, Republicans have led the charge for an array of revisions to state voting rights laws, especially in key battleground states. Republican political appointees in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division have endorsed some of these measures."
Of course, if there's been voter fraud, something should be done about it, right?
"Chandler Davidson, a Rice University sociology professor who has studied voter suppression, said the new laws are questionable because 'there has been virtually no evidence presented that there has been wide-scale voter fraud in the United States.'''
