Nearly 600,000 eligible Ohio voters may be dropped from the voter rolls if Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner doesn't act to protect these voters, according to findings based on publicly available information discovered by Advancement Project and Project Vote.

These voters -- disproportionately voters of color and young voters -- are subject to being removed from Ohio's voter registration rolls without notice or a hearing because of the state's vague regulations on vote caging, a process that enables representatives of one political party to challenge the voter registration credentials of voters at polling places on Election Day.

The Ohio counties with largest numbers of returned notices prior to March 2008 Presidential Primary are Cuyahoga, Franklin, Hamilton, Lucas and Summit, where Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati and Toledo are located.

Labels: vote suppression

In the first seven months of this year, the United States has deported 90,000 children to Mexico - without a parent or guardian.  (Link goes to a Spanish-language news site.)

Frankly, it is a disgrace that this country has become so overtaken by xenophobic hysteria with regard to human migration that the health, safety and well-being of children is disregarded and they are abandoned to the fates on the streets of frequently violent and crime-ridden border towns.    

According to the report linked, 13,500 of those children, or 15%, find themselves in limbo at the border. With no family and no way to take care of themselves, the lucky ones are taken in by social service and religious organizations, but the unlucky ones are simply abandoned to the streets to beg for their existence, or to fall prey to human traffickers. Many are sexually exploited.
In addition to the unbelievable inhumanity of treating children as de facto felons, the practice of deporting these children is having a huge impact on Mexican states with high migration rates that are ill-equipped to deal with this massive influx of untended children dumped by the United States government.

Labels: human rights

she made up a thing, and she does not like it? what is this, a dr. seuss poem?

i do not like a placeness lack
of maverick john or slick barack
i wish this campaign would go back
to rizzlety-diggle dork race quota tack!

because as little peggy noo drones on and on, it becomes clear that what she really misses is not placenss itself, but the time when the all the little raceness knew all their little placeness:

i miss the old geographical vividness. but we are national now, and in a world so global that at the olympics, when someone wins, wherever he is from, whatever nation or culture, he makes the same movements with his arms and face to mark his victory. south korea's park tae-hwan moves just like michael phelps, with the "yes!" and the arms shooting upward and the fists. this must be good. why does it feel like a leveling? like a squashing and squeezing down of the particular, local and authentic.

how dare those koreans act just like a white person! how dare barack be as articulate as john! how dare those uppity coloreds presume to mix w/our people, trying to run things like corporations and cities and states and (shudder) countries!

Labels: bloggers, conservatives

Labels: comedy, Marc Maron

Labels: Barack Obama, lies, media consolidation

Labels: John and Elizabeth Edwards

Federal investigators probing the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks recovered samples of human hair from a mailbox in Princeton, N.J., but the strands did not match the lead suspect in the case, according to sources briefed on the probe.

FBI agents and U.S. Postal Service inspectors analyzed the data in an effort to place Fort Detrick, Md., scientist Bruce E. Ivins at the mailbox from which bacteria-laden letters were sent to Senate offices and media organizations, the sources said.

The hair sample is one of many pieces of evidence over which researchers continue to puzzle in the case, which ended after Ivins committed suicide July 29 as prosecutors prepared to seek his indictment.

Authorities released sworn statements and search warrants last week at a news conference in which they asserted that Ivins was their sole suspect. But the materials have not dampened speculation about the merits of the investigative findings and the government's aggressive pursuit of Ivins, a 62-year-old anthrax vaccine researcher. Conspiracy theories have flourished since the 2001 attacks, which killed five people and sickened 17 others.

[snip]

Friends and former colleagues of Ivins, who died before he could see the full array of evidence prosecutors had gathered, continue to demand information about the DNA advances that authorities say led them to a flask in Ivins's lab.

Defense lawyer Paul F. Kemp yesterday said he wonders "where Ivins could have possibly stored this anthrax without any employees seeing it, or if he took it home, why there was no trace" of the deadly spores, despite repeated FBI searches over the past two years of Ivins's car, his work locker, a safe-deposit box and his house.

Meanwhile, government sources offered more detail about Ivins's movements on a critical day in the case: when letters were dropped into the postal box on Princeton's Nassau Street, across the street from the university campus.

Investigators now believe that Ivins waited until evening to make the drive to Princeton on Sept. 17, 2001. He showed up at work that day and stayed briefly, then took several hours of administrative leave from the lab, according to partial work logs. Based on information from receipts and interviews, authorities say Ivins filled up his car's gas tank, attended a meeting outside of the office in the late afternoon, and returned to the lab for a few minutes that evening before moving off the radar screen and presumably driving overnight to Princeton. The letters were postmarked Sept. 18.

Nearly seven years after the incidents, however, investigators have come up dry in their efforts to find direct evidence to place Ivins at the Nassau Street mailbox in September and October 2001.

Labels: anthrax, tinfoil

Labels: right-wing hatemongers, wingnuttia

Back in the day, John McCain was the sort of politician who would stand first in line to call out this sort of swill. (As, I'm sure Barack Obama or John Kerry would do, if some hate-crazed, money-grubbing left-winger published a book claiming that McCain had been successfully brainwashed in Vietnam--as Kerry did indeed do when a group of spurious Bush-backing Vietnam vets tried to claim exactly that about McCain during the 2000 Republican primary in South Carolina.)

But we're not seeing those sorts of claims being made about McCain this year...because Democrats tend not to do that sort of thing. They are the sorts of claims that Republicans--Bush Republicans--make. They range from the blatantly extra-curricular, like Corsi's book, to the official McCain-sanctioned introduction made by Joe Lieberman--of all people--yesterday: that Obama doesn't "put America first."

I know that people like me are supposed to try to be fair...and balanced. (The Fox mockery of our sappy professional standards seems more brutally appropriate with each passing year.) In the past, I would achieve a semblance--or an illusion--of balance by criticizing Democrats for not responding effectively when right-wing sludge merchants poisoned our national elections with their filth and lies. And it is true, as John Kerry knows, that a more effective response--and a bolder campaign--might have neutralized the Swiftboat assault four years ago. It is also true that Corsi's book this time is far less effective than his Swiftboat venture, since it doesn't come equipped with veterans willing to defile their service by telling lies to camera.

But there is no excuse for what the McCain campaign is doing on the "putting America first" front. There is no way to balance it, or explain it other than as evidence of a severe character defect on the part of the candidate who allows it to be used. There is a straight up argument to be had in this election: Mcain has a vastly different view from Obama about foreign policy, taxation, health care, government action...you name it. He has lots of experience; it is always shocking to remember that this time four years ago, Barack Obama was still in the Illinois State Legislature. Apparently, though, McCain isn't confident that conservative policies and personal experience can win, given the ruinous state of the nation after eight years of Bush. So he has made a fateful decision: he has personally impugned Obama's patriotism and allows his surrogates to continue to do that. By doing so, he has allied himself with those who smeared him, his wife, his daughter Bridget, in 2000. Those tactics won George Bush a primary--and a nomination. But they proved a form of slow-acting spiritual poison, rotting the core of the Bush presidency. We'll see if the public decides to acquiesce in sleaze in 2008, and what sort of presidency--what sort of country--that will produce.

Labels: John McCain, sleaze

Police said Timothy Dale Johnson, 50, of Searcy, barged into Bill Gwatney's office on Wednesday and shot him multiple times. There were no signs that Gwatney and Johnson, who was later shot dead by officers, knew each other.

A Target retail store in Conway had fired Johnson early Wednesday because he had written graffiti on a wall, police said. Before noon, Johnson was in Gwatney's office in Little Rock with a handgun.

"He said he was interested in volunteering, but that was obviously a lie," said Sam Higginbotham, a 17-year-old volunteer at the party's headquarters.

After the shooting, Johnson sped away in a truck, stopped seven blocks away at the Arkansas State Baptist Convention and pointed a gun at the building's manager, police said. When asked what was wrong, the gunman said "I lost my job," according to Dan Jordan, the church group's business manager.

Officers chased the suspect to Sheridan, 30 miles south of Little Rock. After avoiding spike strips and a roadblock, the suspect emerged from his truck and began shooting at deputies and state troopers, who returned fire. Johnson later died at a hospital. Police found two guns in the truck.

Little Rock police Lt. Terry Hastings didn't say what the men discussed after Johnson entered Gwatney's office but said it was not a heated exchange.

"They introduced themselves, and at that time he pulled out a handgun and shot Chairman Gwatney several times," he said.

Labels: economic death watch

Labels: music

THE call came late at night on the first Monday of January, delivering the news that Sigrid Olsen had feared for six months. Liz Claiborne Inc., after a review of its brands, was dismantling her 24-year-old fashion business, closing its 54 stores and laying off dozens of employees, including the designer herself.

Ms. Olsen, who spends much of the year at her longtime home here, began to call her staff in New York to explain what was happening in advance of a corporate announcement that would be made the next day. But what she could not explain was what had led to the demise of a peppy brand with a passionate customer base and peak sales of about $100 million, or why the sputtering Liz Claiborne conglomerate, which had entertained offers for Ms. Olsen’s label and others, had not chosen just to sell it.

“I thought that we were one of the brands they would want to keep and nurture,” Ms. Olsen said. “That was more shocking than anything.”

It is a curious development in the fickle business of fashion that clothing labels like Ms. Olsen’s, made by and for the baby boomer generation, are among those being hardest hit by the current economic turmoil and retail retrenchment. The restructuring of Liz Claiborne early this year also resulted in upheavals at more expensive labels: Ellen Tracy, which was sold; and Dana Buchman, which was pulled from department stores and will be remade more moderately for Kohl’s. At the same time, retailers like Ann Taylor, Talbots and J. Jill have been closing hundreds of stores around the country, and the consolidation of department stores over the last decade has left many malls with more vacancies than options for the enormous demographic of women in their 40s to 60s.

Labels: baby boomers, pop culture

John McCain has gotten the eight fish stick dinner at Long John Silver's™ gratis for too many Goddamned years over his hyping his victimhood, and he's used the horrible spectre of his captivity as a shield and cudgel to silence anyone wno criticizes him, playing the “pity me” card as handily as if he had twenty of 'em up his sleeve on a spring loaded chute to his hand. It's been a veritable godsend for him whenever he's gotten hemmed up in his self-inflicted prisons of avarice and stupid.

Labels: bloggers, John McCain

It is with great sadness that we have learned of the tragic death of Democrat Party Chairman Bill Gwatney. He was an admirable Arkansan and gave so much to this state and his party.

Labels: assholes, Republic Party

Bill Gwatney, the chairman of the Arkansas Democratic party, was shot and critically wounded in his office in Little Rock Wednesday morning, police officials said.

The officials said a single gunman fired three shots at Mr. Gwatney, a former state legislator, in his office a few blocks from the state Capitol and then drove away.

A friend of the Gwatney family, who asked not to be identified, said Mr. Gwatney was near death at the medical center of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, and that doctors considered his wound inoperable.

John McCain recently tried to underscore his seriousness about pushing through a new energy policy, with a strong focus on more drilling for oil, by telling a motorcycle convention that Congress needed to come back from vacation immediately and do something about America’s energy crisis. “Tell them to come back and get to work!” McCain bellowed.

Sorry, but I can’t let that one go by. McCain knows why.

It was only five days earlier, on July 30, that the Senate was voting for the eighth time in the past year on a broad, vitally important bill — S. 3335 — that would have extended the investment tax credits for installing solar energy and the production tax credits for building wind turbines and other energy-efficiency systems.

Both the wind and solar industries depend on these credits — which expire in December — to scale their businesses and become competitive with coal, oil and natural gas. Unlike offshore drilling, these credits could have an immediate impact on America’s energy profile.

Senator McCain did not show up for the crucial vote on July 30, and the renewable energy bill was defeated for the eighth time. In fact, John McCain has a perfect record on this renewable energy legislation. He has missed all eight votes over the last year — which effectively counts as a no vote each time. Once, he was even in the Senate and wouldn’t leave his office to vote.

“McCain did not show up on any votes,” said Scott Sklar, president of The Stella Group, which tracks clean-technology legislation. Despite that, McCain’s campaign commercial running during the Olympics shows a bunch of spinning wind turbines — the very wind turbines that he would not cast a vote to subsidize, even though he supports big subsidies for nuclear power.

Barack Obama did not vote on July 30 either — which is equally inexcusable in my book — but he did vote on three previous occasions in favor of the solar and wind credits.

The fact that Congress has failed eight times to renew them is largely because of a hard core of Republican senators who either don’t want to give Democrats such a victory in an election year or simply don’t believe in renewable energy.

Labels: renewable energy, Thomas Friedman

Significant parts of the book, whose subtitle is “Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality,” have already been challenged as misleading or false in the days since its debut on Aug. 1. Nonetheless, it is to make its first appearance on The New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction hardcovers this Sunday — at No. 1.

The book is being pushed along by a large volume of bulk sales, intense voter interest in Mr. Obama and a broad marketing campaign that has already included 100 author interviews with talk radio hosts across the country, like Sean Hannity and G. Gordon Liddy, Mr. Corsi said on Tuesday.

The publisher is Threshold Editions, a division of Simon & Schuster whose chief editor is Mary Matalin, the former Republican operative turned publisher-pundit. And it is a significant, early success for Ms. Matalin’s three-year-old imprint, which is also planning to publish the memoirs of Karl Rove, President Bush’s longtime political guru. Threshold says it has undertaken an extensive printing effort for anticipated demand, with 475,000 copies of “The Obama Nation” produced so far.

“The goal is to defeat Obama,” Mr. Corsi said in a telephone interview. “I don’t want Obama to be in office.”

He said he was planning to aid several conservative groups that intend to run advertisements against Mr. Obama this fall, though he would not name them.

Mr. Corsi, who has over the years also written critically about Senator John McCain, Mr. Obama’s probable Republican opponent, said he supported the Constitution Party presidential nominee, Chuck Baldwin, and had not been in touch with McCain aides. He called his reporting on Mr. Obama, which he stands by, “investigative,” not prosecutorial.

Ms. Matalin said in an interview that the book “was not designed to be, and does not set out to be, a political book,” calling it, rather, “a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that.” She said she was unaware of efforts to link it to any anti-Obama advertising.

"I look at the election from what's good for Viacom. I vote for what's good for Viacom. I vote, today, Viacom.

"I don't want to denigrate Kerry," he went on, "but from a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration is a better deal. Because the Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on. The Democrats are not bad people. . . . But from a Viacom standpoint, we believe the election of a Republican administration is better for our company."

Labels: corporatism, media consolidation, wingnuttia

Labels: bloggers, dogs

Wall Street’s losses are fast becoming India’s gain. After outsourcing much of their back-office work to India, banks are now exporting data-intensive jobs from higher up the food chain to cities that cost less than New York, London and Hong Kong, either at their own offices or to third parties.

Bank executives call this shift “knowledge process outsourcing,” “off-shoring” or “high-value outsourcing.” It is affecting just about everyone, including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Credit Suisse and Citibank — to name a few.

The jobs most affected so far are those with grueling hours, traditionally done by fresh-faced business school graduates — research associates and junior bankers on deal-making teams — paid in the low to mid six figures.

Cost-cutting in New York and London has already been brutal thus far this year, and there is more to come in the next few months. New York City financial firms expect to hand out some $18 billion less in pay and benefits this year than 2007, the largest one-year drop ever. Over all, United States banks will cut 200,000 employees by 2009, the banking consultancy Celent said in April.

The work these bankers were doing is not necessarily going away, though. Instead, jobs are popping up in places like India and Eastern Europe, often where healthier local markets exist.

Press officers for most banks asked not to be quoted or argued over semantics. For example, one spokesman said his bank’s fast-growing India support operations are not an outsourcing facility, but a “center of excellence”; another argued that large cost cuts at his bank’s New York and London headquarters were really “re-engineering” so the bank should not be included in such an article.

Labels: economic death watch, greed, outsourcing

"I believe we would have won Iowa, and Clinton today would therefore have been the nominee," former Clinton Communications Director Howard Wolfson told ABCNews.com.

Clinton finished third in the Iowa caucuses barely behind Edwards in second place and Obama in first. The momentum of the insurgent Obama campaign beating two better-known candidates -- not to mention an African-American winning in such an overwhelmingly white state -- changed the dynamics of the race forever.

Obama won 37.6 per cent of the vote. Edwards won 29.7 per cent and Clinton won 29.5 per cent, according to results posted by the Iowa Democratic Party.

"Our voters and Edwards' voters were the same people," Wolfson said the Clinton polls showed. "They were older, pro-union. Not all, but maybe two-thirds of them would have been for us and we would have barely beaten Obama."

Labels: icepick meet forehead, idiocy, You can't make this shit up

It took four days and a growing chorus of criticism from conservatives before George W. Bush on Monday matched John McCain’s tough stance on Russia. Having on Monday morning again been upstaged by the Republican presidential candidate, who had called for the US administration to come together with its allies in “universal condemnation of Russian aggression” in Georgia, Mr Bush finally followed suit.

I see George "Macaca" Allen is on Fox explaining why John McCain's gonzo antics trying to get us into a nuclear confrontation over Georgia shows why we desperately need to make him president as soon as possible. But I do notice that McCain is bragging about how he's been repeatedly on the phone talking with the President of Georgia (as has Obama) and generally conducting his own mini-foreign policy.

Labels: double standards, hypocrisy

You can look great in a swimsuit and still be a heart attack waiting to happen. And you can also be overweight and otherwise healthy.

A new study suggests that a surprising number of overweight people — about half — have normal blood pressure and cholesterol levels, while an equally startling number of trim people suffer from some of the ills associated with obesity.

The first national estimate of its kind bolsters the argument that you can be hefty but still healthy, or at least healthier than has been believed.

The results also show that stereotypes about body size can be misleading, and that even "less voluptuous" people can have risk factors commonly associated with obesity, said study author MaryFran Sowers, a University of Michigan obesity researcher.

"We're really talking about taking a look with a very different lens" at weight and health risks, Sowers said.

A regimen of supplements and lifestyle coaching is just as effective as statin medication for reducing levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) or "bad" cholesterol, and more effective in helping people lose weight, new research shows.

People with high cholesterol who took red yeast rice and fish oil daily and received counseling on diet, exercise and relaxation techniques showed the same 40 percent drop in LDL cholesterol seen among people taking 40 milligrams of simvastatin daily, Dr. David J. Becker of the University of Pennsylvania Health System's Chestnut Hill Hospital and colleagues found. And they pared off an average of 10 pounds over 12 weeks, compared to less than a pound for patients taking the statin.

[snip]

With a grant from the state of Pennsylvania, Becker and his team randomly assigned 74 patients to receive 40 milligrams of simvastatin (Zocor) daily along with printed information on lifestyle changes, or to three capsules of fish oil twice daily and 600 milligrams of red yeast rice daily along with the 12-week lifestyle program.

LDL cholesterol levels fell by 42.4 percent in the red yeast rice group and by 39.6 percent in the simvastatin group, not a statistically significant difference. Triglyceride levels didn't change in the statin group, but fell 29 percent in the red yeast rice group, probably because they were taking fish oil, according to Becker and his team.

People in the red yeast rice group lost an average of 4.7 kilograms (just over 10 pounds), compared to 0.3 kilograms (less than a pound) in the statin group.

Red yeast rice comes from fermenting red yeast with rice. Known as hong ku, the substance has been used as a medicine and food garnish in parts of Asia for centuries, Becker said. It contains a substance called monacolin-K that is nearly identical to the cholesterol-lowering drug lovastatin (Mevacor), as well as several other monacolins that may also have cholesterol-lowering properties.

People in the red yeast rice arm of the study were taking the equivalent of 10 to 15 mg of lovastatin, Becker said. "This lovastatin dosage is quite small, yet the effects we saw with the red yeast rice were akin to those one would generally see with a much higher dose of lovastatin."

Labels: weight

Labels: bloggers, satellite radio, talk radio

Labels: humor, sheer awesomeness

Hampered by years of violence, a decimated infrastructure, a lack of foreign investors and a flood of imports that undercut local businesses, Iraq’s private sector, particularly its small non-oil economy, has so far failed to flourish as its American patrons had hoped.

In its absence, the Iraqi government has been sustaining the economy the way it always has: by putting citizens on its payroll. Since 2005, according to federal budgets, the number of government employees has nearly doubled, to 2.3 million from 1.2 million.

The impetus is not only economic: In exchange for abandoning the insurgency that plunged the nation into civil war, many of the 100,000 members of civilian patrols known broadly as the Awakening movement have been promised jobs in the security forces or in reconstruction, though many Sunni Muslim members complain it is not happening quickly enough.

But this growth has not come without problems. Already, a huge wage increase to government workers that was instituted — but then suspended because of fears that it was pushing up inflation — has underscored the difficulties of being far and away the largest employer in an unstable country.

In 2006, 31 percent of Iraq’s labor force was working in the public sector, according to the agency for statistics in the Ministry of Planning. The agency expects that figure to reach 35 percent this year, about 5 percentage points short of where the C.I.A. estimated it to be on the eve of the 2003 invasion.

This figure is not atypical for the region, but it hardly indicates the free market state initially envisioned by the United States-led Coalition Provisional Authority, which pushed for full and rapid privatization in its first few months.

Labels: economic death watch, FUBAR, Iraq

Labels: cluelessness, George W. Bush, idiocy

Pilots are complaining that their airline bosses, desperate to cut costs, are forcing them to fly uncomfortably low on fuel.

Safety for passengers and crews could be compromised, they say.

The situation got bad enough three years ago, even before the latest surge in fuel prices, that NASA sent a safety alert to federal aviation officials.

There has been no action.

Since then, pilots, flight dispatchers and others have continued to sound off with their own warnings, yet the Federal Aviation Administration says there is no reason to order airlines to back off their effort to keep fuel loads to a minimum.

"We can't dabble in the business policies or the personnel policies of an airline," said FAA spokesman Les Dorr. He said there was no indication safety regulations were being violated.

The September 2005 safety alert was issued by NASA's confidential Aviation Safety Reporting System, which allows air crews to report safety problems without fear their names will be disclosed.

"What we found was that because they carried less fuel on the airplane, they were getting into situations where they had to tell air traffic control, 'I need to get on the ground,' " said Linda Connell, director of the NASA reporting system.

[snip]

Labor unions at two major airlines — American Airlines and US Airways — have filed complaints with the FAA, saying the airlines are pressuring members not to request spare fuel for flights.

American notified dispatchers on July 7 that their records on fuel approved for flights would be monitored, and dispatchers not abiding by company guidelines could ultimately be fired.

American said its fuel costs this year were expected to increase to $10 billion, a 52 percent over 2007. "The additional cost of carrying unnecessary fuel adversely affects American's financial success," the airline told dispatchers in a letter. Union officials responded that "it appears safety has become a second thought" for the company.

Labels: Bushonomics, deregulation

Welcome to Race for the White House on a busy Friday. I'm David Gregory -- happy to have you here. It's your stop for the fast pace, the bottom line, and every point of view in the room. Tonight, more on Edwards and the fallout from his admission today about a sexual affair: Is this another skeleton in the Democratic closet that Barack Obama must struggle to overcome? Will Edwards appear at the Democratic convention? All of that ahead.

Labels: David Gregory, hack journalism

Authorities say a North Carolina man will undergo a psychiatric evaluation after being jailed on a charge of threatening to kill Barack Obama.

Federal documents identified the man held Friday as 48-year-old Jerry M. Blanchard. A criminal complaint says witnesses overheard Blanchard twice last month threatening to kill the presumptive Democratic nominee.

A Secret Service agent wrote in court documents that Blanchard may have mental health issues related to recent head injuries. Blanchard denied making the threat, according to the documents.

The 5:20 TBA turned out to be his adoration session with lawmakers in the Cannon Caucus Room, where even committee chairmen arrived early, as if for the State of the Union. Capitol Police cleared the halls -- just as they do for the actual president. The Secret Service hustled him in through a side door -- just as they do for the actual president.

The government is not aware of any specific, credible threat against Obama, according to a law enforcement source familiar with the decision. But his office has received hate mail and calls and other "threatening materials" in the past and during his campaign, the source said.

[snip]

The Secret Service is authorized to provide protection to "major" candidates as determined by the advisory committee, under certain guidelines.

Among those guidelines, the candidate must be announced, be actively campaigning in at least 10 states and have some degree of prominence in the polls.

AMERICAN law enforcement agencies fear Barack Obama will be the target of a violent attack by white supremacists at the Democratic convention in Denver this month.
Ever since the Senator for Illinois emerged as the likely Democratic presidential candidate, neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and similar groups have been making racist threats.

In an interview on Fox News, Railton Loy, Grand Wizard of the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan International, said of Obama's presidential campaign: "I'm not going to have to worry about him, because somebody else down south is going to take him out... If that man is elected president, he'll be shot sure as hell. The hate would be so deep down south."

Meanwhile, websites and blogs have been buzzing with racist posts.

"Obama will die, KKK forever," says a post by "Rodney" on a blog run by a person identified only as Strider333. "The KKK or someone WILL assassinate Obama! If we get a N***** President all you N*****'s (sic] will think you've won and that the WHITE people will have to bow to you F*** THAT."

John W Hickenlooper, the Democrat Mayor of Denver, confirmed that he was aware of threats against Obama from white supremacists and other racist groups.

He added that the Denver Police Department was working closely with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Secret Service. He said: "We are looking at every possibility and making sure that we have prepared for every conceivable contingency. If someone is threatening violence we will go to great lengths to deal with that."

The federal government is providing Denver – and St Paul, Minnesota, where the Republicans are staging their convention at the start of next month – with $50m (£26m) each to cover the security costs of staging the conventions.

The Denver Police Department will nearly double in size, bringing in an additional 1,500 police officers from communities throughout Colorado and beyond. National Guard specialists trained to deal with biological, chemical, nuclear and radiological weapons will also be available.

Labels: Barack Obama, racism, wingnuttia

Labels: Barack Obama