FireDogLake Book Salon: Billionaires & Ballot Bandits

Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps book chat at FireDogLake has finished but check out what was said at here.

Read the first chapter before you chat ‘Colonels in Mirrored Sunglasses‘
Host Watertiger (Dependable Renegade)
Because Americans aren’t anxious enough, forced to digest anemic monthly jobs numbers, an economy teetering on the precipice, the steady stream of illegal home foreclosures, a Democratic President poised to shiv Social Security and Medicare, and the country’s insidious metamorphosis into a security state, they also have to worry about something so basic as the right to vote. That’s because über-bully Karl Rove, not content to have put the Dauphin of Dumbfuckistan in the White House, decided that controlling the Executive Branch wasn’t enough. Like his Machievellian comrade and patron, Charles Koch, he “want[ed] his fair share – and that’s all of it.” Hey, if that means depriving American citizens of their civil rights, well, so be it. There are always going to be winners and losers, amirite? Whaddya gonna do about it?
Enter Greg Palast. Let me rephrase: ENTER Greg Palast. Many of you may already be familiar with Palast’s investigative reports on everything from our decaying democracy to the looting of African economies that have appeared in The Guardian, the BBC, Rolling Stone, Harper’s and The Nation, among others. The author of New York Times bestsellers, he’s a muckraker of the best sort, nonpartisan and intrepid, digging for information while our lazy, turgid American media gets its information from PR flaks and cocktail weenie gossip.
Palast recognizes that the greatest threat to the survival of the American Experiment is the silencing of our collective voice. So he set out to follow the money behind the Koch-and-Rove Show’s organized effort to “shut it down” if I may paraphrase Todd Akin [R-Ignorant Dipshit]. The result? Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps. With comics by the irrepressible Ted Rall, Palast’s lastest outlines precisely how these sociopaths (I know, I use that word a lot, but hey, shoes that fit) have begun to dismantle the voting process and what we, the people, can do to repair the damage and take back our country from these arrogant plutocrats. And yes, it’s up to us, because we can’t rely on the bought-and-paid-for government to do it for us.
I wanted to note that these two pertinent stories hit the wires on Friday:
GOP efforts to purge the voter rolls in Florida and Colorado have so far come up with almost no noncitzens, NPR reports. The two states fought to gain access to an immigration database compiled by the Department of Homeland Security to compare against their voter rolls. Armed with this federal database, Florida claims the purge has identified “several” noncitizens out of 2,600 names, while Colorado admits they have “no confirmed noncitizens.”
And this:
After previously trying to restrict early voting, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted (R) today reversed course on his decision to block county boards of elections from setting their own early voting hours in the days leading up to the November election.
It’s something, but we need more. Much, much more. And with that, I want to welcome Greg Palast and Ted Rall to Firedoglake’s Book Salon!