From new photo ID requirements to permanently disenfranchising citizens with past felony convictions to ending same-day registration, many states have introduced bills and passed legislation this year that will put in place obstacles that make it significantly harder for millions of people to vote in 2012. Five million, in fact, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, an institute that focuses on issues such as voting rights and campaign reform.

In a report on the voting law changes the authors, Wendy R. Weiser and Lawrence Norden, write:

Ahead of the 2012 elections, a wave of legislation tightening restrictions on voting has suddenly swept across the country. More than five million Americans could be affected by the new rules already put in place this year—a number larger than the margin of victory in two of the last three presidential elections.

As writer Ari Berman points out in this video, these changes are coming “just in time for Barack Obama’s reelection campaign.” While those leading the charge for voter suppression laws cry foul on charges of intentional disenfranchisement, claiming the moral high ground as warriors against voter fraud, Berman points out in a recent Rolling Stone article, “A major probe by the Justice Department between 2002 and 2007 failed to prosecute a single person for going to the polls and impersonating an eligible voter, which the anti-fraud laws are supposedly designed to stop.” He continues:

Out of the 300 million votes cast in that period, federal prosecutors convicted only 86 people for voter fraud – and many of the cases involved immigrants and former felons who were simply unaware of their ineligibility. A much-hyped investigation in Wisconsin, meanwhile, led to the prosecution of only .0007 percent of the local electorate for alleged voter fraud. "Our democracy is under siege from an enemy so small it could be hiding anywhere," joked Stephen Colbert.

Writing for Al Jazeera, Heather Digby Parton gives some historical context to this current state of affairs, arguing that, against the interests of the wealthy and privileged, voting rights for all Americans “was one of the great American democratic accomplishments of the 20th century.”

In the United States, there has always been tension about the franchise, going all the way back to the beginning of the Republic. Aristocrats were afraid of it for the simple reason that it would mean the government might have to represent and defend people whose interests interfere with their own interests: to maintain their wealth and pass it down to their heirs.

Whenever you give the vote to poor people and others who need government's protections against the predations of privilege, you are endangering that arrangement - and the privileged fight back. Conservatives are traditionally their soldiers in that battle….[Today] conservatives have been able to leverage racial resentment and a sort of perverted populism to help their wealthy benefactors keep their money.

The Brennan Center for Justice report looks to be “the first full accounting and analysis of this year's voting cutbacks” and seeing them all together—along with their possible consequences on future elections—is sobering, to say the least. It begs us to keep in mind what Utne Reader associate editor Danielle Magnuson wrote in an earlier post on this topic: “voting for our leaders is not a privilege but a sacred right. A disenfranchised person’s vote has the same weight as that of a wealthy and powerful person—and that’s the way it should remain.” Unfortunately, many in charge around the country seem to disagree.

Source: Brennan Center for Justice, Rolling Stone, Al Jazeera 

Image by robertpalmer, licensed under Creative Commons. 

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Obvious news, finally quantified: Two sociologists have analyzed 42 years of Rolling Stone covers and determined that women are increasingly presented as sex objects.

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Gay rights improved by French fries. RIP, Wallace McCain (d. May 13, 2011).

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A recent Wall Street Journal editorial said that WikiLeaks and News Of The World hacking are “largely the same story.” You can’t make it up.

Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. are getting lambasted for the phone-hacking scandal. Call it eye-for-an-eye, but the hacker collective called LulzSec now has The Sun and News of the World in their crosshairs. As LulzSec’s twitter account says, “expect the lulz to flow in coming days.”

And the most misleading headline of the week award goes to…“Michele Bachmann’s Migraines: Joan Didion Weighs In”.

Paul Ford, writing for New York, mourns the end of endings brought about by social media.

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If you missed the recent episode of Frontline about the Kill/Capture campaign in Afghanistan, watch it now.

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Image by iluvcocacola, licensed under Creative Commons. 

This piece was originally published by TomDispatch.

Less than a year ago, General David Petraeus saluted smartly and pledged his loyal support for President Obama’s decision to start withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan in July 2011. In December, when Obama decided (for the second time in 2009) to add tens of thousands of additional American forces to the war, he also slapped an 18-month deadline on the military to turn the situation around and begin handing security over to the bedraggled Afghan National Army and police. Speaking to the nation from West Point, Obama said that he’d ordered American forces to start withdrawing from Afghanistan at that time.

Here’s the exchange, between Obama, Petraeus, and Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as reported by Jonathan Alter in his new book, The Promise: President Obama, Year One:

OBAMA: "I want you to be honest with me. You can do this in 18 months?"

PETRAEUS: "Sir, I'm confident we can train and hand over to the ANA [Afghan National Army] in that time frame."

OBAMA: "If you can't do the things you say you can in 18 months, then no one is going to suggest we stay, right?"

PETRAEUS: "Yes, sir, in agreement."

MULLEN: "Yes, sir."

That seems unequivocal, doesn’t it? Vice President Joe Biden, famously dissed as Joe Bite-Me by one of the now-disgraced aides of General Stanley McChrystal in the Rolling Stone profile that got him fired, seems to think so. Said Biden, again according to Alter: “In July of 2011 you're going to see a whole lot of people moving out. Bet on it.”

In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of the U.S. military, however, things are rarely what they seem. Petraeus, the Centcom commander “demoted” in order to replace McChrystal as U.S. war commander in Afghanistan, seems to be having second thoughts about what will happen next July—a \nd those second thoughts are being echoed and amplified by a phalanx of hawks, neoconservatives, and spokesmen for the counterinsurgency (COIN) cult, including Henry Kissinger, the Heritage Foundation, and the editorial pages of the Washington Post. Chiming in, too, are the lock-step members of the Republican caucus on Capitol Hill, led by Senator John McCain.

In testimony before Congress just last week, Petraeus chose his words carefully, but clearly wasn’t buying the notion that the July deadline means much, nor did he put significant stock in the fact that President Obama has ordered a top-to-bottom review of Afghan policy in December. According to the White House, that review will be a make-or-break assessment of whether the Pentagon is making any progress in the nine-year-long conflict against the Taliban.

In his recent Senate testimony—before he fainted, and afterwards—Petraeus minimized the significance of the December review and cavalierly declared that he “would not make too much of it.” Pressed by McCain, the general flouted Biden’s view by claiming that the deadline is a date “when a process begins [and] not the date when the U.S. heads for the exits.”

The Right’s Marching Orders for the President

Petraeus’s defiant declaration that he wasn’t putting much stock in the president's intending to hold the military command accountable for its failure in Afghanistan next December earned him an instant rebuke from the White House. Now, that same Petraeus is in charge.

The dispute over the meaning of July 2011 is, and will remain, at the very heart of the divisions within the Obama administration over Afghan policy.

Last December, in that West Point speech, Obama tried to split the difference, giving the generals what they wanted—a lot more troops—but fixing a date for the start of a withdrawal. It was hardly a courageous decision. Under intense pressure from Petraeus, McChrystal, and the GOP, Obama assented to the addition of 30,000 U.S. troops, ignoring the fact that McChrystal’s unseemly lobbying for the escalation amounted to a Douglas MacArthur-like defiance of the primacy of civilian control of the military. (Indeed, after a speech McChrystal gave in London insouciantly rejecting Biden’s scaled-down approach to the war, Obama summoned the runaway general to a tarmac outside Copenhagen and read him the riot act in Air Force One.)

If Obama’s Afghan decision was a cave-in to the brass and a potential generals’ revolt, the president also added that kicker of a deadline to the mix, not only placating his political base and minimizing Democratic unhappiness in Congress, but creating a trap of sorts for Petraeus and McChrystal.  The message was clear enough: deliver the goods, and fast, or we’re heading out, whether the job is finished or not.

Since then, Petraeus and McChrystal—backed by their chief enabler, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, a Republican holdover appointed to his position by George W. Bush—took every chance they could to downplay and scoff at the deadline.

By appointing Petraeus last Wednesday, Obama took the easy way out of the crisis created by McChrystal’s shocking comments in Rolling Stone. It might not be inappropriate to quote that prescient British expert on Afghan policy, Peter Townsend, who said of the appointment: “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.”

On the other hand, Petraeus is not simply another McChrystal. While McChrystal implemented COIN doctrine, mixing in his obsession with “kinetic operations” by U.S. Special Forces, Petraeus literally wrote the book—namely, The U.S Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

If the COIN cult has a guru (whom all obey unquestioningly), it’s Petraeus. The aura that surrounds him, especially among the chattering classes of the Washington punditocracy, is palpable, and he has a vast well of support among Republicans and assorted right-wingers on Capitol Hill, including the Holy Trinity: John McCain, Lindsay Graham, and Joe Lieberman. Not surprisingly, there have been frequent mentions of Petraeus as a candidate for the GOP nomination for president in 2012, although Obama’s deft selection of Petraeus seems, once and for all, to have ruled out that option, since the general will be very busy on the other side of the globe for quite a while.

Even before the announcement that Petraeus had the job, the right’s mighty Wurlitzer had begun to blast out its critique of the supposedly pernicious effects of the July deadline. The Heritage Foundation, in an official statement, proclaimed: “The artificial Afghanistan withdrawal deadline has obviously caused some of our military leaders to question our strategy in Afghanistan... We don’t need an artificial timeline for withdrawal. We need a strategy for victory.”

Writing in the Washington Post on June 24, Henry Kissinger cleared his throat and harrumphed: “The central premise [of Obama’s strategy] is that, at some early point, the United States will be able to turn over security responsibilities to an Afghan government and national army whose writ is running across the entire country. This turnover is to begin next summer. Neither the premise nor the deadline is realistic... Artificial deadlines should be abandoned.”

And the Post itself, in the latest of a long-running series of post-9/11 hawkish editorials, gave Obama his marching orders: “He… should clarify what his July 2011 deadline means. Is it the moment when ‘you are going to see a whole lot of people moving out,’ as Vice President Biden has said, or ‘the point at which a process begins… at a rate to be determined by conditions at the time,’ as General Petraeus testified? We hope that the appointment of General Petraeus means the president’s acceptance of the general’s standard.”

Is the COIN Cult Ascendant?

It’s too early to say whether Obama’s decision to name Petraeus to replace his protégé McChrystal carries any real significance when it comes to the evolution of his Afghan war policy. The McChrystal crisis erupted so quickly that Obama had no time to carefully consider who might replace him and Petraeus undoubtedly seemed like the obvious choice, if the point was to minimize the domestic political risks involved.

Still, it’s worrying. Petraeus’s COIN policy logically demands a decade-long war, involving labor-intensive (and military-centric) nation-building, waged village by village and valley by valley, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars and countless U.S., NATO, and Afghan casualties, including civilians. That idea doesn’t in the least square with the idea that significant numbers of troops will start leaving Afghanistan next summer. Indeed, Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer with long experience in the Middle East and South Asia, who headed Obama’s first Afghan policy review in February 2009, told me (for an article in Rolling Stone last month) that it’s not inconceivable the military will ask for even more troops, not agree to fewer, next year.

The Post is right, however, that Obama needs to grapple seriously with the deep divisions in his administration. Having ousted one rebellious general, the president now has little choice but to confront—or cave in to—the entire COIN cult, including its guru.

If Obama decides to take them on, he’ll have the support of many traditionalists in the U.S. armed forces who reject the cult’s preaching. Above all, his key ally is bound to be those pesky facts on the ground.

Afghanistan is the place where theories of warfare go to die, and if the COIN theory isn’t dead yet, it’s utterly failed so far to prove itself. The vaunted February offensive into the dusty hamlet of Marja in Helmand province has unraveled. The offensive into Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban and a seething tangle of tribal and religious factions, once touted as the potential turning point of the entire war, has been postponed indefinitely. After nine years, the Pentagon has little to show for its efforts, except ever-rising casualties and money spent.

Perhaps Obama is still counting on U.S. soldiers to reverse the Taliban’s momentum and win the war, even though administration officials have repeatedly rejected the notion that Afghanistan can be won militarily. David Petraeus or no, the reality is that the war will end with a political settlement involving President Karzai’s government, various Afghan warlords and power brokers, the remnants of the old Northern Alliance, the Taliban, and the Taliban’s sponsors in Pakistan.

Making all that work and winning the support of Afghanistan’s neighbors—including India, Iran, and Russia—will be exceedingly hard.  If Obama’s diplomats managed to pull it off, the Afghanistan that America left behind might be modestly stable. On the other hand, it won’t be pretty to look at it. It will be a decentralized mess, an uneasy balance between enlightened Afghans and benighted, Islamic fundamentalist ones, and no doubt many future political disagreements will be settled not in conference rooms but in gun battles. Three things it won’t be: It won’t be Switzerland. It won’t be a base for Al Qaeda. And it won’t be host to tens of thousands of U.S. and NATO troops.

The only silver lining in the Petraeus cloud is that the general has close ties to the military in Pakistan who slyly accept U.S. aid while funneling support to the insurgency in Afghanistan. If Obama decides to pursue a political and diplomatic solution between now and next July, Petraeus’s Pakistan connection would be useful indeed. Time, however, is running out.

Robert Dreyfuss is an independent journalist in the Washington, D.C., area. He is a contributing editor at the Nation magazine, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone and Mother Jones. His blog, The Dreyfuss Report, appears at the Nation’s website. His book, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, was published by Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books in 2005.  Listen to Dreyfuss in the latest TomCast audio interview discussing Obama's war with the military by clicking here, or to download to your iPod, here.

Copyright 2010 Robert Dreyfuss

Image by the Department of Defense.

As election day nears, new stories of voter suppression and improper voter purges continue to come to light. The polls that pundits tend to focus on may not mean much, as huge numbers of voters will likely be unable to vote on November 4.

States have purged some 13 million voters from the voter rolls since 2004, Joe Rothstein reports for U.S. Politics Today. According to Rothstein, 17 percent of registered voters in the vital swing state of Colorado have been dropped from the rolls, and 10 percent of voters have been dropped in Missouri. CNN reports that 50,000 people have had their voter registrations “flagged,” calling the viability of their votes into question, and “4,500 of those people are having their citizenship questioned and the burden is on them to prove eligibility to vote.”

Even if people manage to get on the voter rolls, some states may not be ready for the massive influx of voters on election day. The Virginia NAACP recently sued Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, a Democrat, claiming that the state has failed to prepare for all the voters, the Associated Press reports. The complaint points out that many polling stations were overwhelmed in the February primaries, with some precincts resorting to makeshift ballots that were later thrown out. The NAACP believes November 4th could be even worse, warning that current preparation could “result in a meltdown on Election Day.”

North Carolina residents who don’t have their votes counted likely will be in good company. More than 1.6 million votes weren’t counted in 2004, according to Robert F. Kenney and Greg Palast writing for Rolling Stone, and the tactics used to suppress those votes could get worse this year. Kennedy and Palast outline six ways that people are going to try and steal votes, including obstructing of voter registration drives, illegitimate voter purges, and challenging and rejecting provisional and “spoiled” ballots.

The groundwork for this voter suppression has been laid by GOP operatives over the past few election cycles, Andrew Gumble writes for the Nation. Barack Obama’s commanding lead in the polls won’t make the illegal and undemocratic efforts to steal people’s votes go away, it just makes them more desperate.

The best way to stop the election from being stolen is to make the election into a blowout, Robert Lovato writes for New America Media. That way, manipulated and stolen votes won’t matter as much. If that doesn’t work, Lovato floats the idea of a general strike, protests, office-takeovers, and other non-violent protest demonstrations.

One of the organizations trying to make sure the vote goes as smoothly as possible is the Video the Vote project, an organization profiled by the New York Times that is supplying volunteers with video cameras to document any election misconduct. The Times also points to the Voter Suppression Wiki and the Election Protection Wiki as user-generated efforts to protect people’s votes on election day.

Image by Ceridwen, licensed under Creative Commons.

It’s been an eventful week for the hip-hop artist Nas. Wednesday afternoon, he joined ColorofChange.org and MoveOn.org outside of Fox News Channel’s New York City headquarters to protest the network's coverage of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign—treatment that he and the groups allege is racist. (SOHH and Racewire have photos of the demonstration.)

The rapper then proceeded to an appearance on the Colbert Report with a 620,127-signature petition demanding that network president Roger Ailes "find a solution to address racial stereotyping and hate-mongering before it hits the airwaves." He also performed the anti-Fox track “Sly Fox” from his new album, which debuted at #1 on Tuesday after months of controversy over its title. Nas originally planned to call the LP Nigger, but abandoned the idea amid qualms from music retailers and his label. Ultimately, he released the album eponymously.

Nas' Fox-slamming and Billboard chart–topping comes at a time of heightened racial tensions in the media: not just criticism of Fox’s Obama coverage, but last week’s New Yorker cover brouhaha and ongoing questions about the role that race plays in Obama’s campaign. This week, the Root explores younger generations’ relationship to race, with a series of essays about Generation Y’s post-racist ambitions, its use of the n-word, and its supposed colorblindness. 

Image by kokuziu, licensed under Creative Commons.

Just the other day I was visiting an ex whom I still count as a good friend, and she showed me a tiny artifact of our relationship, in the form of a mix tape I made for her nearly 10 years ago. I immediately became both embarrassed and wistful as I studied its faded magazine-cutout cover art and hastily typed-up track listing, a veritable time capsule of indie rock and electronica circa 1998—and, more importantly, a catalog of the songs we listened to regularly when we began dating: Elliott Smith, Yo La Tengo, Cornershop, Daft Punk.

Chances are, if you came of age in the '90s and have an even glancing relationship to music, you made your fair share of mix tapes (and, later, mix CDs) for various friends and lovers. If those parties reciprocated, and if you are a pack rat, their lovingly curated compilations are probably still in storage somewhere in your home. Go dig one up. Maybe play it once or twice, if you’re feeling nostalgic (and if you still have a tape deck somewhere), and let the aforementioned wistfulness wash over you.

Then shake it off, you big sap, and submit it to Cassette From My Ex, where several contributors have already shared their musical mementos of past relationships, along with track listings, liner notes, accompanying essays, and even sound clips. “Because we met during the fleeting moment at millennium’s end when analog and digital media coexisted,” writes one contributor, “we could sign out of our Hotmail accounts and then step over to our stereos to express to our affections through mixed tapes.”

Indeed, those of us who still have actual mix tapes—who remember when they were the de facto album format; who occasionally betray our ages in conversations about our cherished cassette copy of Thriller, purchased at Sam Goody, shortly after its release; who once felt that distinctions like Dolby NR and High Bias and Type IV were important considerations—may find that by revisiting this obsolete format now, in the age of mp3s, our sentimentality is triggered almost as much by the form (that little plastic cartridge) as by its content (erstwhile love songs). In fact, a sort of eulogy for the cassette format was delivered in this space not long ago: “By giving listeners the ability to copy and share music,” Brian Joseph Davis wrote in Utne, “tape not only entered a copyright debate that still rages, but also became a way for an entire generation to express friendship, cultural affinity, and even love.” Davis' piece speaks not only to the cassette's versatile function as a musical love letter, but its role as an arguably populist medium—a convenient and controversial way for people to redistribute music; a sort of precursor to the file-sharing revolution of the late '90s. 

Cassette From My Ex is a natural outgrowth of our culture’s burgeoning need to document experience using various media—in this case, the lost art of charmingly cobbled-together, obsolete cassette tapes—and the proliferation of personal narrative, a formula employed to great effect by Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield in his 2006 memoir Love Is a Mix Tape, which expands Cassette From My Ex’s mission into a moving personal narrative as carefully crafted as the mixes he and his late wife assembled for each other. Cassette From My Ex continues in the spirit of Sheffield’s book, with prose contributions that range from irreverently funny to oddly touching, often within the same piece.

Image by kumar303, licensed under Creative Commons.