Wal-Mart Watch: States get tired of keeping Wal-Mart on welfare:

A survey by Georgia officials found that more than 10,000 children of Wal-Mart employees were in the state’s health program for children at an annual cost of nearly $10 million to taxpayers. A North Carolina hospital found that 31 percent of 1,900 patients who described themselves as Wal-Mart employees were on Medicaid, while an additional 16 percent had no insurance at all. And backers of a measure that will be on California’s ballot tomorrow, which would force big employers like Wal-Mart to either provide affordable health insurance to their workers or pay into a state insurance pool, say Wal-Mart employees without company insurance are costing California’s state health care programs an estimated $32 million a year.

Meanwhile, in Washington State, where the insurance commissioner is pushing the legislature to adopt a law similar to the one on the California ballot, companies that struggle to compete with Wal-Mart while insuring most of their own workers have become openly critical. “Socially, we’re engaged in a race to the bottom,” said Craig Cole, the chief executive of Brown & Cole Stores, a supermarket chain that employs about 2,000 workers in Washington and adjoining states and pays for insurance coverage for about 95 percent of its employees. “Do we want to allow competition based on exploitation of the work force?” he asked. Wal-Mart, which disputes the California figures and says it cannot verify the Georgia and North Carolina data, says its employees are largely insured. It cites internal surveys indicating that 90 percent of its employees have insurance – many through means other than Wal-Mart’s coverage because they are senior citizens on Medicare, students covered by their parents’ policies or employees with second jobs or working spouses. “We are doing everything we can to take care of our associates and not shift costs,” Ms. Chambers said.

Shifting costs is, of course, exactly what Wal=Mart is doing by keeping its employees among the working poor, dependent on the very government assistance programs Wal-Mart-backed politicians are so eagerly working to dismantle.

Yes:

“I’m going to apply the Bush standard to this,” Mr. Kerry said. “Yesterday, George Bush said, and I quote him: ‘A political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief when it comes to your security.’ ”

“Well, Mr. President, I agree with you,” he said, adding that Mr. Bush had “jumped to conclusions” on links between President Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11 attacks, on Iraq’s unconventional weapons and on how Iraqis would greet American troops.

“Mr. President, here are the facts that every American can understand, it seems, except for you,” he said of the explosives. “They’re not where they’re supposed to be. You were warned to guard them. You didn’t guard them. They’re not secure.

“And guess what? According to George Bush’s own words, he shouldn’t be our commander in chief. And I couldn’t agree more.”

Via Noam Scheiber, a Deomocratic operative argues that Rove’s insistence on running a national campaign will be Bush’s downfall Tuesday:

Bush is doing relatively, if modestly, better than to be expected out side of the battlegrounds–even in hardcore Democratic states–because they’ve been heavily buying national cable since March. And even on cable they’ve accumulated some real message over all those months. Kerry has done relatively little, though the DNC has done some over the past months. In a place like Hawaii, locals have seen hundreds and hundreds of Bush spots, almost none on the other side. It’s not likely, in the end, to matter in terms of electoral votes, but a central tenet of Rove-ism has always been to affect national numbers and create the sense of inevitability.

Just as long as we win both the electoral and the popular vote.

Human Rights Watch releases a new report on the use of anti-terrorism law as a legislative club against the Mapuche people in Chile:

Mapuche defendants charged with terrorist acts face unequal trials for crimes that do not pose a direct threat to life, liberty or physical integrity. The use of extraordinary procedures, which were established in the antiterrorism law to tackle the most extreme political violence, is wholly unjustified when dealing with crimes attributed to the Mapuche that are mostly against property. “Chile’s antiterrorism law is inapplicable to these criminal acts. The government’s use of this law against the Mapuche violates Chile’s legal obligations to ensure the rights of everyone, including the Mapuche, to due process,” said José Miguel Vivanco, executive director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch. “To make matters worse, when the Mapuche appear before military courts, either as defendants or victims of abuses, they face a true denial of justice.”

Greg Palast on the purge-to-be:

A secret document obtained from inside Bush campaign headquarters in Florida suggests a plan – possibly in violation of US law – to disrupt voting in the state’s African-American voting districts, a BBC Newsnight investigation reveals. Two e-mails, prepared for the executive director of the Bush campaign in Florida and the campaign’s national research director in Washington DC, contain a 15-page so-called “caging list”. It lists 1,886 names and addresses of voters in predominantly black and traditionally Democrat areas of Jacksonville, Florida. An elections supervisor in Tallahassee, when shown the list, told Newsnight: “The only possible reason why they would keep such a thing is to challenge voters on election day.”

Ion Sancho, a Democrat, noted that Florida law allows political party operatives inside polling stations to stop voters from obtaining a ballot. They may then only vote “provisionally” after signing an affidavit attesting to their legal voting status. Mass challenges have never occurred in Florida. Indeed, says Mr Sancho, not one challenge has been made to a voter “in the 16 years I’ve been supervisor of elections.” “Quite frankly, this process can be used to slow down the voting process and cause chaos on election day; and discourage voters from voting.” Sancho calls it “intimidation.” And it may be illegal.

The Exterminator writes torture into law:

on October 8, the House Republican leadership—with Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Leader Tom DeLay in charge—rolled over the Democrats to pass the 9-11 Recommendations Implementation Act, H.R. 10, ostensibly to enact recommendations by the bipartisan, independent 9-11 Commission to actually make our intelligence apparatus live up to its name. As drafted—with no input at all from the Democrats—section 3032 of the bill empowers the secretary of homeland security to remove “certain aliens,” including those on American soil, from the protections of the international Covenant Against Torture (which the U.S. signed) when the secretary finds those “aliens” a danger to the U.S. Then—dig this—section 3033 gives this imperious secretary of homeland security essentially unchecked power to deport or transfer a foreign person to any country in the world—regardless of whether the foreign person is a citizen of that country or has ever been there. This means, as debate in the House conclusively confirmed, that this person detained by us can be sent to countries that torture their prisoners, so that the torturers can extract information from them that our interrogators can’t. And some of these detainees have no U.S. charges against them. As noted here before, these “extraordinary renditions,” as they’re known in the torture trade, have already been conducted secretly by the CIA.

Good move, Yale:

Responding to a critical shortage of flu shots in New Haven, the University has transferred 5,000 doses of the influenza virus vaccine to the city for distribution to high-risk patients. Mayor John DeStefano Jr. and University Vice President for New Haven and State Affairs Bruce Alexander, along with health officials for local clinics and the city, announced the transfer in a press conference yesterday at Hill Health Center. They said the shots will be administered only to people at high risk for complications resulting from the flu, specifically those over the age of 65, children under two years old and people with chronic diseases. New Haven Health Department Director William Quinn said the University’s action is crucial to combating the potentially fatal virus in the city. He said 36,000 people die each year in the United States from the flu. “This is going to save lives,” Quinn said. “It’s that simple.” Quinn said the transfer increases the city’s number of available shots from 1,200 to 6,200.

Zimbabwe expels Cosatu representatives:

Zimbabwe police have expelled a South African trade union mission for defying a ban to enter the country. Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) officials say they had obtained a court order allowing them to stay until Wednesday afternoon. But the government has described their trip to assess conditions in the country as “not acceptable”. The cabinet ordered their deportation after the group refused to guarantee not to meet with certain civic groups.

“We think that the attitude of the Zimbabwe government borders on criminality,” a deported Cosatu official Simon Boshielo told the BBC’s Network Africa programme. Members of the 12-member delegation had been held under armed guard at Harare International Airport for much of Tuesday, following a cabinet decision to cut short their visit…Speaking from Polokwane in northern South Africa, Mr Boshielo said police had initially told them were being taken to their hotel for the night. “Suddenly we discovered during the course of the drive that we were being taken to the border.” “They dumped us at the bridge [between the countries]. And we organised our own trip from there,” he said.

The Zimbabwe government has defended the decision to expel the unionists, saying Zimbabwe was not an extension of South Africa. “Remember, Cosatu means Confederation of South African Trade Unions, not Confederation of Southern African Trade Unions,” government spokesman George Charamba told South African state radio. “They are not a super-trade union. They’re not a super-government,” he said.

If Bush loses on Tuesday, how much do you think he’ll try to ram through before January. He doesn’t strike me as one to be held back by a perceived lack of legitimacy, at least if recent history is any guide. Will we see hastily-composed legislation aimed to push forward some of the more radical parts of the Bush domestic agenda over the next months?

The YDN reports on yesterday’s Fair Share Coalition postcard action:

In five hours yesterday on Cross Campus, the coalition gathered around 500 postcards — two each from 250 Yale students — in support of further negotiations between the University and the city government. Formed in the spring of this year, the coalition is a joint effort of 16 Yale student groups to convince the University to pay taxes the coalition believes Yale owes to the community of New Haven. The postcards contained a three-point message, asking the University to make up for revenue lost due to Yale’s tax-exempt status, to annually contribute an amount of money tied to Yale’s growth, and to ensure the contribution is accompanied by a commitment to benefit the New Haven community.

At the end of the day, the postcards were delivered to Yale Vice President for New Haven and State Affairs Bruce Alexander and the office of New Haven Mayor John DeStefano Jr. Although DeStefano was not present at the time of delivery, Alexander was and met with representatives of the coalition. Phoebe Rounds ’07, a member of the group, said Alexander expressed interest in meeting with students to discuss their respective views for the future of the Yale-New Haven relationship. “We’re all coming together to have this meeting about our collective concerns,” Rounds said. “I think we all look at this as a really exciting opportunity to pursue partnership between the University and the city.”…Joshua Eidelson ’06, a member of the coalition, said although the University makes some payments in lieu of taxes to the city as well as taxes on its for-profit property, he feels that the University is still not fulfilling its responsibility to the community. “Since 1990, Yale has tripled in growth. The city, unfortunately, has not,” he said. “At a time when property taxes have gone up and everybody else is shouldering the burden, we think that Yale should step up to the plate.”