duh

Look, I know as well as anyone that it’s really up the party who they choose as their nominee and I’m fine with the whole delgate, convention thing. But can someone please tell me how it is at all fair in any way that Florida and Michigan are getting to seat any of their delegates? I mean, as I understand things, a while before the election, the DNC told these states (and thier voters) that they were not going to get to seat their delegates. That did 2 things: 1) some, maybe most of the voters did not even vote since they knew their votes would not be counted and 2) the candidates did not campaign in those states.

To now allow delgations from those states is quite unfair to the voters of those states that did not vote and the candidates who did not campaign as hard. What the fuck man?

I’ve seen a lot of stories in the media today about how Senator Fumo so shockingly said what he said, but almost none about the real fight here for the rights of homosexuals to couple. What the fuck is going on? A couple of people (usually very critical of the Senator) seem to be getting the real story (here and here) . People, see through the BS and find the issue here: There may be a constitutional amendment on the ballot come November (remember 2004??) about Gay marriage (and in this case this one could be really bad, banning civil unions as well) that is only going to benefit McCain and the Bigoted/Racist Republican scum.

The fight is on. Support the people who are fighting for us on this!

The fight

Senator Fumo makes his point in a rather unorthodox way. (follow up explanation)

Glad to see that the House is sticking to their guns on this FISA/Wiretapping issue. This is so huge and our reps deserve props for their effort. Here in this article on ARS you can see that their newly proposed bill is quite awesome. Call your rep and support their efforts in this fight!

Nice to see that some congressmen are standing up to the president on this wiretap issue.. I wish I could say the same for our US Senators (even ones I voted for!)

If our nation is left vulnerable in the coming months, it will not be because we don’t have enough domestic spying powers.  It will be because your Administration has not done enough to defeat terrorist organizations – including al Qaeda — that have gained strength since 9/11.  We do not have nearly enough linguists to translate the reams of information we currently collect.  We do not have enough intelligence officers who can penetrate the hardest targets, such as al Qaeda.  We have surged so many intelligence resources into Iraq that we have taken our eye off the ball in Afghanistan and Pakistan. As a result, you have allowed al Qaeda to reconstitute itself on your watch.
You have also suggested that Congress must grant retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies.  As someone who has been briefed on our most sensitive intelligence programs, I can see no argument why the future security of our country depends on whether past actions of telecommunications companies are immunized.

Um Yup! from a letter to GWB from Congressman Reyes of Texas.

Ok.. so as if I haven’t complained enough about the fucked up primary process we use to choose our nominee here comes something else to piss me off. Howard Dean is calling for Obama and Clinton to get into a room and decide who is going to be the nominee.. forget the convention and the delegates and the ‘democratic’ process (the way the super delegates and primarys work are hardly democratic, but that’s another story)… he thinks that we should just anoint someone right off.

Now the election at this point is coming down to who can raise more money and last all the way to the convention since clearly neither is going to win this thing before then. However, if one has to drop out due to money issues, well.. you can see how that would work out.

In some ways I think that the primaries are for us, the democratic voters to decide who we want to represnet us, but on the other hand it’s really up to the DNC right? I mean, they decide weather states can pledge delegates to their convention (see florida). They choose the rules of the whole deal. Why should we expect that we could simply have some transparent way to choose? Why can’t we just have a nationwide popular vote to choose our nominee?

I wish there was some other way to be involved in politcs.. some other party I could choose.. but that’s just hope and in America that only gets you so far.

http://www.legitgov.org/nh_machine_vs_paper.html

also some good stuff on bradblog (http://bradblog.com/) about this same topic.. The interesting thing is that there are paper ballots for these counties but it would take a challenge by Obama to force a manual recount and I would bet that he wouldn’t want to look like a sore looser here so I highly doubt they will do anything. These are the same machines that were on “Hacking Democracy” one of my favorite documentaries on the subject.

There is no doubt in my mind these machines were hacked.. none.

I’ve been telling anyone who would listen for about 3 years now about the fraudulent recount effort of the 2004 presidential election in Ohio that would (in my opinion) have proved that the election was stolen by the evil slimy Bush bastards. It was also recounted quite well in the HBO documentary “HackingDemocracy“. Well, two of the election workers involved were charged with rigging the recount and they have been found guilty and sentenced to 18 months in jail. This is good news. The bad news is multi-faceted. First I’m upset that they only got 18 months. Clearly what they did was tantamount to treason and they should have at least gotten life in prison for subverting our constitution. Second I’m upset becasue you won’t find anywhere in the MSM this story.. I looked with no luck and I’m sure you won’t see this on TV. Lastly, I’m most upset because this does nothing to remove Bush from the White House.. at the least, congress could investigate.. According to Bradblog only 6 Kerry votes in each Ohio precinct would have made him the winner. oh wait.. the ballots have been destroyed even though a Judge ordered them saved.. hmn.. interesting. Fuckers. Why aren’t more of us upset about this?

I fucking hate the Iowa caucus.. it simply determines too much. And its not all their fault either.. it’s the god dammed media attention it gets. Fuck those assholes man..

oh.. a much more well written piece that is similar in view to mine is found on Slate.

I know it and you know it but yet nobody seems to do anything about it. At least I complain to my friends, post here, and pretty much get 0% of my news from (non-bbc) television but still I’m just a small percentage of the potential voters in america. Perhaps if we had a media machine focused on the candidates and what they are all about people would be more interested in voting. Perhaps someone like Dennis Kucinich or Bill Richardson would actually be doing better in the polls if the media stopped focusing on “the front runners”.

Here is a piece in Ars Techica that highlights a very interesting report from The Project for Excellence in Journalism which discusses this very issue. It’s a great read and it should inspire us to demand more from our media.. Will it?