The current effort by Republican-fascists to steal elections in Florida, Georgia and elsewhere by the same kind of Brooks Brothers riot tactics which they stole the 2000 election proves that one of the biggest acts of malfeasance by Democrats during the brief years they controlled the federal government under Barack Obama was that they didn't adopt laws to prevent the stealing of federal elections*.
Here are some ideas I proposed in June 2006 that I think are still worth considering.
- We need one national ballot form for the national constitutional offices, President, Vice-President, Senator, Congressman. These are the only four offices that have a direct impact on us all. The citizens of the entire country have a right to these four offices being filled in a completely honest way. Everyone has a right to know that every congressman was chosen honestly, even in the district farthest from where they live. There is an overriding interest in the citizens of the entire country having an honestly chosen government strong enough to overcome constitutional objections. This is THE question of national integrity, not a detail of petty federalism.
- We need one form of ballot for those offices, no butterflies, no esthetic tampering. One form that a child learns in fourth grade and that doesn't change for as long as our form of government doesn't change. President, Vice-President, Congressman, Senator. One ballot for each office if there are that many candidates in a district but one form that is as familiar to a voter as a Lincoln penny.
- We need those ballots to be on paper, marked clearly by hand with an X or a check mark, either a valid mark. One ballot form, one thing for the voter to do. Both have worked for decades and there is no reason to fool with it.
- We need them to be counted by hand with observers from all parties. Those ballots are to be counted honestly, everywhere, every time. If local officials can't run a clean election it will be run by a higher level of government. If you don't like that, look at those clean, honest, simple and quick elections they've got in Canada run by Elections Canada. You can go to their web site and see how those practical people have managed simple methods for dealing with problems of disabled voters. Look now before the Conservative government starts trying to copy cat the United States to steal elections for themselves.
No electronic voting for the federal constitutional offices is to be tolerated. We have seen that electronic voting and vote tabulation is certain to give an inaccurate count and that's even when it isn't rigged to steal the election.
The results of two stolen presidential elections in a row are all the proof anyone needs that a crooked election gives us a crooked government. We might get a crook in an honest election, we are certain to get one from a crooked election. The elections of 2000 and 2004 have given us the disaster of Iraq and will produce at least one more disaster, probably in Iran. The Republicans who stole these elections are costing us in blood, in honor and in money. We cannot afford to nickel and dime democracy, the cost is staggeringly high if we continue to cheat ourselves out of honest elections.
Computers and modern research have allowed the Republican Party to destroy the last and best hope for a free people to govern themselves. We aren't living in an age where genteel comity and a bit of indulgence of petty theft can be smiled at. If the DC-NY scribblers and the law professors had the blood of their children and themselves at risk they might see it more clearly. There is nothing ironically amusing about it.
I should add that the kind of billionaire, domestic and foreign, funded thuggery that we've seen them both plan and conduct should be added to the fascist tactics of stealing elections. A big part of that is meant to be carried in Republican-fascist media and the range of Republican-fascist friendly to the willing dupes of then. I would put pretty much the entire corporate media in one or another of those categories. Since 2000's edition of the Florida elections stealing by Republicans succeeded, it's been clear that one of the things we have to protect our elections, our government from is the corruption of much of the media and the lazy indifference of more of it.
Another thing we need to protect it from is the negligence of even Democrats on those increasingly rare occasions that Democrats hold office. I remember pushing this again in 2009 but got the feeling that the Obama administration would think it was beneath them to do such unremarkable things while doing things like courting Republicans like love sick teenagers.
* I don't know if the corrupted Republican dominated courts would allow them to force states to run clean elections from the federal government but it is indisputable that the entire country has an interest in having the federal government run by the actual winners of elections.
ReplyDeleteMAN SHOUTS HEIL HITLER AND HEIL TRUMP AT BALTIMORE PERFORMANCE OF FIDDLER ON THE ROOF
https://www.newstimes.com/news/article/Man-shouts-Heil-Hitler-during-Fiddler-on-the-13394799.php
If only the Jews of Israel had moved to Maryland this wouldn't have happened.
Oh, how do you know that?
DeleteI'd like to know who the guy was and what his profile was, it doesn't mention that in the story, which, by the way, I have already read.
You know, Stupy, your area of the country is the place where the highest percentage of antisemitic incidents is reported. But, since there has been that effort to make criticism of Israel into an act of antisemitism it's harder to figure things like that out. You are part of that effort, to make the term mean nothing by making it mean whatever nn asshole like you wants it to mean at any given moment.
I wonder if Duncan, in his lazily bored perusal of the comment threads ever wonder why he gives a mentally impaired asshole like you a forum. You're a big part of what drove down the level at Baby Blue.
"You know, Stupy, your area of the country is the place where the highest percentage of antisemitic incidents is reported."
DeleteHmm. Assuming that's true, Sparkles, why do you think that might be?
Oh wait, I know -- it's because more of my fellow Red Sea Pedestrians live there. I mean, there's a reason they're not painting a lot of swastikas on the churches in Maine, right?
Wow. As the Shadow says in the great MAD magazine parody says -- "Good lord, this man doesn't have a mind to cloud."
You didn't answer my question, Stupy. You and "Zod" would seem to be incapable of answering questions.
DeleteAs to yours? A. Maybe there are just more bigoted assholes in NYC than in some other places, I mean, you're one. Jews are hardly the only victims of bigotry and the expression of hatred there. Only you don't much care about anyone else, or, it being you, pretend to.
B. There are Jews living in Maine. William Cohen was a Senator from here for ages, his father, Ruben Cohen owned the Bangor Rye Bread company. I never voted for Cohen because I don't vote for Republicans. I've voted for a number who ran for state and one for local office, I'd have to really think about it but I'd imagine I have for county office too, though I tend to not pay that much attention to county office. The invaluable Jewish Virtual Library says:
MAINE, northernmost New England state, had an estimated Jewish population of 9,300 out of a total of 1,277,000 (0.7%) in 2001. More than 7,000 lived in the southern part of the State (in Portland, the largest city, Biddeford, Saco, Brunswick, and Bath). Other substantial communities were Bangor, approximately 1000; Lewiston-Auburn, approximately 500; Rockland approximately 200; Waterville, approximately 200; Augusta, approximately 200; and 200 in other parts of Maine in such communities as Calais, Gardner, Caribou, Rumford Falls, Old Town, Old Orchard Beach and Bar Harbor. A large Jewish summer population added considerably to this number but was difficult to estimate.
There were five congregations in Portland, including a Chabad center, three in Bangor, two in Augusta, and one each in Old Orchard, Biddeford, Augusta, Rockland and Bath.
The Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine, located in Portland, and the Bangor Jewish Community Council are the two representative Jewish organizations in the State. The Cedars Nursing Home, the successor to the Jewish Home for the Aged in Portland, is the only such Jewish facility in Maine. Both Portland and Bangor maintained Jewish funeral chapels and Portland also maintained a Jewish Day School. There were Hillel Foundation groups at the University of Southern Maine, University of Maine in Orono and at the private Bates, Bowdoin and Colby Colleges. In addition, the history of Jewish life in Maine was maintained through the Judaica Collection at the Sampson Center for Diversity on the Portland campus of the University of Southern Maine and through the Documenting Old Portland Jewry project.
A Jewish Film Festival has been an annual event in Portland since 1999. Camp Modin, located in Belgrade and founded in 1922, is among America's oldest overnight camps and New England's oldest Jewish camp.
Susman Abrams (1743–1830), a native of Hamburg, Germany, was the first known Jewish resident of Maine. He came to the state in the post-Revolutionary period and lived in Waldborough, Thomaston, and finally in Union where he operated a tannery. Abrams married a Christian woman but did not himself convert to Christianity.
Maine had relatively few German or Sephardic Jewish residents. The Campanal and Decoster families, with Sephardic roots, have been prominent in Maine for several decades and Joseph M. Papo, who was the executive director of the Portland Jewish Federation in 1947–48, wrote the well-regarded book Sephardim in Twentieth Century America: In Search of Unity (1987).
German Jews were among the earliest Jewish residents of the state and began to settle in Bangor by 1829. Bangor developed numerous Jewish institutions and a Jewish cemetery was created in Waterville in 1830.
I hadn't known Jack Decoster had Jewish ancestry, I always wanted to see him in jail, not to mention his scummy cousin Olympia Snowe, but that's a different matter.
So there's no causal relationship between the number of Jews in a given area and the incidence of anti-Semitic incidents in that same area.
ReplyDeleteRight.
Also, rain is not wet.
Keep digging, pal.
Antisemitic incidents aren't caused by Jews, they're committed by assholes, you know, Simps, your kind of people.
DeleteSo there's no reason there aren't anti-semitic incidents where Jews don't live.
ReplyDeleteMan, you're gonna need more shovels.
If you think there aren't antisemitic incidents where Jews don't live that's only because you're ignorant of anything that happens outside of the lesser greater NYC area as well as so much inside it. Have you ever considered that maybe the incidence of REPORTING OF ANTISEMITIC INCIDENTS is more likely to happen where there are Jews who report those incidents? No, of course not because that's thinking and you're allergic to thinking.
Delete"If you think there aren't antisemitic incidents where Jews don't live that's only because you're ignorant of anything that happens outside of the lesser greater NYC area"
DeleteYou're so right, Sparky. There are so many anti-Semitic incidents where there aren't any Jews. Everybody knows that.
You mean, Simps, that if the Nazis, the KKK, skinheads, etc. hold a gathering in a city or town where there are no Jews absolutely no antisemitic incidents will occur there.
DeleteSimps, I think you have to be the stupidest person who believes they are on the left who I have ever encountered.
Adjust your meds before it's too late. Your best friends, if you had any, would tell you that.
ReplyDeleteBut, Simps, you don't refute anything I said you just give boring, repetitive and, it being you, used insults that stopped being funny while you were still below retirement age.
DeleteThe only medication I take is Loratadine and one only takes one in 24 hours, it can't be adjusted.
What do they prescribe for your dementia?
I occurred to me earlier this evening, you remind me of the little of Jerry Lewis' "Hardly Working" as I saw on Siskel and Ebert, what Ebert said was probably the worst movie to ever get a commercial release by a major distributor. Jerry couldn't stop doing the same unfunny shit, too.
Says the guy who still claims Queens can't be the most diverse area on earth because it's part of NYC, which isn't.
ReplyDeleteSay hello from the Bizarro World, Sparkles.
:-)
I wonder if your parents ever had a recommendation to put you in a school for the ungifted, Stupy. I'm not going to explain it in basic set theory to you because I've done that three times and you're too stupid to, literally, understand what they'd have covered in the first day of Algebra class the first day in 9th grade, if not earlier in your school days. A subset cannot have more elements in it than the set it is a subset of can, it is impossible. You're so stupid you can't get that, I would suggest you ask Derbes but it's not my experience that he's especially interested in asserting the truth to his fellow Eschatonians. He certainly knows better. Is the gal who teaches math still wasting her time there? I can't remember her assumed name.
DeleteHere's a clue, you hick nitwit. Queens is not a subset of anything, except on the subset of the Bizarro World that you inhabit.
DeleteIt is a distinct geographical entity with actual boundaries.
Queens only has definition as anything as a borough of New York City, IT IS ONLY ANYTHING BECAUSE IT IS DEFINED AS SUCH. "Queens" is, as all political entities are, a totally made up thing. It is a "thing" in exactly the same way that Maine or New Hampshire or Vermont is a "thing" defined into existence by artificial distinctions for man-made reasons.
DeleteYou are mentally deficient, Simps. That's not an artificial distinction but one which is all to and sadly real.
I wouldn't recommend you come to Queens and tell people it's a made up thing, Sparky.
DeleteJeebus H. Christ on a piece of burnt challah toast, it's amazing your brain generates enough energy to move your typing fingers.
You saying they're as stupid as a Simels? Well, that wouldn't surprise me anywhere near as much as it would have before I found out Trump was from Queens.
DeleteYou know, Stupy, you seldom if ever actually refute something someone says, you rely on insults and diversions and appeals to prejudice, you are so much like Trump in that.
Oh, and like the D-ranked comic you are, you figure that making a reference to something Jewish is all you need to nail it. Which only cheapens those things Jewish.
DeleteEverybody knows your credentials for commenting on movies, Sparky.
ReplyDeleteBy which I mean -- nobody and none.
Keep digging.
Stupy, you're just like Tlaz. I didn't comment on the movie, the late Roger Ebert did. I only saw as much of the unfunny gags as they showed on the show. I'd never have gone to see a Jerry Lewis movie, having found out he was totally unfunny before I was 10. I was saying you reminded me of Jerry Lewis, especially as seen in those clips. He figured him doing it meant it was funny because of who he was, same as you.
Delete"Keep digging." What do you imagine I've got to fear from you lying about what I say at Duncan's, Stupy. The only thing it risks is making me feel smug.