Voter Fraud

The US Presidential Election is hotting up and the hypocrisy from the Republican Party is becoming ridiculous if it wasn't so serious. With Republican apparatchiks in key electorally responsible positions in key states around the Union, they are using methods to prevent the poor, unemployed, generally black and Hispanic neighborhoods from voting. Palast and Kennedy in a Rolling Stone article "Blocking the Vote" clearly delineate the offences and we are advised about the false claims by the GOP, like the ACORN issue which, strangely was exposed by ACORN and has Republican Funding for their voter registration efforts. Before the names were submitted ACORN pulled the false ones, now that should be commended not vilified, however the spin masters took it falsly for their claims and it includes Senator John McCain their Presidential Candidate and Governor Sarah Palin their Vice-Presidential Candidate.

Have there been any retractions, no! This push to establish a meme in the public mind, that voter fraud is a Democratic Issue not a Republican Issue goes against the evidence. Here is a quote from Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!

Now, that, in the firing of these attorneys, came down to these attorneys, Republican US attorneys around the country, saying that they were being pressured to investigate these—what they, you know, called voter fraud cases that turned out not to be voter fraud cases, like the US attorney of New Mexico, the Republican US attorney, David Iglesias, who said he was wrongfully fired because he failed to indict ACORN members for voter fraud. So this really has been going on for quite a long time. And ultimately, the casualty of this was the US Attorney General, because his own US attorneys around the country said that the voter fraud evidence was not there, that they couldn't prosecute the cases that the Bush administration was pushing them to prosecute.

So, can we believe the Republicans, are these events just the tip of the Iceberg? I say they are, with Sarah Palin being the representative of the Religious Right, the Dominionists have a candidate from Alaska who will push their agenda of a Theocratic State for the USA and destroy democracy and the will of the people. These are the enemy of Democracy, and their current Shock Agenda will bring the Freedoms many Americans think they have now, undone. It is critical they are not elected.

Why We Blog?

Andrew Sullivan in his Atlantic Monthly article "Why I Blog" for November is a worthwhile because of the History he gives us and how a journalist can relate to it. Of course he mentions the luminaries in the blogosphere and nods to the rest of us, but when he mentioned the matter I lifted from the article below:

There is, after all, something simply irreplaceable about reading a piece of writing at length on paper, in a chair or on a couch or in bed. To use an obvious analogy, jazz entered our civilization much later than composed, formal music. But it hasn't replaced it; and no jazz musician would ever claim that it could. Jazz merely demands a different way of playing and listening, just as blogging requires a different mode of writing and reading. Jazz and blogging are intimate, improvisational, and individual—but also inherently collective. And the audience talks over both.

Which made me smile because I am listening to some Jazz as I read his article and write this blog. What I would like to add to his excellent article is an observation I made about some blogs which don't fit the definition by either not accepting comments or vetting them so only the supportive ones are published. I have a policy that will accept the comments; however I do require some sort of rational argument from the commenter. These have been what I found in the anti-evolution blogs like Uncommondescent, by that erstwhile polemicist William A. Dembski, and he is not alone in the blogosphere. Is this a sign of Intellectual Cowardice? I'm sure I don't know, but it can be a means of reducing your readership to those that share your world view, and which of course leads to a false and myopic world view.

I trust we can participate in this Great Conversation in the blogosphere as we seek enlightenment and truth, both the discovered and the revealed types.