October, 2010 archive
Complaint of Irregularities with Virginia Beach Voting Machines 0
The Seatack Community Civic League is filing a complaint that voting machines appear to have switched votes.
From the cover letter, a copy of which I received via email:
The Seatack Community Civic League, on behalf of two African-American citizens and voters of our community, do hereby request a full and complete Virginia State Board of Election investigation into the attached voter complaint of voter machine “altering / automatic vote switching, without voter’s knowledge”, by touch-screen voter machine used in City of Virginia Beach, on October 30, 2010 at an Early Voting DVM site, located on First Colonial Road, in the City of Virginia Beach. Victim voter, a 90 some year old elder citizen of our community, as witnessed by her niece and the DMV Voting official. My civic-community investigative affidavit, under penalty of perjury, herewith attached in support of this request for investigation by Virginia State Board of Election.
You can download a copy of the Civic League’s press release here (PDF).
A Modest Proposal 0
Try this with a few banksters (emphasis added):
Earlier this month, Eric Blumberg, FDA litigation chief, told an industry audience that his agency was looking for cases to use what is known as the Park Doctrine as a tool to “change the corporate culture” of firms that have thus far shrugged off other penalties.
(snip)
In an interview Thursday, Blumberg was pointed.
“They need to take this seriously and find out what is going on in the marketing and sales divisions of their companies,” he said of pharmaceutical executives. “In my view, one thing that will get executives’ attention is a few cases in which we have convicted two-legged defendants.”
Fake Tea 0
A historian looks at the teabaggery and finds it indulges in fantastickal thinking. A nugget:
Two things separate antihistory from its prefix-less sibling. First, and most obvious, antihistory gets stuff wrong. In our interview, Lepore cites the example of Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle, who, in defending herself to The New York Times, claimed that “those words, ‘too conservative,’ is fairly relative. I’m sure that they probably said that about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.” The idea of Franklin and Jefferson as social conservatives would certainly surprise their contemporaries, who knew Jefferson for his religious skepticism and Franklin for his public abolitionism.
The second — and, for Lepore, more serious — problem with antihistory is that it hijacks history’s raw materials. It takes a messy tumble of personalities and events and quotations and molds them into a static picture, a picture that happens to line up with current policy goals. “In antihistory, time is an illusion,” Lepore writes. Antihistory is “more literal than an analogy. It wasn’t ‘our struggle is like theirs.’ It was ‘we are there’ or ‘they are here.’ ”
The article goes on to quote teabaggers who disagree.
Vote Early, Vote Often, Vote for Gene . . . 0
Gene Weingarten, that is.
. . . in the Robert Goulet Memorial Mustached American of the Year awards.
QOTD 0
Sir Walter Raleigh, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):
All histories do shew, and wise politicians do hold it necessary that, for the well-governing of every Commonweal, it behoveth man to presuppose that all men are evil, and will declare themselves so to be when occasion is offered.
Astrud Fills the Air 0
To quote Donovan Leitch.
Scoundrels 0
It is really difficult to argue with the Booman’s argument.
And I haven’t read any of Dostoevsky’s novels.
“World’s Dumbest” Contestant 0
He’s vying to be on the show:
At first he thought the noise was from someone on the roof, and the kitchen’s fire suppression system was set off.
“We saw someone’s feet and legs were dangling from the hood system,” Owens said, referring to the ductwork over the stove. The man ended up spending about eight hours trapped in the exhaust vent of the business in the 4400 block of Virginia Beach Blvd., Battalion Chief Ken Pravetz said.
Voting Is Not a Right. It Is a Duty. 0
Republicans don’t want persons to vote, because Republicans know that their policies are inimical to the polity.
Persons, such as this one, who think there is no difference between the parties are not paying attention.
Not voting for one candidate is equivalent to voting for the other.
The Phony War on Christmas 0
Todd was complaining in his podcast that Christmas decorations have started to appear in stores in Honolulu and All Hallows’ Eve has not yet passed.
Which sets the stage for Adam Felber’s rant against the phony war on Christmas war. A nugget:
My memory says otherwise. And my experience says that the only honest reason for anyone to wish anyone a happy or merry holiday or Christmas is because they are wishing someone some small measure of happiness or merriness. Those wishes are something that you are giving away, and as such they are the only holiday wishes that you have any right to control. Any further grumbling isn’t protecting your holiday – it’s just helping ad rates on Fox News while choosing a “righteous” way to nurture a hot little flame of anger and resentment in your heart that might otherwise be extinguished by genuine “Christmas spirit.”
Read the whole thing and get some chuckles along with some truth.
Doing the Mash 0
In teabagger world, freedom of speech is rewritten to freedom of approved speech.
Dick Polman comments. A nugget:
