Saturday, April 18, 2009

Tea Party Video, Garage Sale Pics, and AOTW

Much of my attention has been taken up by planning a garage sale for this Saturday, as I've accumulated lots of kid stuff and it's the community garage sale weekend.

So I had to shorten things up.

First up, we have Dee from over at Conservatism with Heart addressing the KC Tea Party:



(That's it for videos, I'm linking the rest.)

Now there were plenty of people, from the smattering of idiots that were bound to show up at the tea parties and get singled out by the media that are buying the MoveOn(left) party line to the idiots on the left (the story-inventing CNN reporterette (who found said smattering of idiots) and Janeane Garofalo (30 seconds of this shit will suffice)) that could easily qualify as AOTW. Not gonna be them (as there are too damn many possibilities).

As for the garage sale, I have a lot of pics (for me, more than one is a lot. So I'll be posting them in a separate post timed a minute before this one (for reading continuity). But this was the scene that wore my ass out:


For the record, I was up before the kids (6:45 or so), we started setting up around 7:30, finished about 9:00 (the people started showing earlier), my sis bolted around 2:00 (something about 3 hours of sleep and a wedding to attend at 5:00 (with a bunch of shit to do in between (and she didn't kick my ass))), and I didn't finish tearing shit down until 5:00 (except for shoving the mega-box (could hold a couple of refrigerators) into the garage after loading it outside for easy pickup THEN seeing it was going to rain. I made about $77 on the whole thing. Moreover, I cleared a lot of space. Space is good.

I could also have declared myself (or my sister who came over to help me) the AOTW. But I've already mocked myself and she'd beat the shit out of me for doing so. So.

That leaves me with a story which finally has reached a point where the AOTW can be declared. Unfortunately, it ain't the perennial asshat getting the award:

Former Senator Norm Coleman is Asshat of the Week!

First let me talk about Stuart Smalley (oops, I mean Al Franken (no, I mean Stuart fucking Smalley)).

If there were an Asshat Lifetime Achievement Award, this bastard would be in line ahead of fellow Air(head) America failed talk show host (and asshat) Janeane Garofalo, and just behind John McCain (who I still haven't forgiven). This insult to a pair of fucking clown shoes (bonus points for the movie reference (it was included in the deleted scenes only)) was an ok writer and talent on Saturday Night Live. He had some minor roles (the first part of From the Earth to the Moon will always be sullied by his presence (his character is a (surprise!) political asshat).

So he gave up this minimal career and got into talk radio. He got paid a lot of money, and failed to get any listeners. For those of you who judge radio people by ideology rather than numbers, this is why he sucked ass. If you're entertaining, informative (more or less), and at a minimum, interesting, then you'll get listeners. If you're just angry, and uninteresting, and you just blather crap, you're gone (this is why Michael Savage (the Antichrist) still thrives: He's at least interesting sometimes).

So Mr Smalley, possessing the intellect of a can of WWII-era peas, decided that politics was his next career. So off he went to Minnesota, where they were cracked enough to elect former pro wrestler and actor Jesse "the Governor" Ventura (who was a way better governor that the castrated Schwarzenegger). And his target was RINO Norm Coleman.

Well, with the results in, Coleman had a few hundred votes lead.

Then the recounts started. And Lo and Behold, Stuart Smalley crawled out to a lead, something Algore never managed to do.

But the courts have sided with the douchebag, and now Normie is appealin'.

I said this in 2000, and as much as I despise the asshat Franken, it's time to suck it up and take te damned loss. Stick Minnesota with their miserable-assed choice for a Senator. Don't whine because you think (I mean know) you got cheated. That shit happens in politics, so once the election's over, it's over.

Then hope we can eventually repeal the 17th Amendment (the one that makes Senators popularly elected rather than chosen by the state legislatures) so this shit never happens again.

But Norm, for dragging it out longer than an 90-year-old in a nudie booth with his Viagra bottle empty, you gett to be a bigger asshat this week than Stuart Smalley. Because you're good enough, you're smart enough, and doggone it, people hate you.

22 comments:

Shaw Kenawe said...

So, am I to believe you don't like Al Franken?

Okay. You don't have to. He's not representing you.

But he certainly deserves props for going to Iraq several times to entertain the troops. That's putting is ass on the line for them.

Franken has served as a volunteer with the United Service Organizations since he first visited Kosovo in 1999. Franken has conducted several overseas tours to both Iraq and Afghanistan, in addition to participating in numerous celebrity handshake tours at military hospitals to visit wounded soldiers. On March 25, 2009, Franken was presented with the USO's Merit Award for his 10 years of service to the organization through visiting injured and deployed servicemembers.

Being a comedy performer and writer is no disqualification for public office any more than being a B-actor from Hollywood was for RWR.

Franken graduated cum laude from Harvard with a BA in political science. He married his college sweetheart, and they have a son and daughter. His daughter graduated from Harvard College and his son graduated from Princeton.

You don't like his politics. Fine. But his life is as American as apple pie.

Minnesota is lucky to have him as its junior senator.

Good luck, Mr. Franken.

Joe "Truth 101" Kelly said...

I'm planning my annual fishing and drinking trip to the Park Rapids Mn. I look forward to spending time in the great state of Al Franken and Jesse The Body Ventura.

Did you ever read Al's books? He's twice as smart and twice as funny as Dennis Miller and Michael Moore put together.


Franken for President in 2016!

Patrick M said...

Shaw: He's not representing you.Amen to that. However, I pity my fellow blogger, the Soapster, who is weeping at how low Minnesota politics has gone.

The thing with Franken is that he's proved that, more often than not, people in Hollywood and the like almost never make the transition to the political realm without coming off as really dumb. With both him and the aforementioned Ms Garofalo (who I loved in standup and as an actress), they turned out angry, mean, and completely intolerable foolish.

But you'll notice, despite my incessant cheap shots at Stuart Smalley, I did give the AOTW award to Norm, the John McCain of the race.

101: Corrections. First, it's Jesse "the Governor" not "the Body" Ventura. Unless I've missed him showing up in the WWE ring with his old moniker.

Miller is smart and funny. Combine him with the blithering Michael Moore, though, and I can see how Stuart Smalley could be funnier.

I will give Al Franken credit for being funnier than Dennis Miller back when they were on SNL. Oh how times have changed.

Dionne said...

Thanks for all the linkage ;-)).

I can't believe all the election stuff in Minnesota still isn't settled and I can't believe the people in Minnesota are stupid enough to give Franken any votes at all.

As for Janeane Garofalo I cannot believe how ignorant she is, unbelievable!!!!!!! I am still suffering from major heartburn for having clicked on that link. But I snagged it and added to my latest post where she was mentioned.

Her and Keith Olbermann are perhaps the dumbest people walking the face of the earth. What proof does she give for the Tea Party people being racist??? None!!! They disagree with a black president so they are racist. Keith Olbermann just keeps agreeing with every idiotic thing that comes out of her mouth. Wow!!! She then talks about how Fox News is only appealing to a certain group of white men when Fox creamed CNN and MSNBC in the ratings. They have NO CLUE about the facts. Its hard to comprehend.

Also, I don't know if you watch 24 but she is on this season and we all keep watching and waiting for her to be a mole that turns so Jack Bauer can torture her.

Toad734 said...

Wait, Barney Frank caused our economy to collapse? Thats a new one. Ha ha.

And by the way, George Bush ran out of our money, Obama is trying to get us out of Bush's mess. SOmeone needs to tell the 9 people at that KC rally the same thing.

Name: Soapboxgod said...

"Shaw: He's not representing you.Amen to that. However, I pity my fellow blogger, the Soapster, who is weeping at how low Minnesota politics has gone."It's gone very very low. And, while I didn't vote for either of these idiot shits in the Senate race, I actually applaud Coleman for now bowing to a process which has been nothing short of a clusterfuck from the get go.

If he takes the case to the State Supreme court, he likely won't see any proper recourse even though the entire post-election process threw a huge monkey wrench into the equation with respect to the Due Process clause in the Constitution (vis a' vis applying different standards for Franken's votes than for Coleman's).

I posted the following over at Daniel Ruwe's blog [http://danielruwe.blogspot.com/] regarding this particular race:

First, there's the obvious issue of due process clause in the 14th Amendment. You can not have unequal applications of the law. You cannot have one set of standards beneficial to one candidate and then not apply those same standards to the other individual.

Secondly, you've got a 5 member canvassing board left with the task of assessing voter intent. And, if you've not seen some of those ridiculous ballots being reviewed, any objective reviewer could clearly see the dubious nature with which they overwhelmingly went to Franken. That MN SOS Mark Ritchie has previous ties to ACORN and the fact that ACORN filed more than 43,000 registration forms in 2008, 75 percent of all new registrations in the state, it was all but certain that Minnesota was facing vote fraud problems even before the election.

Which brings me to my 3rd and final point and probably the most alarming. It's a thing called the law of probability.

This from John Lott Jr., senior research scientist at the University of Maryland, regarding the improbabilities of this particular race:

"When voters woke up on Wednesday morning after the election, Senator Norm Coleman led Al Franken by what seemed like a relatively comfortable 725 votes. By Wednesday night, that lead had shrunk to 477. By Thursday night, it was down to 336. By Friday, it was 239. Late Sunday night, the difference had gone down to just 221 -- a total change over 4 days of 504 votes.

Amazingly, this all has occurred even though there hasn’t even yet been a recount. Just local election officials correcting claimed typos in how the numbers were reported. Counties will certify their results today, and their final results will be sent to the secretary of state by Friday. The actual recount won’t even start until November 19.

Correcting these typos was claimed to add 435 votes to Franken and take 69 votes from Coleman. Corrections were posted in other races, but they were only a fraction of those for the Senate. The Senate gains for Franken were 2.5 times the gain for Obama in the presidential race count, 2.9 times the total gain that Democrats got across all Minnesota congressional races, and 5 times the net loss that Democrats suffered for all state House races.

Virtually all of Franken’s new votes came from just three out of 4130 precincts, and almost half the gain (246 votes) occurred in one precinct -- Two Harbors, a small town north of Duluth along Lake Superior -- a heavily Democratic precinct where Obama received 64 percent of the vote. None of the other races had any changes in their vote totals in that precinct.
To put this change in perspective, that single precinct’s corrections accounted for a significantly larger net swing in votes between the parties than occurred for all the precincts in the entire state for the presidential, congressional, or state house races.

The two other precincts (Mountain Iron in St. Louis county and Partridge Township in Pine county) accounted for another 100 votes each. The change in each precinct was half as large as the pickup for Obama from the corrections for the entire state.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune attributed these types of mistakes to “exhausted county officials,” and that indeed might be true, but the sizes of the errors in these three precincts are surprisingly large.

Indeed, the 504 total new votes for Franken from all the precincts is greater than adding together all the changes for all the precincts in the entire state for the presidential, congressional, and state house races combined (a sum of 482). It was also true that precincts that gave Obama a larger percentage of the vote were statistically more likely to make a correction that helped Franken.

The recent Washington State 2006 gubernatorial recount is probably most famous for the discovery of ballots in heavily Democratic areas that had somehow missed being counted the first and even second time around. Minnesota is already copying that, though thus far on a much smaller scale, with 32 absentee ballots being discovered in Democratic Hennepin County after all the votes had already been counted. When those votes are added in, they seemed destined to cut Coleman's lead further.

Indeed, it is probably through the discovery of new votes that Franken has his best shot of picking up new votes. Despite the press pushing a possible replay of election judges divining voters’ intentions by looking at “hanging chads” to see if voters meant to punch a hole, that shouldn’t be an issue in Minnesota. The reason is simple: optical scan vote counting machines return ballots to voters if no vote is recorded for a contested race."

Name: Soapboxgod said...

"And by the way, George Bush ran out of our money, Obama is trying to get us out of Bush's mess."By exacerbating that which was inherently WRONG with the Bush Administration [that being deficit spending]???

That's about as backfuckingasswards as one can get.

It's all well and good to criticize Bush and war spending etc.

However, be it known that while Bush may very well have blown a whole in the budget with respect to war spending (and let me be perfectly clear on this note: I am no Bush apologist), the total cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars upwards of around $1 Trillion is the total over roughly 8 years.

Now, lest you've forgotten, Obama has trumped this figure despite having been in office for a mere 3 and a half months.

Gordon Scott said...

Franken does indeed deserve praise for his USO work.

As for Coleman fighting in the courts, I've made that argument elsewhere. Soapboxgod is right.

Name: Soapboxgod said...

EDIT*"I actually applaud Coleman for NOT bowing to manufactured results of a process which has been nothing short of a clusterfuck from the get go."

Toad734 said...

Soap:

ya but where were these people when Bush was doing the same thing? So Obamas number is a little bigger and he isn't just throwing it at no bid military contractor friends and he is trying to jump start the economy with it and by not killing Arabs with it, I can see why the reichwing is so angry. Deficit spending while killing brown people and giving tax breaks to rich white people=A OK!, deficit spending to make up for the hole dug by spending a trillion to kill brown people and giving tax cuts to rich white people = Socialism.

You can see the hypocrisy here. Maybe that's where Garofalo is putting things into perspective. That and the blubbering morons who couldn't say anything bad about Obama except he is a Socialist and will take their guns. There is a reason there weren't a bunch of major Republican politicians attending these rallies; they were afraid of the Klansman and everyone else who were going to show up and talk about shooting blacks or whatever it is they do. The crazies were out there but I admit the morons who have been lied to for so long far outnumbered the crazy Klansmen.

As far as Franken is concerned, I never really liked him personally, I thought he was kind of a hot headed baby. That being said, I do agree with his politics (generally). And he is probably more qualified to be in congress than half the Jerry Falwell University graduates that we have now...wait, that's not congress, that was the Bush administration. My bad.

Name: Soapboxgod said...

"ya but where were these people when Bush was doing the same thing?"Beats the hell out of me Toad. I suggest you take it up with them. I'm not in that camp.

"...tax breaks to rich white people..."Let me ask you a simple question while setting up a little scenario if I may.

Let's suppose that your favorite music artist is coming to town. Then, let us suppose there are two ticket prices to choose from ($250 for main floor or $50 for all other seats). This band being your favorite, you opt for the $250 seat and I in turn opt for the $50 seat.

A week prior to the show, the band has to cancel for whatever reason and subsequently refunds ensue.

Now, by your assessment, am I to surmise that you've not qualms about an equal distribution of refund (thus I receive $150 and you as well receive $150)???

Or, would the proper and moral justification be to return to you the $250 you initially paid for your ticket and my $50 ticket fee to me?

Under the Bush taxcuts, everyone who paid income taxes received a cut. Said cuts were then commenserate with what those individuals contribute to the overall burden.

If the wealthy are footing the greater proportion of the bill, it is by sheer logic that their "rebate" is going to be greater in real dollars than those whose contribution to the bill is much less.

The manner with which you and those of your particular political persuasion circumvent this reality is to view taxation "as a percentage of income". Your argument is sure to declare that the wealthy individual "can afford to pay more" and so in turn he is not shouldering a heavier burden.

This blatant distortion is nothing short of a gross distortion of morality and justice whereby you are seeking to annoint yourself the beneficiary at the expense of your fellow countrymen.

Dare ask yourself why it is that upon entering a grocery store and purchasing your goods, the cashier does not ask your what your annual salary is? Now then, dare to ask yourself why it is that you condone the practice with regards to government services?

What is more, in case you weren't aware, according to the IRS, the top 1% of earners in this country (those earning around the $350,000 figure) hold roughly 20% of the nation's wealth. And yet...they shoulder around 40% of the burden.

Shaw Kenawe said...

Dee posted:

Her and Keith Olbermann are perhaps the dumbest people walking the face of the earth.Oh, I wouldn't say that. There are others who deserve that accusation, to be sure.

Patrick wrote:

The thing with Franken is that he's proved that, more often than not, people in Hollywood and the like almost never make the transition to the political realm without coming off as really dumb. With both him and the aforementioned Ms Garofalo (who I loved in standup and as an actress), they turned out angry, mean, and completely intolerable foolish.Yes. You're are correct. Let's put Fred Thompson, George Murphy and Ronald Reagan into that Hollywood mix as well. If you pin your "stupid" labels only on Democrats who transition from Hollywood to DC, then you're not to be taken seriously at all.

Soapbox:

I'd like to read your analysis of why this happened:

Now, lest you've forgotten, Obama has trumped this figure despite having been in office for a mere 3 and a half months.IMHO, if Franken were challenging the election, y'all [Minnesotans] would be after his head, screaming that Franken should act like a man and concede. This is nothing but partisan politics and sore loosing tactics.

Name: Soapboxgod said...

"..y'all [Minnesotans] would be after his head, screaming that Franken should act like a man and concede. This is nothing but partisan politics and sore loosing tactics."I'll concede the point that indeed that may very well be the case. However, those particular individuals are nothing more than party loyalists. I am not.

I am an objective individual who knows full well the election laws of Minnesota as they pertain to closely held races. As such, I know that the process which ensues is wholly justified regardless of what my preferred outcome may be.

And as well, we come to expect that the judiciary be fair in applying the law equally.

To that regard, this judicial system has failed miserably.

Shaw Kenawe said...

How is it that the courts are not applying the law equally. Why would they not? Is there any entity in Minnesota accusing the courts of being unfair to Coleman? Is there something criminal going on?

Gordon Scott said...

Shaw, you have to show harm to yourself in order to have standing in court. Coleman, Franken and Barkley are the only ones who would.

It's possible that a voter could determine that his or her ballot was treated unequally and sue, but the candidates have the resources.

Name: Soapboxgod said...

"How is it that the courts are not applying the law equally."If you have to even ask this question, clearly you've not been paying attention (beyond the scope of what you've probably heard). The process by which absentee ballots were admitted and subsequently counted were more or less a crap shoot. Ballots from some counties (those which predominently favored Franken) were counted (and in some cases various ballots were even counted twice) whereas in other counties, absentee ballots were rejected en masse. This is just one of many discrepencies of this race. And, living in Minnesota and having thus watched this thing unfold since election day, it has been a clusterfuck of a process.

What is more, is it any wonder that Harry Reid and other Democrats were skirting the application of the law in declaring that an election certificate be awarded to Franken despite that the law asserts this must not be done until ALL legal challenges have been resolved?

"Why would they not?"Apparently the ends justify the means. MN SOS Mark Ritchie got his start with ACORN, ACORN registered a ridiculous amount of voters in the state. ACORN has been indicted and/or investigated in 12-15 states across the country for voter fraud. Mark Ritchie is opposed to an ID requirement to vote and as well he fully supports same day registration while merely having someone vouch for you. Electoral Integrity be damned. Everything else be damned.

"Is there any entity in Minnesota accusing the courts of being unfair to Coleman?"A number of organizations and individuals in the state (including a couple of retired judges). Minnesota Majority is questioning the process by which it came to be that Franken was declared the winner.

"Is there something criminal going on?"Perhaps. However, I'd conclude that the real crime is the threat to election integrity and voter enfranchisement. Counting the same ballots twice while another's ballot goes uncounted doesn't inspire confidence in this election process. That's for sure.

Shaw Kenawe said...

"Why would they not?"Apparently the ends justify the means. MN SOS Mark Ritchie got his start with ACORN, ACORN registered a ridiculous amount of voters in the state. ACORN has been indicted and/or investigated in 12-15 states across the country for voter fraud.

Could you please back this up with a link? Voter fraud means people cast votes fraudulently, and then were caught breaking the law. Voter registration fraud is different. Can you link to where voters broke the law by fraudulently casting their ballots and could you please show the connection to ACORN? Thanks.

Name: Soapboxgod said...

Voter fraud/Voter registration fraud. Fraud with respect to the electoral process is fraud period. I'm not going to get into a debate on the triviality of those differences Shaw. Either way you slice it, both do great harm to not only legitimate votes but also to the entire electoral process.

"ACORN filed more than 43,000 registration forms in 2008, 75 percent of all new registrations in the state."
http://www.startribune.com/politics/state/30956979.html?elr=KArks8c7PaP3E77K_3c::D3aDhUoaEaD_ec7PaP3iUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aULPQL7PQLanchO7DiU


ACORN Indictments: http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009189

More on the irregularities regarding this Senate race from John Lott Jr., senior research scientist at the University of Maryland:

"When voters woke up on Wednesday morning after the election, Senator Norm Coleman led Al Franken by what seemed like a relatively comfortable 725 votes. By Wednesday night, that lead had shrunk to 477. By Thursday night, it was down to 336. By Friday, it was 239. Late Sunday night, the difference had gone down to just 221 -- a total change over 4 days of 504 votes.

Amazingly, this all has occurred even though there hasn’t even yet been a recount. Just local election officials correcting claimed typos in how the numbers were reported. Counties will certify their results today, and their final results will be sent to the secretary of state by Friday. The actual recount won’t even start until November 19.

Correcting these typos was claimed to add 435 votes to Franken and take 69 votes from Coleman. Corrections were posted in other races, but they were only a fraction of those for the Senate. The Senate gains for Franken were 2.5 times the gain for Obama in the presidential race count, 2.9 times the total gain that Democrats got across all Minnesota congressional races, and 5 times the net loss that Democrats suffered for all state House races.

Virtually all of Franken’s new votes came from just three out of 4130 precincts, and almost half the gain (246 votes) occurred in one precinct -- Two Harbors, a small town north of Duluth along Lake Superior -- a heavily Democratic precinct where Obama received 64 percent of the vote. None of the other races had any changes in their vote totals in that precinct.

To put this change in perspective, that single precinct’s corrections accounted for a significantly larger net swing in votes between the parties than occurred for all the precincts in the entire state for the presidential, congressional, or state house races.

The two other precincts (Mountain Iron in St. Louis county and Partridge Township in Pine county) accounted for another 100 votes each. The change in each precinct was half as large as the pickup for Obama from the corrections for the entire state.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune attributed these types of mistakes to “exhausted county officials,” and that indeed might be true, but the sizes of the errors in these three precincts are surprisingly large.

Indeed, the 504 total new votes for Franken from all the precincts is greater than adding together all the changes for all the precincts in the entire state for the presidential, congressional, and state house races combined (a sum of 482). It was also true that precincts that gave Obama a larger percentage of the vote were statistically more likely to make a correction that helped Franken.

The recent Washington State 2006 gubernatorial recount is probably most famous for the discovery of ballots in heavily Democratic areas that had somehow missed being counted the first and even second time around. Minnesota is already copying that, though thus far on a much smaller scale, with 32 absentee ballots being discovered in Democratic Hennepin County after all the votes had already been counted. When those votes are added in, they seemed destined to cut Coleman's lead further.

Indeed, it is probably through the discovery of new votes that Franken has his best shot of picking up new votes. Despite the press pushing a possible replay of election judges divining voters’ intentions by looking at “hanging chads” to see if voters meant to punch a hole, that shouldn’t be an issue in Minnesota. The reason is simple: optical scan vote counting machines return ballots to voters if no vote is recorded for a contested race."

Name: Soapboxgod said...

Per your request, MN SOS Mark Ritchie's connection with ACORN:

Newsmax has learned that contributors to Ritchie’s 2006 campaign, which made him the No.1 official in charge of impartially supervising Minnesota recounts, is a veritable Who’s Who of partisans seeking to alter the outcome of elections, including:



Soros. He donated $250, but perhaps more importantly, he funded organization’s essential to promoting Ritchie’s candidacy.


Anne Chasnow, who donated $150. Chasnow is a longtime voter registration activist who listed her employer as ACORN.


Drummond Pike, a well-known rainmaker for leftist organizations with extensive ties to ACORN, who along with a family member donated $500 to Ritchie.


Deborah Rappaport, who donated $250. Her Rappaport Foundation underwrites progressive causes nationwide.


James Rucker, the former director of grass-roots mobilization at MoveOn.org, and reportedly a co-founder of the Secretary of State Project. He donated $250 to Ritchie’s campaign.

The link to the SoS Project is a major reason Washington Times editor Peter J. Parisi has described Ritchie as a “hyperpartisan Democrat” – not exactly the calling card most states would seek in their chief election official.


SoS is funded in part through Soros’ contributions, according to Minneapolis Star-Tribune columnist Katherine Kersten. Kersten describes Ritchie as a “poster boy” for SoS, and Ritchie has proudly endorsed that organization’s efforts to sway the outcome of electoral contests nationwide.


SoS was founded after Democrats involved in George W. Bush’s narrow 2000 election victory blamed Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris for influencing the outcome. They also charged that then-Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell helped return Bush to power in 2004.


In response, SoS was created to target key secretary of state races nationwide – down ballot races that often can be impacted by even small amounts of money and assistance. So far they take credit for helping Democrats win those key jobs in New Mexico, Nevada, Iowa, Ohio, and, of course, in Ritchie’s Minnesota.


That Ritchie would be the prize protégé of the SoS is no surprise, given his own long history as a community organizer. In 2003, he led National Voice to register over 5 million new voters nationwide.


As ruling after ruling by the Ritchie-led State Canvassing Board has gone against Coleman, some are now openly questioning Ritchie’s influence.


“Mark Ritchie as we all know now is a hard-core liberal who was endorsed by ACORN and funded by ACORN,” Matthew Vadum, senior editor of CapitolResearch.org, a nonprofit think tank, tells Newsmax. “It’s not surprising that he has a permissive attitude toward the recount process.”


A few weeks ago, Vadum says, he expected Coleman to emerge the winner. But now he says Coleman’s chances are “diminishing daily.”


Franken has a 251-vote lead, but many thousands of votes remain to be counted.


“I think things are looking pretty grim. It’s pretty ominous for Coleman. What battle in the recount process has he won? It’s pretty hard for him to lose every single challenge, and yet go on to win the election,” Vadum says.


Kersten, a long-time observer of Minnesota’s political machinations, writes that it’s too soon to say whether Ritchie’s influence and resume will taint the credibility of the contentious recount.

“What we do know,” she writes, “is that the referee in the contest appears to be wearing the colors of one of the teams.”

http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/acorn_mark_ritchie/2008/12/22/164573.html

Satyavati devi dasi said...

I don't think the difference with fraudulent registration and fraudulent votes is trivial.

Name: Soapboxgod said...

It's two sides of the same coin. My point is that both are deletarious to the legitimacy of any election.

Toad734 said...

Soap: I think you are bing lied to. That isn't how the Bush tax cuts worked. Everyone didn't get a straight, equal cut. The rich people got a bigger tax cut than I did.

What you talked about in your ticket story is fair, what that story would look like under the BUsh tax cuts is that I would have gotten $300 back and you would have still received $50 back.

It wasnt like a guy making 1 million per year got a $30,000 tax cut and the guy making $50,000 per year got a $1500 tax cut and the rich guy only got more money because he paid a bigger share.

Lets not forget about the fiscal irresponsibility of those tax cuts which drove us into a huge deficit, which lowered the value of the dollar, raised the price of oil and imports which devalued the dollar even further and put us into a recession.