And Speaking of GOP Politics....

I don't get why the Democratic candidates keep trying to "reach out" to the GOP voters. At this point, the GOP voters who are voting GOP are never going to switch. They'd never vote for a Democrat when there's a Republican to choose. Why are Democrats after the GOP equivalent of Yellow Dog Democrats?

And to top it off, the Dems keep harping on the idea that Ralph Nader or any independent candidate is "spoiling" the elections by taking votes away from the Democratic candidate. So why then don't they try "reaching out" to the left? Why don't they move left instead of right and get back those voters who they claim are voting for spoilers? Wouldn't that be more reasonable?

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

GOP Vote Control

This Brad Friedman post recalls Clint Curtis' allegations that Florida Representative Tom Feeney asked him to create a vote-stealing touch screen program for the 2000 elections. While no legal charges have yet been brought against Representative Feeney with regard to the vote rigging scandal in Florida, it seems that he is receiving large donations to his defense fund in the Abramoff scandal from his old friends and partners in the voting systems companies. And, in case you were thinking that the "conspiracy theories" about the GOP putting the fix on U.S. elections is merely the product of paranoid minds, Friedman's post adds force to the Curtis claims by virtue of a new investigative report by Dan Rather. For the sake of getting these things into serious discussions, I'm sorry to say, I think Dan should allow other reporters who haven't been publicly tainted to take the catbird seat and the credit. At any rate, among the revelations in the Rather report:

Sequoia [Voting Systems] company whistleblowers reveal on camera that, despite their objections, they were forced to use poor quality paper for the punchcards to be used in Florida in 2000. They also revealed that they had been instructed to deliberately misalign the chads for ballots going to Palm Beach County, FL, only.

Now can we have some serious investigations?

Fulll Rather video report here. Summary of the Curtis/Feeney story here.