What the "president" could do after January...

He should have his own segment on SNL; he'd be a hoot. Some people have said that Caribou Barbie might take over from Tina Fey, but frankly I think she's too frightening a combination of stupid, unstable and corrupt to be funny for long. Bush, however, shows that he'll have people howling in the aisles for years to come:

Socialism

So the Presidential election is over and the American people have chosen. And it was the right choice; Obama/Biden are the future; McBush and Caribou Barbie promised to take America into a new Dark Age. Thank goodness for an inkling of common sense at last.

Of course we still have the Repugnican whiners complaining about how Obama will turn America into Socialist Hell, where everything you earn will be given to everyone else - the ultimate share-the-wealth nightmare.

My message: get a grip, and learn something about what the word Socialism really means.

It's easier if I give an example, and what better than the American School System. Yes, it's a Socialist thing. The schools are funded by taxes that we all pay, whether or not we have kids in school. Yes, you're paying for your neighbours' brats' education. But when you put your own kids in school, your neighbours are paying for your kids' education. The same as when your parents' neighbours paid taxes that paid for your education.

This is a good thing: parents have extra mouths to feed but those food-sinks aren't contributing income; having to foot the education bill for said money-sponges on top of all that would be too much for many families. When everyone in a community helps with the costs of teaching all their kids, it makes it possible for the kids to have a decent education without breaking the parents' banks. The alternative would be have everyone pay full whack for their kids education, and that's a recipe for an elitist system where only the children of the wealthy would actually get an education.

Socialism isn't 'Sharing the Wealth'. It's SHARING THE BURDEN.

Now I'm not saying that the American school system is good in itself; it isn't, but that's not because it works on this socialist plan. Other countries have similar systems but their schools do a much better job of teaching; the problem in this country is something to do with the way American schools actually go about teaching, and nothing to do with how they're paid for.

If you don't like this socialist idea, and you have kids in school, then you have only one choice: get your kids out of that commie pinko system and send them to private school - if you can afford it. If you can't afford it, it's homeskooling for your brats. And while you're at it, consider what America would be like if the education system was managed like the health system, i.e. as a for-profit business whose primary purpose is to make money. I'm not even going to try to imagine what a fucking nightmare that would be.

Instead try to imagine what it would be like if the health system was run like the education system. In fact, you don't need to imagine it because there are plenty of such systems around - America is the only country in the developed world that doesn't have a national health system, preferring to fool its people into thinking that a moneygrubbing system that would, and does, let them die rather than pay for lifesaving treatment if it saves an insurance company a few thousand dollars, is better for the American people.

Check out the health systems in Britain, Canada, France, Germany. Better still, get a copy of Sicko on DVD and watch it, and before you listen to some ignorant cunt telling you how Michael Moore exaggerated it all and gassing on about long waiting lists and dirty, underequipped hospitals and underpaid doctors, note that I lived in the British system for 39 years and have more than a little experience of the French equivalent, and I never saw anything like that; Moore actually got it about right.

Socialism isn't good for everything - but it can be very good when it comes to providing the basic services that we all need, such as education, health, police and ambulances.

So back to the plot. The next time you hear the word Socialism, don't immediately run off to check for reds under your bed. Look the word up in a dictionary. UNDERSTAND what it really means, and not what some far-right wingnut, like that asshole Rush Limbaugh, or the incredibly stupid and bigmouthed Ann Coulter, want you to think it means. And make your own, clear-headed decision about whether it's a good thing or not. I know where I stand on it, and I have no problem with people disagreeing - but only if that disagreement is the result of an informed analysis, and not a knee-jerk reaction.

Making your vote count

Interesting article on MSNBC:

Click Here

Sangamon County returns to paper ballots

Click Here

Georgia Early Voting Has Some Waiting For Eight Hours At The Polls

Click Here

Blast from the Past

This is from a blog entry (in a different blog) that I wrote in December 2004, after the fiasco that passed for the Presidential Election that year. The Wikipedia entry that provided this quote has since been edited and the original link is no longer there. However with a little googling I found that it was written by Thomas Crampton of the International Herald Tribute:

International monitors at a polling station in southern Florida said Tuesday that voting procedures fell short in many ways of the best global practices. The observers said they had less access to polls than in Kazakhstan, that the electronic voting had fewer fail-safes than in Venezuela, that the ballots were not so simple as in the Republic of Georgia and that no other country had such a complex national election system...

This is an example of what happened then, and what I hope we don't see a repeat of this year.

Phony flier says Virginians vote on different days

Click Here

Polling Spot Delays May Deter Minority Voters

Click Here

Machines change Dem vote to GOP vote

AND SO IT BEGINS...

Stealing Elections II

Following on from the previous post, here are a couple of useful links:

Steal Back Your Vote!

Video The Vote

Stealing Elections

Every major election has its irregularities; it's not surprising when you consider that there may be hundreds of millions of people voting in a short period of time in thousands of voting stations spread across a continent, and everyone is awaiting the result and wants it to be delivered, like, NOW, that there are going to be mistakes made on occasion.

But when there are a huge number of inconsistencies, to the degree that there is concern that the final result as reported differs from the true result, then it's time to ask some hard questions, and if there's evidence of wrongdoing it should be investigated.

That's almost what happened here in the Good Ol' USA four years ago. I say almost, because the first part definitely happened - there were irregularities, concerns, accusations and in many cases hard evidence that the final counts in some areas didn't reflect the actual votes cast by the electorates.

The hard questions were asked - there's a Wikipedia Article dedicated to the subject - and even today people make reference to the whole sorry episode. There's plenty of evidence to suggest that something was very wrong with the 2004 election.

But what didn't happen was the part about the investigation. That surprised me, because you would have thought that the American people, of all people, would have wanted an assurance that the voting process they use to select their leaders was as fair and correct as was possible. So here was this shitpile of evidence of something being up; an official, independent investigation would have gone a long way to settling the matter one way or the other - either all of the mistakes were innocent, the inevitable errors that you're going to get in a vote this size in a country this size; or a significant number of those 'mistakes' - enough to sway the result - weren't actually mistakes, and there is a group of people out there who perpetrated the biggest vote fraud in recent years. And if that second case is true, then because there was no investigation they got away with it.

I don't want to see this happen again with this upcoming 2008 election. I don't want to hear about exit polls showing significant differences from official results; I don't want to hear about electronic voting machines that can be hacked in under a minute and made to deliberately flip votes; I don't want to hear about votes being destroyed because they were on the wrong kind of paper or a certain checkbox wasn't checked; I don't want to hear about vote counters employed by one party or the other (how is that legal in the first place?) destroying votes for the opposition; I don't want to hear about voters being deliberately misled about where and when they should vote and thereby missing their chance to vote; I don't want to hear about voters being intimidated or harassed, or forced by a shortage of voting stations in some areas to have to wait in line for hours.

And if any of this does happen I do want to hear about an official, independent investigation by people who will have the power to imprison those guilty of any wrongdoing, up to and including the President-elect, if he/she knew what was going on; and who have the power declare the election null and void, and demand a new one, only done right this time.

My New Hero

Keith Olbermann is God

I've seen this guy on streaming video a couple of times and thought he was a thoughtful, sensible guy. But this clip shows that he REALLY knows how to get the point across. And I don't think he's acting out the anger, either - I get the impression that the passion here is 100% Real McCoy:



Say it like it is, dude.

I Feel Better

I feel much better about this election than the last couple. In 2004 I was reasonably confident that the American public wouldn't be so collectively terminally idiotic that they would re-elect the same corrupt, stupid redneck. They did - or at least, that's what the official figures show. I still believe that the election was a sham; there were too many things wrong with it - exit poll figures at odds with the official counts, intimidation of voters, whole areas with uncounted votes. I think it was rigged, and I'm not the only one who does, but the questions got lost in the noise. The average American handed Dubya the KY and bent over; the chimp stayed in the White House when he should have been dragged out in handcuffs.

This time it's a different story. The debate last night made it fairly clear: Obama is definitely the better man for the job. McCain came across as a doddery old fool and his snide little attacks reminded me of a name-calling schoolbrat. He wouldn't have been much less convincing if he'd just sat there making farting noises.

It got me thinking about something that other people have mentioned. McCain is an old man, and it seems to be common knowledge that his health ain't that great. If he gets the vote somehow, and gets sick, Sarah 'batshit crazy' Palin gets the keys to the nuclear arsenal. Isn't that a sobering thought.

But as I said, I feel much better about the whole thing. According to the pollsters, unless something really dumb happens between now and November 4, Obama will be the next President. That has to be a good thing.