Damn! I spent, like, an hour researching a rebuttal to a couple obnoxious posters on the pumapac.org blog today, and when I went back a few hours later, it had apparently not passed muster with the mods and had been sent off into the ether.
I shoulda saved it, but I thought, nah, I don’t do any name-calling in it, I don’t use any profanity in it, my links are good, and I even linked to this blog so they could check out my pro-Hillary cred. There was no reason for my contribution not to be accepted.
Except that it wasn’t.
So now capitalhillforum.com has banned me because they think I’m a pro-0bama spy from the Democratic Underground because I got tired of their hate-speech and stopped visiting them and they didn’t pay attention to the fact that I’d done as they’d asked and introduced myself properly and had already graduated out of probation. They called me a “zero-poster.” Zero!
Stick your finger in a bowl of water. Take it out. Wait five minutes and see what an impression you’ve made.
And blog.pumapac.org doesn’t see fit to acknowledge my new and cogent research. Perhaps my style didn’t gibe with their conspiracy theories. (It surely had nothing to do with challenge coming from within… Why, that would be positively 0bamanable!)
What people were saying in their blog comments is that Ohio, because it doesn’t absolutely require a photo ID at polling places in order for its citizens to be allowed to vote, is obviously positioning itself to perpetrate a mass voter-fraud scheme in order to guarantee 0bama a victory here.
Right. You heard it there, folks: the PUMAs have the scoop, we Ohioans have been busted. After hoodwinking the public in 2004 with our voting machines in order to guarantee W a second term and keep the state Red, we then sneakily switched tactics in order to keep ’em all guessing: we morphed our election laws into some of the most draconian in the Union, elected a Dem governor and a Dem Secretary of State so that our governor could become an ally of Hillary’s, removing all suspicion that we’ve been surreptitiously jockeying the Big Zero into the catbird seat all along, and then started training our minions to be good little Republicans-in-Democrats’-clothing, scuttling into the polls with their forged gas and electric and phone and cable bills so they can vote multiple times in all the most strategic precincts and execute an 0bamian coup.
Aw, heck! Y’all have figured us out! Game over, I guess. I guess we can’t get away with being notorious for two elections in a row.
All that doesn’t even begin to include the backstory.
As they would have seen, had they approved my comments to their blog, Ohioans are neither necessarily the ignorant bumpkins nor the underhanded treacherous scum they would take us for. The issues are very, very complicated, and Ohio has done a lot of soul-searching on matters that present no clear fair courses of action.
Ohio State University law professor Daniel Tokaji, a specialist in voting-rights issues, keeps a blog http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/blogs/tokaji/2006_02_01_equalvote_archive.html on the ever-expanding topic of election reform. What started for him as an interest in voting-machine-related laws has expanded to, as he says in one paper on the topic, the intersection “where election reform meets the voting rights act.”
Tokaji says of photo ID laws, in his 1 February 2006 entry on the newly enacted one in Ohio in the foregoing link,
Indeed the law did cause headaches for precinct personnel in the November 2006 elections, as I can attest personally as a volunteer for the Dems providing information outside the precincts.
The fact is that there are evils at both ends of the spectrum connecting election reform and voting rights. I opposed the photo ID law for the reasons the NAACP, Common Cause, and the League did. It was during my lifetime that disenfranchisement of African-American sharecroppers in Mississippi was still happening under the guise of literacy tests. Forty-three years is still too recent for us to be able to boast of being so culturally evolved that voter intimidation and disenfranchisement couldn’t happen today.
Dr. Tokaji says in the 7 February entry of the blog linked to the preceding quotation,
The Republican Party has made a major push [boldface emphasis added by me] since the 2004 election season to enact laws requiring voters to produce identification when they appear at the polls…. Ohio enacted a new ID law just last month…. The photo ID controversy is representative of the growing nexus between issues of election reform and the Voting Rights Act. Expect more legislation and litigation in the coming year.
I love how these blog-commentators, presumably with their law degrees? are so smug deconstructing the idiocy of those crazy Ohioans who are clearly operatives for the 0bama juggernaut, having known in early 2006 that they would need to leave loopholes in the photo-ID laws so they’d be able to smuggle BO, who, we clairvoyantly knew, would in a year and a week be announcing his intention to run for president in two and a half years, through the system by blatantly and flagrantly flouting the principle of one-person-one-vote.
Curses! Foiled again by those canny PUMAs!
Let us recap, shall we?
1. The Republicans are pissed that Ohio’s photo ID laws aren’t more stringent.
2. Certain PUMAs are pissed that the Pubs didn’t get their way on point #1, because…
3. Now untold numbers of infiltrators will be able to show up at the polls with their fake non-photo-ID utility bills (which they learned how to make as college students falsifying IDs to buy beer), impersonate loyal Democrats, and beat them to their precincts so they can vote for 0bama, thwarting said loyal Democrats from voting for McCain as all good Democrats should, of course, do.
4. Lots of PUMAs, who claim to be Democrats acting as the loyal opposition, are going to jump ship and vote for the Republican presidential candidate.
5. So the Democratic PUMAs who are going to vote Republican so that the Democrat will lose are pissed that the Republicans weren’t able to accomplish their objective of restricting access to the polls from poor minority voters because…
6. Now it will be harder for the PUMAs to force the Democratic National Committee to repent and become straight shooters again.
And I don’t deserve to be heard by these people?
Maybe it was in the nick of time that I found out that this wasn’t the right Island of Misfit Toys for me.