Hi Poet,
Re: Please name some more politically progressive writers and we'll discuss 'em. :)
Please allow me, here's one, for starters:
star-telegram.com
And one more? (This one is a curveball, but it's an interesting curve):
c-n-t-a.com
Molly Ivins, in a recent column wrote that she was in conversation a while back with Jim Hightower. She said that Dick Armey was his own worst enemy. Hightower quipped: "Not while I'm alive." Here's more Hightower:
Here's a radical idea: In a democracy, your vote ought to be counted.
No matter how you feel about Al Gore, George Bush, Ralph Nader, Pat Buchanan, or anyone else in the recent presidential squabble, the ones who really matter are the citizens who cast their ballots with the innocent assumption that those ballots would be treated as the inviolate expression of each voter's will. Yet . . . stuff happened on November 7th.
Poor Florida. It's now the poster child for electoral chicanery and incompetence. Though it's far from being the only state with bizarre ballots, antiquated machinery, and sloppy procedures, Florida's bizarreness, antiquation, and sloppiness has put the very legitimacy of a presidential election in question . . . and disenfranchised thousands of its citizens.
You want bizarre? Some 3,000 Jewish voters in Palm Beach "voted" for Pat Buchanan! What, Yassar Arafat wasn't on the ballot? These people meant to vote for Gore, but the punch-card ballot was so convoluted that those who punched the hole next to Gore's name inadvertently voted for Buchanan. Then there's Daytona Beach, not previously known to be a bastion of socialism, yet nearly 10,000 presidential votes there inexplicably ended up in the column of the candidate of the Socialist Workers Party.
Most bizarre of all, though, is the performance of George W. Bush, who went to federal court to negate a state law that would allow a manual recount of some of Florida's machine-counted ballots. Bush claimed that machines don't make mistakes like humans do“obviously a guy who's never had to deal with his own phone and credit card bills.
This is Jim Hightower saying . . . What happened to Bush's noisy campaign rhetoric about how he's opposed to "litiginous liberals" who're always running to lawyers, about how he opposes "federal intrusion into a state's affairs," about how he always "trusts the people," and about how he'll never "leave anyone behind." Just rhetoric, apparently.
And today's whizdumb:
balsam.forest.net
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That's a start, eh? There's a few more we can get to later....
Best, Ray :) |
