Les citations

• We begin with Oliver Willis:

  If you are faced with bigotry and racism and hate, and you bend yourself into a pretzel-like shape in order to excuse it, you aren’t much better than the bigot in question. Racism and hatred must always be challenged, always be opposed. It isn’t just a “point of view,” it is a cancer on public discourse that must be exposed to blinding light and stamped out.

• Badtux talks about election fraud as practiced in Louisiana. Notice anything?

  This is how you steal elections. This is how we did it in Louisiana, this is how it was done in Chicago back in the day. You don’t do it by registering Daffy Duck, because Daffy Duck’s voter registration card would get returned as “addressee unknown” and he’d be struck from the rolls. You aren’t going to do it by hiring tens of thousands of people to show up and impersonate dead or moved voters — how are you going to recruit tens of thousands of people without tipping your hand that you’re doing something ridiculously illegal? Have you ever even *tried* hiring that many people within a few weeks’ time while keeping it secret? That’s insane!
  
  No, you’re not going to do it that way. You’re going to do it by methods that require the involvement of relatively few people, but which can amount to tens of thousands of votes. Specifically, you’re going to do it by ways that suppress the vote for your opponent (rigging the machines, intimidation / cuts in hours / etc. at polling places in precincts that support your opponent) and by voting the nursing homes (absentee ballot fraud) to inflate your own vote. You’re not going to do bullshit like registering illegals and trotting thousands of people past polling places doing voter impersonation. It’s too damned easy to get caught that way, because how the fuck can you keep something secret if thousands of people (as versus dozens of people) know about it? And if you don’t keep it secret, you go to jail. Crap, I don’t know any politician who wants to be elected enough that he’d take this almost 100% chance of exchanging his suit and power tie for prison stripes!
  
  So why are Republicans so fixated on the vote fixing methods that *won’t* work? Well, it’s because they get to do #3 (and to a certain extent #4) in a different way if they float this bullshit about “voter impersonation” and “illegals voting”. In short, Republicans have invented this “voter impersonation” and “registration fraud” bullshit in order to rig votes the good ole’ fashioned Louisiana way — by depressing the vote of opponents to their rule via intimidation and via striking people off the voting rolls who’ve been voting since before I was born half a century ago.

  I got this via a comment at Just An Earth Bound Misfit, I, who was highlighting a Des Moines Register article (Warning:  Music plays on opening) on someone who'd voted twice because she was convinced the polls were rigged.  Meanwhile, there were two women in Florida (!) practicing their own version of fakery.  Ineptly, I might add.
  
• Yes, that is Beethoven's 9th in the background.  
• Happy Hallowe'en to those who celebrate.  And to those who don't, take that stick out.