Swing Low. Lower.

A recent quote I found went something like this: "If this really was a right-wing country Republicans would make it easy to vote in Wal-Mart check-out lines."

Instead, as of early 2011, the legislatures in every Republican-led swing state except Iowa (Kudos to you, dear Iowa!) have been busy making it harder, if not impossible, for the poor, the elderly, and any indigenous minorities to vote.

Jim Crow is back but his name has been changed to "Señor Voter Fraudini".

The story the GOP has been telling is that the American voting system is rife with untold numbers of ballots signed "Mickey Mouse", and that bus-loads of undocumented, sweaty field-hands have been carted in from Guadalajara just to swell the number of Democratic legislators.

In truth, there's almost no documented vote fraud. You are more likely to have the Space Shuttle land in your bathtub than find a voting error that's anything more than an honest mistake, excluding Mitt Romney who very probably committed voter fraud in 2010.

Another aspect of the voting process that I'd like to touch on is why we deny felons the right to vote. Is this in some absurd way supposed to prevent vast populations of arsonists, for example, from voting for pro-arson candidates? I always thought incarceration, years taken from a man's life, was penalty enough for the crime. Is there any reason other than pure Judeo-Christian spitefulness to deny a man who's paid his debt to society the right to remove from office the very bounders who, oh, I dunno know, caused the sort of economic collapse that drove him to perform his particular desperate act in the first place?

More sinisterly, it appears that one of the results the War On Drugs has been to also disenfranchise large segments of the black population. As many as 8 percent of voting age blacks cannot now vote, as compared to 2 per cent of the general population.

As if that wasn't bad enough, consider this... downloading copyrighted materials, like music or video, can be a felony. If some party had the political will to track down every single media pirate the national vote for president could be something like 372-267.

Total.

We all deserve a chance to make a better life for ourselves regardless of the mistakes we make and we certainly all deserve a chance to vote.

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Will you be voting absentee this November but don't know what to do about it?

Then check out the Long Distance Voter. Not only can you register to vote, and verify your registration, you can also request an absentee ballot.


=Lefty=

Oh, That Mitt.

Stop me if you've heard this one.

On Friday Mitt Romney says that he's worried about the presidential debates because that mean old Barack Obama is going to lie in order to win. Considering that a "lie" to Mitt Romney is the same thing as the truth then maybe, yes, he should worry about Mr. Obama's "lies".


The Associate Press fact-checks Romney's Libya statement and finds that Mitt is so full of poop that he must be employing some vast quantum worm-hole to stash it all.

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Though only tangentially Romney-related, the New York Times shared an opinion piece that reminds everyone that the Obama stimulus package not only worked, it worked well.

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RELEASE YOUR TAX RETURNS, MITT!

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Quote For The Day

"We will never have the elite, smart people on our side… our colleges and universities, they won’t be on our side." - Rick Santorum

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Today's video: Roy Zimmerman's VERY amusing "Vote Republican". The Democrats should just run this instead of their ads. Seriously.

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President Obama's Top 50 Accomplishments

Number 44: Pushed Broadband Coverage:

Proposed and obtained in 2011 Federal Communications Commission approval for a shift of $8 billion in subsidies away from land lines and toward broadband Internet for lower-income rural families.

And now our Chart of the Day: Voter Suppression Legislation State by State.



Larger, considerably more legible, version of chart here.

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Republican Job Creation Update

9-14-12: The House reauthorized the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, then limited taxpayer exposure to a 2005 Energy Policy Act. No jobs were created.



For the full 2001-2012 list of Republican sloth please visit republicanjobcreation.com.

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