![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thatcrazycajunAs you may have heard, one of the last two still-unresolved Congressional election races in this country is headed for a runoff tomorrow, down here in the Georgia that isn't next door to Russia and Turkey. Democratic Senate candidate Jim Martin is facing off for the second time in a month against Republican incumbent Saxby "Shameless" Chambliss, neither having gotten the legally required 50 percent plus one of votes on Nov. 4, thanks in large part to the presence on the ballot of a Libertarian candidate.
With the Minnesota Senate race still in recount-land (but trending towards the Democrat, former SNL mainstay Al Franken) and Alaska's Ted "Convicted Felon" Stevens having likewise lost a squeaker to his Dem challenger Mark Begich, all eyes are on the Peach State now as the prospect of a filibuster-proof Senate majority for my party hangs by one seat. GOP heavyweights from John McCain to Rudy Giuliani have been down here the last few weeks stumping for Chambliss to keep his seat as a "firewall" against untrammeled liberalism in Washington, and Bill Clinton, Al Gore and rapper Ludacris have done the same for Martin. And though the big kahuna himself, President-elect Barack Obama, has been understandably too busy to show up here in corpus—what with putting together his new administration, picking out a puppy for his daughters and trying to keep the world and Wall Street from imploding any further until he can actually take office—he has recorded a "robo-call" message asking the African-American voters who turned out for him in droves here last month to do so one more time.
It's not just that Saxby has sided with the Bush Régime nearly all the time on the issues (sometimes to his own detriment, as when he backed Junior's immigration-reform package only to get booed by party-base wetback-bashers when he came home to speak). It's not just the sleazy ads he ran in 2002 putting then-incumbent Dem (and double-amputee war vet) Max Cleland's photo alongside Osama bin Laden's, in a move even McCain labeled as "reprehensible." Or that his equally sleazy supporters in the National Republican Senatorial Committee have paid to put up ads this time that accuse Martin of being soft on crimes against kids...after Martin's own then-8-year-old daughter was kidnapped a few years ago.
But now, a group called Velvet Revolution has put together a YouTube video alleging that six years ago, votes that were cast for Cleland may actually have been "flipped"—turned into phony votes for Chambliss—by GOP-arranged tampering with some of the Diebold voting machines used in that election. If true, it means that Chambliss has spent those six years wielding power to which he was not entitled, in a seat he did not actually win fair and square. They ran a quarter-page ad in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this morning describing this alleged fraud and another in neighboring Alabama that may have stolen the election from then-Governor Don Siegelman (D), who was subsequently the target of a witch-hunt prosecution by Bush's (In)Justice Department.
If you live in the state, please go to your assigned polling place (find it here) and vote for Martin tomorrow. If you don't, please consider contributing to VR or one of the other groups monitoring election fraud and supporting Martin's and other Democrats' campaigns. Proof of, and prosecutions arising from, these alleged crimes would be the supreme irony to lob at GOP elected officials and party operatives who have spent so much of the past few years wailing about supposed polling-place fraud and passing stringent voter-ID laws (while ignoring absentee balloting procedures that leak like a rusty sieve and fighting paper-trail proposals for digital ballot machines).
"Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." —Josef Stalin, former USSR premier
With the Minnesota Senate race still in recount-land (but trending towards the Democrat, former SNL mainstay Al Franken) and Alaska's Ted "Convicted Felon" Stevens having likewise lost a squeaker to his Dem challenger Mark Begich, all eyes are on the Peach State now as the prospect of a filibuster-proof Senate majority for my party hangs by one seat. GOP heavyweights from John McCain to Rudy Giuliani have been down here the last few weeks stumping for Chambliss to keep his seat as a "firewall" against untrammeled liberalism in Washington, and Bill Clinton, Al Gore and rapper Ludacris have done the same for Martin. And though the big kahuna himself, President-elect Barack Obama, has been understandably too busy to show up here in corpus—what with putting together his new administration, picking out a puppy for his daughters and trying to keep the world and Wall Street from imploding any further until he can actually take office—he has recorded a "robo-call" message asking the African-American voters who turned out for him in droves here last month to do so one more time.
It's not just that Saxby has sided with the Bush Régime nearly all the time on the issues (sometimes to his own detriment, as when he backed Junior's immigration-reform package only to get booed by party-base wetback-bashers when he came home to speak). It's not just the sleazy ads he ran in 2002 putting then-incumbent Dem (and double-amputee war vet) Max Cleland's photo alongside Osama bin Laden's, in a move even McCain labeled as "reprehensible." Or that his equally sleazy supporters in the National Republican Senatorial Committee have paid to put up ads this time that accuse Martin of being soft on crimes against kids...after Martin's own then-8-year-old daughter was kidnapped a few years ago.
But now, a group called Velvet Revolution has put together a YouTube video alleging that six years ago, votes that were cast for Cleland may actually have been "flipped"—turned into phony votes for Chambliss—by GOP-arranged tampering with some of the Diebold voting machines used in that election. If true, it means that Chambliss has spent those six years wielding power to which he was not entitled, in a seat he did not actually win fair and square. They ran a quarter-page ad in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this morning describing this alleged fraud and another in neighboring Alabama that may have stolen the election from then-Governor Don Siegelman (D), who was subsequently the target of a witch-hunt prosecution by Bush's (In)Justice Department.
If you live in the state, please go to your assigned polling place (find it here) and vote for Martin tomorrow. If you don't, please consider contributing to VR or one of the other groups monitoring election fraud and supporting Martin's and other Democrats' campaigns. Proof of, and prosecutions arising from, these alleged crimes would be the supreme irony to lob at GOP elected officials and party operatives who have spent so much of the past few years wailing about supposed polling-place fraud and passing stringent voter-ID laws (while ignoring absentee balloting procedures that leak like a rusty sieve and fighting paper-trail proposals for digital ballot machines).
"Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." —Josef Stalin, former USSR premier
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Franken
Date: 2008-12-02 03:09 pm (UTC)Nate
Re: Franken
Date: 2008-12-02 10:19 pm (UTC)