John Fund looks at multiple investigations of the activist group ACORN. He says that it is about time someone paid some attention to them. The indictment of four ACORN operatives in Missouri for voter registration fraud is just a beginning.
One of those states is Missouri. St. Louis election officials were so inundated with bogus Acorn-generated voter registrants that they mailed a letter to 5,000 registrants, requesting the recipients to contact them. Fewer than 40 responded. Mr. Rathke attacked the officials as "slop buckets" and claimed they had "broken the law in trying to discourage new voters illegally."
City officials scoff at that. They say it's up to Acorn to explain why over 1,000 addresses listed on its registrations don't exist. "We met twice with Acorn before their drive, but our requests completely fell by the wayside," says Democrat Matt Potter, the city's deputy elections director. His election clerks were already putting in 13-hour work days and "dumping this on them isn't fair." In the past, several Democrats, including Mayor Francis Slay, have complained about bloated voter rolls leading to stolen votes.
Acorn insists any problems stem from dishonest former employees. Mr. Rathke says he is actively cooperating with the probe in Kansas City, and has alerted prosecutors in other states about registration problems. That doesn't satisfy Melody Powell, the Republican chairwoman of the Kansas City Board of Elections, who says Acorn's claim that it brought the fraud to light is "seriously misleading." She says her staff first took the evidence to the FBI, and Acorn only then helped identify the perpetrators. According to Ms. Powell, 40% of the 35,000 registrations it submitted appear bogus. "It's a potential recipe for fraud," she says, noting that "anyone can find a voter card mailed to a false apartment building address lying around a lobby and use it to vote." Ms. Powell worries legitimate voters who were registered a second time by someone else under a false address will find it difficult to vote.
Read the whole thing. There is quite a lot that is very, very questionable about the way ACORN is operating. We need to ensure everyone who is entitled to gets to vote, but we also need to eliminate voter fraud. The system depends on people having confidence in the electoral system.
ABC News already has a list of the new committee chairmen that will take over the various important posts in the House next session. And lists of all the investigations each has planned. If you thought there was gridlock before this, you ain't seen nothing yet.
Henry Waxman (D-Calif.): Described as "a pit-bull with a fantastic staff," Rep. Waxman is in place to take over as chairman of the powerful House Government Reform Committee. Insiders look for this to become the powerhouse investigating committee "where the action is at." Expect Rep. Waxman to start by issuing subpoenas for top Halliburton and KBR executives. Others issues will include Iraq war contracting and Katrina and Gulf Coast re-building.
The last time executives from tobacco companies were called to testify was when Congressman Waxman was Chairman of the Health and Environment Subcommittee of Government Reform in 1994.
There are a lot more, you'll want to read them for yourselves. ABC News openly calls this "payback time" so you can see where this is heading.
Massive amounts of slime are left all over the landscape. People are complaining about the government's lack of action on the most important issue of the day. But it's really all about the slime. American politics? Well, yes, but that's not what this post is about. It's about a whole different thing entirely.
Giant snails taking over Barbados.
BRIDGETOWN, Barbados - A breed of giant, ravenous snails that first appeared in Barbados five years ago has thrived on the tropical island, destroying crops and prompting calls for the government to eliminate the slimy pests.
A nocturnal "snail hunt" last weekend reported finding hundreds of thousands of giant African snails swarming the central parish of St. George, the country's agricultural heartland where farmers had complained of damage to crops including sugar cane, bananas and papayas.
"We saw snails riding on each other's backs and moving in clusters," said David Walrond, chairman of the local emergency response office that organized 60 volunteers for the hunt. "You're just crunching the shells as you're walking through."
The snails were riding snails? This is very bad. The animal uprising has cavalry. The slime the snails leave behind can transmit meningitis and other diseases. The snails are also the size of a human hand.
UPDATE: Just to help keep BubbaB from having nightmares about gigantic snails, we've located a picture that gives a sense of scale to these things. He won't have nightmares after this. He'll never go to sleep!
They're coming for your pickles. Bwahahahaha. More pictures here.
Iran has not disappeared and they are still forging ahead in their plan to build nuclear weapons. The head mullah, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is signaling that the religious leadership in Iran is staying with their hardline position.
Speaking before a crowd of thousands in Semnan, 155 miles east of Tehran, Khamenei said most countries believe "nuclear energy should be taken away from the hands of a few powers," state media reported.
"The Americans open their mouth and close their eyes and say whatever they want, such as 'the world opposes enrichment,'" Khamenei said, referring to Iran's enrichment of uranium, which the United Nations has said must cease.
The supreme leader, whose word is final on key decisions, spoke as the U.N. Security Council is wrangling over how to respond to Iran's refusal halt uranium enrichment.
"In a glorious way, the Iranian nation — with awareness, an informed generation and reason — has challenged Western fabrications and will go ahead strongly," Khamenei said.
The United States and its European allies fear that Iran could use enrichment to build nuclear weapons, and have proposed a raft of sanctions to try to curb the country's nuclear development. Russia and China share those concerns, but seek much softer measures to induce Iran's cooperation.
Last week, Russia said it would only support U.N. sanctions on Iran if they were for a limited time and included a clear mechanism for their removal.
Iran, which has praised Moscow for its "softer policy," denies plans to build atomic bombs, saying it is merely trying to harness nuclear energy to generate electricity.
So that issue still needs to be dealt with. As does the impending arms race throughout the Middle East that the Iranian bomb is prompting.
Joe Gandelman at the
Moderate Voice has a large roundup of reactions from all over. It is an interesting cross-section of opinion, left and right.
Less than
600 votes separate the two candidates. This one is really the tightest of the tight. This one will take a while to settle.
Webb in front by around 8,000 votes. This one will head for recount land. But there were a couple of other interesting results there:
Meanwhile, Virginia voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and civil unions and returned all the state's incumbents to the U.S. House. Republicans won in two local elections in Prince William County.
Webb captured a huge amount of support in Northern Virginia, while Allen was beating him across large swaths of the rest of the state. Those differences confirmed a widening gulf between voters in the Washington suburbs and the rest of the state, which also drove approval of the same-sex marriage amendment over Northern Virginia's opposition.
Shortly after 1 a.m. today, after he took the lead in the count, Webb told supporters at a Tysons Corner hotel: "I'd also like to say the votes are in, and we won. This is a great moment for all of us."
But Allen did not show signs of giving up. In Richmond, Allen emerged after midnight to tell his supporters to "Stay strong for freedom . . . and accuracy in elections will prevail." He said he would call on them in the days ahead.
So that race at least had much, much more to do with the person involved than the party he belonged to.
My hosting company appears to be having more problems today after they took my email out in the middle of election night. So if anyone is waiting on a reply to an email, it may be a while. I can't even log in at the moment.
Well, I woke up to find that the Senate is now going to hinge on two extremely close races, Virginia and Montana. Webb has declared victory, but Allen has not conceded. The Washington Post is already throwing cold water on the people who might think the left wing pulled out a major victory here, the Democratic winners last night were mostly running as conservative/centrist Dems, not strident anti-war candidates.
The GOP reign in the House that began with Newt Gingrich in a burst of vision and confrontation in 1994 came crashing down amid voter disaffection with congressional corruption. The collapse of one-party rule in Washington will transform Bush's final two years in office and challenge Democrats to make the leap from angry opposition to partners in power.
How far the balance shifts to the left remains to be seen. The passion of the antiwar movement helped propel party activists in this election year, and the House leadership under the likely new speaker, Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), hails from the party's liberal wing. But the Democrats' victory was built on the back of more centrist candidates seizing Republican-leaning districts, and Pelosi emphasized that she will try to lead without becoming the ideological mirror of Gingrich.
We'll see. The left is already agitating for subpoenas to be issued, so it is not clear that Pelosi will - or even wants to - rein in the extremes. But we, as a nation, have a problem if we simply cut and run from Iraq. That remains my biggest fear and the biggest danger facing us.
