God planning to tamper with the polls!

Oh Sarah Palin, will you ever stop being ridiculous? Probably not, but at least after November 4th we won't have to hear about it anymore.

In the meantime, we get great stuff like this story about an interview Palin did with James Dobson, of Focus on the Family.

Here's a fun quote!

Dobson asked the vice presidential hopeful if she is concerned about John McCain’s sagging poll numbers, but Palin stressed that she was "not discouraged at all."

"To me, it motivates us, makes us work that much harder," she told the influential Christian leader, whose radio show reaches millions of listeners daily. "And it also strengthens my faith because I know at the end of the day putting this in God’s hands, the right thing for America will be done, at the end of the day on Nov. 4."

Okay, let me see if I understand this correctly.

So according to Palin, if when Obama wins on November 4th, it will be because God is doing "the right thing for America"? So Palin believes that even God thinks she's totally unqualified and ridiculous? Man, that gotcha media sure must have hurt her self-esteem!

Ha ha of course that's not what she thinks. She thinks her bearded buddy in the sky will actually intervene to subvert the democratic process and give her and McCain the victory.

She also thanked her supporters — including Dobson, who said he and his wife were asking "for God’s intervention" on election day — for their prayers of support.

"It is that intercession that is so needed," she said. "And so greatly appreciated. And I can feel it too, Dr. Dobson. I can feel the power of prayer, and that strength that is provided through our prayer warriors across this nation. And I so appreciate it."

So is God going to change the minds of people who would otherwise vote for Obama, thereby subverting the whole concept of "free will," or is he going to just tamper with the ballots and/or voting machines?

I don't know which makes more sense. Vote tampering might leave a trail that could make God's sneaky intervention all for naught. There's no point in miraculous vote tampering if you're just going to get caught. If that happens, people might start questioning your omnipotence, and you're already losing adherents as it is.

However, a mind-control ray would have serious theological implications for free will. It would also basically put Yahweh on the same moral ground as your typical supervillain, except without the hollowed-out mountain lair. Which might be okay, because that's basically what his Old Testament shenanigans were all about anyway. He probably misses the old days.

Artist's rendering of God's mind control ray.
I'm no theologian, so I can't really say which way God will choose to go on this matter.

But one thing is certain: The best thing that Republicans can do on November 4th is stay home praying all day. Voting's not going to help a bit. Your only chance is to stay on your knees all day, repeatedly asking your sky-buddy to change the outcome.

Do it for Sarah!

Post-debate Whatever

Here is the single best thing to come out of last night's debate:


Awesome.

Most of the rest of it was babbling about "Joe the Plumber," plus the usual lies and obfuscations and pretty words that mean very little. The most exciting moment was when I really pissed off my friend's cat, who tried to maul me. He couldn't though, because he was declawed, and that must have been pretty frustrating. I feel bad about the whole thing. Sorry I was a dick to you, cat!

The results of the debate are pretty typical. If you already planned to vote for Obama, you still plan to do so. Ditto for McCain. If you're undecided at this point in the game you're probably so clueless you'll either miss the election entirely because you got confused about what month it is or you'll get lost trying to find your polling place and somehow drive into a lake. So who really cares what you think?

There are two things I want to mention, though. They both keep coming up, and they're both really aggravating.

This is a picture of an overhead projector:

This is a picture of the Adler Planetarium's Zeiss Mark VI projector, which John McCain has repeatedly referred to as an "overhead projector":


Yeah, pretty big difference there.

Here's a page where you can donate to help them renovate the Zeiss projector. Feel free to send them some money, by the way. Planetaria are awesome.

Anyway, know why they need a donation page? Because while money for the planetarium was in a budget proposed by Obama, it never passed. The Adler Planetarium got no money to update their 40 year old projector.

Yet McCain repeatedly brings it up. It's bad enough that he thinks planetaria are "foolishness" (that is actually the word he used). But in his whining about someone daring to try to fund science education, he can't even be bothered to tell the truth, which is that the funding never passed. Argh!

It's part of a weird pattern of Republicans hating astronomy, for reasons I can't fathom.

McCain hates planetaria, Nathan Bech hates telescopes, Sarah Palin presumably hates the concept of heliocentrism. I guess the astonomers have it a little easier than the biologists, at least. Hell, nearly 70% of Republicans reject evolution.

I wonder why America is falling behind the rest of the world in science.

The second thing that irritates me into calcifying a black pearl of fury is this quote from McCain about ACORN. This is basically the new Republican talking point/excuse for why McCain is going to lose.

[ACORN] is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history ... maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.

Oh my god what total bullshit that is! Forget Diebold and the largescale disenfranchisement of potentially millions of people, what's important is that a few people might have registered "Mickey Mouse" to vote. So now when Mickey Mouse shows up to vote he will destroy democracy!

Here's a good explanation of ACORN and "voter fraud". In a nutshell, yes there have been cases of false registrations. This was fraud against ACORN, not voter fraud. There's no evidence anyone ever voted under the false registrations, someone was just trying to make some extra cash by registering people who don't exist.

In almost all cases, it was ACORN itself which drew attention to the fraudulent registrations. Their only crime (and this is only a crime in the eyes of Republicans) is trying to register poor people to vote. That's not a reliable Republican demographic!

Making this all the more annoying is that I can pinpoint when I first heard a Republican shill badmouthing ACORN. It was on NPR, in a piece about voter suppression by the Michigan GOP.

The shill downplayed the Republican attempts at voter suppression while also claiming that ACORN commits voter fraud for the Democrats. It was probably on September 11th that I heard it, judging from the date on this NPR blog entry.

Apparently it took the Republicans about two weeks to get their talking points coordinated, because it wasn't until around the 27th that attacking ACORN really started to take off.



The accusations are obvious bullshit to anyone who actually bothers to look at the facts. They're just a smokescreen to try to divert attention from the well-sourced evidence of Republican voter suppression.

Sadly, debunking lies like this just tends to make people believe them more strongly. Cognitive dissonance is a terrible thing.

Anyway, Obama won the debate. Yay!


[Update 6:38 PM] Want to know more about what the hell is up with that picture up top? Go here and be enlightened!

Primaries are dumb

An interesting thing happened at the voting place tonight.

I voted. Yay me! Since I'm officially unaffiliated, it means I could vote for anyone I want! (I chose Obama, which probably surprises nobody. I would have chosen Kucinich but he dropped out.)

So that's all well and good and whatnot.

But here's the interesting part. My girlfriend/fiancee is officially registered as a libertarian. Don't worry, she's not a crazy Paultard or anything. In fact, she wanted to vote for Mike Gravel (a Democrat).

But woe is her!

Apparently there are no libertarians running (at least under the title "libertarian"), which means that those who show up to the polling place with a little "L" beside their name don't get to vote for anybody, regardless of party.

That sort of sucks.

The unaffiliated people like me get to vote for anyone we want. The independents get to vote. So do the Greens. Some other little party I forgot about already (I saw the list, but only very briefly) gets to vote. [Update: Mrs. Unicow thinks it was the Rainbow Party.] Dems and Republicans get to vote too. But if you dare to self-identify as a libertarian, you don't get to vote!

Now, I realize the point of primaries is to whittle down the large number of people running under one dominant party so the winner can run against the winner of the other dominant party, but I fail to see how it's good for democracy to deny anyone a vote. Just because you self-identify as a particular political party, why should you have to vote for them?

It's a corrupt system. Another example of how the vote of an individual does not count. What counts are party politics and stupid affiliations more than voting for who you think would be best for the fucking job.

And I'm just ranting. But the Lady Unicow is upset, and that's not the way you should feel after trying to vote.

On the bright side, I did write her name in for a write-in (non-presidential) spot. So maybe she'll get something out of this after all!