Minnesota Recount Chicanery Starts Soon

Recounts are just so ugly. Here in Washington, State our "recount" crisis during the Governor race just a few years ago, ended in chicanery and a lot of meddling by both parties to incluence the recount.

Now Minnesota is about to have their own recount debacle, this one over a senatorial seat.

Let me be clear: I loathe Al Franken.

I've listened to his radio show, I read his book and he's a jerk. He hides behind the "satire" to say irresponsible things about his opponents, or indeed anyone who dares contradict his narrow point of view. He's the kind of liberal, many of us independents loathe, because he's more focused on demonizing the other side of the political spectrum, than he is about offering solutions, researching facts, or providing real leadership.

His opponent in Minnesota is a very weak counter-proposal to be honest, and really the independent candidate that is running in this race, would have probably received my vote.

However, despite all this, Franken is right, in that he deserves to have the ballots recounted. In fact, he doesn't just deserve it, the law demands he gets a recount. So on this issue, Franken and I agree.

My only word of warning is, watch how quickly the recount is politicized, and watch how much the recount skews the current totals. Recounts are a huge mess, and all kinds of tricks and games come into play, and both the left and right make no apologies in warping, skewing and altering the final totals for their cause.

When a recount triggers, I wonder if it would behoove us all, to simply have an entirely new vote instead? Perhaps, the candidate list should be trimmed to the top 2, so that those who voted for the third and fourth candidates are now forced to choose, similar to the "run off" vote that Georgia will go through in a few weeks.

This would seem to me, to be a more fair way to resolving a race this tight, otherwise ballots suddenly go missing, or suddenly appear (as they have already), or suddenly polling officials claim they "mistyped" their results; and what we get is more about legal manuevering and tricks, than actually determining who the people voted for.

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Fiddler on the Blogosphere

The problem with the right and left in this country is they are intellectual bullies. They rally together, form online packs and then assault everyone who dares to stray from their collective philosophy. This produces a dialog that is more about attacks than resolution and contains more sarcasm, ridicule and antagonism than fact and fresh ideas.

What a sad state the political dialog in this country has become, when the left is spending the majority of their online real estate ridiculing a defeated vice-presidential candidate, and the right meanwhile is already condemning a new president-elect over one cabinet appointment.

Both threads, are so stratified and ironically so distant from one another, and both come at a time when the three major American car companies are screaming for billions of dollars of welfare.

This is an industry that was handed 25 billion dollars just 30 days ago, and now all three are saying they are so cash-poor that they can only stay in business until the end of the year, or they will collapse. In short, these companies are holding our own government ransom for more cash-injection. This is the same industry that spends millions of dollars lobbying our government to avoid regulation on fuel and safety standards.

Yet, our blogosphere is still screaming at the opposite side of their spectrum, vilifying them, demonizing them and mocking them from afar.

It would make Nero proud. Let’s send Markos, Rush, Hewitt and Huffington each a fiddle shall we?

Here's what I intend to do: I am going to spend this weekend, scouring newer, fresher and less-known blogs that are talking about facts and solutions, rather than just "rallying the troops" of the left or right. I will report those sites here.

It's not much, but we need newer, fresher voices out there, that look beyond their own bias, and political party and start dealing with the difficult times ahead.

Rachel Maddow is Wrong

I know she's a liberal super-heroine, and the latest "talking head" on MSNBC to be worshipped by the partisan left, and although liberals often don't see the hypocrisy of denouncing FOX NEWS, but then subscribing to MSNBC, the rest of the country does.

If we must reject hacks like Kristol and O'Reilly, let us please slap Maddow with the same rejection of narrow-minded and partisan media "stars". Rachel, your sarcarstic rant today on your show, that Obama should not govern from the center, because Democrats won, which means your left-of-center philosophy is now vindicated and self-righteous, is the last kind of editorial we need right now.

If partisan Democrats are going to make the same arrogant mistakes George W. Bush did, and interpret an election victory, as a mandate for extremism, the American people will vote you out. You critisized Bush for that kind of thinking just a few years ago, now suddenly because the same argument is being offered by the left it is justified? Isn't that called hypocrisy, and isn't America so very, very tired of these partisan games?

We didn't vote for Obama to get "revenge" on Republicans, or to fire up a new chapter of the culture war that MSNBC and FOX news delight in stoking daily. We voted for Obama to solve difficult problems, not to ratify an agenda that narrowly clings to a single side of the spectrum.

Thankfully, Obama is more pragmatic, and less dogmatic than the cheerleaders at MSNBC.

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