The Domesticated Primate

While driving to work this morning, I was between podcasts, so thought I'd turn on some right-wing channel like 710 to hear Laura Ingraham and see what inanity I could find. Like Limbaugh and Limbaugh-lites out there, Laura loves to do the not very subtle ad hominem attack, while always chastising others (always liberals) who do ad hominems. In fact, Limbaugh and all his imitators have done much to educate people on the term "ad hominem", and boy do these listeners throw that term around. Nothing else indicates you are talking to a dittohead like hearing "ad hominem" or "intellectually honest".

Anyway. So Laura comes back from a commercial break, and immediately launches into some clip she's ho-ho-ing and snickering over from, as she has so cleverly dubbed her, Cynthia "cellphone" McKinney. In the clip, McKinney is bringing up the issues with electronic voting machines. Of course, Ingraham finds this a riot, or at least pretends to. The audience is supposed to feel smug in their superiority over this crazy black woman who is spreading ridiculous conspiracy theories. I laughed at Ingraham's little ploy, knowing 99% of her listeners are clueless as to what she is doing, and how correct McKinney is, and turned off her show. Thing is, if any of those listeners did even the most basic of digging, they'd know Laura's full of shit to imply that McKinney is wrong on this. I'll have to think up my own little "cute" middle name for Laura, like she did for McKinney, but for now, I think Laura "Heritage Foundation" Ingraham will have to suffice.

The problem is, Laura is just glossing over facts, like nearly all far-rightwingers do. Let me drag up this link which has 20 facts about voting. Here are definitely ones everyone in this country needs to know.

1. 80% of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S.
2. There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry.
3. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers.
4. The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
9. Diebold's new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters.
10. Diebold also makes ATMs, checkout scanners, and ticket machines, all of which log each transaction and can generate a paper trail.

Why would anyone object to a paper trail, if they don't have anything to hide? It's time to stop running our elections like a banana republic, in spite of what elitists like Ingraham want.