I can haz Absentee Ballot? No. Not Yours.

At a national level the McCain Campaign
and the RNC have been mailing out Absentee Voter Forms. On the surface
this is a non partisan act of good will to increase voter turn out. At
the simplest examination the logic is Old people like McCain Old people
vote Absentee lets help them out.

In actuality the mailings have the potential to disfranchise you and man
others. First look at the mailing you may have received. I bet it was
addressed to the Seaton Family or Current Resident. Mine was and so have
several others I have seen. The Seaton family is not some elderly
couple that used to live in your place its just a cover to throw you off
the intent of the mailing. The mailer includes an absentee ballot and a
envelope to return it to the registrar. This si step one in
disenfranchising a poor trusting student who received the mailing.

So you think great, I am from Richmond, I want to vote I just fill this
out and shove it in the mail and I am all set. But look closer at the
return envelope. The return address is that of the Montgomery County
Registrar in Christiansburg. If you send it there you wont get receive
an absentee ballot, the registrar you want to notify is your home
county's.

The second way this can get more Blacksburg residents disenfranchised is
by overwhelming the Montgomery county office. Local residents who have
moved, new permanent residents like me and those locals who really need
absentee ballots from the Montgomery Office may not get properly
registered in time because election officials are dealing with errant
absentee requests.

This mailing was mass mailed to Blacksburg addresses which are
overwhelmingly student addresses because of the demographics of our
college town. These ballots have the potential to trick you into
thinking you are all ready to vote absentee when you are not and swamp
the local registrar to the point where actual absentee voters and local
residents have trouble registering. The mailer looks innocent enough,
perhaps you though the campaign was trying to turn out those stalwart
Republicans the Seatons who are unable to leave their home. In fact
this mailer may have been designed to disenfranchise the students of
Virgina Tech and Blacksburg local residents by lulling them into
thinking they are properly registered to vote absentee when they are
not.

Check it out for yourself. Try searching for hard news articles on
McCain absentee ballot mailings. This is not just some conspiracy
cooked up in the minds of liberal bloggers. Its occurring all over the
place. In Ohio they leave off a check box that is required by state law.
In Wisconsin the return addresses are wrong. In Iowa its asks for the
wrong number off your drivers license.

Please check the Virginia State Board of Elections on how to identify
where and how to properly register. If you don't qualify as a Virginia
resident check you home states procedures to register.

Ignorance is Bliss or I should have stopped reading

"If I don't know it, its not true."

That seems to have been a Republican and Other Right Wing enclave tactic to ignore things that don't coalesce into their little world view. A few examples from last weeks news.

Argument:
Sex is Bad therefore Contraception is Bad. Most people think abortion is something to be avoided so lets equate contraception with abortion to try and keep women from having sex.

Fact Required to be Ignored: Oral Contraception doesn't abort anything. Its explained in this satirical post at slate.

Oral contraception does three things prevents ovulation prevents fertilization and prevents implantation. The last one is used to call it abortion. To make that case you have to believe that Oral contraception fails at step one and at step two but is 100% at step three.

As you know, the risk that oral contraception will prevent implantation of an embryo is purely theoretical. There is no documented case of such a tragedy, since we have no way to verify conception inside a woman's body prior to implantation without causing the embryo's death. Even theoretically, the risk is vanishingly small, since the primary effect of oral contraception is to prevent ovulation, and the secondary effect is to prevent fertilization.

Argument: Oil drilling is good for America we need to do it. Conservation such as step to increase fuel mileage is mockable.

Fact required to be ignored: The bottle neck in supply is in gasoline production not in crude supplies.

Oil companies make money turning crude Oil into products we buy. Oil executives make money when Oil companies stock prices go up. If increased drilling and production would raise profits oil companies would be doing it in the lands they already have leases to. The prospect of new leases would raise stock prices soon but not do much to the price of gasoline especially in the near term. Read a well formulated explanation here

Argument: Obama is to famous and popular with the media. This is leading to irrational exhuberance instead of looking at who is better which would lead people to McCain.

Fact ignored: McCain has gottten a pass on all the dumb things he has said because he used to be cool to the press back in 2000.

McCain is a media darling and everybody loves him just look at his IMDB list of appearances as noted by TPM.

No long example here just watch the daily show and read talking points memo. They catch most of the horrible things that come out of his mouth, rape is funny so is killing Iranians and verbally abusing his wife.

Speaking of funny look at this. Paris Hilton lampoons McCain ad.

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/64ad536a6d