if this stands...

...we have no democracy. Over in Mississippi, where the Republicans already lost one special election recently:

So what does Republican Gov. Haley Barbour (the former RNC chair) and the Republican Secretary of State do? They shuffle the placement of the race on the ballot in order to bury it. They put it last, under all the local and minor races, things like school board races and so on, so that it's difficult to find. They do their best to hide it, knowing that it will lower the response rate and help the Republican incumbent.

The problem is, it's plainly illegal. It's not "arguably" illegal, or "a little" illegal. It's just plain illegal. Barbour, however, doesn't care. He's gonna do it anyway, because the advantage of getting that race buried, thus helping the Republican, far outweighs the odds that anyone can actually do anything about it in time to make a difference for the election.

There are very clear rules being violated. Nobody knows. Nobody cares.

Iraq for Sale

The depth of corruption and depravity the Bushies unleashed in Iraq knows no bounds. The whole war was basically an unsupervised giveaway to any corporation with Republican ties. These were then given millions - billions, total - of taxpayer money with no means of accounting for it. The waste and fraud have been document in the film Iraq for Sale. But new reports are coming out all the time, including a new Rolling Stone article that details the incompetence and contempt these people display:

Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam ­Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity -- to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.

OK, I'm gonna stop reading this morning because I'm getting really angry.