I tried to watch the state of the Union, but watching all the Democrats clap for lines about health care, when the real awful plan is based on robbing working people and defunding public hospitals in NY (where Senator Clinton is from, hmmm) to make tax breaks for healthy yuppies, well, that was too much.
But if you missed the real one, this summary goes down somewhat easier, although it's also painful:
Here's a table, filched from the county elections office:
| 744 of 744 Precincts Completely Reporting |
|
|||
| Percent | Votes | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| YES |
|
56.48% | 84,351 | |
| NO |
|
43.52% | 64,984 | |
| Total | 149,335 | |||
Wait a minute….
Ballots Cast: 150,399. Votes total 149,335.
More than a thousand people turned up to vote for this (or submitted absentee ballots) and voted blank? What's up with that? Isn't that a remarkably high rate of spoiled e-ballots for an election with exactly ONE question on it?
Early voting and absentees broke about 2:1 in favor of the “strong mayor” but the actual number of votes cast was minuscule. Out of 1,050,581 eligible voters, only 42,171 voted in favor, and 23,197 against, for a spread of under twenty thousand. Today's voters should be a little more numerous, but with 281 of 744 precincts counted, we're only up to a total of 95,987 votes cast, and the election-day vote is split almost 50/50, with a slight edge to the “no” side.
If this trend were to speed up just a bit, it might become another nail-biter; at present rates, though, the “no” vote isn't catching up quite fast enough. Since the votes are not evenly distributed geographically, and I have no real sense of who has reported and who hasn't, I don't think the trend means much, so anything could still happen ….
Update: With 5/7 of the precincts reporting, the yes vote is now slightly ahead even with today's voters. The spread remains small — about 22,000 votes — but that's out of only 126,000 or so cast. Voter turnout is well into double-digit percentages, though, so that's something.
Libby Destroyed Evidence Prior To Testifying, Cheney “Deeply Involved”.
At what point does this sort of behavior stop being politics as usual and instead become high crimes and misdemeanors?
It's election day today on the Charter Reform, and I'm going to vote FOR it. If you're a Miami-Dade County resident and registered to vote, I urge you to do the same. Turnout will be very light so your vote counts more than usual.
Meanwhile, it's business as usual.
Fraudulent mailings is an old Miami tradition, and it looks as if the lurid mailings I blogged about the other day could be in keeping with tradition.
At least, that's the story at Eye On Miami, FRAUD ALERT in Miami! Political Action Committees and mass mailing by geniusofdespair. It seems that the “Citizens for Unity and Common Rights PAC” is remarkably hard to find. And that its main protagonist, supposedly one Bernardo Bestard, is also sort of hard to find — and has a remarkably protean signature.
Paul Krugman blogs on healthcare:
I'm amazed at the way “government health care” is still a scare-term, when 90 million Americans already get insurance from Medicare, Medicaid, or other government programs including [federal employees] and the V.A. system — and most of them find their care just fine. Actually, government insurance is already bigger in dollar terms than private insurance (private spending is 55 percent of health spending, but a substantial fraction of that is out of pocket.) And somehow nobody notices.
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