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See Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller starting April 16, 2007...

When conservatives raised hell in 2004 regarding Ted Rall's racist depiction of Condoleezza Rice in one of his cartoons, the reaction was curious. The issue was largely ignored by most of the media, and the conservative commentators, websites and blogs that did rail against it were pretty much told to just shut up. Rall's cartoons are still carried by his syndicate and many newspapers.

Someone posted comments earlier about the alleged irony that a "liberal watchdog group" pulled the trigger on the Imus fiasco. But the real scary thing is the working of one sentence in the story:

A 26-year-old researcher in Washington, D.C., for liberal watchdog organization Media Matters for America, he was assigned to monitor Mr. Imus's program.

Wow. "...assigned to monitor Mr. Imus..."

Now, since my liberal friends and foes are always screaming about the alleged erosion of their constitutional rights, and some believe it's necessary to make specious claims, such as comparing George Bush and Hitler, doesn't it concern anyone that this "liberal media group" is "assigning" their staff to "monitor" radio personalities? Do you not have a picture of a room full of people, hunched over their desks with headsets on, pen in hand, jotting down any comments they perceive to be offensive to someone? Then reporting to some self-proclaimed arbiter of political and social correctness for action?

I have to wonder what else they plan to "monitor" if their like-minded compatriots ever regain full political power.

I live in Pittsburgh. This is fucked up right here.

Is living in Pittsburgh as bad as C&H think?

I consider myself a patriot, a realist, and an optimist. And as those things, I ask all you hackers on Slashdot, for the sake of Democracy, somebody, please steal an election. Preferably a major one.

I don't want votes flipped between Democrats and Republicans. I don't want Greens or Libertarians to get a disproportionate amount of the vote, or even win. I want Oscar the Grouch to win a Senate seat on a write-in campaign. Preferably, several Senate seats and maybe a governorship or two.

As Sunday's Foxtrot elegantly put it, the scariest thing this Halloween isn't that Democracy may have been stolen from us, but that hardly anyone seems to know or care.

The only way I can see to shift the priority of this issue in the American Mind from somewhere below whether or not one's going to run out of Doritos all the way up to putting it on par with who's going to win a reality TV show, is to make Oscar win big. Don't let the news get away with their "unbiased" reporting where they say "Princeton says the vote's not secure, but Diebold says it is. Are hemlines on their way back down? Stay tuned for the new fall fashions, when we return." People don't think this is an issue. We know it should be. Make it one.

A recent Foxtrot summed up the issue nicely.

Foxtrot tells it as it is: http://www.gocomics.com/foxtrot/2006/09/07/