mcgruff to bush: you suck! big time!

Hey things are getting nutty again. Know what they say, It ain't the heat, it's the stupidity.

We got our phone line fixed. Again. Another short in the wire. And we didn't have to be here. They called and said we're coming. They called and said it's fixed. And it was. This time the short was in the drop line from the pole to the house line. Kinda makes you wonder how many other shorts there are in the phone lines. No wonder everyone uses a cell these days.

McGruff the Crime Dog has admitted that perhaps the country isn't better off after 8 years of Dick "the Dick" Cheney and his lap dog, George Bush. Damn that must really piss off El Presidento to know that no one likes him and wishes him to go away. He should consider himself lucky because although McGruff may growl at him, the rest of us would prefer that he be impeached. Come on. Still time. 6 more months of this jackass. Let's do him out right.

But at least they solved the 7-year-old anthrax-in-the-mail case! Hate to break it to the FBI but folks are going to just laugh out loud when they hear that part of the government's case is based on the notion that the 62-year old Ivins was obsessed with sorority girls. Come on! I bet half those FBI wankers have the whole set of Kappa Kappa Gamma Girls Gone Wild videos. Oh, and then there's that book that came out today suggesting that in 2001, CIA chief George Tenet was instructed by either Bush or Cheney to fabricate a letter linking Sadam Hussein weaponized anthrax so we could start our bogus war. Damn. Where are the Ghostbusters at a time like this?

We voted this evening during our state primary. They had one of the new-fangled touch screen machines so we decided to give it a whirl. The rest of the machines are the fill-in-the-circles scanning machines. The touch screen machines were DEBOLD brand. The first thing that happened was once I started to vote I realized that the election judge had loaded the wrong party ballot so I had to ask her to change it. Turned out it wasn't possible to cancel the ballot, she had to go through the process and cast a blank ballot. She had to do this in order to get the card back which the election judge has to place inside the machine every time a new person votes. When I asked, well wait a minute, won't you be casting a vote under my name/number that will be blank and then if I try to vote again using the proper ballot, won't it reject me as having already voted?

No she said, there's nothing to tie your vote to the machine. Really? Sounds like a problem to me.

But once I got the new ballot loaded, it was quite easy to use and at the end of the process it gives you a summary and highlights any blank spots you have left. So you get a visual summary of how you voted before you hit PRINT and can make any needed changes.

PRINT is not the same as VOTE. PRINT makes a little printout of your ballot and you can see it scroll past you in a tiny little window, but you don't get a copy of it. You can read it and see if it matches with what you selected. After PRINT, you have to press CAST to actually have your vote recorded. I can see this being a problem during the general election for many, many voters.

All I can say about the general election is get your hands on one of those little programming cards and then go to the polls and VOTE EARLY and VOTE OFTEN. We haven't had the opportunity to do that in a long time.

Just don't vote for any knuckleheads.