How evil are you?

(via accidental verbosity)

Well, maybe:

Two opponents of the Community Preservation Act, which passed by four votes in a Waltham recount last month, have filed a lawsuit alleging that City Clerk Rosario ”Russ” Malone failed to give them voter lists they say would show there were more ballots than voters.

The suit filed last Friday in Waltham District Court by Richard Aucoin and Kim Bryant asks the court to investigate the discrepancy and, if problems are found, to order a new election.

I know the guys bringing the suit and helped collect signatures for the recount. Here’s the story. Activists in Waltham put the Community Preservation act, better known as the CPA on the ballot in Waltham as a referendum. Basically, it’s a tax increase that goes to an unelected comittee to buy up land in town to “preserve the community,” whatever that means. Anyways, there was no campaign about it, no signs urging its support, no real debate on the matter. When the election was held, it won by about ten votes. About 7,000 people cast ballots, which was a rather light turnout for Waltham.

So small government minded folks set out to request a recount. Rich Aucoin and Kim Bryant led the effort. In the end, they got the recount, and the margin of victory was trimmed to 4 votes. Aucoin and Bryant were stonewalled by Malone when asked for the voter lists. When they finally got the lists, it turned out that 38 more votes were cast than the voter lists showed people voting! In other words, either someone in the City of Waltham is managerially incompetent, or is cheating. Either way, given that the margin of error between voters and votes cast is 12x greater than the margin of victory, it is imperative that a new election be held.

When I went around collecting signatures for the recount, it seemed that there were an awful lot of people who were against a tax increase, but failed to show up to vote because they didn’t know one was on the ballot. Conversely, EVERY person who I met who was in favor of the measure seemed to know about it and had showed up to vote. I suspect that if this is put up for a revote, it will be easily defeated.

Read the whole story here.
Read more about the CPA at the Citizens for Common Sense (Watertown defeated it by a 2-1 margin).

For real:

On another vlog, stevegarfield.blogs.com/videoblog/, Steve Garfield screens daily life in his Boston home. He calls it “The Carol and Steve Show,” where viewers can watch Mr. Garfield and his wife, Carol, opening Hanukkah gifts or delighting in their leftover Thanksgiving sweet-potato soufflé. The show is in its 51st episode.

For Mr. Garfield, vlogging is an easy outlet for his creative side. It’s unlikely a major network would pick up ‘The Carol and Steve Show,” but the Internet allows him to broadcast his show as much as he wants along with other videos that teach would-be vloggers basic video techniques, as well a show he narrates called “Vlog Soup” pointing out his top picks among new vlogs.

“It’s part of the democratization of media,” says Mr. Garfield. “It gives people the tools to express themselves and be creative in all different ways.”

Mr. Garfield, who in the past produced public-access shows, is making a career, of sorts, out of vlogging, serving as a correspondent for a popular blog (rocketboom.com/vlog) that includes homemade news reports, and he is paid to create vlogs for others.

One of Mr. Garfield’s clients is Boston City Councilor John Tobin, whose vlog, votejohntobin.com/blog/Videos, gives regular updates on issues for his constituents. Leading up to the November election Mr. Tobin updated the vlog every day.

Viewers could tune in and watch him point out potholes in neighborhood roadways and show busy intersections where he wanted to install speed bumps. On Election Day, he received 706 hits on his site, nearly double the amount of hits for his vlog in November of the prior year.

Congrats Steve! Read the whole thing here.
Visit Steve’s main blog, Off On A Tangent.

Zombietime went to the Tookie protests outside his prison, and took pictures of the protests. They’re extremely revealing, not just about the protesters but about teh news media and what they WOULDN’T cover.

Go look at Zombie on Tookie now.

George Will has a must read column on environmentalism today:

But for many opponents of drilling in ANWR, the debate is only secondarily about energy and the environment. Rather, it is a disguised debate about elemental political matters.

For some people, environmentalism is collectivism in drag. Such people use environmental causes and rhetoric not to change the political climate for the purpose of environmental improvement. Rather, for them, changing the society’s politics is the end, and environmental policies are mere means to that end.

Read George Will.

More like the village idiots. Check out this WoW video of synchronized dancing in World of Warcraft, called The Village Elves.

Caught this over on Fark:

New dollar coins featuring all 37 of the nation’s dead presidents will begin rolling out of the U.S. Mint in 2007 under a bill Congress is sending to President Bush.

Lawmakers hope the coins — and an accompanying $10 gold piece for collectors featuring former first ladies — will be a big money raiser for the government like the 50-state quarter program. They also hope the dollar pieces will rev up interest in the Sacagawea dollars, which have been little-used. [...]

The front of the coins would depict former presidents, but not those who are living or have been dead for less than two years, and the backs would show the Statue of Liberty. Four coins a year would be issued, beginning in 2007, in the presidents’ order of service.

Two years from when, the date of the bill’s passage? The date they start minting coins? The date the particular coin is minted? The article doesn’t say, but there is a hint in the first line. It says 37 Presidents will get coins. And yet, there are 38 dead presidents. The most recent to pass, Ronald Reagan, who died last year.

So our Republican congress has contrived to deny a coin to our greatest president in living memory, the one dead president who still has legions of devotees. For shame.

Read the whole thing here.

It sounds like a David E. Kelley tv series, but it is in fact a giant mosque being erected in Boston, which Boston taxpayers subsidized by donating land for the project. The Weekly Standard has a nice piece on it, and apparently, a Boston resident is suing the city for it:

THE SECOND SUIT has more potential. Filed by Boston resident James Policastro against the BRA and the City of Boston, it alleges that the city provided an unconstitutional subsidy to the ISB by conveying the land for the mosque at a price below market value. What may make the Policastro suit incendiary is that the discovery process could uncover what went into the BRA’s land grant to the ISB.

According to Evan Slavitt, Policastro’s attorney, “any government subsidy to a religion is an implicit violation of the establishment clause.” Because part of the purchase “price” for the land was a lecture series (along with other difficult-to-quantify considerations), the city may have trouble refuting the notion that the conveyance was unconstitutional.

GOOD FOR HIM!!!!!

At the time that I first heard about this, I went to the Massachusetts ACLU website, figuring it would be anxious to file this type of suit. Instead, it looked like it was seeking out aggrieved muslims for Patriot Act lawsuits (it looks different today). What priorities.

Read the whole thing here.

(via Powerline)

The WSJ has been running a story about how Mark Cuban is investing in high-tech toilets now (probably because his other ventures have shit the bed). Anyhoo, I figured he’d be interested in this video of a Japanese techy toilet. (perfectly work safe)

I know that these comments have been covered before, but the quote by Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad pulled out today is interesting to me:

“If your civilization consists of unjust acts, oppression and poverty for the majority of the globe to provide your own people welfare, then we shout at the top of our voices that we hate your frail civilization,” he said, to rapturous cries of “God is Greatest” from the crowd.

Ummm, did you just notice that? Read it again. It’s modern Marxist economics. Modern Marxists, perplexed about why there’s no proletariat in the United States, began concluding that the first world was exploiting the third world, that the proletariat didn’t exist within every country, but rather globally. By this way of thinking, Israel is rich not by its own efforts, by rather by exploiting its neighbors. (Logistically, of course, that’s completely insane, but let’s put that aside for the moment.

So what’s the point? The point is that these are not Islamic complaints. The point is that there’s only one source of this particular line of thinking, namely Western universities. We feed our most dangerous enemies with lies and propaganda useful to them by funding these universities with our tax dollars. In a truly capitalist society, the universities, funded by people who voluntarily give money and who understood how it was made, would be far more likely to be emissaries of American culture, rather than enemies of it.

As it stands now, I’m not sure this war is winnable without doing something about the Universities. Sure, you may beat the Islamists, but the Universities will find another group to pick up their cause. Over the long term, this war will never be won without doing something about our institutions of higher learning.

Read Ahmadinejad’s comments here.
Read more here.
I’ll find more links later.