(Note: this entry posted by Bob Harris)

Congresswoman Corrine Brown (D-FL) represents 600,000 Americans in the Duval County/Jacksonville area.

During the 2000 election, 27,000 ballots went ptooey from faulty machines, just in Rep. Brown's district alone. The chicanery that followed is a part of the public record.

And you can guess the relative skin shades of the folks whose votes a) were not for the governor's brother, and b) didn't count.

Yesterday, the Congresswoman was censured by the GOP-controlled House of Representatives.

Why? For speaking the obvious out loud, without fear or hesitation, that's why:

"I come from Florida, where you [the GOP leadership] and others participated in what I call the United States coup d'etat. We need to make sure that it doesn't happen again. Over and over again after the election when you stole the election, you came back here and said get over it. No we're not going to get over it and we want verification from the world."

The backstory: about a dozen members of Congress, including several leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus, recently called for UN observers to verify American elections, given the hanky-panky we all know is coming.

The ruling junta, displaying their usual integrity, promptly produced a bill forbidding any such thing, shouted the Congresswoman down when she wouldn't just Go Fuck Herself™, censured her, and then had her comments stricken from the Congressional Record.

Nice "democracy" we got here.

(Tip o' the beak to reader Richard.)

Tom here. Getting life set up again, attending to family matters and still trying to meet deadlines is pretty much filling up every available minute right now. Am planning to go to Boston, will certainly resume blogging at that point.

(Note: this entry posted by Bob Harris)

Apologies for my disappearance during Tom's disappearance. I'm just under a crushing workload right now, although one of the things I'm working on will make you dance with joy, I promise, if it actually happens.

Incidentally, those of you concerned about the ongoing security of America's movie lots will be pleased to know that entering Paramount or Sony is still only marginally less hassle than boarding an international flight. Which is good. Because we can't allow Al-Qaeda to get into these places and start pitching movie ideas. Pretty soon, Hollywood movies would be mostly filled with things blowing up and violence glorified as a form of social progress... no, wait. Um. Never mind.

Three subjects are hitting the inbox in quantity, so here are blanket responses:

Yes, I do believe that Team Chimpy is likely to exploit any possibility of postponing our elections in one way or another.

My opinion only, but it seems delusional to imagine they wouldn't, given the laundry list of the unimaginable we already know they're perfectly happy to do: muscle into power, steal multiple entire Congressional districts by redistricting, expose our own intelligence people for political gain, start an entire war based on obvious lies, endanger our safety by subordinating the fight against Al-Qaeda, treat our own wounded troops as pariahs, claim the right to imprison indefinitely at the president's whim, rationalize torture, try to time the arrest of Bin Laden to sabotage the Democrats, and build their entire freakin' convention around the shameless exploitation of a mass murder.

I can't think of a single damned thing that these people won't try to spin and twist and distort into a political advantage. Right this very minute, it's an uphill fight to make sure the voting machines themselves aren't simply hijacked. And you know perfectly well which side Chimpy is on.

If you truly imagine there's a line they won't cross if they can, you're not paying attention. This is not about democracy for them. It never has been. As Molly Ivins put it so well: They wish not to govern, but to rule.

I mean, what more would we need to see the utterly obvious here? Dick Cheney simply biting large bits out of people every time they disagree with him? "Go fuck yourself" replacing "E pluribus unum" as our national slogan? Karl Rove strolling down Pennsylvania Avenue drinking Tom Daschle's brain marrow through a crazy straw?

(And really, at this point, would you be all that surprised...?)

Second, a bunch of you have sent stuff amplifying, translating, and otherwise expanding on the German reports of kiddie parks torture in Iraq. I intend to post a bunch of it when I'm not completely overworked. Just... thanks.

Third, yes, the "Bob Harris" mentioned down in this article is me. No big deal. Just, yeah, since you're asking.

More soon, when it's not 4 am.