Riot Party, Table For Three

Climate. Extinction. Injustice. We've got problems and we need action. Republicans, responding to the charge that they stand for nothing but obstruction, have banded together to invent entirely different problems. In the face of mounting challenges presented by the seemingly wanton exercise of the rights to vote, assemble, and protest, they have produced a multi-state Voting And Rioting Omnibus Bill that large numbers of liberals can be thrown under.

Many state legislatures hope to expand on Florida's Freedom From Braking Act which seeks to eliminate impediments to acceleration, in the event a patriotic motorist encounters a crowd of protestors. It has become the unfortunate norm that lovers of liberty have increasingly been forced to confront groups of people carrying signs they don't agree with, and the Act confers civil immunity in those cases when a reasonable person has no choice but to stomp on the gas and barrel through the opposition. Furthermore, in the particular instance that said driver is accelerating into a crowd that is attempting to deface a Confederate statue, it is no longer incumbent on the driver to remain at the scene. "That could be a safety issue," observed Gub'nah and Florida Man "Ron-Boy" DeSantis.

One state legislator withheld his "yea" vote until a provision was added to require a sternly worded pamphlet be distributed to citizens who inadvertently plow their cars into people carrying fetuses too small to determine their party affiliations. Another amendment specifies that a car may be driven into a crowd of people with whom the driver disagrees as long as the driver does not intend to offer water or snacks.

There are limits. The Freedom From Braking Act does not extend its protections to drivers plowing into people exercising their First Amendment rights about Second Amendment rights.

On the national level, Republicans maintain their stout objection to any definition of infrastructure that goes beyond the traditional construction of highways or bridges upon which a car might be driven into a crowd of liberals.

The Florida bill, widely admired in GOP circles, also defines "riot" as consisting of any group of three or more people ack'n' up. A group of this size might be encountered, for instance, in the vicinity of a ballot drop box in those states that have capped the number of such drop boxes to one per county, or that have severely restricted polling places in poorer communities. Upon encountering groups of three or more people hanging around in a gang outside of a polling place in certifiably blue counties, a rampaging driver should feel free to gun it, gun it, gun it, without ascertaining the crowd's actual positions, as long as they feel personally threatened by their perceived votes and opinions.

Meanwhile, the ongoing effort to purge voting rolls of dead people will be much aided by the new requirement that first responders at the scene of a car-plowing incident immediately send notification of any fatalities to the elections division. "We intend to be proactive to thwart the growing zombie vote problem," said the Gub'nah.

The Gub'nah furthermore hopes the severe restriction in the number of polling places will result in crowding sufficient to justify almost any amount of homicidal driving.

The Secretary of State, candidly admitting she is "old-fashioned" about the legality of murder by Buick, blondly suggested preventive safety measures such as restricting the hours polls can be open to between 5am and 5:23am Brunei Darussalam Time (please consult time zone conversion table on the state website) and limiting locations to areas that can be accessed only by Hummer. For those for whom this might be inconvenient, an absentee ballot may be requested along with identifying information such as the name of the voter's financial advisor or a recent property tax statement.

The Urge To Purge

I voted last week. There were problems. Tater Cat kept stretching out on the Voter's Pamphlet, and I got so caught up trying to figure out one of the ballot measures that I overcooked my oatmeal. Other than that, things went smoothly.  The Voter's Pamphlet came through the mail slot a couple weeks ago and a few days later the ballots shot through too. If I could rig up the mail slot so they'd land in my lap it would be even better.

It takes me a few days to study the ballot, on account of having to attend to the oatmeal and the litter box and whatnot, but I've got plenty of time. And it's a good thing, too. I remember those awful days when we'd trudge through the rain to the polling place and the nice neighbor lady would hand us our ballots and we'd pull the curtains behind us and vote. They were tiny curtains, gave you standard hospital-gown coverage. The ballot always seemed to have a few surprises I wasn't prepared for and that took some time. And then there'd be some initiative that would be described like this:

"The result of a NO vote is to maintain the repeal of the prohibition of the anti-inflammatory annulment revision ban." This kind of thing takes a lot of study. You have to start at the end and work backwards, and you don't always have enough fingers. Filling in the bubble at that point is like snipping the last wire on an explosive device. One wrong move and you might have agreed to donate a kidney to a Republican. It's best done from an easy chair, next to a cat with extra toes.

So I'm certainly glad we switched over to this nice, 100% paper ballot unhackable home voting system. I'm sure the rest of you are satisfied too.

What? You still go to the polls? You stand in line for hours? Sometimes you discover you're not on the rolls anymore? Your chads are still hanging under that curtain? There's no paper trail? You can't vote if your address is a post office box? You need your birth certificate, a note from your mommy, and an 8x10 color glossy? What kind of a stupid system is that?

Well, color me horrified. Except in Georgia, where it would be in my best interest not to color me at all, lest I get purged. There's a nice black woman running for governor there and it even looks like she has a good chance unless something can be done about it. Fortunately, the white dude she's running against is the Secretary of State in charge of elections, so something is.

I do read these comment threads full of Republican apologists. I have to, otherwise I might be able to sleep through the night. So I know what the problem is. There are lots and lots of people out there who can't even be bothered to get a proper driver's license with a photo I.D. to show to the poll people, so they shouldn't be allowed to vote. If you're that lazy, you shouldn't vote.

Uh. The lazy ones don't vote, so I'm not sure what the problem is.

Oh! And then there are all those people still on the voting rolls who are technically dead. That's a travesty. Thousands! We must purge the rolls of dead people.

Uh. Dead people vote even less often than lazy people. If you think you see a bunch of raggedy dead people lurching toward the polling booth, they're probably just homeless. They should vote too--they probably have opinions and life experiences that we need to hear about.

In general, Democrats think people who want to vote should be able to vote, whereas Republicans think people who want to vote Republican should be able to vote. Personally, I think felons should be able to vote. Why not? I understand people think voting is a privilege, but isn't it a privilege of citizenship? Are felons not citizens?

Ah. Citizens. There's the real problem: all those immigrants coming in to vote in our elections. They won't call the cops if there's trouble in the neighborhood, lest they be swept into detention on mistaken identity, but they're lining up in droves to cast illegal ballots. It's a risk for sure, so the only possible explanation for this is they're getting paid by George Soros. We already know they'll do anything for a little bit of money. They'll even pick radishes and dismember chickens and stuff. So. Ipso whacko, they're on the take.

Well, clearly, some restrictions are necessary. We can't just have people expressing their democratic wishes willy-nilly. There should be hoops to jump through. Hoops! That's it!

Let's make everybody shoot foul shots for ballots! Or, alternately, let's make everyone pass a basic civics test--ask a newly naturalized citizen if you need help. Or let's wipe out the lazy contingent altogether by requiring everyone to walk a thousand miles through the desert. That, there, shows fortitude.

Eeny Meeny Miney NO

When I was a kid, a lot of things didn't make sense, or didn't seem fair. When we were choosing who would be "it," by applying the eeny meeny miney moe protocol, some flicker in my brain told me that there should have been a strict mathematical principle involved that would predetermine the result. At the least I should have been able to figure out that any eeny meeny contest with only two people in it will always go to the meeny person, or that with three people it will always land on the eeny person. Yet somehow the result was always a mystery to me until the very end, because I was too distracted by the concept of catching a turkey by the toe to puzzle it out. Could you call them "toes," exactly? And wouldn't that be really hard?

In the "not fair" category was the infuriatingly arbitrary non-game "Mother May I," in which the designated autocrat in charge could tell her favorite to take three giant steps, and could tell everyone else to take baby steps, and that was that, no matter how polite you were. This was an added unfairness on top of the unfairness that I had never been, and still am not, able to take a giant step.

And many things didn't make sense. I was pretty young when I heard a rumor that people could come in different colors. I had been familiar with black and white, even realizing that it was an approximation--for instance, "white" referred to the shade represented by the single crayon called "flesh"--and I more or less accepted "red" although the red people in question were at best reddish, but when mom said there were yellow people too, I was very excited. I guess I bugged her about it for days. I was visualizing a tribe of proto-Simpsons. Finally mom found a suitable example and quietly pointed him out to me, and we both learned something. I learned that adults made weird and subtle distinctions, and mom learned how to make her child bellow "but MOM, he's not YELLOW" on a crowded sidewalk.

Other things were just plain dumb. We used to do this thing where you'd pluck a buttercup, that small yellow shiny flower, and hold it under your friend's chin. If it reflected yellow, it meant she loved butter. Well. That was dumb, for two reasons. We were a low-budget margarine family, and only bought two sticks of butter a year, for the adults to indulge in on high holy days. I thought real butter tasted strange and icky (I got over it), and I couldn't see why anyone would take the word of a buttercup over my own. Two, it wasn't much of a conclusion. The buttercup reflected yellow under everyone's chin. The whole exercise seemed pointless. We kept doing it, though, because it felt kind of good to have someone tickle your chin with a flower.

It was only recently it occurred to me that the point of the exercise was to weed out dark people. Just because everyone in my neighborhood reflected buttercups didn't mean it was universal. I am going to be very quiet about this revelation because I don't want the Republican Party to start going after the voter fraud we don't have any of with mandatory buttercup testing at the polls. It's bad enough that someone who is not even your mother can keep you from taking giant steps in this world.

And I realized something about that eeny-meeny-miney-moe turkey, too. My parents may have had very good reasons for keeping the "nigger" out. But most people don't.