Voter Caging

Caging is a really patriotic, Constitution-loving and respecting little political strategy. Here's how it works: you take a list, any list, and send postcards, marked "Do Not Forward" to everyone on that list. If any of those postcards are returned to you, you challenge that voter at the poll as registered under a false address. This stunt has been pulled for years, exclusively by Republicans, almost always in poor communities where there is a higher rate of residential turnover.

Now, here's the truly evil, 2008 version: Republicans in Michigan announced (no kidding) that they were going to take lists of those whose homes have been foreclosed and pull the old caging stunt on those foreclosed upon. Get it? Yes, the Republicans, who love democracy so much that they will destroy your country and kill all your people to make sure you have it, fostered the foreclosure crisis through their orgy of deregulation and making those subprime loans with no money down at 125% of the value of the house, and now intend to benefit from it by challenging the victims--disproportionately lower income, disproportionately darker skinned people. That would be, the very people overwhelming likely to vote for Barack Obama! This scheme makes Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris look like amateurs. Hanging chads, indeed!

Is it a coincidence that after Obama's legal team filed challenges in Michigan to the Republican party's stated intention, the McCain campaign pulled out of that state? Sort of a confession that, playing by the rules and showing common decency, they couldn't compete, don't you think?

This is merely the first volley of the Republican battle to steal another election. They believe that they can do it, because they already got away with it in 2000 and 2004. Watch these assholes; they'll do it again if they get half a chance!