The Family That Preys Together

Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell may be fairly referred to as the Katherine Harris of the 2004 election. Blackwell notoriously gamed the system as much as he could for his party masters, used his state office for partisan gain, and notoriously disqualified thousands of Ohio ballots because they were the wrong sort of paper stock. For his loyal service, like Harris, Blackwell is attempted to capitalize on his perfidy by parlaying it into higher office, by running for governor of Ohio.

Turns out Blackwell's got his little fingers in some conflict-of-interest cookie jars, as well as some businesses whose products he has actively campaigned against on social and moral grounds.

Although he opposes potential November ballot initiatives to permit slot machines at Ohio’s horse-racing tracks, Republican gubernatorial candidate J. Kenneth Blackwell holds stock in the world’s leading maker of slot machines.

....

Blackwell, who opposes abortion rights, also holds stock in Barr Pharmaceuticals, maker of the controversial Plan B, or the morning-after pill, to prevent pregnancy. Many Catholics and conservative Christians believe that emergency contraception can cause an early abortion.

So let me get this straight -- a conservative scold turns out to be a sanctimonious hypocrite, profiting handsomely from that which he condemns? Really, I am shocked. You could knock me over with a feather.

And these self-righteous fools wonder why we hold them in such contempt. Well, because you insist on letting yourselves get rooked, over and over again, by people like Ken Blackwell. At a certain point, people just figure that maybe it really is morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money.

But here's where it gets really good:

Blackwell also revealed this week that he owned stock last year in voting-machine manufacturer Diebold while his office negotiated a contract with the North Canton company, although Blackwell said the stock was bought by his financial manager without his knowledge.

They hardly even bother trying to hide it any more. They know there are just enough morons who will reflexively assume it's a witch hunt by the librul media. Shit, if only there were a truly liberal media. I think there's a huge story in how Ohio went down in '04. I think there's a tremendous disconnect between our reaction to the Ukraine elections at the time (discrepancy between exit polls and election returns was too large to be ignored) and the Ohio election (exit polls are useless because they didn't jibe with results). I do not understand how a company like Diebold can get away with dozens of reports of defective machines (all defects, curiously, accruing only to Bush), lack of transparency in implementation and maintenance of source code, and a well-known Republican bias announced in writing by the company's CEO.

There is enough muck in this Ohio mess to qualify the state as a Superfund site. What say we leave Brangelina and Tomkat alone for a couple days and do some investimagating, o keepers of the journamalistic flame? Maybe we can pry Tweety Matthews' lips from the Bugchaser's schlong just long enough to make him look into a real story.

Yes, and maybe monkeys will fly out of Donald Rumsfeld's ass at his next bullshit session with the "real" journamalists.