Doonesbury Say What?

"Let's hope that the key conferences aren't when she's menstruating or something, or just before she's going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then."
-- radio host G. Gordon Liddy on Judge Sonia Sotomayor

I wonder if he made similar comments when Ginsberg or O'Conners were nominated. For that matter, I wonder how many female judges there are? Liddy had better hope he never has to appear before one as a defendant! ;-)

Would Sotomayor be #3, or have there been other women on SCOTUS that I can't think of off-hand? In fact, the only time that I did jury duty a woman was presiding over the court.

MANY years ago I used to listen to Liddy's radio show, he was a lot more interesting than Rush. But then he made a comment that everyone who had AIDS deserved it. Isaac Asimov died of AIDS from contaminated blood used during heart surgery. My sister and grandmother had to be tested for AIDS because of blood transfusions. That was when I stopped listening to him, when I finally realized he was just another blowhard.

Honolulu has an electronic election -- voting drops 83 percent!

You could vote by phone or computer, and people just didn't vote.

Three quotes of interest from TFA:

For the first time, Oahu voters had to use computers or the telephone to vote for their neighborhood board candidates and many people did not bother.

About 7,300 people voted this year, compared to 44,000 people who voted in the last neighborhood board race in 2007.

and The city cut its expenses in half by using computers and phone technology by Everyone Counts. It cost about $95,000.

and "This is the future for presidential elections, general elections, primary elections, all the way," Everyone Counts consultant Bob Watada said.

Watada is the former Campaign Spending Commission director.

"(It) gives access to a lot of people who haven't had the access, and you don't have the hanging chads, you don't have the miscounted absentee ballots, you don't have the ballots lost," he said.

How does this address people who don't have access? Anyone can request mail-in ballots, and there's always organizations who will transport you to the polls. And the polls are always ready to help disabled voters to vote.

So you have what appears to be a former gov't official goes to private industry and gets said gov't to spend $95K with his company implementing new voting technology that doesn't leave a voting trail, thus is questionable as to whether it would satisfy legal requirements for recounts. I can appreciate municipalities trying to save money, I work for one, but you have to be very careful trying to save money in offices such as the Clerks: elections, and trust in them, are just too important.

It would be very interesting to see what the full results were as cast by those 7,300 people to see how close the races were compared to previous elections.

http://www.kitv.com/politics/19573770/detail.html?treets=hon&tml=hon_9am&ts=T&tmi=hon_9am_1_02000105272009