Off to the Polls, Once Again

So today I went and cast my ballot in yet another election here in Wisconsin.

We’re getting pretty well practiced in this sort of thing, here at Ground Zero in the Teabagger War on America. We had one round a few weeks ago where I was forced to show proof of having paid my poll tax in order to vote (darn that pesky Constitution with its 24th Amendment – we’ll have none of that here in Fitzwalkerstan). Thanks to several different judges that particular barrier to suffrage wasn’t in effect for today’s election, but it might be next month when we get to vote for the recall primaries or in June when the actual recall elections are held.

Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) has bitterly condemned the various judges for interfering with his grab for absolute power by invalidating the 2011 Voter Suppression Act, by the way, and has vowed to appeal their decisions to the far more friendly confines of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, a body whose naked partisanship, inept electoral corruption, and general inability to function has made it the laughingstock of legal communities across the world. North Korean apparatchiks think the Wisconsin State Supreme Court is too controlled by one party.

We’re getting pretty well practiced in that sort of thing too.

Today’s elections were fairly tame. Here in Our Little Town we had to choose school board candidates, City Council members, and a county judge. I could also vote in the presidential primary if I wanted to, but that seemed foolish. None of the Republican candidates would be worth urinating on even if they were on fire, and thanks to a modern miracle of Not Snatching Defeat From The Jaws Of Victory there isn’t anyone challenging the current occupant of the White House from within his own party.

Next month is when the fireworks start.

The Teabaggers have already announced that they will be subverting the democratic process by running false candidates in the Democratic recall primaries – apparently if you announce this ahead of time the laws forbidding it don’t apply. Learn something new every day!

This is a good thing for the Teabaggers, since there are several such laws that might otherwise impede their cynical attempts to undermine the rule of law and Constitutional practice here, such as:

Wisconsin Statute 12.05: “No person may knowingly make or publish, or cause to be made or publish, a false representation pertaining to a candidate or referendum which is intended or tends to affect voting at an election.”

Or:

Wisconsin Statute 12.13(3)(a) “No person may falsify any information in respect to … a certificate of nomination, nomination paper, [or] declaration of candidacy …; or file or receive for filing a certificate of nomination, nomination paper, declaration of candidacy or any such petition, knowing any part is falsely made.”

And so on.

But since the Teabaggers currently control all three branches of Wisconsin’s government, they are immune from prosecution and above the law. And anyone who says otherwise is clearly a Kenyan Terrorist Marxist Mooooslim Radical Who Hates America. Or an educated citizen. Teabaggers don’t seem to make any particular distinction between those two alternatives.

I always vote. And I generally take my daughters with me when I do, because they need to see it happening. They need to understand that in this country power flows uphill, not down. That American sovereignty resides in its citizens, not its tin-hat petty dictators and their minions, lackeys and cronies in the legislature, nor its corporations, PACs and false-front “Institutes” for policymaking.

Someday historians will look back on this period with the same sort of astonished distaste with which we now look back upon the first Gilded Age.

I’m just getting an early start, is all.