There are other things, but that’s one of them and it’s certainly one that you care about. You could totally get ‘caged’ in ’08.

Caging is a clever process by which someone sends a registered/certified letter to your address, knowing that you are not there to sign for it. Then, when they receive notice that you did not sign for the letter, they challenge your voter registration status and have you removed from the rolls.

Caging is illegal. However, the Republican National Committee caged a bunch of people last year.

The best people to cage, actually, are young people like us. We often vote in our ‘permanent address’ district, while we spend little time there because we are at college or serving in the military.

(Yes, I am saying that the RNC supported out troops by disenfranchising the ones that lived in democratic districts while they were watching things explode in Fallujah.)

Remember how they were trying to get the RNC e-mails that Rove deleted? Some of them have surfaced, in fact.

Here’s an excel spreadsheet retrieved from one of those emails of names removed from the voter rolls in Nevada:

This really happened.

Since caging is a crime, it is the Federal Attorney’s job to prosecute the offenders. Not like it would be hard – certified mail leaves a crystal clear paper trail.

If a republican federal attorney were to try to stop this, or prosecute the RNC people for doing this, that might constitute a ‘performance problem’ (to quote the White House).

An obedient federal attorney would look the other way, but ones truly committed to justice would probably interfere.

I’m not sure if the 8 fired attorneys tried to stop it, but coming from the sucka MC who orchestrated the disenfranchisement of tons of people in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004, there is good reason to suspect that this corruption goes right to the top, with even the Attorney General looking the other way while elections are stolen.

I was looking at the line-up for next week’s committee meetings and hearings so that I would know ahead of time which ones I wanted to attend and listen to, and the Judiciary Committee had a strange bill up.

HB 157 adds some rules to how you can sell things that contain ephedrine and phenylpropanolamine, each of which are necessary ingredients for meth (there are a few recipes, either ephedrine or phenylpropanolamine alone will suffice).

The thing is, there is already a federal law that Bush signed in 2006 that is much stricter, and calls for the logs on who buys those products and a limit to how much of them an individual can buy in a given day or month.

So, essentially, the PA House Judiciary Committee is wasting their time and your money on that issue. The rest of the stuff on their agenda for this coming Tuesday is halfway reasonable, though.

Unrelatedly, someone mis-typed the summary for Senate Bill 876, which deals with the prosecution of child-abusers.

Here’s a screen shot (That way you know it’s real!):

Working Assets, my progressive wireless provider whom I highly recommend, sends me updates on various issues on a pretty regular basis. They also provide me with infinite free minutes to call my representatives in Washington, including the president. Anyway, here’s the content of the e-mail they just sent me:

Send Scooter Libby to Guantanamo or Shut It Down

Today a judge ruled that Scooter Libby must begin serving his prison sentence while his appeals are being heard. Libby, of course, participated in the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame — thus endangering our national security — and was convicted and sentenced to thirty months in jail for perjury and obstruction of justice.

Well, we have a special suggestion. Why shouldn’t Scooter Libby serve his sentence at the Guantanamo Bay prison? After all, the Bush Administration asserts that things are just fine there, and Libby — unlike many at Guantanamo — has in fact been convicted of a crime that endangered our national security.

They make a good point!

I’ve decided to move over here, to WordPress. I hope you continue reading, and I want to point out that it is super-easy to add my blog to your RSS reader of choice, that way you don’t need to visit here every day to find out that I only post every week at best.

Pick an RSS reader like Google Reader, (I think lj can do it, too) and then to add my blog, just copy and paste this into the relevant field: gerritvb.wordpress.com/feed

Done!

See you later!