I knew something foul, disgusting, and pathetic was stinking up the otherwise beautiful Friday air... Ray Nagin was campaigning in Houston the other day.

Never mind the fact that he's bought a house in Dallas and sent his kids to private schools there. Gotta visit the folks he swept under Houston's rug to deal with, you know. Votes is votes, even if you've made them somebody else's problem.

Here's the kicker:

New Orleans residents in Houston and elsewhere are eligible to vote by absentee ballot. Nagin emphatically said during the meeting that he expects to win the election.

That's right. While you're letting John Q. taxpayer pay for your hotel room, meals, your ten kids in overcrowded schools, and the cable bringing you wall-to-wall soap operas to watch while mexicans clear out the rubble and rebuild New Orleans, your input is still needed to rubberstamp the man who abandoned you at the Superdome to drown back into office.

But it doesn't just end with you. After all, you have a pulse and somewhat coherent brainwave activity. What about those who don't even have those things? Can't discriminate against them... it would be racist. (Being a free-roaming hygiene-impaired mental patient is a race, you know. It's in the Bible somewhere. Look it up.)

New Orleans, like many corrupt municipalities, has a problem with large numbers of ballots coming from residents of cemeteries, retirement home coma patients, homeless bums with stacks of registrations to church out for cash, and outright imaginary people. How are we going to make sure that Houston corpses, vegetables, bums, and imaginary people vote only for Houston candidates and not vote twice by voting absentee in elections in New Orleans as well?

Ray Nagin is counting on every rusty and wobbly cog of his shattered political machine to come back together to grind him out another victory. Living or dead, coherent or comatose, one or many-fold, or even legimately a part of our universe - it doesn't matter. He wants the government to build New Orleans back up, and that included the disgustingly corrupt election procedures and absent quality-control which made it the partially fetid stinkhole disaster site with trolleycars and gamblinghouses instead of reinforced levees it is today.

But the law is the law, and it must be enforced. No man is above it, even if it's a jackass in a suit blaming Bush over and over hundreds of feet up in a Coast Guard helicopter yanking people from rooftops. I say absentee voting needs to be stopped for this election so that only those cemetery, nursing home ward, underpass, and fantasyland residents who have shown their desire to participate in the rebuilding of New Orleans should be rewarded with helping rebuild its political structure.

Keep the crooked vote local, dammit!

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