If you follow Ohio Politics at all you will have heard that the Ohio Democratic Party (ODP) chair Denny White resigned last Wednesday. A good thing for all, given how utterly ineffective he has been.

Now we have a golden opportunity to get a chair who can rebuild Ohio and take it back from the GOP corruption and incompetence. But it isn't going to be easy.

There has been much rumor swirling around about insider moves, coup's, and smoke filled back room deals.

So to the gossip and the actions we can take in the extended.

Bradblog Rocks!!

...As Half of Ohio's Counties Fire Up Blackwell's New Diebold Electronic Diebold Voting Machines
Is this the Election that will finally break the camel's back?

With so much going on, we haven't had much time to report here on the extraordinary outcome of last Tuesday's election in Ohio where the crooked state that brung you -- by hook and by crook -- a second term for George W. Bush may have turned in results so staggeringly impossible, that perhaps even the Ohio Mainstream Corporate Media will have no choice but to look into it.

With 44 of Ohio's 88 counties for the first time using Electronic Touch-Screen Voting Machines last Tuesday -- most of them the same Diebold, Inc. machines that were decertified in California -- you must take a look at the extroarindarily inexplicable results of the 4 ballot initiatives that would have reformed voting in the Buckeye State and removed Sec. of State J. Kenneth Blackwell (a hard-right Bush partisan) from elections entirely.

Simply put, the polls published in the historically accurate Columbus Dispatch just two days before the election, matched almost identically on the one ballot initiative supported by Ohio's Governor Taft, but the 4 that called for Electoral Reform? Didn't synch up by a long shot:

ISSUE 1 ($2 Billion State Bond initiative)
PRE-POLLING: 53% Yes, 27% No, 20% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 54% Yes, 45% No

ISSUE 2 (Allow easier absentee balloting)
PRE-POLLING: 59% Yes, 33% No, 9% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 36% Yes, 63% No

ISSUE 3 (Revise campaign contribution limits)
PRE-POLLING: 61% Yes, 25% No, 14% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 33% Yes, 66% No

ISSUE 4 (Ind. Comm. to draw Congressional Districts)
PRE-POLLING: 31% Yes, 45% No, 25% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 30% Yes, 69% No

ISSUE 5 (Ind. Board instead of Sec. of State to oversee elections)
PRE-POLLING: 41% Yes, 43% No, 16% Undecided
FINAL RESULT: 29% Yes, 70% No

FULL STORY and EXTRAORDINARY DETAILS...

Rep. Bob Ney (OH-18), my own special congresscritter, has been subpoenaed by the dept of justice as part of the Abramoff corruption investigation.

WAPO article here.

In other news, he just presided over the first forum of the Bipartisan Working Group on Disaster Recovery and Response.

"`They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They pursued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap. '" -- Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark

Lately, there's been a hunt on for a fabulous beast.  It's being stalked in Ohio by those who think this critter serves to feed the even more fearsome beast known as Diebold.  It's being chased across it's traditional range in Massachusetts by a coalition that spans the political spectrum.  And out in California, the beasts faces the fading fury of he who was the Terminator.

The creature, of course, is the Gerrymander, that serpentine defender of the incumbent and friend to Tom Delay.  But as the hunt intensifies and spreads to more states, the question has to become: do we want to drive the Gerrymander to extinction?  Is it always a varmint, or does it sometimes show a more noble nature?