INCOMING: California RNC 2008 "Dirty Tricks" Already Afoot!

Excellent post warning of California RNC attempt to steal 20 electoral votes for Republicans PERMANENTLY!

NY Times: Republicans Will Use "Elaborate Dirty Trick" to steal White House. Every so often, political hacks join high-minded commissions and say things that sound downright statesman-like. But then, with the passage of time, when dollar signs dance in their heads, they forget that they have a conscience and go back to prostitution. That appears to be the case here in California, where lawyers for the Republican Party have put forward an initiative so cynical and embarrassingly partisan, that Fidel Castro would blush. The New York Times put it succinctly in a scathingly powerful editorial yesterday: this initiative is an "elaborate dirty trick" by a "shadowy group" of California Republicans will "do serious damage to our democracy."

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Tom DeLay, who as the House majority leader put up with the inconvenience of having to achieve Congressional majorities to pass legislation, simply stole five new congressional seats in 2003 by using corporate money to bribe members of the Texas legislature to invent new Republican seats where formerly Democrats had been electable. Remember when the minority Democratic members of the Texas legislature fled the state so that there could be no vote on this literally corrupt power grab? Eventually, DeLay won and Democrats did not win back the House, by about five seats. DeLay's gone, but at what price?

Dirty tricks, paid for illegally by corporate funds, kept the House in Bush's hands for another two years.

Now a lawyer named Tom Hiltachk, who works for the California Republican Party and until a few months ago worked for Governor Schwarzenegger, has filed an initiative that would steal 20 or so Electoral College votes from California's 55, making it damn near impossible for a Democrat to win back the White House.

SNIP--

There's one simple way to put this behind us. Imagine if hundreds of thousands of ordinary people in this country signed a petition to say "no more dirty tricks." And then every day, for as long as it takes, we force those who have the temerity to support this dirty trick to explain themselves.

Cross-posted on Action Point