Thursday, May 26th, 2005...9:29 pm
In the End, the Cranks Always Win.
Hoy es jueves, which means the Tucson Weekly is out today. A couple of stories in there caught my eye that I’d like to file under the “Cranks Always Win” category. In other words, you keep up the fight long enough, people will eventually hear you.
One is the story of John Brakey, a Democratic Party activist on the West Side of Tucson. I worked a bit with John durring the presidential campaign. He saw me up in Phoenix and showed me mounds of evidence, including a CD ROM he had produced, that pointed to what he felt was voter fraud in his precinct. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Sometimes, there is that point where you get inflicted with too much stuff all at once, and its hard to digest. John has been telling his tale to anyone that happens to get close to him. Well, John was persistent, and it looks pretty obvious that there was, at the very least, rank incompetence among the poll workers in his precinct. At worst, I’ll let you judge that.
If there was no outright fraud here, it shows that our elections need to be run in a more professional way. I remember the first election I voted in, I was 18, and I was actually running for precinct committeeman, so my name was on the ballot even. One of the poll workers told me to get out of the line so the grown-ups could vote. I can totally see this sort of silliness developing into something far worse.
There is an article in this week’s issue that is a follow up to one last week regarding a incinerator, wait, I’m sorry, they don’t want to call it that. I am supposed to call it a “gassifier” (insert fart joke here). A company wants to build this thing in Cochise County. The claim is that this thing will cause no, thats a big “N” “O”, emissions. Given the rules about conservation of matter, this is impossible (setting aside what happens to materials like heavy metals). The only person on the Board of Supervisors out there willing to oppose it is Supervisor Paul Newman (not pictured above). Paul can be a bit of a goofball sometimes, but he also cares deeply about the future of the communities out there. One night after a Calexico show, he was going on and on about this. The man was livid. It is good to see a long time pol who can still get angry about such things. The back-slappers and glad-handers that have the web of conflicts of interest that caused this thing to get as far as it has can’t stand him, which actually leaves him freer to oppose them. He has been doing research on the technology and the company. His big question: if this thing is so great, why are y’all putting it out in Cochise County instead of a larger market? Makes one wonder.
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