corrente

I was having coffee with some friends this morning, and we were talking about how the voter registration drives had gone. Everyone agreed that new voter registration was a success, with probably hundreds of thousands of young new voters, mostly for Kerry, added this year. The news stories lately back that up. Everyone's doing followup on the phones once a week, too. Then the talk turned a little more paranoid, a little more tinfoil-hattish. How far would Bushco go to hold onto power? Out of the four of us, only two were willing to say he would stop at nothing. The other two, more trusting types, thought they’d play fair up to a point. What point? Well, they wouldn’t deliberately allow or stage a terror attack, for example. They wouldn’t dream of postponing or canceling elections. But, didn’t the head of the FEC float that idea already? Is there a plan in place for what to do about elections if such an attack occurred? Why has this story gone under the radar?

It got me to thinking (ouch!), so I did a little browsing on the topic after chores, and found a couple of things. First one’s from a blog I never heard of before:

“What is the probability that W's regime would attempt to use an attack for political purposes?" If you assess the probability of that at less than 100%, you need to ask the Easter Bunny or the Great Pumpkin to review the events of the last four years.

How much disruption needs to be caused to trigger a response? If one guy shoots up a precinct in Utah, we keep going, right? What if they blow up the Niagara Mohawk substation in Buffalo-- or Lower Colorado in Texas or one of the other major transmission points on the grid--and we have another huge blackout?Suppose the attack doesn't actually have a direct impact on voting-- a mega-worm that brings down major computer networks 72 hours before Election Day?Suppose there's a nerve gas attack in Houston in late October-- and we've cleaned up the chaos by election day, but we don't know who's to blame?You want to just wing any of those? You don't do that-- you assume that it just can't happen-- and you wind up open for... Well, say there's an attack on Election Day, in Manhattan, and that it's got 9/11-style consequences. You've got a bunch of people dead, fifteen million people unable to get to the polls-- many of whom live in Connecticut and New Jersey (and a large number who commute from Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island). Let's say the perverted wits who chose to attack on "911" do this one at "High Noon", so the rest of the country has 7-10 hours to stew and rage. You ready to hear W. announce that the elections in six key blue states have to be postponed for a week or two-- but the rest of the county can keep voting and counting because "it's important to show the terrorists that they can't win." That's why you want a contingency plan for dealing with a terrorist attack during election season.

via We Report... You Deride

And another site advising folks to get their city councils to do what Hamtramck done:

“Be it resolved, the Hamtramck City Council speaking for the people of the City of Hamtramck wishes it to be known that no act of nature or man will prevent, hinder, or intimidate them from voting and expressing their will…”

via Welcome to GuvWurld

Hey, it could happen. I looked for a contingency plan somewhere; searched the FEC site. Haven’t found a thing. That’s a little worrisome. Any correntians know of one? Is this truly tinfoil hat territory? What would Bushco do if any of these nightmare scenarios played out? I mean, regardless of who caused them? Mebbe we should be demanding to know, What's the Plan?

I haven’t gone back down past the revival tent, but when I do, I have the Wittman article for the “pastor.”