Quito At breakfast the last several mornings I have read the Miami Herald Latin American edition with some interest. Today there was an interesting story about Cuban immigration through Mexican ports along the Yucatan and the increased traffic there. Closer reading turned out that the difference between last year and this year was less than 100 people, more but not huge numbers, 300+ in 2006 at this time and 400 year to date. Another article compared the foreign aid commitments of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez with the USA in Latin America and the fact that in some ways Chavez had committed close to $2 Billion more. Fascinating!
More interesting was an email snippet of news from General Counsel Steve Bachmann alerting me that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had indicated earlier today that he was finally going to resign after hanging by a thread most of the summer and skating on the thin ice of curious and questionable veracity around his Congressional testimony concerning the firing of a bunch of US Attorneys. We followed this with interest since several of the US Attorneys had been pushed on swords with ACORN imprinted on the blade, because they refused to trump up charges that ACORN employees were involved in voter registration shenanigans.
Justice is a funny thing though. Perhaps we should chortle at the mighty fall, given the problems Gonzales and his people caused us, but that hardly brings justice in this situation. We still have a gazillion Google hits that link ACORN with allegations of VOTER FRAUD, and the rightwing and the Wall Street Journal will only be more determined now that that Gonzales’ blood is in the water to see more of ours mixed with it at some time in the future. So we can cluck our tongues for a minute perhaps, but we are still forced to sleep with one eye open and spend tens of thousands continuing to make sure that our registration operations are steeled against future attack. Registering over 1,500,000 new voters between 2004 and 2006, it is daunting to our lawyers and leaders how we can ever assure 100% security, but we will have to try if we are going to stay in the fight to make sure low- and moderate- income citizens get a chance to vote.
Is that justice? Doesn’t feel like it to me. Gonzales may be down and out, but there’s another one coming and there is still nothing that fixes the problem of making sure in a vaunted American democracy that citizens really in fact have the ability to participate and not just the technical right.
Fixing that problem would create some real justice!
