Goddamnit! It's like, every time you turn around, THE MAN is coming down on the Internet. You know what I have to say about that? "Fuck you, 'THE MAN'!" I don't care if you're Bill Jones or the Chicago Board of Elections, if you squash freedom of expression and the press, you have a fiery shit burrito with your name on it waiting for you in Hell.

Gar gar gar! So here's the big hoo-haw: this guy made this perfectly funny and amusing Web site called Voteauction.com, linked to at the end of this page. The point of Voteauction.com is simple: there are thousands of folks out there who are making a HUGE business out of buying and selling YOUR vote. They do media spots, they do polls, they do campaigns, they do "walk-around money", they do whatever it takes to get your vote.

Now, how fair is -that-? I mean, it's YOUR VOTE, shouldn't you be seeing some of this moolah? The deal with VoteAuction.com is that you could put your vote up for auction, and then you'd get paid and told just whom and what and where to vote for. VoteAuction.com cuts out the middle man, and pass the savings on to YOU!

HAW HAW HAW! It's a JOKE, get it? Selling votes is COMPLETE and UTTER BULLSHIT, whether it's done in NBC board rooms or on a crazy half-ass Web site. This is called POLITICAL SATIRE, and it's Constitutionally-protected free speech. The whole point of VoteAuction.com was to point out how egregious election-buying *is* in this country by taking the process to its logical conclusion.

Well, it seems some folks don't see it quite that way.

The original creator of VoteAuction.com, James Baumgartner, was visited by officials from New York State Board of Elections, who told him that they were going to press charges of TREASON against him. That's right, TREASON. As in, literally being subject to a FIRING SQUAD for a SATIRICAL WEB SITE. Yipes! The man backed down, which, like, I would, too.

Of course, there are folks on this here Innurnet who don't take that kind of shit lightly, such as RTMark, authors of the fantastic gwbush.com site. They managed to get VoteAuction.com moved off-shore to Austria, where it could continue to operate outside the clutches of the asswipes at the NY Board of Elections.

That's when the real evil shit began. Because, first Domain Bank, the original registrar for voteauction.com, then Network Solutions, registrars for the altered "vote-auction.com," yanked the registrations and fixed up the root domain servers so they would NEVER, EVER work. This is not about court injunctions or subpoenas or trademarks or what have you -- the domain registrars pulled the plugs without informing the VoteAuction.com people, or giving any reason.

Meanwhile, our own wankbot Secretary of State here in CA, Bill Jones, as well as the Chicago Board of Elections, have both filed in court to get everyone involved in voteauction.com hung by their asses from the nearest flagpole. You've just got to wonder when the Chicago Board of Elections comes down on you for fixing votes, man. CHICAGO, this what we're talking about here. I mean, don't they have some OTHER work to be doing in cleaning up elections, nudge nudge fucking WINK WINK!?

There's a lot of angles about this story that can make you mad. Like, the fact that it's FUCKING CHILLING to think that a few spineless, venal bastards at various domain registrars have so much control over what gets published and what doesn't. No legal responses, no agreements, no nothing. Having your domain name hoisted is like having a newspaper and all of a sudden someone lets the air out of all the tires of your delivery trucks. It's effectively squelching the free press, and it's WRONG WRONG WRONG.

But what's even darker is that law enforcement is even putting pressure on the registrars in the first place. Like, when major Presidential candidates are spending HUNDREDS of MILLIONS of dollars to buy elections, why the HELL is this system coming down on a small satirical Web site? Can we talk about taking the LOG out of your fucking EYE before you go after the splinter in your neighbor's? Thank you? Because this is a WARPED system we have here, folks, and if you can go to the WALL for even TALKING about that system's defects, man, we're farther along the road to destruction than you think.

Check out voteauction, do what you can to support them, send some mail to the running dog shit-suckers linked above. Don't let them keep us down, dammit.

Check it out yourself

hapsburg@pigdog.org