and in other news

[dwenius]

Here's a double whammy for you. Not only are they talking about how to delay the election, but delay or no delay, current homeland security rules will force foreign journalists to leave the country to renew their visas. Thousands of these folks essentially live here on long term assignment, and could until recently renew their visa at their local consulate. Now they're supposed to leave the country and come back? On a reporter's salary? And re-apply at the US embassy in their home country? "Please allow 1-6 months for your application to be processed", gee, it seems they will miss the election! Imagine that!

Remember folks, beseeching your deity of choice, in his or her awesome wrath, to smite, most puissantly, any and all members of the current administration, that they might suffer the damnation they have earned, is fully protected speech.

Comments

Hrmm...

[kmhoofnagle.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Understand, I don't disagree with you one bit about how evil delaying the elections and trying to kick foreign journalists out of the country would be.

Still, I'm very slow to believe the worst. Maybe too slow. The article about election delays seemed to say that Homeland Defense has support for contingency planning efforts from Republicans and no support at all from Dems. That's a far cry from support to actually postpone the election without something catastrophic having already actually happened. Note - I also think it depends on the scope of the delay discussed whether that's a bad idea. Keeping the polls open an extra day in the event of a catastrophy seems reasonable so that no one is disenfranchised. Saying "we'll suspend elections until we feel like having them/the crisis is averted" would NOT be reasonable under any circumstances.

As for the foreign journalists, yeah, that's pretty crappy, but the final paragraph of the article says they'll do a handwavy SOMETHING to expedite the visas of those who've had them renewed in the US before. Point being - without knowing what they intend to do about handling the press corps in some detail and without knowing exactly how much of the 20,000 foreign journalist population is affected, it's hard to know how important this really is.

I, like you, will be watching this carefully. But I'm not scared... yet.
Oh - and my deity has been exhorted to do unto this administration as it would do unto a poor blind gay atheist immigrant who speaks no English and is in need of HIV drugs.

k.