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Cutting Edge: New ideas / Sharp opinions

Cutting Edge: New ideas / Sharp opinions

Iran's Florida vote

The Angry Drunk Bureaucrat posts this item about voting irregularities in Iran:

"Amid increasingly violent protests in Tehran, reports are coming out of Iran's southern Hormozgan Province that thousands of ballots were improperly counted in the presidential battle between right-wing candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and centrist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. Early indications are that so-called 'butterfly ballots' in the heavily Jewish province were confusing, causing many elderly voters to cast ballots for Pat Buchanan by mistake.

" 'The ballots were confusing and difficult to read,' said one elderly voter who refused to be named. 'And Pat Buchanan? Is he even Iranian?' "

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Consolidation consternation

Eve Picker at Utterly-Opinionated.com has this to say about merging the governments of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County:

"It is shocking that something so necessary simply can't be done. Is it because every politician knows it's a minefield? Is it because every politician knows it will take a decade to accomplish? Is there no one who is selfless enough to lead this effort because it should happen and not shy away from it because they may lose votes?

"The future of our Pittsburgh and its region depends on smart, selfless leaders who will get this done because it is the right thing to do. I want my leaders to tackle difficult things. They aren't leaders if they don't."


Thin-skinned engineers

Harry Shearer at HuffingtonPost.com applauds New Orleans station WWL-TV for reporting on what appears to be a campaign by the Army Corps of Engineers to discredit critics of its pre- and post-Katrina work in New Orleans.

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Mr. Shearer said three independent studies had found corps design and construction mistakes responsible for some 50 levee breaches during Katrina, yet a lot of recent comments on nola.com, a popular New Orleans Web site, have denigrated critics of the corps. WWL-TV looked into it and discovered that 700 comments had come from corps computers. Most of them, a former nola.com editor noted, mirrored corps news releases.

Mr. Shearer thinks corps employees should spend more time fixing New Orleans and less time distributing propaganda.


Obama the betrayer

Pridepress.com lays into President Barack Obama for doing nothing to advance gay rights (such as working to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act or ending the don't ask/don't tell policy in the military):

"I have simmered, stewed, and am about to explode! ... I was an ardent Hillary supporter specifically because I did not trust Obama on issues of gay equality. ... Seems to me that he thinks he is smarter than the gays in America. He has mistakenly lumped us into the category of Americans [who] don't pay attention. He has forgotten that we heard him with our own ears promise equality."


Obama the overreacher

The Weekly Standard calls Democratic health-care proposals "a liberal wish list ... that would limit patient choices, ration care and bankrupt the treasury." When "Obamacare" is defeated, the Standard says, the victory "could mark the beginning of a new center-right coalition to restrain the grossly excessive ambitions of the administration."


Bless the Pens

From Chad Hermann at post-gazette.com's Radical Middle blog: "These are wonderful times to be a hockey fan in Pittsburgh. And this is a wonderful team of fine young players and, by all accounts, even finer young men who have earned, and so deserve, every last ounce of this city's abundant, if occasionally misdirected, sporting passion.

"... In our house, Penguins hockey is part sport, part religion; it's shared family values and blessed family tradition. And today, it feels like a benediction -- not just for the game and the series and the season, but for the way that all of those things made us glorious memories to last a lifetime."


Paranoia on the left

At Reason.com, Jesse Walker questions commentators who've linked the killing of abortion doctor George Tiller and the murder of Stephen Tyrone Johns at the Holocaust museum to conservative talk-show hyperbole:

"When mainstream columnists treat a small group of unconnected crimes as a "pattern" of "rising right-wing violence," their thesis bears more than a little resemblance to the conspiracy theories of the fringe figures they oppose.

First Published: June 21, 2009, 4:00 a.m.

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