Political Free Speech

I'm extremely angry at the people who have recently attacked Republican headquarters across the state, stealing computers. Assuming they are Democrats, and not just thugs stealing for money, these people are scum (if they are thugs stealing for money, they are an entirely different kind of scum, by the way). However, it would not at all surprise me to learn that the perpetrators for all these attacks are Republicans trying to get people on their side by playing for sympathy. The number of scummy tactics the rethuglicans have used in this race so far tells me that stooping so low as to damage their own headquarters simply wouldn't be beneath them. In any case, whoever it is, I hope they are caught and punished to the full extent of the law.

One reason I tend to suspect rethuglicans for those attacks is the number of attacks on Democrats recently. There is a fairly large minority of the republican party that seems to believe that free speech is illegal. They attempted to threaten the Crawford paper that endorsed Kerry into retracting the endorsement. They are trying to take down the Electoral Vote Predictor: "The site has had technical problems repeatedly in the past several days and has been down several times. I didn't want to discuss this, but I don't want anyone to think the problem was an incompetent hosting service. Just the opposite. The site has been subjected to a full-scale, well-organized, massive attack with the clear intention to bring it down. The attackers have tried repeatedly to break in, but the server is a rock-solid Linux system which has stood up to everything they threw at it and hasn't crashed since I got it in May. While our troops are fighting and dying to bring freedom of speech to the Iraqi people, there are forces in America who find this concept no longer applicable to America. I don't know who is behind this attack yet (although we are working it), but it is too professional to be some teenager working from a home PC. Given that all the hate mail and threats I get come entirely from Republicans, I can make an educated guess which side is trying to silence me, but I won't say. And I won't surrender to cyberterrorists."

Again, I hope the attackers are caught and punished.

I guess the republicans shouldn't be surprised at the escalation, even if they aren't behind it. After all, the tactics of the rethuglicans recently are pretty scummy... and they've been steadily getting worse and worse. Amazingly, even though they are technically in power, they still find it necessary to use smear campaigns and baseless attacks against Democrats. The amount of sheer bull being produced by the rethuglicans is amazing... enough to fertilize the entire breadbasket region of the United States if you spread it around.