The Onion on Voting, Puppetry and Illusions

A week ago, The Onion produced a hilarious - not to be confused with Hillaryous - satirical look at the upcoming "election", from the shadowy perspective of reports of Diebold voting machine hacks in Florida a month ago ... or perhaps demonstrations of Diebold voting machine hackability a year ago ... or perhaps questionable results from the last two presidential "elections" ... or perhaps the last 14, if their reference to "the group of military and corporate leaders that has chosen every American president since Eisenhower" is not entirely fictional. 

The headline: "A minor software glitch at the Diebold corporation today caused thousands of electronic voting machines to accidentally release the results of the 2008 presidential election, months ahead of schedule."

[link]

[Update: favorite quotes removed, so as not to spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen the video.]

[Update, 2008-03-15: the United States, which received generally high scores in the recently released 2007 Global Integrity Index, ranked only 10th in the integrity of its elections.]

I'm grateful for the link to this video sent to me by Ellen Riloff, my long-time friend and former co-conspirator and lab-mate at the NLP Group at UMass, where she so ably executed the duties of Humor Director, and continues to help me lighten up from time to time, even while on sabbatical in California ... her notes from which reveal another obsession we share - whale watching.