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The Ohio GOP is going to have to get its nails dirty to cheat, this year. Apparently, even though they've been in charge of the overwhelming number of offices in the state for almost a dozen years, now, the Ohio GOP still doesn't control the district courts, which have been shrugging off all Blackwell's challenges to fair voting for everybody. They won't get off with any kind of 'clean' cheating, they'll have to leave their fingerprints on it, and they hate to do that, though they will if they must. Any time I start to feel optimistic, I remember how they beat Dick Celeste out for a second term, back in the '80s -- they rooted around in some legal records and found out that he and his wife had separated in the mid-seventies because he'd had an affair with another woman, then plastered this information all over the place, even though he and his wife had made it up and all was forgiven. Reputedly, the Republican who beat Ted Strickland a couple of times down in his district before he won used to start a whispering campaign somewhere a couple of months before the election that Strickland was gay. Ted married late, and I don't know if he ever had any kids, but because he was a bachelor on into his early 40s, they managed to convince a lot of people who must now be voting for him that he was gay, in a rural, very conservative district in southern Ohio.
I put nothing past them. Winning is the only thing, for them. They'll shoot themselves in the foot to win, and they may well do that this time. Blackwell seems to be partly on his own, this year -- he's pissed off Larry Householder and a lot of the old-time Republicans. I don't think Voinovich thinks much of him. He may just have shat his nest going after Householder, but I don't know how dirty the old time Republicans in this state are willing to get in support of greasing the skids for Bush*. I'm hoping the internal implosions in the Ohio GOP may hobble their efforts, but this may be the one time in the past five or six years they can bring themselves to stand each other long enough to accomplish something.
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