Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Clusterfuck Nation,
A Fine, Deliberately Engineered Mess"Can't we just be Mexico or Paraguay and have peace and quiet while things mostly go to hell?"
- Matt Taibbi
The garish stunt pulled by the Democratic Party in Alaska's US Senate race has been known for months - a florid, festering carbuncle on the election's face - and The New York Times finally reported it this week, mainly to get ahead of an accelerating DOJ probe, spin the story, and soften its sharp edges for public consumption. And a day later, the newspaper is now straining to say that it's just normal politics.
Here's what happened: Rep. Mary Peltola is running against sitting US Senator Dan Sullivan (Dan S.). Somehow, a second Dan Sullivan (Dan J.), a retired nobody in a remote fishing village, was induced to jump on the ranked-choice ballot. (The ranked-choice method is another layer of trickery.) So, there are two Dan Sullivans on the ballot.
Do you suppose this might confuse voters and siphon off votes from the real Sullivan to push a Peltola victory?
Peltola fired her campaign manager, Elisa Rios, in August, for reasons not yet disclosed. Rios then filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against Peltola and sometime along in there Rios went to The Times with the story of how two Dan Sullivans ended up on the Alaska ballot. Turns out that the campaign ran a "ballot composition proj
