The Chicago Board of Election Commissioners has requested federal and state attorneys to shut down voteauction.com, a site where people can sell their votes to the highest bidder. Some representative of the site said that selling your vote is a form of soft money, so it is legal. Frankly, I can't believe it would be legal to sell your vote, especially in such an organized way. Didn't we put a stop to this practice decades ago? Sure, the vote money was going to neighborhood bosses and such, but it's the same principle. It just seems very wrong to me and something that undermines our democratic system. True, there are many other things that undermine our voting system, but once again just because someone else does something wrong doesn't mean you can too.

Speaking of voting, someone else said that we should all take the time to look at the issues and vote intelligently. A lot of people have died defending our country and our interests in order to make sure that the rest of us have the opportunity to live in a country where every vote matters. Another poster mentioned a political cartoon where there is a white man gunning down black people with the caption "what it takes to keep people from voting in South Africa". The next panel shows a hand sticking out the window and being splashed on by a raindrop with the caption "what it takes to keep people from voting the United States". Like everything else, people here take it for granted and squander their privileges...

I hate it when I mis-tape shows. I totally forgot that West Wing was showing two episodes. Voyager was doing the same thing, but they were showing the season ending and season premier. West Wing was showing the first two episodes of the season, and I knew this when I first jotted it down on my "program to tape" list but I it was a heavy taping day so I changed it on the fly to only tape the second hour of both shows, thinking that West Wing was doing the same thing as Voyager. So when I watch West Wing it's like I'm joining in media res and the immediate aftermath of the shooting has been skipped. I'm not paying much attention to the show (rarely do I watch a show with my undivided attention) and this episode flashes back to a few years before when all the characters joined the Bartlett campaign. After half an hour I had to restart and watch the show and then I realized I missed an episode. Darn, I hate that.

In other shows, I watched Dark Angel's premier on Fox. I wasn't expecting much, possibly because it was a James Cameron produced show. He's done a lot of big action movies, but I'm not into watching action shows on television. Still, Dark Angel had some real plots to it and it was interesting and Jessica Alba did a pretty good acting job, playing a character who is trying to be (or perhaps is a bit) unemotional but sometimes it shows through that she is human. Of course, I thought the same thing about Michael O'Hare's portrayal of Commander Jeffery Sinclair in Babylon 5 and a lot of people thought his acting was wooden and dead. So maybe people will think the same thing of Jessica Alba. In any case it was a good premier so let's see if the regular episodes are as interesting.

Oh, another reason why I thought I wouldn't like the show is that I don't like superhuman protagonists that totally outclass their antagonists. Sara is a genetically engineered superhuman designed to be a supersoldier (which reminded me of Kurt Russell's movie, Soldier). In the fight scenes she is insanely faster than anyone else, literally able to run on the wall for short spurts. Add in enhanced senses and reflexes and you really need lots of bad guys to make the fights interesting. Personally, I don't like that too much. I don't want to feel like the hero is toying with all the bad guys, but is really doing their all to win because otherwise they'd lose...