America in Recession! Global Crisis! Hanging Chads Selling for $2 each!

You've seen the headlines: America is in a financial crisis, pulling the whole world into a whirlpool of economic chaos.

Meanwhile, people are buying little scraps of paper at $2 per piece.

We can't be that bad off.

Remember the "hanging chads" snafu in the 2000 Florida presidential election, when claims were made that Florida voters couldn't understand the ballots and/or figure out how to use the machines?

Florida's embarrassment was a Republican political consultant's profit.

Not because Bush won.

Jim Dobyns has been selling the Votomatic III voting machines that proved too much for so many Floridians. He found a warehouse full of the things on eBay.

Now, he's selling the chads themselves. In lots of 10, for $20 per lot. I won't buy the things, but quite a few people are likely to pay for these pieces of history, at two dollars per chad.

I Love This Country!

I think there's hope, as long as some guy in Florida can pick up a warehouse-full of obsolete voting machines being unloaded by someone else, sell most of them, then turn around and sell little scraps of paper at $20 per bag. With only ten scraps in each bag.

In the news:

• "Remember those hanging chads from the 2000 election? Some guy in Florida is selling them"
  "Countdown to Crawford" / Los Angeles Times (October 26, 2008)