A Dish Best Served Cold

Did I ever tell you I have a stellium? No, seriously. It's not a growth requiring a laser for removal. It's an astrological phenomenon where five planets end up under the same sign. I had my chart done years and years ago by a guy I worked with (whom I now realize was hitting on me, but I was a mere babe-in-the-proverbial-woods and it totally went over my head), and he was the one who first told me. In my case, I have a Scorpio stellium. Five planets in the sign of Scorpio.

For the astrologically uninitiated, Scorpios are known for a few things -- highly developed sense of eroticism (check), an inability to suffer fools gladly (check), a fiery temper, followed by a protracted silence (check and check). But there is one thing that Scorpios are notorious for across the board -- the ability to hold a grudge. Like, forever. Scorpios are renowned for sitting back on their haunches and waiting years, long after the original affront has been forgotten, particularly by the affronter. Do wrong to a Scorpio, and you won't spend the next ten years hearing about it. You'll spend the next ten years not hearing about it. Then, when everyone's guard is down, with lightening speed, the Scorpio pounces and stings, and the karmic slate is wiped clean in a single blow. At least, that's what my astrologer friends have told me.

And that's with just the sun in Scorpio. Me? I got five planets, big and small, in Scorpio. Imagine that kind of blame-laying, grudge-holding, revenge seeking drive, multiplied by five. I see by your look of abject terror, you're getting the picture.

In January, 2001, something really horrible happened to this country. The Supreme Court in its infinite wisdom, chose not to intervene in the clearly underhanded election hijinx that had taken place in the state of Florida the previous November. This is something that, I'm convinced, will come back to haunt them when karma rears its oft-ugly head. I was irritated with the Supreme Court. But the person I truly blamed for it all was the person at the heart of an unjust, illegal and unconstitutional travesty of the American electoral process -- the criminally blythe and arrogant Florida Secretary of State, Katherine Harris.

Oh, how I hated the very sight of her. Her large, gaping cocky face with that "we pulled it off" calculated grin. Her cooing, smirking little congratulatory flattery of George W. Bush. Her clear-cut conflict of interest. Her freakin' ugly blue eyeshadow. I used to dream that horrible things would happen to her. I used to imagine that, now that her job was over, once she was no longer of use to them, she would be abandoned by the uppermost echelon of the GOP, then forgotten with her blue eyeshadow and her sly little smirk. I actually predicted that very thing, back when the Chron was over at another site.

Harris is now a representative in the United States Congress, serving Florida's 13th District. It's not the job she wants, however. The job she wants is a seat in the United States Senate, a campaign she is currently waging against incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson. It appears that my predictions about Harris' relationship with the good ol' boys from the Grand Old Party have proved prescient. Harris has been claiming for the past several months that the GOP has turned its back on her. Florida is truly a divided state, with the military and Southern factions tending to vote red, and the Cuban, Black and East Coast retiree factions usually voting blue. (The Cubans are a question mark, thanks to the abortion issue.) Nelson, though, has been a fairly moderate Democrat, and has managed to keep most groups fairly happy -- or at least not altogether miserable -- with his voting record. As a result, he's proven to be a tough incumbent to oust. Harris' campaign has been suffering since before Christmas from a lack of monetary support from the party. By comparison, her 13th District Congressional run was a cake walk, because the people voting for her were people just like her. Or people she grew up with. Or people who "knew her Daddy." (This holds a lot of weight in the South. In the South, you can finance a small country on loans acquired because somebody "knew yer Daddy.")

But the electorate this time around consists of all of Florida, and there are plenty of people who were once described by news agencies (back in 2000) as "disenfranchised voters" -- the very people whose votes Harris conspired to ignore or discard. This makes Harris a very tough candidate to sell in West Palm and Miami Beach, to the blacks and Jewish retirees whose chads weren't quite pregnant enough to count. Bet those semi-pregnant chads are looking really good right about now to Katherine Harris. I'll bet she'd give a small fortune for some of those thrown-out pregnant chads. But I'm getting ahead of myself. We'll come to that in a minute.

Because of her obvious handicaps amongst Floridian voters statewide, the GOP has been largly disinterested in Harris. She was forced to contribute $250,000 of her own money to her fledgling campaign to keep things going. Last fall, in sheer desperation, she even accepted $30,000 in illegal contributions from a shady defense contractor that her campaign was forced to repay. Her election committee staff has been deserting the sinking ship in droves. I'm sure she expected the GOP to come to her rescue. They did not.

Hate to say "I told ya so, but..." Wait. No, I don't hate to say that at all. In fact, besides "I love you so much," and "Have you lost some weight?", those are five of the loveliest words in the English language.

It really was enough to see my dreams of her abandonment and subsequent whimpering come true. Really it was. I needed no more than to be proven right. But this week, I found out that my faith in karma was not misplaced. In light of her struggling campaign's fiscal troubles, the press had been expecting an announcement for days from Harris that she would be withdrawing from the primary race. Wednesday, they collected in anticipation of just that announcement. Instead, Harris vowed to continue and contributed $10,000,000 (that's ten million dollars, for the numerically challenged) of her own money to keep her primary campaign going. Against Bill Nelson. Whom she trails by at least 15 points.

Tee hee.

The lovely thing about having a tiny bit of money in the bank is that you get to send it places where you think it will do some good. Ms. Harris can tell you that. And, inspired by her grand gesture, I made one of my own this morning. I contributed $100 to Bill Nelson's campaign today, and it made me feel like dancing in the aisles. As some of you know, I came within inches of living in Florida a couple of years ago, until the end of my relationship made it moot. So, though I'm sure I would have voted for Bill Nelson had I moved there, I'm not his constituent directly. But if my contribution can, in tandem with others, help push him over the top in his efforts to retain his seat, I will have accomplished two major goals.

First, I will have assisted in some measure in helping the Democratic party retake control of the Congress in 2006. We have had enough of the rubberstamping, one-party, Bush-boot-licking hullabaloo for the past six years. Its time somebody stood up and challenged these overgrown frat-boys with a loud and resounding "sit down and shut the fuck up with your bad-ass self."

But the second thing my $100 hard-earned dollars will have done is help to make that inherited $10,250,000 that Harris will have been spent on her failed campaign utterly and totally in vain. And there she'll be. Without the boys. Without the money. Without the job.

And then, my revenge will be complete. Oh, sure. It's been a long time. Six long years of waiting, waiting. Being patient. But somebody needed an ass-kickin' in her blue eyeshadow. And I was wearing just the pair of open-toed sandals for the job.

~C~

****If you want to join in my campaign of retribution against Katherine Harris, contributions can be made to Nelson's campaign through ActBlue. The initial amount that you offer to contribute will be automatically split equally between Nelson's campaign and Boxer's PAC for Change. You can change the amounts so you don't have to contribute to the PAC at all (I have contributed to that independently). Nelson needs the money most right now, since the GOP wants to see him unseated in the worst way. Take revenge on the Republican juggernaut. Show those theocrats what's what here in America. But most importantly, help me kick the ever-lovin' crap out of Katherine Harris and her Senate campaign, and send her home to Arcadia, broken and dejected.****