If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote, They Would Have Given Us Candidates

This weekend, I saw someone driving around town with a sign on their car promoting a candidate for Congress. I was surprised to see this since this is not a congressional election year and because in last year's congressional election, the representative for the 25th district in New York ran without any major party opposition. I checked out the website of the putative Democratic candidate for Congress, Ken Howland today. I can't say that I was very impressed with Howland's resume, website or positions. His editing skills, however, are the most troubling. He copied Michael Bednarik's position on the war in Iraq verbatim from the Bednarik for Congress 2006 website, including the following sentence:

By promoting national defense rather than international offense, Badnarik would bring home our troops from the over 130 countries where the U.S. Military currently maintains a presence, and subsequently secure America more than any current plan offered by the Democrats and Republicans.

Had Howland been smart enough to change 'Bednarik' to 'Howland', I never would have noticed this. There may be some more content copied over from Bednarik's website. The "Our Positions" sidebar has a lot of the same topics as the Bednarik's sidebar. Of course, Howland's positions don't link to anything, so perhaps he's working on copying some more of Bednarik's content over to his site.