Vote for James Shield, err Chevrolet

This morning while I was racing through my emails, I received a request from The Tampa Bay Rays to cast my vote for James Shield for the Roberto Clemente humanitarian Award. In addition to being an ace pitcher, James does a lot of great work for the Tampa Bay community, and I was eager to cast my vote his way.

Of course MLB needed my information, my name, address, phone number, email address, stopping short at my social security number and my bank account number. I filled everything out, and when I came to the two questions: Do I want to receive information from Chevrolet or from MLB? I checked the no boxes. I have a 1995 BMW 530i, which has been good to me, and I already get plenty of messages from MLB, so I don’t need the info a second time.

I looked over all the candidates, and I voted for Big Game James, as we like to call him, and I pressed VOTE. Instead of learning I had successfully voted, I got the message: Before you can vote, you have to tell us which Chevrolet model you’d like to get more information about. It’s like going to your local polling place and being told that before you can vote for the President of the United States, you have to pick which oil company you want to get more information about. I was so disgusted, I wrote an email to MLB.com telling them how dispicable this was. It’s bad enough the Citizens United case will now allow corporations to fund the congressional candidates to their hearts content. But now we have to bow to corporate sponsors if we want to vote for something as idealistic as the Roberto Clemente Award? Our country is in the grip of Republican politicians who aim to bankrupt us so they can become very rich. This is just one more manifestation of what’s to come.

Heaven help us all.