Ohio citizens are used to the talk about Ohio being a battleground state.  Little did we know that the real battle was taking place in our own homes.  The battle is between political telephone spammers and our right to privacy.

Today, my 18 month old son was taking a nap, when the telephone abruptly rang.  It was a telephone recording from Dennis Kucinich.  After hanging up on the voice recording, my son began to cry - his nap cut short because of political spam.

My son was not the only one forced to wake up to a ringing political spammer’s phone call.  WKYC has reported that Cuyahoga County Commissioner Tim Hagan’s automated political spam message was distributed to nearly 5,300 Cleveland area residents between the hours of 11 PM and 3 AM.  There’s nothing like getting awakened by a recorded political spam encouraging you to pay more taxes.  I wonder if Tim Hagan will be criminally charged for violating telephone solicitation laws?  Let me guess…  Politicians are exempt from that as well?

Kucinich was not the only spammer to call my home today.  The Barack Obama voicemail spammer called as well.  In addition to these two spammers, numerous judges spammed my telephone today.

Yesterday, I received four telephone spams.  Even if you do not pick up the phone, some of these spams will leave a message on the answering machine.  This forces you to have to get up and delete the darn message because of the audible message waiting indicator.

This has to be the worst year for political telephone spam that I can remember.  I find such spam from politicians more deplorable then telemarketers.  There needs to be some changes in current law to prohibit politicians from spamming the telephone grids, especially those that do it at three in the morning.

One of the main problems with the majority of these telephone calls is that there is not a live person on the other end.  If you want to be removed from their spam list, sorry, you are out of luck.  If you are lucky enough to speak to a live person and ask to be removed from their list, you may get the response I got yesterday.  That response was, “I’ll try.”  Try?  It’s my darn phone, and you best not call it!

I can tell you that during the General Election, my telephone will be off the hook.  I’m tired of working my butt off and coming home to run to the phone and hear recorded messages from political hopefuls.  If you work a swing shift or graveyard shift, it makes it even worse.  Election telephone spam has to stop!

What is interesting is that these politicians can get huge donations to run these high end telephone spamming operations, send out massive postal spam, and purchase every other ad slot on radio and television.  You would think if they are this resourceful, they may actually be able to privately raise money to feed the hungry, save a few thousand home foreclosures, or build some homeless shelters.  If they can raise money to help their self serving cause, show us what a public servant they are and raise some money to help your constituents.

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