any time is a good time for a cute dog picture!

(i like this one too) ME FIRST! I'M PREZNIT NOW, DAMMIT

this is from the Clinton Presidential Library opening.

on this, Sidney Blumenthal writes:

John Kerry arrived to defiant cheering from the crowd. Then, when the presidents were announced, Bush tried to push his way past Clinton at the library door to be first in line, against the already accepted protocol for the event, as though the walk to the platform was a contest for alpha male.

HEY W -- XYZ! (this is not photoshopped)

click on the link -- it's straight from AP. the best part is the look Putin is giving the boy-Prez. i imagine he thinking about how much he is going to enjoy destroying him.

The worm turns...

(this really says it all! -- brook)

By Chris Floyd, Moscow Times

There has been much throwing about of brains on the subject of George W. Bush's further lurch to the Right since he limped over the election finish line with his tiny, 1 percent, fraud-marred majority. And to be sure, the wholesale purges he has instituted throughout his regime -- replacing a slew of merely cringing sycophants with cringing, drooling, groveling sycophants -- will indeed hasten the United States' degeneration into corpo-religious authoritarianism along the lines of Franco's Spain.

But all the earnest disquisitions about Bush's Franco-U.S. "ideology" entirely miss the point -- and increase the fog that the Regime deliberately spreads over its true interests. For the heart of this slouching beast is neither left-wing nor right-wing; it's strictly Bush-wing. Anyone even slightly acquainted with the history of the Bush dynasty knows what makes these preppy puppies run -- and it has nothing to do with conservative principles or moral values or national security or world freedom. It's not ideology, but investments -- the gobbling up of unearned, risk-free lucre on the grandest scale imaginable.

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=18847&mode=nested&order=0

The Delay rule,,,,,

As you are no doubt now aware, the House Republican Caucus has voted to allow persons charged with crimes by the government to stay in power as Majority leader. One wonders if the Republicans would want Saddam Hussien to remain in power until his trial as well. Please write your republican congressman or woman and ask them to keep Hussien out of power! Demand that all those accused of crimes be removed from positions of authority!

frist and bulbous, should be tapered.

"The only thing I'll abort...
is the constitution.

"...where's my goddamn coonskin cap
i gotta role call vote in 2 minutes!"



"i may not be talented enough to be a 'singing senator', but I know how to latch on to a rocking possee!"

And they're back!

Congress came into session last week. Among the first order of business for the majority elected for their supposed moral values was changing the House rules on Wensday to allow a person under indictment to serve as House Majority leader. Mean while over in the Senate, also firmly in control of the conservative values and ethics crowd, the only member of congress trained to perform abortions led the republicans in a strick party line vote to raise the ceiling on the national debt to EIGHT AND A HALF TRILLION DOLLARS!!!!

Gee, thanks guys!

Was is hacked?

By Alan Waldman -- Orlando Weekly News -- Published 11/18/04

Despite mainstream media attempts to kill the story, talk radio and the Internet are abuzz with suggestions that John Kerry was elected president on Nov. 2 – but Republican election officials made it difficult for millions of Democrats to vote while employees of four secretive, GOP-bankrolled corporations rigged electronic voting machines and then hacked central tabulating computers to steal the election for George W. Bush.

The Bush administration's "fix" of the 2000 election debacle (the Help America Vote Act) made crooked elections considerably easier, by foisting paperless electronic voting on states before the bugs had been worked out or meaningful safeguards could be installed.

Crying foul this time around isn't just the province of whiny Democrats. Consider that The Wall Street Journal recently revealed that "Verified Voting, a group formed by a Stanford University professor to assess electronic voting, has collected 31,000 reports of election fraud and other problems."

University of Pennsylvania researcher Dr. Steven Freeman, in his November 2004 paper "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy," says that the odds that the discrepancies between predicted [exit poll] results and actual vote counts in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania could have been due to chance or random error are 250 million to 1. "Systematic fraud or mistabulation is a premature conclusion," writes Freeman, "but the election's unexplained exit poll discrepancies make it an unavoidable hypothesis, one that is the responsibility of the media, academia, polling agencies, and the public to investigate." Unlike Europe, where citizens count the ballots, in the United States employees of a highly secretive Republican-leaning company, ES&S, managed every aspect of the 2004 election. That included everything from registering voters, printing ballots and programming voting machines to tabulating votes (often with armed guards keeping the media and members of the public who wished to witness the count at bay) and reporting the results, for 60 million voters in 47 states, according to Christopher Bollyn, writing in American Free Press. Most other votes were counted by three other firms that are snugly in bed with the GOP.

http://www.orlandoweekly.com/news/Story.asp?ID=4688

the berekley study: 130,000 excess votes for Bush in FL

The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections

Summary:

- Irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000 excess votes or more to President George W. Bush in Florida.

-Compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with electronic voting machines were significantly more likely to show increases in support for President Bush between 2000 and 2004. This effect cannot be explained by differences between counties in income, number of voters, change in voter turnout, or size of Hispanic/Latino population.

-In Broward County alone, President Bush appears to have received approximately 72,000 excess votes.

-We can be 99.9% sure that these effects are not attributable to chance.

Details:

Because many factors impact voting results, statistical tools are necessary to see the effect of touch-screen voting. Multiple regression analysis is a statistical technique widely used in the social and physical sciences to distinguish the individual effects of many variables.

This multiple-regression analysis takes account of the following variables by county:
- number of voters
- median income
- Hispanic population
- change in voter turnout between 2000 and 2004
- support for President Bush in 2000 election
- support for Dole in 1996 election

When one controls for these factors, the association between electronic voting and increased support for President Bush is impossible to overlook. The data show with 99.0% certainty that a county’s use of electronic voting is associated with a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush.

The data used in this study come from CNN.com, the 2000 US Census, the Florida Department of State, and the Verified Voting Foundation – all publicly available sources. This study was carried out by a group of doctoral students in the UC Berkeley sociology department in collaboration with Professor Michael Hout, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center.


http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/new_web/VOTE2004/index.html

ES&S WHISTLEBLOWER! illegal software installed on Indiana machines before election!

By Rick Dawson and Loni Smith McKown


I-Team 8 has more information on a woman who disobeyed her company by telling the truth.
 
Wendy Orange works for Election Systems and Software, known as ES&S, which sold Marion County its voting system.


Marion County Clerk Doris Anne Sadler revealed Tuesday that the company installed illegal software before last November's election.


The I-Team first met Wendy Orange last January, when we conducted a test on Marion County's new optical-scan voting machines. Orange is the ES&S project manager for Marion County. She's the one who blew the whistle on ES&S for installing illegal software, the same software used to tabulate November's election results.

http://www.wishtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=1806520

turkey-stan

not sure which
cabinet post
is being filled
or stuffed,
as it were...

icebergs, 95% underwater...

Condoleezza Rice
Margaret Spellings
Alberto Gonzales
porter goss


ownership society dominoes thrust into action

or

shuffling deckchairs on the titanic?

extra credit:

(when dick cheney dies, is tom delay next, you know, 'e-nee-mee-nee-my-nee-moe?'

and how will Bush have a man date if gay marriage is illegal?)

can't make this up, folks...

"FORT BENNING, Ga. (AP) - They are foreign enemies buried thousands of miles from home, but they are not forgotten. Less than a week after U.S. soldiers were honored during Veterans Day, dignitaries on Wednesday are to gather and salute the hundreds of thousands of German prisoners of war taken to camps in the United States during World War II - most of them in the South.

``The minimum you can do is honor these soldiers who sacrificed,'' said Lt. Col. Herbert R. Sladek, a member of Fort Benning's German Army liaison team, which hosts ``Volkstrauertag'' - Germany's day of mourning.

``They were educated in another time period, with another political guideline. In their opinion, they also fought for freedom, liberty and for their fatherland. That's why these people gave all they had - their own lives.''"

"...they also fought for FREEDOM, LIBERTY and for their FATHERLAND."

wtf, i thought they wanted to annhilate the jewish people, et al and take over the rest of the world.

sorry kids, but their is a point at which even a liberal has to wonder about "compassionate conservatism."

viagrastan

who own the vote? ES&S, Ahmanson, Oliver North

(from Common Dreams)

In the early 1980s, brothers Bob and Todd Urosevich founded ES&S's originator, Data Mark. The brothers Urosevich obtained financing from the far-Right Ahmanson family in 1984, which purchased a 68% ownership stake, according to the Omaha World Herald. After brothers William and Robert Ahmanson infused Data Mark with new capital, the name was changed to American Information Systems (AIS). California newspapers have long documented the Ahmanson family's ties to right-wing evangelical Christian and Republican circles.

In 2001, the Los Angeles Times reported, ". . . primarily funded by evangelical Christians - particularly the wealthy Ahmanson family of Irvine - the [Discovery] institute's $1-million annual program has produced 25 books, a stream of conferences and more than 100 fellowships for doctoral and postdoctoral research." The chief philanthropists of the Discovery Institute, that pushes creationist science and education in California, are Howard and Roberta Ahmanson.

According to Group Watch, in the 1980s Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr. was a member of the highly secretive far-Right Council for National Policy, an organization that included Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, Major General John K. Singlaub and other Iran-Contra scandal notables, as well as former Klan members like Richard Shoff. Ahmanson, heir to a savings and loan fortune, is little reported on in the mainstream U.S. press. But, English papers like The Independent are a bit more forthcoming on Ahmanson's politics.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0225-05.htm

welcome to BUSHWORLD - Macomb teens end pregnancy with beating

RICHMOND TOWNSHIP -- Investigators said a pregnant 16-year-old girl allowed her boyfriend to beat her with a miniature baseball bat to cause a miscarriage, which may lead to criminal charges against the teens and one of their parents.

The girl estimated she was four months pregnant, said Macomb County Prosecutor-elect Eric Smith. Police said the boy's mother helped transport the fetus to her home and bury it in the backyard.

Smith said the beatings were "done over a period of three weeks. It was done in an effort to terminate the pregnancy."

_____________________________________________________

In Michigan a teenager under 18 needs parental approval for an abortion. Guess desperate teens will do anything to "abort" if they have to. I guess abortion foes prefer this?

and Bush won fair and square -- so no need to get your back up. he'll install 3 supreme court judges, so we might as well just give up.

Volusia County election records just got put on lockdown

(here's a post from Bev Harris of Black Box Voting -- shits hitting the fan in Florida. go to blackboxvoting.org for more into-- brook)

Dueling lawyers, election officials gnashing teeth, Votergate.tv film crew catching it all.

Here's what happened so far:

Friday Black Box Voting investigators Andy Stephenson and Kathleen Wynne popped in to ask for some records. They were rebuffed by an elections official named Denise. Bev Harris called on the cell phone from investigations in downstate Florida, and told Volusia County Elections Supervisor Deanie Lowe that Black Box Voting would be in to pick up our Nov. 2 Freedom of Information request, or would file for a hand recount. "No, Bev, please don't do that!" she exclaimed. But this is the way it has to be, folks. We didn't back down.

Monday Bev, Andy and Kathleen came in with a film crew and asked for the FOIA request. Deanie Lowe gave it to us with a smile, but I noticed that one item, the polling place tapes, were not copies of the real ones, but instead were new printouts, done on Nov. 15, and not signed by anyone.

I asked to see the real ones, and they told us for "privacy" reasons we can't have copies of the signed ones. I insisted on at least viewing them (although refusing to give us copies of the signatures is not legally defensible, according to our attorney). They said the real ones were in the County Elections warehouse. It was quittin' time and we arranged to come back this morning to review them.

Lana Hires, an employee who gained some notoriety in a Diebold memo, where she asked for an explanation of minus 16,022 votes for Gore, so she wouldn't have to stand there "looking dumb" when the auditor came in, was particularly unhappy about seeing us in the office. She vigorously shook her head when Deanie Lowe suggested we go to the warehouse.

Kathleen Wynne and I showed up at the warehouse at 8:15 this morning. There was Lana Hires looking especially gruff, yet surprised. She ordered us out. Well, we couldn't see why because there she was, with a couple other people, handling the original poll tapes. You know, the ones with the signatures on them. We stepped out and they promptly shut the door behind us.

There was a trash bag on the porch outside the door. I looked into it and what do you know, but there were poll tapes in there. They came out and glared at us. We drove away a small bit, and then videotaped the license plates of the two vehicles marked 'City Council' member. Others came out to glare and soon all doors were slammed.

So, we went and parked behind a bus to see what they would do next. They pulled out some large pylons, which blocked the door. I decided to go look at the garbage some more. Kathleen videotaped this. A man came out and I immediately wrote a public records request for the contents of the garbage bag, which also contained ballots -- real ones, but not filled out.

A brief tug of war occurred, tearing the garbage bag open. We then looked through it, as Pete looked on. He was quite friendly.

We collected various poll tapes and other information and asked if they could copy it for us, for our public records request. "You won't be going anywhere," said Pete. "The deputy is on his way."

Yes, not one but two police cars came up and then two county elections officials, and we all stood around discussing the merits of my public records request.

They finally let us go, about the time our film crew arrived, and we all trooped off to the elections office. There, the plot thickened.

We began to compare the special printouts given to us with the signed polling tapes from election night. Lo and behold, some were missing. We also found some that didn't match. In fact, in one location, precinct 215, an African-American precinct, the votes were off by hundreds, in favor of George W. Bush and other Republicans.

Hmm. Which was right? Our polling tape, specially printed on Nov. 15, without signatures, or theirs, printed on Nov. 2, with up to 8 signatures per tape?

Well, then it became even more interesting. Lana Hires took it upon herself to box up some items from an office, which appeared to contain -- you guessed it -- polling place tapes. She took them to the back of the building and disappeared.

Then, voting integrity advocates from Volusia and Broward, decided now would be a good time to go through the trash at the elections office. Lo and behold, they found all kinds of memos and some polling place tapes, fresh from Volusia elections office.

So, we compared these with the Nov. 2 signed ones and the "special' ones from Nov. 15 given to us, unsigned, and we found several of the MISSING poll tapes. There they were: In the garbage.

So, Kathleen went to the car and got the polling place tapes we had pulled from the warehouse garbage. My my my. There were not only discrepancies, but a polling place tape that was signed by six officials.

This was a bit disturbing, since the employees there told us that bag was destined for the shredder.

By now, a county lawyer had appeared on the scene, suddenly threatening to charge us extra for the time we took looking at the real stuff they had withheld from us in our FOIA. Other lawyers appeared, phoned, people had meetings, Lana glowered at everyone, and someone shut the door in the office holding the GEMS server.

Andy then went to get the GEMS server locked down. He also got the memory cards locked down and secured, much to the dismay of Lana. They were scattered around unsecured in any way before that.

We then all agreed to convene tomorrow morning, to further audit, discuss the hand count that Black Box Voting will require of Volusia County, and of course, it is time to talk about contesting the election in Volusia.

Bev Harris
Executive Director
Black Box Voting

Together with Andy, and Kathleen.

 

Kerry Lawyer says they weren't trained to LOOK FOR FRAUD! Breaking! Kerry Lawyer says they weren't trained to LOOK FOR FRAUD! Breaking!

Did lawyer-observers on Election Day miss fraud incidents?

By IAN H. SOLOMON
Special to The Hartford Courant

Could we have been so naive?

Thousands of the country’s most credentialed lawyers flocked to Florida to guarantee a fair election. Did we inadvertently miss an election debacle even greater than that of 2000 and negligently allow our client to concede?
(snip)
Could we take the accurate counting of computer votes for granted, since the CEO of the leading voting machine manufacturer promised to “deliver” the election for Bush?

At first, the question didn’t matter, because I, like most others, thought Kerry would win. In fact, I was shocked when the official election results started coming in so different from historically reliable exit poll results and my own gut sense of the results in Florida.

(SNIP)

We had been so worried about voting law that we neglected voting technology. Most important, we had been so worried about voter suppression in poor and minority areas that we didn’t pay attention to voter inflation in Republican areas.

We should have had trained observers - computer scientists, not lawyers! - verifying the integrity of polling data from machine upload through the tabulation of countywide and statewide results.

Somehow we neglected the most vulnerable step in the vote-counting process, leaving a gaping hole for error and fraud, casting in doubt the validity of election results in many states.

Voting machine glitch changes election

A recently found computer glitch in the voting machines in Franklin County, Indiana has given a democrat enough votes to bump a republican from victory in a County Commissioner's race.

The glitch in the machines [b]recorded straight Democratic Party votes for Libertarians.[/b/

The votes were re-counted last night, by hand.

The company who made the voting machine is also checking into programming of it's equipment in nine other Indiana counties.

we're closing in -- evidence mounting -- palm beach co numbers

Absentee Kerry: 58%
Absentee Bush: 42%
Absentee Total: 91,038
Kerry Absentee Margin: +16

Early Kerry: 72%
Early Bush: 28%
Early Total: 49,365
Kerry Early Voting Margin: +43

Election Day Kerry: 40%
Election Day Total: 404,666
Kerry Election Day Margin: -20
http://www.redefeatbush.com/modules.php?name=News&file=...

So, according to this, in one of the most Democratic counties in Florida, on election day Kerry managed to loose to Bush 60% to 40%. Hmmm… Yet the absentees should reflect the normal vote even if the early votes are skewed… Why would the early votes be any more skewed than the Election Day votes? Maybe Democrats voted early… sure, but only 50,000 votes were cast, a small percentage.

Hmmm…

Funny how the tabulating computers could only change the numbers of election day totals, but could not change the absentee or the early votes (as they were tabulated differently). I think this is very close to what would be called “evidence”. Especially when Exit polls for early voting showed Kerry up very high and the election day exit polls showed Kerry above 50% also. Something ain’t right here, Doc…

Doesn't this basicly mean that

EXIT POLLS ON ELECTION DAY WERE EITHER WAY THE HECK OFF (BY 22 POINTS), IF IN ONE OF THE MOST DEMOCRATIC COUNTIES IN FLORIDA KERRY LOST BY 20 POINTS, OR THE ELECTION DAY VOTE WAS RIGGED.

THIS IS AS CLOSE TO REAL EVIDENCE I HAVE SEEN SO FAR... EXIT POLLS HAVE NEVER, EVER BEEN THAT WRONG…

EXIT POLLS WERE FOR THAT DAY ONLY, THINK ABOUT IT!

the real maps are purple: FUCK THE SOUTH

i love these maps. the first one, by Robert Vanderbei of Princeton University, shows the red-blue distribution in mixed shades corresponding to the real percentage of the vote. And the second is a cartogram -- a map in which the sizes of states have been rescaled according to their population -- also showing the mixed shades of the percentage of the vote. Look at these maps and read down:




Fuck the South. Fuck 'em. We should have let them go when they wanted to leave. But no, we had to kill half a million people so they'd stay part of our special Union. Fighting for the right to keep slaves - yeah, those are states we want to keep.

And now what do we get? We're the fucking Arrogant Northeast Liberal Elite? How about this for arrogant: the South is the Real America? The Authentic America. Really?

Cause we fucking founded this country, assholes. Those Founding Fathers you keep going on and on about? All that bullshit about what you think they meant by the Second Amendment giving you the right to keep your assault weapons in the glove compartment because you didn't bother to read the first half of the fucking sentence? Who do you think those wig-wearing lacy-shirt sporting revolutionaries were? They were fucking blue-staters, dickhead. Boston? Philadelphia? New York? Hello? Think there might be a reason all the fucking monuments are up here in our backyard?

No, No. Get the fuck out. We're not letting you visit the Liberty Bell and fucking Plymouth Rock anymore until you get over your real American selves and start respecting those other nine amendments. Who do you think those fucking stripes on the flag are for? Nine are for fucking blue states. And it would be 10 if those Vermonters had gotten their fucking Subarus together and broken off from New York a little earlier. Get it? We started this shit, so don't get all uppity about how real you are you Johnny-come-lately "Oooooh I've been a state for almost a hundred years" dickheads. Fuck off.

Arrogant? You wanna talk about us Northeasterners being fucking arrogant? What's more American than arrogance? Hmmm? Maybe horsies? I don't think so. Arrogance is the fucking cornerstone of what it means to be American. And I wouldn't be so fucking arrogant if I wasn't paying for your fucking bridges, bitch.

All those Federal taxes you love to hate? It all comes from us and goes to you, so shut up and enjoy your fucking Tennessee Valley Authority electricity and your fancy highways that we paid for. And the next time Florida gets hit by a hurricane you can come crying to us if you want to, but you're the ones who built on a fucking swamp. "Let the Spanish keep it, it’s a shithole," we said, but you had to have your fucking orange juice.

The next dickwad who says, "It’s your money, not the government's money" is gonna get their ass kicked. Nine of the ten states that get the most federal fucking dollars and pay the least... can you guess? Go on, guess. That’s right, motherfucker, they're red states. And eight of the ten states that receive the least and pay the most? It’s too easy, asshole, they’re blue states. It’s not your money, assholes, it’s fucking our money. What was that Real American Value you were spouting a minute ago? Self reliance? Try this for self reliance: buy your own fucking stop signs, assholes.

Let’s talk about those values for a fucking minute. You and your Southern values can bite my ass because the blue states got the values over you fucking Real Americans every day of the goddamn week. Which state do you think has the lowest divorce rate you marriage-hyping dickwads? Well? Can you guess? It’s fucking Massachusetts, the fucking center of the gay marriage universe. Yes, that’s right, the state you love to tie around the neck of anyone to the left of Strom Thurmond has the lowest divorce rate in the fucking nation. Think that’s just some aberration? How about this: 9 of the 10 lowest divorce rates are fucking blue states, asshole, and most are in the Northeast, where our values suck so bad. And where are the highest divorce rates? Care to fucking guess? 10 of the top 10 are fucking red-ass we're-so-fucking-moral states. And while Nevada is the worst, the Bible Belt is doing its fucking part.

But two guys making out is going to fucking ruin marriage for you? Yeah? Seems like you're ruining it pretty well on your own, you little bastards. Oh, but that's ok because you go to church, right? I mean you do, right? Cause we fucking get to hear about it every goddamn year at election time. Yes, we're fascinated by how you get up every Sunday morning and sing, and then you're fucking towers of moral superiority. Yeah, that's a workable formula. Maybe us fucking Northerners don't talk about religion as much as you because we're not so busy sinning, hmmm? Ever think of that, you self-righteous assholes? No, you're too busy erecting giant stone tablets of the Ten Commandments in buildings paid for by the fucking Northeast Liberal Elite. And who has the highest murder rates in the nation? It ain't us up here in the North, assholes.

Well this gravy train is fucking over. Take your liberal-bashing, federal-tax-leaching, confederate-flag-waving, holier-than-thou, hypocritical bullshit and shove it up your ass.

And no, you can't have your fucking convention in New York next time. Fuck off.


* * * * * * * * * * *
Prof. Paul S. Adler,
Management and Organization Dept,
Marshall School of Business,
University of Southern California,
Los Angeles, CA 90089-0808
USC office tel: (213) 740-0748
Home office tel: (818) 981-0115
Home office fax: (818) 981-0116
Email: padler@usc.edu
List of publications and course outlines at:
http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~padler/

Life under Bush will be nasty, brutish and short

I owe so much to Joe Corso in terms of being able to take the world in. This is one of my favorite days ever in a Joe class. I remember him trying to get us to hear what is going on in this passage. As if it needs any amplification:


Religion with a capital R and Belief with a capital B in what priests tell you are a terrible things. The promise of Eternal Paradise in Heaven, if believed, upsets the rational calculus by which a man scared of violent death and desirous of commodious living signs the Social Contract and bends his neck to the Sovereign Leviathan. Thus religious fanaticism--in Hobbes's case the Roundheads who shot out the stained-glass windows of Canterbury Cathedral for target practice, or the followers of Archbishop Laud who were willing to kill to move the communion table up to the back of the church--breeds large-scale death and destruction.

Hobbes -- I hated how he spoke the truth.

SIGN the online petition to investigate STOLEN 2004 Election

34,000+ signatures so far. Click on the link above to add your name.

I haven't been this happy since about 4pm election day

I don't know if any of you guys are watching this recount business on the news. i hate tv news, but keith olbermann and chris matthews have picked up the story and faux news is starting to freak out. check out what idiot-boy john gibson said:
________________________
Most of the world figured America had the monkey off its back... we had a presidential election and there was a clear winner.George W. Bush was the winner. Even John Kerry admitted it.
*skip*
Two of my colleague news anchors on other networks (Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, not to mention Peter Jennings) actually gave this non-story cable network coverage. It is unconscionable.
*skip*
Then some Marine colonel will lead his men into the next Fallujah and find the damn book in a jihadi terrorist decapitation dungeon — inspirational reading before sawing off someone's head.

This is how stupid ideas get people killed.

That's My Word.
http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,13...
________________________

fox news is actually accusing the blogosphere of killing marines! i fucking love it!

do you know what this means?

wait, there's more:

new york republican congresswoman Susan Molinari was on Hardball tonite talking about how someone needed to hold the bloggers responsible for what they write b/c this stolen election story won't die. it just gets bigger. her body language was so tight, like a B-movie character actor who is doing a scene that requires them to respond to being caught after having thought they got away with murder.

finally the internet is fulfilling its promise of delivering the voice of the people. i feel like i'm in Horton Hears a Who -- "we're here! we're here!"

the real reason the "royal we" are fucked

"EPA WILL USE POOR KIDS AS GUINEA PIGS IN NEW STUDY ON PESTICIDES
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), led by Bush appointees, plans to launch a new study in which participating low income families will have their children exposed to toxic pesticides over the course of two years. For taking part in these studies, each family will receive $970, a free video camera, a T-shirt, and a framed certificate of appreciation. In October, the EPA received $2 million to do the study from the American Chemistry Council, a chemical industry front group that includes members such as Dow, Exxon, and Monsanto. The EPA's Linda Sheldon says the study is vital, because so little is known about how small children's bodies absorb harmful chemicals. As of press time, none of the EPA's employees are offering to have their own children take part in this research project. The Organic Consumers Association is calling on the nation's citizens to demand the EPA forgo this project before its scheduled launch in early 2005. Sign petition by clicking here and forward this email to family and friends... http://www.organicconsumers.org/epa-alert.htm "

Well I lost five bucks in the Aafat death pool..... the old bastard couldn't wait till Friday :(

"I earned capitol, and I intend to spend it...."

Uh George,,, most people invest capitol........

note to the President Bush:

this is not what Hunter S. Thompson means by
"gonzo attorney general"

Important PROTEST the 2004 Election - DNC Headquarters, Washington DC

SPREAD THE WORD!!! URGENT!!!
We need your help to promote the following event ASAP! We are OUTRAGED and demand that action we taken immediately by the DNC and Congress to investigate voting irregularities and possible FRAUD in the 2004 election, specifically in Ohio and Florida.
Time: Saturday, Nov. 13, 2 pm
Place: Sidewalk in front of the DNC
430 South Capitol Street, SE
Washington, DC 20003
For Info/RSVP: sherri@centigradestudio.com

BRING SIGNS! TELL YOUR FRIENDS!

Our Goals are to:
- Demand that the DNC use the millions of dollars raised prior to the election to investigate reports of possible voter fraud in Ohio, Florida and elsewhere
- Bring greater media attention to the situation, which has until now been ignored by the vast majority of media outlets
- Educate voters on specific incidents of voter fraud and the volume of
incidents reported to date
- Request that John Kerry unconcede to bring greater attention to the
situation
- To drive people to BlackBoxVoting.org and HelpAmericaRecount.org
to aid in fundraising for the cause.

Also, many of the details of the situation as it stands can be found at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_controv...

www.legitgov.com
www.blackboxvoting.org
www.helpamericarecount.org (needs donations)

Thanks for all you are doing!

MILITARY TANKS Intimidate Protesters in Downtown Los Angeles

(click on the headline to view the footage -- it's really weird in it's mundane-ness. it's almost like the tanks are props -- like, what better to bring to an antiwar demonstration. it really makes the protesters' point.)


PEACEFUL DEMONSTRATORS MET BY MILITARY TANKS IN
THE STREETS OF LOS ANGELES

http://la.indymedia.org/uploads/tanks-on-la-streets.mov

November 10th, 2004 10:31 pm
Hundreds Protest Attack on Fallujah and U.S. Militarism; Demo Draws Activists and Military Tanks


PEACEFUL DEMONSTRATION DRAWS MILITARY TANKS (VIDEO)

STATEMENT FROM PROTEST ORGANIZERS

Hundreds Protest Attack on Fallujah and U.S. Militarism. A.N.S.W.E.R. Demo Draws Activists and Military Tanks

Hundreds of protestors converged on the Federal building in Westwood last night to demonstrate against the U.S. attack on Fallujah. Colorful signs, banners and placards lined the busy streets while the crowd militantly chanted "George Bush, we say no - the occupation has got to go!" and "The people of Fallujah are under attack. What do we do? Stand up, fight back!"

The A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition initiated last night's emergency demonstration. It was one of many coordinated actions that took place in cities across the nation protesting the new U.S. invasion of Fallujah. Activists and leaders from various progressive organizations attended, including members of Free Palestine Alliance, CAIR, Coalition for World Peace, Women in Black, U.S. Labor Against War, NION, ADC-LA/OC and more.

As the demonstration was winding up, two large U.S. military tanks drove past the protestors on Wilshire Boulevard two times. The second time, the tanks stopped directly in front of a group of about 50 protestors for nearly five minutes. Police attempted to provoke a confrontation with the crowd, but the people resisted. Instead, they chanted "Bring the Troops Home Now!"

We do not know where the tanks came from, where they were going or why they drove past the demonstration. It is an outrage to see military tanks rolling through the streets of Los Angeles.

If the tanks were meant to intimidate us, they failed. The resolve of the protestors to fight against the occupation was strengthened by their presence. The protestors stuck together and chanted loudly until the tanks sped away and the police dispersed.

The presence of military tanks on Wilshire highlights the need to step up the fight against U.S. militarism. The U.S. is the most highly militarized nation on the planet with a defense budget of over $700 billion. We must increase the struggle against war, occupation, racism and all forms of bigotry in the U.S and abroad.

The A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition has unveiled an action plan to deepen the struggle and further unite the antiwar movement so that it grows even stronger in the months to come. Please join us in building these exciting upcoming events in Los Angeles:

PROTEST VIGIL TO BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW!
Sat, Dec 18, 7 pm
Hollywood & Highland (NW corner)

COUNTER-INAUGURAL DEMONSTRATION
Thurs, Jan 20, 2005, 6 pm
Westwood Federal Building (Wilshire & Veteran)

MASS MARCH AND RALLY - GLOBAL DAY OF ACTION
Sat, March 19, 2005, 12 noon
Location TBA
Los Angeles

For more info or to volunteer call 323-464-1636
http://www.answerla.org

smoking gun = #define DESKEY ((des_key* "F2654hd4".

Here's a few snips:

Posting unprotected source codes for a commercial product on the Web is rare and considered unspeakably stupid in the computer world, so, word spread quickly, and a computer scientist at Stanford University told Dr. Rubin. Dr. Rubin, in turn called in Adam Stubblefield, a doctoral student at Hopkins, and Tadayoshi Kohno, a summer graduate student, telling them they needed to drop everything and come see what was on his computer. What they were looking at, they concluded, was a program compiled in 2000 and its April 2002 update, apparently posted so programmers could work on it. It was nothing less than the programming that made the voting machines voting machines.

The students pored over 49,609 lines of "code," computer language commands that look like hieroglyphics to anyone not trained as a programmer. One line blew them away. It means nothing to laymen, but it was enough to make Dr. Rubin's hair stand on end.

#define DESKEY ((des_key* "F2654hd4".

All commercial programs have provisions to be encrypted, protected by secret code so that no one could read or change the contents without the encryption key. That is particularly true of programs that require transmission by telephone or wireless networks. The line that staggered the Hopkins team told them first, that the method used to encrypt the Diebold machines was a method called Digital Encryption Standard (DES), a code that was broken in 1997 and is no longer used by anyone to secure programs. F2654hd4 was the key to the encryption.

The programmers had done the equivalent of putting the family jewels in a safe, putting up a blinking neon sign reading "Jewels in Here!" and taping the lock's combination to the safe door. Moreover, because the key was in the source code, all Diebold machines responded to the same key. Unlock one, you can unlock them all.


"I continue to believe that the Diebold voting machines represent a huge threat to our democracy. I fundamentally believe that we have thrown our trust in the outcome of our elections in the hands of a few companies who are in a position to control the final outcomes of our elections.

"The more e-voting is viewed as successful, the more it will be adopted," he said, "and the greater the risk when someone decides to actually exploit the weaknesses in these systems.

"I am not against technology. I drive a car, get on airplanes and ride elevators. However, if the code in any of these was as bad as Diebold's software, I wouldn't. I think that the real difference is the adversary model. If there were trillions of dollars worth of incentives for people to rig elevators so that they crashed, I would be advocating for only using stairs."

check out this interview with a BBV salesman -- admits sham!

The following are excerpts from interviews with executives from MicroVote.


James F. Ries (Sr.) was a sales representative for the Automatic Voting Machine Co. out of Jamestown, N.Y., premier manufacturer of lever machines like those used in Marion County till recently. AVM went out of business just as they had developed an electronic voting machine.


Ries took his idea for “a better mousetrap” to Bill Carson of Carson Manufacturing, located in Marion County near the Glendale post office. MicroVote was born in 1982. The company’s headquarters is in Broadripple.


The senior Ries is chief executive officer of the company. His son, James M. Ries (Jr.), is President of MicroVote. Steve Shamo is a sales and customer service representative for Indiana. You can check out MicroVote’s Web site at http://www.MicroVote.com.


For a map of Indiana counties that use MicroVote equipment, click here.


SCRUTINY


I-Team: Who were your first customers?


James F. Ries (Sr.): Most of the lever machine counties that I'd sold lever machines to were interested in MicroVote. It was a better mousetrap.


I-Team: But these days voting systems like your push-button direct record electronic (DRE) machines are under intense scrutiny, especially when it comes to security.


James M. Ries (Jr.): Security is becoming a very, very sensitive topic from both manufacturing and developing of source code to local jurisdiction security. I think this year you'll see that our entire industry is going to be under the microscope.


I-Team: Especially when you have just a handful of companies on the receiving end of lots of money…


Ries Jr.: It's been a very small industry, mostly private companies operating the majority of the elections. With the advent of the Help America Vote Act and the several-billion-dollar subsidy that has been appropriated for our industry, you can see why these folks are starting to take this industry much more seriously than they did prior to 2000. Looking back four years ago, what have we done as an industry to increase the faith of the voter and instill the fact that every vote counts?


I-Team: The company most under the microscope has been Ohio-based Diebold. Does MicroVote welcome such scrutiny?


Ries Jr.: Diebold is the 800-pound gorilla. The benefit that came out of the Diebold study was increased scrutiny within the vending community: How do companies control internal source code, how do we release our firmware upgrades, how do we operate as a business? What has that done for the end user? Not a whole lot.


TESTING


I-Team: Is there regulation of the industry? Aren’t there federal standards to ensure that voting systems are accurate, reliable and secure? Isn’t that why your equipment and software undergo federal qualification testing?


Bill Carson: Unfortunately the ITA (independent testing authority) has a limited scope in what they can test and check on the system. It is based on time and economics. For an independent test authority to absolutely, thoroughly test under all possible conditions that the device will operate properly they would have to spend, in my estimation, 10 times the amount of time and money as it took to develop it in the first place…. And the technology changes so rapidly, by the time they get done testing it, it’s obsolete.


I-Team: So what do ITAs not test?


Carson: (Picks up electrical cord.) UL says that this will not shock you and it will not catch fire. They don’t tell you that it actually works. That’s beyond the scope of UL testing. Absolutely nothing will you see in the FEC requirements that this (puts hand on DRE voting machine) has to work. It has to have these functions. But it doesn’t have to work.


I-Team: What about state certification testing?


Ries Jr.: We've been somewhat loosely monitored by the states. There's a lot of trust that the vendors are out for the best interest of the local jurisdictions. The states basically look at the federal qualification testing as being kind of the ultimate testing ground. As a vendor working with these independent testing authorities, they do a good job of following the test plans afforded to them by the vendors. They don't really go outside of those test plans. In the state of Indiana – and I'm not criticizing by any means – we just don't have the technical expertise to take these test result plans that the independent testing authorities provide them and really go through them in detail. Maybe it's just the leap of faith that the states feel that the federal testing authorities have done an adequate job and that they will adopt that product pursuant to state compliance.


I-Team: What about evaluation of equipment at the local level prior to a purchase? Do those buying or approving the purchase even know what questions to ask?


Ries Jr.: Local council, local commissioners typically don't get involved in the evaluation of equipment. And that's not a bad thing.


I-Team: Local jurisdictions conduct public tests of new voting equipment, but few members of the public actually attend. Why do you think that is?


Ries Jr.: I guess it's just a leap of faith and understanding that what we're doing is what we're presenting to the county. So there is a bit of uncertainty there. There has to be faith in their local election boards. It's one of those areas of a leap of faith. That you really do have to have a faith in your local jurisdiction, that they are conducting equitable elections in the best faith of the voters. The larger the jurisdiction, the more scrutiny should exist.


“GLITCHES” AND FAULTY EQUIPMENT


I-Team: Just last November, there was a “glitch” that occurred in Boone County, where equipment showed 144,000 votes were cast in a county with only 50,000 residents and only 19,000 registered voters. What happened?


Steve Shamo: In Boone County, the key to remember is that it did not take place with any of the tabulation software. It was a classic case of misinformation and basically it being blown up. I've answered this question to people calling on a national level. The bottom line is and the set up is, the cartridges are being returned to election center. They're being tabulated. In a secondary room there's a media presentation, which is a laptop secondary computer. It is not tabulating election results. At that point what's happening is the votes are being tabulated on Computer A -- which is fine. All the votes are turning out fine. Now in the media room we have a mask of the same election. So what we're doing, we're going to download the elections from disk. We can do it through the Internet if we choose to or in-house through their network, and send results to this media thing. We have a process called re-initialization, which is a safeguard. When you reinitialize election results, it zeroes out your election. You print a zero report before you read even your first absentee or your cartridge into the voting system. Well if you don't re-initialize both databases, you're bringing results in, okay, to a system that has not been reinitialized yet. So what does it do? It blows up on you. And it blows up in a ridiculous manner: 143,000 votes for every candidate.


I-Team: Election officials in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, claimed their new MicroVote DRE machines didn’t work properly in elections in 1994 and 1995. What happened?


Ries Jr.: Ninety percent of what we do is training and service to make that product functional to the voter. And without the cooperation with the local jurisdiction, it's very difficult to do.


I-Team: Montgomery County sued MicroVote, your partner Carson Manufacturing and your insurance company. You lost a million-dollar verdict. You appealed and lost again.


Ries Jr.: Our manufacturer settled out of court with the county. (He told us the voting machines from Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, are working properly in counties throughout Indiana and North Carolina.)


POLITICS PLUS


I-Team: Owners of other voting machine companies have had partisan ties and have made political donations to candidates. Have either of you made donations to a political party or a candidate running for office?


Ries Jr.: You should be very cautious of aligning yourselves. Even though we're independent people outside of our business environment, this is a political arena.


Ries Sr.: I don't get involved in political donations. I don't think it's right in this industry to do it.


I-Team: We have records that show, Jim (Sr.), that you made political contributions to State Representative Kathy Richardson, a Republican who first began purchasing MicroVote equipment in 1990 when she was Hamilton County clerk. We understand she also serves as Hamilton County Election Administrator and plans to purchase more MicroVote equipment.


Ries Sr.: I've known Kathy forever. The purchase was there already. She's a long-time friend. Back when she was county clerk I knew her. And I don't hesitate if she asks or if her party asks me to donate to her re-election, I'd like to help her out.


(According to Federal Election Commission records, the senior Ries also made a $1,000 donation to Republican John R. Price’s 1997 campaign run for the U.S. Senate. Price was MicroVote’s attorney for the Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, lawsuit and appeal.)


I-Team: Tell us about Mecklenberg County, North Carolina, a federal investigation and federal indictments against the county’s election administrator and MicroVote salesman Ed O’Day. He was convicted of bribery and kickbacks made over a seven-year period, according to stories in the Charlotte Observer.


Ries Jr.: Ed O'Day was an independent agent of MicroVote – not a direct employee but a manufacturer's representative for our product in North and South Carolina. He was convicted of bribing a public official, something we had no knowledge of, nor did we have any input. Unfortunately he's still out selling equipment to election officials, which surprised us all.


I-Team: What about Gary Greenhalgh, a former Federal Election Commission official who was your national sales director. You sued him in 1997. Why?


Ries Jr.: Gary Greenhalgh, on the other hand, was a direct employee. Trade secret violations there. Probably the most damaging, he was actually selling the equipment being released from Montgomery County to our customers on the side. And it violated his working contract with us that he was selling outside of MicroVote's jurisdiction.


I-Team: A Los Angeles Times news story says Greenhalgh told an audience in 1993 that, in writing bids for almost 30 government contracts over two years as national sales director for MicroVote, not one election director asked about protecting ballots from tampering or about how to audit vote counts – matters looming large in Florida. He said influence is more important than a quality product in his industry. How do you respond to that?


Ries Jr.: Influence can mean good selling skills. Influence doesn't have to mean bribery or kickbacks. He’s a bit of a loose cannon…


WILL YOUR VOTE COUNT?


I-Team: How does the voter know that his or her vote is counted correctly?


Ries Jr.: It's one of those areas of a leap of faith. That you really do have to have a faith in your local jurisdiction, that they are conducting equitable elections in the best faith of the voters. The security for the voter, once again, is the acceptance of good judgment by a local board. Quite frankly it's very difficult to convince somebody how do I know my vote counted.


I-Team: How do they know that when they voted for Candidate X that their vote for Candidate X was recorded?


Ries Jr.: Well, because of identity or lack of identity with records, there's really no way that I could prove to a voter, post tally, that their vote exactly counted the way that they voted it. Even in a paper-based system, that identity leaves the voter once that envelope is opened and the ballot is counted. There is no way to link that individual ballot back to that individual voter. And I understand some of the scrutiny towards the security and certainly the question asked, “How do I know my vote counts.” We do need to have some measure available to show them it does count.  


 wow.

The wing-nuts are finally onto something!

Yeehaw, I say. This'll save us the trouble of seceding. Bring it on, I say!

http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=5652

my new bumpersticker

absentee ballots PROVE tampering in NC

Okay, I've spent the better part of the night with the NC voter numbers, and I've reached the conclusion that there is a stunning case for tampering. Let's start with one sample county. I pulled their election data that lists number of registered voters by county and breaks it down into party affiliation, race, and gender. I chose a predominately black county to give a sharper idea and get free of the crossover voter charge. Here are the demographics for Bertie County, North carolina as of 10-31-2004.

Bertie County has 14,460 registered voters:

Party Affiliation
12052 DEM 83%
1403 REP 10%
1005 UNA/LIB 7%

Ethnicity
8685 BLACK 60%
5633 WHITE 39%
18 AM.INDIAN
12 HISPANIC
34 OTHER

GENDER
8370 FEMALE 58%
6017 MALE 42%

So you can see in every category, this is a Democratic lock.

This is how the vote was recorded:

4801 Kerry/Edwards 61%
3027 Bush/Cheney 38%
35 Badnarik 1%
2 Nader -
7865 Total (a turnout of 54%)

On the face, it's shocking to see a 22% drop in the Democratic vote and a 28% gain in the Republican vote of registered voters. But, we have to be careful in the rural South even in a county that is mostly black. As a reference, let's also look at how the county voted in 2000.

DEM - A. Gore-J. Lieberman 4,660 65%
REP - G. W. Bush-D. Cheney 2,488 35%
LIB - H. Browne-A. Olivier 11 0%
RFM - P. Buchanan-E. Foster 17 0%
7,176

Hmmmm. Well, that shows a 7% swing from 2000 to 2004 for Bush/Cheney. A little hard to believe, but not totally impossible I guess given the possibility that this might be an overwhelmingly democratic black county filled with big Rush Limbaugh fans. Let's look at some further numbers from Bertie and see if they can shed some light.

Senate
Bowles (D) 5089 66%
Burr (R) 2614 34%
Bailey 51 >1%
Total 7754

Governor
Easley (D) 5592 73%
Ballantine (R) 2036 27%
Howe 66 .009%
Total 7694

Secretary of State
Marshall (D) 5,624 77%
Rao (R) 1,650 23%
Total 7274

Notice the Senate race also appears supressed for the Democrats. All other races in Bertie County ran roughly in the range of 73-78% Democrat to 22-27% Republican except for President and Senator. Recall that it was also vitally important for Bush to enter his second term with a substantive majority in the Senate. The same Republican Senate bulge can also be seen in Kentucky for Bunning and likely other states as well. My guess is that they got greedy in states with potential Senate seats and gave them an additional bump to help their majority -- probably making those results even further divergent from the exit polls. It also mirrors the previous data I posted on amendment vote correlation to presidential votes. The bigger the swing necessary, the larger the disparity with amendment votes. (See below for more.)

Now after many hours of going over these figures, I began to ask myself a few questions. If I were to set out to rig the election, how would I go about it? I would have to be smart. There couldn't be a paper trail for them to catch me. The fewer people in on the fix, the better - a programmer or two perhaps but anyone more could create too many loose ends that couldn't be controlled. It would have to be either in the touchscreen machine programming, an entry point in the tabulating computer, or in the main computer's software. Nothing with a paper trail. As we've seen systems with a paper trail came very close to matching the exit polls. Systems without paper trails were often well off the exit polls. BUT THERE'S ANOTHER PAPER TRAIL: ABSENTEE BALLOTS.

With that in mind, I decided to have a look at North Carolina's absentee ballots. It was hidden in the precinct data, so it took me a while to download it and go through it county by county. Incidentally, Lee and Catawba counties reported no absentees, so I don't know if they are missing or recorded elsewhere. But for the other 100 counties, the results are:

BUSH 529755 53%
KERRY 469522 47%
OTHER 2749 >1%
TOTAL 1002026


Interestingly, that's amazingly close to the exit polls, a 6% difference bewtween Bush and Kerry. The official statewide results, however, show a full 12% difference:

BUSH 1,926,186 56%
KERRY 1,492,058 44%
OTHER 12630 >1%
Total 3,430,874


And worst, if one subtracts the absentees, to see how the "vote" actually occurred at the polls, we see a 16% difference -- even further away from the reality of the exit polls -- and this is what they actually sampled!

BUSH 1396431 58%
Kerry 1022536 42%
OTHER 9881 >1%
TOTAL 2428848


Holy crap, Batman! The absentees are loudly pointing out the tampering, and I have a strong suspicion that they will prove similar in other states. Absentees are the largest real sample we have (more than a million in NC). Why else would they be SO FAR FROM THE POLL VOTE? THERE IS CONCERTED AND DIRECTED ELECTION TAMPERING!!! CHECK THE ABSENTEES and see how close they come to the exit polls in the states that are out of whack.

One final note...

The other benchmark I used previously was the amendment vote disparity: what percentage of voters voted on both the presidential election and on the state's amendments? Tellingly, North Carolina like Kentucky with a close and necessary Senate race had a horrible percentage. It leads me to believe that whatever fix they were using dropped off the amendment votes (i.e. if it didn't have an R or a D, it didn't register on the change). Just 86% of North Carolina voters seemed to have voted on their top amendment. Using Oregon's paper ballot standard of amendment-presidential vote correlation, it reveals a potential 439,066 missing amendment votes in NC. Dividing that number by the total votes cast gives a percentage of 13%. The figure must be considered a very rough estimate due to uncertainty, but again it is revealingly very close to the exit poll differential.

BBV URGENT: Want recounts? Contact Cam Kerry NOW!!!

from democratic underground
__________________________________

Just got this in my email from DC lawyer Cynthia Butler. This is a listserv post that needs wide distribution.

I am angry and getting emails and recrimination from people
wondering why KERRY just caved and is not fighting this before the final count in Ohio, before any of the fraud was challenged, before New Mexico and Iowa even came in.
There is widespread feeling that he did not lose the election and that it was taken from him.
There is enough here to warrant investigation and enough to challenge the results. It's coming from all corners.
I understand that he has until the official count
certification in Ohio to Un Concede which is several days from now.
Anyone who thinks that he should unconcede should give reasons why - whatever they noticed, particularly in Red Republican Governed States using electronic machines- and send them directly to Cameron KERRY, John Kerry's brother at his law firm at the address CKerry@Mintz.com

They should inform us if they were not allowed to vote provisionally (for whatever reason- they lost forms, ran out of forms, etc.) I personally witnessed a number of things as I reported in Texas with the DCCC. (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee)
If you know anyone in particular in Ohio who tried to vote and was turned away at the polls please get their information and notify the campaign. They should be notified if they experienced lines longer than four hours -particularly elderly or infirm people (we call that torture when they do it to political prisoners) . They should be notified if people were told as has been reported that due to too many people showing up in African American precincts, particularly in Ohio where there were too few booths (some only had two or three for the entire precinct) and told because of heavy turn out they could vote on Wednesday.

If the numbers of these sorts of incidents creates a percentage margin that exceeds
the margin of victory- Un Concession has to be made to challenge the count.
If people wanted to and tried to vote and were prevented or actively discouraged from doing so, that is a Civil Rights matter and must be dealt with in terms of the ultimate count.

This is the last email that I am writing on this subject in this venue. I am taking it up in other venues.
Please pass along this to your listservs so that we may make Democracy Work in America. We are not a country where he who cheats best wins.

Cynthia L. Butler

BUTLER LAW FIRM, P.C.
1717 K St. NW, Suite 600
Washington, DC 20036

House Dems seek election investigation

Three congressmen sent a letter to the General Accounting Office on Friday requesting an investigation into irregularities with voting machines used in Tuesday's elections.

The congressmen, Democratic members of the House of Representatives from Florida, New York and Michigan, cited a number of incidents that came to light in the days after the election. One was a glitch in Ohio that caused a memory card reader made by Danaher Controls to give George W. Bush 3,893 more votes than he should have received. Another was a problem with memory cards in North Carolina that caused machines made by UniLect to lose 4,500 votes cast on e-voting machines. The votes were lost when the number of votes cast on the machines exceeded the capacity of the memory cards.

There were also problems with machines that counted absentee ballots in Florida. Software made by Election Systems & Software began subtracting votes when totals surpassed 32,000. Officials said the problem affected only certain countywide races on one of the last pages of the ballot. Elections officials knew about the problem two years ago, but the company failed to fix the software before the election this year.

Reports from voters in Florida and Ohio also indicated that some of them had problems voting for the candidate of their choice. When they tried to vote for John Kerry, they said, the machine either wouldn't register the vote at all or would indicate on the review page that the vote was cast for Bush instead.

In their letter, representatives John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, Jerrold Nadler of New York and Robert Wexler of Florida asked the GAO to "immediately undertake an investigation of the efficacy of voting machines and new technologies used in the 2004 election, how election officials responded to difficulties they encountered and what we can do in the future to improve our election systems and administration."


HERE'S THE REST

Evidence Mounts That The Vote Was Hacked

by Thom Hartmann

When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.

"It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.

And evidence is accumulating that the national effort happened on November 2, 2004.

The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something startling.

While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios matched the Kerry/Bush vote, and so did the optically-scanned paper ballots in the larger counties, in Florida's smaller counties the results from the optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking - seem to have been reversed.

In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.

In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.

The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the smaller counties where, it was probably assumed, the small voter numbers wouldn't be much noticed. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.

Yet in the larger counties, where such anomalies would be more obvious to the news media, high percentages of registered Democrats equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry.

More visual analysis of the results can be seen at http://ustogether.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm.

And, although elections officials didn't notice these anomalies, in aggregate they were enough to swing Florida from Kerry to Bush. If you simply go through the analysis of these counties and reverse the "anomalous" numbers in those counties that appear to have been hacked, suddenly the Florida election results resemble the Florida exit poll results: Kerry won, and won big.

Those exit poll results have been a problem for reporters ever since Election Day.

Election night, I'd been doing live election coverage for WDEV, one of the radio stations that carries my syndicated show, and, just after midnight, during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted the AP report.

But then the computers reported something different. In several pivotal states.

Conservatives see a conspiracy here: They think the exit polls were rigged.

Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, wrote an article for The Hill, the publication read by every political junkie in Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of brilliant points.

"Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state."

He added: "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points."

Yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as the computerized vote numbers began to come in from the various states the election was called for Bush.

How could this happen?

On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real "counting" is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.

That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.

"In a voting system," Harris explained to Dean on national television, "you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once?"

Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. "What surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's just a regular computer."

"So," Dean said, "anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator?"

Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into the central tabulator system. "This is the official program that the County Supervisor sees," she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting between them loaded with Diebold's software.

Bev then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the results of a test election. They went to the screen titled "Election Summary Report" and waited a moment while the PC "adds up all the votes from all the various precincts," and then saw that in this faux election Howard Dean had 1000 votes, Lex Luthor had 500, and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was winning.

"Of course, you can't tamper with this software," Harris noted. Diebold wrote a pretty good program.

But, it's running on a Windows PC.

So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB" which, Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep the votes." Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled "Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like Excel.

In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.

"Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let's give 100 votes to Tiger."

They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software "the legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the progress of your election."

As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said, "And you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.

Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds."

On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv.)

Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that had Karen Hughes telling George W. Bush that he'd lost the election in a landslide.

Morris's conspiracy theory is that the exit polls "were sabotage" to cause people in the western states to not bother voting for Bush, since the networks would call the election based on the exit polls for Kerry. But the networks didn't do that, and had never intended to. It makes far more sense that the exit polls were right - they weren't done on Diebold PCs - and that the vote itself was hacked.

And not only for the presidential candidate - Jeff Fisher thinks this hit him and pretty much every other Democratic candidate for national office in the most-hacked swing states.

So far, the only national "mainstream" media to come close to this story was Keith Olbermann on his show Friday night, November 5th, when he noted that it was curious that all the voting machine irregularities so far uncovered seem to favor Bush. In the meantime, the Washington Post and other media are now going through single-bullet-theory-like contortions to explain how the exit polls had failed.

But I agree with Fox's Dick Morris on this one, at least in large part. Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in his final paragraph, "This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play."

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show.

Nader demands manual recount in NH

November 5, 2004

Via fax: 603-271-6316

To The Secretary of State of New Hampshire:

The Nader-Camejo campaign requests a hand recount of the ballots in the presidential election in New Hampshire. Numerous voting rights
activists have requested that we seek a recount of this vote.

We have received reports of irregularities in the vote reported on the AccuVote Diebold Machines in comparison to exit polls and trends in voting in New Hampshire. These irregularities favor President George W. Bush by 5% to 15% over what was expected. Problems in these electronic voting machines and optical scanners are being reported in machines in a variety of states.

We are requesting that the state undertake this recount or a statistically significant sample audit of these vote counts.

We would like to make sure every vote counts and is counted accurately.

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader

Paperless Electronic Voting

A bedrock of democracy is making sure that every vote counts. The counting of votes needs to be transparent so people can trust that their vote is counted as they cast it. Paperless electronic voting on touch screen machines does not provide confidence to ensure votes are counted the way voters intend. The software on which votes are counted is protected as a corporate trade secret and the software is so complex that if malicious code was embedded no analysis could discover it. Further, because there is no voter verified paper record, it is not possible to audit the electronic vote for accuracy, nor is it possible to conduct an independent recount. This Primary Day six million voters will be voting on paperless electronic voting machines. This is a grotesquely designed, over-complicated expensive system fraught with the potential for mistakes and undetected fraud.

On July 23, 2003 the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute reviewed the electronic voting system in Maryland and found that it had security “far below even the most minimal security standards . . . .” Johns Hopkins computer security experts concluded: “If we do not change the process of designing our voting systems, we will have no confidence that our election results will reflect the will of the electorate.”

Computers are inherently subject to programming error, equipment malfunction, and malicious tampering. If we are to ensure fair and honest elections, and retain voter confidence in our democratic process, we need to ensure that there are no such questions. Therefore, it is crucial that any computerized voting system provide a voter-verifiable paper audit trail and that random audits of electronic votes be conducted on Election Day. Paperless electronic voting machines make it impossible to safeguard the integrity of our vote thereby threatening the very foundation of our democracy.

The seller of the machines, the Diebold Corporation, is a supplier of money to one of the major party candidates, George W. Bush. The CEO and top officers of Diebold are major contributors to the Bush campaign. This does not pass the smell test. Voters should report immediately any suspected malfunctions and deficiencies at voting precincts around the country to their Board of Elections. And voters should urge their legislators to require a voter verified paper ballot trail for random audits and independent recounts.

--

Outrage in Ohio: Angry Residents Storm State House! Massive Voter Suppression and Corruption - Democracy Failure

By David Solnit

November 3, Toledo Ohio -- Hundreds of angry Ohio residents marched
through the streets of Columbus, Ohio's Capital, this evening and stormed
the Ohio State House, defying orders and arrest threats from Ohio State
Troopers. "O-H-I-O, Suppressed democracy has got to go," they chanted.
After troopers pushed and scuffled with people, nearly a hundred people
took over the steps and entrance to the State's giant white column capital
building and refused repeated orders to disperse or face arrest. People
prepared for arrests, ready to face jail, writing lawyers phone numbers on
their arms, signing jail support lists and discussing non-cooperation and
active resistance (linking arms, but not fighting back).

A freshly painted banner held on the steps read, "ONE VOTE DENIED =
DEMOCRACY IN TROUBLE! 100'S OF 1000'S OF VOTES SURPRESSED = DEMOCRACY
FAILED. An unprecedented massive grassroots voter registration and get out
the vote effort and widespread opposition to Bush went up against the
massive coordinated Republican effort to suppress, intimidate and possibly
steal millions of votes. In addition to the voter suppression and
intimidation is the fact that Bush campaign co-chair Secretary of State
Kenneth Blackwell is in charge of the election and vote counting. But much
deeper questions about fundamental flaws in the system hang in the air.

STOLEN ELECTION?

CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent
to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51
percent to 49 percent. Investigative reporter Greg Palast in an article
today details how the deciding states, Ohio and New Mexico, if all votes
were actually counted, should have gone to Kerry. Palast explains,
"Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for
Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. The
election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something called
"spoilage." Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the vote is
voided, just thrown away, not recorded."
(http://www.tompaine.com/articles/kerry_won_.php )

TESTIMONIES OF DISENFRANCHISEMENT

The Ohio State House takeover was the culmination of an eight-hour long
afternoon of protest at the state capital by Ohio student and youth
groups, including the Columbus and Toledo Leagues of Pissed Off Voters,
Reach Out--Bowling Green, and the Central Ohio Peace Network. The earlier
speak-out featured a litany of people who experienced or witnessed voter
suppression, intimidation and disenfranchisement before and during the
election. Thousand of Ohio voters had been disenfranchised by partisan
poll challengers, intimidation incidents, voters polling places opening
late, lines up to four and five hours long--often in the rain.

Here are a few of their stories:

Holly Roach of Toledo, Ohio spoke of her 74-year-old father, Frank Roach
and her 89-year-old grandmother; Hazel Thompson requested absentee1s
ballots in early October. Hazel Thompson is homebound and Frank Roach has
been scheduled for heart surgery on November 2. Absentee ballots never
arrived. They were told by the County Voting Commission that they could
not vote with either regular or provisional ballots, because they had
already requested absentee ballots and Secretary of State Kenneth
Blackwell has issued a directive forbidding provisional ballots by people
who have applied for absentee ballots for them and not received them
(including some US service people who returned from Iraq). A lawsuit late
in the afternoon of November 2 by a voter in Lucas County led to a late
afternoon order by Judge David Katz of the Northern District of Ohio
instructing the Ohio Secretary of State to immediately advise all county
boards of election to advise polling precincts in their counties to issue
provisional ballots to voters in this situation.

Evan Morrison, a young get out the vote volunteer, told of polls opening
late. One poll at Glenwood Elementary in Toledo, OH opened more than half
and hour late.. During that time, from 6:30 to after 7AM, more than 50
people left without having voted. An hour and a half after the polling
site opened, the Republican election official said they had run out of
pencils, bringing voting to a halt. Evan ran to the store and bought a
bunch of number 2 pencils out of his own pocket so voting could resume.
Voting continued until 11AM, by which time up to 100 more people had
walked away.

Suzie Husami, a University of Toledo student said in a press conference
that her voter registration challenged by Republicans along with 35,000
other mostly newer registrants. She received a letter from the Board of
Elections reading NOTICE OF HEARING Pursuant to Ohio Revised Code Section
3503.24: your registration is being challenged. The reason stated as the
basis for this challenge is that you are unqualified to vote because you
are not a resident of the precinct where you can vote. A hearing has been
set at the above stated place and time. You have the right to appear,
testify and call witnesses and to be represented by an attorney. The
letter was addressed from Paula Hicks-Hudson, Director of the Toledo Board
of Elections. Although the challenges to her were thrown out in court the
day before her hearing received such letters were likely discouraged from voting.

Alli Starr, also being a get out the vote volunteer told about how 25
minutes before polls closed in Toledo, Ohio, Republican challengers were
witnessed harassing voters at the Mott Library, Central City polling
station, a low-income African-American community. Observers said that they
believed these challengers had repeatedly called the police producing
absurd stories in order to intimidate voters. One of the Republican
challengers was recognized as Dennis Lange, a prominent local business
owner who owns Pumpernickels. Mr. Lange aggressively tried to push
back African-American community members who were poll watching and voting
at the site. At one point more than four police and sheriffs officers,
including undercover officers, were witnessed at the site for no apparent
reason. For a photo go to
http://michiganimc.org/newswire/display/7580/index.php

PRE-ELECTION VOTER SUPPRESSION

But even before election day, the Baltimore Chronicle reported November 1
that "Through a combination of sophisticated vote rustling, ethnic
cleansing of voter rolls, absentee ballots gone AWOL, machines that
'spoil' votes---John Kerry begins with a nationwide deficit that could
easily exceed one million votes."

Troy, Michigan Republican State Rep. John Pappageorge, a Michigan Bush
campaign Co-Chair, was quoted in July 16 edition of the Detroit Free Press
as saying, "If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a
tough time in this election." Blacks comprise 83 percent of Detroit's
population, and the city routinely elects Democratic candidates by
substantial margins. The British Broadcasting Company has also disclosed a
memo to top Republican officials in Florida identifying voters in
predominantly black precincts for possible challenge.

The secretaries of state, usually the chief election official at the state
level, in four battleground states--Michigan, Missouri, Florida, and Ohio
have all taken top campaign posts for Bush and have been accused of
manipulating state election laws to restrict voter access on behalf of
Republicans. Ultra-right Ohio Secretary of State, J. Kenneth Blackwell,
the co-chair of the Ohio Bush campaign, together with the Ohio Republican
Party are at the center of this nationwide effort to steal the election
through voter suppression, intimidation and corruption. In the months
leading up to the election, Blackwell attempted to require that
registration applications that were not posted on the correct weight paper
be cancelled. His efforts to suppress the vote have continued. Blackwell
sought to restrict access to provisional ballots: he challenged of the
validity of over 35,000 new voter registrations in the state (recently
thrown out by a Federal Judge): he issued unclear directives regarding the
right of ex-felons to vote.

"In state after state, Republican officials and operatives are working to
deny American citizens the right to vote," charges Wade Henderson,
executive director of Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (the country1s
largest civil and human-rights coalition). Miles Rapoport, former
Secretary of the State of Connecticut and President of the nonpartisan
public policy organization Demos, says "As the election approaches,
chilling reports continue to surface of major efforts to prevent people
from voting. Legions of partisan challengers' are being readied for the
polls on Election Day; Latino registrants in rural Georgia are being
targeted; and tens of thousands of new Ohio registrants have been
challenged. All appear to be organized campaigns. These anti-democratic
activities must be stopped."

TOUCH-SCREEN VOTING

Additionally, the new touch voting machines being used in 29 states and
the District of Columbia, have been widely criticized by elections
officials and computer scientists and as susceptible to hacking and
malfunction. Election Data Services, a consulting firm, predicted 29
percent of voters would use touch-screen machines on voting day.

According to the November 3 Globe and Mail, "several dozen voters in six
states -- particularly Democrats in Florida -- said the wrong candidates
appeared on their touch-screen machine's checkout screen, the coalition
said. In many cases, voters said they intended to select John Kerry but
when the computer asked them to verify the choice it showed them instead
opting for President Bush, the group said. Roberta Harvey, 57, of
Clearwater, Fla., said she had tried at least a half dozen times to select
Kerry-Edwards when she voted Tuesday at Northwood Presbyterian Church.
After 10 minutes trying to change her selection, the Pinellas County
resident said she called a poll worker and got a wet-wipe napkin to clean
the touch screen as well as a pencil so she could use its eraser-end
instead of her finger. Ms. Harvey said it took about 10 attempts to select
Mr. Kerry before and a summary screen confirmed her intended selection."

On November 9, 2003, the New York Times reported: "In mid-August, Walden
W. O'Dell, the chief executive of Diebold Inc., sat down at his computer
to compose a letter inviting 100 wealthy and politically inclined friends
to a Republican Party fund-raiser, to be held at his home in a suburb of
Columbus, Ohio. 'I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral
votes to the president next year,' wrote Mr. O'Dell, whose company is
based in Canton, Ohio. That is hardly unusual for Mr. O'Dell. A longtime
Republican, he is a member of President Bush's 'Rangers and Pioneers,' an
elite group of loyalists who have raised at least $100,000 each for the
2004 race. But it is not the only way that Mr. O'Dell is involved in the
election process. Through Diebold Election Systems, a subsidiary in
McKinney, Tex., his company is among the country's biggest suppliers of
paperless, touch-screen voting machines. Judging from Federal Election
Commission data, at least 8 million people will cast their ballots using
Diebold machines next November. ... Some people find Mr. O'Dell's pairing
of interests -- as voting-machine magnate and devoted Republican
fund-raiser -- troubling."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/09/business/yourmoney/09...

*Co-founder of the Citizens Alliance for Secure Elections, Susan Truitt
said today: "Seven counties in Ohio have electronic voting machines and
none of them have paper trails. That alone raises issues of accuracy and
integrity as to how we can verify the count. A recount without a paper
trail is meaningless; you just get a regurgitation of the data. Last year,
Blackwell tried to get the entire state to buy new machines without a
paper trail. The exit polls, virtually the only check we have against
tampering with a vote without a paper trail, had shown Kerry with a lead.
... A poll worker told me this morning that there were no tapes of the
results posted on some machines; on other machines the posted count was
zero, which obviously shouldn't be the case."

NATIONWIDE RESPONSE

Across Ohio other demonstrations were held in Toledo, Cleveland, Oxford,
Athens and Cincinnati. Across the United States on both elections night
and November 3 people erupted in protest with marches, direct actions, civil disobedience, vigils, breaking of bank
windows in San Francisco and rallies were held in at least 40 cites and
likely many, many more. Many of the outreach flyers for November 3 actions
were headlined, "NOV 2: VOTE! NOV 3: MAKE IT COUNT!"

Most of the actions planned by groups were planned to take place
regardless of the election outcome and were focussed more on the deeper
issues of democracy not empire, healthcare, not warfare and education not
occupation.

The day of action was initially called for by the Beyond Voting network,
whose call for actions read in part, "When your government has troops
stationed around the world, lets big corporations write the rules of the
global economy and pushes racist policies that promote fear, undermines
civil liberties, and rips off working people, you are living in an EMPIRE!
Empire is as system of global control that combines international
aggression with domestic repression to create a deeply undemocratic world.
REAL DEMOCRACY means we the people have direct control over the decisions
and resources that matter in our lives. Real democracy means that we make
the decisions that impact our neighborhoods, workplaces, schools and the
state of the world we hand off to our children. This year the world is
counting on us to expand the election year debate beyond Democrats versus
Republicans to the larger issue of whether the U.S. will be a Democracy or
an Empire."

Two other networks, This Time We Are Watching (a project of the League of
Pissed Off Voters, the Truthforce Training Center and the Ruckus Society
with many other groups) and No Stolen Elections (Global Exhange, Code
Pink, United for Peace and Justice,labor organizers and others) had also
begun to prepare a people power response for November 3. No Stolen
Elections publicized a pledge of action to stop a stolen election, but on
election night they chose not to call on people to take to the streets.
The Election Protection Coalition an umbrella group of volunteer poll
monitors that set up a hotline and planned to monitor and make public
voting irregularities. They may have missed one opportunity to make a
difference when Ralph G. Neas, president of the People for the American
Way which helped form the coalition, said to the media,"Overall, the
problems of outright voter intimidation and suppression have not been as
great as in the past."

The massive grassroots participation and activism -- the highest levels of
activism since before the Iraq invasion-- are hopeful. But electoral work
and single-issue campaigns without a broader systemic analysis are a
recipe for disappointment or failure. Moveon.org has reportedly not
returned press calls for two days after the election, perhaps because they
had naively thrown all their hopes with Kerry and lacked a deeper vision
or longer-term strategy.

The League of Pissed Off Voters was one of the most hopeful efforts within
the massive grassroots efforts to unelect Bush. Catalyzing activism around
the election among youth, especialy youth of color, they had a vision of
building power and organization beyond the elections using creative
tactics and rooting themselves in hip hop and youth culture. Other local
grassroots efforts like Ithaca, New York1s Bush Must Go Coalition, used
the energy of anti-Bush election build their organization and campaigns
that started before and will continue after the election gone. http://indyvoter.org

Let1s be honest. Kerry would have been an improvement to Bush and sent a
much better signal to the world, but he is more reactionary than Nixon; a
pro-war, pro-corporate capitalism millionaire who wants a more
multi-lateral approach to wars and U.S. empire building. It1s also an
important to remember what makes deeper changes in the world is movements
and communities and people power, not politicians. And if we step back and
look at things globally, Bush and his gang are fringe extremists whose
empire is overextended, and lacks any global legitimacy. While we are part
of a global majority, an ever growing movement of movements that is
creating common sense alternatives that will undermine the empire from
below.

*Quote from the Institute for Public Accuracy
http://accuracy.org
Attached Photos by Alli Starr

-----
David Solnit volunteered with the Mobilization for Democracy Not
Disenfranchisement and local anti-bush groups in NW Ohio in late
October/early November and is the editor of Globalize Liberation: How to
Uproot the System and Build a Better World
http://www.globalizeliberation.org

Systemic Harrassment of Voters by Republicans in Toldedo

Witnesses report harrasment of voters by Republican "challengers."



At 7:05pm, 25 minutes before polls closed in Toledo, Ohio, white, Republican challengers were witnessed harrassing voters at the Mott Library Central City polling station, a low-income African-American community. Observers said that they believed these challengers had been repeatedly calling the police producing obsurd stories in order to intimidate voters. One of the Republican challengers was recongnized as Dennis Lange, a prominant white business owner who owns Pumpernickels. Mr. Lange aggressively tried to push back African-American community members who were poll-watching and voting at the site. At one point more than four police officers, including undercover officers, were witnessed at the site for no reason. City council member Michael Ashley and journalist Michael Hayes came to the site to speak with community members.



by Mobilization for Democracy not Disenfranchisement
Email: mediatoledo (at) indyvoter.org (unverified!)
Phone: 419-902-2909
03 Nov 2004
Modified: 09:34:35 AM

more "glitches" favor Bush -- no glitches favor Kerry

Computer glitch still baffles county clerk (IN) -- gives Bush 57,000 extra votes

Carteret tries to solve voting problems (NC) -- 4,000 early votes lost

Election problems due to a software glitch (+11,283 for Bush in NC)

Computer error at voting machine gives Bush 3,893 extra votes (for Bush, in OH)


Glitch "supersizes" Bush tally by 4,000 extra votes.

Bloggers launch Ohio recount

According to my copy of the Constitution, it ain't over until the Electoral College Lady sings. What if Kerry actually wins the Electoral College, and she sings "No Surrender"?

It could happen, if Kerry is certified the winner in Ohio or Florida after all of the votes are officially counted.

The blogosphere is conducting a "virtual recount," looking for errors and fraud. And using the "Rathergate" analogy, the blogosphere has found the first "superscript" in Franklin County, taking a nice bite out of Bush's "lead."

Bush Lead Change
136,483 Election night

132,590
-3,893 Franklin County computer error

Ohio has (I believe) 155,337 provisional ballots that will be counted by November 12, as required by law. I suspect they will favor Kerry significantly, taking a big bite out of Bush's "lead."

A statewide manual recount is mandatory if the margin of victory falls below 0.25% * 5,481,756  = 13,704

If the blogosphere discovers enough errors - or fraud - a manual recount is definitely within reach.

As "Rathergate" proved, it would be a big mistake to "misunderestimate" the blogosphere. Let's find the recount equivalent of "superscripts," "proportional space fonts," and other anomalies - and put John Kerry in the White House!

Join the investigations here:

http://dailykos.com/story/2004/11/4/224812/643

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x2603563

The Bush Balanced Budget News! (again and again)

Congress will come back into session briefly in the next few weeks. Among the work to be done is raising the ceiling for the national debt for the third time since Bush took office. We now owe more than any country ever. Four years of Bush has cost us more in debt than all of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. Bush has spent it all in just 4 years. The national debt is a disgrace, and congress put off raising the ceiling on it until after the election, apparently because it would not play well in the press.

On another note, we have all heard that this election was a triumph for "conservative" values (though what is conservative about the spending splurge the right has been on is beyond me.) If so, how would that explain the absolute ass whipping that was put on Alan Keyes? Here is a guy so conservative that Rush Limbaugh has used him to fill in for him when he was too stoned on oxy to talk, yet he gets the worst pasting in the whole election. This guy is a poster child for the anti abortion crowd, yet got beaten soundly. He is so anti abortion that once in the republican primary he wanted to show a video of an abortion as his campaign theme, yet a self described liberal with a funny name kicked his butt. 51% is sounding less and less like a mandate....

57 Arrested in San Francisco Protest (2,000 participated)

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Police arrested 57 people Wednesday as nearly 2,000 protesters decried the re-election of George W. Bush and the continuing war in Iraq.

San Francisco police said the large demonstration that started around 5 p.m. was peaceful, but a smaller group of about 150 later splintered and marched through Civic Center and the Tenderloin.

Raucous demonstrators chanted "We're going to beat back the Bush attack, get the troops out of Iraq."

Anti-Bush signs were in abundance, proclaiming "Nov. 2, 2004 -- a sad day" and "Overthrow King Bush." One man held a sign that said "Stop mad cowboy disease."


http://www.kron4.com/Global/story.asp?S=2522980&nav=5D7...

Bush victory spurs protest in Portland

By The Associated Press

PORTLAND — Angry protesters took to the streets of Portland yesterday, calling for an end to the Iraq war and greater scrutiny of President Bush's re-election victory.

The demonstrators, who numbered more than 100, were met by police in riot gear and on horseback. At least three people were arrested, but there were no reports of injuries.

The protesters chanted, "Not our president, not our war," and sought an investigation into Bush's victory over Democrat John Kerry.

"I want to see democracy in America," said Cyrus Smith, 24. "I want all the votes scrutinized."

Kerry Won. Here are the Facts.

by Greg Palast

Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of votes cast are voided—known as “spoilage” in election jargon—because the ballots cast are inconclusive. Drawing on what happened in Florida and studies of elections past, Palast argues that if Ohio’s discarded ballots were counted, Kerry would have won the state. Today, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports there are a total of 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded votes plus the 155,000 provisional ballots. So far there's no indication that Palast's hypothesis will be tested because only the provisional ballots are being counted.


Kerry won. Here's the facts.

I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face one more hung chad.  But I don't have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage called American democracy, it's my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry.

Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent.  Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.

So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, "Who did you vote for?" Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters don't know.

Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. [See TomPaine.com, "An Election Spoiled Rotten," November 1.]

here's the rest

Exit polls and ‘actual’ results don’t match; Evoting states show greater discrepancy

An analysis of the original AP exit polling, which showed Kerry with a tighter margin and leading in myriad states, raises serious questions about the authenticity of the popular vote in several key states, RAW STORY has learned.

Since the actual outcome of the votes have been called, AP has changed nearly all of their exit polling to tighten the margin. A reason has not been given.

The analysis, first conducted by a poster at the popular Democratic Underground, suggests possible voter fraud in states that do not have electronic voting receipts, and those that limit the media’s access to polls.

Two inquiries placed by RAW STORY with the media contact for the six-network exit polling consortium at NBC News has received no response.

The curious result comes after the head of Diebold, which produces much of the nation’s electronic voting machines, told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”

An exit poll involves asking someone after they walk out of the election booth who they voted for. While not a guide for proving results, it can be a mechanism for ensuring voting accuracy and flagging potential fraud. Exit polls were recently used in Venezuela to ensure the vote was accurate and legitimate.

Perhaps more importantly, while exit polling is unreliable, the odds of President Bush having gaining an advantage from every exit poll in swing states is an extremely improbable coincidence.

In Florida, Bush led exit polling by CNN of more than 3 million voters by just 5355 votes. Yet he led by 326,000 in the end result. This morning, CNN changed their exit polling to favor Bush, saying that had overweighted African American voters.

In Wisconsin, where exit polls put Kerry up seven percent, Bush has a lead of one percent, an unexplained difference of eight percent.

In New Mexico, Kerry led Bush by 3.8 percent, yet Bush leads Kerry by 3 percent in actual reported voting.

In Minnesota, where a new law sharply restricts reporters’ access to polls, Kerry led 9.6 percent in exit polling. Actual voting counts found that Bush trailed by 5 percent, with a 5 percent discrepancy favoring Bush.

Ohio, which does have paper trail capability but does not mandate receipts, had exits showed Kerry and Bush in a dead heat; in the near-final results, Bush led by three percent.

Exit polls put Kerry up by 8 percent in Michigan; actual results show Bush trailing by just 3 percent.

Nevada, which also has electronic voting – though should have mandated paper trails, had a variance of 4.2 percent. Kerry led the exit polls by 1.2 percent, while Bush led reported votes by 3 percent.

Two states with paper trails for voting were within 0.5 percent margin of error.

New Hampshire, which has electronic voting but provides verified receipts, exit polling is within 0.1 percent of the actual vote. Kerry led by 3 percent in exit polling, and 2.9 percent in the actual vote.

Maine, the final state for which analysis of exit polling was conducted before the AP “resampled” their data, was in the Kerry column by 7.5 percent; the end result put Kerry up 8 percent, a variance of 0.5 percent. Maine has no electronic voting.

Kerry does not gain by any significant margin in actual voting in any state for which analysis has been conducted, RAW STORY found.

Exit polling accurately predicted the results in most states with very little error. Where there were discrepancies, they were significant in the +5 percent range, and always favored Bush.

Allegations of voter fraud is not new to President Bush. On November 12, 2000, the Washington Post ran an article suggesting anomalies in the hotly constested state of Florida.

Something very strange happened on election night to Deborah Tannenbaum, a Democratic Party official of Volusia County. At 10 p.m., she called the county elections department and found that Al Gore was leading George W. Bush 83,000 votes to 62,000 votes. But when she checked the county’s Web site for an update half an hour later, she found a startling development: Gore’s count had dropped by 16,000 votes, while an obscure Socialist candidate had picked up 10,000 … all because of a single precinct with only 600 voters.

Early returns from Florida showed the Green Party candidate leading President Bush and Sen. Kerry in two Ohio counties. They later appeared corrected, but raised eyebrows among liberal bloggers.

EVIDENCE of Ohio Fraud

Here's a photo a Cincinnati poll manager took on election night, and it seems to be proof of some fishy actions with ballots in Ohio. Bottom line: Note the already-voted-with ballots in the back of the truck with the Bush-Cheney sticker in the back window. Does this prove fraud? Well, it certainly doesn't look good in a state that's already had lots of problems this election.



In a nutshell, Stefan Skirtz is a poll manager for the Kerry campaign in Cincinnati. His precinct is heavily made up of minorities and students (i.e., leans Kerry). One of the duties of the poll managers, Stefan told me in a phone call minutes ago, is to follow the poll workers to election headquarters as they drop off the ballots and ballot boxes. Stefan followed the poll workers who didn't go directly to the election headquarters. Instead, they went to a local public school where workers put the ballot machines into a semi trailer, and then the poll workers handed off the sealed bags containing the ballots to someone Stefan assumed was with the county board of elections.

The first problem he noticed was that there was no sign off of the transfer of the ballots. Nothing was written down and given to the poll worker as proof that the ballots were passed off to the county employee.

What's worse, Stefan noticed the pick-up truck of the supposed county board of election - the truck the ballots for 40 precincts were loaded into - had a big Bush-Cheney 2004 sticker in the back window. Stefan did say that he followed the truck to the election headquarters, though he didn't see what transpired after the truck pulled into the election hq parking lot.

As Stefan explains it, the poll managers had such an extensive list of voters rights and regulations that they had to follow, including it being illegal to have any partisan buttons etc. in the polling place, yet the ballots for voters in over 40 precincts were put in the hands of Bush-Cheney partisans.

I don't know whether the Bush partisans did or didn't play any games with the ballots they received, but it sure doesn't look good, and I wonder whether it's even legal. And let's not forget, this is a state that was already well on its way to becoming the new Florida of GOP election fraud.

Stefan says he has 6 or 7 witnesses who also saw the sticker on the truck.

bush wins in districts w/o paper trail

A statistical analysis has been done that shows on several swing states, and in every state that has e-voting but no paper trails that the state totals have an unexplained advantage for Bush of around +5% when comparing exit polls to actual results of voting.

In every state that has paper audit trails on their e-voting, the exit poll results match the actual results reported within the margin of error. So we have matching results for exit polls vs. voting with audits vs. A 5% unexplained advantage for Bush without audits. Also, CNN changed their original exit poll results to match the actual vote totals in the middle of the night. How could original exit poll totals change?

the darkest of days

Yesterday I was remembering how depressed I was when Reagan was re-elected; I thought at the time I was living in a veritable toilet bowl of a world. Now I see elections in terms of the messages Americans send about themselves, to themselves and to the rest of the world. When we re-elected Reagan, we were saying, "We're too scared to face the world without Big Strong Daddy. Daddy wants to keep all the bombs because he wants us to be safe. You can't expect us to let go of Daddy's hand." Totally childish, but you CAN see a) it IS hard to put down your gun before the other guy does, and b) Reagan did deliver a level of emotional comfort that many people could trust above their own puny intellects. Feeling is to many simply more real experientially. And Bush mark 1 simply turned out to be unpalletable as a Daddy surrogate.

But what we've said in this election buggers all description. It's two-pronged kind of dildo-statement. To the world we've said, "We ARE the cowboys; we like riding roughshod over all of y'all when there ain't nothin' you can do about it; we LIKE pissin' off everybody in the world; WE DON'T NEED NO STINKIN' ALLIES!" Talk about a recipe for inviting terrorism.

To Bush we've said, "You've wrecked our economy, destroyed our constitution, pillaged our civil liberties, killed our young people to line your own pockets, and we like it! CAN YOU PLEASE FUCK US JUST A LITTLE BIT HARDER?!" And just to underline that statement, we gave him 3 million of the popular vote to do it with. So all of y'all who voted for Bush, just recognize yourselves for the masochists you are. You like to be seen as the biggest swingin' dicks on the planet, but at home you just can't take it up the ass far enough for your ol' top man.

Ok, so that was the first 24 hours of the rest of my life. Today here's what I'm concerned about. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

POLITICS
Inquiries up from anti-Bush Americans seeking to leave U.S.
- Steve Rubenstein, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, November 4, 2004

Sore losers were doing more than grumbling about the election results Wednesday -- some of them were actually thinking of pulling up stakes and bailing out.

It happens every four years, say the people who answer the phone at foreign embassies and consulates. Most callers are frustrated, but some are actually U.S. citizens serious about leaving the country.

"There's been quite a good deal of interest,'' said Rob Taylor, the consul general in San Francisco for New Zealand. "People have been coming in for six months or so.''

New Zealand has had a slew of American admirers ever since the "Lord of the Rings'' movies came out, featuring the country's scenery. But the presidential election ratcheted things up, Taylor said.

"Whenever New Zealand is the flavor of the month, we get inquiries,'' he said.

There are plenty of high-tech jobs waiting for qualified immigrants, Taylor said. New Zealand is picky, though, and the welcome mat is out primarily for younger, educated applicants with specific skills.

"We want genuine people who want to move, not just people hopping on a plane after the election, saying, 'I'm leaving, goodbye,' " Taylor said. "We want people to come have a look first, and then think about it.''

Consulate executive officer Tim Blackmore said prospective immigrants, even angry ones, should be more keen on coming to New Zealand than on leaving the United States.

"We want people interested in New Zealand as more than just an exit point, '' he said. "But the prospect of another four years of the current administration is certainly weighing on people's minds.''

The Australian Consulate said the phone was ringing there, too.

"Americans are funny,'' said consular officer Linda Heller. "They don't get their own way, so they want to move.''

At the Canadian Embassy in Washington, which handles most immigration issues, inquiries were up as well.

"Yes, we've heard from Americans distraught with the election results,'' said press officer Pam Lambo. "We do hear regularly from people distressed by the direction of the country. I don't get the calls myself, luckily.''

Immigration spokeswoman Maria Iadinardi said it was "a little early to tell'' whether there would be a surge of applicants based on the U.S. election. She said disgust with the U.S. president would neither help nor hurt an applicant's chances of being accepted by Canada.

Some U.S. citizens already living in Canada did not seem encouraged by the results of Tuesday's election to return.

"If I had any inclination to move back, what happened yesterday sealed the deal,'' said a U.S. expatriate and Vancouver resident who goes by the name of Stan K.

Stan K., who moved from Los Angeles to Canada in 1986, teaches jazz saxophone in his central Vancouver studio. Canada suits him, he said.

<> <>"I like living in a country that isn't a superpower,'' he said. "It fits my style. After I watched the U.S. election results, I asked myself if I could move back, knowing that the bozos are still in charge. I don't think so.''

My question is, can't we DO something constructive with that energy? If some people do leave, wouldn't it be better to arrange that leaving as a public protest? Would people be willing to go to some neutral spot as a group, in a true, high-profile act of conscience? The officials quoted in the above article are so dismissive of these individuals because, I think, they ARE individuals and not organized. These few officials are creating the image of Americans as spoiled cry-babies for wanting to leave the U.S. "because they didn't get their way." I think that is very insulting to these Americans personally and very much in furtherance of the damage that's already been done to the image the world has of Americans now. I want that kind of damage to stop. Why can't an organization be created to deal with embassies on behalf of Americans who want to vigorously reject this administration because of its Constitution-destroying activities-- an organization to insist that these Americans be given the same respect that we have generously accorded to political refugees from outside the U.S.? Because indeed, that is what they are, and there's a hell of a credibility difference between a political refugee and a cry-baby, and they deserve to have that distinction be made. Above all, if Americans leave this country in any kind of numbers, some political juice has got to be gotten out of it, regardless of where stay-at-home Americans stand on the ethics of such a choice. And also, any Americans who emigrate for politcal reasons should be functioning as rebuilders of our ties to the rest of the world. Any wave of expatriation must be a success and it must be portrayed as being done for the right reasons, reasons of conscience and not selfishness. I think it’s vital that some effort be made to take control of these developments and use them as a tool for change here; the potential for destructiveness is too great otherwise.

That's the second 24 hours of the rest of my life.

I like white cheeses and red wine, california Cabs in particular

when gore lost in 2000 and my working class democrat neighbors were yelling fraud, etc... I told them then, the dems will not win with TERRY MCAULIFFE (no clue is still clueless) and those other dopes in the drivers seat. they all said pish posh, karl rove this and that.

And now again, I repeat, democrats need to look up toward the front of the bus and look in that big wide mirror and see who is still driving the god damn bus.

as for non-whining republicans/conservatives, they whine when they win, they whine early and often to hedge their bets when they think they might lose. I have access to the various publication that people like Rev, Moon and Rush Limbaugh (ie Human Events) put out, they were filled last week with horror stories of how the liberals were going to steal the election in ohio. (They have to print that shit in advance to get it in the mail on time. They were poised for defeat.)

All this right wing talk about how bad lawyers are and how elections should be taken at face value and the will of the people: funny how the republicans (Bush campaign personally had 500!) were suing anything that moved atarting the week before the election.

Bill O'reilly still has a job,(he interviewed the Pres. in the middle of his litigation, is this a failure of intelligence? or what?) is he the kind of ponderous filthly sack of shit that morally righ-tious 10 commandment wielding people want to associate with? Ralph Reed, phone home...

I know plenty of younger people who voted for Bush on Tuesday, now I implore them, If your faith is so strong, you MUST vote one more time to prove your conviction, by joining the armed forces. Hell, Ann Coulter and half the talking butt cracks on cable news look like they'd fit a uni. Otherwise, there is nothing to celebrate except the downfall of human consciousness.

orwell made it all sound so much more difficult than it turned out to be.

No whining here

Was the election rigged? Who knows? If information develops that it was then we deal with it at that time. In the mean time we have to face 4 more years of the most devisive presidency since Lincoln. Bush now claims he wants to earn the trust we placed in him. Yo George, right at half of us don't trust you and a 1 point spread does not a mandate make. You are as likely to earn our trust as I am to sprout wings and fly. The nation is divided, and your lies did it. The healing won't begin until the wounding stops.

For over a day now I have had to listen to the neocons where I work wax poetic about the fantastic victory they had. To hear them talk, now all america see's things their way. It just ain't true. Nearly half of us don't agree, and we are not going away. Every lie Bush tells, every stupid thing he does will only make us stronger. We will be back in two years to try and take back the congress. We lost, but we are not beaten.

Let's go out there and earn 1 more vote for every 50 people you know and get this country turned around and back on the right track.

And another thing....

It's extremely amusing that the majority of Democrats believed Kerry had over-whelming support. It's quite simple to figure out how they would come to this conclusion since the media grossly supported Kerry, and hence aired much greater amounts of Pro-Kerry stories and such. Get over it already.

Want some cheese with your whine?

I think it's time to call democrats/liberals by a new name, "the whiney bunch"..... Not all democrats/liberals are like this, but some of you people whine too much...you think because some of you think this way the whole nation thinks like you....well, the elections have proven you wrong....no matter how you try to spin this around and try once more to say the elections were rigged.....it's just your liberal mind not accepting your defeat, and bringing back as defense all this crap of "the elections must have been rigged..." Give it up and accept your lost... Why is it that every time Republicans win it is democrats/liberals who yell and bash away that the elections must be rigged, yet when Democrats have won in the past Republicans don't whine.....nor start yelling "the elections must have been rigged..." Stop whining so much...

They stole it AGAIN.

Today we ask, "What Happened?" Everyone from Tony Blair to OPEC was predicting a Kerry win. Oil prices fell. Exit polls indicated a big Kerry win (Max Cleland!). John tells me that in other countries, exit polls are used to send a red flag -- if the official results do not fall in line, an examination is called for to find out why. Venezulea had to do a recount for their recent squeaker. Thank god they had paper receipts from THEIR electronic voting machines. Maybe one day our fair and benevolent King George will favor us with such magnificent machinery.

You do know they stole this again, don't you. You don't even have to think Diebold was in play to see this was a snatch. Look at the long lines. Listen to what are people say about how they traded their real vote for one of those provisional ballots. This was everywhere -- not just in Ohio. And what about all the early voting and absentee voting -- how do you know all that has been counted (and counted correctly)?

This election was stolen OPENLY and we all watched and no one said anything. They did it buy CONTAMINATING THE SAMPLE of the vote by putting the anti-gay initiative on the ballot in almost a dozen states. This means that the extra-chromosome crowd was CALLED BY GOD to vote. You couldn't get away with that kind of SPOILING in a rinky-dink focus group for a bank or a healthcare company. If you devised a survey (especially a survey with action items) with such a skewed sample, you would be right back on fax machine and mailing list duty.

It's a classic Rove tactic and it's been on the books -- we've known about it and no one was talking about it during the whole campaign. As if it were part of the laugh track. That's so 90s. That's so culture war and Bill Clinton to talk about Gay Marriage.

They stole it again and anyone at any minute could throw the first fist of sand in their beady little eye. We all have the right to a fair election. We have the right to ask for one. We have the right to question one. We have the right to demand PROOF. We have a right to deliberation and fair reporting. We have a right to get up in everyone's face -- everyone you see -- and say the truth. Spread the word. The squeaky wheel gets the grease and if you've been waiting for a time to get involved, now would be good.

Let it sink in. They stole it AGAIN.

quotes

hey sounds like a good time to quote Al:

"Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!"

"He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."

"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."



"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."

Interluude

You ever have one of those moments, when you're talking to a Bushie and you think, "wait, a minute... I get it, you're just ribbing me. You don't really BELIEVE all that Bushit -- you're just enjoying my reaction."

I've had that moment for the whole 20 years I've know this friend of mine, Charlie. We went high school together in Kingsport (Dobyns-Bennett) during the Reagan years. He was from a Republican family that lived off the golf course and I was from a Democratic family that lived on Watauga Street, which is what you'd call The Historic Section. His family did marketing. Mine: chemicals.

Politics was alive at our house. We always ate dinner together and always talked about the President, the arms race, the Pope, and because of my input -- the environment. I thought it was necessary to let my family know, at every chance, that Eastman was bad for the environment and they ought to do something about it. They must have loved that. I assumed that everyone under 30 hated Reagan, because -- uh -- wasn't it obvious? Dr. Strangelove. Right?

Wrong.

Not Charlie. He thought Reagan was swell. I never understood why -- except that he would say that Reagan is "a great man; strong, and; putting us on the right track." These didn't seem like reasons, they seemed like clichés. So, I figured, it's inherited Republicanism. He don't mean no harm.

Fast-forward to 2004 and inherited or not, not much has changed.

I had that moment talking to Charlie recently. He was flailing an argument for Bush at me and I thought, "he's pulling my leg. Boy, I stepped into that." The argument in question was something absurd like he was saying W did a fine thing sending us to Iraq. Of all the reasons I can imagine someone being pro-Bush, the War in Iraq isn't the one I'd try to argue. It's obvious -- WMDs -- Osama -- 9-11 -- abu Ghraib -- looting -- missing explosives -- Powell. I can imagine someone believing Bush is their man because they want a Christian Nation. That's the only thing he's been successful at -- destroying the Constitution and the separation of church and state. The war has been a failure.

So, I email Charlie and say basically, I'm on to you. You don't really believe that shit. You're stringing me along.

He writes back:
__________________________

"Sorry I was out most of Friday. Yes I am a GW fan and supporter. I feel
that the way he handled post 9/11 events showed strength and determination.
Americans are hated all over the world because we have more than any other
nation. This is not going to change by electing John Kerry. However simple
GW may seem, I think he does what he says and says what he does. Until we
can get at least the temperature of the middle east settled down I think we
should keep the administration that we have. It has not always been the
right decision to agree with the masses. I hate John Kerry's hair. I think
he lies more than GW. I hate the way that John Kerry loves the sound of his
voice. I hate the fact that John Kerry's wife doesn't think teaching is a
real job. I could go on and on but I will spare you.

"Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds."
Albert Einstein"

_____________

I'm not sure what is more startling: that he thinks Bush showed strength and determination after 9-11 or that he is using an Einstein quote to attack Kerry supports for having "weak minds."

Charlie and I have carried on this political discussion thruout the campaign and I do admit that his arguments are more convincing now than in high school. But I want to mention one thing I thought was facinating. He is all about social darwinism and hobbes' state of nature, which makes him more of a william f buckley libertarian than bushie-christo-fascist. so he says to me, "I think all government is all bad. if we got rid of all governement we'd finally be okay."

I'm like, "dude, you sell insurance (he really does)." Insurance isn't a thing you can trade easily for a goat or chicken. It's a social contract that exists only because we have a liberal form of government that mitigates the state of nature so we can all enjoy commodious living.

And I gave thanks, because I had not thought of the word "commodious" in ages.

my bad

I am fascinated with the idea that, in norway, "my bad" would be:

"jeg er gal"

oh yeah!

good to see the prez backing a winner, no wait, I mean...



serendipity-do-da-diddly-aye,

i mean, the guy who looks like andrew jackson after he has a collision with the short bus.