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The SideshowArchive for November 2004Main |
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Okay, I haven't set up a re-direct for The Sideshow yet, but I will as soon as I've properly wrapped my mind around the idea. The whole site is mostly duplicated at its new home now but archives aren't deleted, so your old permalinks to individual posts will still be good. So do me a favor and change your blogroll links and your favorites ASAP to: And then you can watch some movies: Fiore: The Depressed Democrat's Guide to Recovery (Via An Age Like This) Video: George W. Bush: MISTAKEN I'm now http://sideshow.me.uk. (The www. prefix will work too, but why bother?) We have two strains of thought: One is that every single indicator of who would win and was winning the presidential election was wrong because of a stealth campaign by Bush that was largely invisible and occurred almost entirely below the radar, to the extent that nothing was indicating a Bush win (except for some cooked polls that have been picked apart to the point of destruction). The other is that the vote itself was cooked. The first strain is clearly conspiracy theory: that the Republicans somehow, deliberately, managed to hide their campaign and their support completely from experienced watchers who were looking for them, yet somehow their supporters showed up to overwhelm Kerry supporters at the last minute, and nobody saw them. The facts clearly support the second strain of thought - that the vote was cooked - but the media has chosen to believe that despite any evidence on the ground, a lot of mysterious Bush voters happened to be there when no one was looking. And lied to the exit polls. And did this only in places that were using electronic voting machines owned by a highly-partisan Bush-supporter who had publicly vowed to do whatever he could to bring home the election for Bush. To believe the "Bush won" conspiracy theory, you have to believe that not only Zogby was wrong, but that both Democrats and Republicans completely altered their behavior and switched their voting patterns, and that Republicans did this in such a way that nobody noticed it even while it was happening. Democrats vote late in the day. It's always been true, and everyone knows it. When exit polls early in the day say the Democrat is winning by a wide margin, you can take it to the bank that it's not going to get any better for the Republican as people start coming home from work. And that's exactly how it looked on the ground on election day - there was no late surge of Republicans to outnumber the Democrats. And yet, at the last minute, somehow, the polls suddenly started showing Bush coming even and then breaking ahead at a time when there was no sign of these Bush voters suddenly showing up at the polls. How did that happen? Some folks at Berkeley have done a statistical analysis for us, with all sorts of charts and tables and graphs with color lines and everything, The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in
Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections. That's a .pdf (via Bartcop), but here's the finding for those who don't want to be bothered: Need more? How about Was it hacked? in The Orlando Weekly: The New York Times needs a brick the size of Ohio, apparently, and even that may not work. You have to work to ferret out the facts in Matt Bai's Who Lost Ohio? because Bai apparently believes it's good enough to say that, well, since Kerry lost, the Republicans must have done a better job than anyone noticed at the time. But here we have people actually going out and looking at the supposedly conservative boondocks counties that made an 11th-hour swing for Bush, right at the moment they are supposedly making the swing, and there's no one there - except a few straggling Kerry voters. It's not just that no one saw the Bush campaign, but there weren't many signs of Bush voters at the polls at the time when this surge of same was supposed to be suddenly swamping what had until then been a commanding Kerry lead. No, I'm sorry. All of the facts say that people voted for Kerry. Only the machines disagree. The only real question at this point is why Keith Olbermann seems to be the only person in Big Media who thinks that theories about the magical/invisible Bush surge aren't good enough to counteract the facts. A Sideshow domain name has been registered but isn't activated yet. Once it is, I'll expect you all to change your links right away! Meanwhile, I am posting at Avedon's other weblog (site feed), which you should check out, because interesting and important stories haven't disappeared. I've spent a lot of time lately trying to communicate with my ISP and find out what went wrong. As you no doubt noticed, my site disappeared yesterday around lunchtime and told visitors that the site had been removed due to excessive bandwidth usage. They also sent me an abuse notice saying this excess had happened "within the last 24 hours." This made no sense, since usage had been considerably more in the period leading up to the election, peaking on November 2nd and 3rd and then dropping to much lower levels than it had been at in more than a month. A query in response generated nothing more than an auto-response noting my response and saying they'd get around to me...eventually. The phrase "two weeks" was rather alarming. So I found some other ways to hector them until they finally sent me mail explaining that I had been consistently exceeding bandwidth all month and giving me some precise figures for a change. And, sure enough, I had been. In fact, I'd been exceeding the limit for two months. They also said they were restoring the site but I'd better either upgrade or don't do it again! So I politely wrote back and said thanks for the explanation and why didn't you tell me this two months ago instead of cutting me off with no warning? And also asking what upgrade options I have (and hinting that comparison-shopping might also be in the cards). Which is where we are now with them. In the meantime, it's obvious I need to arrange a domain name of The Sideshow's very own so that I can (a) automatically redirect to Avedon's other weblog in emergencies and (b) give y'all time to change your links so that if I do migrate elsewhere (which is already being looked into, of course), the transition will be less painful. If you didn't remember about the emergency weblog on Blogspot, you can go there now. Back in the day, the Republicans passed a rule that said you had to give up a leadership position in the House if you were under indictment. Of course, that was when the guy under indictment was a Democrat. Now it's Tom DeLay, though, and they want to change the rules to protect him. "What a difference DeLay makes!" says Lambert at Corente, who observes that "now the jackboot's on the other foot, isn't it? Heather went down pretty much the same thought pathway I did while listening to Mark and Marc talking about Wal-Mart on Morning Sedition: That the existence of those big stores that supposedly offer you more choice at lower prices is actually reducing our choice and not necessarily delivering lower prices. They're big and powerful and can undercut your local businesses, but once they've driven out the competition, they don't really have to worry about that anymore. When they've finally eliminated all your local shops, what choice will you have then? Up in Scotland, Ken McLeod is still mourning America: It's been like a death in the family. Not of someone close, but of someone you didn't expect to miss so much until after they were gone. You wish you'd made more of an effort. You find yourself thinking of other things, and then feeling an unaccountable sadness seep into your day, and then remembering why. Or you keep coming back to it, looking again at the old photos, at the once insignificant postcards. I mean all that; that's been, to my surprise, exactly how I felt. The death is of an idea of America and the mementos are the blogs of my friends. Ken has some recommendations for how we can try to come back to life. God knows they are better than the ones the Democratic leadership has come up with. Inspired by Marty (of BartcopE!), your Thought for the day: Allowing a foreigner from Austria to become your head of state was a bad idea in 1933 and I don't see why it would work any better now. With everything else that was going on, I almost didn't notice this, but Cynthia McKinney won. You can see her victory party in Windows MediaPlayer at her site. Via TwoGlasses, Michelle Goldberg on blue state federalism at Salon: What we're seeing, [Cannavo] says, is the growth of blue-state nationalism, a new sort of identity politics forced into life in reaction to the relentless insults of red America. For years now, conservatives have excoriated liberals in almost exactly the same way that previous right-wing movements demonized Jews -- as unwholesomely cosmopolitan, traitorous, decadent, inclined to both socialism and economic elitism. Right-wing authors like Michael Savage, Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter routinely try to write their opponents out of the nation. Jerome Doolittle: Any citizens simple enough believe that Bush is looking out for their old age with his schemes to privatize social security should study very carefully the story of what happened when the courts handed a huge Teamsters Union pension fund over to Wall Street 20 years ago. Read it all, but the nutshell version is that Jimmy Hoffa and the mob did a far better job than Wall Street at managing the money of half a million truck drivers. Did lawyer-observers on Election Day miss fraud incidents? My client conceded the race on the belief that the results were clear. The results are anything but clear, however, and American democratic legitimacy requires an honest reappraisal of the events in Florida and around the country. Is the country swinging left? This guy thinks so: Just as George W. is cackling over his new mandate, Colorado -- The Bellwether State -- has changed direction. Start with the Salazar brothers, newly elected to the House and Senate. Look at the legislature, now controlled by the Dems for the first time in 40 years. Look at the newly enacted tobacco tax, at Fastracks in Denver, and at the passage of Amendment 37 that mandates renewable energy. And look at Michael Merrifield, overwhelmingly re-elected to a second term. Someone explain to me how this could be: The bill would also permit people to use technology to skip objectionable content -- like a gory or sexually explicit scene -- in films, a right that consumers already have. However, under the proposed law, skipping any commercials or promotional announcements would be prohibited. The proposed law also includes language from the Pirate Act (S2237), which would permit the Justice Department to file civil lawsuits against alleged copyright infringers. Kinky Friedman is running for Governor of Texas. In honor of William Safire's announced impending retirement, Media Matters has compiled a list of some of his greatest hits, including his various false claims about WMD being found in Iraq, Al Qaeda links to Saddam etc. And ending with this: Oh, gosh, I seem to have forgotten The Sideshow's third birthday on the 14th. Oh, well.... Charles Dodgson says a flight attendant got fired for posting these photos on her weblog. Don't worry, they are disturbingly work-safe. The bastards. (Charles also notes that TNH has solved the globalization problem.) It's already time to start thinking about the annual Koufax Awards, but this year the folks at Wampum are asking for a little help because they need to do a temporary upgrade in order to speed up the bandwidth for this popular feature. (I'm waiting for them to introduce a "Best Pink" category.) Meanwhile, Dwight Meredith looks at the real problem with frivolous lawsuits, and the real way to fix it, too. Tim Porter has a conference report: Ultimately, says Rosen, journalists need to answer the question: "How can you be useful again?" Here and here and here, Sisyphus Shrugged is on the trail of Republicans, some of whom are having trouble agreeing with each other. I'm not sure who Timothy M. Gay is, but he wrote one of the articles Julia linked, which says: There are a lot of Republicans troubled by their party's exploitation of contemporary know-nothingism. You know who you are. And before your party's degeneracy is complete, you ought to do something about it. Because camouflaging the fear and loathing of gay people as "moral values" isn't the base alloy of hypocrisy. It's hypocrisy itself. In Tapped, Matthew Yglesias explains that there's more to opposing Bush's judicial choices than just abortion (though abortion is a very good indicator of how judges will approach all those other things), and Nick Confessore talks about how Harry Reid will have to represent the 50.8% of us who voted for Democratic Senators. So, what does our friendly local expert have to say? The Problem with Electronic Voting Machines at Schneier on Security. As Bruce points out, they're not the only problem, but right now they are a serious one. Eric Olsen (no, not Erik Olsen!) has a review at Blogcritics of Morris Fiorina's Culture War? that says the kind of thing that baffles me completely: It seems obvious to me that if the Bush administration had been interested in preventing the proliferation of weapons from Iraq to terrorists, they would have made safeguarding weapons caches a priority - but they didn't; they ignored them. So what were they doing? One theory is that the neocons simply wanted a country where they could carry out their economic experiments without interference from local governments, and Iraq fit the bill. Others say they just wanted to plunder Iraq's resources and getting rid of its government first was necessary. Another theory is that chaos in the middle-east serves the purposes of corporate war profiteers and political hawks who know that hawkishness is an easy way to keep power as long as there is actually a war in progress somewhere. There are other variations on this theory that chaos was the desired effect, all citing different purposes. But none of them includes a desire to end terrorism, and the reason for this is that it is difficult to believe that anyone could have been stupid enough to make this many mistakes in pursuit of that goal. I'm not sure that's true - after all, Alan Greenspan admitted he was genuinely surprised that the former USSR didn't become an instant flowering democracy as soon as the communist government broke up. The rise of the KGB into a mafia simply hadn't been anticipated at all. By him - but people who understand how money and power work, who realize what the Constitution is for, should have expected this all along. These aren't people who have a firm grasp of the obvious. It's still a frustration when libertarians defend Bush's policies. It's not a question of whether repressive policies will be implemented, because many have already been implemented. The Patriot Act has already passed. It is already being used to harass and intimidate people who have the wrong religion or even the wrong political opinions. The separation of church and states is crumbling now, not tomorrow. They are breaking our military and pursuing polices that seem guaranteed to force us into a draft. And, while I believe there might have been ways to turn Iraq into a flowering democracy even though the invasion was a terrible idea in the first place, the administration has attempted none of those (tried and true) methods of turning dictatorship into democracy, instead opting for methods long known to do quite the reverse. Eric Olsen isn't someone who is stupid or oblivious. And while there are some people who you know are never going to vote Democratic, he isn't one of them. And though the current manipulation of the media is designed to mislead Americans into trusting the maniacs who are running things, it's not clear why it is working on someone like Eric. How do we beat that? Last night, Hecate was sitting in for Atrios at Eschaton and she said a few words: I can't tell from here how much time the media is giving this story: But there it was, on his doorstep: a letter from Barry W. Kimmons, Deputy Chief, Deserter Information Point Extension Office of the Army Reserve Personnel Command. "On 12 July 2004 you were involuntarily mobilized to active duty in the United States Army," the letter says. "To date you have not reported to your mobilization station as required by your orders." Possibly Pistorius had not responded for two reasons. The Pistorius family had moved from the address in Sharon, Pa., to which the Army had sent its first letter. More saliently, having served honorably in not one but two branches of the U.S. military, with no additional obligation showing on his discharge papers, Pistorius would have had no reason to think he was subject to anything but his civilian job at a local steel plant. It sounds like people who get their news from television aren't going to know these things until the people who actually run the mainstream media finally decide they have had enough - if that ever happens. Bearing in mind that "evidence" in this case is not proof of voting fraud, but is certainly proof that a closer look should be taken at the reliability of US elections, let's consider this comment (one among many interesting comments) to a post over at Political Animal: Consider that in 2000 the exit polls were off by a wide margin in ONE state. That disparity was later explained primarily by a large number of spoiled ballots that had been intended for Gore, mostly in Duval (the largest chunck) and Palm Beach. The exit poll was not wrong ... the vote counting was. Again, not alleging conspiracy, simply pointing to the fact that 10s of thousands of Florida voters intended to cast votes for Gore and did not. The spoilage rate in parts of Duval exceeded 50%. This is far above the expected spoilage rate of even the worst vote-counting devices (the vote-a-matics), which is about 3%. Whatever happened, it wasn't due to normal voting technology errors. Now, in 2004, we have a similar exit poll discrepancy but it is present in at least 9 states (probably more ... similar errors were exhibited in many non-battleground states). This is, statistically, extremely suspicious. You just don't have large discrepancies across many states all in one direction. Such a massive discrepancy is not likely to be due to a cumulative sum of small errors, but (as in Florida 2000) due to a very small number of big errors. So, what is common to all the states where the polls were far off? First, is the exit poll methodology, which is why that should be examined. 2004 exit polls used updated methodology, and it could be that the updates distorted the numbers. However, the problem is not obvious. Why was, for example, Wisconsin NOT distorted? Why were the distortions predominantly in the presidential race and not other ballot contests? It is not enough to simply say "the exit polls were wrong", one must investigate and determine why they were wrong. If not the exit polling methodology, then the errors are due to something else. My friend Pete Hisey says: I am begging EVERYONE TO BUY THIS CD. Not only is it great music, $3 goes to Alejandro for a liver transplant. (Pete is also very excited about this little scandal involving Senator Man-on-Dog.) There's a lot out right now about the "war" between the White House and the CIA. I hate to defend the CIA, but at least some of them tried to do their job and if "the intelligence" was faulty, it's the intelligence at the top we should be pointing to. Putting Porter Goss in charge is just adding injury to insult. Charles Pierce in his most recent letter to Altercation (scroll down or search on "Pierce") is also leaping to the agency's defense: And there it is. Courtesy of a former (you freaking bet!) top-level spook, as relayed by Knut Royce of The Baltimore Sun yesterday, the single dumbest notion yet to leak out from under the Mayberry Machiavellis. I have enormous respect for the Newsday guys, and I have no illusions that this would ever happen in any major newspaper, but ought not the next piece of the story read something like this? "Of course, as history and common sense would tell us, this perception no more conforms to reality than it would if the White House perceived the CIA to be a pod of humpback whales, an exaltation of larks, a gathering of the Inuit tribes, or an alternative rock band from Pullman, Washington. Sources have declined comment on whether or not the White House political operation has stopped its brief experiment with psilocybin mushrooms." The reality is no joke. The CIA is on its way to becoming the enforcement arm of whatever the foreign policy fantasts next want to foist on the nation. Unless, of course, the CIA decides to fight back. There's progressive politics for you in November of 2004 -- hoping that the spooks will covertly undermine the lunacies of an elected government. Thanks again, America. Bill Scher saw that jerk Lieberman doing the Sunday talk shows: Yes that's right. The so-called moderates are already organizing and strategizing over how to avoid standing up to the GOP. I can't even tell if this is parody or real news: Hostettler mounting campaign to change the name of Interstate 69. Diana Moon at Letter From Gotham has a long post-election post of her own and also a letter from Texas that complains about how both parties ignored Texas, despite the fact that there are signs the Dems can do a whole lot better if they really put some elbow in it. Why? Because the Dems made some ground here in Texas. Doubtless you heard about DeLay's redistricting fiasco down here, during which the Democratic legislators bolted the state - twice. A couple of districts were designed to oust prominent Democrats. Guess what? The Dem won in one of them. Dallas County (which includes Dallas proper and several suburbs) voted in a Dem as county sheriff. She's also the first woman elected to the post (we had one in the late 1920s who filled her late husband's term). She's also openly gay, which turned out to be mostly a non-issue. When you consider that Dallas is the buckle of the Bible Belt, that says something. The GOP wants to pretend this is all there is to it: The sheer number of voters that Bush inspired to turn out demonstrated impressive strength. But on several key indicators, Bush's victory ranks among the narrowest ever for a reelected president. But Bush also inspired a larger number than any candidate to vote against him. Ronald Brownstein in the LAT on the unusual narrowness of Bush's victory. Rorschach says Safire is going to retire next year. Can't you just see them at the NYT? "So many crackpots, so little op-ed space...." Speaking of which, it seems the Pope has been doing his bit for world peace, again. James Carville has egg on his face - literally. Unfortunately, I don't see a map with Beyond red and blue (again), but Robert David Sullivan has a different look at the divisions in the states and where the parties should be looking for votes: Kerry won the battle for new votes in only two regions, Upper Coasts (his home base, where he won 60.3 percent) and Great Lakes (which includes Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit, and which he won with 56.7 percent). But it's worth repeating that Kerry still beat Bush in two other regions -- and that he didn't actually lose votes in any region. Compared with 2000, Bush's win was decisive, but this map shows that the Republican Party can hardly rest easy in 2008. [Update: The map is with the earlier article.] The Values Gap in Time by Joe Klein provides another example of mainstream media guys who just don't get it: Cluelessly, Klein goes on: Klein, like so many of his colleagues, knows what "liberal positions" are only through the lens of the RNC's talking points. And that's what they tell us is "the liberal media". Amanda at Mousewords: I don't know what the answer is to make it so that artists can get paid for what they do. But I think it's clear that you can't undo what's done--the concept of "intellectual property" is damaged beyond repair. Instead of trying to turn back the clock, it's time to start looking for new methods to pay people for what they do. Vaara has completed transcripts for the BBC series The Power of Nightmares, which I heartily recommend. In The St. Petersburg Times, Robyn Blumner on Tuesday's winners: not us: Perhaps the biggest winners on Tuesday were all those people who said they voted to protect "moral values." Oh, we understand that this concern had nothing whatever to do with providing for the poor or making sure children have health insurance. And we also know that the amorality of sending young men and women to die for a war grounded in a lie is not what you meant either. (via) Not "Was It Stolen", but "Was it Stealable" by Stirling Newberry: The question is not "was the election stolen?" but "was it secure"? In this post 911 world, we can easily make the distinction between "nothing went wrong, today" and "something could go wrong". What we will find, regardless of whether there is a way to make it add up to enough votes to swing the results, is to prove that there are pervasive irregularities in the balloting system, that these pervasive irregularities favor the Republican Party consistently, and that the "solutions" proposed often make the situation worse not better. (Via our good friend Simbaud)
NYT editorial About Those Election Results actually gets it, saying: Defenders of the system have been quick to dismiss questions like these as the work of "conspiracy theorists," but that misses the point. Until our election system is improved - with better mechanics and greater transparency - we cannot expect voters to have full confidence in the announced results. Pity it isn't a front-page series, though. Maybe someone should write to Daniel Okrent and have him explain that news decision. Dems won 3,000,000 more Senate votes than the GOP. Too bad it doesn't show where it counts. Hm, wait a minute.... (via) Democrats Prevail in Washington Ballot Lawsuit: A judge Friday ordered election officials in the state's largest county to turn over the names of about 900 voters whose provisional ballots are in dispute. [...] A lawsuit by Democrats had sought to block election officials in King County, home to Seattle, from discarding the disputed ballots. Another page of links on voting problems This is from Bob Somerby on election day: In case you needed proof that none of today's big shots in the political world - whether they're doing the politics or just covering it for the press - have any idea what's going on, Adam Nagourney and Carl Hulse provide it in the NYT: Yet for all that, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, who is about to become the new Senate minority leader, has risen from the gray battlefield of the Democratic campaign and is about to become one of the two most powerful Democrats in Washington - at a time when his party is hungering for help. So, having sacrificed Daschle first, how do they explain making the same mistake again? It gets worse, as young Matt Yglesias points out, quoting the same NYT piece: Like Matt says: But as we know, the truth is that the modern Republican Party hates America, and they will drag any Democrat into the gutter with smears and lies and hateful campaigns of viciousness and the last thing we need is yet another nice guy to lie down for them. We sure don't need Diane Feinstein cheerleading us into total capitulation. We needed a party leader who had the spark and the resources to fight back hard. And this is what they gave us. God. Damned. Fools. Mapleberry Blog's Curmudgeon has two posts up on that most important issue, starting with this letter to Terry McAuliffe & the DNC expressing chagrin that they seem to be showing no interest whatsoever in free and fair elections in the United States. And here's the other post, re-stating what should have been obvious to all and yet, strangely, has not been. Even Keith Olbermann, the one journalist who has taken the issue at all seriously, seems to think it's only about whether Kerry won. Well, it ain't. Let me say this again: It's not simply a question of being able to prove that this election was fixed, it's that we absolutely must be able to prove that every election is not fixed. So go on over to Old American Century for some more links on the subject. In our brave new world, high school kids who want to sing Dylan's "Master's of War" are expressing "an extreme leftist point of view" and must be censored, I learn from Kevin Drum. All the money you made will never buy back your soul. Bush politicized the intelligence-gathering process, and now David Brooks is complaining that the CIA is being political when they object to this waste of their efforts. The other fabulous Michael, who we know and love from his posts at rec.arts.sf.fandom (and he's another sexy bastard, too), lines up Brooks against Seymour Hersh and thinks maybe Hersh (and the CIA) have this one right. (Did you ever think you'd be defending the CIA? Or that you'd see me doing it?) By the way, Michael is also served with, and serving, a draft notice. I keep reading various versions of the theme that Bush has to reward his Christianist supporters for their votes and will now move more forcefully to the right since they (allegedly) delivered for him this year at the polls. Take, for example, this passage from Michael Crowley in his Slate article on James Dobson: The religious right's new kingmaker: The term "President for life" is the bitter phrase we have always applied to dictators in countries where they either don't have elections at all or where the elections are known to be thoroughly corrupt (like Saddam's sort of elections). So, if it's only tin-foil hat types who are doubtful of the legitimacy of Bush's means of holding on to power, why the hell is everyone acting like he will still need those right-wing voters four years from now? Shouldn't they be referring to him as a "lame duck" instead? Arianna: As at almost every other turn, the campaign had chosen caution over boldness. Why did these highly paid professionals make such amateurish mistakes? In the end, it was the old obsession with pleasing undecided voters (who, Greenberg argued right up until the election, would break for the challenger) and an addiction to polls and focus groups, which they invariably interpreted through their Clinton-era filters. It appears that you couldn't teach these old Beltway dogs new tricks. It's time for some fresh political puppies. (via) Michael Miller of Public Domain Progress wrote a fan letter to The Atlanta Journal and Constitution's Jay Bookman: For persistently engaging in this most basic form of patriotism, thank you. Remember to write to journalists - and their publishers or networks - to thank them when they produce good stuff. (Why do you think Keith Olbermann kept following up the election story? It's because they got an extraordinary amount of positive feedback. And why do you think news shows and papers give so much ink and time to right-wing hackery? Because the right-wingers write to them a lot. We have to balance them out.) Bell Waring hearts libertarians - and says their destiny is the Democratic Party: Let's come together, people. You have nothing to lose but your insulting, theocratic, soi-disant Republican allies. (via) Reality Check's The Myth of Corporate Government While the right-blogosphere and the monopoly media are giving us their twisted ideas of what is wrong with the Democratic Party, liberals, and the so-called liberal media, ex-Republican Paula Hay has written what may be the cleanest advice I have seen yet for Democrats for what we need to focus on to get back in shape. (And also, she supplies the term "monopoly media".) Jonathan Last, in The Weekly Standard, insists that John Kerry was not a bad candidate: I have to assume that many of these critics never actually followed the candidate around, because close-up, Kerry was a pretty good candidate. I saw Kerry blow away crowds in New Hampshire. He gave a very good convention speech. He was excellent in the first presidential debate (but for the "global test" line, which haunted him afterwards). His day-to-day performance on the stump was also very fine--I saw him handle tough questions from voters with aplomb; and when he was interacting with a crowd, his rich and haughty caricature disappeared completely. Here's another cute little voting machine glitch story - if you voted the straight Dem ticket, your votes went to the Libertarians. Via Mark Evanier, another neat bit of red/blue state cartography, but this time without going to purple to show the way the states' results were mixed. This map looks a lot more evenly divided than the standard map. The creator also notes that: The District of Columbia makes for an interesting example of another failing of the conventional red state-blue state map, as well as of this map: voters from different states are not equally represented. For example, the little bit of blue in D.C. represents nearly 20,000 more voters than the large swath of red in Wyoming. Similarly, the blue in New York State represents more voters than all the red in Montana, Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico combined. By now everyone is probably aware of both the the Lancet study on the number of Iraqi deaths and the numerous people trying to debunk it. Over at Crooked Timber, Daniel Davies critiques the critiques and concludes that the study itself is good science. Matt Welch takes Daniel Henninger of WSJ to task for complaining that the Abu Ghraib story was the media yelling, "Fire!" in a crowded theater. This is the common reaction of the right when they are caught with their pants down - it's all the media's fault for actually reporting it. It's really more a case of conservatives perpetually shouting, "Theater!" in a crowded fire. Via Kevin Drum, Jonathan Chait's piece in the LAT saying that it's conservatives, rather than lefties, who are the real conspiracy theorist nuts. Naturally, many commenters to Kevin's post just can't see that suspicions about this election could be any less nutty than, say, accusing the Clintons of murdering Vince Foster (and investigating them for it five times). Matthew Yglesias recommends this piece by David Sirota in The Washington Monthly about how a Democrat won the Montana gubernatorial race without pretending to be a Republican. It's an otherwise thoroughly red state, but, His victory was so resounding and provided down-ballot party members such strong coattails that Montana Democrats took the state senate and four of five statewide offices. It's really very hard to read things like this from Squoosh and not wonder how the guy didn't win the election: Now, I don't blame The New York Times for not wanting to print stories that assert as fact that there was certainly election fraud, but I do blame them for dismissing it all as blog-hyped conspiracy theory. These are charges of election-fixing, and the Times shouldn't be sneering, it should be investigating. Look how quickly they dismiss what, a mere five years ago, would have been regarded as a frighteningly suspicious fact: But of course, the Times continues to miss the real point, which is not that the election was stolen, but that we have no way to prove that it wasn't. Which means we don't know whether we had "a free and fair election." And that's not good enough. From JuliusBlog, this QuickTime video: We Had a Dream, a tribute. (via) In the future (this Sunday), Frank Rich will be writing On 'Moral Values,' It's Blue in a Landslide: The Reverand James Forbes of the Riverside Church wrote a while back about The Moral Urgency of Electing John Kerry. As a news story, this aspect of the "moral values" vote has been perhaps the most under-the-radar of all, but most black preachers and many whites have been saying all along that their liberal values are underpinned by their Christianity, and they've never supported Bush, for exactly that reason. If the media itself had been liberal, they would have been focusing on these people when the issue of "moral values" came up, and refusing to accept the idea that morality is only about sex. You can tell that Bill McClellan has moral values: Ashcroft here is referencing the last sentence of the Declaration of Independence: I suggest this tells you what Ashcroft and the Bush administration -- despite their public piousness -- truly find sacred and truly worship. More than a week after the real liberal media debunked this claim by right-wingers, delusional wingnut Charles Krauthammer announces that the 'Moral Values' Myth about the election is, in fact, a myth - which he claims was invented by the liberal media to explain away the fact that they lost the election. Why? Because it's a way for liberals to assuage our "moral vanity": But the So-Called Liberal Media, which gets it's talking points about things like the "moral values" vote direct from the RNC, is stuck on this idea, so it's obviously true that the rest of us are going to have to counter it by pointing out that bigotry and killing people aren't moral values, they're immoral values. David Broder found out that there is No Vote Necessary in an e-mail from a reader: "While she was on the phone . . . I was informed that my congressman, John Mica, was unopposed. I said, 'I knew that, but shouldn't his name be on the ballot, with a line below it for a write-in candidate?' That seemed traditional to me. I asked whether Mica didn't need to get at least one registered vote somewhere so he could be returned to Washington as an 'elected official' to serve another two years. The answer came back over the phone that Mica had been 'automatically reinstated in Washington.' So... what is the difference between running and not running? The Brad Blog has loads of links for stories on election problems. This Space for Rent supplies us with a little Langston Hughes: The Sideshow completely agrees with Simbaud that it would be poor form to link to this, and if by some unhappy chance you accidentally find yourself looking at it, you will go to Hell if you dare to laugh. Going to School with Fafnir and Giblets The Case That Must Not Be Named! (via) 12thharmonic is quoting Dr. Avi Rubin:
Monday, 22 November 2004Eyeball news
23:00 GMTPropagate this link!
17:56 GMTFact vs. Fantasy in the election
Electronic voting raised President Bush's advantage from the tiny edge he held in 2000 to a clearer margin of victory in 2004. The impact of e-voting was not uniform, however. Its impact was proportional to the Democratic support in the county, i.e., it was especially large in Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade. The evidence for this is the statistical significance of terms in our model that gauge the average impact of e-voting across Florida's 67 counties and statistical interaction effects that gauge its larger-than-average effect in counties where Vice President Gore did the best in 2000 and slightly negative effect in the counties where Mr. Bush did the best in 2000. The state-wide impact of these disparities due to electronic voting amount to 130,000 votes if we assume a "ghost vote" mechanism and twice that - 260,000 votes - if we assume that a vote misattributed to one candidate should have been counted for the other.
Well, now, that's mighty suspicious, isn't it? The suggestion of the machines flipping Kerry votes for Bush is about as subtle as a brick, here, folks.How do we know the fix was in? Keefer says the total number of respondents at 9 p.m. was well over 13,000 and at 1:36 a.m. it had risen less than 3 percent - to 13,531 total respondents. Given the small increase in respondents, this 5 percent swing to Bush is mathematically impossible. In Florida, at 8:40 p.m., exit polls showed a near dead heat but the final exit poll update at 1:01 a.m. gave Bush a 4 percent lead. This swing was mathematically impossible, because there were only 16 more respondents in the final tally than in the earlier one.
No, really, you think it was a fair election? Just how big a brick do you need to get hit in the head with?
15:18 GMT
Saturday, 20 November 2004News of the moment
15:17 GMT
Friday, 19 November 2004Vast apologies
16:24 GMT
Wednesday, 17 November 2004Under a cloud
16:09 GMTStuff from around
11:43 GMTSafliar
In a March 14, 2000, article at Salon.com, Conason recounted the numerous false accusations Safire leveled against the Clintons, including Safire's January 1996 headline-making column that called Hillary Clinton a "congenital liar:"
No reckoning, of course, has ever come, nor any attempt anywhere at the Times to set the record straight. By contrast, we have a White House that is manifestly guilty of outrageous, deliberate falsehoods, and the NYT still won't let Krugman call Bush a liar.Again and again over the past several years, Safire has charged the Clintons and their associates with such offenses as fraud, conspiracy, perjury, witness tampering and obstruction of justice. Using the jargon of Watergate to emphasize their culpability, he has written about the so-called Clinton scandals as if even the most minimal professional scruples and cautions did not apply to him -- let alone the standards of fairness that are held sacred at the newspaper of record and in all reputable news organizations. ... But a newspaper as uniquely powerful as the New York Times carries unique responsibilities. When one of its most prominent writers recklessly damages the reputations of people who turn out to be innocent of the offenses he has alleged, a reckoning is in order.
02:39 GMTBloggy bits
01:30 GMT
Tuesday, 16 November 2004The landscape
22:02 GMTWorking as designed?
I voted for Bush but I am a social liberal, an economic and environmental moderate, and a strong believer in the separation of church and state.
The question I'm struggling with right now is just what it is he started. Is what's going on in Iraq a feature or a bug?
[...]
In my case, I just thought it best to return Bush to office to (attempt to) finish what he began regarding the war on terror.
16:13 GMTIf it ain't on TV, it ain't goin' on
Of course, Kerry was telling the truth about the atrocities in Viet Nam. Every war has atrocities. Now, there's a new one in Iraq. But it's too icky to show on tv. Too bad. This war will end when Americans get to see every night at dinner what their sons and daughters are becoming. What the true cost is of those SUVs. If it's too icky to show, maybe it's too icky for us to be doing it?
And, sadly, someone called Tow said this in the comments:Are the troops fighting in these really nasty battles (ok, they're all bad, but Fallujah is bad to the 10th power sounding) EVER going to come home? I would think a few of these guys speaking up might get some people's attention. Iraqi Veterans Against the War. Or something.
Sadly, because the equivalent of the VVAW already exists: Iraq Veterans Against the War. (And I see that Mother Jones has a story on them, Breaking Ranks, in the new issue.) Additionally, Veterans Against The Iraq War seems to be a more general vets' group. And while Operation Truth isn't specifically an anti-war group, they're not a "support our troops by agreeing with everything the administration does" group, either.Three years after he was honorably discharged from the Army, Frederick Pistorius was surprised to learn he was a deserter.
(Via The Left Coaster.)
[...]
"They basically told me that my Marine Corps time doesn't count as military service," Pistorius said.
13:38 GMTEvidence room
While there is a serious problem with the disparity of voting technologies (a fact that by international definition automatically disqualifies U.S. elections from certification), this alone cannot explain the disparity in exit polls.
We should find out what that "something else" is, and then fix it.
12:26 GMTPor Vida
04:49 GMTCannibals
"The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda."
In other news:
03:33 GMTSome stuff I saw
00:54 GMT
Monday, 15 November 2004More witless advice for Democrats from the SCLM
But they have also been enthralled by the most intolerant of their interest groups. The liberal hostility to funding faith-based social programs-which are provided mostly by poor black and Latino congregations who need the financial help-is a witlessly secularist reaction against some of the most successful antipoverty efforts in the U.S. The liberals' defense of abortion beyond the first trimester has no moral rationale unless the life of the mother is at risk.
Catch that? Klein has no idea what the liberal position on any of these things is. But he's not saying we should articulate those positions better - he's saying we should abandon them because, well, they irritate Republicans. He seems unaware that churches didn't have to wait for "faith-based" programs to get government money to help people fight their way out of poverty, because they were already available and legal; there is no evidence that making them "faith-based" improves their impact. He also seems unaware that the government actually used to provide far more effective programs than the "faith-based" stuff, before the Republicans started dismantling them. Meanwhile, we are supposed to pretend that separation of church and state doesn't actually protect freedom of religion, just like we're apparently supposed to forget that late-term abortion is in fact performed to protect the life and health of the mother - a damned good moral reason for preserving it. That's why the Supreme Court overturned the law Congress passed banning it.Their full-throated embrace of freedom of speech ignores the social pollution caused by the arrant commercialization of the culture. If Democrats cannot concede even these points and show a real appreciation for the values of faith, they will have a hard time winning national elections anytime soon.
On the rare occasion when this plaint is actually accompanied by examples, it's usually something like "ads for Viagra on the radio," something that aggravates liberals as much as it aggravates everyone else, but then, it wasn't our idea to pretend that corporations were entitled in their advertising to the free speech rights that the Constitution grants to the press and to individuals, or us who decided it would be a great idea to allow pharmaceutical houses to advertise prescription drugs on the radio. Who's idea was that? Um....
23:38 GMTHot topics
19:29 GMTA preponderance of evidence
12:46 GMTThird world nation
Yes, the Republicans wanted to make it hard for them to vote, so they created something that resembled those long bread-lines in the Soviet Union we used to hear so much about. That's just one of the things that happened this year that a responsible press in a democratic country would regard as a scandal.KRUGMAN (11/2/04): Over the weekend, people in some [Florida] polling places had to stand in line for four, five, even six hours, often in the sun. Some of them - African-Americans in particular - surely suspected that those lines were so long because officials wanted to make it hard for them to vote.
We don't know why those lines are so long. But let us state what we've seen few Big Pundits state-it is, simply put, an astonishing scandal when people have to stand in line five hours to vote. Is Jeb Bush's Florida a banana republic? It is astounding-astonishing; intolerable; inexcusable-that the situation Krugman describes exists in this affluent nation. Is there any other part of our culture where people are asked to do this?
00:33 GMT
Sunday, 14 November 2004Stupid, stupid, stupid
New Democratic Leader in Senate Is Atypical Choice
No he's not, no he's not, no he's not.He is a teetotaling Mormon, a former Capitol Hill police officer who opposes abortion and was a cosponsor of the constitutional amendment banning flag-burning. He is a little-known senator from a red state whose considerable skills do not include being a compelling presence on television or behind a lectern.
Yes, that's just what we needed, because we hadn't already pretty much lost the farm by having a relatively conservative Senator from a red state up there doing virtually nothing to help the Democratic cause. And, of course, what being Senate minority leader did for Tom Daschle was make him into a target for the GOP, which ended up losing him his seat."When you look a presidential election where we lost in every age group except one, I think it time to do some reassessment - and that's one reason why I'm glad Harry is there," said Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California. "I believe very strongly that the voice of the moderates of our caucus ought to have some sway. I have noticed in the past that all the gravitas has slid to the left. All one has to do is look at the map to know that you can't win a presidential election that way."
Have I mentioned lately that we need to get rid of Feinstein?Some Democrats looking for a ray of light in the election argued that [Senator Harry] Reid's amiability might make it harder for the White House to demonize him.
Ha ha ha. Yes, of course, the Republicans are much too nice to demonize a sweet guy like Reid - they've only attacked the others because they were, you know, traitors to the country who worshiped Osama and Saddam. Gosh, it's a good thing the Democrats have seen the light and picked someone who doesn't hate America!This "immunization fallacy" needs to be combatted in all its manifestations. People thought after the 2000 election that it wouldn't be possible to demonize Tom Daschle, the soft-spoken veteran moderate Senator from very red South Dakota, but it was.
Yes! And that was obviously because he hated America! He was such a firebrand, too - we all remember how he screamed himself hoarse for the last four years, don't we? No wonder they had to get rid of him.
23:23 GMTKeep your eye on the ball
18:38 GMTTwofer
13:44 GMTKill this meme
He's already leveraging his new power. When a thank-you call came from the White House, Dobson issued the staffer a blunt warning that Bush "needs to be more aggressive" about pressing the religious right's pro-life, anti-gay rights agenda, or it would "pay a price in four years."
Pay how? Do they know something we don't know? I mean, I know this administration ignores the law at every turn, and they have a Congress that happily aids and abets, but Constitutional Amendments have to be ratified at the state level, and even Tom DeLay's power only extends so far. But everyone - and I mean everyone - seems to be talking as if it's being taken for granted that "the White House" and George Bush are planning to run for election again in another four years.
Saturday, 13 November 2004More stuff to read
17:53 GMTAfter the rain
05:01 GMTStuff to read
01:13 GMT
Friday, 12 November 2004It's worth finding out
I do have to say, I feel the slightest ray of sunshine through the hole in the ozone layer, because Minnesota managed to go decidedly Democrat, despite the swelling ranks of psycho-Christian evangelicals pouring into our suburban crapholes. Yea, us! I even read this morning that Edina (Edina!) voted for John Kerry. This may mean nothing to our non-Minnesotan peeps, but Edina is your prototypical old, rich, snooty, cantankerous, straight-A suburb. They have always been right wing, because dangnabbit they don't want their taxes going to the darkies, if you catch my drift. They have never, as far back as records go, voted for a Democrat. Until John Kerry. Snap!
And kudos for Wisconsin as well for eeking it out for the less-bad guys and especially for giving Feingold some more time to piss off 58 million-plus fuckwads out there.
That's the thing about it - all these people voting blue who had always been red before, and yet somehow Bush got more votes. It doesn't figure.And the early Election Day polls, conducted for a consortium of television networks and The Associated Press, which proved largely inaccurate in showing Mr. Kerry leading in Florida and Ohio, continued to be offered as evidence that the Bush team somehow cheated.
Exit polls are important because you must have something to measure the accuracy of the vote by - not the other way around. Exit polls are accurate; it's the ballot-counting that gets fixed. The normal reaction when the exits and the vote-counts don't match is to say, "Hm, could there have been cheating going on at the polls?" Instead we have The Newspaper of Record assuming that it's just an artifact from the inaccuracy of the exit polls.
22:35 GMTMorality tales
The blue ascendancy is nearly as strong among Republicans as it is among Democrats. Those whose "moral values" are invested in cultural heroes like the accused loofah fetishist Bill O'Reilly and the self-gratifying drug consumer Rush Limbaugh are surely joking when they turn apoplectic over MTV. William Bennett's name is now as synonymous with Las Vegas as silicone. The Democrats' Ashton Kutcher is trumped by the Republicans' Britney Spears. Excess and vulgarity, as always, enjoy a vast, bipartisan constituency, and in a democracy no political party will ever stamp them out.
Rich is always a bit behind the curve and deeply steeped in the mainstream media's conventional wisdom - he's as lazy as the rest of them - but he's right about one thing:
[...]
But the distance between this hard-core red culture and the majority blue culture is perhaps best captured by Tom Coburn, the newly elected Republican senator from Oklahoma, lately famous for discovering "rampant" lesbianism in that state's schools. As a congressman in 1997, Mr. Coburn attacked NBC for encouraging "irresponsible sexual behavior" and taking "network TV to an all-time low with full frontal nudity, violence and profanity being shown in our homes." The broadcast that prompted his outrage on behalf of "parents and decent-minded individuals everywhere" was the network's prime-time showing of Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List."[Marshall] Wittman echoes Thomas Frank, the author of "What's the Matter With Kansas?," by common consent the year's most prescient political book. "Values," Mr. Frank writes, "always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won." Under this perennial "trick," as he calls it, Republican politicians promise to stop abortion and force the culture industry "to clean up its act" - until the votes are counted. Then they return to their higher priorities, like cutting capital gains and estate taxes. Mr. Murdoch and his fellow cultural barons - from Sumner Redstone, the Bush-endorsing C.E.O. of Viacom, to Richard Parsons, the Republican C.E.O. of Time Warner, to Jeffrey Immelt, the Bush-contributing C.E.O. of G.E. (NBC Universal) - are about to be rewarded not just with more tax breaks but also with deregulatory goodies increasing their power to market salacious entertainment. It's they, not Susan Sarandon and Bruce Springsteen, who actually set the cultural agenda Gary Bauer and company say they despise.
As Justin observes, the Bushistas did scam some of the evangelicals, but then, they scammed almost everyone.I'm a liberal, and that means I believe in responsibility, both personal and collective. Collective responsibility? You betcha. I believe that society - that's us - has a responsibility to take care of the less fortunate and those who can no longer provide for themselves. Social Security, for instance, is a liberal idea. Both for retirees and the disabled. If a working person becomes disabled, he or she will get a monthly check. It's not going to put a person on Easy Street, but that person is not going to have to sit on the sidewalk begging like you see in some countries. Back when the whole Social Security program was being founded, many of our conservative friends were against it.
Some people's moral values are in doubt, as Jonathan Schwarz says in John Ashcroft's Real Religion:We all know John Ashcroft is a religious man. And now that he's leaving the Justice Department, let's remember what that religion actually is. Here's something he said in 1998 to Southern Partisan magazine:
My own morality tells me that unwanted pregnancy is a tragedy; Amanda has a look at people whose morality means increasing the misery rather than trying to ameliorate it. Well, that was just one in a series. Here's another:"Your magazine also helps set the record straight. You've got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like [Robert E.] Lee, [Stonewall] Jackson and [Confederate President Jefferson] Davis. Traditionalists must do more. I've got to do more. We've all got to stand up and speak in this respect, or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda."
No, I'm not saying Ashcroft's real religion is racism. (Although the link above has truly appalling instances of Southern Partisan "setting the record straight.") It's something else....for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
Do you see what Ashcroft switched? The people who signed the Declaration of Independence mentioned their fortunes, but what they called sacred was their honor. Ashcroft changed it so as to refer to "fortunes" as being sacred.To hang up the snark for a minute, this more than anything burns me up about the abstinence-only crowd is that they are always bleating about the "consequences" of premarital sex as if these consequences are mere acts of god that we have no control over, when of course the high rate of "consequences" are attributable to the lack of sex education and access to health services that the abstinence-only crowd has agitated for. They want to tell kids that "decisions determine destiny" while avoiding the fact that their decision to agitate for ignorance has determined our destiny as a country that's up to its neck in unplanned pregnancy, STD's, and HIV.
Don't forget the sexual violence and child abuse, Amanda! Yeah, that's the real dirty secret in America's closet - the fact that the "moral" right gives us some of our worst violence and crime.You never lose because your ideas are sclerotic or your positions retrograde, but because your opponent appealed to the baser instincts of mankind.
Of course, this is the sort of thing people like Krauthammer have to tell themselves when liberals have been talking for weeks about the fact that more than half of the people who voted for Bush have made clear that they would not actually support the administration's "ideas" if they actually knew what they were. We don't think people voted for Bush because of "moral values"; we think they voted for Bush because they believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 and thank god we found his nuclear weapons, which otherwise would be aimed at their small-town shopping malls. It obviously appeals to Krauthammer's own moral vanity to believe that there is some reason other than the fact that his candidate's ideas are so retrograde and sclerotic that he had to lie to pass himself off as an acceptable candidate, and that therefore supporters are just plain pig-ignorant and thought they were voting for someone different.
16:53 GMTIt's the verifiability, stupid
Maureen Farrell on The Elephant in the Voting Booth: The White House, you might recall, discounted early exit polls which showed Kerry winning because they were too heavily skewed by heavy female turnout. Yet Bush supposedly won the election largely thanks to support of married women in the suburbs. Wouldn't the early female vote count in his favor, then? Who was more likely to be voting during the day? Working women or so-called "security moms"?
14:48 GMTMostly painless stuff
Hidden Pictures (via)Democracy will not come
How we voted - the cartography.
Today, this year
Nor ever
Through compromise and fear.
02:00 GMTBecause we have to keep watching
Moreover, because the KEY was IN the source code, all Diebold machines would respond to the same key. Unlock one, you have then ALL unlocked.
I can't believe there is a person alive who wouldn't understand the reason this was allowed to happen. This wasn't a mistake by any stretch of the imagination. This was a fixed election, plain and simple.
This second coup d'etat is either stopped now or America ceases to be.
[...]
However, I was worried about something else as well. In the past week, the media coverage of potential problems in e-voting has been unbelievable. I spent most of the week doing media interviews and appeared recently on the Today show, on 60 Minutes, on the cover of the Baltimore Jewish Times, in several major national newspapers, and on quite a few radio shows. The media was setting up the election as potentially marred by e-voting. There was a problem with this. The biggest threat posed by the current crop of electronic voting machines is a software problem, either malicious or due to an unintentional bug, that affects the outcome of the election in an undetectable way. The media, however, focus on detectable problems. To some extent, I felt that the election was going to be viewed as a referendum on electronic voting, despite the issue not appearing on any ballot. However, even if the election were viewed as 'successful,' it would not alleviate the vast majority of my concerns with the machines. Voting machines that are vulnerable to wholesale rigging can still perform perfectly normally. It is possible that nobody exploited the vulnerabilities this time around, and it is also possible that there was fraud or serious error, but that they went undetected. Electronic voting will be judged on the noticeable failures, and the unnoticeable ones are the most serious.The Green Party has called for a recount in Ohio; Tom at Corrente reports a rumor that it's gonna happen, and says Keith Olbermann continues on the case, reporting that Ralph Nader is also in the mix (maybe he remembered that this power can be used for good), but the issue all around is that it costs money. It also turns out that the lockdown in one Ohio county that was explained as a response to a Homeland Security alert has been disavowed by the FBI (surprise, surprise), and Ralph Nader apparently does a good impression of Richard Nixon. (Who knew?) And so it goes....
03:33 GMT
Love & PoliticsCalif. settles electronic voting suit against Diebold for $2.6M: California Attorney General Bill Lockyer announced Wednesday a $2.6 million settlement with Diebold Inc., resolving a lawsuit alleging that the company sold the state and several counties shoddy voting equipment.
Jim Henley says: Fallujah Once, Shame on YOU: My suspicion last week was that most guerrillas were withdrawing from Fallujah in advance of a heavily hyped assault. A better question is, were they all there in the first place? Was Fallujah really the geographical nerve center and quartermaster's store of the insurgency, packed to the gills with foreign and Iraqi fighters, like we've been reading all these months? Or was Fallujah just another trouble spot that got hyped into Death Star status by the media and the military? Also: Mad Science explains Michael Ledeen.
Iris Chang is dead. She exposed an ugly secret in Japan's World War II history (and took a lot of flack for it), and now we are told she has killed herself. Steve Clemons knew her, and shares his thoughts on this sad occasion.
Skimble has the news that Jeff Skilling wants a change of venue because too many of Enron's victims in Houston already know he's a scumbag. (And 93,000 extra voters? Boy, they really must've been worried about those absentee ballots.)
John M. Ford wrote to TNH about why he refuses to call it "fundamentalism": Indeed, where exactly is the Christianity or Islam in either of these two debased ideologies? Apart from a handful of symbols and catch phrases (along with pastiches, like "The Rapture," that baldly pretend to be authentic principles), there's nothing of Jesus or Mohammed, or the long discussions of how we should then live that followed them.
Conservatives make up new excuse for why they are basically dumb. Look, the reason "conservative" professors are not so popular in academe isn't because of "bias", it's because they talk crap. Get it through your heads, dammit!
Richard Cohen recommends you watch Last Letters Home on HBO - which, I understand, is being unlocked for viewing by anyone who has cable whether they subscribe to HBO or not. Rachel Madow and Lizz Winstead were recommending this on their show today, just in case you want a more reliable opinion. It sounds good.
If you believe in anything decent, fight this thing like crazy. I do not want to see America's old people left on ice floes.
Greeting cards from the damned
17:20 GMT
Get it doneSteve Gilliard has written a letter to liberals. He doesn't want people to get wound-up with the idea that Kerry "really" won unless they have evidence, but he does want us to get it together on what we have to do to start winning - "You want to preserve abortion rights, defend them. Don't whine about Bush and his future judges." That's wise counsel; there's no point in complaining about the positions of potential judges if you can't make a case for your own position. So:
I wouldn't worry too much about the people who bought Bush's lies. The ones who want to will come around. Someone posted a story about a 20-something Bush voter who was glad her husband was too old to be drafted. When asked, she said he was 25. When told she was wrong, she turned white as a ghost and stammered...."I thought they only drafted up to 23". Well, missy, no. They can draft up to 36, but they usually stop at 26. The skills draft could go up to 34.We oppose them at every turn, absolutely. But we also have to make clear what our own program is about. We're not "pro-abortion", for example, we're for people being able to raise healthy children because they can get an honest day's pay for an honest day's work. If that sounds mundane, please bear in mind that at the moment we are in a political environment where wanting that simple thing is being labelled "far left". These so-called "pro-life" folks are saying that having a law against abortion is smarter than giving people hope that their children will have a real future. That's not just stupid and immoral, it's disgusting.Or when the college Republican goes down to the local Walgreens and asks for her birth control pills only to be told that the pharmacist refuses to fill the prescription because she's opposed to birth control.
The question you need to ask is this: what do we offer them when they wake up? What do we tell them? Who do we offer for them to vote for. We need to pick the fights closest to home and be credible. We should go after the libertarians and fiscal conservatives and tell them the GOP is leaving them. The Vets, who are being betrayed by them. We need to welcome these people and explain what the GOP is really turning into.
We need to oppose them, not just in Washington, but at City Hall and the school board. We end the free ride we gave them. We oppose them at every turn.
Start learning more about individual issues and formulating ways to crystallize and articulate responses to what the other side says. Some people are already doing that. If you don't think you have a facility for doing that, find others who do and start collecting the good points together for use in anything from policy documents to fliers to bumper stickers. It's all good.
Anyway, I made a rather longer-than-usual response to Steve's post, in the comments:
I think everything Steve says in this post is right, but I also think it's important to safeguard our vote. That means it's important to keep the story alive - not because there's any certainty that the election was rigged, but because there's no certainty that it wasn't.That's what it's all about. And, please, let's hear no nonsense about how, "There's always cheating and there's always gonna be cheating." For one thing, there is not always cheating. (There are plenty of places where ballots are counted in front of God and Everyone.) And for another, it's still no excuse for allowing the likelihood of cheating to be institutionalized.So far the "proof" that it wasn't consists of saying that, well, we can think up reasons why the funny stuff wasn't actual cheating, just errors.
But that's not good enough. We need to be able to have faith in our system. We need to be able to know that the votes were counted, and counted honestly. We should never have to be in a position where there is a single precinct where we know before the election that there is no way to verify the vote. It is irrelevant whether Kerry did or didn't "really" win this election on an honest count. What's vital is that we can't know, and we must be able to know, every time.
Additionally, voter disenfranchisement should not be treated as acceptable. Adult citizens should be presumed to have a right to vote. There should be no laws on the books that make it easy to relieve a citizen of their right to vote. Not even felony convictions. All citizens have a stake in the outcome of an election, so they should all be able to vote.
Now: According to the Constitution, voting is a local issue. So there's nothing about working for verifiable voting that is inconsistent with Steve's very wise counsel to work locally. Verifiable voting can be part of a galvanizing grass-roots program and is therefore an issue that local politicians can campaign on. Making it a local campaign issue in individual precincts also makes it a weapon against governors who are responsible for putting in (or not getting rid of) unverifiable voting systems. It can be used that way state-wide.
We made some inroads in this election toward strengthening Democrats in local government, and that's where a strong national party starts. We have to keep doing that.
Which means if all you're doing is posting on blogs, you'd better have a good excuse - like being physically and economically unable to do anything else. If you're not doing something that reaches people who aren't reading blogs, you're not doing enough.
And if you're waiting for the next election cycle, your wait is over: It has already started, so get to work.
We really can do better, you know.
14:53 GMT
Stuff I sawKeith Olbermann is still blogging about the election, and says: With news this morning that the computerized balloting in North Carolina is so thoroughly messed up that all state-wide voting may be thrown out and a second election day scheduled, the story continues. And yet, I remember four years ago when the very idea of a do-over in problem areas was pronounced impossible. Meanwhile, Keith also points to this story in The Charlotte Observer about counting provisional ballots, which includes this:
The board had no split votes, though the one Republican, Phil Summa, raised two objections. He argued against counting ballots that were not signed by a precinct official, but neither of his Democratic colleagues seconded his motion. Summa's second objection was to the concept of counting votes cast in the wrong precinct. But he acknowledged that state law required the board to count those votes.I don't know about the first objection, but why raise the second if state law said different? Just trying to scam his colleagues?And from an earlier post, one of my favorites:
The problem is, the rubber clown immediately bounces back with the report that officials in Youngstown managed to catch a slight glitch in their voting there: a total drawn from all the precincts that initially showed negative 25,000,000 million votes cast. It evokes a Monty Python sketch ("Mr. Kevin Phillips Bong - Sensible Party - 14,352. Mr. Harquin Fim Tim Lim Bim Bus Stop Fatang Fatang Ole Biscuit Barrel - Silly Party -- minus 25,000,0000).And also, you'll be happy to know:The most pleasing thing of the last three days of blogs and newscasts is the reassurance from political professionals that all of you (all of us) who have wondered about what went on a week ago yesterday are not necessarily nuts. We might not necessarily be right, but there are some very stodgy, very by-the-book folks who think we're damned right to be asking.Hell, yes. But there's more in that post that you should read.Im the WaPo, Harold Meyerson says there's something good goin' down in the Democratic Party: Listen closely. That silence you hear is the sound of Democrats not recriminating. That's pretty much true - there's a lot of analysis, a lot of regrouping, but remarkably little of that circular firing-squad thing.
And Michael Feingold in The Village Voice has a good piece on Our Vanished Values, also worth a read. And that link came via I'm Just Sayin', which you might want to read more of.
11:17 GMT
Stuff you might want to seeDavid Corn on why it's important to count the vote even if the evidence of tampering doesn't turn out to be any good.
The trouble with Uzbekistan - speech by the British Ambassador to the Republic of Uzbekistan: Uzbekistan. Government sees statistics as largely an instrument of propaganda. Sound familiar? (Thanks to Phil Palmer for the tip.)
Bill Scher says the Dems need to present our own plans for tax simplification and other issues to undercut anything the GOP comes up with.
Consortium News says: There's been both praise and criticism for Consortiumnews.com's four post-election stories, which tried to frame the questions about the Nov. 2 vote tallies and which depicted the U.S. news media as dangerously imbalanced to the right. So in response to the comments, we offer a fuller explanation of why we see a broken system that threatens to turn the United States into a democratic republic in name only. Explaining Ourselves, by Robert Parry, talks about the importance of a real investigation of the election as well as the vital need to create a liberal media infrastructure.
The trouble with Alberto Gonzales: Is this the best we can get?
TChris at TalkLeft has more discussion of enfranchisement of convicted felons - even when they are still in prison. I can't think of a reason not to let them vote - after all, the difference between convicted felons and anyone else is really only that they got caught.
Also at TalkLeft, more on voter disenfranchisement - by not getting those absentee ballots to voters in time. And one on voter intimidation by a familiar RNC thug working as an election official.
Spiritual strategyRabbi Lerner says The Democrats Need a Spiritual Left:
Imagine if John Kerry had been able to counter George Bush by insisting that a serious religious person would never turn his back on the suffering of the poor, that the bible's injunction to love one's neighbor required us to provide health care for all, and that the New Testament's command to "turn the other cheek" should give us a predisposition against responding to violence with violence.Well, it would have been nice if Kerry had known how to do that. But politicians in general aren't terribly good at the spiritual values thing. God knows the Republicans aren't.And we do have a spiritual left, but for some reason the mass media doesn't talk to them a lot - maybe because they don't have their own television network.
However, Christine Quinones thinks we do need a minister:
In reading about the necessity of Democrats to engage with the religious vote, it occurred to me: why are we depending on the pols to accomplish this? The GOP has its Falwells and Robertsons spreading the word to the faithful so that the Bushes and Cheneys don't have to do the heavy lifting. If there are so many evangelicals who think our way, where is their ministry's voice? Who better to connect liberal ideas to faith than someone whose job it is?I've actually heard a number of my favorite ministers on AAR on weekday mornings. This morning, it was the Rev. Barry Lynn. But here is RLP:We wanna make progress? Put Real Live Preacher on Air America every Sunday morning.
"See, I think Christianity is like a human poem, written over thousands of years by people who have a sense that there is something more important for us than just waking up every day and going about our business. I'm one of those people, I'm afraid. I know that makes me seem a little foolish to you, but maybe you have room in your life for one goofy friend, huh?"Yeah, I could dig that on AAR on Sundays, sure.
00:59 GMT
Steve Gilliard has a magnificent screed up about the people who are running our country -
Bushco doesn't want to fight stateless terrorism. They created it and they benefit from it. You think they don't know terrorists target blue state cities? They also know that Wyoming gets $38 a person in "Homeland Security" funds and NYC gets $5 per person- and those who voted for them -Check 'em out! They want you dead. Don't you think you should be aware? Browse their sites and comment boards and then come back and tell me you can reach them, educate them, live in peace with them. Or that you want to.A good venting. Via Shameless Agitator.
23:30 GMT
As the frog boilsBuzzflash.com has the story: After early exit polls in Tuesday's election inaccurately suggested that Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry would trounce President Bush, Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie is recommending that major news organizations pull the plug on the prognostications.
Also via Buzzflash, Tanks in the streets at anti-war protest in LA: LOS ANGELES, November 9, 2004 - At 7:50 PM two armored tanks showed up at an anti-war protest in front of the federal building in Westwood. The tanks circled the block twice, the second time parking themselves in the street and directly in front of the area where most of the protesters were gathered. Enraged, some of the people attempted to block the tanks, but police quickly cleared the street. The people continued to protest the presence of the tanks, but about ten minutes the tanks drove off. It is unclear as to why the tanks were deployed to this location. Uploaded here is video from the event.
From the fire to the frying pan: Jeralyn at TalkLeft has confirmed that Bush's choice of replacement Attorney General is Alberto Gonzales, the man who wrote the "torture memo" advising that the administration could ignore the "quaint" Geneva Conventions, and who was also responsible for preparing briefings to then-governor Bush on death penalty clemency appeals - briefings which failed to mention any of the reasons for giving clemency.
22:58 GMT
Yesterday's newsRobert Parry has two pieces up on the voting problems, Evidence of a Second Bush Coup? and Bush's 'Incredible' Vote Tallies: George W. Bush's vote tallies, especially in the critical state of Florida where he earned more votes than registered Republicans, are so statistically stunning that they test the bounds of believability. Democratic activists, who worked hard to turn out millions of new voters for John Kerry, are wondering how the GOP pulled it off.
Bruce Baugh has decided he's not a libertarian anymore: I continue to agree with the principle that it's best to vote for a candidate rather than against one or more others, and I can see the logic in thinking that if there is no choice you actively approve of, refraining is the next best step. It's just that I realize what many others have before me: stopping a great evil is also a good act. And indeed this seems to me in accordance with a bunch of classic libertarian mottos like "Utopia is not an option". It seems to me now that it's more utopian to assert broad moral equivalence for every candidate capable of getting a major party nomination than to examine their histories and characters and look for grounds on which to say "this one is more a friend to liberty and human dignity, or at least less of a threat to them, than that one". Most libertarians seem to end up talking a better game than acting it out.
Ashcroft resigns: The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved. Whew! I'm sure glad that's over with.
One more reason to like Dick Durbin.
18:47 GMT
All the news in bitsBob Herbert: You have to be careful when you toss the word values around. All values are not created equal. Some Democrats are casting covetous eyes on voters whose values, in many cases, are frankly repellent. Does it make sense for the progressive elements in our society to undermine their own deeply held beliefs in tolerance, fairness and justice in an effort to embrace those who deliberately seek to divide?
Charles Dodgson reminds me that Daniel Drezner was one of those undecided voters who wasn't prepared to support Kerry because although he knew he didn't like what Bush was doing, he wasn't sure he wouldn't also dislike what Kerry would do.
Ellen at Newshounds says that the situation is not hopeless, and it's just a matter of working hard and working smart.
Dave at Seeing the Forest has learned from experience and has more thoughts about why bloggers are an important supplement to the professional media's news process. In some ways, I guess you could say that bloggers have a better opportunity to see more than one tree at a time and get a view of the forest.
Over at the Register, cranky Americans tell the red-staters what they've lost. Interestingly, Matt Yglesias is saying much the same thing over at The American Prospect, but not nearly as snarkily. And yet, he still tell's them they're chumps.
Yet more from Thom Hartmann, who says This is a Game Where Principles are the Stake, and that if we could get through 1798, we can get through this.
Access Denied: Find out why growing numbers of doctors and pharmacists across the US are refusing to prescribe or dispense birth control pills.
On the time-travel front, Dylan Thomas writes about the current administration at Tina's Shark Tank.
03:17 GMT
Who were they?Your must-read comes from Rick Pearlstein in The Village Voice:
The idea that last week's election results show that there is a great silent majority of Americans who vote first and foremost on their moral values, which means that they vote for the Republicans, has become gospel on our nation's airwaves by now. It is nonsense on stilts. Bush didn't win this election on "moral values." It turns out he didn't do any better among strong churchgoers, or rural voters, than he did in 2000. What was it that actually put him over the top? It's the wealth, stupid.So before anyone decides to jettison liberal values, it's important to pay attention to what was really going on, and work to make that class warfare aspect much more clear in the future. The Republicans didn't win on "values" issues, they won on scaring Democrats out of being proud liberals. (Via The Farmer at Corrente.)
[...]
Where did the lion's share of the extra votes come from that gave George Bush his mighty, mighty mandate of 51 percent? "Two of those points," Klinkner said when reached by phone, "came solely from people making over a 100 grand." The people who won the election for him-his only significant improvement over his performance four years ago-were rich people, voting for more right-wing class warfare.
00:27 GMT
In the cultural cauldronNYT: The Antiwar Right Is Ready to Rumble: On Thursday, Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation and chairman of the Free Congress Foundation, issued a call to conservatives for a serious debate about the administration's foreign policy. "The consequences of the neocons' adventure in Iraq are now all too clear," he said. "America is stuck in a guerrilla war with no end in sight. Our military is stretched too thin to respond to other threats. And our real enemies, nonstate organizations such as Al Qaeda, are benefiting from the Arab and Islamic backlash against our occupation of an Islamic country." (via)
Matt Welch: Gracious: Since Andrew Sullivan instructed us that "it's time we called a truce in the family squabble" and "put the bile and anger and passion of the past few months to one side," I figured I'd take a quick tour through the winner's circle to see if Sullivan's advices are being taken to heart. And he gives us that tour. It's not a pretty sight.
Chris Bowers looks at "Real" conservative values - what they are alleged to be and what they really are, based on the man and the values that conservatives appear to have supported for the presidency.
21:47 GMT
Moral hygieneThis piece by Fred Clark at Slacktivist about Chuck Colson was already interesting before I got to this part:
One of my biggest complaints with Colson over the past year is his failure to live up to the idea of restorative justice in his personal life. After his born-again experience, Colson reportedly apologized to many of the people he had attacked and slandered while working in Nixon's White House -- people like Daniel Ellsberg and John Kerry.Fred says he is saving his words on James Dobson for later. Meanwhile, he also has a link-rich post you might want to check out.That's right, John Kerry. Richard Nixon hated and feared John Kerry's work with Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and Colson's job was to destroy anything and anyone that Nixon hated or feared. So Colson hired John O'Neill -- the same John O'Neill who resurfaced from his crypt this year to lead the Swift Boat liars crusade -- to batter the young veteran with all the lies he could invent.
The lies and slanders thrown at John Kerry during the recent campaign were all recycled from the 30-year-old files of John O'Neill. They were concocted at Chuck Colson's direction and on Chuck Colson's payroll.
Yet the born-again Colson did not bother to make a single statement this year condemning the rebirth of his and O'Neill's filthy campaign. (Or, at least, if he did condemn O'Neill, he did so very quietly and I never heard it.)
Instead, Colson spent the year once again working in concert with people like O'Neill. He recorded pro-Bush GOTV phone messages and used his "Break Point" columns and radio commentaries as an extension of BC04 (apparently he'd finally run out of ways to paraphrase/borrow/steal from C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man).
20:01 GMT
The most important election storyThom Hartmann has a much-quoted piece up called Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked, but let's remember why we keep hammering this story. As he said in another piece, The Ultimate Felony Against Democracy:
Why have we let corporations into our polling places, locations so sacred to democracy that in many states even international election monitors and reporters are banned? Why are we allowing corporations to exclusively handle our vote, in a secret and totally invisible way? Particularly a private corporation founded, in one case, by a family that believes the Bible should replace the Constitution; in another case run by one of Ohio's top Republicans; and in another case partly owned by Saudi investors?And for an interesting side-note, Ken Layne is curious about whether Karen Hughes really did sit Bush down in the very early morning of November 3rd to tell him that Kerry was winning in a landslide.From the Voters Unite! problem page:
Broward County accepted on 2428 provisional ballots out of a "ton" of them. In many cases, clerks at the polling places gave provisional ballots to people who could have voted regularly, deputy registrar Salas said. She thinks many clerks had trouble with last names of voters with compound names -- they simply couldn't find their names in the precinct registers, even though they were there. Story[Something I've been wondering all day is how it is that even in states that were supposed to be "close", they got rid of Republicans in local legislatures (one state legislature, I understand, actually went 100% Dem), and passed initiatives that Republicans had spent extraordinary amounts of money trying to defeat. It just seems odd to me that all these people came out to vote like Democrats and yet still ended up voting for Bush. It doesn't make sense.]Keith Olbermann has more in the aftermath of his show last night about the voting problems, and somewhere down in the article says this:
Back to those emails, especially the 1508 positive ones. Apart from the supportive words (my favorites: "Although I did not vote for Kerry, as a former government teacher, I am encouraged by your `covering' the voting issue which is the basis of our government. Thank you."), the main topics were questions about why ours was apparently the first television or mainstream print coverage of any of the issues in Florida or Ohio. I have a couple of theories.(Thanks for the heads-up to Kip, to whom I'm sure we all send our condolences.)Firstly, John Kerry conceded. As I pointed out here Sunday, no candidate's statement is legally binding - what matters is the state election commissions' reports, and the Electoral College vote next month. But in terms of reportorial momentum, the concession took the wind out of a lot of journalists' aggressiveness towards the entire issue. Many were prepared for Election Night premature jocularity, and a post-vote stampede to the courts - especially after John Edwards' late night proclamation from Boston. When Kerry brought that to a halt, a lot of the media saw something of which they had not dared dream: a long weekend off.
Don't discount this. This has been our longest presidential campaign ever, to say nothing of the one in which the truth was most artfully hidden or manufactured. To consider this mess over was enough to get 54 percent of the respondents to an Associated Press poll released yesterday to say that the "conclusiveness" of last week's vote had given them renewed confidence in our electoral system (of course, 39 percent said it had given them less confidence). Up for the battle for truth or not, a lot of fulltime political reporters were ready for a rest. Not me - I get to do "Oddball" and "Newsmakers" every night and they always serve to refresh my spirit, and my conviction that man is the silliest of the creator's creations.
Larry Chin discusses the long list of "errors" and wonders whether Kerry's concession was more bait-and-switch, in The stolen election of 2004: welcome back to hell. It's possible that Kerry is being smart - I've heard it suggested that laying low could be a way of keeping the RNC spin machine quiet on all the reasons why votes shouldn't be counted at all - but we'll have to see what happens when those last counts are actually "completed".
There's a story in The Washington Post about how Kerry is all fired up to fight in the Senate and doesn't plan to "disappear" from the political scene like Al Gore did after the election. Well, that's good, what with him being in the Senate and all. Especially since he hasn't had much chance to be there lately. And especially especially since Al Gore was actually making a better showing over most of the last year than Kerry was, even though the press mostly chose not to notice (or else say he was nuts).
What I want to know now is, how fired up are Kerry and his colleagues to fight if those vote counts don't confirm Bush's alleged victory? Right now, I'm not seeing any signs of it.
18:50 GMT
Quick linksHappy birthday to Mr. Sideshow. I would like to be able to add a clever comment, but I don't have one.
Dangerous blogger investigated by FBI.
Shaula Evans gives voice to a thought I've had lurking in my mind as a way to defeat voter-suppression efforts: Re-register as a Republican. (via)
"Retirement" - it's so 20th century.
Digby explains the Coastal Establishment vs. Heartland/South divide. Seriously. Important post, go read it all. And take a look at this post about another under-the-radar Republican GOTV method (and more evidence that you must wear the Mark of the Beast).
Bits of stuffSuburban Guerilla says: Look at this. The reason we razed that hospital in Falluja is that it appeared to be the source of rumors of heavy casualties. Man, I am so, so glad that major combat operations are over - aren't you? (Also: If you want to work for the Beast, you have to sell your soul.)
My dad's ashes are interred at Arlington Cemetery because he enlisted during World War II. But after that, he got married, raised kids, and lived to be 86. Right now, a lot of people are dying for the wrong reason before they have time to do any of those things. At The Left Coaster, soccerdad directs our attention to Arlington West.
Also at TLC, Yuval Rubinstein on why Hillary should not be the candidate. He's right.
Eileen McNamara in The Boston Globe writes about what could be a A telling loss for the church in this election - or might be a greater victory than they realize.
It's so spiritualHm, right-wing evangelicals want credit for Bush's victory (and I'm sure everyone else is happy to let them deflect attention from the voting machines and terrorism), but Kevin Drum says that after analyzing the data, it doesn't look to him like they were as important as everyone is trying to claim.
In the NYT, Steve Waldman writes about how the right-wing evangelicals want payback for delivering the election. But, notes Laura at War and Piece, David Brooks is trying to play-down the influence the religious right is likely to have on Bush's second term.
Atrios figures they ought to be able to get the head of Arlen Specter if they want it, but says that Tapped disagrees.
23:05 GMT
You can leave your (tin-foil) hat onJeanne D'Arc says that Keith Olberman is going to be doing a show on possible election fraud tonight or tomorrow. And he thanks bloggers for keeping the story alive, although he warns that blog posts don't go through the fact-check filter that mainstream media stories do. But it doesn't matter whether the stories turn out to be true or not; what matters is that we should be in no doubt. In the comments, Kevin Hayden says:
Neither party will be able to make clear claims of legitimacy unless they are avid about correcting the process. Any shirking in this regard will give the appearance of cover-up and well it should.And someone called "a-train" says:What reasonable person would oppose a thorough investigation?
David Brooks trying to explain the discrepancies on PBS said, he got an email from Rove early in the day saying the polling numbers were wrong. This is supposed to put us at ease? How did Rove know?Much as I disagree with that argument when it comes to the Patriot Act and similar legislation, it does seem rather odd that this argument is acceptable when it comes to locking people up forever without a trial, but not when it comes to merely creating verifiable reliability for voting. (And how did Karl Rove know that the exit poll numbers were wrong?)Like the argument for the Patriot Act: "If you haven't done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about." If there was no fraud, no one should have a problem with an investigation.
The right-wingers like to point out that the Democratic Party has a long, old history of vote-fixing tactics. What they don't like to remember is that they're talking about a Democratic Party that began disappearing after the Voting Rights Act and the Southern Strategy - and those Democrats disappeared into the Republican Party. But they haven't changed their spots.
John Conyers, Jerrold Nadler, and Robert Wexler of the House Judiciary Committee have written to the U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO) asking for an investigation of the irregularities:
The House Judiciary Committee Democratic staff has received numerous reports from Youngstown, Ohio that voters who attempted to cast a vote for John Kerry on electronic voting machines saw that their votes were instead recorded as votes for George W. Bush. In South Florida, Congressman Wexler's staff received numerous reports from voters in Palm Beach, Broward and Dade Counties that they attempted to select John Kerry but George Bush appeared on the screen. CNN has re
