LINDA'S LINKS

HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS WAR - WOLCOTT

2004-11-19T10:04:00.000-08:00

James Wolcott, www.jameswolcott.com

"...[He] who fights against the weak--and the rag-tag Iraqi militias are very weak indeed--and loses, loses. He who fights against the weak and wins also loses. To kill an opponent who is much weaker than yourself is unnecessary and therefore cruel; to let that opponent kill you is unnecessary and therefore foolish. As Vietnam and countless other cases prove, no armed force however rich, however powerful, however advanced, and however well motivated is immune to this dilemma. The end result is always disintegration and defeat; if U.S. troops in Iraq have not yet started fragging their officers, the suicide rate among them is already exceptionally high. That is why the present adventure will almost certainly end as the previous one did. Namely, with the last U.S. troops fleeing the country while hanging on to their helicopters' skids."

So prophecizes Martin van Creveld. ...........

So thick is the euphoria and triumphalism post November 2nd that I wonder if most of our media, never mind the bovine American public, have any inkling of how ghastily Iraq is going down the drain, and taking the American military with it. We've been so bombarded with "Failure is not an option" that few are willing to assert, as van Creveld and Lind do, that failure may not be an option but it damn well may be the outcome, and quicker than anyone contemplates.

Andrew Sullivan and Thomas Friedman can petition for more troops all they please. It's too late for more troops. We don't have troops to spare as it is, but even if we did, it's too late. It's too late for everything. The blundering mistakes that were made in the first days and weeks of the occupation can't be reversed now--they're incorrectible. The window of opportunity dropped like a guillotine while Donald Rumsfeld was regaling the press corps with his pithy wisdom.

---- http://jameswolcott.com/archives/2004/11/headless_body_i_1.php

CHENEY ON IRAQ - 1991

2004-11-19T08:22:00.000-08:00

"Once you get to Baghdad, it's not clear what you do with it. It's not clear what kind of government you put in place of the one that's currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime, a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward Islamic fundamentalists? How much credibility is that going to have if it's set up by the American military there? How long does the United States military have to stay there to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens once we leave?"

------ Dick Cheney, while serving as Secretary of Defense, in 1991

A SUCCINCT & ASTUTE ANALYIS OF THE ELECTION

2004-11-14T06:56:00.000-08:00

"The Democrats' mistake was in thinking that a disastrous war and national bankruptcy would be of concern to the electorate.

The Republicans correctly saw that the chief concern of the electorate was to keep gay couples from having an abortion."

---- Anonymous

DUBYA HAS A TIGER BY THE TAIL:

2004-11-12T06:52:00.000-08:00

The head of Concerned Women for America [a man ] has told Bush "Business as usual won't do" and scolded Bush for his pre-election support of civil unions via state's rights -- Jerry Falwell is starting NOW to register anti-abortion voters for the 2008 election, while chatting up Karl Rove and helping set the Bush II agenda -- Bob Jones of Bob Jones University [if you don't know who he is - Google him - he's a doozy] is telling Bush to get rid of "weaklings" in the administration who are not sufficiently conservative -- Arlen Specter is phoning Jerry Falwell with assurances that if the "Religious Right" will please, please let him be the head of the Judicial Committee, he won't block Bush's nominess. These folks feel emboldened --- after all, they won by 2% in a "landslide"!!

EVANGELICALS WANT FAITH REWARDED: Christian leaders fear that influence on Bush, despite wide support, could be short-lived: Peter Wallsten: The Los Angeles Times, 11/12

Christian evangelicals provided much of the passion and manpower for President Bush's reelection. But even as they celebrate his victory, many of the movement's leaders are experiencing post-election anxiety, worried that their strong support for the president might not translate into the instant influence they expected.
They are flexing their muscles to block Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), an abortion rights supporter, from a Senate leadership post overseeing judicial nomination debates — but Specter appears likely to get the job. They want a clear-cut ban on same-sex marriage, but Bush's newly stated support for civil unions makes them wonder how strongly the president will back their efforts.
And as much as they turned out in force for Bush on election day, many are worried that their power could be short-lived, given that a number of prominent Republicans who support abortion rights and gay rights are positioning themselves to succeed Bush in 2008.
In recent days, some evangelical leaders have warned in interviews that the Republican Party would pay a price in future elections if its leaders did not take up the issues that brought evangelicals to the polls.
"Business as usual isn't going to cut it, where the GOP rides to victory by espousing traditional family values and then turns around and rewards the liberals in its ranks," said Robert Knight, who heads an affiliate of Concerned Women for America, a Christian conservative advocacy group. .....
The Rev. Jerry Falwell, one of the nation's most prominent evangelists, is so concerned about harnessing the movement's power within the GOP and national politics that this week he formed the Faith and Values Coalition, which, as he put it, aimed to be a "21st century version of the Moral Majority."
The group will seek to register millions of additional evangelical voters, starting in January, to ensure that supporters of abortion rights, such as former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, or backers of gay rights, such as Arizona Sen. John McCain, don't win the GOP presidential nomination and that Republicans retain the White House in 2008.
"If the Republican Party were to nominate a pro-choice head of the ticket, the energy level in the evangelical camp would be greatly diminished," Falwell said. "And, very frankly, I think the Republicans would lose."
The nervousness stands in contrast to the rejoicing that took place after Bush won by a wider margin than many expected. He benefited from a heavy turnout among conservative Catholics and Protestant evangelicals.
Evangelicals generally see the Bible as the authoritative word of God, emphasize "born again" religious conversion and are committed to spreading their faith and values. .....
...... Bush's most recent remarks on same-sex marriage infuriated some Christian conservative leaders.
"I don't think we should deny people rights to a civil union, a legal arrangement, if that's what a state chooses to do," Bush said on ABC in an interview that aired a week before the election. His statement put him at odds not only with some social conservatives but with the Republican Party platform.
"The president has to stop endorsing homosexuality indirectly by supporting civil unions," said Knight of Concerned Women for America. ..........
Bob Jones III, president of the Christian conservative Bob Jones University in South Carolina, recently urged Bush to purge moderates from the White House."If you have weaklings around you who do not share your biblical values, shed yourself of them," Jones said in a letter to Bush after the election. "Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ."
Complicating relations between Republican leaders and evangelicals is that the movement is divided on how to wield whatever influence it has, and on which issues are most important.
Falwell said he had spoken to Rove three times since the election, and that Specter called him this week to offer assurances that he would not block Bush's court nominees. ......

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-na-evangelical12nov12,1,2852842.story

THE BUSH RECORD ON CIVIL RIGHTS

2004-11-12T06:25:00.000-08:00

Editorial, The New York Times, 11/12

In a rare gesture of transparency, a majority of the eight commissioners on the United States Commission on Civil Rights voted in 2002 to put the agency's staff reports on the Internet as soon as they are completed. That way, the public can read them before the commissioners hold public hearings to discuss the staff's findings.

The latest report - an assessment of President Bush's civil rights record - was put on the agency's Web site in September. But at their October meeting, less than a month before the election, the commissioners declined to discuss it. Objecting to the report's timing, the four commissioners appointed by President Bush and the Congressional Republican leadership managed to put off any discussion until the postelection meeting, scheduled for today.

The commission owes the public a spirited debate, especially if, as the report indicates, the apparent aim of the Bush administration is to break with long-established civil rights tactics and priorities. This question takes on a new urgency with the appointment of the White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, as the next attorney general because he was deeply involved in the formulation of administration policy on these issues in the first term.

The report, which is still available online, is a scathing 166-page assessment of an administration that has, at best, neglected core civil rights issues. It cites numerous examples of administration attempts to replace affirmative action with "race neutral" alternatives, to focus on voter fraud rather than the more insidious problem of voter disenfranchisement and to recast taxpayers' support for religious institutions as a civil right for people of faith, rather than as a constitutional issue involving the separation of church and state.

In the most telling research into the way that Mr. Bush uses talk of civil rights to promote his own agenda, the report says that of Mr. Bush's public statements on civil rights, only 17 percent have outlined plans of action. Of those, it says, more than half pertained to "faith-based initiatives." It criticizes the president for using the language of civil rights - terms like "remove barriers" and "equal access" - to frame his case.

Earlier this year, the conservative commissioners simply voted down, without explanation, a staff report on language barriers in federal programs. Such disdain - for the very issues the commissioners are supposed to examine - deprives Americans of the dialogue they need and deserve. It is our hope that the conservative commissioners will engage with the issues and their fellow commissioners at today's meeting. In any case, Americans can judge the civil rights report for themselves by going to www.usccr.gov.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/opinion/12fri2.html?oref=login&th

2004-11-12T06:21:00.000-08:00

SIGN THIS PETITION:

A Petition to Congress requesting an investigation into the Presidential Election of 2004

http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?uselect

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

2004-11-10T20:58:00.000-08:00

From The Talent Show: posted by Greg, 11/10

Here's an informative quote from a guy whose name you'll be hearing a lot :

"In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

---- Alberto Gonzales In case you hadn't heard, this is the guy they want to replace Ashcroft.
A quick reminder : 48% of us voted against this... Abu Ghraib torture ...but in Bush-mandate land, it gets you a promotion.

http://www.thetalentshow.org

A NOTE ON THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN OHIO:

2004-11-10T19:57:00.000-08:00

Congressman Dennis Kucinich: Common Dreams, 11/10

The 2004 presidential election was determined by the results of Ohio. The unofficial result, as reported on November 3, had George Bush with approximately 136,000 more votes than John Kerry. Senator Kerry conceded the election to President Bush. He also said every vote would be counted.
I have been vigilant in monitoring Ohio's election in 2004. Attorneys from my party closely monitored the election before and during election day.
While there were some incidents of voter intimidation noted by the attorneys, most if not all cases were resolved at the scene because of quick action by challengers, witnesses, the Kerry campaign, and volunteers from other campaigns including my own.
The unofficial count gave Ohio to George Bush by approximately 136,000 votes. The official count by county Boards of Election will begin on Saturday, November 13, 2004. It is due at the Secretary of State's office by December 1. The Secretary of State must certify the election by December 3.
During this interim period, attorneys from both political parties, and those representing me, will be watching the procedures by county Boards of Elections carefully. Among the most important issues to note is the counting of the overvotes. Overvotes occur when more than one candidate is indicated on the punch card. Another issue relates to whether all properly cast provisional ballots will be counted.
My constituents have also brought other issues to my attention. In an effort to provide appropriate government oversight, I am reviewing every issue and bringing them to the attention of attorneys, congressional authorities, party officials, or Boards of Elections, as appropriate.
I want to assure my constituents and others who have contacted me with their concerns, that I am paying c lose attention to this important period of time between the initial results and the official vote tabulation and will not hesitate to take appropriate legal action where supported by facts. ...............................

Thanks to Marc and to Stefanie for sending this to me ......

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1110-31.htm

WE ARE ALL DUBYA'S DOORMAT

2004-11-10T18:24:00.000-08:00

Folks: This says it all ... Mark Morford at his outraged best!! Thanks to Tim B ....

NEWS FLASH FOR ORDINARY REPUBS AND BORN-AGAINS: BUSH DOESN'T CARE ABOUT YOU, EITHER: Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist, 11/10

This just in: millions of moderate Republicans and gay-terrified evangelical Christians and intellectually numbed conservative parents who thought they were doing some sort of good by blindly voting for Dubya and hence protecting their wee ones from swarthy Islamic evildoers who want to steal their kids' Kraft Lunchables and nuke Disneyland all should be emerging from a deep fog of savage denial any minute now.
Wake, they will, to the increasingly obvious fact that their beloved smirkin' president, the one who seemed to care about them so deeply just a couple weeks ago and who reached out to them and promised them the gun-happy gay-unfriendly moon in exchange for full access to their civil rights and a blank check to do whatever the hell he likes, he apparently doesn't give a damn about them. Not anymore.
The truth will soon be hitting much of the conservative nation like a redneck smacks a dog: now that the fear-saturated Right has handed this failed oilman four more unrestrained years to do his dirtiest deeds and a deeply contaminated, well-greased Congress to do it with, he no longer needs their support and he couldn't care less about their "moral values" or their positions on Social Security reform or the war in Iraq or just what the hell he meant about spending the "political capital" he claims he's earned by winning the election (by the slimmest margin of any incumbent president in history).
Oh, sure, Bush reached out, didn't he, Mrs. Moderate Republican? He made you a believer. He promised more intolerance for gays and more Bible classes in the White House and more laughably irresponsible tax breaks you don't really need and more dumbed-down, black-and-white, good-versus-evil perspectives that take all the pressure off of having to, you know, think.
ETC. ....................

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2004/11/10/notes111004.DTL

2004-11-10T14:41:00.000-08:00

HAGER HOAX: Don't Fall for the Petition in your Inbox: posted by Sarah Posner

By now you might have received an e-mail regarding Bush's appointment of David Hager to chair the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee and asking you to sign a petition that will be sent to the White House opposing his appointment as chair. (I've already received it from two people.) You remember the e-mail flurry over Hager's original appointment a couple of years ago; he's the OB/GYN who prescribes Jesus rather than Midol for PMS. This new e-mail says that Bush "has announced his plan" to appoint Hager to head the Advisory Committee; it further states that because the Advisory Committee hasn't met for two years, its charter has lapsed and all eleven spots are therefore vacant.

I don't know who started this chain e-mail, but I couldn't verify its truth. First, I could find nothing on the Internet, searching multiple news sources, on Bush announcing any plan about appointing Hager as chair. Second, I checked the FDA website. There you will find that this Advisory Committee last met on December 15, 2003, and that its charter expires on March 23, 2006.

http://gadflyer.com/flytrap/index.php?Week=200446#1133

POEM FROM THE ELDERS, HOPI NATION

2004-11-10T13:51:00.000-08:00

You have been telling the people that this is the Eleventh Hour.
Now you must go back and tell the people that this is the Hour.
And there are things to be considered:
Where are you living?
What are you doing?
What are your relationships?
Are you in right relation?
Where is your water?
Know your garden.
It is time to speak your Truth.
Create your community.
Be good to each other.
And do not look outside yourself for the leader.
This could be a good time!
There is a river flowing now very fast.
It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid.
They will try to hold onto the shore.
They will feel they are being torn apart and they will suffer greatly.
Know the river has its destination.
The elders say we must let go of the shore,push off into the middle of the river,keep our eyes
open and our heads above the water.
See who is in there with you and celebrate.
At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally.
Least of all, ourselves.
For the moment that we do,our spiritual growth and journey comes to a halt.
The time of the lone wolf is over.
Gather yourselves!
Banish the word struggle from your attitude and your vocabulary.
All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.
We are the ones we've been waiting for.

Thanks to Lisa G. for sending this ....

2004-11-10T13:43:00.000-08:00

MARK FIORE PRESENTS: And the Winner is .....

http://www.workingforchange.com/comic.cfm?itemid=18027

H. L. MENCKEN QUOTE

2004-11-10T07:39:00.000-08:00

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

----H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

Thanks to Wendy for this one ....

CAMERON KERRY LETTER

2004-11-09T14:22:00.000-08:00

Send Voting Problem Info to DNC: a BuzzFlash news alert, 11/9

I am grateful to the many people who have contacted me to express their deep concern about questions of miscounting, fraud, vote suppression, and other problems on election day, especially in Florida and Ohio. Their concern reflects how much people care about the outcome of this election. I want to you to know we are not ignoring it. Election protection lawyers are still on the job in Ohio and Florida and in DC making sure all the votes are counted accurately. I have been conferring with lawyers involved and have made them aware of the information and concerns people have given me. Even if the facts don't provide a basis to change the outcome, the information will inform the continuing effort to protect the integrity of our elections.

If you have specific factual information about voting problems that could be helpful to the lawyers doing their job, please send it to vri@dnc.org rather than to me.

The election protection effort has been important to me personally, and I am proud of the 17,000 lawyers around the country who helped. It's obvious that we have a way to go still, but their efforts helped make a difference. Their work goes on.

Thank you,

Cam Kerry

http://www.buzzflash.com/alerts/04/11/ale04089.html

MANDATE ????

2004-11-08T22:50:00.000-08:00

I have been quite concerned this past week with Republican talk of 'Mandates' after a 51% win. David Neiwert at Orcinus makes the case for just how out-of- control this idea of "we won -- you are the losers --get lost" seems to be. A long post on Orcinus, but well worth your time to read it. We all need to be paying attention.

ELIMINATING THE ENEMY: David Neiwert, Orcinus, 11/5

Good ol' Republicans. Give 'em an inch, and they'll take an eon. Give 'em a "mandate," and they'll take a monocracy.

There's no spectacle like the right gorged on its own power. (I'm from Idaho. I know all about this.) Eventually they become so stuffed with hubris that they explode like the "just one thin mint" man in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. The question, of course, is just how much damage they can inflict upon the rest of us along the way.

It's looking like the answer is, "a lot."

As I've already noted, it didn't take long for the right's post-election mask of "civility" to come off. If President Bush's message wasn't clear enough, right-wing talkers around the dial have left no doubt that if there's any compromising to be done, it's liberals who will be doing it. Bipartisanship, indeed.

If conservatives are "building bridges," then they have a remarkable one-way orientation. In the meantime, it seems that, according to movement conservatives, the only "hate" we're dealing with is that emanating from the left. Right.

A consistent theme now running throughout the campaign that Bill Bennett calls "our long, national cultural renewal" is the notion that those on the right are engaged in a heroic enterprise. Contingent on any such enterprise is the naming of an Enemy.

In the past, the right focused its energies on external enemies -- particularly the specter of Global Communism. With the fall of the Soviet Union, though, and the demise of this Enemy, those energies have turned inward. For the conservative movement, the Enemy, now, has been named. It is any American who, for the movement, is Not One Of Us. Better known by the short handle, "liberal."
At the official level, this is only hinted at darkly. But the right's leading propagandists -- particularly the hatemongers of talk radio -- have been making this explicit.

The worst of these, as always, has been Michael Savage, to whom I've been tuning in the past few days. Savage has been unusually vicious in relegating liberalism to the ashbin of history.

On his Thursday show, Savage was reiterating the point made by Mark McKinnon to Ron Suskind, asking: "When are these people going to figure out that we don't like them?" ...................................

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2004_11_07_dneiwert_archive.html#109987517241945636

48% IS DARN CLOSE TO HALF

2004-11-08T22:41:00.000-08:00

I am deeply concerned with the constant talk in the media, following the election, that Mr. Bush "has a mandate" According to the popular vote, there's no mistaking that a majority of Americans wanted Bush in the White House. But hey! 48 percent is darn close to half. It's not like he won by a landslide. If approximately 136,000 voters in Ohio had voted for Kerry, he'd be President according to the electoral college, regardless of the popular vote.

So yes, Bush won. But what about the 48 percent? Don't our views and opinions matter? This was not the Super Bowl. In a democracy, once the election is over, if Bush has a mandate, it is to be the president for ALL of us.

Bush's clear victory is not a clear mandate. Republicans are bragging that Bush received more votes for president than any Republican in history. I would like to point out that John Kerry garnered more Democratic votes than any other candidate ever has, as well. Bush's numbers were impressive, but so were Kerry's.

Look at the final figures in the 1996 election were:

Bill Clinton 47,402,357 49%
Bob Dole 39,198,755 41%
Ross Perot 8,085,402 8%

Clinton won by a margin of 8 percent of the popular vote -- 8.2 million. Did the "liberal media" declare that Clinton had a clear mandate from the people? Well, no. The mainstream press instead proclaimed "The voters hand Clinton a historic victory but send a message, not a mandate".
[CNN - http://cgi.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1996/elections/time.special/term/]

Obviously Clinton had to deal with a Republican Congress, but fellas?

It seems to me that Mr. Bush's "message" in the election was also that 48 percent of the nation, at least, clearly and strongly disapprove of the direction he is taking our country. Why do you folks in the press seem not to have noticed that this time around?

When Mr. Bush begins to genuinely include the rest of us, the 48 percent, in the process, and to treat our concerns with more than smirking disdain, then he'll be serving ALL of the people. Until every American citizen is welcome at a Bush speech/rally, he's ignoring the will of an "almost" majority of the people he's pledged to govern.

And until he realizes and acts like the President of the UNITED States of America, of ALL of us, he cannot claim a real mandate.

The Media is culpable in Bush's "I won, now I'm the Emperor" attitude. Until Bush makes a true effort to unite the polarized division in this country, that divide will continue worsening. Claiming a mandate because of 3% isn't the way to heal the obvious deep problems seething in this country.

Moral values are not just "I don't like gays/lesbians, and don't want them to marry". How moral is it that millions of children in this country live at or below poverty level? How moral is it that millions of Americans, many children, have no health care? How moral is it that environmental regulatory rollbacks by the Bush administration are leading to polluted water and air? That Bush got his "mandate" on fear, derision, mockery of Kerry and the phobias of "his base" is a sad commentary on MY America. What happened to "give me your tired, your poor"?

Running a campaign designed to create even more division, twisting Kerry's words, and let's face it, deliberating lying, is how Bush won. Bush said that Kerry would allow the United States' own security decisions to be vetoed by other nations -- A LIE. Bush said that Kerry would hike taxes on the middle class and small businesses -- A LIE. The smearing of Kerry’s war record, courtesy of the Swift Boat veterans, was likewise based on lies. Bush and Cheney deliberately lied about Kerry's words in their stump speeches. The assertions Bush/Cheney made were not just false, but demonstrably false. Did the Media challenge them? Usually not. Or the Media let the stories and "whisper campaigns" go on until Rove had achieved his objective of creating “doubts about the other guy.” What happened to statesmanship and civil discourse in this country?

And it worked for Bush/Cheney/RNC because they knew that they could, as Paul Waldman at The Gadflyer said:

"count on political reporters to write about the campaign with the moral urgency of a sportswriter covering a baseball game in June. And that's exactly what happened. Before the postmortems enshrine the Kerry-is-at-fault story line, it’s also worth remembering that there’s a simple reason winners invariably push the notion that the loser has no one to blame but himself for defeat: It absolves the winning side from blame for its own reliance on unsavory tactics to win. As obvious as this is, however, political reporters can always be counted on to play along, because there’s one unassailable rule of post-campaign stories: To the victor goes the spin."

A win of 2-3% is not a mandate. The Media needs to stop talking like it is and reprise their role as watchdog for the American people, all of us, not just the 51%. They need to stop being the mouth piece of the GOP and the Bush/Rove slime machine. Disenfranchising a near majority of this country is divisive and mean-spirited, and ultimately bad for America.

POPULAR FICTION

2004-11-08T16:15:00.000-08:00

POPULAR FICTION: Jacob S. Hacker & Paul Pierson, The New Republic via TruthOut, 11/8

No sooner had the red and blue ink dried on the maps of election commentators than triumphant Republicans began talking about their clear mandate for an ambitious domestic agenda. The people have spoken, Republicans proclaimed, and what they have said is that they favor the conservative agenda on taxes, Social Security, health care, gay marriage, and abortion. The administration, their humble servant, has a solemn duty to execute their wishes. And so President Bush has promised to move forward with ambitious but still only vaguely outlined plans for Social Security privatization, tax simplification, and restrictions on lawsuits. "I have political capital and I intend to spend it," he declared.
Amazingly, much of the media seems to be buying the Republicans' mandate line. Just a day after the election, a front-page New York Times article, entitled "President Seems Poised to Claim a New Mandate," argued that President Bush "can claim that an apparently insurmountable lead in the popular vote vindicated his policies, his persistence, his personal qualities and his political strategy." U.S. News & World Report was more blunt: Bush, according to one headline, is the "man with the mandate."
This is patently absurd. .................

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/110904W.shtml

WISE WILL SHAKESPEARE

2004-11-08T09:35:00.000-08:00

"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edgedsword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind...Andwhen the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils withhate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizingthe rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded with patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader,and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar."

--- William Shakespeare

FOOTPRINTS OF ELECTORAL FRAUD

2004-11-08T09:22:00.000-08:00

The November 2 Exit Poll Scam: Michael Keefer www.globalresearch.ca , 11/5

Republican electoral fraud in the 2004 presidential election was widely anticipated by informed observers--whose warnings about the opportunities for fraud offered by "black box" voting machines supplied and serviced by corporations closely aligned with Republican interests (and used to tally nearly a third of the votes cast on November 2) have been amply borne out by the results.1
One of the clear indicators of massive electoral fraud was the wide divergence, both nationally and in swing states, between exit poll results and the reported vote tallies. The major villains, it would seem, were the suppliers of touch-screen voting machines. There appears to be evidence, however, that the corporations responsible for assembling vote-counting and exit poll information may also have been complicit in the fraud.
Until recently, the major American corporate infomedia networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, and AP) relied on a consortium known as the Voter News Service for vote-counting and exit poll information. But following the scandals and consequent embarrassments of the 2000 and 2002 elections, this consortium was disbanded. It was replaced in 2004 by a partnership of Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International known as the National Election Pool.
The National Election Pool’s own data—as transmitted by CNN on the evening of November 2 and the early morning of November 3—suggest very strongly that the results of the exit polls were themselves fiddled late on November 2 in order to make their numbers conform with the tabulated vote tallies.
It is important to remember how large the discrepancy was between the early vote tallies and the early exit poll figures. By the time polls were closing in the eastern states, the vote-count figures published by CNN showed Bush leading Kerry by a massive 11 percent margin. At 8:50 p.m. EST, Bush was credited with 6,590,476 votes, and Kerry with 5,239,414. This margin gradually shrank. By 9:00 p.m., Bush purportedly had 8,284,599 votes, and Kerry 6,703,874; by 9:06 p.m., Bush had 9,257,135, and Kerry had 7,652,510, giving the incumbent a 9 percent lead, with 54 percent of the vote to Kerry’s 45 percent.
At the same time, embarrassingly enough, the national exit poll figures reported by CNN showed Kerry as holding a narrow but potentially decisive lead over Bush. At 9:06 p.m. EST, the exit polls indicated that women’s votes (54 percent of the total) were going 54 percent to Kerry, 45 percent to Bush, and 1 percent to Nader; men’s votes (46 percent of the total) were breaking 51 percent to Bush, 47 percent to Kerry, and 1 percent to Nader. Kerry, in other words, was leading Bush by nearly 3 percent.
The early exit polls appear to have caused some concern to the good people at the National Election Pool: a gap of 12 or 14 percent between tallied results and exit polls can hardly inspire confidence in the legitimacy of an election.
One can surmise that instructions of two sorts were issued. The election-massagers working for Diebold, ES&S (Election Systems & Software) and the other suppliers of black-box voting machines may have been told to go easy on their manipulations of back-door ‘Democrat-Delete’ software: mere victory was what the Bush campaign wanted, not an implausible landslide. And the number crunchers at the National Election Pool may have been asked to fix up those awkward exit polls.
Fix them they did. .............

http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE411A.html

WORSE THAN 2000 - WILLIAM RIVERS PITT

2004-11-08T08:28:00.000-08:00

WORSE THAN 2000: TUESDAY'S ELECTORAL DISASTER: William Rivers Pitt, TruthOut, 11/7

Everyone remembers Florida's 2000 election debacle, and all of the new terms it introduced to our political lexicon: Hanging chads, dimpled chads, pregnant chads, overvotes, undervotes, Sore Losermans, Jews for Buchanan and so forth. It took several weeks, battalions of lawyers and a questionable decision from the U.S. Supreme Court to show the nation and the world how messy democracy can be. By any standard, what happened in Florida during the 2000 Presidential election was a disaster.

What happened during the Presidential election of 2004, in Florida, in Ohio, and in a number of other states as well, was worse.

Some of the problems with this past Tuesday's election will sound all too familiar. Despite having four years to look into and deal with the problems that cropped up in Florida in 2000, the 'spoiled vote' chad issue reared its ugly head again. Investigative journalist Greg Palast, the man almost singularly responsible for exposing the more egregious examples of illegitimate deletions of voters from the rolls, described the continued problems in an article published just before the election, and again in an article published just after the election.

Four years later, and none of the Florida problems were fixed. In fact, by all appearances, they spread from Florida to Ohio, New Mexico, Michigan and elsewhere. Worse, these problems only scratch the surface of what appears to have happened in Tuesday's election. The fix that was put in place to solve these problems - the Help America Vote Act passed in 2002 after the Florida debacle - appears to have gone a long way towards making things worse by orders of magnitude, for it was the Help America Vote Act which introduced paperless electronic touch-screen voting machines to millions of voters across the country.

At first blush, it seems like a good idea. Forget the chads, the punch cards, the archaic booths like pianos standing on end with the handles and the curtains. This is the 21st century, so let's do it with computers. A simple screen presents straightforward choices, and you touch the spot on the screen to vote for your candidate. Your vote is recorded by the machine, and then sent via modem to a central computer which tallies the votes. Simple, right?

Not quite. .......

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/110804A.shtml