November 3, 2004
The discrepancy between the exit polls and the voting machine tallies is troubling. Exit polls are historically very accurate, but that has changed in the time of Diebold Republican untrackable voting machines. Early in the evening the exit polls showed a Kerry victory. Voting machines did not confirm the exit poll numbers. Daily Kos Carlyle's secret deal to make a billion off Iraq's debt to Kuwait suddenly vanished into the memory hole. Carlyle denies everything. Guardian Reagan-Bush Treason 1980 -- More evidence has surfaced to confirm the original October Surprise of 1980, when the Reagan-Bush team negotiated to delay the release of American hostages held in Iran until after the election. "In 1992-93, a House Task Force conducted a half-hearted investigation of the controversy and judged the allegations of a Republican-Iranian deal to be false. But it was later discovered that the Task Force had concealed evidence that pointed in the opposite direction, including a classified report from the Russian government stating that Bush, Casey and CIA officers had met with Iranians in Europe in 1980 to strike a deal." Consortium News Third World America -- Under Bush, America's middle class is becoming the working poor. Bush continues to drive America to the brink of economic catastrophe. Would a financial collapse benefit the Bush faction? "In the past ten years, American jobs screamed out of the United States at an accelerating rate of speed. While American workers stood in unemployment lines, major corporations insourced, outsourced and offshored jobs to Third World countries. Why? They could obtain labor for $1.00 an hour and sometimes less. Capitalism knows no loyalty to man, beast or country." Washington Dispatch
November 3, 2004
Triumph of the Right
Okay, to all my Republican acquaintances, you win. You control the world. The American public likes fascists. No more can I say the aggressiveness of the Bush administration cannot be blamed on the American people, that this administration was not really elected, but presented a deceptive picture of itself as "compassionate" and "conservative", neither of which it turned out to be.Now the population -- not all of it, but a large portion of it -- has affirmed George W. Bush's record as president. With the voting shenanigans illustrated in the Florida 2000 case and still ongoing in many states, the discrepancies between what we are being told and what voters really chose could be large, even decisive. But the fact remains that a substantial part of the population affirmed George W. Bush's policies, and that is a fact that deserves some consideration.
About half are exempt in the sense that they voted against Bush, but the fact remains that close to half of the people of America today said yes to Bush's agenda, which includes attacking other countries whenever we want to and not feeling we have to observe any laws of any kind, or to respect the wishes of anyone.
This fact changes everything.
To have the Bush administration actually be elected by the people changes everything. If the Diebold Republican-electing machines are to be trusted -- and we know they aren't -- then a majority of Americans has approved the invasion of Iraq and the killing of 100,000 civilians for trumped up reasons. This is a very serious situation. Now, if the Bushes have won, they do have a mandate, something they never had, though they behaved as though they did.
I heard a story tonight about an old woman who was dying, but wanted to stay alive long enough "to see that smirk wiped off his face." Right now it looks like that will not happen.
I've read somewhere that people get the leaders they deserve. I never wanted to believe it in America. I never wanted to believe that people like Nixon really reflected the character of Americans. I thought instead corrupt politicians like that got over because they managed to hide their true motives. But if George W. Bush is re-elected and his record is affirmed by the American people, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Americans knowingly want a leader to who lies to them about why he invades countries, and come to think of it, lies about everything. Tell me lies, they say. Waltz me into Neverland.
What Bush has done, invading Iraq and killing 100,000 civilians, is right out in front of everyone. There's no need to try to hide it. Torture of American prisoners in Guantanamo, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and other places. These things have happened under this administration. America has become a dark, authoritarian state. What happened to the America we knew? I put my hope in the people to declare that mass murder and lies are not okay. But it didn't happen.
A pundit in CBS said the defining issue in many of the Bush states was "moral values," that is, positions on abortion, gay marriage and such things. So lying, and conducting mass murder of civilians for false pretenses is somehow consistent with these people's "moral values." Go figure.
Americans are in denial that there IS a world out there, beyond this twisted Bush reality tunnel. Okay. I concede. Right wing, you win. America is yours.
The Right Wing has won, has consolidated power. Run for cover.
November 4, 2004
Square One
People all around so sad and depressed, scared and anxious. Many of them say the feeling is like when JFK was shot. Something large and very malevolent is lurking. A terrible deed has been done. Americans' democracy was stolen from it.We cannot have a voting system that is not transparent, not trackable or verifiable. That does not comply with the minimum standards for what a voting system must be. We just eradicate the non-trackable machines. That is step one.
Now we must pick ourselves up one more time and prepare to fight back. We cannot allow corporate tyrants to steal our country and destroy our republic.
November 4, 2004
It's the Voting Machines, Stupid
The point of power is the voting machine. As Stalin said, all that matters is who counts the votes. The voting machines that have taken over our election system are nonverifiable, they are controlled by four companies who adhere to extreme right wing agendas. This is the point that renders every other action irrelevant.Marc Sapir MD, MPH, executive director of Retro Poll (www.retropoll.org, writes, "Despite the fact that the Democrats registered far more people in the past six months than the Republicans, and despite a huge voter turnout, with first time voters (according to Warren Mitofsky's poll) giving Kerry a 60:40 edge, President Bush appears to have increased his national vote total by 8 million votes compared with the 2000 election, yet Mitofsky saw no desertion to Bush from 2000 Gore voters (90% of Gore voters stayed with Kerry and 90% of Bush voters stayed with Bush)."
In other words, the numbers aren't there. Bush received 8 million votes out of thin air, or more accurately, out of a computer programmed to give him a majority.
Even though the voting machines are unverifiable and do not leave any kind of record or paper trail, there are other numbers in the system that are known and can be figured with. And they do not add up.
Sapir continues: "How can these contradictory pieces of information be reconciled? They can't if Mitovsky's data is correct. So let's assume Mitovsky is wrong and there was some shift of former voters to Bush. One possibility is that an increased rural vote went for President Bush more heavily percentage wise than it did in 2000. However, there do not seem to be enough rural voters in the U.S. to improve that vote by more than perhaps a few million votes. A second is that perhaps Mr. Bush uniformly made major inroads in the urban-suburban areas and lost them by a much slimmer margin this time, adding vastly to his urban vote totals as well as to rural increases. Reviews of the actual major urban-suburban vote totals will confirm or refute this hypothesis. A third possibility is that Mr. Bush improved dramatically in some urban areas in particular and not in others. If such asymmetrical results were to be determinative in a few states such as Ohio one would have to ask the question 'how did it happen?' To begin with, I'd like to ask Carl Rove, known for his razor precision, how he called Ohio so early for Bush without public data to back his assessment. But the more valuable approach, were there to be significant non uniformity seen across urban areas, would be to carry out a study of results comparing urban counties in key states that had used the Diebold electronic voting machines versus those that had used other methods of voting; to also evaluate the turnout and results of each of these metropolitan areas comparing their 2000 and 2004 experience both controlling for and not controlling for a shift in the methodology to touch screen computers. And thirdly to consider the issue of potential absentee and provisional vote suppression if there are some urban areas with lower turnout, looking at the challenged voter experience (though this last concern is separate from the 8 million vote demographic issue)."
The first clue is that Kerry was winning the exit polls. The wave of new voters was making its impact felt. Exit polls are historically very accurate. Just asking people who came out of the voting booth who they voted for. Pollsters don't have to devise samples, contact people through phone calls. They've traditionally been extremely accurate and reliable. Until the Diebold era.
According to a post at , an analysis of the figures shows that "on several swing states, and EVERY STATE that has EVoting but no paper trails has an unexplained advantage for Bush of around +5% when comparing exit polls to actual results. In EVERY STATE that has paper audit trails on their EVoting, the exit poll results match the actual results reported within the margin of error. So, we have MATCHING RESULTS for exit polls vs. voting with audits vs. A 5% unexplained advantage for Bush without audits." (See a good selection of links about this issue at stolenelection2004)
Once again we come up against a reluctance to face this possibility, though it stares us in the face. Denial born in fear, no doubt. Why have Diebold and its brethren not created a way to verify the accuracy of their counts? Why should it be any more difficult than making ATMs that give receipts and keep accurate tallies? We are being hoodwinked. This is not a wild conspiracy theory. The machines are not trustworthy, there is no way to verify their results. It is insane to put blind faith into them, or in those who are thrusting them upon us.
This is the first step toward any strategy of restoring democracy and justice to the U.S. We have to have verifiable voting. The systems and their owners must be accountable. At a time when millions are devastated and at a loss how to proceed, this is the point of power. Without a resolution to this problem, all other efforts are moot.
Ernest Partridge, who maintains crisispapers.org, writes: "This morning I've been reading a few of the post-mortem blogs and pieces in some of the progressive sites. Virtually all of them accept as a given that the numbers on the TV screen represent votes cast as intended by the voters -- i.e., no fraud. Worse still, apparently most of the Democratic Party establishment accepts the 'honest vote' hypothesis. Needless to say, the media are totally sold on the 'honest election' theory. Well, I'm not. And thankfully, neither are you. Why, all of a sudden, has massive e-fraud become the topic that dare not speak its name? Will the Bush regime, like the Warren Commission, succeed in selling a preposterous theory by sheer repetition and by slandering proponents as 'conspiracy nuts'"?
For more information, see See BlackBoxVoting.org and VerifiedVoting.org.
See also
Greg Palast Why Be a Believer? "Because electronic voting machines do not leave a paper trail, we simply have to take the word of the people and corporations that program the machines that they accurately register votes. But why should we take their word for it? Elections are based on transparency, and there is nothing less transparent than a computer running proprietary software." dailykos.com Diebold's Political Machine -- "One such Republican pocket is Upper Arlington, the Columbus suburb that is home to Walden 'Wally' O'Dell, the chairman of the board and chief executive of Diebold. For years, O'Dell has given generously to Republican candidates. Last September, he held a packed $1,000-per-head GOP fundraiser at his 10,800-square-foot mansion. He has been feted as a guest at President Bush's Texas ranch, joining a cadre of 'Pioneers and Rangers' who have pledged to raise more than $100,000 for the Bush reelection campaign. Most memorably, O'Dell last fall penned a letter pledging his commitment 'to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President.'" Mother Jones. Chuck Hagel's company in Nebraska made the machines that delivered him an 85% majority over a popular former governor. "A little less than eight months after stepping down as director of AIS, Hagel surprised national pundits and defied early polls by defeating Benjamin Nelson, the state's popular former governor. It was Hagel's first try for public office. Nebraska elections officials told The Hill that machines made by AIS probably tallied 85 percent of the votes cast in the 1996 vote, although Nelson never drew attention to the connection. Hagel won again in 2002, by a far healthier margin. That vote is still angrily disputed by Hagel's Democratic opponent, Charlie Matulka, who did try to make Hagel's ties to ES&S an issue in the race and who asked that state elections officials conduct a hand recount of the vote. That request was rebuffed, because Hagel's margin of victory was so large." Then there were blatant problems with Diebold in Florida that got lost in the shuffle. "The first signs that the Diebold-made system in Volusia County was malfunctioning came early on election night, when the central ballot-counting computer showed a Socialist Party candidate receiving more than 9,000 votes and Vice President Al Gore getting minus 19,000. Another 4,000 votes poured into the plus column for Bush that didn't belong there. Taken together, the massive swing seemed to indicate that Bush, not Gore, had won Florida and thus the White House. Election officials restarted the machine, and expressed confidence in the eventual results, which showed Gore beating Bush by 97,063 votes to 82,214." Exit polls showed Kerry winning Ohio and Florida. Internet News Florida numbers vs 2000 - something is wrong Daily Kos Watchdogs Spot E-Vote Glitches -- Wired Shoplifting the Presidency? Greg Palast interviewed on Democracy Now More thoughts to think:
Now the U.S. is drifting closer to fascism -- or deeper into fascism -- than ever before. We must be strong in our resistance. We must learn from all those of history who had to exercise resistance before us. We cannot let the Bushies turn America into a totalitarian state. The dream of a democratic, egalitarian, just society was handed down to us. The incarnation was not perfect, but it is our duty to maintain, and if possible improve and develop the dream. Right now we are giving it up, letting it go down the toilet, not preserving it for our children. We cannot allo
The election hangover of a lifetime -- Tom Engelhardt at tomdispatch.com
November 5, 2004
Just One More Thing
As the smoke clears and we pick ourselves up from another sucker punch, it occurs to me that I'm a little pissed at John Kerry. I don't want to kick a man while he's down, but I'll say this now and get it over with. The guy made a promise, as Bruce Springsteen sang it, no defeat, no surrender. He pledged that "this time we will make sure every vote is counted." And then he walked away from it so easily. He just believed them and walked away.This is a guy who has been around. He's not dumb. He investigated the Iran Contra crimes and BCCI, the bank of crooks, criminals, terrorist, money launderers and other Bush cohorts. He knows the Bushes going back to Yale, back to the days of Skull & Bones and the Tomb. He knows who he is dealing with. He knows they cheat and lie and scheme their way through everything. He wasn't born yesterday.
The information about the flaws in the voting machines has been out there a long time. There have been lawsuits, quite a lot of controversy based on these machines that clearly can't be trusted. Why didn't he press it and force the Diebold company -- whose CEO publicly pledged to help deliver Ohio to the Republicans -- to prove the reliability of those vote counts? Now he's left us again with uncertainty, an unresolved outcome.
Just like Al Gore, when it came down to the nitty gritty, he rolled over and gave it to them. There was still plenty of room for questioning. He was our standard bearer. I may not have agreed with everything about him, but he was all we had to protect us from another slash-and-burn party by the right wing. He was the only one we had to help us wipe that smirk off that arrogant face. And he let us down.
What is it with these guys? It's like he couldn't stand to come off like a prick. He had to maintain his dignity. He was too much of a gentleman to lower himself to get into a real scrap. But in the end he let us down. He left us in the wilderness with nothing to shield us from the onslaught. When you are fighting with pigs you have to be ready to get dirty.
To all the people who are reluctant to even look at the voting machine issue for some reason, the evidence is there right out in the open that there are problems with those machines. They don't provide the means for a traditional vote recount for verifiability. There are legitimate questions that need to be answered if the "healing" Kerry talks about can ever begin.
There can be no healing. That rings as hollow as another sanctimonious political slogan. It's an insult. "Healing"? when the country is under siege by a bunch of pirates? You mean acquiescence to a fascist takeover of the United States. You mean giving it up to the crew who has shown no restraint in driving the country to an ultra-right wing, militaristic, pseudo religious autocracy. It's fine for you, John Kerry billionaire. But all of us don't have your privileges. You have left us exposed. We put our hearts into you and you abandoned us when the real test came.
It was Howard Dean who really kicked ass and got this campaign fired up, gave the people something to believe in, forced the more mainstream, establishment Democrats to take notice of the rage of the people. I don't care what Fox and CNN and any of that rat pack have to say, I liked the scream. The scream represented me. That's how I feel. And now I'm still screaming.
Let's get those voting machines fixed up. We need a reliable voting system. Let's stop with this game already. Either we're a democratic country with elections, or just scrap it and come out in the open as a totalitarian military state. This three-card monte game with the phony voting machines won't do.
Gentleman John, you let us down. You had what it takes to be a great president, to step up during one of America's greatest crises and lead us through the storm. But when it came down to the confrontation, you rolled over. Why?
A few worthy links:
Questions Remain -- "Some 8.2 percent of touch-screen votes in senatorial elections between 1998 and 2000 were lost, according to an MIT/CalTech study. That was more than any other system except lever machines, which lost 9.5 percent of votes." Op Ed News An Election Most Foul -- Take Them At Their Words A Modest Restructuring Proposal -- Redraw the borders so it's The United States of Canada (including the blue states), and rename the red states Jesusland. Buzzflash Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain -- Of course voter fraud is not a serious question, so the fact that one Ohio county using those reliable Diebold machines reported a minus 25,000 votes. Must be some legitimate explanation. No Republican would ever tamper with a voting result, not even Diebold. Guerrilla News Network The Hardest Word -- "So then, to much of Europe, Russia, Asia, Canada, Mexico, the Middle East -- to all those dozens of major world nations who want Bush out almost as much as the educated people of America, to you we can only say: We are so very, very sorry. We don't know how it happened, either. For tens of millions of us, Bush is not our president and never will be. That's how divisive. That's how dangerous. That's how very sad it has become." Mark Morford
November 6, 2004
On Our Own
John Kerry abandoned us. He walked away from the post, returned to his cushy billionaire's life and left us on our own to fight the Bush juggernaut. He took a dive, leaving us to wonder if the whole struggle between the two Skull & Bones comrades was just theater, a drama to placate the dull masses. Never mind that now. I offer you an alternate scenario.Since Kerry abdicated his leadership, proved in the end to lack the mettle to stand up for American democracy under siege, we will now have the pleasure of bringing down George W. Bush and the whole rotten corporate power structure that rules Washington ourselves. We the people.
Remember Richard Nixon? He won in '72 in what was seen as a landslide, and he didn't need phony voting machines to do it. But he pushed his disdain for the law too far, and it caught up with him. Two years later he had to leave office.
The people are aroused. The channels have been created in response to the Bush coup of 2000. A whole new infrastructure of democratic action has grown up through Moveon.org, ACT and so forth. It is on this foundation that we will mount our attack on corrupt corporate power in the United States.
Black Box Voting is key. The rigging of an election is no third rate burglary. With machines that leave no paper trail, they thought they could get away with calling it anyway they wanted. But it's not that simple. There are other ways to analyze the mathematical system to expose the fraud. Fortunately some heroic souls are now engaged in that process.
Some times the system of fraud shows through the surface quite vividly, as in the case reported by the Associated Press and CNN Friday showing that Bush was awarded several thousand votes in a precinct where only a few hundred people even voted.(See AP) Several thousand in one tiny precinct. How interesting. Quickly the officials rush to tell us it was the only mistake and it wouldn't have changed the result so it's not relevant anyway. But that's not good enough.
That's what they said in 2000 when the Supreme Court stopped the vote counting and appointed the president based on a legal argument that looked like it was crafted by Heckyl and Jeckyl. It wouldn't have mattered anyway, the Bush partisans said. He would have won anyway, so it's irrelevant that we cheated. Try that in a casino some time. Sure, I cheated, but it didn't change the result, so it doesn't matter.
It does matter. There is no rational argument for saying that the one precinct where Bush's total was reported at 1000% of the actual result was the only one where that kind of "error" took place. None whatsoever. An investigation is required to restore confidence in the legitimacy of our voting system.
This investigation will obviously not come from the Republican-controlled legislature. But it can come from a grassroots movement. There are people working on this problem and they need support. Bev Harris of Black Box Voting has filed a Freedom of Information lawsuit that will require some serious money to pursue. Donations can be made at her site.
The Bush administration is guilty of many crimes, high crimes. Lying and falsifying evidence to lead the country into a war from which there is no exit is perhaps the worst. Having the vice president and the president's father making millions off that war compounds the crime. The hijacking of our public airwaves for use by propagandists is another massive crime. But probably none of their crimes are as great as undermining the electoral system itself, taking away the very heart of democracy. It is time to bring them to justice. Through the determined will of the people, it can be done.
It will not be easy. If these rats feel the hounds too close to their trail, they will wreak all sorts of havoc to divert attention. They will be fighting for survival because once their crimes start to unravel, there is no telling where it will end. So be fully prepared for them to launch an assault of everything within their awesome arsenal. We are already dangerously close to the precipice of economic collapse. Such an eventuality would be a handy diversion for an administration looking for one. It would strengthen their control systems. Another terrorist attack on the mainland is also to be expected. It will serve as the pretext for activating the next extension of the Patriot Act to create a military dictatorship. Be ready for all these things.
But the people are strong too when united in great numbers. People have overthrown tyranny many times before, as recently as the '80s and '90s when the people of Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Russia overthrew the regimes that ruled them. They didn't have voting rights, and they overthrew the tyrants anyway. We can do it too.
Some noteworthy links:
Unraveling? A South Dakota Republican is speaking out against Republican vote fraud. Rapid City Journal Interesting number crunching of the Florida election -- A little hard to sort through, but, for example, Republican total votes tend to greatly exceed the number of registered Republican voters in a given precinct. UStogether. The state-by-state discrepancies between exit polls and official counts. Blue Lemur Kerry Won: Here are the Facts Greg Palast The Glitch President -- "Broward County corrected a computer glitch Thursday that had miscounted thousands of absentee votes, instantly turning a slot-machine measure from loser to winner and reinforcing concerns about the accuracy of electronic election returns. " Miami Herald The ultimate felony against democracy -- Thom Hartmann Truthout A second Bush coup? "But the most perplexing fact is that exit polls into the evening of Nov. 2 showed Kerry rolling to a clear victory nationally and carrying most of the battleground states, including Florida and Ohio, whose totals would have ensured Kerry’s victory in the Electoral College. Significantly, polls also showed Republicans carrying the bulk of the tight Senate races. However, when the official results were tallied, the presidential exit polls proved wrong while the Senate polls proved right." Robert Parry The Case for Fraud -- Cannonfire Outrage in Ohio -- Michigan IMC
November 7, 2004
Settling into a new reality, resigning oneself to it, there are ironies among the bitterness. Kerry's rapid concession tends to confirm some of the criticisms of him, which I paid little attention to at the time because my focus was to remove George W. Bush at all costs. Kerry's imperfections were more or less irrelevant. But given that Kerry would be 100 times the president Bush could be, the fact is he didn't fight hard enough when it all came down.Bush's pitch was: you may not agree with me but you know where I stand and I won't waver. For better or worse, mostly worse, it's true, and showed itself to be true in the final battle. Bush doesn't care if his side stole the election through tampering with voting machines in Florida and Ohio, as well as a broad range of other techniques of voter suppression and manipulation. He just wants to win. How he does it is secondary. So even if he was dead wrong, even if he was really the loser, he stood up and seized victory.
No conscience, no second guessing, no self-doubt is ever going to hamper this guy.
Kerry, on the other hand, did not even stick around to fulfill his pledge to be sure all the votes are counted. Now every day we are hearing more about all the votes that were suppressed. What happened to the army of lawyers we heard about? Was that all a bunch of bluster? Very disappointing, John Kerry. There are very legitimate questions, questions that must be asked and satisfactorily resolve if this country is to ever pretend to have even a residual form of democracy. You failed us. You deserted us when the chips were down. That's a hard pill to swallow.
Some Links:
Counting Backwards -- Early Thursday, as Broward County elections officials wrapped up after a long day of canvassing votes, something unusual caught their eye. Tallies should go up as more votes are counted. That's simple math. But in some races, the numbers had gone . . . down. Officials found the software used in Broward can handle only 32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the system starts counting backward." palmbeachpost.com Caught Red Handed -- More evidence of malfeasance in Ohio. "In a letter dated Oct. 21, Ken Nuss, former deputy director of the Auglaize County Board of Elections, claimed that Joe McGinnis, a former employee of Election Systems and Software (ES&S), the company that provides the voting system in Auglaize County, was on the main computer that is used to create the ballot and compile election results, which would go against election protocol. Nuss claimed in the letter that McGinnis was allowed to use the computer the weekend of Oct. 16. Nuss, who resigned from his job Oct. 21 after being suspended for a day, was responsible for overseeing the computerized programming of election software, according to his job description. His resignation is effective Nov. 11." Evening Leader Facing the Truth: A Nation Insane -- A fine soul-searching piece by Ruth Lopez on Buzzflash. "...2004 proved what 2000 merely hinted at: we are not rising up. We are not going to. We are sad but we will do nothing except make vague threats about next time. Next time we'll get them. Next time. That has sealed it. This is what has elected Bush. It is the complacent acceptance that has elected him..." Mounting Evidence of a Hacked Election -- "In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry. In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush. The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush." Thom Hartmann on Commondreams No Exit -- Sure you want to leave the United States. What sane person has not thought of this in the last week. But you can't! "You cannot leave. You cannot drop the armor now. Why? Because you are needed, more than ever. You are mandatory to keep the energy flowing, the karmic vibrator buzzing, to keep the progressive and lucid half of the nation breathing and healthy and awake and ever reaching out to the half that's wallowing in fear and violence and homophobia and sexual dread, hoping to find harmony instead of cacophony, common ground instead of civil war, some sort of a shared love of a country so messy and internationally disrespected and openly confused its own president can't even speak the language." Mark Morford at SFGate Stolen Election 2004 Bush's "Mandate" -- Get Real! pabloonpolitics.com Should Americans trust the election results? Washington Dispatch Voting Problems in Ohio Set Off an Alarm -- NY Times The stolen election of 2004: welcome back to hell -- Excellent overview with many essential links by Larry Chin at Online Journal New Blog -- Margie Burns.
November 8, 2004
Smudging History
Truth as Bludgeon -- It is becoming a common right wing tactic to simply deny facts that are easily documented and substantiated. Cheney denies what he said 20 times on video. Bush does the same thing. I didn't say it, he says, but he said it. I heard the tape that day maybe. Truth is whatever we say it is, they signal by implication, and if you don't like it maybe we'll rip your guts out and make an example of you. You're a terrorist if we say you're a terrorist, and terrorists don't have rights. We hereby nullify the Geneva Conventions.Recently I was alerted by e-mail that right wingers are now denying that Nixon said he had a "secret plan" to end the War in Vietnam when he was running for president. I had read something to that effect in a William Safire column and I thought it was embarrassing for Safire to express doubt about that, when a New York Times writer always has access to fact checking resources and could easily resolve the matter by taking a look at the video tape of Nixon's speech the night before the election in 1968. I wrote Safire and suggested he check it out, but of course he didn't deign to acknowledge my e-mail.
Then when I was informed that conservatives are getting into this idea that that never happened, so I got on Google and sure enough -- that is what's happening. An attempt to change history by blasting something so hard that it obliterates the established fact.
I checked and the website of the Nixon Library makes the claim that Nixon's Secret Plan was a myth and he never said it. Of course Nixon lied practically every time he opened his mouth, so why shouldn't his library continue the tradition? Truman said, it's not only that he lies so much, "I don't think the sonofabitch knows the difference." And in that particular case, Truman nailed it.
I personally cannot be convinced of this idea that the Secret Plan is a "myth" because I saw it. I saw him say it on TV the night before the election. I was of draft age, and like most of my generation was hopping mad that we were being sent off to die in that ridiculous war. And I'm still pissed off about it, and especially about it happening again. And especially under the direction of guys who didn't ever put themselves on the line when they had an opportunity to serve.
But that night I was plenty pissed and I couldn't believe that Nixon would try something so desperate and devious. I couldn't believe this lying sack was going to try to pull off something so blatant, so transparent in its falsity. But he said it. And he got elected -- really only because people were so pissed at the Democratic Party for the war, and at Humphrey for not publicly denouncing Johnson's policies. Nixon was a slimey opportunist who had built his career literally by slandering decent, middle of the road, old fashioned Americans who were holding offices Nixon coveted.
After Johnson was politically destroyed by his war, Nixon saw his opening and went for it. It was not that widely known in the main stream what a compulsive liar he was. He still had some of Eisenhower's luster from being his running mate, though Eisenhower rarely fanned the flames and found Nixon a distasteful presence in private.
But I saw him say it, and I would be willing to make a wager if an authentic tape of that night's speech exists. For 35 years it has been an acknowledged fact, but now the Republicans are trying to wipe it from memory, hence wipe it out of existence, by bludgeoning the public with an alternate reality, the idea that the Secret Plan was just something dreamed up by some malevolent Librul.
If you do a Google search on Nixon's Secret Plan you will find plenty of references to it in encyclopedias and other relatively neutral sources. Here are a few.
Meanwhile,
"Do We Still Have a Democracy?" by Ernest Partridge at crisispapers.org is to the point in a way that very few election commentaries are these days, because they are built on a set of presumptions that include the presumption that the voting machine totals are accurate. I can't take seriously now any commentaries of people who accept on faith the totally unverified premise that these machines are to be relied upon. The answer to the question is: NO. We do not have a democracy at this moment. Democracy is latent, waiting to be actualized. That should be the result of the last non-election. Read This piece on the voting machine fraud by William Rivers Pitt. This, Pitt says, is worse than 2000. And he makes his point. "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."
November 9, 2004
Here is another great e-mail I received. Posted as is, from them to you:Friends,
It has been five days since the election.
In that time, accounts of voter fraud and malfunctioning voting machines have flooded into local newspapers in Ohio, to public-interest groups, universities and weblogs.
This message is an overview of those reports.
The stories are summarized here, with links to the original publications. After seeing this evidence -- and there is more still to be rounded up -- I am no longer convinced that Bush won the election.
I hope you will read through these summaries, click on the links to the original stories, and come to your own conclusions.
I've included all the accounts of election tampering that I'm aware of, but have not done a broad search. This is only what I've learned in the past five days.
My education was provided by a group of concerned journalists who posted reports to a chat list. This is a compilation of their research.
I believe there is enough evidence to suggest that the electorate may have actually chosen Kerry on Tuesday. We don't know for sure -- we can't know till there is a recount. Or, if that's not possible because of electronic voting machines, until the election is held over in Ohio and Florida.
Bush has not yet been chosen by the Electoral College. The Electors meet and vote on Dec. 13. We need to raise questions about the results -- and raise them loudly -- to get an investigation launched before that date.
So far, the mainstream media in not picking up the story. They moved very slowly after the 2000 election.
Here are the accounts of election tampering from four states, plus reports on multi-state problems.
(Please note: some of the newspaper links may expire soon. You may want to print out the stories so that later on, you don't have to buy them from the newspapers' archives.)
FLORIDA:
The most troubling news comes out of Florida. Throughout most of the state, new electronic voting machines were in use. These machines -- many manufactured by a company called Diebold -- are controversial because they don't leave a paper trail.
There is no way to double-check the results.
The final Florida tallies on Diebold machines from Tuesday are literally unbelievable.
In 29 counties where Diebold machines (an optical scanner) were used to count the ballots, large majorities of voters were registered Democrats. But the final results gave all the counties to Bush, sometimes by huge margins.
The individual county data shows how unlikely the machine results were.
For instance:
In Calhoun County, 82% of registered voters are Democrats. But Diebold machines said 63% of the county voted for Bush.
In Lafayette County, 83% of voters are Democrats, but Diebold said 74% of the county voted for Bush.
In Liberty County, 88% of voters are Democrats, but Diebold said 64% voted for Bush.
In Washington County, 67% of voters are Democrats, but Diebold said 71% voted for Bush.
This same pattern appears in the results for 29 COUNTIES in Florida. In every one of those counties, the Diebold Optical Scanner produced the results.
The Optical Scanner has been called the voting machine that is most susceptible to tampering.
Many of you have been watching elections closely for years. Do you believe that in 29 Florida counties in which Democrats were in the majority -- in some cases with 4 out of 5 registered voters being Democrats -- they all voted strongly for Bush?
Here are the links.
You can find the voter registration/final result data here:
You can find a story analyzing these results here:
You can read about electronic voting machines -- an untested phenomenon in American elections, here:
THE OTHER PROBLEM IN FLORIDA:
In 6 counties -- again, they were all using electronic machines -- more votes for President were recorded than there were actual voters in the counties.
Altogether, these six counties reported 188,885 more votes for President than there are voters living there.
Right now, no one knows whether those extra 188,000 votes were cast for Bush or for Kerry. But Bush won the state of Florida by a 5% margin -- contrary to what all the polls were showing only days earlier.
In Glades County: 2,443 votes for Bush / 1,718 votes for Kerry / 27 votes for Other. Those add up to 4,188. But the machines recorded the official turnout as 3,446. That adds up to 742 more votes than voters.
In Highlands County: 25,874 for Bush / 15,346 for Kerry / 271 for Other. Official Turnout: 33,996. That adds up to 7,495 more votes than voters.
In Miami-Dade County: 358,613 for Bush / 406,099 for Kerry / 3,841 for Other. Official Turnout 716,574. That adds up to 51,979 more votes than voters.
In Osceola County: 43,108 for Bush / 38,617 for Kerry / 453 for Other. Official Turnout 63589. That adds up to 18,589 more votes than voters.
In Palm Beach County: 211,894 for Bush / 327,698 for Kerry / 3,243 for Other. Official Turnout: 452,061. That adds up to 90,774 more votes than voters.
In Volusia County: 111,544 for Bush / 115,319 for Kerry / 1,495 for Other. Official Turnout: 209,052. That adds up to 19,306 more votes than voters.
Use this link to get to the data: dailykos.com
STILL MORE PROBLEMS IN FLORIDA
This account comes from partisans. Four Kerry volunteers working in Broward County sent a letter detailing election tampering to one of the reporters on our chat list. All four signed it and included their email addresses.
They report a wide, disturbing range of problems, from voters saying their electronic machines malfunctioned, poll workers denied them assistance, to police putting up roadblocks on the routes to polling places, and so on.
The entire text of the letter, along with the signatures, appears at the bottom of this letter.
OHIO
In Ohio, there were problems in four counties and one city.
In Howard County, a judge ruled on Election Day that everyone standing in line to vote at 7:30 p.m. had to eventually be allowed inside.
The order said the ruling was good for the day of Nov. 2. (You can view the order at the website below.) But maybe it didn't occur to the judge that everybody might not make it inside by midnight.
At the stroke of midnight, when the calendar legally clicked over to Nov. 3, Republican Ken Blackwell, the secretary of state, told all the waiting voters to go home. His workers gave them paper ballots (i.e., provisional ballots), told them to fill them out and bring them back later.
It was an improvised move that undercut the intent of the judge's ruling, and created chaos. Many people in Howard County still haven't turned in those ballots because they don't know where to take them or what the deadline is.
The only kind of ballot in a federal election that people can legally take home, fill out and turn in later is an absentee ballot, and those are marked as such. They're marked with clear rules concerning deadlines, postmarking, and so on.
So an uncounted number of people in Howard County--estimated in the thousands-- couldn't get in and were turned away with what may be ruled an illegal procedure. The vast majority of those votes wre expected to go to Kerry based on the heavily Democratic population of Howard County.
The Democrats have filed a lawsuit. You can click on the Ohio State University law school website to read about it:
Meanwhile, in Warren County, election officials locked the doors to the County building and refused to allow bi-partisan observers to watch the vote-count. They also denied access to the AP reporter (it is standard procedure for the AP to observe vote-counting in counties all over the country.)
The Sheriff of the county said he did it for "homeland security" reasons. He never explained or specified what the security concerns were.
Here is the link to the story in the Cincinnati Enquirer: enquirer.com
Meanwhile, in a Columbus suburb called Gahanna, the same problem showed up with electronic machines that we saw in Florida: more votes were cast than there were voters to cast them. In this case, however, the problem was investigated and the extra 3,893 votes were shown to have been erroneously tallied for Bush.
Here is the link to the story on the Ohio Network News:
Meanwhile, in Mahoning and Mercer Counties, electronic machines again malfunctioned, but the effect that had on the vote count is not clear. The machines had to be re-set, and at one point showed votes of "negative 25 million," according to the head of the local board of elections.
Here is the story from the local Youngstown paper, called the Vindicator:
INDIANA
In Laporte County, electronic voting machines once again appear to have failed.
They tallied results for 22,200 voters, even though there are 79,000 registered voters in LaPorte County. Assuming the county actually had a 65% turnout rate (comparable to others in the area and its own track record), that means 29,000 votes were not counted.
Here is the link to the story in the Michigan City News-Dispatch:
NEW HAMPSHIRE This is one of several states where original exit polls (interviews with voters as they are leaving) do not jive with the results produced by electronic voting machines. I was told by an administrator at Bev Harris's group, called BlackBoxVoting (more on this below) that they are urging Ralph Nader to press for a recount in New Hampshire. Nader was on the ballot there, so he is in a good position to ask for a re-count. You can read about Harris and her work at BlackBoxVoting.org.
SIX STATES
In at least six states, there was a large difference between how people said they'd voted, and how officials said they'd voted.
In Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New Hampshire and New Mexico, there was a large discrepancy between what voters said in the original exit polls, and the final results claimed by election officials.
In each of those six states, electronic voting machines were used in some or most of the counties.
In contrast, in states where paper ballots were the primary method of voting, there was little or no discrepancy between original exit polls and official results.
To see an easily viewable graph of this data, go to
That graph was originally compiled by a website affiliated with The Raw Story, which often gets quoted in the major dailies. So far as I know, it's a reputable site.
You can see their original posting here:
MORE ON EXIT POLLS
These are routinely conducted in elections by major news organizations. Accounts are surfacing that both the Associated Press and CNN (and perhaps others) later CHANGED their exit polling data to more closely resemble the official results.
So far as I know, none of the news orgs has offered an explanation. They may try to justify it on statistical grounds.
Here are two accounts. The first is very brief, the second is in-depth:
MORE ON ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINES
Here is an except from the Moderate Independent website about Bev Harris's work. She is a freelance journalist who has been documenting how unreliable the machines are, and how vulnerable they are to tampering.
"Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting and the BlackBoxVoting.org web site, has documented numerous cases of electronic disasters. One occurred in Volusia County, Fla., in 2000 in which county election officials hand recounted more than 184,000 paper ballots used to feed the computerized system, after the central ballot-counting computer showed a Socialist Party candidate receiving more than 9,000 votes and Al Gore getting minus 19,000. Another 4,000 votes were received for Bush that should not have been there.
"Election officials eventually tallied Gore beating Bush by 97,063 votes to 82,214. But the wrong numbers had already been sent to the media, which were used by FOX and other networks to erroneously call the election for Bush and swing the public relations part of the recount battle in his favor."
I urge you to get familiar with Harris and her work as quickly as possible.
Three Members of Congress Have Asked the GAO to Investigate the Election
Three Congressmen have asked the General Accounting Office, a federal agency, to investigate the election, citing questionable results in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina and California. Click here to see their letter to the GAO:
Remember These Four Points:
-- Bush's approval numbers were consistently below 50% throughout the campaign.
-- New Democratic registrations in Ohio were 10 times that of Republicans, and in Florida, Democrats held a similar but somewhat smaller advantage.
-- All the polls that were still giving Bush leads after the debates were within the margin of error, and when the undecideds started making up their minds over the last weekend, Kerry's poll numbers were surging.
-- the $10 million exit-poll system, specifically designed not to fail this time, clearly showed, in the original reports, a Kerry victory.
Other Voices to Hear:
Other people besides me and the journalists I know are beginning to question the legitimacy of the election. Here are some of them:
Here is a report of voter complaints in 7 Southern states: ABC
Again, I urge you to realize that there may still be time to do something about this before the Electoral College meets on December 13th.
The first step is to educate ourselves. The second step is to educate the mainstream media. The local and regional press, and the alternative media, have been doing their jobs; now we need the national press to do its job, too.
If you are concerned about this election being stolen, please do two things:
1) Send your concerns to everyone you know, both inside and outside the United States.
2) Send your concerns to the major news organizations. A list of contacts appears at the end of this message.
Sincerely,
Donna Knipp, New York, N.Y.
The Letter from Kerry Workers In Broward County, Fla.:
"Spurred by the unwillingness of the broadcast media to report voting problems during the 2004 election race, we want to alert others to the widespread voter suppression and disenfranchisement that occurred in Broward County, Florida. We staffed the emergency hotline for the Kerry Campaign Headquarters in Broward County from late October through the election.
"All of us were devastated by the margin of Bush’s win in Florida, particularly since polls predicted the race would be extremely close.
"Many of the calls to our hotline were from voters who had pressed the “Kerry” button on their electronic voting screen, only to have “Bush” light up as the candidate they had chosen. In some cases, this would happen repeatedly until about the 5th or 6th time the voter pressed “Kerry” and eventually his name would light up. In other cases, the voters pushed “Kerry” but were later asked to confirm their “Bush” vote.
"We had calls about a road block, put up by the police at 7am on Nov. 2, which blocked road access to two precinct locations in majority black districts. There was no justification for the road block – no accident or crime scene or construction.
"Many of our calls dealt with voter suppression, or manipulation, of the Haitian population – occurrences which seem too numerous, and their targets too indefensible, as primarily poor, first-time-voter, Creole-speaking refugees, to be anything but systemic. In one example, a voter whose hands were bandaged could not press the touch-screen himself; he asked the nonpartisan election official to press “Kerry” for him, but the election official pressed “Bush” and sent his vote immediately into the machine. Many, many others were denied the right to vote and were not given provisional ballots, while others were refused assistance at the polls, even though provisional ballots and voter assistance are legal rights.
"Others were told they had already voted and were turned away, although they had never voted previously. This latter experience was a complaint not isolated to Haitians but also included other surprised voters with no recourse except their word against that of the Supervisor of Elections.
"We spoke with hundreds of voters who were certain they had registered to vote in the past 6 months, well before the October 18 deadline, but were not on the rolls. And those were just the people who had the information to contact us.
"The local paper, citing the Supervisor of Elections office as its source, told all people voting by absentee ballot that they could turn in ballots by hand to any of its seven offices by 5pm on Tuesday, Nov. 2.
"Every single one of those offices except one was closed on Tuesday.
"We had numerous calls from voters on Nov. 2 whose precincts had closed, yet the Supervisor of Elections office had given voters no notification of the closure, and no notification of where to go to vote.
"Thousands of people were likely disenfranchised because of inexcusable mishaps such as this. We had many calls from people who had been harassed by poll workers, who were turned away without being allowed the right to vote provisionally (another breech of voter rights). Other people were turned away because the address on their driver’s license did not match the address on their voter registration card; again, this is in direct violation of election law.
"All of these problems do not even take into account the 58,000 absentee ballots that had been “lost” by the Supervisor of Elections, in perhaps the most democratic county in the state, disenfranchising thousands of people who were disabled, out of the country, or elderly and unable get to the polls. These events, and many others, have been documented and also reported to lawyers, but we fear they will not get the attention they deserve. This is what we witnessed in just one county. We believe that these “voting irregularities” raise serious concerns about the legitimacy of the results in Florida, and more broadly, about the health of democracy in this country."
Libby Anker Libanker@berkeley.edu Ryan Centner rcentner@berkeley.edu Jill Greenlee jillgs@socrates.berkeley.edu Rachel Van Sickle-Ward rvansick@berkeley.edu
November 10, 2004
Don't let the door hit you -- It's good to see Ashcroft stepping down. What a great relief to have survived his reign somehow. But just watch. Bush will come up with someone worse. New York Times 57% of Brits now think the invasion was wrong. Reuters Halliburton admits bribes "may have been paid." Commondreams Incredible Vote Results -- Bush the Wonder President gets more votes than there are voters. Consortium News What you can do about vote fraud. Bev Harris at Democratic Undergroun. Send evidence of voter fraud to Cameron Kerry at cameronkerry@mintz.com. Keith Olbermann on vote fraud and the coverage of it. MSNBC Odds that the tallies are accurate: 50,000 to 1. Blue Lemur Election Maps Hospital bombed to the ground in Fallujah -- Targeting civilians? Uruknet.info Isn't it interesting that all the places that were actually hit on 9/11 went solidly for Kerry? The 911 Truth Organization surfaced in an article in The New York Times. "'It just isn't possible that 19 screw-ups with box cutters pulled this whole thing off,' Mr. [James] Walter said in a telephone interview Friday as he traveled from Florida to California by train. He has traveled by train since Sept. 11, 2001, he said, because he has been too scared to fly. 'We've never gotten solid answers on why Tower 7 collapsed when it was two full blocks away from where the planes hit,' he said. We've also never received an answer for how such a large plane left such a small hole in the side of the Pentagon.'... A Zogby poll of New Yorkers' opinions about the 9/11 investigation, released last month, indicated that 49 percent of New York City residents and 41 percent of New York state residents believed that some federal officials 'knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act.' The poll also found that 66 percent of New York City residents and 56 percent of state residents wanted a fuller investigation of the 'still unanswered questions.' Using the poll findings to make their case, relatives of victims of the attacks and others skeptical of the commission's investigation have asked Eliot Spitzer, the New York attorney general, to open an investigation into what they said were unanswered questions."
November 11, 2004
Vote on a CNN poll on the question: "Do you believe there is a U.S. government cover-up surrounding 9/11?" At 9:55 p.m., November 10, its about 81% to 19% in favor of "Yes." [At 7:30 a.m. November 11 its 88% to 12% in favor of yes.] So there you have it.
Now, Bush has chosen a successor to the malevolent Ashcroft! Could Bush find another so vile? Yes! Indeed! Bush has a great talent for seeking out life forms normally seen only under rocks. Gonzales, his new nominee, is the guy who wrote up the torture memos for him. That's a test of loyalty, if ever there was one. Create a legal justification for disregarding the Geneva Conventions, boy, because we really want to torture, and we don't want anything to hinder us in pursuit of our goal. Loyalty is Bush's primary criterion for promotion. It was a favorite Nazi trick, by compromising someone's integrity, you gain power over them. Now that Bush has "the power of the people behind" him, he doesn't need Ashcroft. He can come out in the open and be the hideous monster himself. No more need to put on airs. No more elections to worry about! They don't torture "for information," which they seem to think justifies it. Torture is proven to be ineffective for getting good information. They do it for the sheer sadistic pleasure, and for intimidation. Can you spell t-e-r-r-o-r?
The Bush doctrine is: We are the biggest baddest around, and we are going to use our power to maintain the superiority we now possess. That means anyone whom we deem to be threatening to that superiority, we will crush. That is a paraphrase of "The National Security Strategy of the United States," and not a particularly loose interpretation.
"Shock and Awe", the Bush brand name for terrorism, was the centerpiece of the Bush campaign to take over Iraq. It was meant to be a demonstration of what can happen to anyone who defies us, or even anyone who doesn't defy us, if we get an idea to smash someone. It's classic gangsterism, which is, when moved to the government level, called fascism. The Bushes are the biggest racketeers in the world, bar none. In all of history!
Now someone suggested Bush may nominate Ashcroft for the Supreme Court! As absurd as that sounds, it just might be what Bush has planned. Who could believe it? But who would have imagined he would have made Ashcroft attorney general. Ashcroft wouldn't have been such a monster if Bush hadn't wanted him to be.
Rock Me To Sleep -- David Corn of The Nation once again steps forward as the left's own caped crusader against conspiracy theories, and urges calmness and complaisance in the face of massive evidence of sweeping voter fraud, manipulation, intimidation, cheating, destroying ballots and registration forms and so forth. Corn has a million reasons why what looks like blatant fraud may not really be. "Clear away the rhetoric," he intones, "and what's mainly left are the odd early exit polls (which did show Kerry's lead in Ohio and Florida declining as Election Day went on and which ended up with the current national Bush-Kerry spread), troubling instances of bad electronic voting, and curious--or possibly curious--trends in Florida. This may be the beginning of a case; it is not a case in itself." A laser focus on one thing at a time, ignoring all the rest, eliminating one argument at a time with some Byzantine reasoning, but ignoring the overwhelming preponderence of evidence that they cheated a thousand ways. And you are telling us not to get excited? Thanks David for being the voice of reason and calm. I say, "Do not go gentle into that good night."
I heard we are under an Orange Alert as of today. Is that up or down? I don't know what color we were last. I don't even know what the colors are. I guess the really bad one is red. I'm sure glad Americans voted for the guy that keeps everyone so safe. Americans are now so pummeled with noise they are as good as brain dead. 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead. How can anyone hear that and not be outraged? No WMD. No connection to Al Qaida. False information presented to the U.N. 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians. How do these people screen that out and say they are voting for moral values? How insane are Americans? Tanks on the street in response to an anti war protest. Indymedia, MYDD Post election American death toll surging -- APNEWSL Senator Bob Kerrey on CNN: "KERREY: That's correct, because the president had a case, a very simple case to make: I am the commander in chief. I won the war in Afghanistan, even though John Kerry supported it, even though, by the way, there's a credible case that the president's own negligence prior to 9/11 at least in part contributed to the disaster in the first place. ZAHN: How so? KERREY: Well, the 9/11 report says in chapter eight -- now that it's beyond the campaign, so the promise I had to keep this out of the campaign is over. The 9/11 report in chapter eight says that, in the summer of 2001, the government ignored repeated warnings by the CIA, ignored, and didn't do anything to harden our border security, didn't do anything to harden airport country, didn't do anything to engage local law enforcement, didn't do anything to round up INS and consular offices and say we have to shut this down, and didn't warn the American people. The famous presidential daily briefing on August 6, we say in the report that the briefing officers believed that there was a considerable sense of urgency and it was current. So there was a case to be made that wasn't made." The curse of Bush II -- Salon The law for the new draft [that Bush promised wouldn't happen] is at thomas.loc.gov. Enter H.R. 163 and click search. As soon as the next attack happens, it will go into place. Will your vote count? Channel 8, WISH TV Indianapolis Election comments by Chomsky -- Z Mag
