from GAWKER:

Freemans, tuesday night the 16th of nov. the bush twins , along with 2 massive secret service men, tried to have dinner. they were told by the maitre'd that they were full and would be for the next 4 years. upon hearing, the entire restaurant cheered and did a round of shots... it was amazing!!! [Ed: We're hearing that this is actually true.]

from the proof-that-there-is-a-vast-right-wing-conspiracy department:

Environmentalists fear that oil exploration would ruin the refuge despite claims from the oil companies that modern techniques would keep environmental damage to a minimum.

Ironically, the oil companies have not been pushing for drilling. It is the Bush administration, backed by local politicians in Alaska, that has kept up the pressure. For the Republicans, a decision in their favour is the chance to give the environmental movement a real bruising.

As Tom DeLay, the Republican leader of the House of Representatives, said three years ago, a pro-drilling vote would "crack the backs of radical environmentalists." As for Alaska's politicians, the arrival of oil companies in the refuge would bring in more revenues.

Of course, the Republicans do not describe the issue as the chance to put those pesky environmentalists in their place. The administration's position is that the US needs to develop more domestic energy sources, including the proven oil reserves in Alaska, to lessen America's dependence on foreign oil.

But not by much. Americans use 19 million barrels of oil each day, or 7 billion barrels of oil annually. The US interior department estimates that the refuge could have anywhere from 5.7 billion barrels to 16 billion barrels. Even erring on the generous side, the area would yield at most two years' worth of oil, although most estimates put the supply at no more than six months.

That seems precious little oil for the high level of effort expended and the inevitable environmental damage that would ensue. Experts predict that oil production from the refuge could not begin for at least 10 years and the Congressional Research Service, the nonpartisan congressional thinktank, estimates it would take at least 15 years.

So why are Republicans so keen to open up Alaska for more drilling when the prospects are so meagre? Environmentalists suspect that the real motive is to set down a marker. If the White House gets its way on such a contentious issue, there will be no holding back oil companies from other wilderness areas, such as the Rocky Mountains region and parts of New Mexico.

But even if the administration wins its battle in the Arctic, much is happening at the state level that runs counter to the administration's thinking.

more juicy stuff for those of you trying to defend yourselves against the evangelical warriors.

a MUST READ!

rock ridge institute writes:

Right-wing commentators have insisted that in both cases the problem was caused by a few misguided and troubled individuals. No need for any further scrutiny; the only issue is to punish the bad guys. But this resort to the “bad apple” theory is actually the leading edge of “the new right-wing permissiveness”. Conservatives have long blamed the permissiveness of liberals for many of our society’s most intractable problems–crime, delinquency, and drug use. But the Right now has embraced a more insidious form of permissiveness that is creating an “anything goes” moral culture. The elements of this new permissiveness are the bad apple theory and the idea that reliance on a “higher authority” eliminates the need for moral judgments. Together these undermine a culture of moral responsibility.

just saw thomas frank (what's wrong with kansas) on jon stewart. it appeared that tom was walking over jon's head. amazing. jon, you need to learn that we're not all dumb.

if ever there was any doubt about the nuGOP being the party of hate:

"If I had one dirty bomb ... I could eliminate all the liberals in Fresno at once." – right-wing Fresno (CA) City Council member Jerry Duncan on August 15, 2003
Fresno Bee

"We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals by making them realize that they could be killed, too." – Ann Coulter
Reason

"My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building." – Ann Coulter
American Politics

"Chelsea is a Clinton. She bears the taint; and though not prosecutable in law, in custom and nature the taint cannot be ignored. All the great despotisms of the past — I'm not arguing for despotism as a principle, but they sure knew how to deal with potential trouble — recognized that the families of objectionable citizens were a continuing threat. In Stalin's penal code it was a crime to be the wife or child of an ‘enemy of the people’. The Nazis used the same principle, which they called Sippenhaft, ‘clan liability’. In Imperial China, enemies of the state were punished ‘to the ninth degree’: that is, everyone in the offender's own generation would be killed, and everyone related via four generations up, to the great-great-grandparents, and four generations down, to the great-great-grandchildren, would also be killed. (This sounds complicated, but in practice what usually happened was that a battalion of soldiers was sent to the offender's home town, where they killed everyone they could find, on the principle neca eos omnes, deus suos agnoscet — ‘let God sort 'em out’.) – John Derbyshire
The National Review, February 15, 2001

and speaking of the draft, or one that is being denied in the works, we have this tidbit from louisana:

ALEXANDRIA (AP) - When Larry Chevalier took his son to get his first driver's license, he was floored to discover that to get it, the boy had to preregister for a nonexistent military draft.

''I just can't believe it,'' said Chevalier, whose 16-year-old son, Nathan, did fill out the form to register with the Selective Service so he could get his license.

''They wouldn't let him get it otherwise,'' Chevalier said Saturday.

Even a 15-year-old boy who wants a learner's permit in Louisiana must provide information to be forwarded, when he turns 18, to the Selective Service System, which would run a military draft if one is set up again.

headline says it all: Government looking at military draft lists

The Selective Service System (SSS) and the U.S. Department of Education now are gearing up to compare their computer records, to make sure all men between the ages of 18 and 25 who are required to register for a military draft have done so.

The SSS and the education department will begin comparing their lists on Jan. 1, 2005, according to a memo authored by Jack Martin, acting Selective Service director.

While similar record checks have been done periodically for the past 10 years, Martin’s memo is dated Oct. 28, just a few days before the Nov. 2 presidential election, a hard-fought campaign in which the question of whether the nation might need to reinstate a military draft was raised in debates and on the stump.

It took several more days, until Nov. 4, for the document to reach the Federal Register, the official daily publication for rules and notices of federal agencies and organizations.

The memo was also produced after the U.S. House voted 402-2 on Oct. 5, against House Resolution 163, a bill that would have required all young people, including women, to serve two years of military service.

why doesn't anybody recognize that the insurgency didn't start until months after baghdad fell.

from zogby (for the full version of I SMELL A RAT):

I smell a rat. It has that distinctive and all-too-familiar odor of the species Republicanus floridius. We got a nasty bite from this pest four years ago and never quite recovered. Symptoms of a long-term infection are becoming distressingly apparent.

The first sign of the rat was on election night. The jubilation of early exit polling had given way to rising anxiety as states fell one by one to the Red Tide. It was getting late in the smoky cellar of a Prague sports bar where a crowd of expats had gathered. We had been hoping to go home to bed early, confident of victory. Those hopes had evaporated in a flurry of early precinct reports from Florida and Ohio.

By 3 AM, conversation had died and we were grimly sipping beers and watching as those two key states seemed to be slipping further and further to crimson. Suddenly, a friend who had left two hours earlier rushed in and handed us a printout.

"Zogby's calling it for Kerry." He smacked the sheet decisively. "Definitely. He's got both Florida and Ohio in the Kerry column. Kerry only needs one." Satisfied, we went to bed, confident we would wake with the world a better place. Victory was at hand.

The morning told a different story, of course. No Florida victory for Kerry--Bush had a decisive margin of nearly 400,000 votes. Ohio was not even close enough for Kerry to demand that all the votes be counted. The pollsters had been dead wrong, Bush had four more years and a powerful mandate. Onward Christian soldiers--next stop, Tehran.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics

I work with statistics and polling data every day. Something rubbed me the wrong way. I checked the exit polls for Florida--all wrong. CNN's results indicated a Kerry win: turnout matched voter registration, and independents had broken 59% to 41% for Kerry.

Polling is an imprecise science. Yet its very imprecision is itself quantifiable and follows regular patterns. Differences between actual results and those expected from polling data must be explainable by identifiable factors if the polling sample is robust enough. With almost 3.000 respondents in Florida alone, the CNN poll sample was pretty robust.

The first signs of the rat were identified by Kathy Dopp, who conducted a simple analysis of voter registrations by party in Florida and compared them to presidential vote results. Basically she multiplied the total votes cast in a county by the percentage of voters registered Republican: this gave an expected Republican vote. She then compared this to the actual result.

Her analysis is startling. Certain counties voted for Bush far in excess of what one would expect based on the share of Republican registrations in that county. They key phrase is "certain counties"--there is extraordinary variance between individual counties. Most counties fall more or less in line with what one would expect based on the share of Republican registrations, but some differ wildly.

How to explain this incredible variance? Dopp found one over-riding factor: whether the county used electronic touch-screen voting, or paper ballots which were optically scanned into a computer. All of those with touch-screen voting had results relatively in line with her expected results, while all of those with extreme variance were in counties with optical scanning.

The intimation, clearly, is fraud. Ballots are scanned; results are fed into precinct computers; these are sent to a county-wide database, whose results are fed into the statewide electoral totals. At any point after physical ballots become databases, the system is vulnerable to external hackers.

It seemed too easy, and Dopp's method seemed simplistic. I re-ran the results using CNN's exit polling data. In each county, I took the number of registrations and assigned correctional factors based on the CNN poll to predict turnout among Republicans, Democrats, and independents. I then used the vote shares from the polls to predict a likely number of Republican votes per county. I compared this ‘expected' Republican vote to the actual Republican vote.

The results are shocking. Overall, Bush received 2% fewer votes in counties with electronic touch-screen voting than expected. In counties with optical scanning, he received 16% more. This 16% would not be strange if it were spread across counties more or less evenly. It is not. In 11 different counties, the ‘actual' Bush vote was at least twice higher than the expected vote. 13 counties had Bush vote tallies 50--100% higher than expected. In one county where 88% of voters are registered Democrats, Bush got nearly two thirds of the vote--three times more than predicted by my model.

Again, polling can be wrong. It is difficult to believe it can be that wrong. Fortunately, however, we can test how wrong it would have to be to give the ‘actual' result.

I tested two alternative scenarios to see how wrong CNN would have to have been to explain the election result. In the first, I assumed they had been wildly off the mark in the turnout figures--i.e. far more Republicans and independents had come out than Democrats. In the second I assumed the voting shares were completely wrong, and that the Republicans had been able to massively poach voters from the Democrat base.

In the first scenario, I assumed 90% of Republicans and independents voted, and the remaining ballots were cast by Democrats. This explains the result in counties with optical scanning to within 5%. However, in this scenario Democratic turnout would have been only 51% in the optical scanning counties--barely exceeding half of Republican turnout. It also does not solve the enormous problems in individual counties. 7 counties in this scenario still have actual vote tallies for Bush that are at least 100% higher than predicted by the model--an extremely unlikely result.

In the second scenario I assumed that Bush had actually got 100% of the vote from Republicans and 50% from independents (versus CNN polling results which were 93% and 41% respectively). If this gave enough votes for Bush to explain the county's results, I left the amount of Democratic registered voters ballots cast for Bush as they were predicted by CNN (14% voted for Bush). If this did not explain the result, I calculated how many Democrats would have to vote for Bush.

In 41 of 52 counties, this did not explain the result and Bush must have gotten more than CNN's predicted 14% of Democratic ballots--not an unreasonable assumption by itself. However, in 21 counties more than 50% of Democratic votes would have to have defected to Bush to account for the county result--in four counties, at least 70% would have been required. These results are absurdly unlikely.

The second rat

A previously undiscovered species of rat, Republicanus cuyahogus, has been found in Ohio. Before the election, I wrote snide letters to a state legislator for Cuyahoga county who, according to media reports, was preparing an army of enforcers to keep ‘suspect' (read: minority) voters away from the polls. One of his assistants wrote me back very pleasant mails to the effect that they had no intention of trying to suppress voter turnout, and in fact only wanted to encourage people to vote.

They did their job too well. According to the official statistics for Cuyahoga county, a number of precincts had voter turnout well above the national average: in fact, turnout was well over 100% of registered voters, and in several cases well above the total number of people who have lived in the precinct in the last century or so.

In 30 precincts, more ballots were cast than voters were registered in the county. According to county regulations, voters must cast their ballot in the precinct in which they are registered. Yet in these thirty precincts, nearly 100.000 more people voted than are registered to vote -- this out of a total of 251.946 registrations. These are not marginal differences--this is a 39% over-vote. In some precincts the over-vote was well over 100%. One precinct with 558 registered voters cast nearly 9,000 ballots. As one astute observer noted, it's the ballot-box equivalent of Jesus' miracle of the fishes. Bush being such a man of God, perhaps we should not be surprised.

What to do?

This is not an idle statistical exercise. Either the raw data from two critical battleground states is completely erroneous, or something has gone horribly awry in our electoral system--again. Like many Americans, I was dissatisfied with and suspicious of the way the Florida recount was resolved in 2000. But at the same time, I was convinced of one thing: we must let the system work, and accept its result, no matter how unjust it might appear.

With this acceptance, we placed our implicit faith in the Bush Administration that it would not abuse its position: that it would recognize its fragile mandate for what it was, respect the will of the majority of people who voted against them, and move to build consensus wherever possible and effect change cautiously when needed. Above all, we believed that both Democrats and Republicans would recognize the over-riding importance of revitalizing the integrity of the electoral system and healing the bruised faith of both constituencies.

This faith has been shattered. Bush has not led the nation to unity, but ruled through fear and division. Dishonesty and deceit in areas critical to the public interest have been the hallmark of his Administration. I state this not to throw gratuitous insults, but to place the Florida and Ohio electoral results in their proper context. For the GOP to claim now that we must take anything on faith, let alone astonishingly suspicious results in a hard-fought and extraordinarily bitter election, is pure fantasy. It does not even merit discussion.

The facts as I see them now defy all logical explanations save one--massive and systematic vote fraud. We cannot accept the result of the 2004 presidential election as legitimate until these discrepancies are rigorously and completely explained. From the Valerie Plame case to the horrors of Abu Ghraib, George Bush has been reluctant to seek answers and assign accountability when it does not suit his purposes. But this is one time when no American should accept not getting a straight answer. Until then, George Bush is still, and will remain, the ‘Accidental President' of 2000. One of his many enduring and shameful legacies will be that of seizing power through two illegitimate elections conducted on his brother's watch, and engineering a fundamental corruption at the very heart of the greatest democracy the world has known. We must not permit this to happen again.

(11/12/2004)
- By Colin Shea, The Freezer Box

how anybody can not believe war crimes have been committed in fallujah, is beyond me.

from the AP:

BAGHDAD, Iraq Nov 14, 2004 — In the weeks before the crushing military assault on his hometown, Bilal Hussein sent his parents and brother away from Fallujah to stay with relatives.

The 33-year-old Associated Press photographer stayed behind to capture insider images during the siege of the former insurgent stronghold.

"Everyone in Fallujah knew it was coming. I had been taking pictures for days," he said. "I thought I could go on doing it."

In the hours and days that followed, heavy bombing raids and thunderous artillery shelling turned Hussein's northern Jolan neighborhood into a zone of rubble and death. The walls of his house were pockmarked by coalition fire.

"Destruction was everywhere. I saw people lying dead in the streets, wounded were bleeding and there was no one to come and help them. Even the civilians who stayed in Fallujah were too afraid to go out," he said.

"There was no medicine, water, no electricity nor food for days."

By Tuesday afternoon, as U.S. forces and Iraqi rebels engaged in fierce clashes in the heart of his neighborhood, Hussein snapped.

"U.S. soldiers began to open fire on the houses, so I decided that it was very dangerous to stay in my house," he said.

Hussein said he panicked, seizing on a plan to escape across the Euphrates River, which flows on the western side of the city

"I wasn't really thinking," he said. "Suddenly, I just had to get out. I didn't think there was any other choice."

In the rush, Hussein left behind his camera lens and a satellite telephone for transmitting his images. His lens, marked with the distinctive AP logo, was discovered two days later by U.S. Marines next to a dead man's body in a house in Jolan.

AP colleagues in the Baghdad bureau, who by then had not heard from Hussein in 48 hours, became even more worried.

Hussein moved from house to house dodging gunfire and reached the river.

"I decided to swim … but I changed my mind after seeing U.S. helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to cross the river."

He watched horrified as a family of five was shot dead as they tried to cross. Then, he "helped bury a man by the river bank, with my own hands."

"I kept walking along the river for two hours and I could still see some U.S. snipers ready to shoot anyone who might swim. I quit the idea of crossing the river and walked for about five hours through orchards."

He met a peasant family, who gave him refuge in their house for two days. Hussein knew a driver in the region and sent a message to another AP colleague, Ali Ahmed, in nearby Ramadi.

Ahmed relayed the news that Hussein was alive to AP's Baghdad bureau. He sent a second message back to Hussein that a fisherman in nearby Habaniyah would ferry the photographer to safety by boat.

"At the end of the boat ride, Ali was waiting for me. He took me to Baghdad, to my office."

Sitting safely in the AP's offices, a haggard-looking Hussein offered a tired smile of relief.

"It was a terrible experience in which I learned that life is precious," he said. "I am happy that I am still alive after being close to death during these past days."

the war crimes is evident here. we USED to be the GOOD guys.

what's all this frist-cats thing about? freeperville *GASP!* provided the answer:

Capitol Hill (CNSNews.com) - Incoming Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist was a successful surgeon in his home state of Tennessee before being elected to the Senate in 1994. Now the Republican leader is being challenged by animal "rights" activists to "atone for" unauthorized medical experiments he conducted on cats.

Frist admitted in his 1989 book that, while a student at Harvard Medical School, he adopted cats from animal shelters and practiced surgery on the animals. In adopting the cats, however, Frist told shelter staff members he wanted the animals for pets. All of the cats died as a result of the surgeries.

"It was a heinous and dishonest thing to do," Frist wrote in Transplant: A Heart Surgeon's Account of the Life-and-Death Dramas of the New Medicine.

images of dr. mengele come to mind

from zogby:

Asked the question of the greatest moral crisis facing our country, 31% of Catholics chose poverty and 31% chose greed, compared to only 20% who chose abortion, and 11% that chose same-sex marriage. Further, more Catholic voters were turned off by messages from conservative leaders trumpeting ‘non-negotiable’ issues, as opposed to Catholic groups who held up a broad range of moral issues. According to Zogby, 25% of voters said that conservative Catholic messages touting ‘non-negotiable’ issues made them more likely to vote for Sen. John Kerry, whereas only 20% said these messages made them more likely to vote for President George W. Bush. Fifty-six percent said these messages had no effect on them at all."

another letter writer points out something that many forget:

what did george w. bush have that john kerry didn't have? he had all those republican radio talk shows that saturate the country behind him. for instance, rush limbaugh is on the air for three hours every day, five days a week, 52 weeks a year from one election to the next. that's full-time campaigning, and rush is only one of many republican talk-show hosts. i would be willing to make a small wager that limbaugh alone has won many a convert to the republican party.

so one has to wonder, what with alll these advantages (non-stop, suffocating radio, red-biased cable, twice as much campaign money, false smear ads), bush still came so close to losing (i actually think he did lose, since ohio was basically stolen)

from a letter writer in iowa city

the popular vote indicates that president bush has a "mandate" to continue along his current path. again, please note that president bush won by the smallest margin of any sitting president in history and whereas he got more votes than any previous presidential candidate, so did john kerry. kerry won more votes from americans than any previous presidential candidate including ronald reagan and bill clinton.

what irony. russia lecturing America on democracy. from yesterday's pravda:

The stance taken by Bush and Blair in blowing their trumpets so often spells out two things: first, that they are deep-down uneasy with what they have done, indeed Tony Blair nearly resigned earlier this year and contemplated changing from Anglicanism to Catholicism, which, however noble a quest, reveals that he is troubled inside and second, this Anglo-Saxon Alliance remains and continues to be an insult to the international community which through the United Nations Organization, made one simple request: that Washington and London adhere to international law.

They did not because they had committed their troops in the area before bothering to find out the facts and were not man enough to back down. Bush and Blair do not stand for freedom and democracy or anything else because free and democratic states must follow the principles of freedom and democracy, namely debate, discussion, dialogue and the UN Security Council is the proper forum for crisis management, not the rule of the rifle.

Bush behaved like an American settler, taming the wilderness with the bullet and the Bible. Blair followed him because he would do anything to gain protagonism. It is as simple as that.

the lapdog media has a long history of protecting the bushit empire, and now they're out to destroy those who dare question their credibility. what a joke. what a sad, dastardly-evil joke.

couldn't have said it better myself, from TIA on DU:

To believe that Bush won the election, you must also believe:

1- That the exit polls were WRONG...

2- That Zogby's 5pm election day calls for Kerry winning OH, FL were WRONG. He was exactly RIGHT in his 2000 final poll.

3- That Harris last minute polling for Kerry was WRONG. He was exactly RIGHT in his 2000 final poll.

4- The Incumbent Rule I (that undecideds break for the challenger)was WRONG.

5- The 50% Rule was WRONG (that an incumbent doesn't do better than his final polling)

6- The Approval Rating Rule was WRONG (that an incumbent with less than 50% approval will most likely lose the election)

7- That Greg Palast was WRONG when he said that even before the election, 1 million votes were stolen from Kerry. He was the ONLY reporter to break the fact that 90,000 Florida blacks were disnfranchised in 2000.

8- That it was just a COINCIDENCE that the exit polls were CORRECT where there WAS a PAPER TRAIL and INCORRECT (+5% for Bush) where there was NO PAPER TRAIL.

9- That the surge in new young voters had NO positive effect for Kerry.

10- That Bush BEAT 99-1 mathematical odds in winning the election.

11- That Kerry did WORSE than Gore agains an opponent who LOST the support of SCORES of Republican newspapers who were for Bush in 2000.

12- That Bush did better than an 18 national poll average which showed him tied with Kerry at 47. In other words, Bush got 80% of the undecided vote to end up with a 51-48 majority - when ALL professional pollsters agree that the undecided vote ALWAYS goes to the challenger.

13- That Voting machines made by Republicans with no paper trail and with no software publication, which have been proven by thousands of computer scientists to be vulnerable in scores of ways, were NOT tampered with in this election

globe and mail has this interesting tidbit:

WASHINGTON -- What do moral values have to do with legalized brothels? Not much in Churchill County, Nevada, or so it seems.

Last week, the small county in northern Nevada voted 71 per cent for the re-election of President George W. Bush, whose campaign leaned heavily on fundamentalist Christian values such as opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion.

On the same ballot, voters also crushed an effort to ban the county's legalized brothels by a margin of nearly 2-1.

"It totally blows me away," said Alan Perazzo, head of the Coalition to End Prostitution in Churchill County. "I'm as confused as the next guy. We voted 72 per cent for Bush and 63 per cent to keep the brothels."

from the chitrib:
Some artillery guns fired white phosphorous rounds that create a screen of fire that cannot be extinguished with water, The Washington Post reported. Insurgents reported being attacked with a substance that melted their skin, a reaction consistent with white phosphorous burns.

Consortium News

George W. Bush’s vote tallies, especially in the key state of Florida, are so statistically stunning that they border on the unbelievable.

i'm confused. if the bush administration (i.e., allawi) will not negotiate with terrorists, then what was all the negotiations going on before this assault? we are not fighting terrorists. we are fighting iraqis who want more than what they're getting.

josh marshall puts the bushit win into perspective:

Another measure of the Bush landslide.

President Bush won reelection last Tuesday with 286 electoral votes (over Kerry's 252).

That is the second lowest electoral margin for the winning candidate since 1916 when Woodrow Wilson beat Charles Evans Hughes by a margin of 277 to 254.

(ed. note: Between 1900 and 1912, the size of the electoral college went from 447 to 531 -- only seven fewer than there are today. So comparisons to elections more than one hundred years ago don't work unless the electoral spread is judged in percentage terms.)

Given that fact, it seems worth pointing out that this election, rather than being a decisive win or a "landslide", was actually, by every objective measure, one of the half dozen or so closest presidential contests in modern American history, along with 1876, 1916, 1960, 1968 and 1976.

election problems nicely laid out at DU.

from keith oberman, who only now has put a smile on my face knowing that there are still some reasonable anchors over at cnn. anyway, he writes about ohio, and the bushfix saga that is rolling up to be a story with some headlines (hopefully, God willing):

Thus the majority of the media has yet to touch the other stories of Ohio (the amazing Bush Times Ten voting machine in Gahanna) or the sagas of Ohio South: huge margins for Bush in Florida counties in which registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans 2-1, places where the optical scanning of precinct totals seems to have turned results from perfect matches for the pro-Kerry exit poll data, to Bush sweeps.

somehow i knew this whole relationship with chalabi was going to backfire. the picture of him sitting next to laura bush during bush's SOTU speech after the invasion of iraq, is just priceless now. from the NY Times:

The two main religious Shiite parties in the interim Iraqi government have already banded together. But they face a formidable challenge to their prominence from an unlikely and possibly anti-American alliance that is looming between Ahmad Chalabi, the former exile and Pentagon favorite, and Moktada al-Sadr, the firebrand cleric who ignited two deadly uprisings against the Americans and the interim government.

are libertarians jumpin on the "stolen election" bandwagon? over on lew rockwell's site, one could certainly think so.

I want to know the truth and I'm not afraid to acknowledge that it appears that we have been bamboozled again in this election. There is too much evidence and I'm throwing a red flag on the field. Let's take a timeout, have an instant replay and review the evidence from all angles and then make an informed decision. The stakes are too high. Here's what makes me very uncomfortable;

1. WASHINGTON – November 4 – Teresa Fedor, [via Greg Lestini]
Ohio State Senator Teresa Fedor said today: "There was trouble with our elections in Ohio at every stage. It's been a battle getting people registered to vote, getting to the ballot on voting day and getting that vote to count. There is a pattern of voter suppression; that's why I called for [Ohio Secretary of State] Blackwell's resignation more than a month ago. Blackwell, while claiming to run an unbiased elections process, was also the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio. Additionally, he was the spokesperson for the anti-business, anti-family constitutional amendment "Issue 1," and a failed initiative to repeal a crucial sales-tax revenue source for the state. Blackwell learned his moves from the Katherine Harris playbook of Florida 2000, and we won't stand for it."

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

3. Bob Fitrakis, an attorney who monitored the election with the Election Protection Coalition, said today: "There were far fewer machines in the inner-city districts than in the suburbs. I documented at least a dozen people leaving because the lines were so long in African-American areas. Blackwell did a great deal of suppressing before the election – like attempting to refuse to process voter registration forms. The absentee ballots were misleading in Franklin County. Kerry was the third line down, but you had to punch number four to vote for him. Bush was getting both his votes as well as Kerry's."

2. John Zogby, considered to be the "gold standard" of presidential polling, predicted that John Kerry and John Edwards would win with over 300 electoral votes. Following Zogby’s prediction to the letter, the preponderance of the exit polling stated that John Kerry would carry all of the major battleground states: Florida, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Oregon. These exit polls were interpreted as further confirmation of Zogby’s final predictions.

3. When comparing the exit polls to the actual "official" final results, it appears that EVERY state that had electronic voting, without paper trails, had an "unexplained" advantage for Bush of about 5%.

And it appears that EVERY STATE that had paper trails on their Electronic Voting, the exit poll results match the actual results reported within the margin of error.

So it appears that they remotely electronically messed with the electronic voting results in every state where they could get away with it (because there was no paper trail to disprove it in those states).

Does this sound like something Karl Rove might do to guarantee a victory for Bush? Don't answer – it's a rhetorical question.

SO HOW WAS THE ELECTION TECHNICALLY STOLEN?

Roz Hill explains how easy it is to steal an election with paperless electronic voting machines.

So, here are the numbers (so far): 112,596,922 voters counted in the presidential race. Bush has been consistently polling at 45%, which SHOULD have given him 50,668,614 votes, instead of 58,073,612. This translates into 7,404,998 votes being siphoned off from Kerry votes. Now, how does that magic work???

Taxpayers get hit with a bill for $3600 (or more) for EACH of the touch-screen "voting" computers, which are nothing more than dedicated COUNTERS except that they are marketed by Republicans (who vowed to ensure Bush's victory); and the American people have not been allowed to examine or certify the software in these units.

Here is how easy it is to "make magic";

We need COUNTERS - (B) = Bush; (K) = Kerry; (V) = Vote; (T) = Tally

If V = B, add 1 to B
If T = 8, add 1 to B; Clear T; Skip 3
If V = K, add 1 to K; Add 1 to T
This extremely simple bit of programming would shift 12% of the vote from Kerry to Bush, it would defy exit polls, and it would make it look like Bush had a huge popular win, which is precisely what happened.

At this point, why has no one raised the spectre of criminality or a criminal conspiracy to inflate votes for Bush and deflate tallies for Kerry via hacking the computerized voting machines?

In addition, it is highly suspicious to note that the scale of Bush’s vote far exceeded the best of the pre-election polling, which could certainly be explained by this scenario.

Time out is over and you've seen the evidence.

Is it too painful to acknowledge that we have been bamboozled or are you going to demand the truth?

then the kicker, for all the bush sympathizers out there, who voted for the king because he would do more than kerry to keep them safe.

SUCKERS!

WASHINGTON - Despite the Bush administration's pledge to battle terrorist financing, the government's average penalty against companies doing business with countries listed as terrorist-sponsoring states fell sharply after the Sept. 11 attacks, an Associated Press analysis of federal records shows.

The average penalty for a company doing business with Iran, Iraq (news - web sites), North Korea (news - web sites), Sudan or Libya dropped nearly threefold, from more than $50,000 in the five years before the 2001 attacks to about $18,700 afterward, according to a computer-assisted analysis of federal records.

After the attacks, Bush grouped North Korea, Iran and Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s Iraq together as an "axis of evil" countries with both weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorists.

A Treasury Department (news - web sites) spokeswoman said that despite the smaller average fines, the administration was doing a good job of enforcing economic penalties against nations considered sponsors of terrorism. Molly Millerwise said the department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, "is committed to ensuring that U.S. entities abide by U.S. sanction laws. We are not in the business of making money."

so you see, black is white, wrong is right. and you're stupid for not drinking the kool-aid.

and while all that is going on in iraq.... it's just not enough killing for king georgie. from the mercurynews:

Counterterror specialists look for ``chatter'' in Islamic extremist circles preceding an attack. There is a lot of chatter going on today in Washington -- only this time, it is about an American attack on Iran.

In seminars and hallways, there is eager anticipation of an airstrike against Iran's nuclear facilities. Sure, the talk goes, we may not get all those buried nuclear labs. But a few waves of cruise missiles and bombers will set Iran's program back several years, enough time to pursue regime change in Tehran.

The Iran buzz is loud enough to have prompted an unusual statement by British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw on Thursday that any attack on Iran would be ``inconceivable.'' In a message meant for Washington and for countrymen nervous about joining yet another war, Straw added: ``I don't see any circumstances in which military action would be justified against Iran, full stop.''

the assault on fallujah has begun. the 60-day martial law declared by allawi was just a signal, a ruse that there would still be time, but obviously, when you're working with the devil's handmaiden, you can't trust anything said.

the early reports:
from IFC (Information Clearing House)

11/06/04 "ICH" -- As the hubris of the American election is passed, the people of Fallujah are under new massive US assault. The world “only” superpower is posed to flatten the city of 300,000 people in order to pacify (kill) its citizens because of their opposition to US Occupation. This new massacre is sold by the Bush Administration and mainstream Western media as a “necessary step to hold election” in Iraq.

The US took over the main hospital and converted to a military hospital. In other words, the people of Fallujah no longer have a hospital to treat injured men, women and children. The US Occupation forces are currently preventing men of age 14-60 years from leaving the city. It is a crime against humanity to massacre unarmed civilians. US forces are also preventing journalists from entering the city to report on the ongoing massacre of innocent civilians.

As I write, the BBC reports that the US strikes on the centre of Fallujah have completely destroyed the Nazzal Emergency Hospital in the centre of the city. There are no reports on casualties of a criminal attack on a hospital in the centre of the city. Can you imagine this happening in Manchester or Boston?

In April 2004, the first US massive attacks on Fallujah killed more than 1300 Iraqis, mostly innocent women and children, reported by AFP. The heroic Iraqi Resistance forced the Marines to capitulate, and Fallujah became the symbol of Iraqi Resistance to US Occupation.

According to Rahul Mahajan of Empire Notes, who was in Fallujah at the time of the siege in April 2004, “[o]f 20 people I saw come into the clinic I observed in a few hours, only five were "military-age males." I saw old women, old men, a child of 10 shot through the head; terminal, the doctors told me, although in Baghdad they might have been able to save him”.

Since then, the city has been under constant aerial bombardments by US forces killing many more innocent civilians. Reuter’s news agency reported on September 02, 2004, the US killed 17 people, including 3 children, a woman and an elderly man. Reuters reported on the night of September 07, 2004, US warplanes and helicopters “pounded Fallujah all night and killed ‘up to 100 militants’ according to US military; though local hospital sources reported ‘only’ 6 dead and 23 wounded”.

The new assault comes even as Iraqi Muslim Scholars denounced the aerial bombardments as “terrorist acts”. In a statement to Aljazeera, they pointed out that the victims of the US air strikes were “women and children, most of them less than 10-years old”. They urged the international community to earnestly work for an end to the US acts of aggression in Iraq.

The Fallujah community leaders tried to negotiate a peaceful solution, but the US forces refused any negotiation. Instead, the US forces through their spokesman, Iyad Allawi, tried to paint a distorted picture of the people of Fallujah and opted for “military solution”.

The pretext for this barbarity is that the US intended to kill a “terrorist” by the name of al-Zarqawi. According to the people of Fallujah, “al-Zarqawi does not exist. He is a made-up figure”. The US Occupation forces in Iraq have been claiming that al-Zarqawi and his Arab and non-Iraqi Muslim fighters are hiding out in Fallujah. Dr Muhammad al-Hamadani, a Fallujah resident told Aljazeera News that he had no knowledge about any non-Iraqi fighters in the town.

It appears that al-Zarqawi is replacing the old and elusive pretext of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Unlike the WMD pretext, the al-Zarqawi pretext is dangerous because the one-leg elusive man can move site. In other word, if al-Zarqawi is not found in Fallujah, the Bush Administration can say that he run to another city.

However, according to Article 50 of the Geneva Conventions, “[t]he presence within the civilian population of individuals who do not come within the definition of civilians does not deprive the population of its civilian character”. The Bush Administration is committing war crimes in violations of international law.

The Iraqi Resistance has revealed the limits of the US superpower. Fallujah is the symbol of resistance to US hegemony. Fallujah is an example the Bush and his gang of terror are obsessed with and they want to destroy it. Bush and his gang of terror naïvely think that if they succeed in Fallujah, they will succeed in the rest of Iraq. Fortunately, they proved to be dead wrong.

then, the whores over at the NYTIMES:

The wave of attacks came a day after insurgents launched coordinated bomb and mortar attacks in Samarra and the surrounding area, killing at least 30 people, many of them Iraqi police officers. Those strikes demonstrated that a major American-led offensive last month in Samarra, a "no go" zone for the Americans during much of the summer, had failed to rid the city of insurgents or secure key parts of town. The senior American military official said that a "resurgence" of the insurgency had taken place because there was "a lag in providing sufficient Iraqi police."

Before the move into Falluja, about 10,000 American troops, mostly marines, amassed outside the city. Early Sunday and again Sunday night, American forces continued heavy aerial bombardments and artillery shelling of parts of Falluja, with explosions lighting up the night sky. The attacks were intended to weaken the defenses that the guerrillas had built up, the senior military official said.

Edward Wong provided reporting from Baghdad for this article. Iraqi employees of The New York Times also contributed reporting.

didn't they "practice" in samarra for the fallujah operation?

why bush's ownership & taxation reform plans will fail. it goes against every business model ever conceived. what he wants to do is tax those who work their asses off, while rewarding those that let money do the work.

we are not at that point in world relations to make this work. nice idea, but it can not work at this time.

bartcop has a thread that's interesting.

OHIO strikes again!

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.

SLASHDOT

Mihg writes "Try searching Google Images for abu ghraib, lynndie england, or Lynndie's boyfriend charles graner and note how you don't get any pictures of US soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners of war. Now try it with some of their competitors, like AltaVista, Lycos, or Yahoo!. Google used to be able to find them, as is discussed in this AnandTech forum thread." I'm guesing that this is another case of our administration confusing "National Security" with "Politically Undesirable".

motherjones is uberfabulous:

Norquist calls it the "Leave-Us-Alone Coalition," a grouping of gun owners, the Christian right, homeschoolers, libertarians, and business leaders that he has almost single-handedly managed to unite. The common vision: an America in which the rich will be taxed at the same rates as the poor, where capital is freed from government constraints, where government services are turned over to the free market, where the minimum wage is repealed, unions are made irrelevant, and law-abiding citizens can pack handguns in every state and town. "My ideal citizen is the self-employed, homeschooling, IRA-owning guy with a concealed-carry permit," says Norquist. "Because that person doesn't need the goddamn government for anything."

Few in American politics are as blunt about their plans. "If the American people really want to know what George W. Bush is up to, the best place to look is the candor of Grover Norquist," says Ralph G. Neas, president of People for the American Way. Norquist is not above equating tax collection with a street mugging, or suggesting that arguments for higher taxes on rich people echo the ones Nazis used to justify their targeting of Jews. "Bipartisanship is another name for date rape," he told a reporter in May, borrowing a phrase from former House Majority Leader Dick Armey. He likes to say he wants to shrink the size of government in half over the next 25 years "to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

the scariest line of the day (and there are indeed too many to remember):

The church has been awakened to its responsibility to keep this nation the way God intended it to be.

what better way to effectuate a perfect coup, than by using untraceable, proprietary coded vote counters?

whenever i need to point out the hypocrisy of the new league of biblethumpers, all i have to do is point to the superbowl of 2003. remember that? when janet had that costume malfunction, and the evangelicals saw the chance to get the natives riled up in a frenzy? their screaming bloody hell over a tit, and how were they going to explain it to the millions of children who were glued to the television.

i have one question: how did you explain erectile dysfunction lasting more than 4 hours? although my bets are that they wouldn't know anything about such things, they no doubt would have tried to justify their tit-anger by saying commercials aren't the same thing.

the thing that gives me the edge is that i know what goes on behind closed doors. homosexuals will have knowledge that some will be working to hide. homosexuals know all too well the hypocritical personalities some have. homosexuals naturally see both sides (and by virtue, have better compromising abilities) especially when they're still living in the closet.

yet, the christian reich will have you believe that that's evil. that they can say God loves them more with a straight face is truly amusing.

from COMMON DREAMS

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

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

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

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

Also See:

Florida Secretary of State Presidential Results by County 11/02/2004 (.pdf)
Florida Secretary of State County Registration by Party 2/9/2004 (.pdf)

While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking – the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.

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.

Yet in the touch-screen counties, where investigators may have been more vigorously looking for such anomalies, high percentages of registered Democrats generally equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry. (I had earlier reported that county size was a variable – this turns out not to be the case. Just the use of touch-screens versus optical scanners.)

More visual analysis of the results can be seen at http://us together.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm. Note the trend line – the only variable that determines a swing toward Bush was the use of optical scan machines.

One possible explanation for this is the "Dixiecrat" theory, that in Florida white voters (particularly the rural ones) have been registered as Democrats for years, but voting Republican since Reagan. Looking at the 2000 statistics, also available on Dopp's site, there are similar anomalies, although the trends are not as strong as in 2004. But some suggest the 2000 election may have been questionable in Florida, too.

One of the people involved in Dopp's analysis noted that it may be possible to determine the validity of the "rural Democrat" theory by comparing Florida's white rural counties to those of Pennsylvania, another swing state but one that went for Kerry, as the exit polls there predicted. Interestingly, the Pennsylvania analysis, available at http://ustogether.org/election04/PA_vote_patt.htm, doesn't show the same kind of swings as does Florida, lending credence to the possibility of problems in Florida.

Even more significantly, Dopp had first run the analysis while filtering out smaller (rural) counties, and still found that the only variable that accounted for a swing toward Republican voting was the use of optical-scan machines, whereas counties with touch-screen machines generally didn't swing - regardless of size.

Others offer similar insights, based on other data. A professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, noted that in Florida the vote to raise the minimum wage was approved by 72%, although Kerry got 48%. "The correlation between voting for the minimum wage increase and voting for Kerry isn't likely to be perfect," he noted, "but one would normally expect that the gap - of 1.5 million votes - to be far smaller than it was."

While all of this may or may not be evidence of vote tampering, it again brings the nation back to the question of why several states using electronic voting machines or scanners programmed by private, for-profit corporations and often connected to modems produced votes inconsistent with exit poll numbers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How could this happen?

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

That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But, it's running on a Windows PC.

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

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

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

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

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

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

On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv.) And they had left no tracks whatsoever, Harris said, noting that it would be nearly impossible for the election software – or a County election official - to know that the vote database had been altered.

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

Morris's conspiracy theory is that the exit polls "were sabotage" to cause people in the western states to not bother voting for Bush, since the networks would call the election based on the exit polls for Kerry. But the networks didn't do that, and had never intended to.

According to congressional candidate Fisher, it makes far more sense that the exit polls were right - they weren't done on Diebold PCs - and that the vote itself was hacked.

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

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

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

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann .com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."

from attenuation:

Wow, what can I say, in the past 24 hours over 540,000+ people have visited this page, and I will probably have to take it down soon due to bandwidth issues. I originally posted this to a few friends on a forum, using information from a list just like this created after the 2000 election. The list was carried by the St. Petersburg Times and the Economist, amongst others. The IQ data was originally attributed to the book "IQ and the Wealth of Nations", though I checked and couldn't find them in the current edition, I posted saying such at the bottom of the table. The tests and data were said to have been administered via the Raven's APT, and The Test Agency, one of the UK's leading publishers and distributors of psychometric tests.

I have recently been emailed by someone claiming to have seen a retraction many issues later on the behalf of the Economist Magazine. The Economist could not independently verify the IQ data and the retraction can be found here. I have yet to find any other retractions from the St. Petersburg Times or other publications. Here you can find a report correlating IQ and income, and their relation to how people voted in the 2004 election. This IQ data is based on SAT/ACT test scores. Here you can see the correlation between percentage of college graduates in a state and whom they voted for in the 2000 election.

I think matching census data to the results of the election reveals some very interesting things. For instance, there is a direct correlation that has been pointed out by the Boston Globe between the divorce rate per state, and who they voted for, as it turns out, the higher the percentage of people voting for Bush, the higher the divorce rate. That is very interesting considering many people voted based on 'morality'.

I am glad that so many people are so interested in IQ, statistical correlations, and their relation to politics. I believe such correlations are increasingly interesting as some candidates this year funneled more money into biased advertising and partisan propaganda than has ever been attempted in the history of the world.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP-CNN) -- An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said.

Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.
Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct, Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told The Columbus Dispatch.

State and county election officials did not immediately respond to requests by The Associated Press for more details about the voting system and its vendor, and whether the error, if repeated elsewhere in Ohio, could have affected the outcome.

Bush won the state by more than 136,000 votes, according to unofficial results, and Kerry conceded the election on Wednesday after acknowledging that 155,000 provisional ballots yet to be counted in Ohio would not change the result. (Full Ohio results)

The Secretary of State's Office said Friday it could not revise Bush's total until the county reported the error.

The Ohio glitch is among a handful of computer troubles that have emerged since Tuesday's elections. (Touchscreen voting troubles reported)

In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because officials mistakenly believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. And in San Francisco, a malfunction with custom voting software could delay efforts to declare the winners of four races for county supervisor.

In the Ohio precinct in question, the votes are recorded onto a cartridge. On one of the three machines at that precinct, a malfunction occurred in the recording process, Damschroder said. He could not explain how the malfunction occurred.

Damschroder said people who had seen poll results on the election board's Web site called to point out the discrepancy. The error would have been discovered when the official count for the election is performed later this month, he said.

The reader also recorded zero votes in a county commissioner race on the machine.
Workers checked the cartridge against memory banks in the voting machine and each showed that 115 people voted for Bush on that machine. With the other machines, the total for Bush in the precinct added up to 365 votes.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a glitch occurred with software designed for the city's new "ranked-choice voting," in which voters list their top three choices for municipal offices. If no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes outright, voters' second and third-place preferences are then distributed among candidates who weren't eliminated in the first round. (E-vote goes smoothly, but experts skeptical)

When the San Francisco Department of Elections tried a test run on Wednesday of the program that does the redistribution, some of the votes didn't get counted and skewed the results, director John Arntz said.

"All the information is there," Arntz said. "It's just not arriving the way it was supposed to."
A technician from the Omaha, Neb. company that designed the software, Election Systems & Software Inc., was working to diagnose and fix the problem.

the washington dispatch has some interesting information

no WONder the media is silent about any aberrations. its as if there were NONE. and ya know what? they were wrong on iraq. they were wrong on the 'exit polls', which in essence, they were indeed correct, only that they throught they were playing rove's game, and now we find the utter gall of these corpmedia types in ignoring the reality of this election.

According to the official election results posted on the Palm Beach County election website, 542,835 ballots were cast for a presidential candidate while only 454,427 voters turned out for the election (including absentee). This leaves a discrepancy of 88,408 votes cast for the presidential candidates.

Palm Beach County's supervisor of elections is Theresa LePore who is known for the 2000 Presidential Election and the notorious "butterfly ballot" that caused confusion among seniors and other Floridians.

Other election oddities occurred throughout Florida with some counties registering a 400% increase in expected voter turnout among Republicans while Democrats supposedly experienced a -60% decline in expected support within certain counties. The 50+ counties experiencing the high percentage fluctuations in expected turnout used optical scan voting machines on November 2nd.

Vote discrepancies were also found in Gahanna, Ohio which gave an extra 4,000 votes to President Bush. The error was explained away by Franklin County administrators as a "glitch" in the electronic voting system.

Developing. . .

moral values malarky - i knew it!

cbs is running a story (hopefully in primetime too) about how the media is manipulating the populace at the joy of the reich-wing.

Let’s try to snuff this election’s new Big Theory before it becomes Conventional Wisdom, although it’s probably too late.

The subject matter is "moral values." The theory is this: Kerry lost because he was very unpopular with people who believe moral values are the most important issues. This group of values voters is growing and Democrats are doomed until they can win them over.

The evidence comes from one exit poll question: Which issue mattered most in deciding how you voted for president? Here are the results (see link above)

Analysts and commentators have been stunned that moral issues would trump the other biggies. From this single result, where moral values trounced economy/jobs by a whole two percentage points, both gloaters and mourners have extrapolated a fatal flaw in the Democratic Party and all it encompasses. An industry of values voter literature has mushroomed in just the few days since the election. It’s misguided.

While the nexus of issues boiled into the words "moral values" certainly were a big factor in this election, it’s being exaggerated partly because of the oddities of the poll itself and partly because the Big Theory conforms with what Republican strategists want you to believe.

First, the poll: If the poll had been worded or constructed only slightly differently, moral values would not have been the top issue. We’re building a worldview out of a small, odd vista.

If, for example, one of the issues on the list was a combined "terrorism and Iraq," it would have been the top concern of 34 percent of the electorate and nobody would be talking about moral values.

If "taxes, jobs and the economy" was on the list as one item instead of two, it would have been the topper at 25 percent.

If, say, abortion rights, gay marriage and moral values were all on the list separately, the numbers would be very different.

Who knows what the exit poll would have found if "truth in government" were an option. Polls are fickle.

As for the notion that that the legion of values voters is exploding, I don’t see it.

America, if the trend continues, is headed towards a one-party rule.

when a country has only one party that rules what is supposed to be the most diverse populace on the planet, there's reason for increased concern about liberty, justice, and the American way.

Go to HERE

Page 23
Gahanna 1-B
4,258 - Bush
260 - Kerry

But suprisingly enough there is not a SINGLE place you can find these 4,000 voters reappear.

Not on page 23 with the senate race
Not on page 90 for county commissioner
Not on page 129 for Sheriff, County Recorder, Treasurer, Engineer, Corner, Board of Ed, or supreme court justice.
Not on page 168
Not on page 207

Drum roll please!!!
Prop 1 on page 285. Gay Unions. The wonderful hate clause that every Bush zombie is voting for. WOW! Those 4,000 voters didn't vote for this either? Crazy crazy!

Now a little more detective work.

http://www.gahanna.org/community/profile/default.asp
The City of Gahanna website.

33,000 estimated population
29% 18 or younger.
Leaves 20,130 people elligible to vote (except I missed the 18 year olds here)

Now back to the other document and go to page 23. Add up the totals in each Gahanna district.

Gahanna 1 - 8192
Gahanna 2 - 4143
Gahanna 3 - 4210
Gahanna 4 - 4191
Grand total: 20,736

Now that's what I call voter turn out! They did better than 100% I obviously needed their secrets so we can use their voter turn out methods in 2008. (haha)

So I decided to give them a phone call and see what was up! Mayors office didn't really want to talk to me. So I decided to lie and say I was with the press. The city councilman I talked to told me they have about 70% voter registration, but no, no where near 100%.

70% voter registration sounds reasonable. So that means out of 20,130 elligeable aged voters 14,091 are registered.

Wow.. that's 47% more voters than possible registered voters.. Interesting huh?

He could tell at this point that I wasn't with the press. I don't know how to "pretend" to be with the press. I just wanted to talk with someone. I asked if they have electronic voting machines but he hung up on me.

Basically, I'm so far from a conspiracy theorist and would normally laugh at the notion that someone would cheat in an election like this. Apparently I was just nieve. How many other votes are slipped in here or there. Someplace unnoticable.

This was an obvious flaw.. but how about the not so obvious?

It truly sickens me. Turns my stomach.

EOM

from the nytimes:

The new $10 million polling system used by many news organizations to predict the outcome of the presidential race had a number of problems that led to the early erroneous impression that John Kerry was heading for victory, according to a report prepared by the system's architects.

The report, written by Joe Lenski and Warren Mitofsky and obtained by The New York Times, details systemic glitches that skewed the data in ways of which several news organizations, who paid tens of thousands of dollars for the service, were not aware.

In some cases, the report said, survey takers could not get close enough to the polls to collect adequate samples of voters opinion. They were often stopped by legal barriers devised to keep people electioneering - not necessarily bona fide poll canvassers - away from voters.

The report also theorized that the poll results more frequently overstated support for Mr. Kerry than for President Bush because the Democratic nominee's supporters were more open to pollsters. Whatever the case, according to the report, the surveys had the biggest partisan skew since at least 1988, the earliest election the report tracked.

from thehill:

This is, dear Watson, elementary.

Next to the forged documents that sent CBS on a jihad against Bush’s National Guard service and the planned “60 Minutes” ambush over the so-called missing explosives two days before the polls opened, the possibility of biased exit polling, deliberately manipulated to try to chill the Bush turnout, must be seriously considered.

At the very least, the exit pollsters should have to explain, in public, how they were so wrong. Since their polls, if biased or cooked, represented an attempt to use the public airwaves to reduce voter turnout, they should have to explain their errors in a very public and perhaps official forum.

This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play.