December 14
My impression that the bankruptcy of Social Security keeps moving farther away has been documented by Kevin Drum in his blog on Washington Monthly. Ten years ago, the trust fund was projected to run out in 2029, 35 years away. It should now be 25 years away, but the Social Security Administration is projecting 2042, 38 years away. And these are the pessimistic projections. Al Franken had an interesting point on his Monday show. If the economy is as bad as it would have to be for that projection to be right, the stock market would be in the toilet, so why would we put the trust fund in stocks?
There was another forum on election irregularities in Ohio yesterday held by congressional Democrats. Some of the findings have been in the news and commented upon here. Among the irregularities new to me and mentioned by the article were voters refused entry to polling places after closing, despite their presence in line before closing. Volunteers from Texas, the "Texas Strike FOrce", their expenses paid by the Ohio Republican Party, were witnessed making intimidating calls to targeted voters telling them they would be arrested if they tried to vote. The new part isn't that such calls were being made, but that they were identified. The election director of Franklin County told a federal court in answer to a voting rights lawsuit over the lack of machines in Democratic precincts that he had no more, but he actually had 81 in the warehouse. Along the same line, Kenyon College, predominately liberal and now famous for having one voting machine and 11 hour waits, was near to Mt. Vernon Nazarene University, conservative and having enough machines that there were no lines.
It bears repeating that every glitch, in Ohio or elsewhere, has benefitted Bush. Every time. Shouldn't systemic problems be a bit more evenly distributed? It also bears repeating that some fraud, like the Texas Strike Force, has been proven, and the willingness of the acting president to countenance fraud disqualifies him for office, regardless of whether the fraud was enough to change the election result.
It's sweet to see a toady like Norm Coleman left hanging in his attack on Kofi Annan, despite his literally fast talking (scroll to "Sen. Norm Coleman"). Every UN member backed the Secretary General and even gave him a standing ovation. This is unusual. Even our ambassador, John Danforth, endorsed Annan with Bush's permission, though of course after every other member had done so. Almost no one in congress supported Coleman. He has come in for criticism for getting his facts wrong on Annan's authority over the oil for food program, and for calling for Annan's resignation before the investigation was complete. From the interview on Midday, he seems utterly insensible to the irony of calling for the resignation of a CEO who allowed a huge scandal on his watch.
However, the secretive Bush administration has brought about its own version of Kremlinology, which was trying to read the workings and conspiracies of the Soviet government. Doug Grow speculates that Coleman made his call for Annan's resignation as a trial balloon with Bush's connivance, so it was by prior agreement he was left hanging and it doesn't really hurt him.
Another bit of Kremlinology (Bushology? GOPology?) says that Bernie Kerik didn't withdraw because of a nanny problem. The speculation on Air America is that the nanny was made up as a cover up. The oddities leading to that speculation are that Bush and Kerik spokesmen have given different stories about when the nanny left the country, and the nanny's name is unknown, whereas it was known immediately in the other nanny scandals. The why of the cover up is the nanny story can be claimed to be voluntarily disclosed, not dug up by the press, and they don't have to admit the vetting process was sloppy enough to miss Kerik's numerous skeletons. Maybe there was something bigger and yet unknown, or maybe connected to Kerik's patron Guiliani, who may harbor presidential ambitions. Remember Rudy Guiliani? The guy who happened to be mayor when New York was attacked, became one of Bush's most visible backers, and then blamed the troops for Iraqi munitions dumps being left unguarded? This might finish him. My liberal heart bleeds.
December 13
More details have come out about Curtis Clinton, the programmer who said he was asked to write code to steal elections. According to Wired, there are technical questions about his claims, and details about who he talked to might not be checking out. What is giving pause before dismissing his claims is that he signed an affidavit, which subjects him to perjury charges if he is lying. It's unlikely he would do that if he didn't believe it himself. The important point here is that Clinton's claims are believable because the voting machines are closed to outside inspection. If election theft took place, there would be no way to tell without examining the software, and even then it might only be possible to tell if theft was possible, not if it happened. Only a paper trail makes an audit possible. Even though there have been suspicions optical scan machines and central tabulating machines have been hacked, they have a paper trail which not only solves the auditing problem, but solves the long lines problem too. We use these machines in Minnesota, and inserting the ballot takes only a moment. Waiting for a booth takes time, but precincts in Minnesota allow voters to take their ballot to overflow tables or anywhere else they can write, which means we usually don't have lines except at the registration tables, and pre-registered voters even avoid those. I just can't fathom why these optical scans aren't the standard nationwide.
Finally, even if it's for 2002, a Bush campaign official gets indicted for fraud. James Tobin has been indicted for jamming Democratic and union GOTV phone lines in New Hampshire. Maybe he'll talk to save himself, and reveal things like who puts up flyers with misinformation, or calls voters to direct them to polling places far from home.
The challenge of the Ohio election to the state Supreme Court wasn't acted upon before the state's electors voted.
American RadioWorks and the BBC examined a problem with American elections that was mostly ignored, the gerrymandering of congressional districts (scroll down to "Carving Up the Vote"). The most surprising thing, but it illustrates how little Americans know about this, was man on the street interviews in Austin, Texas, found people who knew nothing about gerrymandering. Texas is where it precedent was broken by mid-census redistricting, Austin is the capital, it's a liberal island in a conservative state, the gerrymandering was done by and for Republicans, and Austin itself was divided between four districts. Austin isn't New York. It fits into one district. The countervailing argument consisted of the other side does it too, and the legislators can be voted out if the voters don't like it. Well, no, they can't be voted out. That's why they arrange districts their way.
The number of people who don't support the troops in Iraq is pretty short, but it must include the Bush administration. It's not just lying about producing armor, treating whistleblowers like the Soviets treated dissidents,, leaving them destitute at discharge, or lying about their deaths if it doesn't suit PR needs. Now they can be court-martialed for fixing their vehicles. They scrounged parts from abandoned vehicles, but apparently some procedure wasn't followed, so they were treated like thieves. NPR had an interview with one of the soldiers (scroll to "Soldiers Disciplined for Unauthorized Use of Military Vehicles") in which he claims this is common practice. I'm sorry, that's too harsh to say Bush doesn't support the troops. He does support them, so long as the press is watching.
December 12
It's scary how so many people who should know better can't figure out basics about the screwed up election we had. A case in point is that county officials in Ohio plan to count just three percent of the ballots, and then run the remainder through the same machines that mucked it up the first time. One of the primary problems with the Ohio elections was that the punch card machines, used by 70% of voters, missed 96,000 ballots. Why would they catch them the second time? Instead, they'll produce the same bad result, feeding demands for what should be done in the first place, a hand recount. Some Ohioans used touchscreen machines which of course have to be taken on faith, despite the outsourcing of vote counting to people with a decided interest in the outcome, so those can't be recounted. The rest, however, should just be counted the right way the first time.
Kerry's lawyer for the Ohio recount, Donald McTigue, has asked to have witnesses inspect 92,000 ballots where no vote for president was recorded.
There were protests of election fraud at many state capitols today, the day before the electoral college votes.
Nice as it is to see someone who got rich by petty corruption and brownnosing, as appears to be the case with Bernie Kerik, get bounced from an office where he would have likely been a disaster, it's irritating too. He withdrew his nomination over a sequel to nannygate. Donald Rumsfeld just lied to our soldiers about production problems making it impossible to improve their vehicle armor, on top of the other lies he's told, the grotesque incompetency of his management of the war, the corruption behind the white collar looting, and his insufferable arrogance despite all the failure. But he's keeping his job. Condoleeza Rice lied to the 911 commission among other whoppers, ignored terrorism before 911, and got everything wrong in Iraq, but she kept her job and gets to replace Colin Powell. Powell completely misled the UN Security Council with the speech where he repeatedly said "these are facts," except almost nothing was correct. His credibility was important in selling the US public too. He kept his job. The acting vice president remained on the payroll on the company that got the juicy contracts to loot Iraq. Anyone see him resigning? Or his boss, who has told plenty of whoppers of his own, besides war crimes? So for Kerik to withdraw over his nanny seems almost unjust.
The Economist backs the science behind the Lancet's estimate that 98,000 Iraqis have died because of the war. Not "during", "because of".
December 10
On the subject of Iraq, on Countdown, Keith Olbermann had a segment on Rumsfeld's Q&A with soldiers stationed in Iraq and showed Rumsfeld telling the soldiers that there isn't the production capacity to armor the vehicles any faster. Then Olbermann had a story about the manufacturer putting the armor on. The manufacturer says they could immediately increase production 20% but the Army hasn't asked them to. What a shock, Rumsfeld lied, just like the last time I heard him give a speech.
You've heard about the torture if you've been following this blog. Now you can read about the cover up in this article from Salon (the article is also reprinted on Michael Moore's web site). In June 2003, about six months before the Abu Ghraib scandal came to light, Sgt. Frank "Greg" Ford, a whistleblower in an intelligence unit committing war crimes, was treated as a mental patient when he tried to go through the chain of command to report it. The cover up started with his team leader, went to his company commander, the lieutenant colonel, and after he got home the FBI and Defense Department. At every step he's run into attempts to discredit him with no apparent attempt to investigate. The reporter who wrote the article was another soldier in Ford's unit.
In another Iraq cover up, a CIA official claims he was fired for refusing to fake evidence of WMD.
Yahoo has put several election stories in easy reach of each other. In Cleveland, though voting machines were precinct specific, voters were told to use any open machine causing their votes to go to the wrong candidate. Democratic Representative John Conyers of Michigan has asked for the raw exit polling data, but the pollsters don't want to show it. Something else occurs to me: in other countries, when results aren't known for five weeks after election day, that's taken as a sign of fraud. Why is that not the case with Ohio?
This election story is huge if true: Unfiltered on Air America had an interview with Curtis Clinton, a programmer who claims a former employer had him build a program to change results in touchsreen machines (this is an audio link). He claims the client was Tom Feeney, a Republican congressman. Rachel Madow, who conducted the interview, expressed skepticism on the grounds there is no hard evidence yet. Clinton said the proof is in the source code, if ever any independent experts can get a look at it, and it was simple enough to receate from memory. He has posted it at JustAFlyOnTheWall.com. Bev Harris of Black Box Voting suspects this is disinformation. "Disinformation" means deliberately putting out false information, in this case giving those of us concerned that the machines were tampered with to produce a fraudulent win for Bush exactly what we're hoping to find, thereby discrediting the fraud claims when the disinformation is debunked. This would cast a pall over accurate information too. If true, Clinton's claims prove that Republicans at least prepared to steal votes, even if they didn't, and answers the fraud claims' critics' charge that no whistleblowers have come forward. If it's disinformation, it shows the Republicans have something to hide but we still can't tell what. If Clinton lied on his own, maybe he just wants his 15 minutes of fame. In any case, it would all be cleared up quickly with a paper trail, open source code, and access to the machines in question. All of this has been blocked by the Republicans, which is why the suspicion won't go away and why I continue to call Bush the "acting" president, because he has yet to win a fair election.
Though I've been focused on fraud as an explanation for Bush's apparent win, a while back I offered another theory, that voters are reluctant to remove an incumbent president during a war, and based it on the six prior elections where an incumbent ran during a war and the incumbent won every time, even with the war going badly. According to Steve Rosenthal, CEO of ACT (America Coming Together), they have polls in Ohio that show voters who switched from 2000 to 2004 went for Bush, and terrorism and the war were their issues. This reinforces the theory that 3G voters (God, gays, guns) were no more important this time than other elections, though I would point out that "no more important" doesn't mean unimportant. These are still working class and middle class votes that should go to Democrats, and I still say liberals have to attend to these issues more even though that means promoting opposing positions. I've been meaning to write about these more but election fraud has to be attended to now, plus there always seems to be something else immediate going on. I've had an entry on evolution in my head for a while now. I hope tomorrow is the day.
December 9
The acting president himself is the caught in, not really a lie, but an inconsistency. The subject is Social Security privatization, which a few years ago I called a solution without a problem. Today, Bush said, "I will not prejudge any solution,'' but then said, "We will not raise payroll taxes to solve this problem.'' Apparently, he's open to any solution as long as it's the one he's already decided upon. Even though he said during campaign appearances he wouldn't privatize Social Security, he said to a more important audience that privatization was a top priority.
Paul Krugman raised some interesting points like when the trust fund runs out, tax collection doesn't stop, it just doesn't meet the need. We don't have to find all of the money for the program's obligations, just enough to meet the shortfall estimated at 19%. Also, as I pointed out, the projection that has the trust fund running out in 2042 is based on pessimistic projections, and the Congressional Budget Office, using numbers Krugman called "realistic" projects 2052. I'm not surprised, because for all the years we've been hearing of the program's doom, the date keeps going further into the future. It was 30 years away, then 35 years away, now it's 38 years away. One of the biggest frauds being perpetrated on the public is the program's bankruptcy without drastic change. Talk with the people who favor major changes, and you'll find they don't like the program ideologically, even if it's simple to fix and is thoroughly successful.
December 8
Here's a classic case of either lying or incredible denial. In response to today's forum on Ohio's election irregularities, Carlo LoParo, spokesman for Kenneth Blackwell, said, "Ohio had a great election. There were issues with long lines but I think you'll find the entire country experienced delays." That is true of Florida, the other election that ought to be examined, but I've not heard of day-long lines anywhere else, nor I believe has LoParo. If he said lines of a half hour, I'd guess he was right. However, he said long lines, which in Ohio were literally all day.
Fahrenheit 911 has been nominated for a People's Choice Award, and voting is being conducted online. It's not as good as winning the election (or perhaps we should say not as good as having a fair election) but it is a chance to stick the proverbial finger in the eye of the lying right that wants to demonize Michael Moore. Or maybe someone can at long last show me something in the movie that he got wrong?
December 7
It's a credibility issue. That's the meaning of the story that the Pentagon lied about how Pat Tillman died. It's just like when the story about Jessica Lynch turned out to be mostly made up. Lynch later gave interviews to give her version of events and personally debunk the lies, but Tillman can't do that. Just to be clear, the issue isn't Iraq as Tillman was fighting in Afghanistan and that war has overwhelming approval even among opponents of the Iraq war. The issue isn't friendly fire, because no matter how hard the armed forces try to avoid it, it's going to happen and even the staunchest Bush opponents realize it. The issue isn't even whether soldiers fired at each other while under attack or got spooked by an explosion nearby. Those things would seem bound to happen in that situation. The issue is that for whatever reason, the Pentagon has tried to stop the real story coming out. Maybe they thought they needed a hero, maybe they thought the way he was killed would diminish that or become a scandal. What matters is that people on the spot knew right away he was killed by friendly fire, yet it was a month before the public was told. I naively assumed, having heard no details, that there was nothing to hide and it just took a while to figure out what happened. I even heard Tillman's name in the news this week and figured I'd already heard he was killed by friendly fire, so what's the story. Silly me.
Why this hurts the armed forces is polls have shown for a long time they're one of the country's most trusted and respected institutions. Even lefties like me agreed. We knew they were deceptive during Vietnam, but their reputation had been rebuilt since then. Now it seems they lie like, well, their boss. Remember this kind of thing happening during the Clinton administration? I don't either. Despite the Lewinsky scandal and the many charges that never panned out, Clinton set a tone by being honest on policy matters including foreign policy and war. Bush, by contrast, has lied like it's a reflex, including the big lies to get the Iraq war going and to cover his screw ups in 911. Is it possible the armed forces have taken a cue from the boss?
Don't like Clinton as an example? Fine. Today is the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Franklin Roosevelt had on his hands one of the biggest disasters in American history. It probably seemed like the biggest when it had just happened. Roosevelt didn't lie. He had a commission on Pearl Harbor which didn't have to fight the president to get information. The Pentagon told the truth, and just held back information useful to the enemy. They were completely different from Bush's boys.
Maybe the lying has trickled down the chain of command, because it looks like not only did prisoner torture continue in Iraq after it was publicly revealed, but some special forces doing it tried their own cover up by intimidating DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) employees. I don't buy for second that they came up with prisoner abuse idea all on their own. The tone is set far above, by leaders who sought before the war to justify using torture and ignoring international law regarding prisoners.
Something to watch tomorrow: Democratic members of Congress will hold a forum in the form of a hearing on election irregularities. They invited Kenneth Blackwell, who is certainly the man with a lot of the information sought by those of us trying to figure out what happened in the election he ran. My bet is he doesn't attend.
December 6
Better late than never: at long last, the national Democratic Party is taking the election in Ohio seriously.
Some U.S. House Democrats have been ahead of their party in taking this seriously. They've reacted to the many complaints they've received not just by asking for a GAO investigation, but by sending this letter to Kenneth Blackwell spelling out the problems in the election he ran and asking 34 specific questions, mostly along the lines of "How did this happen?" and "What are you doing about it?"
Speaking of "what are you doing about it," the Public Editor at The Oregonian, Michael Arrieta-Walden, says what his paper's readers did about it was demand the paper cover the election fraud issue. He said his paper had been slow to pick up the story because the stories aren't originating in Oregon, the wires haven't had much, and the Kerry campaign failed to make an issue of it. The issue has been driven by the grassroots, including the blogosphere. I don't know that this little blog had a hand in that, but that's what I've been trying to do by raising this issue day after day, so allow me to feel a little good about that.
Speaking of the news media, Trio had an interesting documentary on 24 hour news channels, Feeding the Beast: The 24-Hour News Revolution. It started from CNN's humble beginnings in 1980 through the jingoism (my word, not theirs) of the invasion of Iraq. The part that stuck out was that Fox News was the only media organization that refused to cooperate. Trio did have footage of Bill O'Reilly and Roger Ailes, but no interviews. Maybe it was the right's instinctive secretiveness and need to control the message. They needn't have worried. Ann Coulter talked and didn't get trashed. The focus was on CNN and the revolution in TV news it has wrought, not on Fox and how it lies.
December 5
The bad news: a new report from the Defense Science Board says the resentment of the Muslim world has grown worse as a result of the war in Iraq, and even resentment in Europe is endangering vital alliances. The good news is at least someone in the pentagon is trying to get the truth across the Secretary of Defense and his boss, the acting president. The Bush administration is singularly immune to reality, but maybe someday someone will break through. At least the Defense Science Board didn't have to leak, like whoever told the press about the reports on Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo last week.
Minnesota is one of those states plagued with politicians who took a no tax pledge in 2002 in hopes of winning election. Thanks to our governor and Republican legislators, and maybe this is part of why they took such a shellacking in 2004, our social services and schools suffered severe cuts in funding. Nick Coleman wrote about a school near the capitol that had almost no books until donations came in recently, and this is a state that used to have one of the best school systems in the country. This led to a high level of educational achievement and a high standard of living, but now too many beneficiaries of Minnesota schools prefer to starve them. Meanwhile, battered women's shelters are overfilled and understaffed. Governor Pawlenty is getting a bunch of businesses together to squeeze more efficiency out of the medical system, to the extent it can be called a system, but apparently looking at whether the system itself is screwed up isn't part of the plan. Charlie Weaver, formerly Pawlenty's chief of staff and now a lobbyist for a group representing the state's biggest business, said, "I'm optimistic that we can turn this big ship. It will take a while, but market forces will change it." Why should market forces work now? They couldn't fix it ten years ago. Or twenty. Or thirty. You get the idea. We do have Minnesota Care for people who can't get insurance from employers but don't qualify for Medicaid. It works rather well, so of course it's been taking cuts too.
Speaking of Minnesota, U.S. Senator Mark Dayton has been called a coward ever since he moved his staff out of Washington due to warnings of terrorist threats (he would have been out of Washington himself like every senator, but the right's name callers are rarely interested in facts). I wonder if any of those who called him a coward would like to follow him on his trip to Iraq?
December 4
It's not just me folks. I'm not the only one who has used the phrase "war crimes" to describe the mistreatment of prisoners by the Bush administration. It's not even just the maker of the sign I quoted over there on the right. Human rights advocates are attempting to start official investigations in Canada and Germany. The Canadian effort relies on the U.N. Convention against Torture, which was ratified by both Canada and the U.S. The German case might be trickier, since it relies on domestic German law declaring universal jurisdiction over suspected war criminals. If anyone harbors illusions that U.S. prosecutors, who after all work for Bush, will bring charges in U.S. courts, you might want to notice this: the administration is arguing in court that information gained by torture is legal. Torture is illegal so presumably gaining information this way is illegal, but Bush is arguing that detainees in the current wars have no constitutional rights, which means we can do whatever we want to them. Even if there were a reasonable interpretation of the Constitution, it's a violation of international law like is the core of the Canadian case. But forget the legalities for a moment. Think about it: an American government, accused of torture, isn't denying it, promising to investigate, or promising to stop. It's defending the legality of torture. That makes Bush and the other decision makers war criminals, and that's in a literal sense, not rhetorical. Remember when Americans were the good guys?
Read this harrowing account from The Independent of the insurgent seizure of a Baghdad police station. Who are the incompetents who left the Iraqi police so ill-equipped? Oh right, so the same guys who've screwed up everything else so far. The same guys who managed to stay in office despite the appearance of fraud. Speaking of which, Bev Harris of Blackboxvoting.org posted on update on the situation in Volusia County, mentioning that local races might have been affected too and claiming other Florida counties are stonewalling her attempts to see their election records.
December 3
The Minneapolis Star Tribune recently ran an extended obituary for a local man, Clarence Forester, who was a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. I bring this to readers' attention because ever since the debate started on whether to attack Iraq, conservatives have been browbeating liberals with the charge that we would have stood by and done nothing instead of fighting Hitler. It's bad enough that Americans keep thinking every war is a repeat of World War II, which Iraq War II is not. What makes it so much worse is conservatives have the basic facts wrong. It was their ideological predecessors who opposed doing anything about the Axis as long as the war was just in Europe and Asia. Conservatives ignored the rise of dictators, persecution of minorities, and invasion of neighbors. It was the left that raised the alarm about these dictators and the need to use force to stop them. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade is exhibit A. The American left raised a volunteer force to fight the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, who were receiving aid from Hitler and Mussolini. Unfortunately, the left couldn't convince the democracies of the threat they faced when it could have been stopped with a smaller war, and America persecuted them for it. The super patriots wouldn't listen then any more than they listen now. Instead they have dragged us to a disastrous war by factual misinformation and misinterpretations of history.
The overturning of a fake election: Newsweek has a slideshow from Ukraine. This photo is from that slideshow, and I hope attribution is enough to satisfy copyrights. It's just a marvelous photo. The bigger point is that while Ukraine's fraud the old fashioned intimidation and destroyed ballot kind, are we sure we got any better result from our black box voting? Maybe the fraud was less blatant here not because there was less of it, but because it was computerized. We don't have to let our elections get to the point where demonstrators surround the capitol and people fear for the stability of their country, like is the case in Ukraine.
Also from Newsweek, arms control can work. Despite the refusal of Russia, China, and the U.S. to sign on, the treaty banning land mines has succeeded in reducing their use and manufacture, and a lot of progress has been made in clearing them. Why is it every attempt to make the world a safer place is opposed by the U.S. and some dictatorships? You'd think the company we keep would make our leaders rethink their positions. Besides the land mine treaty, we held out on the Kyoto Protocol, the war crimes treaty, we even took decades to ratify the banning of genocide.
This is why some blue states don't want to understand the red states. After a recount, it's official: Alabama voted to keep segregation laws in the state constitution. One of the clauses to be removed says there is no right to a public education, and the social conservatives fought the keep those laws on the grounds that a court might order school tax increases. How awful, spending money on education. After all, protecting moral people from anything that might undo their God given ignorance made Alabama what it is today --- a place that votes to keep segregation in the 21st century.
December 2
The day after the New York Times revealed that a Red Cross report from June showed abuse "tantamount to torture" was still going on at Guantanamo, the Washington Post revealed that the army knew about torture at Abu Ghraib a month before the photos came out which told the whole world. Remember how the Pentagon and the White House acted surprised? What, none of this made its way up the chain of command? The article says abuse occurred elsewhere than Abu Ghraib, so it wasn't just a few rogue soldiers. I wrote a couple days ago about the implication of the Red Cross report being that even if there was no knowledge beforehand or prior approval, a little hard to believe given the memos that have come out, they definitely failed to act to stop the torture after they knew about it. This is a basic human rights violation. Coming in the context of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq makes these war crimes. No wonder Bush won't sign the treaty that created the war crimes court. He'd and his cronies would quickly be sitting in the defendant's chair.
Hamilton County election official Tim Burke, a Democrat, has done one very good thing I would expect from a Democrat and said one thing that shows that as an election official he just doesn't get it. The good thing is he has called for 400 disallowed provisional ballots to be counted on the grounds that the errors were committed by poll workers, not voters. Several precincts voted at each polling place, so it was easy for voters to be at the right place but the wrong line. Some voters were literally at the wrong table, that was all. Apparently overwhelmed poll workers didn't tell people which line was which until they got to the front of the line, and surely anyone can understand that someone who waited hours in the wrong line doesn't want to have to wait hours more. Whether from sympathy or misinformation, some poll workers allowed voters to vote in the wrong precinct. Since that was allowed in the last primary, that's reasonable. That's right, that rule change came between the primary and general elections. It's one more aspect of the Ohio election that seems designed to confuse the process rather than simplify it. It's a classic case of the problem being either corruption or incompetence, neither of which is excusable.
The part Burke didn't get is the problem of the punch cards. He said that if a recount happens, he'll hand count a few precincts, then run the rest through the machines again. He misses the point that the machines made a lot of errors the first time, and of course they'll screw up again, so what's the point of that? The reason for the recount is that the first count has proven to be about worthless. There have been so many errors, so much reason to suspect fraud, that only a careful recount can come close to getting the accurate result. I say "close" because the biggest problem appears to be the unknown number of people unable to vote because of the multi-hour waits, and these waits were primarily in Democratic areas and there are indications it was sometimes done deliberately.
One bit of good news though is the Kerry campaign has at long last gotten directly involved. An interesting bit in that same article is once again, a county election official doesn't get it. Delaware County doesn't want to do a recount because the county wasn't close. Republicans keep acting like county results matter, like when they show the maps with the country mostly red, or remember how after 2000 they tried to legitimize Bush by counting the number of counties he won. They seem unable to figure out that the presidential election is statewide, which is why every county has to recount regardless of its own result. The only way a county counts is that counties run their own elections, with whatever supervision a state cares to have. The key thing for readers to be aware of is the recount isn't sure to happen, nor is it sure it will be fair if it happens, which is why the pressure has to stay on.
There is some amazing hypocrisy in the criticism of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan by a couple congressional Republicans. Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota, renowned here in his home state as Bush's main toady, has called for Annan's resignation part way through the investigation of the Iraq oil for food program. He said, "If this widespread corruption had occurred in any legitimate organization around the world, its CEO would have been ousted long ago, in disgrace. Why is the U.N. different?" Hey Norm, will you call for Bush's resignation too? You're this upset over $21 billion in the oil for food program, so what do you think of $200 billion for war on false pretenses, billions ripped off by war profiteers? Should that CEO go too? That would be the acting president.
The other congressman is Rep. Christopher Shays of Connecticut. He was upset to find that Annan's son, who had worked for one of the contractors in the oil for food program but left before his employer became involved, has had his health insurance covered through June. He got $2500/month through last February. Shays is upset about this, but has no problem with the acting vice president getting deferred compensation and stock options from Halliburton after he quit as CEO. The main beneficiary of the spending in Iraq has the vice president on the payroll, but that's less of an issue than an insurance premium.
December 1
There's both good and bad in Jesse Jackson taking such a public role in the fight to expose the fraud in Ohio. The good is that finally a prominent Democrat is publicly taking seriously what the grassroots has been yelling about. This may cause more prominent Democrats and more mainstream media to take it seriously. It certainly has caused the Republicans to take it more seriously, and therein lies the bad. If the Republicans have their way, this will all be about Jackson. The other night on Countdown, Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell kept referring back to Jackson. I think there's truth to his statement that Jackson was getting in front of a parade already in progress, but since I've been bemoaning how the grassroots has been left on its own in this, I'm hardly going to complain about the presence of someone who can draw attention to it and maybe give direction. Definitely Jackson's presence does more good than harm. Maybe his willingness to use the word "fraud", even though he says only he "thinks" there's fraud but doesn't know for sure, will embolden some other Democrats.
See the archives for earlier entries.
