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[doltex]

Day of the Dead.



On the day of the dead I was on a bus coming back from
a wedding in Texistepec, Veracruz while millions of
United States citizens were voting. As I drifted in
and out of sleep that day, I often wondered what was
happening in the north. �Surely this will be a
landslide for Kerry,� I thought. �How could anyone
with a brain and a heart vote for Bush, especially
knowing what we now know about him?� Then I thought
of November 2000 and how Bush magically became
president even though he didn�t win and went ahead
with his petro-criminal agenda without the popular
mandate of the people (now there�s democracy, folks.
Exactly the kind Bush hopes to export). The crude
reality that I woke up to this November 3rd will go
down in the books as a very bleak day for humanity I
am sure. I just now read in the New York Times that
Kerry has conceded to Bush and the petro-criminal
agenda continues but this time with the people, it
seems anyway, legitimately having chosen Bush as their
president. This means that the majority of the
citizens of the United States of America are in favor
of and approve of the following:



a) waging unprovoked and unnecessary war on a
defenseless nation.

b) The murder of 100,000 + civilian Iraqis who in
no way have any significant bearing on the lives of
US citizens.

c) A president who claims to be a Christian but
behaves in exactly the opposite manner as prescribed
by the life of Jesus (anyone smell an antichrist
here?).

d) Pillaging other nations for their natural
resources.

e) Big ugly materialistic greed.

f) Sending US troops to die for zero good
reason



I could go on and on. I could mention the
democratically elected presidents of Haiti and
Venezuela for whom Bush & Co. have caused endless
grief (former president in the case of Haiti) . I
could mention Bolivia, I could mention the
disregarding of the U.N. and of our former allies in
the world. I could mention Bush & Co.�s environmental
record and their lust for more oil at the expense of
life . I could mention the mercury in my tuna. I
really could go on and on and on and on. But then I
would be exposing that I enjoy a different brand of
�freedom of the press� than what the folks in the USA
do.



Then I think of the majority of the people with whom I
went to high school, and then later at the university.
I think of their passion for the unimportant. Their
lust for power. Their selfishness. I think of jocks
and cheerleaders and sororities and fraternities and
sports bars and shopping malls and the death of main
street and cover bands and women with their stupid tit
jobs and �the big game� on Saturday. I think of the
coach who in 9th grade accused me of being on drugs
because I showed no interest in trying out for the
team. I think of video games. I think of sex being
marketed and sold as violence. I think of violence
being marketed and sold as sexy. I think of big dumb
Okie cops harassing me for �suspicious activity�. I
see a continuous smear of idiot faces speaking garbage
and useless bodies doing dumb things. I think of all
these people and say, �well no wonder�.



I am sure no one wants me there in the �good ol� USA.
I don�t stand for this shit. I really don�t. I�ll
watch this empire fall from down here in m�xico, thank
you. Because it will fall. But before it does it will
mean many more unnecessary deaths.. Rivers, oceans of
innocent blood. All done with the popular mandate of
the greedy bloated US citizens. And on their hands! On
November 2nd the US citizens chose death. They have a
day of the dead now too.



Sincerely,


doltex

[joshua2004]

�ANADALE, de acuerdo, ya tienes mejor razon para aprender espa�ol! �Si o no?

[ls650]

[thelmadatter]

Call me a dreamer or just overly-optimistic, but I hope/believe we might have already seen the worst of GW. True, he no longer has to worry about re-election, but I think he thought he had it made starting on Sept 12, 2001. What I mean is, he (or rather the people who rule thru GW, like Cheney and Geo. Bush I) thought he/they could do whatever he/they wanted post-9/11 without having to worry ... no one would oust a president when we are under attack, right?

We are in Iraq because Bush's dad wanted to finish what he started in Gulf War I. We are up to our neck in it and I can't see how another escapade in yet another country is going to divert attention in a way the GWII and Co. would want.

That there was any contest at all gives me hope in the system. I'll bet GWII and Co thought in 2001 that they could look forward to a landslide victory in 2004. But GWII did have to answer at least a few questions about his actions. Like I try to tell people here -- we are not a bunch of blind goons - America is much more complicated than that. Sure there are A LOT of blind goons -- but not everybody. High voter turnout means people cared. That Kerry got 48-49% of the popular vote means that enough people are not happy with they way things are going. If the Republicans want to keep power, they will have to keep that in mind. It may not be so easy in 2008 ... esp is Iraq stays the quagmire it is and we have another major attack. I happen to think both are very likely (as might be an assasination (attempt) on the Prez (foreign or domestic))

The only thing about the results that bothers me is how divided we are as a country. The heavily populated/multi-cultural areas of the country have very different morals/values than the more rural areas. You could see this even within states, by the county-by-county breakdown that CNN provided as well as state-by-state. States and counties with major population centers went to Kerry. The more rural areas went to Bush. Perhaps a reflection of the "culture war" that Fox News always talks about.

[moonraven]

I returned yesterday evening to Mexico after spending a month in the US.

Whoever thinks there was any contest is being spectacularly ingenuous. The same money presented US voters with 2 candidates, so that they were sure to continue in power. Kerry's immediate folding (Ironing Board Man for his stiffness and his folding) the morning of the 3rd is proof of that. He actually won Ohio, but who really cares.

The pendulum of history will NOT be swinging back. This is it--the downward apocalyptic spiral to the completion of the Mayan and Hopi prophecies.

I am with Doltex on this.

[ls650]

[MixtecaMike]

[moonraven]

There is no reason for you to look in on anything, whiner.

[gregd]

Two points:

1) More US citizens voted for President Bush than for any other American president. Every person has the right (and responsibility) in a democracy to vote. They have done this- I think this give Goerge Bush and the Republicans (lets not forget that they made gains in the other contests too) a mandate.

If you are entitled to vote, and you didnt.... well who have you got to blame? If you did vote and it was for the Democrats. Thats democracy working. Sorry.

2) Consider Iraq. 100,000 innocent people have died since the war started. This is NOTHING compared to the hundreds of thousands that were silently and brutally murdered under the regime in Iraq before the war (the plight of the Kurds is well documented).

If the coalition (US, UK, Australia, Spain, Portugal, Japan etc) did not do anything surely you will agree that more Iraqis would die in the long term?

Oh, and lets not forget that GW Bush tried to influence Saddam Hussein through the UN BEFORE the war started. Its not as if the guy has simply decided to do this... It was necessary and I for one, am poud that democracy works in the US and will soon be working in Afghanistan and Iraq.

[moonraven]

Posts like the one above are examples of the spectacular ingenuousness I mentioned before, coupled with the emotional need to be deliberately ignorant. "Democracy in action"--how ridiculously jejune.

Mussolini and Hitler were elected, too--but they didn't have the nerve to call themselves democratic leaders.

[MixtecaMike]

[gregd]

Mussolini and Hitler were elected... and it was Allied Forces that removed these dictators and returned the countries to their people. (Familiar story...)

Ignorance only occurs when you are not prepared to examine the facts...

1) More people voted for Bush than any other president

2) More INNOCENT people died under Saddam Hussein than since his removal.

Dont ignore the facts Moonraven, and please dont resort to personal insults when someone posts an opinion that differs from yours.

[some waygug-in]

I think everyone better have a look at this article before they start making pronouncements about "what the voters did or didn't do"

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm

Published on Saturday, November 6, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
Evidence Mounts That The Vote Was Hacked
by Thom Hartmann

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."

[isabel]

[gregd]

Or, the exit poll ambiguities can be explained simply as follows (source: www.bbc.co.uk);

[i]The origin of at least some of the reports giving Mr Kerry a hefty early lead in key battleground states was data collected by pollsters Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool, a consortium of TV networks and other news outlets.

They had hired the companies to carry out exit polling after the networks' problematic calls on election night in 2000. The first wave of data showed Mr Kerry with a lead of three percentage points in Florida and four points in Ohio, leading to euphoria within the Democratic camp. Both were battleground states ultimately won by President Bush.

A server crash at the pollsters' headquarters was blamed in part for the fact that information was not updated for a period of time, but those in charge of the data also blamed web pundits for misinterpreting the preliminary data or taking it out of context. [/i]