from NewMexiKen
From CNN October 27, 2000
Gallup: Bush 52% Gore 39%
CNN/Time: Bush 49% Gore 43%
ABC/Washington Post: Bush 48% Gore 45%
Zogby: Gore 45% Bush 43%
Actual vote: Gore 48.4% Bush 47.9%
I expect a Kerry landslide. Bush will be unable to ignore, explain away, deny or defeat the drubbing he’s got coming. mjh
WALB-TV, Albany. South Georgia’s #1 News Source: Challenge dropped against most Atkinson voters
Many of the people who gathered outside the Atkinson County Courthouse had at least one thing in common, a Hispanic name.
They all received letters saying their right to vote had been challenged.
“I didn’t know why I was being challenged,” said Antonio Hernandez, who’s lived in the county for 12 years and served on a grand jury there. “I didn’t know what was the cause or anything.”
So they filled the courtroom, many prepared to show birth certificates and citizenship papers, all because three men, Frank Sutton, Phillip Liles and James Mullis, questioned their right to vote.
“It was a closely contested commissioners race,” Liles said. “And after looking into it, it had been discovered that there were some non-citizens who had been asked to vote.”
But after county attorney Russ Gillis began the hearing, it didn’t take him long to get to his point. The challenges were dismissed because they were “legally insufficient because they’re based soley on race,” he said to the courtroom.
Representing the Board of Registrars, he explained that the 96 people who received letters represent nearly 80 percent of the county’s Hispanic voter, making it obvious they were challenged only because of their race, which is a violation of the Voters Rights Act.
But before it was over, one citizen wanted to make a point of her own.
“If you went to school and studied history, you should know that even your last name is foreign,” said Olga Martinez, who was raised in a migrant farming family and became a U.S. citizen four years ago.
In fact, many of the people challenged were born U.S. citizens and pointed out that they are never challenged when they come to pay taxes.
“They kind of just take your check and I was kind of surprised to be challenged to vote,” said Sid Rodriguez, who was born and raised in Texas and has lived in Atkinson County for more than 20 years.
ith little notice or discussion, Senator Christopher Bond of Missouri allowed a provision into a Senate appropriations bill that could ban even nonpartisan voter registration efforts in public housing developments all over the country. This is an example of the unfortunate impulse now afflicting some parts of the Republican Party: a desire to suppress voting in poor and minority neighborhoods. Mr. Bond’s proposal runs contrary to both the spirit of democracy and federal law, which in recent years has moved increasingly toward broadening ballot access. The National Voter Registration Act – commonly known as the Motor Voter Act – actually requires state agencies, including those that issue welfare benefits and drivers’ licenses, to offer voter registration materials to the people they serve.
The proposed Senate legislation comes on top of recent G.O.P. maneuvers in Ohio, where Republicans challenged the registrations of more than 30,000 voters, many of them impoverished. Federal courts have stepped in to halt such challenges for now, but more are expected at the polls.
The same impulse to discourage voters was on display over the last several months in New Mexico, where the Indian Health Service of the Health and Human Services Department suspended voter registration efforts for several months at some medical centers and clinics serving Native Americans. Earlier this month, the Indian Health Service issued a memorandum effectively ending the ban, but only after untold numbers of Native Americans had missed the opportunity to register to vote in the coming election.
Mr. Bond’s argument – that housing built with public money should be used only for housing, not voter registration – makes no sense on its face. It is even more ridiculous given the universal support for voter registration on military bases around the world. Military voters tend to favor Republicans, and public housing residents tend to favor Democrats. It would be nice if everyone could agree that both groups should be encouraged to vote.
From Bush on down, buck-passers are saying the 400 tons of very powerful explosives that disappeared were gone before we got there. Yeah, right. Thanks to the embedded media, we have film of soldiers inspecting the bunkers. AFTER which, the weapons disappeared. We all have moments of incompetence, most of us have moments where we lie, but lying incompentents deserve some rebuke. mjh
Top News Article | Reuters.com
Report: Video Shows Explosives Went Missing After War
ABC News on Thursday showed video appearing to confirm that explosives that went missing in Iraq did not disappear until after the United States had taken control of the facility where they were stored.
The disappearance of the hundreds of tons of explosives from the Al Qaqaa storage facility near Baghdad has become a hotly contested issue in the U.S. presidential campaign.
Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry has charged that President Bush’s administration blundered by failing to safeguard the powerful conventional explosives.
Bush countered that Kerry was making wild accusations without knowing the facts. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Thursday advanced the administration’s argument that the explosives may have been gone by the time U.S. forces got there.
Without mentioning Kerry by name, Rumsfeld told a radio interviewer, “People who use hair-trigger judgment to come to conclusions about things that are fast-moving frequently make mistakes that are awkward and embarrassing.”
Rumsfeld also said it was “very likely that, just as the United States would do, that Saddam Hussein moved munitions when he knew the war was coming” in order to protect the material from attack.
ABC said the video it broadcast was shot by an affiliate TV station embedded with the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division when the troops passed through the storage facility on April 18, 2003, nine days after the fall of Baghdad.
ABC said experts who have studied the images say the barrels seen in the video contain the high explosive HMX, and U.N. markings on the sealed containers were clear. …
ABC said the barrels seen in the video were found inside locked bunkers that had been sealed by inspectors from the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency just before the war began.
“The seal’s critical. The fact that there’s a photo of what looks like an IAEA seal means that what’s behind those doors is HMX,” Albright said.
The soldiers were not ordered to secure the facility, ABC reported.
IAEA Says It Warned U.S. About Explosives
U.S. officials were warned about the vulnerability of explosives stored at Iraq’s Al-Qaqaa military installation after another facility — the country’s main nuclear complex — was looted in April 2003, the U.N. nuclear agency said Thursday.
The International Atomic Energy Agency cautioned American officials directly about what was kept at Al-Qaqaa, the main storage facility in Iraq for so-called high explosives, spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said.
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The disclosure shed new light on what the United States knew about Al-Qaqaa, which held 377 tons of high explosives that have vanished — an issue that has become a flashpoint in the final days of the U.S. presidential campaign.
The explosives can be used to make car bombs that insurgents have used to target U.S.-led forces in Iraq. On Thursday, an armed group in Iraq claimed in a video to have obtained a large amount of the missing material — HMX, RDX and PETN — and threatened to use it against foreign troops.
To the Editor:
Re “Mixed Results for Bush in Battles Over Judges” (“The Bush Record” series, front page, Oct. 22):
The president’s nominees to federal circuit courts have been judged conservative for their stands on hot-button issues like abortion. But a review of their financial disclosure forms and Senate questionnaires reveals that the nominees are more notable for their close ties to corporate and economic interests, especially the energy and mining industries.
Some of them were paid lobbyists for those same interests. Further, the nominees with industry ties were overwhelmingly appointed to circuit courts regarded as traditional battlegrounds over litigation affecting these industries. Independent observers we’ve talked to who follow the federal bench believe that the extensive corporate involvement among so many of the nominees is unprecedented.
Burton Glass
Executive Director
Center for Investigative Reporting
San Francisco, Oct. 22, 2004
Researchers claims that 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died in war
By Sam Lister, Health Correspondent and Michael Evans, Defence Editor
MORE than 100,000 civilians have died as a result of the allied invasion of Iraq in March last year, the first study of mortality in the country claims today.
The research, conducted in Iraq last month by a team of American and Iraqi researchers, will be published on the online edition of The Lancet, the medical journal.
It suggests that most civilian deaths have been due to military activity, with those caused by violence rising sharply in recent months.
The figures far exceed all previous estimates. Their publication just five days before the US presidential election are bound to cause controversy by reinforcing the impression that events are out of control. …
In coming to a total of 100,000 civilian deaths, the team excluded Fallujah, where two thirds of the violent deaths recorded have occurred.
Experts said that including this area, where collecting data remains highly dangerous, would push the total number of civilian deaths much higher.
A few thoughts as we enter the last week:
Duhbya says Kerry doesn’t have the resolve for the “War On Terror”. Kerry has been campaigning hard for over a year. Kerry has shown is resolve. Bush, in turn, shows how isolated and insulated he is.
After the debates, fact-checkers and Right-wingers jumped on “$200 Billion” spent in Iraq, when the correct figure was closer to $120B. Today, we learn Bush will ask for $70B more just for 2005. $190B within a couple of weeks of the debates.
A few hundred tons of tremendously powerful explosives with potential as detonators of nuclear bombs are missing from Iraq. The location was well known before the invasion (unlike all the WMDs we can’t find). Now, these explosives are missing. Does Duhbya deserve the blame? He sure does.
In ads and speeches, BushCo say Kerry tried to gut Intelligence more than a decade ago. Conveniently, they ignore that Defense Secretary Dick Cheney sought similar cuts and the new CIA Director, Porter Goss, Republican, sought even deeper cuts.
Bush & Company are unworthy of their office. And they had 4 years they never deserved to prove that point. Vote the Rats Out. mjh
Would Kerry Throw Us To The Wolves?
A new Bush ad claims Kerry supported cuts in intelligence — so deep they would have weakened America’s defenses against terrorists, and shows a pack of hungry-looking wolves preparing to attack. Actually, the cut Kerry proposed in 1994 amounted to less than 4 percent, as part of a proposal to cut many programs to reduce the deficit.
And in 1995 Porter Goss, who is now Bush’s CIA Director, co-sponsored an even stronger deficit-elimination measure that would have cut CIA personnel by 20 percent over five years. When asked about that at his confirmation hearings he didn’t disavow it.
An Avalanche of Misinformation
Two misleading Bush ads accusing Kerry of supporting tax increases on gasoline and middle-class parents were running heavily last week. According to the Campaign Media Analysis Group of TNS Media Intelligence, which tracks TV ads in the top 100 markets, the two Bush ads accounted for nearly half of the estimated $16 million spent by Bush and the Republican National Committee during that week alone.
Both ads repeat claims we’ve repeatedly disputed here. They both attempt to portray Kerry as eager to raise taxes on middle-income taxpayers, which Kerry has said consistently he won’t do. One ad characterizes Kerry’s votes against proposed tax cuts as votes to “raise taxes,” an outright falsehood.