CNN.com – Ashcroft: ‘Activist’ judges can put nation’s security at risk – Nov 12, 2004

Without referring to specific adverse rulings on the treatment of detainees or enemy combatants, Ashcroft blasted “activist” judges for encroaching on the powers that he insists belong solely to the president in wartime.

“The danger I see here is that intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing of presidential determinations in these critical areas can put at risk the very security of our nation in a time of war,” Ashcroft said. …

“Ideologically driven courts have disregarded and dismissed the president’s evaluations of foreign policy concerns, in favor of theories generated by academic elites, foreign bodies and judicial imagination,” Ashcroft said.

Wampum: Liberal Federal Judges?

The conservative argument that the Federal Judiciary is controlled by liberals may have been true at one time but is clearly not the case today. That point can be demonstrated in three ways. First, the numbers show that it is Republican Presidents, not Democrats who, by and large, have shaped the current Federal Judiciary.

Of the nine current members of the Supreme Court, seven were appointed by Republicans. In the last thirty-five years (since 1969) there have been thirteen appointments to the Supreme Court. Republican Presidents have made eleven of those appointments while Democratic Presidents have made two.

At the Circuit Court of Appeals level, the pattern remains the same. Since 1969, Republican Presidents have appointed 211 Judges to the Circuit Courts. Democrats have appointed 122. Since 1969, Republican Presidents have appointed 813 trial Judges to the District Court bench while Democrats have made 508 such appointments.

If the Federal Judiciary is comprised of a bunch of liberal activists, it is the GOP who put them there.

[original links from dangerousmeta!]

Ashcroft and After

Ashcroft, in the end, can’t properly be called a conservative at all; rather, he used his job to expand executive branch authority, the power of police agencies to monitor citizens without judicial oversight and the intrusion of government into private lives. Ashcroft treated criticism and dissent as treason, ethnicity as grounds for suspicion and Congressional and judicial oversight as inconvenient obstacles. No wonder that finally even a conservative attack dog like Congressman Bob Barr soured on Ashcroft justice; no wonder that even the Rehnquist Supreme Court slapped down the Administration’s Guantánamo detention policies, declaring that even a state of war is not “a blank check.”

President Bush’s selection of White House counsel Alberto Gonzales to succeed Ashcroft shows that Bush has no intention of changing the tenor or the policies of the Justice Department. It was Gonzales who laid the legal groundwork for torture at Abu Ghraib with a memo claiming that detainees in the “war on terror” were not covered by the Geneva Conventions–which he described as “quaint.” And it was Gonzales who urged the President to deny prisoner-of-war status to the detainees at Guantánamo, leaving them unprotected from coercive interrogation and endless imprisonment. With those two policies alone, it can fairly be said that he played a central role in blackening America’s image throughout the world. Gonzales also played a major role in selecting extremist judicial nominees, consistently pushed the limits of executive privilege and publicly defended the Administration’s policy of detaining terrorism suspects without access to lawyers or the courts.

The confirmation of Gonzales will be a test not only of Bush’s intentions but of the fault lines within the GOP Senate majority; and a test, too, of the durability of the right-left civil liberties coalition that emerged in opposition to Ashcroft’s abuse of the law. The temptation may be to heave a sigh of relief that Ashcroft is gone, and to view Gonzales as an improvement. That would be a crucial error. Gonzeles’s nomination should provoke the first in a series of battles over civil rights, the Supreme Court and the Constitution itself.

God intervened to re-elect President Bush; George W. Bush and evangelicals; divine intervention in elections — Beliefnet.com

Did God Intervene?
Evangelicals are crediting God with securing re-election victory for George W. Bush. By Deborah Caldwell

The Almighty intervened in the U.S. election, these evangelicals believe, to allow Bush to remain president. They say God has “blessed” America with Bush–and had Sen. John Kerry been elected, God would have “cursed” the U.S. By allowing Bush to be re-elected, God has given America “more time” to stop its slide into evil. …

“This was Providence,” evangelical leader and presidential adviser Charles Colson told Beliefnet [Charles Colson was chief counsel for President Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1973…. Known as President Nixon’s hatchet man, Colson could be counted on to break the china – do whatever was necessary – to achieve the desired political ends of his boss.]. “Anybody looking at the 2000 election would have to say it was…a miraculous deliverance, and I think people felt it again this year.” By allowing Bush to stay in office, Colson said, God is “giving us a chance to repent and to restore some moral sanity to American life.” …

Meanwhile, Paul Weyrich, founder of the Free Congress Foundation and one of the original engineers of the conservative Christian political revolution, wrote an essay claiming that “God gave this President and this President’s Party one more chance…God heard the fervent prayers of millions of values voters to keep His hand on America one more time despite our national sins of denying the right to life, despite ignoring the Biblical injunction against acts which are ‘an abomination unto the Lord’ and despite the blatant attempt to remove God from the public square.”

Jim Rogers of the group Mission America sent out an email the day after the election saying, “Yesterday America cried out and He heard from heaven and answered our prayers. PRAISE GOD!!” …

Now that God has given America extra time from which to be spared his wrath, evangelicals feel some urgency to buckle down to God’s business. …

Many evangelicals think America is secular and decadent and in cultural decline. Their role, they believe, is to stem that tide and renew the culture. Many of these Christians seem to believe that God will be angry with them—and with the entire nation—if they don’t make big legislative changes. And so, they put themselves on a short leash with God, and they hope to convince other Americans to do likewise.

“God is not going to tolerate a nation that thumbs its nose at Him,” Colson says. …

It seems clear that the president himself believes that God is orchestrating American history. At the 2003 National Prayer Breakfast, for instance, Bush said, “we can be confident in the ways of Providence… Behind all of life and all of history, there’s a dedication and purpose, set by the hand of a just and faithful God.” …

The Puritans believed they were establishing the New Israel and that their enterprise was guided by God–that they were God’s chosen people headed for the Promised Land. But that metaphorical idea, that America was a beacon, began to mutate by the early 19th Century into the belief that America was the literal instrument to lead a world transformation to Christian democracy. …

“When God’s people were idolatrous and rebellious he sent justice–sometimes evil kings and sometimes foreign conquerors,” he says. “I’ve said on numerous occasions, that if God would allow his chosen people to be taken off into captivity, don’t think he won’t judge the United States.”

VotersUnite!

VotersUnite! presents the following compilation of problems reported in the media about the 2004 general election. Starting with early voting, we are seeing a wide array of problems, some of which appear in multiple states. This page allows you to see how widespread the problems are as they accumulate.

E-Voting News and Analysis, from the Experts

Nader requests N.H. vote recount By KEVIN LANDRIGAN, Telegraph Staff

Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader requested a hand recount of ballots in New Hampshire after getting seven-tenths of 1 percent of the vote.

“We have received reports of irregularities in the vote reported on the AccuVote Diebold Machines in comparison to exit polls and trends in voting in New Hampshire,’’ Nader wrote.

“These irregularities favor President George W. Bush by 5 percent to 15 percent over what was expected. Problems in these electronic voting machines and optical scanners are being reported in machines in a variety of states.’’

Nader/Camejo Challenge Electronic Voting Results in New Hampshire — Main Story Archive – Nader for President 2004 – www.votenader.org

Paperless electronic voting machines make it impossible to safeguard the integrity of our vote thereby threatening the very foundation of our democracy.

The seller of the machines, the Diebold Corporation, is a supplier of money to one of the major party candidates, George W. Bush. The CEO and top officers of Diebold are major contributors to the Bush campaign. This does not pass the smell test. Voters should report immediately any suspected malfunctions and deficiencies at voting precincts around the country to their Board of Elections. And voters should urge their legislators to require a voter verified paper ballot trail for random audits and independent recounts.

The Agonist: Diebold Machines

While differing in implementation, these systems share a crucial feature: all information about the votes is stored exclusively in digital format. The crucial difference from more traditional voting systems (e.g., punch card and optical scan machines) is that those systems keep the original vote in a physical form (usually paper) that can be directly verified by the voter. This “paper trail” can later be used during a recount, if the need were to arise.

A recount is generally possible with Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines, but what is recounted is simply what the machine recorded in the first place and this can be quite different from the intended vote.

Discrepancies arise through a number of factors, ranging from machine malfunction to malicious tampering with its software. Without the hard-copy redundancy offered by traditional voting systems, performing an independent audit is virtually impossible.

AxisofLogic/ The 2004 Elections

[I]t’s critical that we keep the largest issue at the forefront at all time: Why are We The People allowing private, for-profit corporations, answerable only to their officers and boards of directors, and loyal only to agendas and politicians that will enhance their profitability, to handle our votes?

Black Box Voting: Ballot – Tampering in the 21st Century

VOTERGATE

Diebold Election Systems – AccuVote-TS Product Information

AccuVote TS

The AccuVote-TS™ system is a robust voter-activated interactive touch-screen system that is hailed as the future of voting systems. Featuring an easy-to-operate touch-screen interface, it offers voters enhanced visibility and brightness.

Using an intelligent Voter Card as the voter interface, the AccuVote-TS permits voters to view and cast their votes by touching target areas on an electronically generated ballot. Each unit provides a direct-entry computerized voting application that automatically records and stores appropriate ballot information and results. At the end of the voting period, the system can print precinct totals to be included as part of the permanent record and modem the results to a host computer via TeleResults.

While classified as a direct record entry (DRE) device, the AccuVote-TS system has capabilities that transcend traditional DRE technology.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: AP – U.S. Headlines
Wisconsin city allows teaching creationism

GRANTSBURG, Wis. — The city’s school board has revised its science curriculum to allow the teaching of creationism, prompting an outcry from more than 300 educators who urged that the decision be reversed.

School board members believed that a state law governing the teaching of evolution was too restrictive. The science curriculum “should not be totally inclusive of just one scientific theory,” said Joni Burgin, superintendent of the district of 1,000 students in northwest Wisconsin. …

There have been scattered efforts around the nation for other school boards to adopt similar measures. Last month the Dover Area School Board in Pennsylvania voted to require the teaching of alternative theories to evolution, including “intelligent design” – the idea that life is too complex to have developed without a creator.

School Board Considers Censoring Books, Handing Out Bibles, Teaching Creationism (washingtonpost.com)

Some Teachers Decry List of Ideas as Attempt to Inject Christian Values Into Curriculum
By Joshua Partlow

To Margaret Young, vice chairman of the Charles County Board of Education, the required reading lists in her Southern Maryland school system are teeming with “profanity and pornography, fornication and adultery.”

Take, for example, “Dust Tracks on a Road,” an autobiography by acclaimed American author Zora Neale Hurston. Young said the book contained “disgusting” scenes of “inappropriate” sexual conduct. …

One of the more controversial proposals was to invite Gideons International to hand out Bibles to students. …

“Basically these people are telling you how you should be and, if you’re not, you’re a bad person….”

Science > Creationism and Science Clash at Grand Canyon Bookstores” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/26/science/26cany.html”>The New York Times > Science > Creationism and Science Clash at Grand Canyon Bookstores By CORNELIA DEAN

[You may] not seen “Grand Canyon: A Different View,” but others who have, including geologists on the Park Service staff, say it does not meet that test. A compilation of photographs, biblical quotations and essays published last year by Master Books, the book says God created the heavens and the earth in six days, 6,000 years ago, and that the canyon formed in a flood God caused in order to wipe out “the wickedness of man.” The geology of the canyon proves it, the books’ contributors say.

Actually, the universe formed billions of years ago, Earth formed billions of years later and the Grand Canyon was shaped by millions and millions of years of hydrology, chiefly the action of the Colorado River. Other ideas, however dearly held, are myths. Or, as the Geologic Resources Division of the Park Service put it in a memo, “The book purports to be science when it is not. The book repudiates science.”

Nevertheless, it is for sale at the six bookstores at Grand Canyon National Park.

News from Agape Press

“The interesting thing is that, really, from a creationist perspective, we have no trouble at all explaining variation within human kind like this,” he explains. “I like to help people understand that by saying, ‘Look — eight people got off Noah’s ark, and as they increased in number, and then you have the Tower of Babel, and you split up the human gene pool.'” …

[H]e says creationists understand that there are some differences between modern man and the ancient skeleton, and that this is just another example of God’s creativity in designing people. …

Ham says evolutionists simply do not know what to do with this conflicting information. But he says these die-hard Darwinists will fit all their contradictory conclusions into their faulty evolutionary framework anyway.

Questionable Tactics by GOP by Thom Hartmann

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.

Those faulty exit polls were sabotage=The Hill.com= by Dick Morris

Exit polls are almost never wrong. … So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries. … But this Tuesday, the networks did get the exit polls wrong. Not just some of them. They got all of the Bush states wrong.

To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible. It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here. …

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.

Note that the infamous Dick Morris is suggesting that Dems rigged the infallible Exit Polls. mjh

How can we process billions of ATM, credit card, debit card and other financial transactions every single day with a miniscule error rate and not be able to do the same when it matters most to the entire nation? Because voting machines are a business and every business wants to get things done as cheaply as possible. mjh

NewsNet5.com – Politics – Computer Glitch Gives Bush 3,893 Extra Votes

Computer Glitch Gives Bush 3,893 Extra Votes

Software flaw found in Florida vote machines

Software flaw found in Florida vote machines

Wired News: Computer Loses 4,500 Votes

Computer Loses 4,500 Votes