What pisses me off is my fellow Catholics. Kerry doesn’t approve of abortions — neither do I — he just wants to protect a woman’s right to choose. Catholics turning against Catholics!
I didn’t tell my Hispanic neighbor that the abortion rate is rising under Duhbya, the Uniter. Why upset him more? mjh
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
Blended Results By State
Purple-USA.jpg (JPEG Image, 616×483 pixels)
By County
Election 2004 Results
Using County-by-County election return data from USA Today together with County boundary data from the US Census’ Tiger database we produced the following graphic depicting the results. Of course, blue is for the democrats, red is for the republicans, and green is for all other. Each county’s color is a mix of these three color components in proportion to the results for that county.
The whole “red state” view serves the Republicans and the Media and dumbs down the facts. Talking about purple states doesn’t exactly fix the matter, but at least it shows more of the truth — Dems and Reps live everywhere; thank god we’re integrated.
The link below leads to a very different kind of map, a cartogram, which I find harder to digest. 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
BEWARE EXPLANATION: We humans reason very poorly, to the extent that we reason at all. Consider the current attempts to “explain” Tuesday’s election results.
First, there may not be much to “explain” here. When the electorate goes from 49-49 (Bush-Gore) to 51-48 (Bush-Kerry), that is a very minor “change.” Except on the micro level at which political pros work, it’s not clear that there’s anything much to explain here. And when a change in the vote is so small, almost any factor can be said to “explain” it. For example, how many points did Kerry lose because of the endless Swift Boat attacks? We don’t know how to answer that question, but we haven’t seen the Swift Boat matter come up very often in the instant “explanations.” [mjh: Pat Buchanan called the Swift Boat Liars For Bush the “winners” in this election.] Instead, Stampeding Pundits have rushed toward a few standard “explanations”? of the minor change in voter behavior. Sorry–there will rarely be a way to “explain”? such a change, although many aspects of Campaign 04 are, of course, well worth discussing.
But we are all human, and we humans reason very poorly unless we work hard to stay on track. Such hard work is foreign to our press corps. How does the press corps approach an election? First, pundits waste their time (and ours) for weeks trying to predict the election’s outcome. And let’s face it, these efforts tend to go very poorly.( In this election, John Zogby couldn’t come close to “predicting” the outcome ten hours after the voting began!) But so what? Hours later, predictions in ruins, pundits begin “explaining”? the outcome–the outcome which they couldn’t predict. Of course, they can’t explain it either–but in that case, there is no objective check on the high theories that they throw off.
Why did this race end up 51-48? Most pundits can’t answer to that question, and don’t even know how to approach it. We make this suggestion: Beware explanation. Many aspects of this election are worth discussing. But most of the pundits you see on TV won’t even know what they are.
I recommend you read the rest of Howler’s column for a discussion of the Religious Right that feels ‘dissed’ by Democratic Elites. mjh
Politics News Article | Reuters.com
It will not be an easy task. Defeated in the presidential election, the party that dominated U.S. politics from the 1930s until the 1990s also lost ground in both chambers of Congress and the Republicans retained control of most of the state governorships.
“I think this is a realigning election. The Democrats are going to have to get used to permanent minority status for a generation or two,” said Tom Schaller, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. …
In many ways, the Democrats have become a coalition of minorities — blacks, homosexuals, Jews, the unmarried and the unreligious. Bush’s political strategist Karl Rove characterized the typical Democrat as “somebody with a doctorate … people who imbibed the values of the sixties and seventies and stuck with them.”
Yeah, those crazy sixties ideas like equality, justice, peace, love — what bunch of looney liberals! And, heck, we need to find a way to express ourselves more simply. mjh
TimesDispatch.com | Bush advances his agenda
A day after declaring victory in a hard-fought election, President Bush said at a news conference, “I’ll reach out to everyone who shares our goals,” adding that “I earned capital in this election, and I’m going to spend it.” …
Bush said he felt it was “necessary to move an agenda that I told the American people I would move,” adding: “When you win, there is a feeling that the people have spoken and embraced your point of view.”
Stop the Tape: President Bush Has Learned About The Enemy, Declares: “I Meant What I Said”
See, to them, you have to understand, to many in Washington and the White House press corps, and many in the left in general, you say things to fool people.
You say things to avoid controversy or you say things to actually deceive people. But you never say what you mean. That’s a sign of weakness. That’s giving your intentions away. You don’t do that. You gotta fool people. You gotta lie to ’em. You gotta set ’em up. You gotta deceive ’em, and I think that’s why so many people have trouble understanding Bush.
Please express my heartfelt thanks to Michael Moore for helping re-elect President Bush.
LS
Fort Worth, TX
Voting for Bush because of Michael Moore is like voting for Kerry because of Lush Limbaugh. If Moore or Limbaugh made up your mind, if *either* was your main motivation, maybe you really are a moron. Ask around.
What we learned is that if one party claims for itself *everything* that is good at the most basic and personal level (family, freedom, faith) while projecting onto the other party everything that is bad (weakness, duplicity, corruption), those who say they are good and their enemies are bad will persuade some people. The 55.5 Million who voted for Kerry were not persuaded. The 80 Million who did not vote may not have been persuaded. Three percent is a mandate for caution.
The Radical Right has hammered a wedge into the heart of the nation for at least 12 years (think Gingrich and the impeachment of Clinton) using some of the most incendiary language (think Limbaugh). Now, after a brutal campaign in which no one can think Bush/Cheney/Swiftvets took the high road, we’re all supposed to be nice again. You can show us how it’s done in two years. You reap what you sow.
peace, mjh