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2004 Election Weirdness Continues
I've read dozens of submissions about election anomalies in the last week and they show no sign of slowing so I've decided to post a few of the main ones here to let you all discuss them. The first is the Common Dreams report
that shows that
optically scanned votes have a strange anomoly in florida: the Touchscreen counties roughly matched up to party registration numbers, but optically scanned paper ballot counties showed strangeness like one county where 69.3% registered democrat, but only 28% of them voted for Kerry.
Palm Beach County, Florida logged 88,000 more votes than there were voters;
that machines in LaPorte, Indiana discounted 50,000 voters;
in Columbus, Ohio voting machines gave Bush an extra 4,000 votes;
in Broward County, Florida voting machines were counting backwards;
Lastly,
precincts in New Mexico gave provisional ballots that will never be counted to as many as 10% of all their voters.
It was the Eevil Y2K Bomber. After the Legion of Cobol Coders foiled his schemes, he went into voting machines. So far, it's been more successful than his IPv4 and 8.3 filename plots.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Okay, so maybe the real question is, does the narrow margin of victory achieved by the Neoconservatives - by myriad forms of deception - amount to a "mandate" to continue their bizarre and destructive policies?
As far as I can tell, all Bush did was push us into to Iraq, set up a bunch of high-paid defense companies, and funnel taxpayer money through Halliburton, etc., right back into his campaign.
Meanwhile apparently they've loosened restrictions on companies that do business with terrorist nations, and received more donations from those companies than any others.
How can such a transparent policy of bait-and-switch continue to work generation after generation?
They cry out "we are moral!" and yet they do nothing except promote their own entrenched economic and military power.
Frankly, if the whole point of the USA is now simply to promote its own survival and prosperity, maybe it should leave the Earth. Our prosperity and supposed generosity of spirit doesn't mean shit if it is not translated into action.
Obviously, I think the action taken in Iraq is stupid. The place was under a stranglehold already, millions of children dying under the auspices of our "power."
Common people around the world are getting a little sick of the USA using its power to kill more liberally than its power to give aid - in direct opposition to the world's interests and its own.
Ordinary US citizens are getting sick of a kowtowing media that exists to simultaneously feed our narcissism and play to our susceptibilities through overblown hyperbole and emotionally-potent oversimplifications.
CNN, Fox News... You know. The agenda-setting media. The makers of history.
The election results and polling of non-partisan voter attitudes shows that more than 60% of American adults are actively concerned about issues like black-box voting, pollution, global warming, education, social welfare...
That surely stands as more of a mandate than banning gay marriage and establishing military outposts all over the Middle East.
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-- thinkyhead software and media
Shit. I need mod points. Damn good job....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill