Given that Jim Wales, the Wikipedia's millionaire founder, is a big Ayn Rand fan, has anyone detected a distinct pro-libertarian, anti-communist or anti-gov't spin to many Wikipedia articles?
I'm not saying that's good or bad (especially given our present PATRIOT Act-loving, big brotherish administration), I'm just curious if others have noticed any libertarian bias to the Wiki's articles?
I'd also argue it's not undemocratic, as the representatives are simply voting for who their state voted for. Very few states give their representatives the power to choose on their own.
Those two sentences contradict each other. In one, you're saying it's democratic. But in the other, you're saying that some states allow their electors to vote for anyone they want to vote for, regardless of what the people want. That's not democratic and is a recipe for disaster.
It forces candidates to go to the small, toss-up states (like NH) instead of just going for the big-cheese states (NY or CA).
I live in NH. Why should my vote count more than anyone else's? NH is one of the "swing states" that will literally decide the election, but we're not representative of the country as a whole.
Imagine yourself a Republican voter in NY. NY has many times the population of NH. Yet would your vote matter in NY? No. NY will go for Kerry. In effect, millions of people will be disenfranchised in NY (ditto for many other states).
Yet I in NH am privileged because we're a swing state -- my vote counts for several NY or California votes. That is not democratic, and it is not fair.
Do you really want the outright tyranny of the majority?
I'm familiar with the history of that term, but it's a loaded, biased, term which is designed to frighten and scare people; it also tries justify elitism and disproportionate electoral power.
Yes, I want the majority to rule -- I want a straight direct election for president. How come direct elections are okay for Congress but not for the president?
We have civil liberties (well, what's left of them at least) to protect minorities, but in choosing our gov't, the majority should rule in a fair one-person, one-vote election.
But not all military are in love with George Bush, no matter what Duke and the TV news tells us. You won't see stuff like this on the nightly news:
"As a military family with a combined total of 57 years of active service in the U. S. Army, myself, son, and daughter-in-law have accumulated over 80 combat medals, one or more of us have served in Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, El Salvador, Kosovo, Bosnia, and three of us served together during Desert Storm. My son recently returned from the Iraq War, his third war, and, being fed up with Bush lies and back-to-back deployments, applied to be discharged from his "indefinite enlistment" status."
"Six days later he was under investigation for making "disloyal comments" about George Bush...which amounted to saying in general conversation with other soldiers that "Bush should have never started the war" and "Bush is no military leader." He was charged under Article-15 and was denied an attorney and could not cross-examine the case against him..."
Bush's service in the TANG was no assurance of not going to Vietnam.
Give me a break. The guy scored 25 (out of 100) on his pilot aptitude test. The average to get to be a pilot was in the 70s. Yet somehow, he mysteriously became a pilot in the TANG at a time when everyone and their brother was trying to get into the Nat'l Guard.
I'm a disabled vet and I can't figure out the same thing.
I mean, I think it's fairly clear that Bush used huge political influence to avoid Vietnam. The former Texas Lt. Gov. from the 70s has recently publicly stated that he pulled strings to get Bush and other sons of the elite into the Nat'l Guard.
Bush obviously didn't want to go to Vietnam (I can't blame him), since he checked the box saying he didn't want to go overseas.
It's also clear that Bush was a deserter. After his father sent him away from Texas for being a drunk he went missing from the Nat'l Guard for a year. You mean to tell me that some of the supposedly hundreds of people that served with him are not stepping forward to claim the thousands of dollars in rewards for saying they served with Bush?! That's insane.
Then there's the military records. I remember how fat my 201 file was and how the military loved to keep paperwork. There's no way those records are "lost" -- I think it's far more likely that Bush cronies cleaned house on his records.
I also think it's fairly likely that Kerry worked an angle to get 3 purple hearts and to get out of Vietnam. Hell, I would not have wanted to go to Vietnam. But then again, when an explosion went off and Kerry got a butt-ful of rice, dirt, and some shrapnel, do we honestly think he was knew about that explosion or was calculating how it would impact on him? When he was grazed with a bullet, do we really think he was volunteering to be shot "just a little" so he could get the hell out of Vietnam and go back home?
Hell no. He got lucky. He got lucky repeatedly, saw an angle to get out, and got the hell out. I can't say as I blame him -- he did his time and played by the rules.
But that's a helluva lot more than you can say about Bush's "service"[sic]. The fact that this deserter organizes campaigns to criticize Kerry or McCain says a lot about his lack of character.
only to be surprised by just how many of my fellow servicemen are not Bush supporters at all.
And I think it's safe to say that there are significant elements of the top brass that are not Bush/Rumsfeld supporters.
This was most clearly illustrated when Gen. Shinseki, the-then chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, was forced into retirement for publicly stating that he would need "hundreds of thousands" of troops to secure Iraq.
When the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff job opened up -- the wet dream job for every general in the military -- no general stepped forward. Rumsfeld had to call one of his cronies out of retirement to take the position. That speaks volumes! The generals know that Bush/Rumsfeld threw out the "Powell Doctrine" so painfully learned after Vietnam, and they don't like it.
but I question OIF being part of the GWOT myself.
Why, just because "Operation Iraqi Freedom"[sic] was planned well before 9/11?
Do people forget Bush's hand-picked Treasury Secretary, lifelong Republican Paul O'Neill -- one of the highest officials in the US gov't, going on TV on "60 Minutes" showing a map of Iraq carved up among American and British/western oil companies and saying that the map was made long before 9/11 and the plan to attack Iraq started as soon as Bush took office?
My question is: why do you have questions?! The answer is as solid as you're going to get!
Watching from Switzerland I was amazed to see the majority of the people in a country vote for one individual and that individual lose the election.
That's the way the US Constitution works -- it's happened 3 times since the US Civil War (1860s). The people don't select the president, the states elect the president through an obscure undemocratic process known as the "Electoral College."
The US is not a democracy, it's a republic. Worse, it's a republic written with a Constitution whose wealthy authors were openly scared of democracy. Those authors inserted many checks against the democratic will.
If you want to read up on this, the "Federalist Papers," a series of pro/con arguments written by the authors of the document in the 1780s during the debate over the then-proposed Constitution, clearly points this out.
IMHO what's more telling than the history of this is the fact that today, in the 21st Century -- and after what happened in the 2000 election -- there is no serious effort to eliminate the Electoral College. That is highly indicative of a broken system.
To look at this constitutionally is fraught with landmines.
First, according to the Constitution, the states are solely responsible for how their Electoral College electors get selected, correct?
The Florida state Supreme Court did make a decision on the issue -- to recount certain counties' ballots because of claims of fraud. Based on the US Constitution, one could make an argument that the US Supreme Court should not have been involved.
But even given the fact that the US Supreme Court did decide to get involved, there's the conflict of interest angle.
If you sued someone and I was selected to judge the case, would you have a complaint of potential bias if my wife or my son worked for the person you were suing?
A simple yes or no answer will do.
Of course you'd have a claim for potential bias. Obviously, any honorable judge would recuse himself and refuse to judge the case because of the conflict of interest.
Yet 2 of the 5 Supreme Court justices who ruled for Bush to override the Florida state Supreme Court and ordered the recount to stop had conflicts of interest. One's wife worked for the Bush campaign, and one's son worked for the legal firm who was representing Bush.
Those dishonorable oligarchs did not have the decency to step aside. They cast critical votes which was the final nail in the coffin of rigging the 2000 election.
Sorry, that article is nothing more than a "he stole the election" rehash.
Did you actually read the article? The story is about an election official in Florida counting/rigging her own election, and that election was held in 2004.
The only information in the article relating to the 2000 election was to cite that the election official was controversial during that election too.
Informative? Only if your of the tin foil hat group.
Let's see. A story by an award-winning investigative British reporter, the same reporter who uncovered the "use databases to keep 90K+ Floridians from voting" in the 2000 election (thus, he has a deep background in US and Florida elections), writes a story about election corruption still going on in Florida in 2004. Yet that somehow is not informative and is the stuff of a "tin foil hat group?"
Your bias is so strong it's illogical.
First rule : If its not a commoningly know link, ie a news source many people know of, trust, or etc then its probably a hack site.
The source cited was a news aggregator site. They simply reprinted the article. See the other posts of this article where I cited the same article on Congress.org and the journalist's own web site.
Of the 46,000 registered in both states, 68 percent are Democrats, 12 percent are Republicans and 16 percent didn't align themselves with a party, the newspaper reported on Sunday.
That's bad, but aren't those individual acts?
What we know for sure (see link below) is that the Republican Party rigged the 2000 election to allow the person who got fewer votes to take the White House.
Whether it was Florida's counting illegal military ballots, whether it was Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris' use of databases to prevent 90K+ Floridians from voting because they were "suspected" felons, whether it was the Supreme Court voting 5 to 4 to stop counting ballots when 2 justices out of the 5 voting to stop counting had close relatives (a son and wife!) working for the Bush campaign, it is crystal clear that the 2000 vote was cooked.
I'm not saying the Democrats are any better. But lots of retirees being registered to vote in two places does not show a conspiracy to rig the vote. It could be a case of many spacey elderly people forgetting where they're registered. The election in Florida in 2000 definitely shows that it was rigged in many ways.
BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast is one person who originally turned up the bogus use of military absentee ballots in Florida in the 2000 election.
You'd think they would have straightened it out, but as this story reports the absentee process in Florida if anything has gotten worse!
Now, four years later and the process is not fixed, and is arguably worse than ever. Accidental or planned?
Cool! Now Google can sell ads based on the contents of my files!:-(
Is it just me, or is the GMail cheerleading by normally-privacy-concerned/.ers highly strange? Where are the rants about GMail's privacy issues -- especially when there are other free services which offer as much or more disk space and which don't have any privacy issues?!
There are a number of books dedicated to this topic. In political science circles, one classic is Piven & Cloward's "Why Americans Don't Vote." They reach distinctly different conclusions.
Hell, Ross Perot who didn't really have a chance in hell of being elected, considerably changed the political landscape.
How was the landscape changed? What effects of Perot's candidacy do I feel or can I see in today's politics?
I agree that Perot's candidacy was historic and showed the people's discontent with the duopoly. And the duopoly did move a bit to steal Perot's thunder and to negate his influence. I might even go so far as to say that some of Clinton's budget-balancing zeal was due to Perot's candidacy.
But the duopoly did their job. They set up a rigged debate commission to ensure that no other third party candidate ever "does a Perot". You didn't see Ralph Nader (or any other 3rd party challenger) in the debates in 2000 and you certainly won't see it in 2004 -- the game is fixed.
Today -- a mere decade later -- Perot's legacy is zero. The Reform Party is dead and the duopoly rules completely.
Oh, Demms screw with elections as much as possible as well.
I just cited 3 instances within the past 35 years that Republicans have cooked the presidential elections. Please give me 1 instance of Democrats doing the same.
Yes, there's no doubt that the Democrats have skeletons in their closet. They invented big-city "machine" politics, but that nasty trend hasn't been very strong since Richard Daley was the Chicago "boss" in the late 60s. And yes, Gerrymandering was invented by Democrats and is happily used by both Republocrats and Demopublicans. It's used/abused so much that the nasty bastards think it's "normal" and the way things should be done.
The whole system is just *ripe* with potential for abuses.
Well, there's only one party I can see that is treating the Presidency like a used tampon -- please educate me if I'm wrong.
IMHO, the whole system isn't ripe with potential abuse, the whole system is being abused.
From the corporate funding of our two[sic]-party system (to the extent that the corporate lobbyists actually write some laws!), to the undemocratic way the media supports the duopoly and excludes other parties, it's a nasty, rotten system that is long overdue for major, serious reforms.
With the limited choice(s) we have in politics, do we really have to wonder why 1/2 of Americans don't care enough to bother even casting a vote?
I've never understood the justification for using an average-of-averages voting mechanism to elect the president. Am I missing some obvious (to US citizens, maybe?) benefit of this,
Historically, the reason for the electoral college is that the authors of the US Constitution were not democrats -- they were republicans (I'm talking the political science definition here, not the political party). The authors feared democracy and worked to limit it in many ways. Electing senators for 6 year terms but only electing 1/3 every 2 years was one way -- to replace the entire Senate you'd need a 6-year political movement. Having Senators elected by the states and not the people (as it was until the amendment for direct election of Senators, which happened in the 1910-20s "Progressive era" of US history) was another way to thwart democracy. The electoral college was yet another way.
The authors' fear of democracy comes across clearly in the "Federalist papers", a series of arguments both pro and con the Constitution written during the debate over its ratification.
Up until the 2000 election, most Americans weren't even aware of the electoral college and its function. When I taught civics and American gov't, I was shocked to "discover" that *most* of my fellow teachers thought the US President was elected directly by the people! They thought I was insane when I explained to them how it actually worked (seriously! and these were degreed professionals!).
There are after-the-fact rationalizations that people come up with to justify this undemocratic institution. Most revolve around arguments of "representing" rural areas and small states. Of course, that tends to fall apart when you point out that we're supposed to be representing people and not land.:-)
As to it's ultimate function? IMHO, it serves to complicate and confuse the electorate and to make them feel detached and less in control.
If you're one of the elites who funds our party structure, that makes you feel more in control -- basically what the authors of the Constitution intended (remember, when those authors penned that document, you could only vote in most states if you owned property).
How did America get to the point where the fear of rigged elections (normally something reserved for so called "rogue states") is so real that many feel the neat to bring in overseers from abroad?
We got there by having the Republican party repeatedly cook and subvert our electoral system.
Does the name Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon ring a bell?! Read some good histories of the "Watergate era" -- he did far, far more than "just" break into the Watergate Hotel where the Democratic Party HQ was located.
How about Ronald Reagan keeping the US embassy hostages held by Iran locked up to prevent Jimmy Carter's "October Surprise"? That was a blatant rigging of an election.
Carter was close to doing an "arms for hostages" deal with Iran to bring back the hostages in October. Reagan sent Bush and others to Paris to negotiate a bigger "arms for hostages" deal with the Iranians. The Iranians took the better offer -- Reagan/Bush's.
Who says so? Former US CIA agents, French intelligence reports, Russian (Soviet era) intelligence, Jimmy Carter himself admitted that he heard many rumors about such a deal but that he was powerless to do anthing, and to top it off, the now-retired, former Iranian president candidly states that he did do the deal!
Now, for those that can't keep score, that's 2 rigged elections since 1972.
Add to that the 2000 election that George and Jeb Bush rigged...
That's how we got to that point. You're damned right we need international observers!!
Better still, we need new political parties -- one not dominated by undemocratic traitors and one complete with a spine (some others for variety might be nice too!).
IMHO, the gov't reports are typical bureaucratic-speak which tries too hard to be non-judgemental and non-offensive (remember, this report was being written when the authors knew that Bush would be in office for 4 years -- thus, the political price of taking a strong position would be substantial). Combining the gov't analysis with reports from even the mainstream corporate media (LA/NY Times, etc.) gives a much more thorough picture. If you add in coverage from British or other "friendly" overseas media, it's becomes far more clear what happened.
Let's see, is there a link between democrats and felons as you suggest? Sounds like a good reason to eliminate those votes, not to mention that felons are federally prohibited from voting.
State law determines whether a felon can vote or not; some states allow felons to vote (though Florida does not). As discovered and reported by the BBC (since confirmed by others) Jeb Bush used "felon lists" to keep people from voting.
Originally about 170,000 people were kept from voting this way in Florida. Of that number, more than 90,000 people were not felons, and they were perfectly legal to vote. 90% of the 90K+ kept from voting were Democrats.
Nothing fishy there, right?!
Military absentee votes must count, federal law and state can't superceed that.
That's just wrong. State law determines voting procedures and practices. The states are fully in control of how the electors get selected
And remember, it is the Electoral College's electors that choose the president -- the popular vote is just a "democratic" illusion. Some states say that if one candidate gets 50%-plus-one-vote of the popular vote, they get all of the state's electors; other states rougly proportion their electors to the popular vote -- it's all up to the state.
During the 2000 vote just the absentee military ballot issue itself would have thrown the election to Gore. Kathrine Harris -- simultaneously the FL Sec. of State who was responsible for a fair FL election and Bush's FL campaign chair (no conflict of interest there, right?!) -- broke FL law by allowing enough bogus military absentee ballots to throw the election to Bush. The New York Times also confirmed this -- post election, of course.
You have to hand it to the Republicans on this issue though; James Baker and other false-patriots created great media propaganda about Gore wanting to "deny" our GIs their vote. The media sucked that up and Gore was definitely put on the defensive on this issue.
False information about voting places and times? Why wouldn't this have affected republican voters equally?
No. Election rigging is more of a science.
By determining which precincts you want to rig, you can ensure that while you might lose a few Republican votes, the overwhelming votes lost would be Democrat.
For example, Blacks in Florida voted about 90% for Gore, following the national trend. It's a no-brainer to this in black neighborhoods and too leave suburbia alone -- that will definitely skew the vote and that is one of the instances cited by the federal investigation after the election.
The federal gov'ts report which was done after the 2000 election found many cases of such dirty tricks -- but of course, that was months after the election.
The whole "hanging chad" thing statistically could have happened to just as many republicans as democrats, it was mechanically a poorly designed system (yes, I've seen and used one).
Yes, quite true. But the hanging chad issue was settled fairly -- with a Republican and Democrat looking over an election official's shoulder and having to agree with the official for the vote to count (see earlier posts of this article).
The election was not rigged as a result of hanging chads -- that was a red herring.
The election was rigged as a result of processes noted above.
The articles both argue over the reliabililty of computer ballot counts, paper trails, and the fiction of "hanging chads" and error-proned human counts.
This is the corporate media version of what happened in Florida. It deliberately misses the big picture.
What about the fact that Jeb Bush deliberately removed tens of thousands of "supposed" felons (who were 90%+ Democratic voters; he's trying it again this year but is meeting more criticism)? What about the counting of absentee military ballots which violated Florida law? What about the findings by the federal gov't that there was deliberate denials of voting rights to many Flordians? This included false information about voting places/times, closing roads, excessive police presence at selected voting precints.
I'm all for a paper ballot trail and audited code for voting machines and a clear oversight process. But the sham election in 2000 (see link below) was far more deliberate than just an issue of "hanging chads" -- and those issues are completely ignored.
Bruce Schneier has a great term for this: he calls it "security theater".
He hit the nail right on the head; that's exactly what it is.
Fortunately terrorism isn't a threat in the US. The chances of dying of terrorism here are less than the chances of being killed by lightening or many other things. We shouldn't worry about it.
Shhh -- you're not supposed to say that, no matter how true it is.:-)
But no matter how true that is, it is not what the general population believes. And when you think about it, you can't blame them too much.
When night after night the news talks about terrorism and our vulnerabilities, it sinks into people. It should, it's supposed to. It's just like crime -- if you overreport crime enough people will lock their doors, feel frightened of blacks, and support ever-increasing police budgets and prison populations.
The article ponders the question, "Have we lost our common sense when it comes to passenger screening?"
The question assumes the purpose of the screening is security. It is not. The purpose of the screening is to build fear in the population.
Only a fearful population will sit back and do nothing while the gov't and its neo-cons pass laws like the Patriot Act and eviscerate the Bill of Rights. The corporate media plays into this fear-mongering, with everything from shows like "Cops" to overreporting crime issues and parroting whatever the gov't says.
One example: NYC (and some other areas) are supposed to be on a "High" level of terrorism alert. That's serious, right?! Yet it was just reported that NYC has dispatched dozens and dozens of police across the country to watch American citizens who might be coming to NYC to protest the Republican convention.
Given this, obviously NYC has all of its terrorism options more than covered, right? Why else would they be wasting their police manpower to send cops around the country to do 24hr surveillance on Americans with no terrorist background?
The emperor has no clothes. This terrorism hype is just like the airport security hype. They know there's little they can do to stop terrorism, so they are instead focusing on domestic issues and creating a fearful population that can be easily manipulated after the next inevitable terrorist attack.
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Given that Jim Wales, the Wikipedia's millionaire founder, is a big Ayn Rand fan, has anyone detected a distinct pro-libertarian, anti-communist or anti-gov't spin to many Wikipedia articles?
I'm not saying that's good or bad (especially given our present PATRIOT Act-loving, big brotherish administration), I'm just curious if others have noticed any libertarian bias to the Wiki's articles?
I'd also argue it's not undemocratic, as the representatives are simply voting for who their state voted for. Very few states give their representatives the power to choose on their own.
Those two sentences contradict each other. In one, you're saying it's democratic. But in the other, you're saying that some states allow their electors to vote for anyone they want to vote for, regardless of what the people want. That's not democratic and is a recipe for disaster.
It forces candidates to go to the small, toss-up states (like NH) instead of just going for the big-cheese states (NY or CA).
I live in NH. Why should my vote count more than anyone else's? NH is one of the "swing states" that will literally decide the election, but we're not representative of the country as a whole.
Imagine yourself a Republican voter in NY. NY has many times the population of NH. Yet would your vote matter in NY? No. NY will go for Kerry. In effect, millions of people will be disenfranchised in NY (ditto for many other states).
Yet I in NH am privileged because we're a swing state -- my vote counts for several NY or California votes. That is not democratic, and it is not fair.
Do you really want the outright tyranny of the majority?
I'm familiar with the history of that term, but it's a loaded, biased, term which is designed to frighten and scare people; it also tries justify elitism and disproportionate electoral power.
Yes, I want the majority to rule -- I want a straight direct election for president. How come direct elections are okay for Congress but not for the president?
We have civil liberties (well, what's left of them at least) to protect minorities, but in choosing our gov't, the majority should rule in a fair one-person, one-vote election.
But not all military are in love with George Bush, no matter what Duke and the TV news tells us. You won't see stuff like this on the nightly news:
"As a military family with a combined total of 57 years of active service in the U. S. Army, myself, son, and daughter-in-law have accumulated over 80 combat medals, one or more of us have served in Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, El Salvador, Kosovo, Bosnia, and three of us served together during Desert Storm. My son recently returned from the Iraq War, his third war, and, being fed up with Bush lies and back-to-back deployments, applied to be discharged from his "indefinite enlistment" status."
"Six days later he was under investigation for making "disloyal comments" about George Bush...which amounted to saying in general conversation with other soldiers that "Bush should have never started the war" and "Bush is no military leader." He was charged under Article-15 and was denied an attorney and could not cross-examine the case against him..."
Read more of this letter here.
Bush's service in the TANG was no assurance of not going to Vietnam.
Give me a break. The guy scored 25 (out of 100) on his pilot aptitude test. The average to get to be a pilot was in the 70s. Yet somehow, he mysteriously became a pilot in the TANG at a time when everyone and their brother was trying to get into the Nat'l Guard.
Ben Barnes, who was the Lt. Gov. of TX at that time admits he gave Bush and other sons of the TX elite special treatment (if you don't like that link, search Google and you'll find many references of Barnes' admission) to avoid Vietnam.
When you have connections like that, do you really think there was a chance George Bush was going to be sent into harm's way?
I'm a disabled vet and I can't figure out the same thing.
I mean, I think it's fairly clear that Bush used huge political influence to avoid Vietnam. The former Texas Lt. Gov. from the 70s has recently publicly stated that he pulled strings to get Bush and other sons of the elite into the Nat'l Guard.
Bush obviously didn't want to go to Vietnam (I can't blame him), since he checked the box saying he didn't want to go overseas.
It's also clear that Bush was a deserter. After his father sent him away from Texas for being a drunk he went missing from the Nat'l Guard for a year. You mean to tell me that some of the supposedly hundreds of people that served with him are not stepping forward to claim the thousands of dollars in rewards for saying they served with Bush?! That's insane.
Then there's the military records. I remember how fat my 201 file was and how the military loved to keep paperwork. There's no way those records are "lost" -- I think it's far more likely that Bush cronies cleaned house on his records.
I also think it's fairly likely that Kerry worked an angle to get 3 purple hearts and to get out of Vietnam. Hell, I would not have wanted to go to Vietnam. But then again, when an explosion went off and Kerry got a butt-ful of rice, dirt, and some shrapnel, do we honestly think he was knew about that explosion or was calculating how it would impact on him? When he was grazed with a bullet, do we really think he was volunteering to be shot "just a little" so he could get the hell out of Vietnam and go back home?
Hell no. He got lucky. He got lucky repeatedly, saw an angle to get out, and got the hell out. I can't say as I blame him -- he did his time and played by the rules.
But that's a helluva lot more than you can say about Bush's "service"[sic]. The fact that this deserter organizes campaigns to criticize Kerry or McCain says a lot about his lack of character.
only to be surprised by just how many of my fellow servicemen are not Bush supporters at all.
And I think it's safe to say that there are significant elements of the top brass that are not Bush/Rumsfeld supporters.
This was most clearly illustrated when Gen. Shinseki, the-then chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, was forced into retirement for publicly stating that he would need "hundreds of thousands" of troops to secure Iraq.
When the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff job opened up -- the wet dream job for every general in the military -- no general stepped forward. Rumsfeld had to call one of his cronies out of retirement to take the position. That speaks volumes! The generals know that Bush/Rumsfeld threw out the "Powell Doctrine" so painfully learned after Vietnam, and they don't like it.
but I question OIF being part of the GWOT myself.
Why, just because "Operation Iraqi Freedom"[sic] was planned well before 9/11?
Do people forget Bush's hand-picked Treasury Secretary, lifelong Republican Paul O'Neill -- one of the highest officials in the US gov't, going on TV on "60 Minutes" showing a map of Iraq carved up among American and British/western oil companies and saying that the map was made long before 9/11 and the plan to attack Iraq started as soon as Bush took office?
My question is: why do you have questions?! The answer is as solid as you're going to get!
Watching from Switzerland I was amazed to see the majority of the people in a country vote for one individual and that individual lose the election.
That's the way the US Constitution works -- it's happened 3 times since the US Civil War (1860s). The people don't select the president, the states elect the president through an obscure undemocratic process known as the "Electoral College."
The US is not a democracy, it's a republic. Worse, it's a republic written with a Constitution whose wealthy authors were openly scared of democracy. Those authors inserted many checks against the democratic will.
If you want to read up on this, the "Federalist Papers," a series of pro/con arguments written by the authors of the document in the 1780s during the debate over the then-proposed Constitution, clearly points this out.
IMHO what's more telling than the history of this is the fact that today, in the 21st Century -- and after what happened in the 2000 election -- there is no serious effort to eliminate the Electoral College. That is highly indicative of a broken system.
To look at this constitutionally is fraught with landmines.
First, according to the Constitution, the states are solely responsible for how their Electoral College electors get selected, correct?
The Florida state Supreme Court did make a decision on the issue -- to recount certain counties' ballots because of claims of fraud. Based on the US Constitution, one could make an argument that the US Supreme Court should not have been involved.
But even given the fact that the US Supreme Court did decide to get involved, there's the conflict of interest angle.
If you sued someone and I was selected to judge the case, would you have a complaint of potential bias if my wife or my son worked for the person you were suing?
A simple yes or no answer will do.
Of course you'd have a claim for potential bias. Obviously, any honorable judge would recuse himself and refuse to judge the case because of the conflict of interest.
Yet 2 of the 5 Supreme Court justices who ruled for Bush to override the Florida state Supreme Court and ordered the recount to stop had conflicts of interest. One's wife worked for the Bush campaign, and one's son worked for the legal firm who was representing Bush.
Those dishonorable oligarchs did not have the decency to step aside. They cast critical votes which was the final nail in the coffin of rigging the 2000 election.
Sorry, that article is nothing more than a "he stole the election" rehash.
Did you actually read the article? The story is about an election official in Florida counting/rigging her own election, and that election was held in 2004.
The only information in the article relating to the 2000 election was to cite that the election official was controversial during that election too.
Informative? Only if your of the tin foil hat group.
Let's see. A story by an award-winning investigative British reporter, the same reporter who uncovered the "use databases to keep 90K+ Floridians from voting" in the 2000 election (thus, he has a deep background in US and Florida elections), writes a story about election corruption still going on in Florida in 2004. Yet that somehow is not informative and is the stuff of a "tin foil hat group?"
Your bias is so strong it's illogical.
First rule : If its not a commoningly know link, ie a news source many people know of, trust, or etc then its probably a hack site.
The source cited was a news aggregator site. They simply reprinted the article. See the other posts of this article where I cited the same article on Congress.org and the journalist's own web site.
Gee, would you rather the information came from Democratic Congressman? Would that make it any more relevant? How about if the same information came from the award-winning journalist's own web site? Would that make it "more true"?
Somehow I suspect that your gripe about the information isn't with the source of the information, it is instead the facts cited in the information.
Of the 46,000 registered in both states, 68 percent are Democrats, 12 percent are Republicans and 16 percent didn't align themselves with a party, the newspaper reported on Sunday.
That's bad, but aren't those individual acts?
What we know for sure (see link below) is that the Republican Party rigged the 2000 election to allow the person who got fewer votes to take the White House.
Whether it was Florida's counting illegal military ballots, whether it was Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris' use of databases to prevent 90K+ Floridians from voting because they were "suspected" felons, whether it was the Supreme Court voting 5 to 4 to stop counting ballots when 2 justices out of the 5 voting to stop counting had close relatives (a son and wife!) working for the Bush campaign, it is crystal clear that the 2000 vote was cooked.
I'm not saying the Democrats are any better. But lots of retirees being registered to vote in two places does not show a conspiracy to rig the vote. It could be a case of many spacey elderly people forgetting where they're registered. The election in Florida in 2000 definitely shows that it was rigged in many ways.
BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast is one person who originally turned up the bogus use of military absentee ballots in Florida in the 2000 election.
You'd think they would have straightened it out, but as this story reports the absentee process in Florida if anything has gotten worse!
Now, four years later and the process is not fixed, and is arguably worse than ever. Accidental or planned?
Cool! Now Google can sell ads based on the contents of my files! :-(
/.ers highly strange? Where are the rants about GMail's privacy issues -- especially when there are other free services which offer as much or more disk space and which don't have any privacy issues?!
Is it just me, or is the GMail cheerleading by normally-privacy-concerned
I believe it is called laziness.
There are a number of books dedicated to this topic. In political science circles, one classic is Piven & Cloward's "Why Americans Don't Vote." They reach distinctly different conclusions.
Hell, Ross Perot who didn't really have a chance in hell of being elected, considerably changed the political landscape.
How was the landscape changed? What effects of Perot's candidacy do I feel or can I see in today's politics?
I agree that Perot's candidacy was historic and showed the people's discontent with the duopoly. And the duopoly did move a bit to steal Perot's thunder and to negate his influence. I might even go so far as to say that some of Clinton's budget-balancing zeal was due to Perot's candidacy.
But the duopoly did their job. They set up a rigged debate commission to ensure that no other third party candidate ever "does a Perot". You didn't see Ralph Nader (or any other 3rd party challenger) in the debates in 2000 and you certainly won't see it in 2004 -- the game is fixed.
Today -- a mere decade later -- Perot's legacy is zero. The Reform Party is dead and the duopoly rules completely.
Oh, Demms screw with elections as much as possible as well.
I just cited 3 instances within the past 35 years that Republicans have cooked the presidential elections. Please give me 1 instance of Democrats doing the same.
Yes, there's no doubt that the Democrats have skeletons in their closet. They invented big-city "machine" politics, but that nasty trend hasn't been very strong since Richard Daley was the Chicago "boss" in the late 60s. And yes, Gerrymandering was invented by Democrats and is happily used by both Republocrats and Demopublicans. It's used/abused so much that the nasty bastards think it's "normal" and the way things should be done.
The whole system is just *ripe* with potential for abuses.
Well, there's only one party I can see that is treating the Presidency like a used tampon -- please educate me if I'm wrong.
IMHO, the whole system isn't ripe with potential abuse, the whole system is being abused.
From the corporate funding of our two[sic]-party system (to the extent that the corporate lobbyists actually write some laws!), to the undemocratic way the media supports the duopoly and excludes other parties, it's a nasty, rotten system that is long overdue for major, serious reforms.
With the limited choice(s) we have in politics, do we really have to wonder why 1/2 of Americans don't care enough to bother even casting a vote?
I've never understood the justification for using an average-of-averages voting mechanism to elect the president. Am I missing some obvious (to US citizens, maybe?) benefit of this,
:-)
Historically, the reason for the electoral college is that the authors of the US Constitution were not democrats -- they were republicans (I'm talking the political science definition here, not the political party). The authors feared democracy and worked to limit it in many ways. Electing senators for 6 year terms but only electing 1/3 every 2 years was one way -- to replace the entire Senate you'd need a 6-year political movement. Having Senators elected by the states and not the people (as it was until the amendment for direct election of Senators, which happened in the 1910-20s "Progressive era" of US history) was another way to thwart democracy. The electoral college was yet another way.
The authors' fear of democracy comes across clearly in the "Federalist papers", a series of arguments both pro and con the Constitution written during the debate over its ratification.
Up until the 2000 election, most Americans weren't even aware of the electoral college and its function. When I taught civics and American gov't, I was shocked to "discover" that *most* of my fellow teachers thought the US President was elected directly by the people! They thought I was insane when I explained to them how it actually worked (seriously! and these were degreed professionals!).
There are after-the-fact rationalizations that people come up with to justify this undemocratic institution. Most revolve around arguments of "representing" rural areas and small states. Of course, that tends to fall apart when you point out that we're supposed to be representing people and not land.
As to it's ultimate function? IMHO, it serves to complicate and confuse the electorate and to make them feel detached and less in control.
If you're one of the elites who funds our party structure, that makes you feel more in control -- basically what the authors of the Constitution intended (remember, when those authors penned that document, you could only vote in most states if you owned property).
How did America get to the point where the fear of rigged elections (normally something reserved for so called "rogue states") is so real that many feel the neat to bring in overseers from abroad?
We got there by having the Republican party repeatedly cook and subvert our electoral system.
Does the name Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon ring a bell?! Read some good histories of the "Watergate era" -- he did far, far more than "just" break into the Watergate Hotel where the Democratic Party HQ was located.
How about Ronald Reagan keeping the US embassy hostages held by Iran locked up to prevent Jimmy Carter's "October Surprise"? That was a blatant rigging of an election.
Carter was close to doing an "arms for hostages" deal with Iran to bring back the hostages in October. Reagan sent Bush and others to Paris to negotiate a bigger "arms for hostages" deal with the Iranians. The Iranians took the better offer -- Reagan/Bush's.
Who says so? Former US CIA agents, French intelligence reports, Russian (Soviet era) intelligence, Jimmy Carter himself admitted that he heard many rumors about such a deal but that he was powerless to do anthing, and to top it off, the now-retired, former Iranian president candidly states that he did do the deal!
Now, for those that can't keep score, that's 2 rigged elections since 1972.
Add to that the 2000 election that George and Jeb Bush rigged...
That's how we got to that point. You're damned right we need international observers!!
Better still, we need new political parties -- one not dominated by undemocratic traitors and one complete with a spine (some others for variety might be nice too!).
If you have a link around you could post, I'd be grateful.
One link I can find quickly is to the report of Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election.
IMHO, the gov't reports are typical bureaucratic-speak which tries too hard to be non-judgemental and non-offensive (remember, this report was being written when the authors knew that Bush would be in office for 4 years -- thus, the political price of taking a strong position would be substantial). Combining the gov't analysis with reports from even the mainstream corporate media (LA/NY Times, etc.) gives a much more thorough picture. If you add in coverage from British or other "friendly" overseas media, it's becomes far more clear what happened.
Let's see, is there a link between democrats and felons as you suggest? Sounds like a good reason to eliminate those votes, not to mention that felons are federally prohibited from voting.
State law determines whether a felon can vote or not; some states allow felons to vote (though Florida does not). As discovered and reported by the BBC (since confirmed by others) Jeb Bush used "felon lists" to keep people from voting.
Originally about 170,000 people were kept from voting this way in Florida. Of that number, more than 90,000 people were not felons, and they were perfectly legal to vote. 90% of the 90K+ kept from voting were Democrats.
Nothing fishy there, right?!
Military absentee votes must count, federal law and state can't superceed that.
That's just wrong. State law determines voting procedures and practices. The states are fully in control of how the electors get selected
And remember, it is the Electoral College's electors that choose the president -- the popular vote is just a "democratic" illusion. Some states say that if one candidate gets 50%-plus-one-vote of the popular vote, they get all of the state's electors; other states rougly proportion their electors to the popular vote -- it's all up to the state.
During the 2000 vote just the absentee military ballot issue itself would have thrown the election to Gore. Kathrine Harris -- simultaneously the FL Sec. of State who was responsible for a fair FL election and Bush's FL campaign chair (no conflict of interest there, right?!) -- broke FL law by allowing enough bogus military absentee ballots to throw the election to Bush. The New York Times also confirmed this -- post election, of course.
You have to hand it to the Republicans on this issue though; James Baker and other false-patriots created great media propaganda about Gore wanting to "deny" our GIs their vote. The media sucked that up and Gore was definitely put on the defensive on this issue.
False information about voting places and times? Why wouldn't this have affected republican voters equally?
No. Election rigging is more of a science.
By determining which precincts you want to rig, you can ensure that while you might lose a few Republican votes, the overwhelming votes lost would be Democrat.
For example, Blacks in Florida voted about 90% for Gore, following the national trend. It's a no-brainer to this in black neighborhoods and too leave suburbia alone -- that will definitely skew the vote and that is one of the instances cited by the federal investigation after the election.
The federal gov'ts report which was done after the 2000 election found many cases of such dirty tricks -- but of course, that was months after the election.
The whole "hanging chad" thing statistically could have happened to just as many republicans as democrats, it was mechanically a poorly designed system (yes, I've seen and used one).
Yes, quite true. But the hanging chad issue was settled fairly -- with a Republican and Democrat looking over an election official's shoulder and having to agree with the official for the vote to count (see earlier posts of this article).
The election was not rigged as a result of hanging chads -- that was a red herring.
The election was rigged as a result of processes noted above.
As the article notes, Moore's sources for his information are quite solid -- mainstream newspapers and the BBC.
The articles both argue over the reliabililty of computer ballot counts, paper trails, and the fiction of "hanging chads" and error-proned human counts.
This is the corporate media version of what happened in Florida. It deliberately misses the big picture.
What about the fact that Jeb Bush deliberately removed tens of thousands of "supposed" felons (who were 90%+ Democratic voters; he's trying it again this year but is meeting more criticism)? What about the counting of absentee military ballots which violated Florida law? What about the findings by the federal gov't that there was deliberate denials of voting rights to many Flordians? This included false information about voting places/times, closing roads, excessive police presence at selected voting precints.
I'm all for a paper ballot trail and audited code for voting machines and a clear oversight process. But the sham election in 2000 (see link below) was far more deliberate than just an issue of "hanging chads" -- and those issues are completely ignored.
Bruce Schneier has a great term for this: he calls it "security theater".
:-)
He hit the nail right on the head; that's exactly what it is.
Fortunately terrorism isn't a threat in the US. The chances of dying of terrorism here are less than the chances of being killed by lightening or many other things. We shouldn't worry about it.
Shhh -- you're not supposed to say that, no matter how true it is.
But no matter how true that is, it is not what the general population believes. And when you think about it, you can't blame them too much.
When night after night the news talks about terrorism and our vulnerabilities, it sinks into people. It should, it's supposed to. It's just like crime -- if you overreport crime enough people will lock their doors, feel frightened of blacks, and support ever-increasing police budgets and prison populations.
It's simple propaganda.
You're making the dangerous assumption that the gov't is run by logic. It's clear why you can keep your matches and lighters on planes.
Do you know how much money such a ban on lighters and matches would cost the corporate tycoons that are invested in tobacco companies?!
Terrorists would be stupid to try to hijack planes again.
:-(
Good point. And if Bin Laden and al Queda have proven anything, it's that they are not stupid.
Sadly, I can't say the same for the morons running the US.
The article ponders the question, "Have we lost our common sense when it comes to passenger screening?"
The question assumes the purpose of the screening is security. It is not. The purpose of the screening is to build fear in the population.
Only a fearful population will sit back and do nothing while the gov't and its neo-cons pass laws like the Patriot Act and eviscerate the Bill of Rights. The corporate media plays into this fear-mongering, with everything from shows like "Cops" to overreporting crime issues and parroting whatever the gov't says.
One example: NYC (and some other areas) are supposed to be on a "High" level of terrorism alert. That's serious, right?! Yet it was just reported that NYC has dispatched dozens and dozens of police across the country to watch American citizens who might be coming to NYC to protest the Republican convention.
Given this, obviously NYC has all of its terrorism options more than covered, right? Why else would they be wasting their police manpower to send cops around the country to do 24hr surveillance on Americans with no terrorist background?
The emperor has no clothes. This terrorism hype is just like the airport security hype. They know there's little they can do to stop terrorism, so they are instead focusing on domestic issues and creating a fearful population that can be easily manipulated after the next inevitable terrorist attack.