How on earth can you say this with a straight face? Hussein let the inspectors back in, and when it became obvious that they weren't going to find what the US wanted them to find, the US told them to withdraw and invaded anyway.
Ok, you seem to have forgotten some key points here. In 1998, the inspectors were forced to leave. Technically, Saddam did not kick them out, but he told them that he was not going to cooperate with them AT ALL anymore, so there was no point in the inspectors staying.
In response, Bill Clinton lobbed a few missiles into Iraq, but didn't really accomplish anything. Saddam was still in blatent violation of the UN resolutions.
Fast forward to 2002. The US has come to the realization that we can't afford to have a sworn enemy like Saddam possess the WMDs that the whole world agreed that he had. However, Saddam still won't let the inspectors back in. So we park 300,000 troops on his doorstep- only then did he agree to any kind of inspections, but he never produced the documentation that the UN resolutions required of him. He was still in violation.
Note that whether or not Saddam had illegal weapons has never been an issue- we know that he had them. But he was required by the UN to prove that he destroyed those weapons, and he never did that. It is possible that he destroyed his weapons in secret (in spite of the threat of military action against him), but the blame still rests solely on Saddam's shoulders.
I'm continually astonished that people like you can continue to defend this blatantly transparent war of aggression as being somehow defensive and just.
Our action was defensive and just. I'm astonished that you can't see that.
Their goal is to kill Americans and their allies until they give in to their political ideologies
Um, Bin Laden's "political idealogies" are for an Islamic state where you pray to Mecca a couple of times a day, women cover their faces and are forbidden to go to school, and people shun the infidels that try to exercise some personal liberties. Do you want to 'give in' to that here?
Glossing over terrorists' motivations as "hating freedom" is not only false, it's also stupid. It means that we cannot deal with their motivations and thus cannot stop their memes from spreading.
According to Osama Bin Laden's fatwa, his motivation is that we are not muslim. His goal is to destroy every non-muslim in the world, starting with the Jews. He wants us out of the Arabian peninsula- why? Because we are not muslim. Its kind of hard to reason with that.
So did we. Have we stopped developing nukes? Nope. In fact, we just increased spending on a new tactical nuke designed to eliminate underground bunkers.
You obviously haven't read the treaty or even the definition of proliferation. Our nuclear arsenal is not growing or spreading- on the contrary, we have eliminated a majority of our nuclear weapons (2,450 nuclear warheads in 1989, and only 500 in 2003, source. We have destroyed 80% of our nuclear weapons so far, source). We are very much in compliance with the NPT.
Conclusion: US policymakers are unwilling to live by the same rules they make everyone else follow and throw a fit when others follow their wonderful example.
And what rules would those be? I don't think any rational country is asking the US to give up our nuclear weapons- especially now that the threat of nuclear weapons spreading to unstable areas is greater now than ever before.
1. There's no proof that Iran's civil program is a weapons program. There's just suspicion. Frankly, I don't blame them. Having an enriched civil program leaves a weapons program a possibility when and if that becomes necessary.
Wait- so are you actually saying that you think Iran should have nuclear weapons? I'm glad people like you aren't in charge.
Since the US has demonstrated that treaties and the UN are meaningless
I fail to see how the US has demonstrated that. Treaties are taken very seriously in this country- they must be ratified by a full congress and they become a strict law.
And the US has not demonstrated that the UN is meaningless- the UN demonstrated that. The UN passed 17 freaking resolutions under Chapter VII of the UN Charter against Iraq. If you care to read the UN Charter, Chapter VII resolutions are binding to all members of the UN, and members are REQUIRED to enforce them. If the best they could do after 12 years of blatant non-compliance by Iraq is send inspectors on a wild goose chase, then the UN is meaningless.
If you think about it, what has the UN actually accomplished in its life? The UN has tried to resolve 2 major conflicts in the past 50 years- Korea fought to a stalemate and is still unresolved, and they let Saddam jerk them around for 12 years. Yeah- the UN is sooooo important.
It's mighty convenient that the US doesn't obey the rule of law. It's just like the absolute monarchies all over again, ruling by divine right instead of by and under the rule of law.
Again- where do we disobey the rule of law?
Since the US has no divine right to ignore treaties
Right- and we dont.
while holding everyone else accountable to them
Do you think the US is the only country that doesnt want North Korea or Iran to have nuclear weapons?
plainly the treaty is now invalid and it's, again, a nuclear free-for-all.
Plainly, you are going to find any excuse to justify your hatred of the United States.
This is the North Korean and Iranian logic as well: "Let us research nuclear technology so we do not get caught with our pants down, lest the Americans invade."
Both North Korea and Iran have signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. With that, they gave up their "right" to develop nuclear weapons.
This is just one tack. If North Korea, Iran, etc. just wanted to embarrass the crap out of the U.S., they could stop (or never start... whatever) their programs and retort: "We have put down our weapons. Now put down yours."
You see, the thing is, they have been saying that all along, but they have been lying.
And do you realize what would happen if the US just decided to "put down" their weapons? Haven't you studied history? There will ALWAYS be people that are not willing to live peacefully. Eventually, there will be another Japan that invades Manchuria, Germany that invades Poland, North Korea that invades South Korea, Iraq that invades Kuwait, etc. Like it or not, but the US provides security for a majority of the world. When crap hits the fan, the world looks to the United States to jump in.
I thought their votes were removed *after* they voted.
Nope. In fact, that would be impossible to do while using an anonymous ballot system like we have in the United States. The claim is that these 1000's of voters were "scrubbed" from the voter registration before the election, so when they turned up at the polls, they were unable to vote. However, that claim is pretty dubious, and there is no evidence that a significant number of innocent people were affected by the felon list, and that is saying a lot considering how close the election was.
Um, DBT/Choicepoint was hired before Katherine Harris took office, and they were hired by a Democrat named Ethel Baxtor.
Oh- and although the list was pretty inaccurate, the Florida law accounted for this and required each individual county election supervisor to verify the names on the felon list (many of them are democrats too!). Many counties ignored the list completely. In fact, when the USCCR held hearings on the Florida elections, they were unable to interview a single person that was incorrectly prevented from voting because of the felon list (A link of the dissenting opinion that supports this claim)
Since you seem to want people to back up their information with links, where were your links to back up your claims? Please use something better than a Greg Palast op-ed or a link to democrats.com.
Maybe there were voters that were purged incorrectly- we will never know. But if it had been such a widespread problem, don't you think the USCCR could have found at least one person to testify that they were kept from voting because of the list?
You linked to the dissenting opinion, and not the original report.
Yes- I know. The report was split along party lines with the democrat majority writing the final report. The dissenting opinion brings up some valid points. For example, the conclusion that "countless" people were prevented from voting was based on anectodal and uncorroborated testimony from 26 people representing only 8 counties. However, when it came down to it, they did not hear testimony from a single person that was actually incorrectly prevented from voting. That is not very concrete evidence to support their conclusion of a statewide systematic disenfranchisement of minority voters.
criticism of an an effort to purge convicted felons and other ineligible voters from registration roles. Lists of ineligible voters, compiled by a private firm, had an error rate of at least 14 percent, and black voters had a "significantly greater chance" of appearing on the inaccurate lists than white voters
As I said before, it was known in advance that the felon list was not perfect, and that is why the law placed the responsiblity of verifying the names to each individual county. If somebody was incorrectly prevented from voting, the responsibility lies with the county election supervisor, and not Jeb Bush, Catherine Harris, or George Bush. Also, the conclusions that the majority reached also ignore the fact that many counties ignored the list completely.
black voters were nine times more likely than white voters to have their ballots rejected during the counting process.
This 9x number is based on some pretty serious fallacies in Dr. Lichtman's study of the election. His reasoning was that if more ballots were spoiled in counties with higher percentages of black voters, then the black voters must have been disqualified in those counties. That is not a statistically sound conclusion (see the dissenting reports discussion of the ecological fallacy).
About the absentee ballots- in 1973 the Florida Secretary of State ruled that either a postmark or a dated signature were sufficient to validate an absentee ballot. Unless you are suggesting that this 27 year old ruling was a part of the republican conspiracy to win the 2000 election, the absentee ballots were perfectly legal.
Yes- I have read a lot of Greg Palast's work, and I have concluded that it is partisan crap from somebody with a vested interest in making a name for himself. Take two seconds on his home page to see that he is not an unbiased source of information about President Bush. Do you honestly think he is going to provide you with more unbiased information than CNN? And you accuse me of "buying the party line"?
No- I base my arguments on the findings from the United States Commission on Civil Rights, the actual Florida statute, and documented facts from the election. Why haven't more people made a big deal about the felon purge list? Because IMO it isn't a big deal. The system was not perfect, but as far as we know, nobody was actually disenfranchised because of it. Florida already made some changes to the law, and now its time to move on.
This person did not lose his vote. He may have appeared on the felon list, but he did not lose his vote because of that.
There were several absurd examples of blatently incorrect names on the list (I think one of the county elections supervisors even made the list), but that does not conflict with it's purpose (that is, to get as many possible matches as they could so they could verify them later).
The County Elections Supervisors were required to attempt to verify every name on the list BEFORE any action was taken against a voter. Nobody with a conviction date of 2005 was prevented from voting (actually, they couldn't find ANY eligible voter that was prevented from voting because of the list).
Jeb Bush and co. worked to get thousands of black voters disenfranchised by removing their names from the voting rolls if they had a name similar to that of a convicted felon
NO! First of all, when the (Democrat majority) USCCR held hearings on the Florida election, they were not able to find a single person that was disenfranchised by the felon list. Nobody was removed from the voter registration just because their name "sounded like" a convicted felon- you are confusing 2 seperate lists.
List #1- The Felon list that a 1998 Florida statute required the state to compile. This was a list of possible felons (including people names similar to convicted felons). The intent of this list was to get as many possible matches as they could, but being on this list DID NOT mean you were prevented from voting. This list was then forwarded to the individual county elections supervisors, and they were required to verify the names as actual convicted felons BEFORE any action was taken.
List #2- The actual voter registration. Only people on the felon list that were verified by the individual counties as actual felons were removed from this list, and even then they were given 30 days written notice with a process to appeal.
An Jeb Bush had absolutely nothing to do with this. You might recall that the legislature passes laws, not the Governor. And the firm that compiled the list (DBT) was contracted by a democrat named Ethel Baxtor. And the individual county supervisors (many of which are democrats) made the final decision on the names. This is not a huge Republican conspiracy.
Bush worked to maximize the number of overseas ballots in counties he won, he also worked to disenfranchise military ballots in counties Gore had won
To quote from the times article that you cited, "The Times study found no evidence of vote fraud by either party."
And before I get lambasted by conservatives, consider the following: how would you react if you heard that the CEO of the company supplying voting equipment wrote in a Democratic fund raising letter that he was committed to helping Hillary Clinton win the presidency in 2004? You'd be a little nervous, and a lot pissed.
Do you honestly think that #1, diebold is going to rig the election for Republicans, and #2, the CEO would publically announce his intentions to rig the election for the Republicans 2 years before the election?
The claim made at the time was that the (Florida Republican) folks in charge of voter lists took advantage of a law that lets them kick convicted felons off the list, knocking out anyone from the "wrong" neighborhoods whose name was more or less similar to a convict.
Nope. Nobody was "kicked off the list" because of the felon list. In fact, when the USCCR held hearings on the 2000 Florida elections, they couldnt find a single eligible voter that was kept from voting because they were incorrectly identified as a felon (and believe me- the Democrat majority in the commission looked VERY hard).
And the Florida Republicans were not taking advantage of some loophole in the law- the state was required by a 1998 statute to compile a list of possible felons. According to the law, this list was then given to the individual county elections supervisors who were required to verify that a person actually was a convicted felon before removing them from the voter registration.
The cool part is it's pretty hard to find out you've been de-enrolled 2 weeks before the election, let alone get this error corrected.
According the the statute, anybody that was removed from the voter registration was given at least 30 days written notice, and they were given a process to appeal (in most cases, they only had to go to a police station and submit a fingerprint).
1) Get rid of 20-stage pipeline, it's too long for anything serious.
No its not. In fact, according to this research, the P4 pipeline is not deep enough. That paper concludes that P4 performance could be improved by up to 90% by increasing the pipeline depth to around 50 stages and increasing the cache size.
Do you actually think that Intel didn't know the consequences of increasing the pipeline depth? The Intel engineers didn't just guess on the P4 architecture- it was a very deliberate design decision. Judging by the P4's performance gains, it was a pretty good decision, too.
ATA100 is most certainly 100 megabytes/sec. Its a 50 MHz clock with a 2 byte wide lane (66 MHz for ATA133). And I believe most drives today can do a sustained write at 30-50 MBytes/sec (reads are even faster).
Ah yes, somehow raising taxes is always the left wing response to a "problem" (in this case, the only problem is that not everybody likes the same gutless matchbox cars that you do).
people would have to consider the fact that we will run out of oil some day and wasting it just makes that day arrive sooner.
We are no where near running out of oil. If oil supplies started to run out causing prices to rise, then it would suddenly be economically feasable to access huge known oil reserves (such as oil shale) that are too expensive to tap right now. Conservative estimates show that would be enough to supply the world for the next 250 years.
But who knows if that will even be necessary. In the past few years, it has been discovered that some old dorment oil fields were somehow getting refilled with oil. That could mean that there are even larger oil reserves deeper in the earth than we ever thought possible. There is probably more oil in this planet than humans could ever use.
Florida law required that all absentee ballots have postmarks in them.
Actually, that is not quite correct. The Florida Secretary of State ruled in 1973 that absentee ballots needed either a postmark or a dated signature to be valid.
Wrong. The lists were not checked. That is what the private company that was contracted to do the checking, DPT, was paid $4 million dollars for.
I'm sorry, but take the 2 seconds to read the 1998 Florida Statute that called for the creation of this list. It clearly states that the names on the list must be verified by the individual county elections supervisors before action is taken. Many of the county elections supervisors are democrats- are they a part of this big conspiracy to help Bush win?
They were *paid* not to check the rosters by telephone. There is a data trail, a letter from Jeb Bush to K. Harris, to prove this
Of course- it wasn't their job to verify the names. They were contracted to find as many *possible* matches as they could. It was up to the county supervisors to verify the names.
mistakes, when checked, added up to 95% error rate. It was voter fraud
To date, not a single innocent person has been found that was actually kept from voting because of the list. There is no fraud.
The man who gave out the contract was named Clayton Roberts and he was assistant to K. Harris. He was not a Dem. Harris was the state chair of the Bush campaign in FL.
I'm sorry, but that is just incorrect. DBT was contracted to make the list before Harris was even elected.
The contract was not put out to bid and the owners of the company in question, DBT, were all Republicans.
Thats actually a pretty dubious claim. Greg Palast claims that the company is "packed with republican stars", and he gives 2 names to "prove" this: - Ken Langone, who worked on Giuliani's senate campaign, but Palast fails to mention that Langone also donated money to Bill Clinton's 1996 campaign as well as several democratic senators - Rick Rozar, who has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Republican party. But Palast doesn't mention that Rozar wasn't even affiliated with DBT when they were awarded the contract. He joined DBT when his company was taken over by them a full year after the contract was awarded.
Thats not really strong evidence that the company is "all Republicans" like you claim.
The NAACP got an undisclosed settlement for voter's rights violations.
Funny you should mention that- the NAACP also stated VERY clearly in their settlement that they "have not alleged that Defendants acted in a purposefully discriminatory manner toward any group."
If they didn't find anyone it must've been for the same reason the Warren Commission didn't find anyone who heard shots coming from in front of the JFK motorcade. Getting a commission to whitewash something is no big deal. Par for the course
Holy cow- read the report. It was (along party lines) extremely critical of the Florida elections process. They would have loved to find something like that. Just look at the dissenting statement to see how partisan the report was.
In order for this to be the big scandal that you seem to think it is, the following would have to be true: - The legislature that passed the bi-partisan law in 1998 was a part of the conspiracy - The Democrat that hired DBT was part of the conspiracy - Every county elections supervisor that was a Democrat was also in on the plot to elect Bush - There would actually have been people incorrectly prevented from voting because of the list
Since I don't see any of these as being true, I dismiss this crap as sour grapes by the losers.
On December 12, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Florida Supreme Court ruling ordering a full statewide hand recount of all undervotes not yet tallied. The U.S. Supreme Court action effectively ratified Florida election officials' determination that Bush won by a few hundred votes out of more than 6 million cast.
Using the NORC data, the media consortium examined what might have happened if the U.S. Supreme Court had not intervened. The Florida high court had ordered a recount of all undervotes that had not been counted by hand to that point. If that recount had proceeded under the standard that most local election officials said they would have used, the study found that Bush would have emerged with 493 more votes than Gore.
No, no, no. Lets take this one point at a time, because your facts are pretty messed up.
In the Florida elections thousands of people, mostly black Democrats, were delisted for being felons.
The felon list that was compiled for the 2000 election did not "delist" anybody from voting. The list was given to the individual county supervisors, and they were required to verify the names on the list before any action was taken. And even if action was taken, the people were given written notice with a procedure to appeal the decision.
The vast majority of these felonies did not take place and were dated up to a milennium in the future. Further, the list was comprised of people who had moved from Texas to Florida.
The only people claiming that the "vast majority" of the list was incorrect are partisan pundits with an axe to grind. Even so, it is irrelevant. The legislature intended the list to cast as wide of a net as possible to reduce the possibility that an ineligible voter would slip through. There were mistakes on the list, but that does not conflict with its stated purpose.
The Floridan Democrats barred from voting were not actually felons, they were locked out as a favor from one Bush to the other.
This had nothing to do with Jeb Bush or even Katherine Harris. The Legislature passed the law, and a democrat elections supervisor (Ethel Baxtor) contracted with a company to generate the list. Oh, and when the Federal Elections Commission held hearings on the Florida Election, they could not find a single person that was wrongly prevented from voting because of the list.
What I find odd is that you seem to think it is that cut and dry.
Newsflash: the voting process is not perfect, and it will never be perfect because humans are doing the voting and humans tend to screw stuff up a lot. It is impossible to say with 100% confidence that Gore had more "legitimate votes" than Bush because there isn't enough precision in the data. All we have is imprecise data that shows that Bush had a slight lead.
So what do we do in situations like that? Well, you abide by the rules that were in place before the contest started. The Florida laws stated very plainly that you need to take the best data that you have and certify the election results by Nov 14th. The best data at that time was a 300+ vote lead for Bush.
However, Gore resorted to the playground tactic of changing the rules mid game, and he was somewhat successful in that. The result? Almost a full month and dozens of updated recount statistics later, Bush still had a lead, and the Supreme Court had to step in to stop the unequal treatment that voters in different counties were recieving.
In fact, in all of the unofficial media recounts that followed the election, Gore only had a slim lead in the most extreme and unlikely of the scenarios (that ALL "undervotes" and ALL "overvotes" would be counted as Gore votes).
Ok. Under Reagan, inflation recovered from the Jimmy Carter mess very quickly, and remained very low for the rest of the 80's bottoming out at 1.86% in 1986, so inflation didn't play a very big roll in that (source).
2. a growing worldwide economy
I contend that the Reagan supply side economics helped the economy grow.
3. emergence/growth of industries like hi-tech
Yes- that helped a lot. See #5.
4. deficit spending (it generates some tax revenue)
Actually, public debt as a % of the GDP was higher under Clinton than under Reagan (source).
5. shifts is gov't spending (i.e. major increases in defense).
The defense spending invested heavily in technology, and that helped the hi tech industries grow.
Also note from the Cato article I linked above, all income groups saw an increase in real income under Reagan, but minorities and the poorest quintile saw the biggest increase.
Slashdot Mirror
How on earth can you say this with a straight face? Hussein let the inspectors back in, and when it became obvious that they weren't going to find what the US wanted them to find, the US told them to withdraw and invaded anyway.
Ok, you seem to have forgotten some key points here. In 1998, the inspectors were forced to leave. Technically, Saddam did not kick them out, but he told them that he was not going to cooperate with them AT ALL anymore, so there was no point in the inspectors staying.
In response, Bill Clinton lobbed a few missiles into Iraq, but didn't really accomplish anything. Saddam was still in blatent violation of the UN resolutions.
Fast forward to 2002. The US has come to the realization that we can't afford to have a sworn enemy like Saddam possess the WMDs that the whole world agreed that he had. However, Saddam still won't let the inspectors back in. So we park 300,000 troops on his doorstep- only then did he agree to any kind of inspections, but he never produced the documentation that the UN resolutions required of him. He was still in violation.
Note that whether or not Saddam had illegal weapons has never been an issue- we know that he had them. But he was required by the UN to prove that he destroyed those weapons, and he never did that. It is possible that he destroyed his weapons in secret (in spite of the threat of military action against him), but the blame still rests solely on Saddam's shoulders.
I'm continually astonished that people like you can continue to defend this blatantly transparent war of aggression as being somehow defensive and just.
Our action was defensive and just. I'm astonished that you can't see that.
Their goal is to kill Americans and their allies until they give in to their political ideologies
Um, Bin Laden's "political idealogies" are for an Islamic state where you pray to Mecca a couple of times a day, women cover their faces and are forbidden to go to school, and people shun the infidels that try to exercise some personal liberties. Do you want to 'give in' to that here?
Glossing over terrorists' motivations as "hating freedom" is not only false, it's also stupid. It means that we cannot deal with their motivations and thus cannot stop their memes from spreading.
According to Osama Bin Laden's fatwa, his motivation is that we are not muslim. His goal is to destroy every non-muslim in the world, starting with the Jews. He wants us out of the Arabian peninsula- why? Because we are not muslim. Its kind of hard to reason with that.
So did we. Have we stopped developing nukes? Nope. In fact, we just increased spending on a new tactical nuke designed to eliminate underground bunkers.
You obviously haven't read the treaty or even the definition of proliferation. Our nuclear arsenal is not growing or spreading- on the contrary, we have eliminated a majority of our nuclear weapons (2,450 nuclear warheads in 1989, and only 500 in 2003, source. We have destroyed 80% of our nuclear weapons so far, source). We are very much in compliance with the NPT.
Conclusion: US policymakers are unwilling to live by the same rules they make everyone else follow and throw a fit when others follow their wonderful example.
And what rules would those be? I don't think any rational country is asking the US to give up our nuclear weapons- especially now that the threat of nuclear weapons spreading to unstable areas is greater now than ever before.
1. There's no proof that Iran's civil program is a weapons program. There's just suspicion. Frankly, I don't blame them. Having an enriched civil program leaves a weapons program a possibility when and if that becomes necessary.
Wait- so are you actually saying that you think Iran should have nuclear weapons? I'm glad people like you aren't in charge.
Since the US has demonstrated that treaties and the UN are meaningless
I fail to see how the US has demonstrated that. Treaties are taken very seriously in this country- they must be ratified by a full congress and they become a strict law.
And the US has not demonstrated that the UN is meaningless- the UN demonstrated that. The UN passed 17 freaking resolutions under Chapter VII of the UN Charter against Iraq. If you care to read the UN Charter, Chapter VII resolutions are binding to all members of the UN, and members are REQUIRED to enforce them. If the best they could do after 12 years of blatant non-compliance by Iraq is send inspectors on a wild goose chase, then the UN is meaningless.
If you think about it, what has the UN actually accomplished in its life? The UN has tried to resolve 2 major conflicts in the past 50 years- Korea fought to a stalemate and is still unresolved, and they let Saddam jerk them around for 12 years. Yeah- the UN is sooooo important.
It's mighty convenient that the US doesn't obey the rule of law. It's just like the absolute monarchies all over again, ruling by divine right instead of by and under the rule of law.
Again- where do we disobey the rule of law?
Since the US has no divine right to ignore treaties
Right- and we dont.
while holding everyone else accountable to them
Do you think the US is the only country that doesnt want North Korea or Iran to have nuclear weapons?
plainly the treaty is now invalid and it's, again, a nuclear free-for-all.
Plainly, you are going to find any excuse to justify your hatred of the United States.
This is the North Korean and Iranian logic as well: "Let us research nuclear technology so we do not get caught with our pants down, lest the Americans invade."
Both North Korea and Iran have signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. With that, they gave up their "right" to develop nuclear weapons.
This is just one tack. If North Korea, Iran, etc. just wanted to embarrass the crap out of the U.S., they could stop (or never start... whatever) their programs and retort: "We have put down our weapons. Now put down yours."
You see, the thing is, they have been saying that all along, but they have been lying.
And do you realize what would happen if the US just decided to "put down" their weapons? Haven't you studied history? There will ALWAYS be people that are not willing to live peacefully. Eventually, there will be another Japan that invades Manchuria, Germany that invades Poland, North Korea that invades South Korea, Iraq that invades Kuwait, etc. Like it or not, but the US provides security for a majority of the world. When crap hits the fan, the world looks to the United States to jump in.
I thought their votes were removed *after* they voted.
Nope. In fact, that would be impossible to do while using an anonymous ballot system like we have in the United States. The claim is that these 1000's of voters were "scrubbed" from the voter registration before the election, so when they turned up at the polls, they were unable to vote. However, that claim is pretty dubious, and there is no evidence that a significant number of innocent people were affected by the felon list, and that is saying a lot considering how close the election was.
Um, DBT/Choicepoint was hired before Katherine Harris took office, and they were hired by a Democrat named Ethel Baxtor.
Oh- and although the list was pretty inaccurate, the Florida law accounted for this and required each individual county election supervisor to verify the names on the felon list (many of them are democrats too!). Many counties ignored the list completely. In fact, when the USCCR held hearings on the Florida elections, they were unable to interview a single person that was incorrectly prevented from voting because of the felon list (A link of the dissenting opinion that supports this claim)
Since you seem to want people to back up their information with links, where were your links to back up your claims? Please use something better than a Greg Palast op-ed or a link to democrats.com.
Maybe there were voters that were purged incorrectly- we will never know. But if it had been such a widespread problem, don't you think the USCCR could have found at least one person to testify that they were kept from voting because of the list?
You linked to the dissenting opinion, and not the original report.
Yes- I know. The report was split along party lines with the democrat majority writing the final report. The dissenting opinion brings up some valid points. For example, the conclusion that "countless" people were prevented from voting was based on anectodal and uncorroborated testimony from 26 people representing only 8 counties. However, when it came down to it, they did not hear testimony from a single person that was actually incorrectly prevented from voting. That is not very concrete evidence to support their conclusion of a statewide systematic disenfranchisement of minority voters.
criticism of an an effort to purge convicted felons and other ineligible voters from registration roles. Lists of ineligible voters, compiled by a private firm, had an error rate of at least 14 percent, and black voters had a "significantly greater chance" of appearing on the inaccurate lists than white voters
As I said before, it was known in advance that the felon list was not perfect, and that is why the law placed the responsiblity of verifying the names to each individual county. If somebody was incorrectly prevented from voting, the responsibility lies with the county election supervisor, and not Jeb Bush, Catherine Harris, or George Bush. Also, the conclusions that the majority reached also ignore the fact that many counties ignored the list completely.
black voters were nine times more likely than white voters to have their ballots rejected during the counting process.
This 9x number is based on some pretty serious fallacies in Dr. Lichtman's study of the election. His reasoning was that if more ballots were spoiled in counties with higher percentages of black voters, then the black voters must have been disqualified in those counties. That is not a statistically sound conclusion (see the dissenting reports discussion of the ecological fallacy).
About the absentee ballots- in 1973 the Florida Secretary of State ruled that either a postmark or a dated signature were sufficient to validate an absentee ballot. Unless you are suggesting that this 27 year old ruling was a part of the republican conspiracy to win the 2000 election, the absentee ballots were perfectly legal.
Yes- I have read a lot of Greg Palast's work, and I have concluded that it is partisan crap from somebody with a vested interest in making a name for himself. Take two seconds on his home page to see that he is not an unbiased source of information about President Bush. Do you honestly think he is going to provide you with more unbiased information than CNN? And you accuse me of "buying the party line"?
No- I base my arguments on the findings from the United States Commission on Civil Rights, the actual Florida statute, and documented facts from the election. Why haven't more people made a big deal about the felon purge list? Because IMO it isn't a big deal. The system was not perfect, but as far as we know, nobody was actually disenfranchised because of it. Florida already made some changes to the law, and now its time to move on.
This person did not lose his vote. He may have appeared on the felon list, but he did not lose his vote because of that.
There were several absurd examples of blatently incorrect names on the list (I think one of the county elections supervisors even made the list), but that does not conflict with it's purpose (that is, to get as many possible matches as they could so they could verify them later).
The County Elections Supervisors were required to attempt to verify every name on the list BEFORE any action was taken against a voter. Nobody with a conviction date of 2005 was prevented from voting (actually, they couldn't find ANY eligible voter that was prevented from voting because of the list).
Jeb Bush and co. worked to get thousands of black voters disenfranchised by removing their names from the voting rolls if they had a name similar to that of a convicted felon
NO! First of all, when the (Democrat majority) USCCR held hearings on the Florida election, they were not able to find a single person that was disenfranchised by the felon list. Nobody was removed from the voter registration just because their name "sounded like" a convicted felon- you are confusing 2 seperate lists.
List #1- The Felon list that a 1998 Florida statute required the state to compile. This was a list of possible felons (including people names similar to convicted felons). The intent of this list was to get as many possible matches as they could, but being on this list DID NOT mean you were prevented from voting. This list was then forwarded to the individual county elections supervisors, and they were required to verify the names as actual convicted felons BEFORE any action was taken.
List #2- The actual voter registration. Only people on the felon list that were verified by the individual counties as actual felons were removed from this list, and even then they were given 30 days written notice with a process to appeal.
An Jeb Bush had absolutely nothing to do with this. You might recall that the legislature passes laws, not the Governor. And the firm that compiled the list (DBT) was contracted by a democrat named Ethel Baxtor. And the individual county supervisors (many of which are democrats) made the final decision on the names. This is not a huge Republican conspiracy.
Bush worked to maximize the number of overseas ballots in counties he won, he also worked to disenfranchise military ballots in counties Gore had won
To quote from the times article that you cited, "The Times study found no evidence of vote fraud by either party."
And before I get lambasted by conservatives, consider the following: how would you react if you heard that the CEO of the company supplying voting equipment wrote in a Democratic fund raising letter that he was committed to helping Hillary Clinton win the presidency in 2004? You'd be a little nervous, and a lot pissed.
Do you honestly think that #1, diebold is going to rig the election for Republicans, and #2, the CEO would publically announce his intentions to rig the election for the Republicans 2 years before the election?
The claim made at the time was that the (Florida Republican) folks in charge of voter lists took advantage of a law that lets them kick convicted felons off the list, knocking out anyone from the "wrong" neighborhoods whose name was more or less similar to a convict.
Nope. Nobody was "kicked off the list" because of the felon list. In fact, when the USCCR held hearings on the 2000 Florida elections, they couldnt find a single eligible voter that was kept from voting because they were incorrectly identified as a felon (and believe me- the Democrat majority in the commission looked VERY hard).
And the Florida Republicans were not taking advantage of some loophole in the law- the state was required by a 1998 statute to compile a list of possible felons. According to the law, this list was then given to the individual county elections supervisors who were required to verify that a person actually was a convicted felon before removing them from the voter registration.
The cool part is it's pretty hard to find out you've been de-enrolled 2 weeks before the election, let alone get this error corrected.
According the the statute, anybody that was removed from the voter registration was given at least 30 days written notice, and they were given a process to appeal (in most cases, they only had to go to a police station and submit a fingerprint).
1) Get rid of 20-stage pipeline, it's too long for anything serious.
No its not. In fact, according to this research, the P4 pipeline is not deep enough. That paper concludes that P4 performance could be improved by up to 90% by increasing the pipeline depth to around 50 stages and increasing the cache size.
Do you actually think that Intel didn't know the consequences of increasing the pipeline depth? The Intel engineers didn't just guess on the P4 architecture- it was a very deliberate design decision. Judging by the P4's performance gains, it was a pretty good decision, too.
ATA100 is most certainly 100 megabytes/sec. Its a 50 MHz clock with a 2 byte wide lane (66 MHz for ATA133). And I believe most drives today can do a sustained write at 30-50 MBytes/sec (reads are even faster).
So the only way somebody could disagree with your taste in cars is if they are stupid? You sound like a pretty humble guy to me.
Ah yes, somehow raising taxes is always the left wing response to a "problem" (in this case, the only problem is that not everybody likes the same gutless matchbox cars that you do).
people would have to consider the fact that we will run out of oil some day and wasting it just makes that day arrive sooner.
We are no where near running out of oil. If oil supplies started to run out causing prices to rise, then it would suddenly be economically feasable to access huge known oil reserves (such as oil shale) that are too expensive to tap right now. Conservative estimates show that would be enough to supply the world for the next 250 years.
But who knows if that will even be necessary. In the past few years, it has been discovered that some old dorment oil fields were somehow getting refilled with oil. That could mean that there are even larger oil reserves deeper in the earth than we ever thought possible. There is probably more oil in this planet than humans could ever use.
Florida law required that all absentee ballots have postmarks in them.
Actually, that is not quite correct. The Florida Secretary of State ruled in 1973 that absentee ballots needed either a postmark or a dated signature to be valid.
Actually, in 1973 the Florida Secretary of State ruled that the ballot needs to either be postmarked or signed and dated before the election (Source).
Interesting- that link to the Florida Senate was working 20 minutes ago, but now it looks like it is broken.
d e=Display_Statute&URL=Ch0098/ch0098.htm
Just in case, here is a link to the whole chapter.
http://www.flsenate.gov/Statutes/index.cfm?App_mo
98.0977 contains the relevant portion.
Wrong. The lists were not checked. That is what the private company that was contracted to do the checking, DPT, was paid $4 million dollars for.
I'm sorry, but take the 2 seconds to read the 1998 Florida Statute that called for the creation of this list. It clearly states that the names on the list must be verified by the individual county elections supervisors before action is taken. Many of the county elections supervisors are democrats- are they a part of this big conspiracy to help Bush win?
They were *paid* not to check the rosters by telephone. There is a data trail, a letter from Jeb Bush to K. Harris, to prove this
Of course- it wasn't their job to verify the names. They were contracted to find as many *possible* matches as they could. It was up to the county supervisors to verify the names.
mistakes, when checked, added up to 95% error rate. It was voter fraud
To date, not a single innocent person has been found that was actually kept from voting because of the list. There is no fraud.
The man who gave out the contract was named Clayton Roberts and he was assistant to K. Harris. He was not a Dem. Harris was the state chair of the Bush campaign in FL.
I'm sorry, but that is just incorrect. DBT was contracted to make the list before Harris was even elected.
The contract was not put out to bid and the owners of the company in question, DBT, were all Republicans.
Thats actually a pretty dubious claim. Greg Palast claims that the company is "packed with republican stars", and he gives 2 names to "prove" this:
- Ken Langone, who worked on Giuliani's senate campaign, but Palast fails to mention that Langone also donated money to Bill Clinton's 1996 campaign as well as several democratic senators
- Rick Rozar, who has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Republican party. But Palast doesn't mention that Rozar wasn't even affiliated with DBT when they were awarded the contract. He joined DBT when his company was taken over by them a full year after the contract was awarded.
Thats not really strong evidence that the company is "all Republicans" like you claim.
The NAACP got an undisclosed settlement for voter's rights violations.
Funny you should mention that- the NAACP also stated VERY clearly in their settlement that they "have not alleged that Defendants acted in a purposefully discriminatory manner toward any group."
If they didn't find anyone it must've been for the same reason the Warren Commission didn't find anyone who heard shots coming from in front of the JFK motorcade.
Getting a commission to whitewash something is no big deal. Par for the course
Holy cow- read the report. It was (along party lines) extremely critical of the Florida elections process. They would have loved to find something like that. Just look at the dissenting statement to see how partisan the report was.
In order for this to be the big scandal that you seem to think it is, the following would have to be true:
- The legislature that passed the bi-partisan law in 1998 was a part of the conspiracy
- The Democrat that hired DBT was part of the conspiracy
- Every county elections supervisor that was a Democrat was also in on the plot to elect Bush
- There would actually have been people incorrectly prevented from voting because of the list
Since I don't see any of these as being true, I dismiss this crap as sour grapes by the losers.
Not quite.
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/florida.ballots/
No, no, no. Lets take this one point at a time, because your facts are pretty messed up.
In the Florida elections thousands of people, mostly black Democrats, were delisted for being felons.
The felon list that was compiled for the 2000 election did not "delist" anybody from voting. The list was given to the individual county supervisors, and they were required to verify the names on the list before any action was taken. And even if action was taken, the people were given written notice with a procedure to appeal the decision.
The vast majority of these felonies did not take place and were dated up to a milennium in the future. Further, the list was comprised of people who had moved from Texas to Florida.
The only people claiming that the "vast majority" of the list was incorrect are partisan pundits with an axe to grind. Even so, it is irrelevant. The legislature intended the list to cast as wide of a net as possible to reduce the possibility that an ineligible voter would slip through. There were mistakes on the list, but that does not conflict with its stated purpose.
The Floridan Democrats barred from voting were not actually felons, they were locked out as a favor from one Bush to the other.
This had nothing to do with Jeb Bush or even Katherine Harris. The Legislature passed the law, and a democrat elections supervisor (Ethel Baxtor) contracted with a company to generate the list. Oh, and when the Federal Elections Commission held hearings on the Florida Election, they could not find a single person that was wrongly prevented from voting because of the list.
What I find odd is that you seem to think it is that cut and dry.
Newsflash: the voting process is not perfect, and it will never be perfect because humans are doing the voting and humans tend to screw stuff up a lot. It is impossible to say with 100% confidence that Gore had more "legitimate votes" than Bush because there isn't enough precision in the data. All we have is imprecise data that shows that Bush had a slight lead.
So what do we do in situations like that? Well, you abide by the rules that were in place before the contest started. The Florida laws stated very plainly that you need to take the best data that you have and certify the election results by Nov 14th. The best data at that time was a 300+ vote lead for Bush.
However, Gore resorted to the playground tactic of changing the rules mid game, and he was somewhat successful in that. The result? Almost a full month and dozens of updated recount statistics later, Bush still had a lead, and the Supreme Court had to step in to stop the unequal treatment that voters in different counties were recieving.
In fact, in all of the unofficial media recounts that followed the election, Gore only had a slim lead in the most extreme and unlikely of the scenarios (that ALL "undervotes" and ALL "overvotes" would be counted as Gore votes).
consider the effects of:
1. inflation
Ok. Under Reagan, inflation recovered from the Jimmy Carter mess very quickly, and remained very low for the rest of the 80's bottoming out at 1.86% in 1986, so inflation didn't play a very big roll in that (source).
2. a growing worldwide economy
I contend that the Reagan supply side economics helped the economy grow.
3. emergence/growth of industries like hi-tech
Yes- that helped a lot. See #5.
4. deficit spending (it generates some tax revenue)
Actually, public debt as a % of the GDP was higher under Clinton than under Reagan (source).
5. shifts is gov't spending (i.e. major increases in defense).
The defense spending invested heavily in technology, and that helped the hi tech industries grow.
Also note from the Cato article I linked above, all income groups saw an increase in real income under Reagan, but minorities and the poorest quintile saw the biggest increase.