And I take it the Department of Elections is overseen by Joe the toothless guy. I guess, he, not Harris should have certified the results? Or, am I wrong here to? (Like I have to ask in order to get someone to tell me.
In Florida, just like other states, elections are supervised by the local county elections division. Each county has the responsibility of maintaining the voter registration, administering the vote, and of counting the vote results. You are correct, though, that the Department of State certifies the results reported by each county.
I was using a stat that about 90% where up there wrongly or about 51,000 voters.
I'm curious how you get such a huge percentage of false positives. Even the US Comission on Civil Rights (which was very critical of the Florida 2000 election) estimated that only 14% of the names on the list were inaccurate.
It wasn't just the fellons on the list, but people who shared the same name as the fellons, the same last name as the fellons, and had the same birthday as the fellons. Then there where was that guy who was convicted of a felony in 2010 and his companions. But, no, no mistakes. Just white out those dates and every thing's ok.
Nobody is disputing that there were false-positives on this list. When DBT/ChoicePoint was comissioned, they were instructed to cast as wide a net as possible to make sure no names would slip through the cracks. Why? Because the Democrats pushed for it after irregularities in the 1997 Miami Mayoral runoff election. Some people even argued that the new election law didn't go far enough to stop widespread voter fraud (like dead people voting).
Oh, and that same Florida Law (section 98.093) says those local election boards are required to automatically purge people on the list provided to them.
No, no. You are looking at the wrong law dealing with a different list. Section 98.093 deals with the monthly updating of the voter registration by the county health department (to remove people that deceased in the last month), and the court clerks (to remove people who were convicted of a felony int he last month). It makes sense that those people should be automatically purged as they become ineligible.
The law in question is 98.0977, which deals with the statewide voter registration maintenance. This has no such requirement, in fact section 3d - 3f clearly indicate that each name must be manually verified before it is removed from the voter registration rolls, and those affected have a clearly defined process of appeal.
You are wrong on so many counts that it is hard to know where to start.
the head of the Bush campaign in Florida also happened to be the person in charge of Florida elections
I assume you are talking about Secretary of State Katherine Harris. I guess you don't realize that the Department of State is not "in charge of Florida elections". Elections are the responsibility of the... Department of Elections! Funny how that works.
worked with a Republican headed company and George Bush's brother Jeb
Bzzzt. Wrong again. ChoicePoint was hired by Ethel Baxtor (D - Florida Director of Elections), before Harris or Bush were elected to Florida office.
to have ~51,000 people wrongfully taken off the voter rolls who where later found to 90% Democrat
Strike Three! 51,000 people were not "wrongfully taken off the voter rolls". 51,000 (actually it was 56,000) people were included in a list of voters who would possibly not be allowed to vote because their name produced a match in the ChoicePoint database as a convicted felon without their voting rights restored. According to Florida Law (section 98.0977 - Page 15), the only people with authority to remove a voter from the registration rolls are the county election supervisors from one of the 67 counties in Florida (not Katherine Harris or Jeb Bush).
Then there's that whole thing where Bush Jr. got appointed President by the people his daddy appointed into office
The USSC ruling agreed with all three of the completed vote counts and recounts in the state (including the count that was certified by the Secretary of State on the 7th day after the election, as required by Florida Law), and simply stated that the standards of vote counting and recounting could not be changed after the election was over (which was exactly what Al Gore was trying to do).
Yeah. Somebody wrote a script that uses Mod-rewrite to use the Amazon Web services product feed and create an individual html page for every item that Amazon sells. So anybody can throw up the amazon script and mod-rewrite hack on a web server and they instantly have thousands of "pages" that Google indexes, which are nothing more than associate comission links to Amazon pages. I've noticed these kinds of pages nudging their way into the top 10 for a while now.
LOL! As you say, any 5th grade student should know that the legislative branch makes the laws, and the executive branch executes them... So the Fla legislature says, "Remove persons convicted of felonies in FLa and other states that don't return the vote to ex-cons from our voting roles." Then the executive branch proceeds to do so - but the exectutive branch in this case had considerable control over how that was accomplished - with the results we saw in Fla. - the exclusion of thousands of eligible black voters - at a disproportionately high rate when compared to white voters.
You are correct, however the execution of this law was not the responsibilty of Kathernine Harris or the Department of State, it was the responsibility of the Department of Elections. Here is the actual text of the Florida statue. Its on page 15-16 (Statute 98.0977). Note this is an updated version from what was on the books in 2000 (98.0975), but the proceedures are the same.
The system shall provide functionality for ensuring that the database is updated on a daily basis to determine if a registered voter is ineligible to vote for
any of the following reasons, including, but not limited to:
...
(b) The voter has been convicted of a felony and has not had his or her civil rights restored
...
(d) When the supervisor of elections finds information through the database that suggests that a voter has been convicted of a felony and has not had his or her civil rights restored or has been adjudicated mentally incompetent and his or her mental capacity with respect to voting has not been restored, the supervisor of elections shall notify the voter by certified United States mail. The notification shall contain a statement
as to the reason for the voter's potential ineligibility to be registered to vote and shall request information from the voter on forms provided by the supervisor of elections.
As an alternative, the voter may attend a hearing
at a time and place specified in the notice. If there is evidence that the notice was not received, notice must be given once by publication in a newspaper of general circulation
in the county. The notice must plainly state that
the voter is potentially ineligible to be registered to vote and must state a time and place for the person to appear before the supervisor of elections to show cause why his or her name should not be removed from the voter registration rolls. After reviewing the information provided by the voter, if the supervisor of elections determines that the voter is not eligible to vote under the laws of this state, the supervisor of elections shall notify the voter by certified United States mail that he or she has been found ineligible to be registered to vote in this state, shall state the reason for the ineligibility, and shall inform the voter that he or she has been removed from the voter registration rolls. The supervisor of elections shall remove from the voter registration rolls the name of any voter who fails either to respond within 30 days to the notice sent by certified mail or to attend the hearing.
(e) Upon hearing evidence at the hearing, the supervisor of elections must determine whether there is sufficient evidence to strike the persons name from the registration books. If the supervisor determines that there is sufficient evidence, he or she must strike the name.
Emphasis is mine. Note that this statute in no way provides the Department of State any authority to strike a name from the voter registry. It is clearly stated that this was the responsibility of the director of elections in each county. So every name that was removed from the voter registration rolls was removed by one of the 67 county supervisors of elections, not Jeb Bush or Katherine Harris.
Defendants have taken an oath to support,
protect and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States and of the State of Florida, and
are dedicated to act in a manner consistent with the requirements of federal, state and local
election law. Plaintiffs have not alleged that Defendants acted in a purposefully discriminatory
manner toward any group.
Not even the NAACP claimed that Bush or Harris purposefully discriminated against minority voters. In fact, if you read the entire settlement, the NAACP acknowledges that most of the points of suit were already corrected prior to the settlement taking place.
Where did your invented information come from?"
How about her own words?
Ok, Palast and Harris disagree with each other. Those are some insightful links.
"Last year, the Florida legislature passed virtually all of my bills as part of its landmark Election Reform Act."
Thank you for proving my point. Were you sleeping in Government 101?
Maybe things happened different in your alternate reality
Let's look at your "reality". You are blaming Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris for:
A law that was passed before they were in office
A voter "felon" list that was comissioned by a Democrat and wasn't even used by the entire state
Voter registrations that were removed by Democrat county election officials in Democratic counties
The report does not find that the highest officials of the state conspired to disenfranchise voters.
The same U.S.C.C.R struggled to find 5 voters who were "disenfranchised", 4 of which were allowed to vote and the 5th had been convicted of a crime.
A list of 57,000 names where it is unknown A) How many names were incorrectly included, B) How many names were actually scrubbed of the voter registration by county election officials, C) How many were in a county that actually used the list, D) How many who were incorrectly on the list didn't dispute the list as they were entitled to do up to 1 week before the election, E) Who these people would have voted for if they were allowed to vote and F) How many would have bothered to go and vote in the first place
Whatever alternate reality you are in, that must be some pretty good stuff you're smokin.
There was no attempt made to change the 'electoral process', only to cause it to adhere to its principles
Florida law has provisions requiring an automatic recount in the event of a close election. Florida law also requires that the election results be certified at 5PM on the 7th day after the election. After the initial recount was finished (with Bush still in the lead), this deadline passed and the results were certified. Gore then sued to force a selective recount in counties where he stood to gain the most votes after the deadline for certification, effectively changing the existing Florida election law.
It's simple to make unfounded assertions.... You gave no information that suggested anything other than Mr. Palast belives that George Bush is a Bad Guy, not that there was any vested interest in that position for him.
Mr. Palast is an expert at making unfounded assertions. Lets start at page 1 of his book:
Here's how it worked: Mostly, the disks contain data on Florida citizens - 57,700 of them. In the months leading up to the November 2000 balloting, Florida Secretary of State Harris,
in coordination with Governor Jeb Bush, ordered local elections supervisors to purge these 57,700 from voter registries. In Harris's computers, they are named as felons who have no right
to vote in Florida.
Mrs. Harris and Gov. Bush didn't "order local elections supervisors" to purge votor registries - they didn't even have the authority to do that. This came from the Florida Legislature, because in the US the Legislature writes the laws, not the Executive branch (which most people should have learned in 5th grade US Government, but apparently not Mr. Palast - maybe thats why he moved out of the country). In fact, the Florida Legislature passed this requirement in 1997, before Harris or Bush were elected to office in Florida (see this Salon.com correction from when they published the original Palast article), and this list was compiled at the direction of Ethel Baxter, the Democrat Florida Director of Elections. In addition, this law in no way forced local election officials to purge anybody off the voter registries. In fact, there were several counties that scrapped the entire list without using a single name. You see, county election officials control county election rolls, not the Department of State or the Governor. This means that any voter disenfranchising in heavily democratic, minority counties was done by county election officials, who happen to be Democrat minorities in such counties.
Explain to me what Mr. Palast's 'vested interest' is... in this issue?
If you can't see how he doesn't profit from three high-on-emotion, low-on-fact-but-we-hate-republicans books on this very subject, then maybe you don't understand what a vested interest is.
for instance, Cheney's Vested Interest in the Iraq war is that he will profit from the assignment of Halliburton as the primary contractor - that is a 'vested interest'
Ah, yes, the left wings favorite whipping boy. You do realize that Dick Cheney divested himself of all financial ties to Halliburton (with the exception of an insured retirement annuity, which doesn't change no matter how much or how little money Halliburton makes)? I guess you also realize that Halliburton has been working almost exclusively on Government contracts for the last 60 years, not just from when Dick Cheney became associated with them. And I guess you would also know that most of the so-called "no-bid" contracts that Halliburton has been awarded in Iraq were because Halliburton is the only company that does what the contractors were looking for. After all, how many companies out there have the oil fire expertise of Kellogg Brown & Root? Never mind all of these facts, lets just complain about the rich white guy!
Katherine Harris was tasked with disenfranchising a few thousand names off the list of voters because they were felons
This sentence is 100% false. Katherine Harris had nothing to do with the voter felon scrub list. This list was initiated as a result of Florida Statute Section 98.0975, passed in 1997 by the state legislature, a year before Harris or Gov. Bush were elected. This list was created by ChoicePoint systems, who was hired by Ethel Baxtor (D), the Florida Director of Elections.
And Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush had no legal authority to remove voters from the registration lists, because Florida Elections and election rolls (like almost every other state election) are supervised and maintained by the County election officials (who happen to be Democrat minorities in overwhelmingly Democratic minority counties). So even if Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush wanted to disenfranchise 100,000 minority voters, they had absolutely no way of doing it.
Perhaps there is something to be inferred from the situation where an attempt to enforce the Constitution is ILLEGAL (in caps).
Attempting to change the electoral process in the middle of an election recount in an attempt to change the outcome in your favor is not endorced or permitted anywhere in the constitution.
And isn't it odd that the state that just happened to have the problems with the voting process just happened to be the state whose governor was the brother of one of the candidates?
Close election != problems with the voting process
And isn't it simply horrible that someone would bring a court action to redress the blatant violations of the rights of Black Americans in Florida by the State of Florida?
And from the settlement of that court action, the NAACP conceeds that:
Plaintiffs have not alleged that Defendants acted in a purposefully discriminatory
manner toward any group.
Did you read the book? Or even the first chapter?
Actually, I have read this book, and I find it comical how many ignorant facts, blatant mistruths, logical fallicies, and downright partisan rhetoric people will believe from somebody who has a vestedinterest in discrediting the Bush presidency.
Whether you agree with it or not, Executive Privilege has been validated by the courts and used by almost every president. President Clinton himself used his Executive Privilege at least 13 times (far more than all of the other post-Water-gate presidents combined). The Clinton administration issued this directive in 1994:
"The policy of this Administration is to comply with congressional requests for information to the fullest extent consistent with the constitutional and statutory obligations of the Executive Branch.... Executive privilege will be asserted only after careful review demonstrates that assertion of the privilege is necessary to protect Executive Branch prerogatives....Executive privilege belongs to the President, not individual departments or agencies"
Its also interesting that the Clinton Administration adopted this policy in 1994 as well:
"In circumstances involving communications relating to investigations of personal wrongdoing by government officials, it is our practice not to assert executive privilege, either in judicial proceedings or in congressional investigations and hearings."
However, he used his Executive Priviledge on several occasions to delay or thwart the independent counsel investigation led by Kennith Starr, directly contradicting his own administration directives.
The practice of claiming Executive Priviledge is not new, and it is ridiculous to use this in a partisan blast against the Bush administration, especially in light of the previous administrations liberal application of it.
The report does not find that the highest officials of the state conspired to disenfranchise voters. Moreover, even if it was foreseeable that certain actions by officials led to voter disenfranchisement, this alone does not mean that intentional discrimination occurred. Instead, the report concludes that officials ignored the mounting evidence of rising voter registration rates in communities.
Please tell me how one of the highest tax burdens in history, stocks trading at PE ratios in the several hundreds, stock prices jumping through the roof even if the latest dot.com hadn't show a profit, and companies overstating earnings and profits to the tune of billions of dollars qualifies as a "great" economy.
That "great" economy was an inflated lie and things were never that good. The economic slump was nothing more than a correction back to what things should have been. And the only reason we had a barely recordable 1 quarter recession was because of 9/11.
You are guilty of common problem amongst computer types - blame the user when the machine is at fault.
You are guilty of a common problem amongts Democrat types - blame the Republicans for everything no matter what.
If the ballot machines in Black, Democratic voting areas were programmed to silently ead up the ballot and ignore the vote, the blame rests soley on the elected officials in the Black, Democratic voting areas (which usually happen to be Black, and are most likely Democrats). Blaming the republicans in the white, Republican areas for apparently configuring their machines correctly makes absolutely no sense, especially considering that they had no control over the other areas voting setup.
That is not the point. The point is that there are people overseas that CAN live on a dollar an hour.
You know, I seem to recall that America has survived for over 225 years while paying something resembling a living wage to the workers. It was working 10 years ago, and 5 years ago. What happened?
This isn't new. From textiles in the '20s, to Steel in the '50s, to Cars in the '70s and '80s, skilled positions have always transferred overseas as wages dropped. The US is nothing but better off because of it. That's why you can go buy a $10 pair of pants or a brand new $10,000 car.
Carly, the unreconstructed know-nothing, knows she is going to be hyper wealthy on tax cuts and wage slashing. She doesn't give a flaming damn about anyone but her circle of wealthy friends.
No, she knows that if she doesn't cut costs, the thousands of shareholders that she represents, along with the thousands of employees that work for her will be out of money and out of a job.
This isn't some scam to make the rich richer. Its a natural progression of the global economy that was inevitably started decades ago.
How is it reasonable to expect companies to pay you 10 times more when there are "equally qualified or more qualified" counterparts overseas? Corporate America has no obligation to pay for your education.
Decrease production costs most certainly translates into lower priced goods. If they didn't, we would be paying $20,000 for a computer and taking out jumbo mortgages for a car. If Dell doesn't lower their price, somebody else will and Dell won't be playing much longer.
Margins on computer equipment and electronics hover around 1%. That means if you drop $1000 on a new Dell or HP computer, about $10 of that goes to line the pockets of those "greedy" corporate fatcats. I also read that the average $15,000 car nets carmakers around $250 profit. With margins that slim, you have to cut costs wherever you can or you will not survive. This has nothing to do with greed, it's only about survival.
Yeah, I think we should have stepped back and let Saddam finish them all off himself. At least we could have sat down and patted ourselves on the back because it wasn't us that was killing innocent Iraqi citizens.
Here is Katherine Harris' response to the garbage the Palast published.
You might also want to read the USCCR Report, which states in part:
The report does not find that the highest officials of the state conspired to disenfranchise voters. Moreover, even if it was foreseeable that certain actions by officials led to voter disenfranchisement, this alone does not mean that intentional discrimination occurred. Instead, the report concludes that officials ignored the mounting evidence of rising voter registration rates in communities..
You're forgetting: the duty to produce a list of voters who should NOT be allowed to vote because of their ex-felon status was delegated to a private firm.
This firm was hired in 1997 as a result of Florida Statute Section 98.0975, which mandated the use of a private firm to provide the names of potentially ineligible voters who remained on the voter-registration rolls. They were hired by the Florida Director of Elections, Ethel Baxtor (a Democrate), before Harris was even in office.
This firm produced a list and gave it to Harris saying 'hey, this list is over populated and needs to be rechecked by your officials - who should know who really IS an ex-felon in your state.' KH said 'No problem, just make it as "comprehensive" as you can, we'll sort it out!' So, the overloaded list was handed to KH... what did she do? She turned around and distributed it to the counties and their polling places, as is, and claimed that it was carefully reviewed before being put in to use.
That's what she was required to do by Florida State Law. The legislature, not the Department of State, required county supervisors to remove the names of these persons from the voting rolls if they were unable to determine that this information was incorrect.
End result? Hundreds, if not thousands, of eligible voters were turned away at the polls.
The US Civil Rights Comission struggled to find 5 such people (and 4 of the people they did find were eventually allowed to vote).
By the way, most modern industrialized (and even some not so industrialized) nations have realized that blocking ex-felons from voting is just another way of disenfranchising a class of voter - akin to poll taxes and the like. Reconstructionist bullshit, to put it nicely.
This isn't isolated to just Florida. 9 states have a lifetime voting ban on convicted felons, and another 32 states have some sort of restriction on felons voting. This is hardly something that can be blamed on those evil republicans.
You can get a DirecTivo for less than $50 and only pay $5/month for Tivo service. So for your nice PVR-computer price of $200, you can get a Tivo and over 2 years of service. Plus that $5/month covers all the Tivo receivers you have.
But tell me, just how did Iraq pre-invasion pose a threat to US national security?
Do the math: 1) Saddam has used WMD in the past 2) Saddam has large amounts of WMD that were unaccounted for by the UN 3) Saddam says he will use WMD against the US 4) Terrorists say they want to use WMD against the US 5) Terrorists have proven their ability to attack inside the US
How is that not a threat?
Almost as laughable as your statement that "nobody has tried to deny that claim" - why do you think the majority of the world's nations were opposed to the US-led invasion?
Why do you think the UN Security Counsel passed 17 Chapter 7 resolutions condemning Iraq for non-compliance on WMD? The fact that the UN doesn't have the balls to enforce their own resolutions doesn't change anything.
Slashdot Mirror
And I take it the Department of Elections is overseen by Joe the toothless guy. I guess, he, not Harris should have certified the results? Or, am I wrong here to? (Like I have to ask in order to get someone to tell me.
In Florida, just like other states, elections are supervised by the local county elections division. Each county has the responsibility of maintaining the voter registration, administering the vote, and of counting the vote results. You are correct, though, that the Department of State certifies the results reported by each county.
I was using a stat that about 90% where up there wrongly or about 51,000 voters.
I'm curious how you get such a huge percentage of false positives. Even the US Comission on Civil Rights (which was very critical of the Florida 2000 election) estimated that only 14% of the names on the list were inaccurate.
It wasn't just the fellons on the list, but people who shared the same name as the fellons, the same last name as the fellons, and had the same birthday as the fellons. Then there where was that guy who was convicted of a felony in 2010 and his companions. But, no, no mistakes. Just white out those dates and every thing's ok.
Nobody is disputing that there were false-positives on this list. When DBT/ChoicePoint was comissioned, they were instructed to cast as wide a net as possible to make sure no names would slip through the cracks. Why? Because the Democrats pushed for it after irregularities in the 1997 Miami Mayoral runoff election. Some people even argued that the new election law didn't go far enough to stop widespread voter fraud (like dead people voting).
Oh, and that same Florida Law (section 98.093) says those local election boards are required to automatically purge people on the list provided to them.
No, no. You are looking at the wrong law dealing with a different list. Section 98.093 deals with the monthly updating of the voter registration by the county health department (to remove people that deceased in the last month), and the court clerks (to remove people who were convicted of a felony int he last month). It makes sense that those people should be automatically purged as they become ineligible.
The law in question is 98.0977, which deals with the statewide voter registration maintenance. This has no such requirement, in fact section 3d - 3f clearly indicate that each name must be manually verified before it is removed from the voter registration rolls, and those affected have a clearly defined process of appeal.
You are wrong on so many counts that it is hard to know where to start.
... Department of Elections! Funny how that works.
the head of the Bush campaign in Florida also happened to be the person in charge of Florida elections
I assume you are talking about Secretary of State Katherine Harris. I guess you don't realize that the Department of State is not "in charge of Florida elections". Elections are the responsibility of the
worked with a Republican headed company and George Bush's brother Jeb
Bzzzt. Wrong again. ChoicePoint was hired by Ethel Baxtor (D - Florida Director of Elections), before Harris or Bush were elected to Florida office.
to have ~51,000 people wrongfully taken off the voter rolls who where later found to 90% Democrat
Strike Three! 51,000 people were not "wrongfully taken off the voter rolls". 51,000 (actually it was 56,000) people were included in a list of voters who would possibly not be allowed to vote because their name produced a match in the ChoicePoint database as a convicted felon without their voting rights restored. According to Florida Law (section 98.0977 - Page 15), the only people with authority to remove a voter from the registration rolls are the county election supervisors from one of the 67 counties in Florida (not Katherine Harris or Jeb Bush).
Then there's that whole thing where Bush Jr. got appointed President by the people his daddy appointed into office
The USSC ruling agreed with all three of the completed vote counts and recounts in the state (including the count that was certified by the Secretary of State on the 7th day after the election, as required by Florida Law), and simply stated that the standards of vote counting and recounting could not be changed after the election was over (which was exactly what Al Gore was trying to do).
Yeah. Somebody wrote a script that uses Mod-rewrite to use the Amazon Web services product feed and create an individual html page for every item that Amazon sells. So anybody can throw up the amazon script and mod-rewrite hack on a web server and they instantly have thousands of "pages" that Google indexes, which are nothing more than associate comission links to Amazon pages. I've noticed these kinds of pages nudging their way into the top 10 for a while now.
You are correct, however the execution of this law was not the responsibilty of Kathernine Harris or the Department of State, it was the responsibility of the Department of Elections. Here is the actual text of the Florida statue. Its on page 15-16 (Statute 98.0977). Note this is an updated version from what was on the books in 2000 (98.0975), but the proceedures are the same.
...
(b) The voter has been convicted of a felony and has not had his or her civil rights restored
...
(d) When the supervisor of elections finds information through the database that suggests that a voter has been convicted of a felony and has not had his or her civil rights restored or has been adjudicated mentally incompetent and his or her mental capacity with respect to voting has not been restored, the supervisor of elections shall notify the voter by certified United States mail. The notification shall contain a statement as to the reason for the voter's potential ineligibility to be registered to vote and shall request information from the voter on forms provided by the supervisor of elections. As an alternative, the voter may attend a hearing at a time and place specified in the notice. If there is evidence that the notice was not received, notice must be given once by publication in a newspaper of general circulation in the county. The notice must plainly state that the voter is potentially ineligible to be registered to vote and must state a time and place for the person to appear before the supervisor of elections to show cause why his or her name should not be removed from the voter registration rolls. After reviewing the information provided by the voter, if the supervisor of elections determines that the voter is not eligible to vote under the laws of this state, the supervisor of elections shall notify the voter by certified United States mail that he or she has been found ineligible to be registered to vote in this state, shall state the reason for the ineligibility, and shall inform the voter that he or she has been removed from the voter registration rolls. The supervisor of elections shall remove from the voter registration rolls the name of any voter who fails either to respond within 30 days to the notice sent by certified mail or to attend the hearing.
(e) Upon hearing evidence at the hearing, the supervisor of elections must determine whether there is sufficient evidence to strike the persons name from the registration books. If the supervisor determines that there is sufficient evidence, he or she must strike the name.
Emphasis is mine. Note that this statute in no way provides the Department of State any authority to strike a name from the voter registry. It is clearly stated that this was the responsibility of the director of elections in each county. So every name that was removed from the voter registration rolls was removed by one of the 67 county supervisors of elections, not Jeb Bush or Katherine Harris.
Look at the settlement:
Not even the NAACP claimed that Bush or Harris purposefully discriminated against minority voters. In fact, if you read the entire settlement, the NAACP acknowledges that most of the points of suit were already corrected prior to the settlement taking place.
Where did your invented information come from?"
How about her own words?
Ok, Palast and Harris disagree with each other. Those are some insightful links.
"Last year, the Florida legislature passed virtually all of my bills as part of its landmark Election Reform Act."
Thank you for proving my point. Were you sleeping in Government 101?
Maybe things happened different in your alternate reality
Let's look at your "reality". You are blaming Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris for:
A law that was passed before they were in office
A voter "felon" list that was comissioned by a Democrat and wasn't even used by the entire state
Voter registrations that were removed by Democrat county election officials in Democratic counties
Intentional Voter Disenfranchisement, even when the U.S. Civil Rights Comission concluded that:
The same U.S.C.C.R struggled to find 5 voters who were "disenfranchised", 4 of which were allowed to vote and the 5th had been convicted of a crime.
A list of 57,000 names where it is unknown A) How many names were incorrectly included, B) How many names were actually scrubbed of the voter registration by county election officials, C) How many were in a county that actually used the list, D) How many who were incorrectly on the list didn't dispute the list as they were entitled to do up to 1 week before the election, E) Who these people would have voted for if they were allowed to vote and F) How many would have bothered to go and vote in the first place
Whatever alternate reality you are in, that must be some pretty good stuff you're smokin.
There was no attempt made to change the 'electoral process', only to cause it to adhere to its principles
... in this issue?
Florida law has provisions requiring an automatic recount in the event of a close election. Florida law also requires that the election results be certified at 5PM on the 7th day after the election. After the initial recount was finished (with Bush still in the lead), this deadline passed and the results were certified. Gore then sued to force a selective recount in counties where he stood to gain the most votes after the deadline for certification, effectively changing the existing Florida election law.
It's simple to make unfounded assertions.... You gave no information that suggested anything other than Mr. Palast belives that George Bush is a Bad Guy, not that there was any vested interest in that position for him.
Mr. Palast is an expert at making unfounded assertions. Lets start at page 1 of his book:
Here's how it worked: Mostly, the disks contain data on Florida citizens - 57,700 of them. In the months leading up to the November 2000 balloting, Florida Secretary of State Harris, in coordination with Governor Jeb Bush, ordered local elections supervisors to purge these 57,700 from voter registries. In Harris's computers, they are named as felons who have no right to vote in Florida.
Mrs. Harris and Gov. Bush didn't "order local elections supervisors" to purge votor registries - they didn't even have the authority to do that. This came from the Florida Legislature, because in the US the Legislature writes the laws, not the Executive branch (which most people should have learned in 5th grade US Government, but apparently not Mr. Palast - maybe thats why he moved out of the country). In fact, the Florida Legislature passed this requirement in 1997, before Harris or Bush were elected to office in Florida (see this Salon.com correction from when they published the original Palast article), and this list was compiled at the direction of Ethel Baxter, the Democrat Florida Director of Elections. In addition, this law in no way forced local election officials to purge anybody off the voter registries. In fact, there were several counties that scrapped the entire list without using a single name. You see, county election officials control county election rolls, not the Department of State or the Governor. This means that any voter disenfranchising in heavily democratic, minority counties was done by county election officials, who happen to be Democrat minorities in such counties.
Explain to me what Mr. Palast's 'vested interest' is
If you can't see how he doesn't profit from three high-on-emotion, low-on-fact-but-we-hate-republicans books on this very subject, then maybe you don't understand what a vested interest is.
for instance, Cheney's Vested Interest in the Iraq war is that he will profit from the assignment of Halliburton as the primary contractor - that is a 'vested interest'
Ah, yes, the left wings favorite whipping boy. You do realize that Dick Cheney divested himself of all financial ties to Halliburton (with the exception of an insured retirement annuity, which doesn't change no matter how much or how little money Halliburton makes)? I guess you also realize that Halliburton has been working almost exclusively on Government contracts for the last 60 years, not just from when Dick Cheney became associated with them. And I guess you would also know that most of the so-called "no-bid" contracts that Halliburton has been awarded in Iraq were because Halliburton is the only company that does what the contractors were looking for. After all, how many companies out there have the oil fire expertise of Kellogg Brown & Root? Never mind all of these facts, lets just complain about the rich white guy!
Katherine Harris was tasked with disenfranchising a few thousand names off the list of voters because they were felons
This sentence is 100% false. Katherine Harris had nothing to do with the voter felon scrub list. This list was initiated as a result of Florida Statute Section 98.0975, passed in 1997 by the state legislature, a year before Harris or Gov. Bush were elected. This list was created by ChoicePoint systems, who was hired by Ethel Baxtor (D), the Florida Director of Elections.
And Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush had no legal authority to remove voters from the registration lists, because Florida Elections and election rolls (like almost every other state election) are supervised and maintained by the County election officials (who happen to be Democrat minorities in overwhelmingly Democratic minority counties). So even if Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush wanted to disenfranchise 100,000 minority voters, they had absolutely no way of doing it.
Get your facts straight.
Maybe you should be checking your facts.
Perhaps there is something to be inferred from the situation where an attempt to enforce the Constitution is ILLEGAL (in caps).
Attempting to change the electoral process in the middle of an election recount in an attempt to change the outcome in your favor is not endorced or permitted anywhere in the constitution.
And isn't it odd that the state that just happened to have the problems with the voting process just happened to be the state whose governor was the brother of one of the candidates?
Close election != problems with the voting process
And isn't it simply horrible that someone would bring a court action to redress the blatant violations of the rights of Black Americans in Florida by the State of Florida?
And from the settlement of that court action, the NAACP conceeds that:
Plaintiffs have not alleged that Defendants acted in a purposefully discriminatory manner toward any group.
Did you read the book? Or even the first chapter?
Actually, I have read this book, and I find it comical how many ignorant facts, blatant mistruths, logical fallicies, and downright partisan rhetoric people will believe from somebody who has a vested interest in discrediting the Bush presidency.
Its not the rain or the snow that affects the signal, its the height of the storm clouds that may get in the way of the signal.
5) As soon as Dubya has his mourning coffee
So, is this coffee that he only drinks when he is really sad?
Whether you agree with it or not, Executive Privilege has been validated by the courts and used by almost every president. President Clinton himself used his Executive Privilege at least 13 times (far more than all of the other post-Water-gate presidents combined). The Clinton administration issued this directive in 1994:
"The policy of this Administration is to comply with congressional requests for information to the fullest extent consistent with the constitutional and statutory obligations of the Executive Branch.... Executive privilege will be asserted only after careful review demonstrates that assertion of the privilege is necessary to protect Executive Branch prerogatives....Executive privilege belongs to the President, not individual departments or agencies"
Its also interesting that the Clinton Administration adopted this policy in 1994 as well:
"In circumstances involving communications relating to investigations of personal wrongdoing by government officials, it is our practice not to assert executive privilege, either in judicial proceedings or in congressional investigations and hearings."
However, he used his Executive Priviledge on several occasions to delay or thwart the independent counsel investigation led by Kennith Starr, directly contradicting his own administration directives.
The practice of claiming Executive Priviledge is not new, and it is ridiculous to use this in a partisan blast against the Bush administration, especially in light of the previous administrations liberal application of it.
Here is a reminder of what happened to you last time you tried to bring this up. Some Democrats never learn....
Here is what the inquiry acually found:
The report does not find that the highest officials of the state conspired to disenfranchise voters. Moreover, even if it was foreseeable that certain actions by officials led to voter disenfranchisement, this alone does not mean that intentional discrimination occurred. Instead, the report concludes that officials ignored the mounting evidence of rising voter registration rates in communities.
Please tell me how one of the highest tax burdens in history, stocks trading at PE ratios in the several hundreds, stock prices jumping through the roof even if the latest dot.com hadn't show a profit, and companies overstating earnings and profits to the tune of billions of dollars qualifies as a "great" economy.
That "great" economy was an inflated lie and things were never that good. The economic slump was nothing more than a correction back to what things should have been. And the only reason we had a barely recordable 1 quarter recession was because of 9/11.
Clinton and Clark did not get one US soldier killed in the Balkans
Nah, instead we bombed passenger trains full of innocent civilians.
You are guilty of common problem amongst computer types - blame the user when the machine is at fault.
You are guilty of a common problem amongts Democrat types - blame the Republicans for everything no matter what.
If the ballot machines in Black, Democratic voting areas were programmed to silently ead up the ballot and ignore the vote, the blame rests soley on the elected officials in the Black, Democratic voting areas (which usually happen to be Black, and are most likely Democrats). Blaming the republicans in the white, Republican areas for apparently configuring their machines correctly makes absolutely no sense, especially considering that they had no control over the other areas voting setup.
So if these meetings were secret and their record has never been published, how to you know what Cheney was asking and what their response was?
Can you live on one dollar an hour? Can you?
That is not the point. The point is that there are people overseas that CAN live on a dollar an hour.
You know, I seem to recall that America has survived for over 225 years while paying something resembling a living wage to the workers. It was working 10 years ago, and 5 years ago. What happened?
This isn't new. From textiles in the '20s, to Steel in the '50s, to Cars in the '70s and '80s, skilled positions have always transferred overseas as wages dropped. The US is nothing but better off because of it. That's why you can go buy a $10 pair of pants or a brand new $10,000 car.
Carly, the unreconstructed know-nothing, knows she is going to be hyper wealthy on tax cuts and wage slashing. She doesn't give a flaming damn about anyone but her circle of wealthy friends.
No, she knows that if she doesn't cut costs, the thousands of shareholders that she represents, along with the thousands of employees that work for her will be out of money and out of a job.
This isn't some scam to make the rich richer. Its a natural progression of the global economy that was inevitably started decades ago.
How is it reasonable to expect companies to pay you 10 times more when there are "equally qualified or more qualified" counterparts overseas? Corporate America has no obligation to pay for your education.
Decrease production costs most certainly translates into lower priced goods. If they didn't, we would be paying $20,000 for a computer and taking out jumbo mortgages for a car. If Dell doesn't lower their price, somebody else will and Dell won't be playing much longer.
Margins on computer equipment and electronics hover around 1%. That means if you drop $1000 on a new Dell or HP computer, about $10 of that goes to line the pockets of those "greedy" corporate fatcats. I also read that the average $15,000 car nets carmakers around $250 profit. With margins that slim, you have to cut costs wherever you can or you will not survive. This has nothing to do with greed, it's only about survival.
Yeah, I think we should have stepped back and let Saddam finish them all off himself. At least we could have sat down and patted ourselves on the back because it wasn't us that was killing innocent Iraqi citizens.
Article on Salon...
Guess you missed this correction.
Harpers...
Here is Katherine Harris' response to the garbage the Palast published.
You might also want to read the USCCR Report, which states in part:
The report does not find that the highest officials of the state conspired to disenfranchise voters. Moreover, even if it was foreseeable that certain actions by officials led to voter disenfranchisement, this alone does not mean that intentional discrimination occurred. Instead, the report concludes that officials ignored the mounting evidence of rising voter registration rates in communities..
The Dissenting Statement is also a worthwhile read on the subject.
You're forgetting: the duty to produce a list of voters who should NOT be allowed to vote because of their ex-felon status was delegated to a private firm.
This firm was hired in 1997 as a result of Florida Statute Section 98.0975, which mandated the use of a private firm to provide the names of potentially ineligible voters who remained on the voter-registration rolls. They were hired by the Florida Director of Elections, Ethel Baxtor (a Democrate), before Harris was even in office.
This firm produced a list and gave it to Harris saying 'hey, this list is over populated and needs to be rechecked by your officials - who should know who really IS an ex-felon in your state.' KH said 'No problem, just make it as "comprehensive" as you can, we'll sort it out!' So, the overloaded list was handed to KH... what did she do? She turned around and distributed it to the counties and their polling places, as is, and claimed that it was carefully reviewed before being put in to use.
That's what she was required to do by Florida State Law. The legislature, not the Department of State, required county supervisors to remove the names of these persons from the voting rolls if they were unable to determine that this information was incorrect.
End result? Hundreds, if not thousands, of eligible voters were turned away at the polls.
The US Civil Rights Comission struggled to find 5 such people (and 4 of the people they did find were eventually allowed to vote).
By the way, most modern industrialized (and even some not so industrialized) nations have realized that blocking ex-felons from voting is just another way of disenfranchising a class of voter - akin to poll taxes and the like. Reconstructionist bullshit, to put it nicely.
This isn't isolated to just Florida. 9 states have a lifetime voting ban on convicted felons, and another 32 states have some sort of restriction on felons voting. This is hardly something that can be blamed on those evil republicans.
Acutally, Tivo has been offering a "Tivo Basic" service on some Tivo devices. This offers DVR functionality with no subscription to the Tivo service.
You can get a DirecTivo for less than $50 and only pay $5/month for Tivo service. So for your nice PVR-computer price of $200, you can get a Tivo and over 2 years of service. Plus that $5/month covers all the Tivo receivers you have.
OK, if that was the case then wouldn't these WMDs have been found by US/UK troops upon inspecting Iraqi troops that they had captured or killed?
This colonel also claims that the WMD is still in hands of fedayeen, and that Saddam deployed secret weapons caches throughout the country to supply resistance fighters after the war. He also said that "Only when Saddam is caught will people talk about these weapons".
But tell me, just how did Iraq pre-invasion pose a threat to US national security?
Do the math:
1) Saddam has used WMD in the past
2) Saddam has large amounts of WMD that were unaccounted for by the UN
3) Saddam says he will use WMD against the US
4) Terrorists say they want to use WMD against the US
5) Terrorists have proven their ability to attack inside the US
How is that not a threat?
Almost as laughable as your statement that "nobody has tried to deny that claim" - why do you think the majority of the world's nations were opposed to the US-led invasion?
Why do you think the UN Security Counsel passed 17 Chapter 7 resolutions condemning Iraq for non-compliance on WMD? The fact that the UN doesn't have the balls to enforce their own resolutions doesn't change anything.