they're at it again:

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/30/bush.nader/index.html

Sterling, if your character is more important than your "cause", then can you explain to me how you manage to support the character(s) of this administration? VP Cheney, who, while campaigning said he wanted to "restore a tone of civility and decency to the debate in Washington"--this guy uses the f-word on the Senate floor. The same people who consider a boob during a half-time show the epitome of indecency. How about the character of conservative judges on the Supreme Court who appointed George Bush by abandoning jurisprudence in favor of partisanship? How about the character of Rush Limbaugh, who has recommended about drug addicts "if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up", this guy has admitted to abusing powerful opiates and is decrying attempts to send him up. That's character? Not to mention the character of a President and VP who both have, let's say, creative reasons for having avoided service in Vietnam. Yeah, the character of conservatives. Just ask Jack Ryan, who they reluctantly abandoned when it came out that he'd pressured his wife into accompanying him to sex clubs (and then tried to persuade her to have sex with him in front of others). The response, from a fellow conservative who'd actually lost to Ryan in the primary: "Racy bars in three different cities, that's it?" asked Rauschenberger [an IL state senator}. "I just think he would have been better off coming out with this information earlier. But I don't think it's a big deal." NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL CHARACTER...

What are you talking about?!?! The "initial" list was never reduced to only 1000 people. It wasnt a small hurdle for those on it. These people were not reinstated until after the NAACP sued, well after the election. You are the one who is clearly distorting facts, and therefore have lost all credibility. I neither lied nor relied on fiction, I quoted facts from the journalists who investigated the scam, you are the one who is ignoring the truth or simply dismissing it because you dont like it. You are demonstrating first hand how conservatives debate: you lie, circumvent fatcs presented to you, try to rationalize behavior that is both immoral and illegal, all while trying to insult and belittle you opponent. Good job!

As for you silly comparison of left and right wing activism, it's so dumb I dont know whether to laugh or cry. The right doesnt believe in anything but creating hegemony for the few, and maintaining that power by any means necessary. The right wing only believes in power and money, and when democracy gets in the way, well, you know the drill.

Yes, SP, I don't doubt that in the initial draft of 60,000 people, there were numerous errors. However, sometime between that draft and the actual removal, the number of people to be removed was cut dramatically - to the point where about 1000 were improperly removed. Not the 54,000 you claimed. But even those 1000 were not barred from voting, they just had an extra hurdle thrown up in that they had to write out an appeal slip indicating that they had the right to vote. Look, SP, when you get caught repeatedly fabricating or misrepresenting information in an argument, do you know what that means? It means you lose. It means that the other party to the argument no longer takes you seriously as a good-faith opponent. You have an idea in your head - that Bush stole the election - and you cling to any piece of information that supports that, regardless of whether it's true or not. Which would be fine, if you didn't fancy yourself an evangelist for your message. As an evangelist you are a profound flop, because you cannot make an argument without relying on fictions.

John - Recounts are conducted when necessary, not every time the loser wants to hold on to some shred of hope for victory. In addition to being expensive to conduct, they are rife with the opportunity for mischief and must be closely watched. And incidentally, it was a 7-2 vote in the US Supreme Court declaring the Florida SC's actions unconstitutional, not 5-4. The 5-4 vote was to uphold the midnight deadline (and which effectively ended the recount). Everyone focuses on the 5-4 vote because it makes it look as if the conservative justices fixed the election for Bush, but it was the 7-2 vote that ended the Florida Supreme Court's attempt to re-write the election rules in Gore's favor, and thus torpedoed Gore's strategy.

And by the way - the situation could not be "reversed". The reason Bush's supporters stuck with him in Florida is because he won. If he had lost the initial count and the Florida-law mandated recount (as Gore did - both), we would have expected him to concede. (The fact that Gore did concede and then retracted it struck us as amazing.) As should be evident to anyone who watched the fall of Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston, John Rowland or even Trent Lott, conservatives tend not to support their politicians when they are in the wrong. This is because we see our "cause" as subordinate to our character. The Left, on the other hand, sees its cause as a great struggle and subordinates everything (including truth, as SP has demonstrated) to that struggle. There is no conservative equivalent to Saul Alinsky. Few leftists understand this - but it's the reason why there are hundreds of times as many leftist "activists" in this country as conservative ones.

I quote Greg Palast, who in addition to having his own office writes for The Nation, hardly considered a left wing loony publication by the main stream (who knows what rabid right wing sickos think):

"Five months before the election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris ordered the removal of 57,700 names from Florida’s voter rolls on grounds that they were felons."

"My office carefully went through the scrub list and discovered that at minimum, 90.2 percent of the people were completely innocent of any crime"

"There were 8,000 Floridians who had committed misdemeanors, but were counted as felons."

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=217&row=2

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20010205&s=palast

Sterling, you really don't get it, do you? I quoted (didn't paraphrase, have a look:http://www.chicagomediawatch.o...

something you disagree with--*I* didn't make it up. Maybe someone else "made it up", but that really depends on how you interpret the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment.

And Sterling, if gross irregularities in the ballots and tallying shouldn't provoke a statewide, if not nationwide, recount, then what should? I mean, your guy got the most votes, right? What's the harm in recounting them, then, especially if there are concerns in more than one state (Wisconsin, right?). The fact that the Supreme Court stopped the recount under the auspices of equal protection based on votes from Supreme Court Justices whose records for equal protection voting showed they were skeptical of it, AT BEST, should've been enough to set off even your creatively-tuned bullshit detector. I'm QUOTING below:

The majority's decision in Bush v. Gore that the recount process ordered by the Florida Supreme Court violated the Equal Protection Clause was a highly activist, but plausible interpretation of the Constitution. What was disheartening to me was not the constitutional principle embraced by the majority, but the votes cast by Justices Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas in support of that decision, votes that were dispositive of the case, and of the presidency of the United States.

No one familiar with the jurisprudence of Justices Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas could possibly have imagined that they would vote to invalidate the Florida recount process on the basis of their own well-developed and oft-invoked approach to the Equal Protection Clause.

In the decade leading up to Bush v. Gore, Justices Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas cast approximately 65 votes in non-unanimous Supreme Court decisions interpreting the Equal Protection Clause. Nineteen of those votes were cast in cases involving affirmative action, and I will return to them in a moment. Of the 46 votes that these Justices cast in cases that did not involve affirmative action, Justices Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas collectively cast only two votes to uphold a claimed violation of the Equal Protection Clause. Thus, these three Justices found a violation of Equal Protection in only 4 percent of these cases.

For the sake of comparison, over this same period, and in these very same cases, the colleagues of Justices Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas collectively voted 74 percent of the time to uphold the Equal Protection Clause claim. 74 percent versus 4 percent.

Against this background, one must wonder why Justices Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas suddenly discovered power and beauty in the Equal Protection Clause in Bush v. Gore. Indeed, as a group they cast more votes (three, to be exact) to uphold the Equal Protection Clause claim in Bush v. Gore than they had previously cast in all of the non-affirmative action Equal Protection Clause cases that they had considered in the previous decade.

Of course, those other cases were different, for they involved laws that disadvantaged blacks, women, gays, the disabled and the poor--groups that are surely less deserving of concern under the Equal Protection Clause than the beneficiary of the Court's decision in Bush.

But this is not a fair characterization. After all, I have excluded from the above analysis the votes of Justices Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas in affirmative action cases. In those cases, these three Justices have consistently demonstrated the same spirit of bold and innovative interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause that they manifested in Bush v. Gore. Indeed, over the past decade, these three Justices have collectively cast 19 votes to hold unconstitutional various forms of affirmative action. This represents 100 percent of their votes in these cases--a perfect record. (Their colleagues, by contrast, have voted only 33 percent of the time to invalidate such programs.)

What does this tell us? It tells us that Justices Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas have a rather distinctive view of the United States Constitution. Apparently the Equal Protection Clause, which was enacted after the Civil War primarily to protect the rights of newlyfreed slaves, is to be used for two and only two purposes--to invalidate affirmative action and to invalidate the recount process in the 2000 presidential election.

As Professor Robert Post of the Berkeley Law School has observed, "I do not know a single person who believes that if the parties were reversed, if Gore were challenging a recount ordered by a Republican Florida Supreme Court," that Justices Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas "would have reached for a startling and innovative principle of constitutional law to hand Gore the victory."

http://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/1/777777122240/

Wait, let me guess: that's left-wing loonyism?

Funny, thing, SP - you say "And of the 60,000 purged voters, less than 10% were actually convicted felons eligible for legal exclusion from the election."

But I found a site, "Democrats.com", which says this: "Shortly after the 2000 Election, Greg Palast reported on the Florida Voter Purge. Nearly 60,000 names were on the original lists, and more than a thousand predominantly minority and Democratic voters were wrongly removed from the rolls."

While it's true that 54,000 is "more than 1,000" somehow I think that if the number of people improperly excluded was 54,000+, as you suggest, the the Democrats.com people would have said "more than 54,000", not "more than 1,000".

So it looks like I caught you lying again, unless the writers at Democrats.com, like the mostly-black Gadsden County government, are also involved in the sinister Republican conspiracy to deprive the black man of the vote in Florida.

Here's the link: http://www.democrats.com/view.cfm?id=10362

OK, I will go into just a few reasons why the CEO of Diebold, for instance, would not and could not arrange for voting machines to be manufactured that could be easily manipulated.

Right off the bat, do any of you remember an accounting firm called Arthur Anderson? Do you remember what happened to it? It was involved - in just a few cases - of abetting corporate fraud in reporting results to the SEC and shareholders. Within the course of a few weeks, Arthur Anderson, a multi-billion dollar company, effectively ceased to exist. It's owners/partners were left severely in the lurch. That is the penalty for the sort of thing you are suggesting. And let it be noted that Arthur Anderson accountants committed these crimes for MONEY.

OK, that's just to put things in context. Now, one of the errors people on both the left and the right make is to project their own motivations on the other side. In the case of the left, this means that it often ascribes activist motives to Republicans. In this case, the idea that the CEO of a major corporation would risk everything to see his political agenda enacted. According to the FEC, Walden O'Dell, the CEO of Diebold, has contributed about $10,000 to political campaigns over the last seven years. $6000 to the RNC, and $4500 to Senator Voinovichs' campaign (R-OH). His salary according to SEC filings, just last year, was $3 million dollars. So this diabolical manipulator of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy has spent an amount equal to 1/300th of last year's salary over the last seven years to support the Republican cause. Oh yeah, he's a sinister fucker.

Now let's go into some technical reasons why this is impossible. First off - these are standalone terminals. No one can access them over a network. Secondly - they are audited periodically and tested - if secret communications gear was hidden in their innards, it would be found. Thirdly, HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE ARE INVOLVED IN THE DESIGN AND MANUFACTURE OF THESE MACHINES. The conspiracy could not be kept secret. I could go deeper, but this seems like enough. They are simple tallying machines, SP, which have safeguards in place to allow candidates to be added, and to deliver results when the polls close. Yes, they can malfunction - just like every other vote-collecting technology.

Typical conservative response: when you dont like what you hear, you say that the critique is (multiple choice):

loony, un-american, laughable etc etc.

Since you only consider major media outlets as legitimate:

http://www.local10.com/news/1237092/detail.html

http://www.aclufl.org/legislature_courts/legal_department/briefs_complaints/naacp_v__harris.cfm

And of the 60,000 purged voters, less than 10% were actually convicted felons eligible for legal exclusion from the election.

Well, SP, you're contradicting yourself. It seems as if 60,000 people were removed because the State of Florida thought they were felons, not for "no reason". I've only ever been a registered voter in Virginia and New Jersey, but I know that in both of those states, if you show up to vote but are not on the rolls, you're given a slip of paper to vote on, and are able to appeal your ineligibility. Your vote and appeal are then sealed until after the results are tallied. If the number of people voting in such a fashion is more than the margin of victory in the election, then the appeals and votes are unsealed and each is considered on the merits.

By the way, what percentage of those 60,000 were not actually convicted felons? 60,000 represents about 0.6% of the total number of registered voters in Florida, and seems like a reasonable amount to clear in an election year. Obviously there are going to be errors in a process like this, but that doesn't necessarily indicate malice. Further, since Jeb Bush probably didn't do the data entry himself, the process of flushing out the felons from the list would have been watched over by career civil servants, not political appointees.

As for the voting machines themselves being in on the conspiracy, that's absurd. There are so many reasons for this being absurd that I am emotionally overwhelmed at the prospect of listing them. None of the links you provide suggest any kind of non-wacky rationale for how the machines might have been able to steal Gore votes - they are ALL loony left sites.

I don't link to loony right sites, you shouldn't link to loony left sites. I'm sorry, SP, but you are definitely crazy. You should seek professional help and medication - I mean that, it's not just a rhetorical device. Sorry.

Whats worse, giving a handfull of homeless people cigarettes or eliminating 60,000 people from voter rolls for no reason? Thats not a conspiracy theory, it happened and you still havent responded to it with anything more than a fascist statement that you think it was legitimate law enforcement. The NAACP sued Harris over this and won.

There is no question that ever since democratic elections have been held, parties on all sides have tried, in some ways more devious and illegal than others, to increase their chances of winning. In this case it was more than just getting homeless people to go vote when they might not have otherwise in exchange for a small bribe like you allege the democrats did. Florida was a testing ground for the Republican effort to gain control of elections at the source. Not only are they illegally removing voters from the rolls, they are also in control of the voting machines, with the compliity of their buddies at Diebold, they can make the numbers come out in the favor every time.

The American vote-count is controlled by three major corporate players - Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia - with a fourth, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), coming on strong. These companies - all of them hardwired into the Bushist Party power grid - have been given billions of dollars by the Bush Regime to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines nationwide by the 2004 election. These glitch-riddled systems - many using "touch-screen" technology that leaves no paper trail at all (not that it matters, they can print one thing and "record" another) - are almost laughably open to manipulation, according to corporate whistleblowers and computer scientists at Stanford, John Hopkins and other universities.

If you want to read about how Al Gore lost 16,000 votes in a county that was using Diebold machines read here:

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0310/S00211.htm

http://www.bartcop.com/diebold.htm

http://disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Diebold_Election_Systems

http://healthandenergy.com/election_fraud.htm

Want to read more about how black voters were denied their constitutional rights:

http://www.gregpalast.com/

SP - I'm sorry but I think you're a loony conspiracy theorist. I mean, you cite this conspiracy against blacks as being particularly sinister in Gadsden County. You say that 1 in 8 ballots in the county was voided by the state. THAT IS A LIE, isn't it, SP? They were voided by the Gadsden County Board of Elections. Gadsden County, according to the US Census, is 57% black, and I would expect the local elected officials and board of elections to reflect that racial preponderance.

What really happened is that to save money, Gadsden County decided to use central counting, which means that all the ballots are tabulated at one location after the polls have closed. In other counties in Florida, for instance Leon County, tabulating machines were installed at most precincts, and voters were able to insert the ballot themselves. If the machine could not read the ballot, the voter was given a clean ballot to try again. That's not possible when, as in Gadsden County, the tabulating is done afterwards. So there's no conspiracy here, SP, there's just a county government that decided to save money by skimping on voting equipment. Isn't that right? Come on, admit it: you lied.

John - Just because you are paraphrasing from another source does not mean you are immune from responsibility for error. There was no constitutionally required recount. NONE. You made it up. Further, any argument that a recount must be "complete" or violates the equal protection clause is absurd, as elections are managed on a local basis (see above). Further still, my recollection is that Florida law did not provide for the recounting of ballots, but rather the retallying of precinct results. The various Democrat-controlled elections boards took it upon themselves, extra-legally, to start manually recounting ballots. So to find that a county board acting without legal authority creates a constitutional obligation for every other board (statewide? nationally?) to do the same thing is absurd.

I also note with some dismay that neither of you seem particularly concerned with vote fraud in Wisconsin, committed by your fellow New York Democrats.

"Republicans are so aggressive about removing ineligible voters from urban districts, it's because Democrats have a long and sordid history of vote fraud in those same districts. So if it's a Republican conspiracy, it's a conspiracy to prevent Democrats from breaking the law. This is referred to, by most people, as "law enforcement"."

So you're saying its ok for a state government to deny the right to vote to 60,000 people simply because they are black (because that IS what happened) on the ASSUMPTION that Democrats may somehow have a way of manipulating, coercing or somehow defrauding those people of their right to vote? This is a legal "law-enforcemnt" method?

This quote sadly says it best:

"Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few."

-- George Bernard Shaw

Sterling, as I just said, it was a quoted assertion, from here (not an assertion of mine):

http://www.chicagomediawatch.org/01_4_gore.shtml

The argument is that the equal protection guaranteed under the 14th Amendment was violated when the recount was only partially completed, that some votes were counted and others were discounted. Both sides were arguing equal protection from different directions. Once triggered, the recount had to be completed or else it violated the equal protection clause in the amendment, as discussed here:

http://slate.msn.com/id/95203/

John - Again. You wrote this: "Gore never needed to "pursue and gain" a statewide recount: all he needed was for the US Supreme Court to allow the constitutionally required recount to proceed."

Please indicate and quote for me the article in the Florida or United States Constitution to which you refer, that specifies the procedures for the recounting of ballots.

Here's the link to Article VI of the Constitution of the State of Florida, which is titled "Suffrage and Elections": http://www.beachbrowser.com/Archives/News-and-Human-Interest/August-99/THE-FLORIDA-STATE-CONSTITUTION.htm#A06

And here's a link to a copy of the US Constitution: http://www.house.gov/Constitution/Constitution.html

Feel free to take your time. Let me know when you're ready to provide backing for your assertions.

Sterling, I didn't write what you said I did. It came from one of the links I'd cited above, as I noted. Anyways, I'm not "making shit up". If you want to read about the equal protection argument, here you go:

http://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/1/777777122240/

Some more minutiae in there for you, the voting histories of Justices Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas when it comes to equal protection. There's a funny disparity you might notice...

John writes: "Gore never needed to "pursue and gain" a statewide recount: all he needed was for the US Supreme Court to allow the constitutionally required recount to proceed."

Which "constitutionally required" recount is that, John? There's no such thing. There was a legislative recount requirement, and it said SEVEN DAYS. When seven days were up, Harris sought to certify the election, AS REQUIRED BY LAW. Gore's lawsuits were aimed at disrupting that process. Don't make shit up.

SP wrote: "When questioned about the high percentage of African Americans on the scrub list, they responded, 'Well, you know how many black people commit crimes.'"

Is that what they said, SP? Why do I not believe that any elected or appointed Florida official said anything even remotely resembling that? As I said to John, don't make shit up.

Look, if you want to deal in minutiae, it's not all on your side. Florida spans two time zones - Eastern and Central - the Central part is in the panhandle, which is overwhelmingly conservative. As a result, voting districts in much of the Florida pandhandle open and close an hour LATER than in the main bulk of the Florida penninsula. Several of our nation's left-leaning TV news departments - CBS, CNN and ABC - called Florida for Gore before the panhandle polls had closed. It is believed that this depressed Bush turnout in the panhandle by as much as 12,000 votes. A lot of Republicans have trouble believing that was an accident.

And SP, if you're wondering why Republicans are so aggressive about removing ineligible voters from urban districts, it's because Democrats have a long and sordid history of vote fraud in those same districts. So if it's a Republican conspiracy, it's a conspiracy to prevent Democrats from breaking the law. This is referred to, by most people, as "law enforcement".

One example among many: New York Gore/Lieberman Campaign workers - PART OF THE OFFICIAL GORE/LIEBERMAN CAMPAIGN - traveled to battleground state Wisconsin to BRIBE HOMELESS PEOPLE to vote for Gore with cartons of cigarettes. Major New York Democrat fundraiser Connie Milstein (who personally donated about $402,000 to Democrat campaigns during the 2000 election cycle) actually admitted to a Milwaukee TV news reporter on camera that she was there to "get out the vote", after she'd unknowingly been captured on camera bribing homeless people. The Gore campaign won Wisconsin by less than 6000 votes out of about 2.5 million cast, yet Republicans didn't make a stink despite overwhelming VIDEO EVIDENCE of a Democrat vote fraud conspiracy. Here's the link:

http://html.themilwaukeechannel.com/sh/election2000/stories/election2000-20001105-143203.html

I thought Ashcroft's performance of his original song, "Let the Eagle Soar" was truly one of the film's highlights.

John:

1) An "undervote" - where one candidate's name may be marked in a fashion too subtle for a machine to read - is arguably an uncounted vote. But an "overvote" - someone marking more than one candidate's name or punching more than one box - is prima facie evidence that the voter did not understand the ballot. Now, you can place the blame on the (Democrat-controlled) Palm Beach County Board of Elections for that if you like, but if the voter didn't understand how to vote, then it is impossible to go back and accurately reconstruct what it is that he or she meant to do.

2) The Guardian story, as an example, says this: "In 1,367 cases, voters punched every hole except that for Mr Bush." And suggests that those 1,367 ballots were intended as votes for Gore. I'm not at all sure that's the case - those little punch ballot "chads" had X's printed on them - if you punched out all the chads on the ballot, then the only candidate with an X or dark circle next to his name would be Bush. Blacking out a box or marking an X on a ballot traditionally means "I am voting for this person." (See what I mean about interpreting the intentions of people who don't bother to read the instructions?)

3) Gore's campaign wisely stayed away from the overvote issue, recognizing that interpretation of such ballots is so arbitrary that it probably would have backfired.

As I said before, because the count of properly marked ballots was so close, all we have to fall back on are the rules. And under the rules, Bush won. Thanks for taking the time to do your research this time, John, fruitless though it was.

If you want the details of the Bush-Saudi quid-pro-quo relationship, please read Craig Unger's "House of Bush, House of Saud" (he's featured in F9/11). The book has all the footnotes that the film is lacking.