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Monday, November 08, 2004
Election Depression Relief...
Posted by Tim Tagaris1.) Five Second video of Andrew Sullivan picking at what might a thong under his pants during the closing moments of Bill Maher this weekend. Video Here.
2.) A website where hundreds (?) of Americans have submitted pictures, apologizing to the rest of the world because the United States elected George Bush. Website Here
3.) Santa Claus denied a flu vaccine. Story Here
4.) A bit of GOOD election news. It looks like the Democratic candidate for Governor in Washington might just hold on. She widened her lead today in the counting of absentee ballots. Follow the results Here
5.) Good news for us that still hold the deepest admiration for Governor Howard Dean. He is mulling taking over as Chair of the DNC. Although, one must wonder if that immediately takes his name off the long list of potential Presidential candidates in 2008? Story Here.
Hope this helps. No? Give me a break - I'm trying here!
Tim
Posted at 08:53 PM in General | Technorati
Comments
Tim, the Sorry Everybody site helps immensely. And as a Gregoire voter, I've been following her count closely. I think she'll pull it out. We also took back the state Senate here and added to our majority in the House. Washington is relatively sane, at least (even if my county isn't quite).
Posted by: Joel Caris at November 8, 2004 09:13 PM | Permalink | Edit Comment | Delete Comment
Joel,
Yeah, the sorry everybody site is pretty good. I just saw them feature it on CNN as well, interestingly enough.
We did relatively well in the State House races across the country. Hell, we even gained seats in Ohio too. But now I am back in the friendly confines of my relatively sane state as well, Illinois.
I think the real prize in there is Andrew Sullivan playing with his ass.
Tim
Posted by: ttagaris at November 8, 2004 09:20 PM | Permalink | Edit Comment | Delete Comment
Okay, that Sullivan video is just ridiculous. I thought James Wolcott might have been making it up - but no, he was dead-on serious.
Posted by: DavidNYC at November 8, 2004 11:47 PM | Permalink | Edit Comment | Delete Comment
I hope Hawrd Dean gets the position -- will Democracy for America be coming out to support this? Dean knows what we need to do in embracing the center (not the left or right) of our party and then standing firm, and delivering when we get the majority. With Kerry, Bush was (unfairly) able to tar him as not standing for anything -- how many times did I hear, "I don't like Bush but ..." or "I agree with what Kerry's saying but ..." Dean's problem was Joe Trippi. But when you see Dean talk, it becomes clear he believes what he's saying, and his health care ideas are motivated by concern and experience. He also has a good command of policy. I think Howard Dean knows this is what we need to do and want to whipthe aprty into shape, and brings with him a lot of people and energy. (And I was rooting for Kerry of Clark in the primaries...).
Posted by: Marc at November 9, 2004 11:13 AM | Permalink | Edit Comment | Delete Comment
Thanks so much, Tim. Any progress on Stage 5 yet?
(I have yet to hear back from OH democrats on rounding county people up for recount, but I'm still keeping an ear out)
Posted by: shimamoto at November 9, 2004 12:16 PM | Permalink | Edit Comment | Delete Comment
Interesting developments -- I wonder if these stories will grow legs -- mainstream media doesn't
seem to be interested so far.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1106-30.htm
http://pages.ivillage.com/americans4america/id20.html
Posted by: Kurt O. at November 9, 2004 12:18 PM | Permalink | Edit Comment | Delete Comment
John,
First off, let���s skip the ���symantecal thing���. Words are always cumbersome, but they���re all we have. Everyone is ���painting with a broad brush��� as far as the ���Christian Fundamentalists who turned out for Bush���. Everyone has a pretty good idea of what it means; anyway, I haven���t heard anyone asking for clarification or complaining. Just take it with a grain of salt. There are always exceptions. But I do have to mention your continued use of the word ���elitist���. ���Elitism��� has to do with someone thinking they are ���superior��� to someone else. I don���t see the connection. To my way of thinking, whether someone ���understands��� something or doesn���t has nothing to do with ���superiority���. Different people ���understand��� different things, usually depending on their experiences. This does not make them superior or inferior, and I never even as much as implied it.
I���m not into one-up-wo/manship.
You asked how you being a man would ���preclude��� you from understanding that religious fundamentalists want to suppress women. I didn���t think it would. YOU said that I was not accurate in saying they were trying to suppress women. I thought it might be because you are a man you would not have had the experience of it happening to you, that���s why. I don���t want to argue with you. I was just trying to give you a perspective on things I thought you might not have. It has been my experience that people get a lot better understanding of something when they actually experience it. It seems other people posting on this blog have experienced some of the same as I have.( Did you read the experience and quotes from the Bible by DFuller? )
Have you ever heard the old saying ���Don���t judge me until you���ve walked a mile in my shoes���.? Remember that guy who wrote the book, ���Black Like Me���. He posed as a black person for a period of time to see what his experience in society would be like. His report on the experience was that even though he had thought he knew what it must be like being black in our society, that experience of ACTUALLY being one gave him a deeper understanding he never truly had before. That���s why I think he said he wrote the book, to tell people about this.
And I DO have the right to say what I think other people���s motives are, depending on my experience with the topic, and what people have said and told me etc. And as you say ���people believe what they believe for their own reasons���, yes that���s true, but they should always be open to new information. I don���t agree with the statement ���if you have to ask, you wouldn���t understand���. If I don���t understand I ASK and I usually am able to understand of the person and I can communicate well enough. I think ASKING is the BEST way to understand.
By the way, are you for Bush? This is a QUESTION, NOT an accusation. Just ANSWER it without all the flair.
Posted by: Kim at November 9, 2004 12:24 PM | Permalink | Edit Comment | Delete Comment
Completely off topic, but Lincoln Chafee says he's staying with the GOP because apparently (and this is a real quote) "...they value the voice I bring and they have made it very clear...that they respect and want that voice to be heard". Wow. Years of disrespect by the far right of his party healed in a few short days with a simple pep talk. So, who do we have who can successfully challenge him in '06? If he won't join us, we take him down.
Posted by: Dale at November 9, 2004 12:56 PM | Permalink | Edit Comment | Delete Comment
A coalition has formed to investigate the election fraud of 2004. It includes: Mad as Hell; Do Not Concede the Vote; blackboxvoting.org, Citizens for Legitimate Government and others interested in exposing and pursuing the fraud and those who committed it.
We have a plan of civil actions and litigation that need to be pursued swiftly. Please contact us if you are interested in standing with us to reclaim our power within the CITIZEN GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES.
We particularly need volunteers who are located in:
FLORIDA
OHIO
NEVADA
IOWA
NEW MEXICO
However, we need citizens all over the country for wide scale protests against these crimes.
Please contact us at: benet_gesserit@yahoo.com with your contact information.
This activity is vital because according to our constitution, WE ALL COUNT.
Posted by: Gina de Miranda at November 9, 2004 01:15 PM | Permalink | Edit Comment | Delete Comment
Kurt --
The voting is something that ebars scrutinay and I am glad of the Freedon of Info Act requests and the number-crunching to analyze what happened. The first article you cite brings up a strong concern based on the touch screen vs. optical scanners. TO my knowledge, there aren't all that many Dixiecrats still calling themselves Dixiecrats, but I thankfully don't know central Florida. Two problems struck me though -- comparing FL to PA to examine a "rural democrat" effect is not valid b/c we're talking Dixiecrats here -- southerners. A poll when in lvied in FL probably now 5+ years back said the registered Democrats in the state were actually less open-minded about minority races than registered Republicans -- the rub being that these registered Dixiecrats voted for Republicans. The second problem seems to be trying to correlate the minimu wage with Kerry voters even loosely -- my understanding is that 2/3 of Americans would vote to raise the minimum wage.
The Cuyahoga stats bear scrutiny -- I remember the Republicans getting ready to sue if they lost Ohio, based on precincts that had more registered voters than eligible voters. So clearly something was amiss in Ohio, even if its just bad record-keeping.
Whether Republican or Democrat, the problems of running elections on hackable PC's and so on is a big problem -- if it hasn't happened yet, it will happen eventually, and it may be either party doing it. We need to clean up this mess. Republicans who love the mess now may be crying foul in the future and vice-versa.
But my feeling as Democrat -- unless there is smoking gun evidence that can be used in Court (we'll see what the candidate from FL has) these stories will be dismissed. What we need to do is use the ballot initiative to create paper trails and accurate voting methods, non-partisan election commisions, earlyu voting, a professional election civil service that is capable of preventing these long lines, and avenues for the various parties to scrutinize the results. We will never know what would've happened if the lines to vote had been shorter.
Posted by: Marc at November 9, 2004 01:22 PM | Permalink | Edit Comment | Delete Comment
Kim-
I think I misunderstood you. When I stated that I disagreed about "fundamentalist" supressing women, I was using a broad interpretation of the word. I was responding to the concept of the conservative Christians who turned out in droves to vote for Bush as a whole, and not specifically to fundamentalist sects. In other words, I think this is symantic. I don't believe that the Religious Right per se supresses women...beyond that, I cannot say one way or the another, because I have not been associated with a church that does not ordain women.
As far as the election...I voted for Bush. Although I have some relatively moderate to liberal views in certain areas, I am basically a conservative in most of my views. Actually, I could vote for a Joe Lieberman, who is probably the one Democrat that many people on this board would dread having as their candidate.
Posted by: JOhn at November 9, 2004 05:31 PM | Permalink | Edit Comment | Delete Comment
One more thing...I would vote for Joe Lieberman if he were running against John McCain...no doubt in my mind.
Posted by: John at November 9, 2004 05:31 PM | Permalink | Edit Comment | Delete Comment
I too always thought Lieberman was a good choice for this election. I think with all the Dean mania he got lost in the crowd. He would have appealed to more conservative voters and would have frowned on embracing Michael Moore and Whoopie Goldberg. And most of all he had genuine credibility by actually doing important work during his career. He could have run on his record because he did a lot more than push through a bill to save the dolphins.
Posted by: Pete at November 10, 2004 09:28 AM | Permalink | Edit Comment | Delete Comment
I have to say I really like Lieberman, too. I just thing that he doesn't have that commanding presence that we should be looking for in a candidate. This is the presence that we saw in Kerry during the debates and during his acceptance speech. (We certainly saw more from Kerry than we saw from Bush, if you ask me.) If I haven't quite discribed it well enough yet, keep an eye on guys like McCain, Biden, Dean (minus the scream), Giuliani, and even Cheney (I don't like to admit that very often).
As much as I would love to see Lieberman get the nod, I just don't see him giving all of those swing voters a good feeling about him.
Posted by: Dan Hogan at November 10, 2004 09:59 AM | Permalink | Edit Comment | Delete Comment
Lieberman would have been a disastrous candidate for the Dems. He concurred with George Bush on virtually every meat-and-potatoes issue, ranging from support of continued budget-busting tax cuts to blind agreement with pre-emptive unilateral war in Iraq to the celebration of the outsourcing of American employment. His only clear differences with Bush involve being on the left side of "moral issues" that only win votes in the same urban counties of the nation where Kerry won handily. Those who believe a Lieberman candidacy would have helped the Dems win over conservative NASCAR dads in North Carolina or even steelworkers in Ohio are only fooling themselves. On the other hand, populist Democrats like myself who are concerned primarily with the financial and jobs issues would have voted for Nader out of protest to a Lieberman candidacy. Ultimately, he would have most likely fared more poorly than Kerry did.
Posted by: Mark at November 10, 2004 10:17 AM | Permalink | Edit Comment | Delete Comment
Working Assets' Act For Change is taking up the issues of Election Reform and Voting Machine Irregularities. Please see the following links to send an email to your representatives to address these issues in the congress and senate.
Election Reform:
http://www.workingforchange.com/activism/action.cfm?itemid=18051
Investigate Voter Machine Irregularities:
http://www.workingforchange.com/activism/action.cfm?itemid=18055
Posted by: WisVoter at November 10, 2004 12:17 PM | Permalink | Edit Comment | Delete Comment