We should all just act like it was a blown call at the end of a game and get over it. We need to be uniters not dividers, just like our Pres.
I'm tempted to say here that I couldn't get past mc mark and the title of the thread.... ... but I did. No comment at this time.
I have just read half of it because I am on my treo and it is very well documented and troubling. this may not sound like much of a comparison but the dismissals remind me of how people talked about the market during the bubble and how things had changed and the old rules didn't apply to the new market. after reading the article it is difficult to dismiss the discrepancies away and you have to conclude there was fraud. that being said you also have to conclude that there needs to be standarized voting practices or this will continue on both sides. further, we need to get rid of the electoral college. it is outdated and hurts the democratic process.
As thought provoking as the article is...i just can't get past the fact it's penned by Robert Kennedy and printed in Rolling Stone. I know we were asked not to bash the source....but it's too glaring here. Lot's of interesting points though...and no doubt some validity to some of them. But it reads a little too much like the 911 conspiracy articles for my tastes.
What about the DNC operatives who slashed the tires of buses taking Republican voters to the polls? I'm not excusing any attempt to prevent voters from voting but to act like it's a one sided-thing like is being argued here is beyond belief.
I went thru and read the rest of the article, parts 2 and 3, and it was very weak and partisan sounding. it takes away a lot of the credibility it established in the first part with the exit poll discussion. the amazing discrepancies in the exit poll data are what really make you question what happened during that election. it would have been nice if that was explored further.
But you think CNN, FOXnews, or any of the major networks is going to raise a ruckus about anything substantial?
Kudos to you robbie for slogging through it. It's a lot of information to digest. I had to read a few parts a second time. Like batman, I had to walk away from the computer several times after a few paragraphs just to digest what was being said. I came away from the whole article with so much rage for both parties and the whole Washington establishment. Kind of shakes one's foundation to the core that our elected officials would be so cavalier with our most sacred trust. The final quote in the article from Thomas Paine sums it up nicely. Unless we ensure that right, everything else we hold dear is in jeopardy.
lol wait i thought i had read it all but i was lying. i was reading it on my treo last night and i didn't see there were 3 more pages! oh well i guess i will have something to do at work later.
Here's a lovely excerpt : Republicans in Ohio also worked to deny the vote to citizens who had served jail time for felonies. Although rehabilitated prisoners are entitled to vote in Ohio, election officials in Cincinnati demanded that former convicts get a judge to sign off before they could register to vote.(83) In case they didn't get the message, Republican operatives turned to intimidation. According to the Conyers report, a team of twenty-five GOP volunteers calling themselves the Mighty Texas Strike Force holed up at the Holiday Inn in Columbus a day before the election, around the corner from the headquarters of the Ohio Republican Party -- which paid for their hotel rooms. The men were overheard by a hotel worker ''using pay phones to make intimidating calls to likely voters'' and threatening former convicts with jail time if they tried to cast ballots.(84) This was no freelance operation. The Strike Force -- an offshoot of the Republican National Committee(85) -- was part of a team of more than 1,500 volunteers from Texas who were deployed to battleground states, usually in teams of ten. Their leader was Pat Oxford, (86) a Houston lawyer who managed Bush's legal defense team in 2000 in Florida,(87) where he warmly praised the efforts of a mob that stormed the Miami-Dade County election offices and halted the recount. It was later revealed that those involved in the ''Brooks Brothers Riot'' were not angry Floridians but paid GOP staffers, many of them flown in from out of state.(88) Photos of the protest show that one of the ''rioters'' was Joel Kaplan, who has just taken the place of Karl Rove at the White House, where he now directs the president's policy operations.(89)
I realized the same thing the other day while I was hanging in midair kicking a guy in a cheap black suit and sunglasses.
The issue of what happened in 2004 is not an academic one. For the second election in a row, the president of the United States was selected not by the uncontested will of the people but under a cloud of dirty tricks. Given the scope of the GOP machinations, we simply cannot be certain that the right man now occupies the Oval Office -- which means, in effect, that we have been deprived of our faith in democracy itself. American history is littered with vote fraud -- but rather than learning from our shameful past and cleaning up the system, we have allowed the problem to grow even worse. If the last two elections have taught us anything, it is this: The single greatest threat to our democracy is the insecurity of our voting system. If people lose faith that their votes are accurately and faithfully recorded, they will abandon the ballot box. Nothing less is at stake here than the entire idea of a government by the people. Voting, as Thomas Paine said, ''is the right upon which all other rights depend.'' Unless we ensure that right, everything else we hold dear is in jeopardy. quick someone hand me a hanky ...
That's the gist of it really. Looks like the GOP may have ramped the dirty tricks to a new intensity. I wouldn't put it past this bunch. I don't, however, think the election was necessarily 'stolen.' Face it...a lot of your fellow citizens voted for this guy. A whole lot of them. For a variety of reasons And I just don't buy the degree of conspiracy and collusion that would be necessary to take this article at its word. Maybe my faith in the electoral system and the fifth estate is misplaced, but I certainly hope not. And I do put more faith in CNN et al over Rolling Stone and Robert Kennedy. Despite their flaws. But wouldn't it be so much better if they'd learn to play nice.
I have to believe from the fact that you think my statement was a bit much that you have not yet read the article. Though I agree with you that the GOP is much, much better at wallowing in the mud and misleading voters than the Democrats, this is not about dirty tricks or dirty politics like the Swift Boaters or whatever. This is about seeking to and succeeding in subverting the will of the voters in order to install a president that, according to the statistical evidence presented in the article, the American people did not wish to elect. My quote was anything but over the top, in the face of that. Read the article and you will agree. There is no greater cheat and no greater theft imaginable in this country than the subversion of the will of the American electorate.
