Was the Presidential Election Stolen?

Um, didn’t a Kennedy “steal” the election of ‘60?

One also might wonder: if an election is very very close, does it really matter who wins? In cases like this the electorate is clearly very evenly split. It is a given that the declared loser in such close elections will claim unfairness.

Lastly i think it is absolutely pathetic that another party (even along the lines of a third party) could not come up with a candidate that could win against such a weak president as Bush.

Robert Kennedy was asked that same question by Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report.  I wish I could quote his words and I can’t, but I can tell you that I was impressed with his reaction and his response.  He did not become defensive.  He was fair and non partisan.  I can only remember I was satisfied with his answer.  I’ll have to watch for that on re-runs.  I recommend you do so too.

Wolf,

Exactly what my first thought was — Chicago 1960! (Unless, of course you believe Democrats are so loyal they will vote from the grave.)

The exit polls don’t bother me too much. I place very little importance on any polls unless I have seen what the questions were and how they were phrased.

I am totally opposed to computer voting of any kind, with or without a paper trail. You don’t have to be Bill Gates to realize the possibilities for fraud are nearly limitless. 

Also, the returns should not be announced in the east until polls are closed in the west. I would like to see the electoral college abolished too. Let’s have no more popular/state conflicts in the count.

As it is now, the 2004 election results will never be acceptable no matter how much investigation or explaination.

HI Sally - thanks for the reference. I love Colbert! I was traveling last week and may still run across the interview as i catch up (yea for Replay TV!),

WTH....Is there a full moon...we agree again...this is spooky...all jokes aside...YES the election was fixed ;both 2000 & 2004 the discrepancies are well documented...Now as far as computer balloting , what can be done...technology is the name of the game , personally I see no problem with paper ballots ;...point : in MD. you are allowed to vote absentee ballot if your job is a hinderance in getting to the polls, that is what I did in 2004...voted on a Saturday ; paper ballot...as stated earlier voting for Kerry gave me no pleasure...viable candidates is my real concern....is a little integrity too much to ask for ??HR 550 may sound like good legislation...but how well it will work is yet to be seen...can you say loopholes....

“Exactly what my first thought was — Chicago 1960!”

But Chicago didn’t put Kennedy in the White House.

1960 electoral vote totals:
Kennedy = 303
Nixon = 219
Illinois gave Kennedy 27 electoral votes.
You do the math.

In any case, the more significant problem with our “democracy” is non-participation:  The U.S. ranks 139th out of 172 nations in voter turnout.  Maybe 62 million voted for Bush, maybe 58 million for Kerry - but roughly 45 million eligible citizens didn’t bother to vote at all.  Every effort should be made to prevent electoral corruption, but the non-participation issue - while complex and lacking the appeal of a good conspiracy story - needs to be treated as a major crisis and given more attention, especially in the “progressive” media.

The Employee Free Choice Act can help address the democracy crisis: There are currently 16 million members of labor unions in the U.S.; in 2004, they went 61% Kerry, 38% Bush.  If given the chance, 57 million additional workers say they would join a union.  By restoring the right to organize (another criterion of democracy where the U.S. falls short), the Act can help create that sense of efficacy which leads citizens to the voting booth.  Democrats would obviously benefit, despite their complicity in the anti-labor, pro-capital agenda of the last 30+ years.

Redhorse,

Bingo! Another one.

I think many of us agree on more things than seem apparent in a lot of these discussions.

Sometimes it is what methods we each think best to achieve a “good “ result, sometimes it is a difference in degree of government involvement needed and other times what each one sees constitutes fact or what is just another opinion we “want” to be true.

I think if there is one single thing which divides people, it is our different life experiences. Whatever they have been are bound to seem more real to each person and therefore will affect his perception on any topic.

With all the bad news and flat out lying that goes on I keep wondering if it is really any worse or if all the constant news bombardment we get is just making it seems like it is.

I think in my case the extra time I have since I quit working 10 to 12 hour days exposes me to more than my brain can handle.

Cheers.

WTH....Personally...I believe it has always been this way , based mostly on history...but also life experience...human nature...lust for riches and power ARE universal...As milk toast as the media is the increase in information has helped folks become less naive...a little info overload never hurt.....” how does one eat an elephant...one bite at a time.”...the 1960 election...although my take on Kennedy as a leader is not much different than any other rich guy turned politician...he did try too clean-up organized crime...cost him his life...there probably where two shooters...never seen a bullet make a right turn in mid flight....
If I remember correctly Big Daddy Joe Kennedy is the one who organized the voter fraud...dead folks voting ....oldest trick in the book....He also admired Hitler and Fascism....made his first millions...bootlegging...during prohibition of course....as ambassador to England had no problem with Hitler moving in on Poland or a fascist europe...thought it would be good business for U.S....

p.s....Calm down Scorp...the tears don’t move anyone...you still have Iraq......get over it....

Redhorse,

Old man Joe got his jollies by making his kid president — Jack happened to be next in line after Joe Jr. was killed in WW2.  We won’t live long enough to ever know the true story of his killing, but there is enough questionable info and squelched info to make this an ongoing TV series to rival Dallas.

We will probably have Teddy around for ever too. He’s such a pompous ass he could drive ME to drink. On second thought I think I’ll do the driving.

Anonanonanonanon,

I think we have a low voter turnout because a lot of people are too busy watching American idol and other important things. Seriously though I would rather have only informed and responsible people vote than push for high percentages.

Some, like my two sons never voted until they were over forty. They finally got disgusted enough to want to change things. Now, ironically, I feel so disillusioned with government at anything above the local level, that unless some really outstanding candidate emerges, I may not bother. Lately a coin toss would have chosen as well.

It’s kind of hard to take this article seriously.  Are the so-called facts true? 

If we go back to March 16, 2004 .... to the article called “CAMPAIGN OF SHAME”.

www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/523/

That article claims that John Kerry only raised $50 Million up to that time, when in fact John Kerry had raised almost $80 million as of March 4.  And John Kerry ended up with a total of $233.4 million total and ended up with $47 million left over after the election. 

www.gwu.edu/~action/2004/kerry/kerrfin.html

The exit polls were fixed by liberals in hopes of Republican voters thinking they lost and they would not vote.  But it didn’t work .... the scam by the Dems backfired. 

In an email prior to the debate, Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe urged the party faithful to “vote in online polls” as soon as the debate ended.

The email also urged Democrats to write to local newspapers and call radio talk shows. Major media website addresses were given. Democrats were implored to forward the message to “at least” ten other people.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/10/01/politics/main646915.shtml

PS > YOU LOST AND YOU CAN’T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT !!!

lol…

lmao....

tina1 wrote:
“Unions screwed themselves, they went way overboard.  Look at what unions did
to the rubber plants in Akron, Ohio during the 70’s.  BF Goodrich, General
Tire, Kelly-Springfield, Goodyear and Firestone were all located in Akron. 
Employment in Akron’s rubber companies was at 60,000.  After a four-month,
industry-wide strike in 1976, rubber companies started building plants in
Iowa, Oklahoma and southern states where the work ethic was better.  These
plants were still union but the people in these states were better workers
and they didn’t try to screw their employer.  They actually take pride in
what they do, unlike union workers in Ohio and Michigan ... which is why
plants are leaving N.E. Ohio and Michigan ... the WORKERS are lazy and
stupid.”

thanks, tina1 - It always helps “us liberals” when people like you make such a clear display of their anti-democratic attitudes, along with their ignorance.  Look up “right to work” and “Taft-Hartley Act” regarding why manufacturing industries moved to the South.  And look up “slavery” regarding the South’s historic position in labor relations (and frequent use of adjectives like “lazy” and “stupid").
Democracy means little without economic democracy, which is possible in a capitalist system only when there is a strong labor movement.  As the service sector displaces manufacturing as the primary employer of the working class, it won’t be as easy for employers to pick up and move elsewhere - and they know it, which is why they’ve been so aggressive over the past 30 years in putting legislators and judges in place who demolish basic human rights of American workers.

According to Wikipedia, Kennedy won Illinois by 9000 votes, after Mayor Daley had withheld the Cook County ballots until late in the evening, when it was discovered that Kennedy had won Chicago by an “extraordinary” 450,000 votes.  There were also irregularities in Texas, and Texas and Illinois together would have given the election to Nixon. 

Which brings to mind LBJ’s first election to the Senate.  Some ballot boxes were withheld until most of the votes had been tallied, and the late votes gave Johnson an unexpected victory - by exactly 87 votes out of over one-half million votes cast.  Johnson then picked up the nickname, “Landslide Johnson”.  LBJ’s previous nickname from when he was in college was, “Bullshit” Johnson.

There was, in fact, documented fraud and dishonesty in the 2004 elections.  In Florida, Ohio, and other states there were recorded instances of assault, tire slashing of campaign vehicles, and destruction of campaign property and materials.  All the reported crimes were committed by Dimocrats, and several people went to jail or were fined.  I personally find it hard to believe that there were no miscreant Republicans out there, and would welcome any solid documentation to that effect.  But when I was researching this in 2004, all the criminals seemed to be Dims.  And surely any widespread fraud, voting or otherwise, will be detectable.  But all we have is idle speculation.  So we have real live Dimocratic criminals, and a bunch of Dimocrats creaming their jeans, wishing they could prove dishonesty among Republicans. 

Since exit pollees are self-selected, there is absolutely no way to conduct a scientific, accurate exit poll.  I note that Dims love to shoot off their mouths, so I expect that lots of Dims are quite willing to tell the world how they have voted.  And, while honesty is the best policy in personal and business relationships, any SOB that interrupts my dinner to conduct a survey, political or otherwise, will learn all kinds of fanciful things.

Tina said “YOU LOST AND YOU CAN’T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT !!! “ And then she laughs.....

Tina, that is a dictatorship...if you really mean we can’t do anything about it, especially if you are hinting that your remark refers to future elections.

We DO have elections coming up in November and then again in 2008.
I imagine people will begin to catch on to voter machine fraud- and if we really stilll DO live in a DEMOCRACY, where people decide then I hope you will remember the phrase, “the harder they come, the harder they fall.”

The pleasure you get out of saying we lost and can’t do anything about it is as scary as the theocratic movemment in this country.

The essay posted here is interesting, but it seems to be based on one very dubious assumption: that exit polls are trustworthy. While I admit that I have not read Mr. Bleifuss’ book, I can only gather from this article that such an assumption has been made without analysis.

Why trust ANY exit poll? The electorate is well-informed about how such polls are used; much of the electorate remains angry that such polls may or may not have influenced voter turnout in previous elections. We all know the criticism that exit polls lead pundits and prognosticators to call a state or district for a particular candidate before the final tallies are in, and, perhaps, before polls are closed. Hence, knowing that voters are mindful of this sort of problem with exit polling, why would we assume that any voter participating in an exit poll is telling the truth?

My own experience is two-fold. I have lied on the exit polls I’ve taken (I am not proud of this, now that I think about it), and I know many others who have lied on the exit polls they’ve taken as well. Plus, I am amazed by the vast numbers of people who refuse to even acknowledge an exit poll worker when exiting the voting station. What, alas, is the percentage of voters who vote in the actual election who take exit polls, and what percentage of them are NOT telling the truth? I don’t know, and I am not going to get the answer from reading this essay.

Moreover, how do I know that REAL voters even filled out the exit polls in question? If I can’t trust the polls INSIDE the voting station, why should I trust polls taken OUTSIDE? Surely we can all imagine an overzealous exit-pollster working to skew the projection data by filling out a few extra exit polls, can’t we?

The bottom line is that potential problems with a voting machine does not a conspiracy make, nor does a disparity between inside and outside polls. This essay does not appear to analyze the most basic assumption of the authors’ whole thesis—the trustworthiness of exit polls—and as such should be read warily. And I am afraid that if we were to launch an investigative study of exit polls, we would discover that such tools are rife with problems, potential and actual.

Peace,

Bill Gnade

Robin -

Tina said “YOU LOST AND YOU CAN’T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT !!! ... And then she laughs.....

Tina, that is a dictatorship…

Oh, come on, Robin.  Tina is obviously referring to the elite leftist dictatorship of the proletariat. 

The reason the elite leftist dictatorship of the proletariat (communists, for short) keeps on losing is that they do not understand how the world works.  The communists are convinced that the world works the way Karl Marx said it did, but it does not.  And, while the communists in Russia were a minority, they were able to seize power, and graphically illustrated the falsity of Marx’s so-called philosophy, at the cost of 100 million innocent dead worldwide, over a period of seventy years. 

The communists in the USA are also a minority (with a sizeable number of their own useless idiots, called moderate Dimocrats), but they cannot seize power, because the unstable political situation in Russia in 1918 does not prevail in America today.  Not for lack of trying.  Every time the elite leftists succeed in electing a leftist as President (Johnson, Carter, Clinton), there follows an economic disaster (economic stagnation, inflation and interest rate catastrophe, bubble crash and recession, respectively), sort of like the Soviet Union was throughout its long unhappy Marxist existence.

When the Dimocrats screw up the works, the Republicans have to clean up the mess, as Presidents Reagan and Bush fils have done.  The average American voter is smarter than the average communist manipulator, and is becoming smarter election by election; that is why the results of the 2004 election were so much better than the 2000 election.  No one likes to be at war, least of all us Republicans, but few are foolish enough to follow the communist philosophy; and when they do, they are soon reminded of why you should never vote communist. 

Communists genuinely do not understand why American voters are smarter than they are, and this leads the communists into error, big time.  Communists are desperate to understand why they are so electorally incompetent, and grasp at straws: Bleifuss’ conspiracy theory about vote machines, Kos’s obscene rants, and Lakoff’s framing the debate, etc., etc., etc., none of which make a shitting bit of difference.  American voters are smarter than communist elites, and are not buying what the communists have to sell.

That is all that Tina was saying.  Don’t get your bloomers in a bunch.

Prediction: the loser of the next presidential election will cry foul and electoral fraud, the winner will cry sour grapes, journalists will make money documenting it, blogoscreamers will find yet another issue to vent on.

Oh my god! It is a conspiracy from bloggers and their advertisers!

That explains—[REDACTED]!

Whatever the past elections’ reliability, it seems only prudent to make voting as fool proof and as tamperproof as possible.

Is there really anyone out there who can’t see more chance for rigging in computerized balloting than with paper ballots? 

Is there any defense for keeping the electoral college?

For the winner’s validity, the loser’s peace of mind and the unity of the nation we should go for quality and varifyibility over ease and speed.

I posted this on another link (after the article about Lou, the elderly union guy), but it is very appropriate here.

National campaigns?  The congressional elections?  I spent time and money in both 2000 and 2004 working hard on the presidential campaigns (being a local precinctperson as well).  And guess what?  Even though both Gore and Kerry carried Oregon, chicanery and fraud in other states ruined any chance of them getting into office.  I am convinced that the same thing will happen this year.  Republicans will maintain control of Congress because they control the vote counting via electronic voting machines.  Just look at the special election in Congress to fill the Republican seat vacated by a fraud conviction—the Republican squeaked through.  That’s how they have done it ever since the elections of 1998.  The votes are changed so that the Republicans always win by a squeaker—notice that it’s never the other way around.

What does this mean?  It means, dear friends, that the problem really isn’t the American electorate overall.  If the actual will of the American electorate still did not result in the election of the candidates they actually voted for, the problem lies elsewhere—it lies in the incredibly fraudulent voting machine technologies that states have been forced to adopt by bills passed by a Republican congress and signed by a Republican president.  It was win-win-win for them.  Money for their financial backers, power on both the state and national level, and neutralization of their opponents, no matter how hard the opponents campaign.  Until this is changed (at the local and state level, by local and state activists willing to run for such unromantic and invisiible jobs as controller, secretary of state, county recorder, etc., etc.), there is no point in voting for a national candidate in certain states.  There’s certainly no point in giving them any money.  Even if the most people vote for them, they won’t “win”.

Oregon, with its mail-in voting system which automatically guarantees that a paper ballot exists for every vote cast, is the only state in the union right now with free, fair and honest elections.  We don’t always like how our fellow citizens vote, but we know that our elections are clean.

Until the election systems in every state are as well-run and as documented as the one in Oregon—by the way, a big thank you to Bill Bradbury, the Democratic Secretary of State who devised the vote-by-mail program—we have no hope of changing the national government to actually reflect what people want.

I can’t understand why, with all the internet coverage of the stolen elections of 2000 and 2004, election campaigners and activists are still worried about attracting the votes of the working class—for the most part, they already get them—they just don’t count.

Dear Whattheheck,

Yes, I do believe there is a defense of the electoral college, and it is this:

Please, just imagine for one second, that the Mormons in Utah go on a reproduction spree (I am not dissing Mormons here). Meanwhile, in major metropolitan areas around the country, a weird disease smites the population. Suddenly, in less than one generation, the largest single, and single-minded, voting bloc lives in Salt Lake City and its surrounding towns. Suddenly, one place and one place only, dictates national elections by having the largest single vote, dominating popular elections for decades.

Or, think of it this way. Imagine that the Ohio population burgeons to 600,000,000 people, all of whom are Republicans. Do you think anyone would ever campaign in New Hampshire again? The point is that there is to be a distinction between state and federal power. State power must not ever usurp or transcend federal power re: a federal policy or function. But, abandoning the electoral college may indeed lead to one state acting as the dictator of federal office.

Killing the electoral college is anti-democratic. In one very real sense, the electoral college is an affirmative action protecting smaller voting populations. And it makes candidates more sentient of the broad opinions that compose American ideologies; dismantling the electoral college will reduce candidates’ interest to the one major voting bloc that can give them the popular vote.

The electoral college may be the most ingenious thing ever created by our forbears, eclipsing, if that were possible, the very Constitution itself.

Peace,

BG

For Scorp and Tina, I have several comments—first, every single recount undertaken after the Florida and Ohio debacles showed that Gore and Kerry had the most votes, and every single investigation by anyone who has bothered to look has shown that multiple instances of fraud occurred in both 2000 and 2004. And while vote fraud occurred in the past, that is never an excuse for it—it is always bad, no matter who does it.

Secondly, you clearly haven’t read Marx! Marx’s discussion of the evolution of societies is amazingly astute. The people who invented communism were Lenin and Stalin—they professed to be Marxists but they really weren’t.  In psychological terms, one could say that they were both pathological control freaks. Trotsky tried to establish a real socialism, including entrepreneurial free market capitalism which gave Russia a booming economy in the early twenties, but Lenin made sure he was taken care of.

Your comments about “communism” and “communists” are essentially a regurgitation of John Birch Society propaganda that has been floating around since before the 1960’s.  The Soviet Union called itself a socialist society, but it never really was—it was dictatorship of an elite, and its policies, especially under Stalin, were not that different from Tzarist policies! 

This is the one thing that really drives me nuts about right wing nuts—they only know propaganda; they never know or understand history. They read books that tell them what to think about what Marx wrote (in other words, books of propaganda), but they never read Marx themselves. What heactually wrote is fascinating. The poor guy is rolling in his grave at what Lenin, Stalin and Mao claimed to do in his name!  Remember, Marx was writing in London at the same time that Dickens was writing. They were both observing the same stratified, rigidly oppressive society, and their social commentary is quite similar. Marx was responding to the same horrific social injustices. The big mistake most uneducated people make is to think about Marx in terms of the Russian revolution and the Soviet Union, neither of which reflected actual Marxist philosophy.

“Communism” and “communist” as Scorpo uses them are propaganda labels—both in the way they were used in the early days of the Soviet Union to establish communes, etc., and in the way American anti-communists propagandists have used them. The right wing works hard to make sure that labels have either negative connotations or positive ones—and that their enemies are associated with the negative ones, no matter how untrue or inaccurate—that’s why the right wing still brings up the old communist bugaboo—it still works as a negative label that produces a knee-jerk reaction of fear, loathing or scandal.

Another sad aspect of your posts is the nasty tone—e.g., “YOU LOST AND YOU CAN’T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT !!! “ This remark is just simply vicious, and has no place in a discussion forum where nearly everyone who reads or posts has a deep and abiding concern for the future of their country. Nevertheless, this kind of childish taunt is quite representative of Republican politics at this time.

There is no question that politics in this country has become increasingly vicious as the right wing has risen to power. There is a spiteful, resentful attitude that is promoted by the FAUX News anchors and Rush Limbaugh and other right wing writers and commentators. Bill O’Reilly is a pitiful bully, living the life of his father all over again. They encourage their viewers and readers to think the worst of those who are defined as enemies and to have no qualms about libeling or slandering them. Ann Coulter has made a career on lies and slander and misrepresentations of history—does the right wing or anyone in the GOP criticize her? No. Nor the hypocrisy of Limbaugh or the viciousness of McLoughlin.  It, too, is part of the strategy—the bullying part. And it is very sad.

Scorp....Johnson was a southern Dixie-crat...a member of the core that later made up your conservative movement...Carter & Clinton are both Trilateralist...right leaning Democrats that follow the philosophy of guys like Zbigniew Brzezinski...Clintons was YOUR best weapon ,the undercover Republican...oh the propaganda....you just swim in that stuff..........The base reason all you neo-cons are so pumped is because the progressive agenda made progress from FDR till Johnson....scared the hell out of you guys because of the precieved loss of privilege...so here comes Goldwater ; then 20 years of lost elections , with the exception of Nixon who was his own man ; you finally get Reagan and the neo-con movement is born....even Ike was leary of your nonsense...soo.. now you’re in power...and Bush , with his 33% approval rating will go down in history as the stupidist most arrogant rats ass of a president EVER...The racist nature of your agenda...the lies about WMD, all those dead and maimed military personnel...the lousy management style..the overt and covert use of the fear factor ( folks don’t like being PLAYED ) Katrina...etc....will bite you in the ass....if the U.S.A. is too SURVIVE ; a correction towards the left ...MUST materialize or all of us are FINISHED...period...bottom line…
It’s like rid’in a bike , once you get moving ; BALANCE is key....the neo-cons lack balance............b-a-a-l-a-a-n-c-e…
Think about it ...WTH voted for your Boy...now he’s so DISGUSTED...he may never vote again , how many others… ..all Bush did was remind the citizens ( with their short attention span ) of all that is wrong with Amerika....but pigs may fly ; if the Dems play the same dumb game , they have been...that IS your only hope....
Your 1000 year reich is only...what...maybe...25 years old...and you talk’in like it’s a done deal…

“first, every single recount undertaken after the Florida and Ohio debacles showed that Gore and Kerry had the most votes,”

This is simply untrue or intentionally misleading (perhaps you mean that they won the US popular vote, which is not relevant to determining victory in our political system).

That said, in the election of 2000 it really did not matter who won - the vote was split almost exactly equally. (One can’t help but note that if Gore had won his home state, there would have been a clear winner. . .)

“There is no question that politics in this country has become increasingly vicious as the right wing has risen to power.”

Some of this blame is due to the abortion issue being mandated by the courts, as opposed to the congress or states (i.e., voters). Some is due to the investigation of Clinton. Some is due to the strong feeling on both sides about the need (or lack of) for the war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The reason for the bitter politics is that urban liberals and rural conservatives live quite different lives. Which values do we elevate (e.g., self reliance vs social reliance)? Right now the conservatices hace the ball, but eventually the liberals will regain possession (or even better, a third party will emerge with some good ideas and policies).

PS - “Ann Coulter has made a career on lies and slander and misrepresentations of history” Um, ever hear of Mike Moore? Compared to him Ann is, well, pretty anyway. Two sides of a coin. . .

The fact that there were voter irregularities in 1960 in no way justifies the same behavior of the Bush campaign in 2000 and 2004. I know that the logic of two wrongs do not make a right appalls conservatives who would enjoy seeing the U.S. turn into a fascist military dicatorship that annihilates the Middle East, Cuba, and Venezuela, but I believe in a better world.

How many millions died when the U.S. suppressed the leftist grassroots uprising in Indonesia in 1965 and installed Suharto. How about all the deaths in Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Vietnam, and now Iraq? The U.S. has killed tens of millions of people in suppressing independent nationalism over the past century, so scorp, you have no moral high ground upon which to excoriate the U.S.S.R.

Gnade....The Electoral College was created too protect the Republic of the elite from democracy...it’s main purpose is steering the popular vote...it doesn’t matter what the popular vote is the college can go anyway it wants...and don’t even think about 3rd party candidates...the college can elect “Gumby “ if the Republic sees fit...and lets be clear about the “ Republic “ that’s the Dualopoly the two...two...two parties in one.....................
.............Trilateralism bay-bee
p.s....The disparity with the voter machines is that Diebolds big boy is Bushies butt buffer...too the tune of about 2 million in campaign funds...that wouldn’t be a conflict of interest would it ?…

Naiad -

Will wonders never cease!  A coherent leftist!  Don’t you feel out of place among the few coherent Conservatives and the large mass of incoherent and incomprehensible leftists on this site?  But welcome aboard, regardless. 

Now, first you say:

The Soviet Union called itself a socialist society, but it never really was—it was dictatorship of an elite, and its policies, especially under Stalin, were not that different from Tzarist policies! 

Well, no shit.  And then you say:

The right wing works hard to make sure that labels have either negative connotations or positive ones—and that their enemies are associated with the negative ones, no matter how untrue or inaccurate—that’s why the right wing still brings up the old communist bugaboo—it still works as a negative label that produces a knee-jerk reaction of fear, loathing or scandal.

Well, yes.  It is easy to label and criticize self-identified socialists when they are killing tens of millions of innocent victims.  And “Bushitler” is a neutral label, of course.

But the problems of socialists goes W-A-A-A-A-A-Y beyond the Soviet Union.  Even now, socialist old Europe is stagnant, corrupt, and inefficient, and is dying off at a rate greater than when the communists were killing off tens of millions of their own people. 

And, if you were paying attention, I pointed out that:

Every time the elite leftists succeed in electing a leftist as President (Johnson, Carter, Clinton), there follows an economic disaster (economic stagnation, inflation and interest rate catastrophe, bubble crash and recession, respectively), sort of like the Soviet Union was throughout its long unhappy Marxist existence. 

Now, the problem is that, independent of context (SU, Europe, USA, or elsewhere), when Marxist thought becomes a factor, and socialist economic policies are applied, decline and corruption follow, not to mention “fear, loathing (and) scandal”; there has never been an exception to this rule.  Regardless, Marxist thought remains popular among obsessive-compulsive socialists, sort of like opium for the obtuse.

And free-market economics in a democratic environment consistently delivers jobs, growth, and efficiency unparalleled in the world, unless interrupted by some Dimocrat ding-a-ling coming in, raising taxes, and screwing the economy, as we have consistently seen.  The promises of socialism remain promises after one hundred fifty years, and I wonder that more-or-less coherent people, such as yourself, enjoy being lied to (or self-deluded), decade after decade after decade.

It seems to me that the real problems were with the exit polls, not the voting machines. 

Exit poll information was released prematurely and improperly, and there was a problem with one of the pollster’s servers:

Preliminary exit poll results had leaked throughout the day and were posted on a number of Web sites, including the widely viewed Drudge Report site, which added to the confusion and fanned the media frenzy.

The crash occurred barely minutes before the consortium was to update its exit polling with the results of later interviewing that found Bush with a one-point lead. Instead, journalists were left relying on preliminary exit poll results released at 8:15 p.m., which still showed Kerry ahead by three percentage points.

The exit pollsters themselves later admitted problems with methodology:

Interviewing for the 2004 exit polls was the most inaccurate of any in the past five presidential elections as procedural problems compounded by the refusal of large numbers of Republican voters to be surveyed led to inflated estimates of support for John F. Kerry, according to a report released yesterday by the research firms responsible for the flawed surveys.

In addition, by averaging regular polls taken shortly before the election, the result matches the final tally nearly exactly.

In neighboring Pennsylvania, there is very good reason to suspect voter fraud favoring Kerry.  That state was polled (not exit polls) to be pretty much a toss-up, but ended up going to Kerry.  Should it really have?  Should there be an investigation?

A real, huge discrepancy in exit polls vs final results doesn’t seem a concern when it comes to Venezuela.  Here, a 60-40 exit poll against Chavez transformed into a 60-40 victory for him in the end.  In this case, we’re told that of course the exit polls were unreliable and skewed.

WTH...If you are driving and Ted is drink’n....just make sure they’re no females in the car...would’nt want to catch a “ wrongful death beef “ or worst “ a rape charge “ you know the senator likes too walk around naked.....”..you don’t pick up a knife and fork unless you’re ready to dine.”.....nephew Smitty ?......”. Will The Senator From Massachusetts...Keep Both Hands On The Dash Board.......please ! ? ! “

WTH...You know that was the joke during the confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas...all those senators sitting up on that panel ; ask’n Anita Hill questions about Long Dong...and pubic hairs and all that nonsense....”..Sir..Senator...Sir...Will All The Senators Keep Both Hands On The Table....Sir...Senator Kennedy..Sir...Both HANDS On The Rostrum...Sir.”.........As filthy minded ; can’t send your child too be a Capital Hill Page without being molested..doin it in the bathroom with some 12 year old boys..nasty masochistic power hunger freaks....gonna sit up on that panel and ask Anita Hill questions about sex.,… the duplicitous hypocrisy ! !..”..Both Hands On The Table Senator...Not One..Both Hands...Sir “

I wonder, will tina-1 kill herself if the dems win in nov.? If so, how many neo-con nazi’s will follow her if hilary makes president. If I was going to kill myself under neo-con rule I would have done it already. U.S. has to kill another 2500 gi’s and stay the course for another 10 years like nam.
Bush is for big government, big tax breaks for the rich, big debt, nation rebuilding. lobbist went from 15,000 to 33,000, scooter libby treason in time of war, and bush is a conservative? I work on an army base and we are going broke, no money to keep ops running. Some how this must be clintons fault.

Brian -

Since the Dims are (1) fanatical (2) losers, how about you?  Are you willing to lay down your life for the Dim cause? 

Think carefully about this before you commit yourself.  The titular head of the Dimocrat Party is John Kerry, by virtue of his being the Dim presidential candidate in 2004.  The main rap on Kerry was his flip-flop ways, not normally a desirable characteristic in a president.  So Kerry has opened his quest for renomination by --- flip-flopping, again, on the war in Iraq, again.  Kerry’s Senate Resolution to cut and run in Iraq just lost in the vote in the Senate.  That is the third Congressional vote on Iraq this week, and the Dims have lost every one of the votes by overwhelming margins. 

The other three Dims in primary leadership positions are Reid, Pelosi, and Dean.  The most attractive and rational of the lot is Screaming Howard Dean, designated loser (by Dim Party officials) in 2004, which gives a quick index of the Dim prospects in the future.  Plus Dean is again pursuing the nomination, and is using DNC money and influence to support himself and his goals, not the Dim Party goals, whatever they might be (no one is saying, probably because no one knows). 

The foremost military misspokesman for the Dims is John Murtha, an ambitious, aggressive, senile gentleman, who wants to put the Iraq quick reaction force in Okinawa, eight time zones away.  Who writes Murtha’s stuff anyway, Karl Rove?  Murtha proposed himself for a House leadership position, in spite of ethical problems, and emphatically against Pelosi’s vain attempts to create some sense of harmony (!) among the Dimocrats.

But I do wish you well with the nomination of Hillary Clinton; she would be the ideal Dim nominee for president.  The Dim powers have already rejected Hillary, like they rejected Dean in 2004, because of her strong negatives; half of the USA says they would not vote for Miss Hillary under any circumstance.  I can handle that.

This excerpt from a recent article on tompaine.com summarizes nicely the tactics the GOP used to help steal the presidential election in Ohio in 2004:

“Start with the run-up to Election Day. Acting under orders from a partisan Republican Secretary of State, J. Kenneth Blackwell, who also co-chaired the state’s Bush-Cheney campaign, local officials purged 300,000 voters from the state between 2000 and 2004. Did Democratic groups registering new voters in the summer of 2004 know they were playing catch-up, not getting ahead, with registration? No. Did these same groups know which precincts in minority and other Democratic strongholds would receive insufficient numbers of voting machines, causing thousands of people to leave without voting? No. Did they know which precincts were going to be relocated? No. Did they know that outdated voter lists would be delivered to those precincts? No. Did they know last-minute rules would invalidate provisional ballots if they were turned in at the correct precinct but the wrong table? No.

Ohio’s secretary of state defended these—and other tactics—in congressional field hearings in early 2005 as prerogatives of local control. In a nation with 13,000 separate and unequal election jurisdictions, heavy-handed partisan elections are exactly what the southern Republicans want to see written into a renewed National Voting Rights Act.

But it’s not just southern Republicans who want to game the election system. What else did Ohio’s Secretary of State do under the false guise of local control?  He rewrote the voter registration laws to reject applications that weren’t on the right weight of paper. He made it harder for provisional ballots to be validated. Provisional ballots allow people to vote who believe they are registered but don’t find their names on the rolls at a polling place, with election officials later investigating to verify the voter’s eligibility. Blackwell threw up obstructions to the validation process by moving Democratic precincts without informing voters, not training poll workers and requiring new identification. He tried to summon 10,000 students to a sports arena saying they had to prove their registrations were valid. He stood with GOP officials who said they were going to try to stop 35,000 people from voting at the polls. He ran television ads that didn’t tell people they could also vote at county boards of election.

Of course, the Democratic Party and their allies will never admit they should have known better and acted to stop these tactics. But you can read between the lines of the DNC’s 2005 report on Ohio that said 2 percent of Ohio’s 5.8 million voters who intended to vote were stopped from doing so. That’s 116,000 voters in a state where George W. Bush’s margin of victory was 118,775 votes.

On Wednesday, House Republicans reminded Americans that the ghost of Jim Crow is still hovering over our elections. It’s time for Democrats and voting rights activists to look up from their computers and pay attention to the tactics that the Republicans are embracing and continuing to espouse. The problems with electronic machines will remain. But to ignore the ways the GOP wants to disenfranchise voters, complicate voting, discount ballots and manipulate the vote count is to duplicate what happened in 2004. Does the left really want history to repeat itself?”

Scorp said: “And free-market economics in a democratic environment consistently delivers jobs, growth, and efficiency unparalleled in the world.”

The problem with that statement is that the United States has consistently favored autocracy that allows unfettered foreign investment over democratic movements in nations that promote socialism. The U.S. helped Suharto to massacre the left-wing social movements in Indonesia in the 1960s, which from that point on contained the “virus” of leftist nationalism in Southeast Asia. Look at the horrors the U.S. bought to Cuba after Castro came to power in 1959, or the decades long atrocities the U.S. funded in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Haiti, all in the name of “free trade” and neoliberal economic policies. The U.S. tried to overhtrow the democratically elected Hugo Chavez in Venezuela in 2002 because his domestic policies did not comport with U.S. multinational corporate interests. yet the right wing and its mouthpiece at the Wall Street Journal editorial page laud the “re-election” of Uribe in Colombia, despite his clear connections to fascist paramilitary groups and recent revelations that his government had penetrated the ranks of universities in an attempt to undermine the political views of faculty. The last left-wing political party in Colombia was utterly destroyed when over 3,000 of its members were systematically murdered by right-wing paamilitary groups, thus ensuring the continued viability of a fascist right-wing regime that America has so ardently supported.

The market by itself has no concern for the workers who create wealth, just the owners who control it. The market has no corrective measure for the way it unfavorably treats women and minorities. The Enron case celarly demonstrated the inability of the market to correct itself from excess and unethical behavior. Without the collusion of several major investment firms and banks, Enron would never have been able to continue on as long as it did.

Coca-Cola colludes with the fascist militias in Colombia to intimidate and murder union and human rights activist who criticize the company for its working conditions. Wal-mart relies on slave-labor to maintain its low prices. Oil companies destroy indigenous communities in the third-world with support by the native governments in search for more profits.

There goes your bogus crap assertion scorp. Anymore “theories” you care to espouse?

I am really too busy revising my novel to spend much time here, but a long post that I wrote two days ago did not get posted, so very briefly, I must correct more of Scorpo’s mis-statements.

The U.S. does not have and never has had an “elite-leftist” power structure.  Please, please, please get down your Encyclopedia Britannica and start reading everything listed in the Propedia about American history. This is a truly judicious and balanced source of historical information about our country—truly encyclopedic!

Right now, nowhere in the world is there an “elite-leftist” government, not even in Venezuela. No, not in China—a system that is so corrupt because of the financial manipulations of the “party elite” that it can no longer even be called leftist. It has evolved into a classic fascist state.

And no, not North Korea. North Korea has nothing whatever to do with real socialism or social democracy.  It is a “politico-religious” state in which the religion is the worship of its inherited dynastic leader who personally owns all the country and everything produced there.

Lastly, has Scorpo ever been to Europe? The right-wing rags about its decline that Scorpo quotes are entirely mythological. It is lovely, and I would move there in a heartbeat. It’s a much better place to raise one’s children right now.

As in the U.S. and Canada, they have a serious immigration problem with illegal migrants coming from Africa and Eastern Europe (for the same reasons that they travel from Latin America to the U.S.), but their way of dealing with it so far has been much more humane—in large part because consensus in the EU requires a lot of compromise and bargaining—things which the Republican Party in the U.S. has completely eschewed.

I love Europe and if I had the money to move there, I’d do it this moment. Austria still has a bit too much of a fascist influence, but Germany is lovely.  Is is a paradise? No. Such a place does not exist on this Earth.  Is it free of problems? No, for the same reason. And it is not hard to find a job if one is educated, especially if one is multi-lingual. Italy and Spain are economic powerhouses. Italy especially is courting in-migrants with education and young families. Spain has a tremendous export business in Latin American where Spanish businesspeople have been very successful in marketing Spanish products. Switzerland is charming but very expensive. Holland, Belgium and Denmark are really nice—though it is harder to find work.  Sweden, Norway and Finland are also economic powerhouses, and all of them have a social-democratic government—and have had such a government for decades. Think of how many products you buy that are made by Swedish companies or marketed by Swedish companies—not just Volvo, but much, much more, especially in the high-tech fields of pharmaceuticals and medical devices. And Nokia—a Finnish company!
To be continued....

When Russia and its former client states left the old communist system behind, they embraced a myth of free-market economics that has caused enormous devastation and human misery. All of those countries would have been much better off if they had followed the mixed economic models of the Scandinavian countries. To a degree, the Baltic countries did, and their economies are the healthiest in the former Soviet bloc.. Don’t believe me? Go travel to those places.

The failure of “cold turkey” conversion to laissez-faire capitalism in the former Soviet countries has had some interesting effects. It scared the hell out of the Chinese political elite to the point that it prevented political liberalization in China. China has become a fascist state. There is little social safety net and millions of Chinese live in dire poverty without health care or any kind of social services. Ah, gee, sounds like another country I know that has become mired in the financial corruption of an unregulated economic elite....

The second aspect of the failure of “cold turkey” laissez-faire capitalism in the former Soviet Union is that it has confirmed the original analysis of such systems made by Karl Marx himself. In essence, in going from a tightly-controlled, pseudo-shared economy, it went overnight to a laissez-faire system. The result is the rise of the oligarchs, the reduction of most of the population to dire poverty, and the collapse of the social service networks that previously supported the have-nots in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Compare this to Germany, which twenty years ago was faced with the sudden prospect of integrating the moribund society of East Germany into the vibrant economic and social life of West Germany. West Germany committed billions of dollars to bringing East Germany up to technological parity with the former West Germany. No German starved or went without medical care, while former East Germans were retrained for new jobs. It wasn’t all peaches, of course. The tax burden on relatively rich West Germans was large, but after twenty years of social, economic and political investment, Germany is one nation where everyone is on a nearly equal footing. Yes, there are lingering resentments among a small number of Germans. Yes, there is dissatisfaction in the populace, but it is a very small percentage of the population.

The chancellor of West Germany was honest with his citizens in the late 80’s—he told them that it would take decades to integrate East Germany into the new Germany and he told them it would cost money. But he also told them it was a moral imperative, that they could not turn their backs on their fellows in the east who had suffered for so long under the most repressive Eastern Bloc government. The Germans used a combination of socialist and capitalist programs to integrate their country and their countrymen. Mixed economies, in which basic human needs such as health care and public education are provided by collective programs through the agency of democratic government are by far the most successful economies in the world. Gosh, imagine an electorate that responds to a call for social justice as a moral imperative!  Boggles my mind.

Lastly, we have never had a “left-wing” president in the US. Not ever! Not even FDR. Neither Clinton nor Carter nor Johnson nor Kennedy were left-wing. Clinton in particular led a right-of-center administration that was very pro-business, and a major reason that we have such a terrible problem with illegal immigrants right now is NAFTA and other “free trade” agreements, which basically ensure “free trade” for big corporations, but poverty and destitution for small farmers and factory workers.

None of the deluded right-wingers who post here will be able to admit the truth of what I’ve written, but at least their deliberate misrepresentations have been exposed for the record.

Liberal -

Getting a little incoherent, aren’t you? 

My comment, which you quoted, related directly to the outstanding performance of the American economy, as long as Democrats are not in office.  You got off on every possible silly leftist rant, mostly on situations in foreign countries.

When you did address the domestic economy, you said:

The Enron case celarly (sic) demonstrated the inability of the market to correct itself from excess and unethical behavior. 

Well, that is not exactly true, is it?  Enron is out of business, and the main perps have been convicted; some of them are already in jail.  Neither physical assets nor human skills have been lost, but have been put to more productive use. 

At any rate, if Enron was so bad (it was) why didn’t President Clinton and his Attorney General, Janet Reno, do something about it?  Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, all the big scandals in the 1990s occurred on Clinton’s watch, and he did nothing to identify or correct the problems.  The prosecutions of these criminal acts occurred during the Bush Administration, AGAG presiding.

The reason Clinton did nothing about the biggest crimes that occurred during his Administration was that he was too busy: diddling Monica, or whomever, or whatever.  Same thing with Janet Reno; she was too busy killing the Branch Davidians and sending Elian Gonzalez back to Cuba to worry about a long string of the largest business scandals in the world.

Densan that you are, you probably have not noticed that there have been no similar frauds and scandals during the Bush Administration.

Naiad -

Revising your novel? Cool.

The U.S. does not have and never has had an “elite-leftist” power structure. 

Well, that is not true, of course.  The leftist media and the leftist academy certainly regard themselves as elite, and actively promote their numbnut elitist fellow travelers: Kerry, Reid, Pelosi, Murtha.  And there is quite a history in the origin of the elite leftist terminology:

“American radicals and socialists began calling themselves `liberals’.” - F.A. Hayek, 1960.

This nation was founded on liberal principles and ideals from the enlightenment.  The hi-jacking of the term `liberal’ to serve the purposes of radicals and socialists was an act of grand larceny, not to mention blatant dishonesty.  There is frequent confusion from the use of a term having two diametrically opposed meanings. 

It is politically useful for the radicals and socialists to confuse the issue for their own sinister purposes, just as the left always does; the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea is not a democracy, nor a republic.  But `democracy’ and `liberal’ are respected terms and radicals and socialists need all the respect they can beg, borrow, or steal.  Applying the terms `democracy’ and `liberal’ to radicals and socialists is like applying lipstick to a pig; still pig ugly. 

The American left calling themselves “liberal” would be like the Republicans calling themselves “communist thugs” for political advantage.

The term is often modified to `elite liberal’, meaning, in current usage, large groups of wealthy, politically active, educational and professional elites that should know better giving massive amounts of money to left-wing political groups: Soros and ilk, trial lawyers, academy professionals, etc. But the term `elite liberal’ is of more ancient vintage: 

“Like the notion of social class itself, the idea of a liberal elite originated on the left, among early 20th-century anarchists and Trotskyites who noted, correctly, that the Soviet Union was spawning a ‘new class’ of power-mad bureaucrats.”

Barbara Ehrenreich, NYT

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0701-03.htm .

Ehrenreich’s reference to a ‘new class’ of power-mad bureaucrats refers back to Milovan Djilas’s 1957 analysis of corruption and failure among the communist elites after WWII.  Djilas wrote-up his analysis in his book, The New Class, still a very timely read. 

The governing principles and bureaucratic excesses of leftists are universal, whether in the collapsed Soviet Union, stagnant Old Europe, or Democratic Party-induced economic slowdowns (the Bubba Bubble) and social disasters (LBJ’s Great Society Welfare program) in America.  Radicals and socialists have plagued the left and the right since the early days of communism.  The least we can do is to call them by their rightful labels: radical and socialist.  Save the term `liberal’ for the noble ideals for which it was originally intended. 

You elite leftists have long exhibited a consuming rage toward President Reagan, Prime Minister Thatcher, and President Bush fils.  At times it makes you irrational and incoherent.  Simon Heffner has an article, Wrong, defeated, humiliated: why the Left still hates Lady Thatcher, in today’s Telegraph.  The article brings startling clarity to the uncertain motivations of the left, and is worth a read. 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;jsessionid=KD155I4B1JHABQFIQM FCFF4AVCBQYIV0?xml=opinion/2006/06/21/do2102.xml&sSheet;=/opinion/2006 06/21/ixop.html

OregonR....My cousin is living and working in Germany as we speak...loves it...this is her second time living in Germany ; says she would love to retire there....

I wonder, will tina-1 kill herself if the dems win in nov.? If so, how many neo-con nazi’s will follow her if hilary makes president. If I was going to kill myself under neo-con rule I would have done it already. U.S. has to kill another 2500 gi’s and stay the course like nam.
Bush is for big government, big tax breaks for the rich, big debt, nation rebuilding. lobbist went from 15,000 to 33,000, scooter libby treason in time of war, and bush is a conservative? I work on an army base and we are going broke, no money to keep ops running. Some how this must be clintons fault.

You elite leftists have long exhibited a consuming rage toward President Reagan, Prime Minister Thatcher, and President Bush fils.  At times it makes you irrational and incoherent.

Just like right wing nuts hate the clintons and all dems. Who is calling the kettle black here? This is why nothing is getting done in congress or the senate. The rage of hate between the two parties no matter who is in charge will result in nothing getting done for years to come.

“The rage of hate between the two parties no matter who is in charge will result in nothing getting done for years to come.”

Too true. If only people - including politicians - would be respectful of different points of view (which seems unlikely, cause anyone who thinks different is a bigot, or wimp, or traitor, or, ad nauseam) and be willing to compromise (same problems) this would be a better place. Of course, that means winning - and losing - with dignity.

Wolf, Brian28....I don’t think the Dems vs. Rep is the issue....the idea is for them to debate...then find solutions....What is really going on is a kind of dog and pony show...good cop...bad cop shakedown....with the citizienry as the shill....These guys on Cap Hill are playing the citizenry for fools...Think...just think ,when was the last election where instead of a Star Search type campaign...politicians ran on real grass root type issues , money needs to be taken out of the equation...and candidates should be limited to specific talking points...hard line rules should be applied like in sports so everyone is clear on what can and can’t be said or done...transparency..total transparency.........As is Dem + Rep = Daulopolgy meaning one party dictatorship...Republican = Bad Cop Trilateralism ; Democrats = Good Cop Trilateralism....the only difference is the Democrats use more morphine...where as the Republicans don’t care about the pain they inflict.on others.....

Ah, Scorpo, I am laughing out loud!  Clearly, you at least enjoyed my typos—did that give you a sense of superiority?  Why do you need it?  I type fast, and I don’t always take the time to check for typos, especially in such a forum as this, where grammar is pretty much “as you like it” generally.  Why should that matter more than content?

Wolf, Redhorse and Brian28 seemed to understand what I wrote without a translation.

Your two comments in reply to mine prove my case better than anything else I could write here.  Confusion is “always politically useful” for all ideologues.  You are ranting without basis in fact. 

Recently, a neurological researcher studied two study groups which consisted of adamant Democrats and adamant Republicans.  What he found was that both could not use the rational faculties of their brains when talking about the other.  It was fascinating.  When both groups were given a chance to rhetorically bash their perceived enemies, the pleasure centers of their brain were activated—the same areas that respond to cocaine, etc!  Scorp is clearly addicted to the same happy feeling—it also explains Rush Limbaugh!  And not just what he does on the air!

I feel sorry for you, Scorpo, because at some point your delusions will have real consequences for someone you love—when that happens, you will discover that the life you think you have is not the reality.  Meanwhile, you will have to find someone else with more time to precipitate your political pleasure response.  I don’t enable addicts.

OregonRusalka.....I very much agree...the problem in amerika , is the nation fails to see the true nature of it’s immature reaction too world events.... the majority of these misconceptions are pretty much force feed to the general public by news media and policy hawks....Carl Rovian Conditioning , also amerika by it’s own evolution is a very xenophobic nation....europe has had more time too “ get it right “....One would think it would be wise to learn from ones elders...but such is life ...

Brian -

Point proven.  You quoted me as follows:

You elite leftists have long exhibited a consuming rage toward President Reagan, Prime Minister Thatcher, and President Bush fils.  At times it makes you irrational and incoherent. 

And then you say:

Just like right wing nuts hate the clintons and all dems. Who is calling the kettle black here? This is why nothing is getting done in congress or the senate.

Nothing is getting done in congress or the senate?  Nothing at all?  NOTHING??? 

“Nothing” covers a lot of territory.  Here is a partial list of Congressional votes during the Bush Administration that were passed with Democratic Party support, often with “irrational and incoherent” resistance from elite leftists:

1) Tax Cut Act 2001

During the last year of the Clinton Administration, 2000, the Bubba Bubble (NASDAQ) crashed, losing over 80% of its value, the DOW peaked and started down, millions of people lost billions of dollars as the markets declined, and GDP stopped growing and saw quarterly decline.  This was a very hazardous situation, similar to the crash of the Japanese Bubble in 1991, when the Nikkei Index declined by over two-thirds, and the Japanese economy went into a fifteen-year recession. 

In an economic bind of this nature, the only known remedy is to provide capital for investment and growth, and the only known sources of capital are tax cuts and reduced interest rates, if possible.  In a time of economic stagnation, President Kennedy lowered taxes and thus improved the economy and increased tax receipts, much to the astonishment of some Old Economists.  At the time of the Carter Catastrophe, President Reagan lowered taxes and initiated economic reforms, and thus improved the economy and increased tax receipts, much to the astonishment of elite leftists who could scarcely credit their own senses, much less credit President Reagan.  And at the time of the Bubba Bubble Recession, President Bush lowered taxes and initiated economic reforms, and thus improved the economy and increased tax receipts, much to the astonishment of elite leftists who could scarcely credit their own senses, much less credit President Bush.  As you can see, elite leftists are a rather dense lot. 

The elite leftist media and academia do everything they can to discredit the solid economic accomplishments of the Bush Administration, but at a cost; nobody believes them anymore, and the Old Media are losing customers, revenues, and profits.  Which would not make any difference in the Soviet Union (before the collapse, of course), but this is not the Soviet Union.

Continue ...

2) Afghanistan War Resolution, 2001
Iraq War Resolution 2002

Following 09/11, there was strong bipartisan support for overthrowing terrorist regimes and installing democracies to replace them.  The success in this endeavor has been nothing short of spectacular.  Fifty million people are now living in nascent democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their security services are being constantly upgraded.  When Libya’s Qaddafi saw the videos of Saddam getting his tonsils checked by American personnel, Qaddafi opted out of the terrorist business, and the substantial remnants of Libya’s nuclear program are now lying in boxes in a warehouse in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.  Inspired by the American commitment to freedom and democracy, Georgia, Ukrania, and Lebanon instituted their own freedom and democracy movements, with considerable success.  The free press in Iraq, in particular, is broadcasting results of the elections and political debates in Iraq, and all of a sudden, beautiful democracy is stirring in the ugliest, most backward area of the globe, the Middle East; Sa’udi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, and Oman are now gingerly exploring this democracy thing that has caused such enthusiasm in Baghdad.  Irani terrorism is not nearly as big a threat to the world as Iraqi democracy is a threat to the corrupt Irani mullahs.

And the cost of the Iraqi and Afghani efforts have been minimal; in terms of civilian casualties, American casualties, and dollars.  With the single exception of Gulf I, the current war is the least expensive American war ever fought, by an order of magnitude.  For example, American fatalities in Iraq are just 4% of the fatalities in the Dimocrat cock-up in Vietnam, and the results in Vietnam were the murder of two million Vietnamese, after the Dimocrats refused further assistance to the South Vietnamese after our withdrawal. 

And the elite leftists, such as Kerry and Murtha, who voted for Afghanistan and Iraq: do you think that they are taking credit for the big victory for freedom and democracy that resulted from their vote?  Don’t be stupid.  They are voting to cut and run from Iraq like they decided to cut and run from Vietnam.

I have difficulty believing that the elite leftists are opposed to democracy as such, but they obviously prefer a failure of President Bush’s efforts in Iraq to success of democracy in Iraq.  Tough shit, leftists.

3) Anti-War Resolutions 2006

Three Anti-War Resolutions were voted on in Congress this week, one of them sponsored by John Kerry, uber-leftist.  All of them failed, by wide margins. 

So, your point that “nothing is getting done in congress or the senate” is nonsense.  You might even say it is “irrational and incoherent”.  But now we are back to where this conversation started.  You really are irrational and incoherent.

Naiad -

Clearly, you at least enjoyed my typos - did that give you a sense of superiority? 

Enjoyed your typos?  Enjoyed?  Your?  Typos?  Enjoyedyourtypos???

Umm, no, as a matter of fact.  After your latest post, I went back and reread everything you have posted on this thread.  I noticed no typos the first time through, I see no typos now, and I certainly did not correct or comment on any typos.  I rather admire your lack of typos and your clarity of [removed]appropriate for a self-confessed novelist), if not your ideological orientation.  Unlike Redhorse, for example, who is basically illiterate.

And I maintain that I am the least superior visitor to this site.  That is why I try to avoid typos, and such, much more errors of logic and fact, and such.

Which brings up a point.  You obviously disagree with what I have written, but you have made no response whatever to the logic or fact of what I have written.  Instead, you go off on a tangent about psychological studies.  Which is fine, I have some interest in the psychology of problem personalities.  Do you have a reference?

Since you are interested in this area, you may be aware of the UCLA study:

..... a team of U.C.L.A. researchers analyzed the neural activity of Republicans and Democrats as they viewed a series of images from campaign ads. And the early data suggested that the most salient predictor of a ‘’Democrat brain’’ was amygdala activity responding to certain images of violence ... Such brain activity indicates a kind of gut response, operating below the level of conscious control.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/magazine/22IDEA.html

How interesting!  Democrats tend to exhibit more amygdala activity in response to provocative stimuli.  But the amygdala is the seat of the emotions.  Are Democrats more emotional than Republicans?  Since emotional responses tend to overwhelm all other input and output, more emotional necessarily means less rational.  That would certainly explain the Democrats lurching from political topic to political topic, with no coherent plan, and lots of internecine conflict. 

If you feel you need to spend your energy elsewhen, feel free.  I sense you are up against a factual and logical block anyway.  Enjoy.

Redhorse

Don’t give up, you are doing fine, and re-enforcements are closer than you think.  You are stuck in a cave full of trolls, and morons.  WTH is often seeming reasonable, so don’t be so surprised, he and even Wolf can be sensible enough so long as their core beliefs are not being challenged at which time the hysteria takes over.  Cognitive Dissonance is still a amjor problem for them both.  Tiny one, is a broken troll and not to be taken seriously.  She has been going around in silly circles for a while and her ability to even communicate is hampered by her problem.

Hang in there, when we have finished reading down the thread, a few comments will be in order.

In the meantime the rabbit would like to point out that the elections of 2000 and 2004, have been PROVEN to have been stolen, won by fraud alone,.  The exit polls tell the extent of it, but the actual records of disenfranchised voters and the freaky machines and the witnesses to many irregularities (Like altering records and burning lots of unwanted ballots rather than count them) are what put paid to any claim of legitimacy.  The electoral commission itself, not to mention international bodies have declared the elctions to be disreputable. 

Just for a bit of spice though, the rabbit wishes to point out that as usual the Bushling is a complete liar and fraud and warmongering sack of shit.  Iran is a saintly nation next to the evil SHRUB and his beastmen cronies.

This week an interesting story appeared in The Washington Post—buried on page 16, of course, lest anyone think it was of the slightest importance. It revealed that documentary proof has now emerged confirming the fact that in the spring of 2003, the regime of President George W. Bush—flush with its illusory “victory” in Iraq—spurned a wide-ranging peace feeler from Iran that offered “full cooperation” on every issue that the Bushists claim to be concerned about in regard to Tehran: “nuclear programs, acceptance of Israel and the termination of Iranian support for Palestinian militant groups.”

In other words, everything that Bush says he wants from the Iranians now, he could have had for the asking—three years ago. What then can we conclude from the rejection of this extraordinary initiative? The answer is obvious: The Bush faction is not really interested in curbing nuclear proliferation or defusing the powder keg of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the regional and global terror that it spawns.

Hello Scorpy, Rabbit is glad as always to see you.  Lots of big long boring posts to try and hold out the criticism I see, Rabbit is proud of his troll, you’ve not changed a bit.  Hi WTH, Rabbit hears word of your ocasional appearance of rationality, with the caveat that you still suffer from creative delusionalism when the core beliefs get rattled.  Tiny one, Rabbit is trying to find your owner, pehaps she can help you with your problems.  Was there a smell of Bat somewhere in this thread?  Could there be a Natty Batty amongst these fine morons?

Oh my GOD! Rabbit checking just saw .......Jay Decline.  Wow!  Having been told of this thread, Rabbit expressed excitement, but speculated about how such a lineup of morons could only be improved with the additional cherry on top, of the greatest moron ever seen on ITT, Jay Bird, the man himself.  Now having arrived, Rabbit sees his prayers have been answered.  Hello Jay.........^^..............Have you missed the rabbit?

I’ll bet some of you trolls are thrilled with the new editing arrangements.  You can go back and change your posts.  The denial and delusion defense just got light years easier for you guys I guess.  When you stick your feet into your mouths and are caught out, you can just go back and remove the foot, pretending it never did happen.  Jay especially should find that useful.

Rabbit just likes to be able to fix some of his less fortunate spelling errors.

OregonRusalka

Thanks for the concise and precise message about Russian communism and Marx.  It has been getting the rabbits goat lately listening to idiots gabbling on about communism and socialism and Marx etc as if they have a clue.  Also the idiotic prognostications about Islam which similar types of idiots engage is getting tired.  What is missing often is a simple and straight forward refutation to them. Something so simple they cannot slither around it.  Thanks.

The debate about Kennedy is a silly red herring, why does anyone want to bother with it?  He wasn’t president, and there is a big difference between a few thousand and a few hundred thousand votes being stolen, or omitted as the case is. 

What the hell has it got to do with the fact that the most unsuccessful and most unpopular US president in history achieved his position by blatantly disenfranchising tens of thousand of black voters and others mostly likely to vote against the fraudsters? 

Just because everyone is doing it has also been a distinctly unsuccessful excuse for naughty children as well as naughty politicians.  To cheat is one thing.  To cheat and then trash the country as well as a few other peoples countries is a whole other scale of naughtiness.

WOW!!!  I’m watching superman 3 on the side here as I sit late in the office and Superman just welded up the broken sides of the ship which he broke whilst being a bad superman an hour or so earlier.  He welded up the sides of the ship with his X-ray vision.  It looked like lasers to me, but heck what do I know, I’ve never seen welding done with lasers or X-rays, but the rabbit is a welder, and was distinctly impressed with that. Superman can weld with his eyes, how excellent.  Practical too.  Better than running faster than a bullet I reckon.. 

“More powerful than a speeding locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, he can even weld metal with his eyes......Superman” ....Welders will understand.

Of course as someone said early on, Redhorse I think, the whole thing is a dog and pony show.  The elite has their candidate in both camps as they did with Kerry and Bush.  Personally Rabbit expects they are setting the stage for a woman, and that woman is probably going to be the Clinton Bitch.  It is hard not to feel contempt for anyone who actually thinks there is anything significant to be argued between Democratic and Republican deck chairs.  The titanic is still committed to the same course.

Gnade

There is another defense of the electoral college which occurs to Rabbit. 

All you Americans will do well to pay attention to the hopper, right now at least, because it occurs to me despite my foreign status that this may be of consequence.

The name United States of America infers that it is a Union of States.  As such the STAES are being recognised implicitly as independant entities in the primary unit, the UNION.  As such it is the STATE which is entered and represented in that UNION.  Not the individuals who make up that STATE, except in the abstract.  It is the entity of the state which is part of a UNION of STATES. 

This is to him interesting since this rabbit as you can see by the little mostly blue flag in the corner is from the land downunder where we do things a bit differently, but with the same or at least similar results of course.  (What difference does a hundred IQ points make if they are both merely NWO puppets?)

scoop or scorp thanks for the neo-con rant on congress doing a good job. With a 25% approval rating, there doing a heck of a job ol scorpy.

Hey, folks…

“The rage of hate between the two parties no matter who is in charge will result in nothing getting done for years to come.”

Congress gets done what it wants to get done. For all else they have ways to delay or move on to the most “urgent” business.  (Remember most of these guys are lawyers and stalling is Legal Tactics 101.)

Some examples:

This will take a while — send it to a committee.

• Health Care — extremely complex problem (decades required)

• Social Security and Medicare ("They’re old — they’ll forget or just die off.")

• Border security/illegal immigration — requires a “comprehensive” 300 plus page senate (amnesty) bill be merged with the house (no amnesty by ANY name) bill.  “Let’s wait until after the November elections — they’ll forget about it.”

• Katrina (with a bit of luck another will hit and we can start over)
-------------------

Very urgent.

• Discussion of the gay marriage amendment
The most urgent (so much so it is on autopilot)

• Congressional pay raise
-------------------

Special category (Let’s just say we we’ll do it.)

• Dubai port sale — nothing has been offered on the market (3 months)

• 2000 New border guards per year — not funded (2 years — 200 guards)
-------------------

It doesn’t matter which party is in the majority — they’re a tag team.

Seriously now —
What could be more important or urgent than establishing fair and honest voting procedures? It should be something every legitimate, honest candidate for office would make a priority. If I were elected I would want the result to be verifiable and believable. Wouldn’t you?

What can be more important than trust?  It must be earned. It must be maintained. Without it little of any real value can be accomplished.

So, just how soon can we expect any congressional action on election reform?  It hasn’t even gone to committee as far as I know. It is no doubt a complicated problem which will need much study before a comprehensive plan can be agreed upon.

WTH
Agree 100% on no computer voting. People doing stuff is good for democracy, I’ve seen how involved they are here. 

US is so big , would take v many observers to sort out the most racist and otherwise crooked areas.

A worthy fight for those who fight for it, because if they start to win, (not tomorrow morning) the consequences will range very far ....

Just for a bit of spice though, the rabbit wishes to point out that as usual the Bushling is a complete liar and fraud and warmongering sack of shit.  Iran is a saintly nation next to the evil SHRUB and his beastmen cronies.

In his response to questions from the audience, Ganji talked about the specific Iranian laws and regulations that ban people from writing for life. “The laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran say that anybody who engages in propaganda against the state is punishable for one month up to a year. During the last eight years, most journalists in Iran have been accused of this. According to paragraph 8 of article 6 of the current Press Law, any journalist who is judged to have engaged in propaganda against the regime is banned from journalism for the rest of his life,” Ganji said, adding, “I think the Islamic Republic of Iran is the only country in the world that still has laws banning journalists from writing.”

Meanwhile, the Christian republic of America has no plans to arrest or ban from journalism for life, reporters and editors from the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal for publishing classified national security information on a regular basis.

In other news, Iranian women held a major rally in Tehran two weeks ago to demand the end of legal discrimination. The protest was brutally crushed by the hardline government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with some 70 arrests. But the event also marks a major turning point for the women’s movement. 

Meanwhile, back in America, the evil administration of George W. Bush admits lagging far behind in its arrest of women protesters, having arrested so far none since their evil regime took power.  When asked to account for the big goose egg, a spokesman replied, “I guess we’ve just had other things on our plate, what can I tell you?  We have definite plans to change that score during upcoming NOW and CODEPINK demonstrations certain to occur as we approach the 2006 mid-terms.”

Natalie....And of course the Civil Rights Movement in amerika was a cake walk....How many times do you folks need to be reminded of amerikas brutal response too anybody who stood up and said no more...I will state this again....Every....Absolutely Every right you and we enjoy in this “ land of freedom “ was fought for by progressive working peoples movements....period....capital could give a rats ass about your need for such silly things as Public Education...or maybe Workmen Compensation...oh no that stuff just happens out of the goodness of rich folks hearts.....Hey...and sense places like Iraq and Iran don,t do thinks the way amerika does ....hey...lets bomb them back too the middle ages....I’m sure this is just what the womens movement in Iran wants........
MLK stood up and spoke out against the Vietnam War , he wasn’t banned for life....no....he was assassinated.....lnychings...the klan.....The Illegal War In Iraq....Oklahoma Tim McViegh...Kissinger and his support of death squads in central amerika , Negroponte , the same thing....CIA funding for death sqauds in Afrika ,.Central & South Amerika.....the FBI COINTELPRO death squads...FBI backed assassination of Malcolm X.....Fred Hamptons assassination by chicago police , for running a free breakfast program in HIS community.....Angela Davis and her false imprisonment , basically because of her intelligence and the willingness too share this KNOWLEDGE with others...black families being Red Lined for Mortgage Loans....the Indigenous Amerikas..hey...now they got a great deal...right ? ?.......Natalie you have nothing too brag about.....

And didn’t that “ tower of christian value and virtue.”..Pat Robertson call for the assassination of one individual , the President of a foreign sovereign nation...HUGO CHAVEZ. the Venezuelan Head of State.....MY QUESTION IS...If Jesus was a liberal , how can all you right-wing christians be so conservative.....

Natalie

Hello Darling.  It is quite a novelty to see you out of the cave. 

This rabbit would never dream of suggesting that Iran is perfect, you know by now that nuance is the order of the day, with rabbits.  It is true that a normal week of political repression, lack of security and freedom to protest together with secret detentions, government eavesdropping and religious fundamentalism in Iran is not much different than a similar week in the USA. 

The point I was making was that on the wider scene, the international scene, Iran had offerred the concessions and more which the lying Bushling and co claim they refuse.  This is foreign policy, it is international matters and the things you are reffering too are national concerns of Iran’s.  They have nothing whatsovere to do with America, especially since you no longer have any internetaional cred in the democracy or human rights department.  Number one human rights abuser, that’s the offical title accorded the USA now.  So just you mind your own business, the Iranians are not asking for the Americans to come smashing their way into Iran with guns and bombs to “bring them democracy or freedom American style”. 

Bush is a LIAR about Iran being a problem, is the point.  You din’t refute it, you merely changed the subject.

I see you’ve not learned any new tricks.

The Bush government is trying to have the journalists who reported the Bush government’s illegal spying on Americans, tried for treason.  Despite the fcat those reporters even witheld the truth for a year fist themselves.  Can anyone say HYPOCRITE?  To the best of my knowledge that carries a fairly heavy penalty in your silly flag humping country.  Whether or not it compares to being banned from reporting for life is only a matter of degrees. 

If you feel you are permitted to interfere with the internal business of other countries then your own business becomes just as subject to others’ interference too.  I know you think that Americans are better than other people Natty.  The Nazis were also convinced of their superiority and couched their views in similar language to yours..

Natty you actually said that the Bushling junta hasn’t arrested any women protesters did you not?  Natty have you heard of Cindy Sheehan?  Just to name a single one of many women protesters who has been arrested.

Also women protesters and men too, who put up anti bush stickers or protest especially outside of the free speech zones or protest zones or whatever the Newspeak term is for what you now have in place of freedom of speech.

Natalie you silly girl, with 5% of the world’s poulation the USA has 23% of the worlds prison population.  Does that register?  Of course not, I forget who I’m speaking to.

It seems even to a silly rabbit that for an American to be preaching about freedom from arrest and imprisonment etc, is rather a foolish stunt and doomed to raucous laughter from the gallery.

Ah ha Redhorse, do not be fooled, Natalie is not a Christian.  She is a genuine blood sucking, death worshipping Vampire.

Rabbit...yes.but....Tricks are for kids...and again ; Natalie is an example of the fake ass child-like nonsense that goes on in this country....Bush plays that card all day long , no real attention to facts , attack the strength of your opponents argument as being un-patriotic , then scratch...sniff....bob his head...and say something like “ stay the course “......
Christianity is the perfect religion for folks like Natalie...because it requires very little real dicsipline...you see....Jesus is going to take care of them....you really don’t have to repent...they believe “ not by your works , but by His blood will you attain His Glory “ you see....so there is no real incentive for them to do anythang , as long as they go too church on Sunday and pay the minister for lying...it’s all good....
And for the record....Nata-lie...This nations founding so-called fathers practiced “ DEISM “ not Christianity...check it out.....you do read....??

Redhorse,

I don’t know how it is where you are living, but there has been definite improvement for minorities where I live.  (Midwest —150,000 city pop. about 250,000 in surrounding area)

About twenty years ago the president of the local community college said, “People living in the northeast quadrant of the city have moved to this white enclave to escape any chance of integration.” (Maybe he was speaking for himself, since he lived in the same area in a very expensive house on a private lake.) It made the papers and caused quite a stir. Frankly we moved here; 1. Because by building we could get what we wanted for less money down, and 2. the elementary, middle and high schools were all within walking distance.

Now, 39 years later, all the kids are getting bused to distant schools, but the neighbor hood is very well mixed. From my front door I can see a Hispanic family’s house about 50 yards away, a Muslim three doors away and two black families homes from our back porch.

All this came about with no “block busting” and obviously no redlining. There was no mass exodus. Our neighbor on one side has lived there for 38 years, two more on our circle have been here over twenty years and the only houses which have changed hands have been due to deaths.
This has never been mentioned in our paper — most good news is NOT “good news” as far as the media is concerned.  Not everything is great by any means, but people have let it happen naturally without objections or any hassle that I know of.

-----------------------
“Christianity is the perfect religion for folks like Natalie...because it requires very little real discipline...you see....Jesus is going to take care of them....you really don’t have to repent...they believe “ not by your works , but by His blood will yo