Michael Moore.com : Mike's Message : Mike's Latest News: "November 5th, 2004 6:10 pm
No Surrender
By Paul Krugman / New York Times
President Bush isn't a conservative. He's a radical - the leader of a coalition that deeply dislikes America as it is. Part of that coalition wants to tear down the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt, eviscerating Social Security and, eventually, Medicare. Another part wants to break down the barriers between church and state. And thanks to a heavy turnout by evangelical Christians, Mr. Bush has four more years to advance that radical agenda.
Democrats are now, understandably, engaged in self-examination. But while it's O.K. to think things over, those who abhor the direction Mr. Bush is taking the country must maintain their intensity; they must not succumb to defeatism.
This election did not prove the Republicans unbeatable. Mr. Bush did not win in a landslide. Without the fading but still potent aura of 9/11, when the nation was ready to rally around any leader, he wouldn't have won at all. And future events will almost surely offer opportunities for a Democratic comeback.
I don't hope for more and worse scandals and failures during Mr. Bush's second term, but I do expect them. The resurgence of Al Qaeda, the debacle in Iraq, the explosion of the budget deficit and the failure to create jobs weren't things that just happened to occur on Mr. Bush's watch. They were the consequences of bad policies made by people who let ideology trump reality.
Those people still have Mr. Bush's ear, and his election victory will only give them the confidence to make even bigger mistakes.
So what should the Democrats do?
One faction of the party is already calling for the Democrats to blur the differences between themselves and the Republicans. Or at least that's what I think Al From of the Democratic Leadership Council means when he says, 'We've got to close the cultural gap.' But that's a losing proposition.
Yes, Democrats need to make it clear that they support personal virtue, that they value fidelity, responsibility, honesty and faith. This shouldn't be a hard case to make: Democrats are as likely as Republicans to be faithful spouses and good parents, and Republicans are as likely as Democrats to be adulterers, gamblers or drug abusers. Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the country; blue states, on average, have lower rates of out-of-wedlock births than red states.
But Democrats are not going to get the support of people whose votes are motivated, above all, by their opposition to abortion and gay rights (and, in the background, opposition to minority rights). All they will do if they try to cater to intolerance is alienate their own base.
Does this mean that the Democrats are condemned to permanent minority status? No. The religious right - not to be confused with religious Americans in general - isn't a majority, or even a dominant minority. It's just one bloc of voters, whom the Republican Party has learned to mobilize with wedge issues like this year's polarizing debate over gay marriage.
Rather than catering to voters who will never support them, the Democrats - who are doing pretty well at getting the votes of moderates and independents - need to become equally effective at mobilizing their own base.
In fact, they have made good strides, showing much more unity and intensity than anyone thought possible a year ago. But for the lingering aura of 9/11, they would have won.
What they need to do now is develop a political program aimed at maintaining and increasing the intensity. That means setting some realistic but critical goals for the next year.
Democrats shouldn't cave in to Mr. Bush when he tries to appoint highly partisan judges - even when the effort to block a bad appointment fails, it will show supporters that the party stands for something. They should gear up for a bid to retake the Senate or at least make a major dent in the Republican lead. They should keep the pressure on Mr. Bush when he makes terrible policy decisions, which he will.
It's all right to take a few weeks to think it over. (Heads up to readers: I'll be starting a long-planned break next week, to work on a economics textbook. I'll be back in January.) But Democrats mustn't give up the fight. What's at stake isn't just the fate of their party, but the fate of America as we know it.
"
Sunday, November 07, 2004
Bloglines | My Blogs
Bloglines | My Blogs
November 6th, 2004 6:53 pm
Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked
by Thom Hartmann / Common Dreams
When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.
"It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.
And evidence is accumulating that the national effort happened on November 2, 2004.
The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something startling.
While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios matched the Kerry/Bush vote, and so did the optically-scanned paper ballots in the larger counties, in Florida's smaller counties the results from the optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking - seem to have been reversed.
In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.
In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.
The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the smaller counties where, it was probably assumed, the small voter numbers wouldn't be much noticed. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.
Yet in the larger counties, where such anomalies would be more obvious to the news media, high percentages of registered Democrats equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry.
More visual analysis of the results can be seen at http://ustogether.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm.
And, although elections officials didn't notice these anomalies, in aggregate they were enough to swing Florida from Kerry to Bush. If you simply go through the analysis of these counties and reverse the "anomalous" numbers in those counties that appear to have been hacked, suddenly the Florida election results resemble the Florida exit poll results: Kerry won, and won big.
Those exit poll results have been a problem for reporters ever since Election Day.
Election night, I'd been doing live election coverage for WDEV, one of the radio stations that carries my syndicated show, and, just after midnight, during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted the AP report.
But then the computers reported something different. In several pivotal states.
Conservatives see a conspiracy here: They think the exit polls were rigged.
Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, wrote an article for The Hill, the publication read by every political junkie in Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of brilliant points.
"Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state."
He added: "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points."
Yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as the computerized vote numbers began to come in from the various states the election was called for Bush.
How could this happen?
On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real "counting" is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.
That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.
"In a voting system," Harris explained to Dean on national television, "you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once?"
Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. "What surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's just a regular computer."
"So," Dean said, "anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator?"
Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into the central tabulator system. "This is the official program that the County Supervisor sees," she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting between them loaded with Diebold's software.
Bev then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the results of a test election. They went to the screen titled "Election Summary Report" and waited a moment while the PC "adds up all the votes from all the various precincts," and then saw that in this faux election Howard Dean had 1000 votes, Lex Luthor had 500, and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was winning.
"Of course, you can't tamper with this software," Harris noted. Diebold wrote a pretty good program.
But, it's running on a Windows PC.
So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB" which, Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep the votes." Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled "Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like Excel.
In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.
"Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let's give 100 votes to Tiger."
They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software "the legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the progress of your election."
As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said, "And you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.
Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds."
On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv)
Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that had Karen Hughes telling George W. Bush that he'd lost the election in a landslide.
Morris's conspiracy theory is that the exit polls "were sabotage" to cause people in the western states to not bother voting for Bush, since the networks would call the election based on the exit polls for Kerry. But the networks didn't do that, and had never intended to. It makes far more sense that the exit polls were right - they weren't done on Diebold PCs - and that the vote itself was hacked.
And not only for the presidential candidate - Jeff Fisher thinks this hit him and pretty much every other Democratic candidate for national office in the most-hacked swing states.
So far, the only national "mainstream" media to come close to this story was Keith Olbermann on his show Friday night, November 5th, when he noted that it was curious that all the voting machine irregularities so far uncovered seem to favor Bush. In the meantime, the Washington Post and other media are now going through single-bullet-theory-like contortions to explain how the exit polls had failed.
But I agree with Fox's Dick Morris on this one, at least in large part. Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in his final paragraph, "This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play."
November 6th, 2004 6:53 pm
Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked
by Thom Hartmann / Common Dreams
When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.
"It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.
And evidence is accumulating that the national effort happened on November 2, 2004.
The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something startling.
While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios matched the Kerry/Bush vote, and so did the optically-scanned paper ballots in the larger counties, in Florida's smaller counties the results from the optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking - seem to have been reversed.
In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.
In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.
The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the smaller counties where, it was probably assumed, the small voter numbers wouldn't be much noticed. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.
Yet in the larger counties, where such anomalies would be more obvious to the news media, high percentages of registered Democrats equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry.
More visual analysis of the results can be seen at http://ustogether.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm.
And, although elections officials didn't notice these anomalies, in aggregate they were enough to swing Florida from Kerry to Bush. If you simply go through the analysis of these counties and reverse the "anomalous" numbers in those counties that appear to have been hacked, suddenly the Florida election results resemble the Florida exit poll results: Kerry won, and won big.
Those exit poll results have been a problem for reporters ever since Election Day.
Election night, I'd been doing live election coverage for WDEV, one of the radio stations that carries my syndicated show, and, just after midnight, during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted the AP report.
But then the computers reported something different. In several pivotal states.
Conservatives see a conspiracy here: They think the exit polls were rigged.
Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, wrote an article for The Hill, the publication read by every political junkie in Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of brilliant points.
"Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state."
He added: "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points."
Yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as the computerized vote numbers began to come in from the various states the election was called for Bush.
How could this happen?
On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real "counting" is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.
That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.
"In a voting system," Harris explained to Dean on national television, "you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once?"
Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. "What surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's just a regular computer."
"So," Dean said, "anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator?"
Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into the central tabulator system. "This is the official program that the County Supervisor sees," she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting between them loaded with Diebold's software.
Bev then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the results of a test election. They went to the screen titled "Election Summary Report" and waited a moment while the PC "adds up all the votes from all the various precincts," and then saw that in this faux election Howard Dean had 1000 votes, Lex Luthor had 500, and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was winning.
"Of course, you can't tamper with this software," Harris noted. Diebold wrote a pretty good program.
But, it's running on a Windows PC.
So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB" which, Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep the votes." Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled "Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like Excel.
In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.
"Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let's give 100 votes to Tiger."
They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software "the legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the progress of your election."
As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said, "And you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.
Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds."
On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv)
Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that had Karen Hughes telling George W. Bush that he'd lost the election in a landslide.
Morris's conspiracy theory is that the exit polls "were sabotage" to cause people in the western states to not bother voting for Bush, since the networks would call the election based on the exit polls for Kerry. But the networks didn't do that, and had never intended to. It makes far more sense that the exit polls were right - they weren't done on Diebold PCs - and that the vote itself was hacked.
And not only for the presidential candidate - Jeff Fisher thinks this hit him and pretty much every other Democratic candidate for national office in the most-hacked swing states.
So far, the only national "mainstream" media to come close to this story was Keith Olbermann on his show Friday night, November 5th, when he noted that it was curious that all the voting machine irregularities so far uncovered seem to favor Bush. In the meantime, the Washington Post and other media are now going through single-bullet-theory-like contortions to explain how the exit polls had failed.
But I agree with Fox's Dick Morris on this one, at least in large part. Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in his final paragraph, "This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play."
Friday, November 05, 2004
Bloglines | My Blogs
Bloglines | My Blogs
Published on Thursday, November 4, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
The Ultimate Felony Against Democracy
by Thom Hartmann
The hot story in the Blogosphere is that the "erroneous" exit polls that showed Kerry carrying Florida and Ohio (among other states) weren't erroneous at all - it was the numbers produced by paperless voting machines that were wrong, and Kerry actually won. As more and more analysis is done of what may (or may not) be the most massive election fraud in the history of the world, however, it's critical that we keep the largest issue at the forefront at all time: Why are We The People allowing private, for-profit corporations, answerable only to their officers and boards of directors, and loyal only to agendas and politicians that will enhance their profitability, to handle our votes?
Maybe Florida went for Kerry, maybe for Bush. Over time - and through the efforts of some very motivated investigative reporters - we may well find out (Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.org just filed what may be the largest Freedom of Information Act [FOIA} filing in history), and bloggers and investigative reporters are discovering an odd discrepancy in exit polls being largely accurate in paper-ballot states and oddly inaccurate in touch-screen electronic voting states Even raw voter analyses are showing extreme oddities in touch-screen-run Florida, and eagle-eyed bloggers are finding that news organizations are retroactively altering their exit polls to coincide with what the machines ultimately said.
But in all the discussion about voting machines, let's never forget the concept of the commons, because this usurpation is the ultimate felony committed by conservatives this year.
At the founding of this nation, we decided that there were important places to invest our tax (then tariff) dollars, and those were the things that had to do with the overall "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" of all of us. Over time, these commons - in which we all make tax investments and for which we all hold ultimate responsibility - have come to include our police and fire services; our military and defense; our roads and skyways; our air, waters and national parks; and the safety of our food and drugs.
But the most important of all the commons in which we've invested our hard-earned tax dollars is our government itself. It's owned by us, run by us (through our elected representatives), answerable to us, and most directly responsible for stewardship of our commons.
And the commons through which we regulate the commons of our government is our vote.
About two years ago, I wrote a story for these pages, "If You Want To Win An Election, Just Control The Voting Machines," that exposed how Senator Chuck Hagel had, before stepping down and running for the U.S. Senate in Nebraska, been the head of the voting machine company (now ES&S) that had just computerized Nebraska's vote. The Washington Post (1/13/1997) said Hagel's "Senate victory against an incumbent Democratic governor was the major Republican upset in the November election." According to Bev Harris, Hagel won virtually every demographic group, including many largely black communities that had never before voted Republican. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska, nearly all on unauditable machines he had just sold the state. And in all probability, Hagel run for President in 2008.
In another, later article I wrote at the request of MoveOn.org and which they mailed to their millions of members, I noted that in Georgia - another state that went all-electronic - "USA Today reported on Nov. 3, 2002, 'In Georgia, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll shows Democratic Sen. Max Cleland with a 49%-to-44% lead over Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss. 'Cox News Service, based in Atlanta, reported just after the election (Nov. 7) that, "Pollsters may have goofed" because 'Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss defeated incumbent Democratic Sen. Max Cleland by a margin of 53 to 46 percent. The Hotline, a political news service, recalled a series of polls Wednesday showing that Chambliss had been ahead in none of them.'" Nearly every vote in the state was on an electronic machine with no audit trail.
In the years since those first articles appeared, Bev Harris has published her book on the subject ("Black Box Voting"), including the revelation of her finding the notorious "Rob Georgia" folder on Diebold's FTP site just after Cleland's loss there; Lynn Landes has done some groundbreaking research, particularly her new investigation of the Associated Press, as have Rebecca Mercuri and David Dill. There's a new video out on the topic, Votergate, available at www.votergate.tv.
Congressman Rush Holt introduced a bill into Congress requiring a voter-verified paper ballot be produced by all electronic voting machines, and it's been co-sponsored by a majority of the members of the House of Representatives. The two-year battle fought by Dennis Hastert and Tom DeLay to keep it from coming to a vote, thus insuring that there will be no possible audit of the votes of about a third of the 2004 electorate, has fueled the flames of conspiracy theorists convinced Republican ideologues - now known to be willing to lie in television advertising - would extend their "ends justifies the means" morality to stealing the vote "for the better good of the country" they think single-party Republican rule will bring.
Most important, though, the rallying cry of the emerging "honest vote" movement must become: Get Corporations Out Of Our Vote!
Why have we let corporations into our polling places, locations so sacred to democracy that in many states even international election monitors and reporters are banned? Why are we allowing corporations to exclusively handle our vote, in a secret and totally invisible way? Particularly a private corporation founded, in one case, by a family that believes the Bible should replace the Constitution; in another case run by one of Ohio's top Republicans; and in another case partly owned by Saudi investors?
Of all the violations of the commons - all of the crimes against We The People and against democracy in our great and historic republic - this is the greatest. Our vote is too important to outsource to private corporations.
It's time that the USA - like most of the rest of the world - returns to paper ballots, counted by hand by civil servants (our employees) under the watchful eye of the party faithful. Even if it takes two weeks to count the vote, and we have to just go, until then, with the exit polls of the news agencies. It worked just fine for nearly 200 years in the USA, and it can work again.
When I lived in Germany, they took the vote the same way most of the world does - people fill in hand-marked ballots, which are hand-counted by civil servants taking a week off from their regular jobs, watched over by volunteer representatives of the political parties. It's totally clean, and easily audited. And even though it takes a week or more to count the vote (and costs nothing more than a bit of overtime pay for civil servants), the German people know the election results the night the polls close because the news media's exit polls, for two generations, have never been more than a tenth of a percent off.
We could have saved billions that have instead been handed over to ES&S, Diebold, and other private corporations.
Or, if we must have machines, let's have them owned by local governments, maintained and programmed by civil servants answerable to We The People, using open-source code and disconnected from modems, that produce a voter-verified printed ballot, with all results published on a precinct-by-precinct basis.
As Thomas Paine wrote at this nation's founding, "The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery."
Only when We The People reclaim the commons of our vote can we again be confident in the integrity of our electoral process in the world's oldest and most powerful democratic republic.
Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann .com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."
###
Published on Thursday, November 4, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
The Ultimate Felony Against Democracy
by Thom Hartmann
The hot story in the Blogosphere is that the "erroneous" exit polls that showed Kerry carrying Florida and Ohio (among other states) weren't erroneous at all - it was the numbers produced by paperless voting machines that were wrong, and Kerry actually won. As more and more analysis is done of what may (or may not) be the most massive election fraud in the history of the world, however, it's critical that we keep the largest issue at the forefront at all time: Why are We The People allowing private, for-profit corporations, answerable only to their officers and boards of directors, and loyal only to agendas and politicians that will enhance their profitability, to handle our votes?
Maybe Florida went for Kerry, maybe for Bush. Over time - and through the efforts of some very motivated investigative reporters - we may well find out (Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.org just filed what may be the largest Freedom of Information Act [FOIA} filing in history), and bloggers and investigative reporters are discovering an odd discrepancy in exit polls being largely accurate in paper-ballot states and oddly inaccurate in touch-screen electronic voting states Even raw voter analyses are showing extreme oddities in touch-screen-run Florida, and eagle-eyed bloggers are finding that news organizations are retroactively altering their exit polls to coincide with what the machines ultimately said.
But in all the discussion about voting machines, let's never forget the concept of the commons, because this usurpation is the ultimate felony committed by conservatives this year.
At the founding of this nation, we decided that there were important places to invest our tax (then tariff) dollars, and those were the things that had to do with the overall "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" of all of us. Over time, these commons - in which we all make tax investments and for which we all hold ultimate responsibility - have come to include our police and fire services; our military and defense; our roads and skyways; our air, waters and national parks; and the safety of our food and drugs.
But the most important of all the commons in which we've invested our hard-earned tax dollars is our government itself. It's owned by us, run by us (through our elected representatives), answerable to us, and most directly responsible for stewardship of our commons.
And the commons through which we regulate the commons of our government is our vote.
About two years ago, I wrote a story for these pages, "If You Want To Win An Election, Just Control The Voting Machines," that exposed how Senator Chuck Hagel had, before stepping down and running for the U.S. Senate in Nebraska, been the head of the voting machine company (now ES&S) that had just computerized Nebraska's vote. The Washington Post (1/13/1997) said Hagel's "Senate victory against an incumbent Democratic governor was the major Republican upset in the November election." According to Bev Harris, Hagel won virtually every demographic group, including many largely black communities that had never before voted Republican. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska, nearly all on unauditable machines he had just sold the state. And in all probability, Hagel run for President in 2008.
In another, later article I wrote at the request of MoveOn.org and which they mailed to their millions of members, I noted that in Georgia - another state that went all-electronic - "USA Today reported on Nov. 3, 2002, 'In Georgia, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll shows Democratic Sen. Max Cleland with a 49%-to-44% lead over Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss. 'Cox News Service, based in Atlanta, reported just after the election (Nov. 7) that, "Pollsters may have goofed" because 'Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss defeated incumbent Democratic Sen. Max Cleland by a margin of 53 to 46 percent. The Hotline, a political news service, recalled a series of polls Wednesday showing that Chambliss had been ahead in none of them.'" Nearly every vote in the state was on an electronic machine with no audit trail.
In the years since those first articles appeared, Bev Harris has published her book on the subject ("Black Box Voting"), including the revelation of her finding the notorious "Rob Georgia" folder on Diebold's FTP site just after Cleland's loss there; Lynn Landes has done some groundbreaking research, particularly her new investigation of the Associated Press, as have Rebecca Mercuri and David Dill. There's a new video out on the topic, Votergate, available at www.votergate.tv.
Congressman Rush Holt introduced a bill into Congress requiring a voter-verified paper ballot be produced by all electronic voting machines, and it's been co-sponsored by a majority of the members of the House of Representatives. The two-year battle fought by Dennis Hastert and Tom DeLay to keep it from coming to a vote, thus insuring that there will be no possible audit of the votes of about a third of the 2004 electorate, has fueled the flames of conspiracy theorists convinced Republican ideologues - now known to be willing to lie in television advertising - would extend their "ends justifies the means" morality to stealing the vote "for the better good of the country" they think single-party Republican rule will bring.
Most important, though, the rallying cry of the emerging "honest vote" movement must become: Get Corporations Out Of Our Vote!
Why have we let corporations into our polling places, locations so sacred to democracy that in many states even international election monitors and reporters are banned? Why are we allowing corporations to exclusively handle our vote, in a secret and totally invisible way? Particularly a private corporation founded, in one case, by a family that believes the Bible should replace the Constitution; in another case run by one of Ohio's top Republicans; and in another case partly owned by Saudi investors?
Of all the violations of the commons - all of the crimes against We The People and against democracy in our great and historic republic - this is the greatest. Our vote is too important to outsource to private corporations.
It's time that the USA - like most of the rest of the world - returns to paper ballots, counted by hand by civil servants (our employees) under the watchful eye of the party faithful. Even if it takes two weeks to count the vote, and we have to just go, until then, with the exit polls of the news agencies. It worked just fine for nearly 200 years in the USA, and it can work again.
When I lived in Germany, they took the vote the same way most of the world does - people fill in hand-marked ballots, which are hand-counted by civil servants taking a week off from their regular jobs, watched over by volunteer representatives of the political parties. It's totally clean, and easily audited. And even though it takes a week or more to count the vote (and costs nothing more than a bit of overtime pay for civil servants), the German people know the election results the night the polls close because the news media's exit polls, for two generations, have never been more than a tenth of a percent off.
We could have saved billions that have instead been handed over to ES&S, Diebold, and other private corporations.
Or, if we must have machines, let's have them owned by local governments, maintained and programmed by civil servants answerable to We The People, using open-source code and disconnected from modems, that produce a voter-verified printed ballot, with all results published on a precinct-by-precinct basis.
As Thomas Paine wrote at this nation's founding, "The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery."
Only when We The People reclaim the commons of our vote can we again be confident in the integrity of our electoral process in the world's oldest and most powerful democratic republic.
Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann .com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."
###
Thursday, November 04, 2004
Alan Maass: Jon Stewart vs. the Pundits
Alan Maass: Jon Stewart vs. the Pundits
October 28, 2004
Jon Stewart vs. the Political Pundits
Political Satire 101
By ALAN MAASS
WE’RE SUPPOSED to live in a “beacon of democracy,” with a highly developed political system that makes us the envy of the world. So why is the host of a self-described “fake news” program responsible for many of the few-and-far-between moments of honesty in this year’s endless, mind-numbing, soul-deadening election campaign?
Jon Stewart and his fellow comedians at Comedy Central’s Daily Show are the unlikely stars of Election 2004. Their half-hour show--a satire of a nightly television news show that appears Monday through Thursday nights--has increased its ratings by 20 percent over last year as the presidential campaign has ground on toward Election Day. Stewart and nearly 20 other people who write or appear on the show are also responsible for the country’s best-selling book--America (The Book), a hilarious parody of the textbooks that grade school students continue to endure in government and history classes.
But Stewart’s notoriety reached new heights last week when he routed the puffed-up windbags on CNN’s political “debate” show, Crossfire.
Stewart went on Crossfire to promote the book, but he refused to play along when blowhard hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala tried to clown around with him. Instead, he slammed Crossfire and the whole media machine for serving as a giant echo chamber for the dishonest, cynical sound bites of the powerful.
“Right now, you’re helping the politicians and the corporations,” Stewart said, as Carlson tried to shout him down. “You’re not too rough on them. You’re part of their strategies. You’re partisan--what do you call it--hacks.” Thanks to the Internet, the 15-minute segment has been watched and savored by millions.
The Crossfire appearance goes straight to the reason of why Stewart and the Daily Show are so popular. With the corporate journalism organized around flattering the politicians, instead of challenging them--no matter how outrageous the lies or how bloated the rhetoric--Stewart’s “fake news” ends up being more truthful about the reality of U.S. politics than all the Crossfires and Hardballs piled up in a great steaming heap.
John Kerry and the Democrats do get off easier--the show definitely saves its venom for the right wing, especially the strutting liars and warmongers of the Bush administration. But the Daily Show’s best moments are when it exposes the absurdities of the Washington system as a whole--and that inevitably means dishing up shots at both pro-corporate parties, since both are responsible for propping it up, even if the Republicans are more outrageously corrupt and cynical about it, especially at election time.
The same themes come across in America (The Book). Designed as a fake textbook, it comes complete with the standard semi-helpful illustrations and charts (“The Cabinet: Yes Men of Freedom”), discussion questions (“If you lived in a monarchy, would you rather be a king or a slave? Why?”) and suggested classroom activities (“Disenfranchise a Black student”).
The usual explanation of “how a bill becomes a law” is made much more realistic with the inclusion of “amendment-sneakin’ time,” in which lawmakers load on pork-barrel provisions, and “passing lobbyist muster,” where the hired hands of Corporate America “assist our representatives in any last-minute changes in language, content or intent necessary to insure their reelection funds.”
In a chapter on the media, the book abandons all pretence in a heartfelt rant. “These spineless cowards in the press have finally gone too far,” reads the first draft, before, uh, editorial revisions. “‘Was the president successful in convincing the country?’ Who gives a shit? Why not tell us if what he said was true? And the excuses. My God, the excuses! “Hey, we just give the people what they want. ‘What can we do, this administration is secretive.’ ‘But the last season of Friends really is news.’ The unmitigated gall of these weak-willed...You’re supposed to be helping us, you indecent piles of shit!”
Stewart and the Daily Show writers get in their election-year shots in a special 24-page section--plus a pullout feature that could have been produced by Socialist Worker: a boxing poster for a match pitting “Skull vs. Bones: The Thrilla in Vanilla. This time, it’s presidential.”
There are some misses when the book stoops to stupid and sometimes offensive stereotypes--something that seems to happen especially often when the subject roams beyond the borders of the U.S. And as on the Daily Show, Stewart and his fellow writers tend to be cynical about anyone associated with politics, including progressive and left-wing activists outraged by the very hypocrisy that the book points out, but committed to doing something about it.
But if your spirits are dragging under the weight of the hypocrisy and lies of this miserable election, you’ll want a copy of America (The Book) on hand for election night and after.
Today's Stories
October 28, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Kerrycrats and the War
October 28, 2004
Jon Stewart vs. the Political Pundits
Political Satire 101
By ALAN MAASS
WE’RE SUPPOSED to live in a “beacon of democracy,” with a highly developed political system that makes us the envy of the world. So why is the host of a self-described “fake news” program responsible for many of the few-and-far-between moments of honesty in this year’s endless, mind-numbing, soul-deadening election campaign?
Jon Stewart and his fellow comedians at Comedy Central’s Daily Show are the unlikely stars of Election 2004. Their half-hour show--a satire of a nightly television news show that appears Monday through Thursday nights--has increased its ratings by 20 percent over last year as the presidential campaign has ground on toward Election Day. Stewart and nearly 20 other people who write or appear on the show are also responsible for the country’s best-selling book--America (The Book), a hilarious parody of the textbooks that grade school students continue to endure in government and history classes.
But Stewart’s notoriety reached new heights last week when he routed the puffed-up windbags on CNN’s political “debate” show, Crossfire.
Stewart went on Crossfire to promote the book, but he refused to play along when blowhard hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala tried to clown around with him. Instead, he slammed Crossfire and the whole media machine for serving as a giant echo chamber for the dishonest, cynical sound bites of the powerful.
“Right now, you’re helping the politicians and the corporations,” Stewart said, as Carlson tried to shout him down. “You’re not too rough on them. You’re part of their strategies. You’re partisan--what do you call it--hacks.” Thanks to the Internet, the 15-minute segment has been watched and savored by millions.
The Crossfire appearance goes straight to the reason of why Stewart and the Daily Show are so popular. With the corporate journalism organized around flattering the politicians, instead of challenging them--no matter how outrageous the lies or how bloated the rhetoric--Stewart’s “fake news” ends up being more truthful about the reality of U.S. politics than all the Crossfires and Hardballs piled up in a great steaming heap.
John Kerry and the Democrats do get off easier--the show definitely saves its venom for the right wing, especially the strutting liars and warmongers of the Bush administration. But the Daily Show’s best moments are when it exposes the absurdities of the Washington system as a whole--and that inevitably means dishing up shots at both pro-corporate parties, since both are responsible for propping it up, even if the Republicans are more outrageously corrupt and cynical about it, especially at election time.
The same themes come across in America (The Book). Designed as a fake textbook, it comes complete with the standard semi-helpful illustrations and charts (“The Cabinet: Yes Men of Freedom”), discussion questions (“If you lived in a monarchy, would you rather be a king or a slave? Why?”) and suggested classroom activities (“Disenfranchise a Black student”).
The usual explanation of “how a bill becomes a law” is made much more realistic with the inclusion of “amendment-sneakin’ time,” in which lawmakers load on pork-barrel provisions, and “passing lobbyist muster,” where the hired hands of Corporate America “assist our representatives in any last-minute changes in language, content or intent necessary to insure their reelection funds.”
In a chapter on the media, the book abandons all pretence in a heartfelt rant. “These spineless cowards in the press have finally gone too far,” reads the first draft, before, uh, editorial revisions. “‘Was the president successful in convincing the country?’ Who gives a shit? Why not tell us if what he said was true? And the excuses. My God, the excuses! “Hey, we just give the people what they want. ‘What can we do, this administration is secretive.’ ‘But the last season of Friends really is news.’ The unmitigated gall of these weak-willed...You’re supposed to be helping us, you indecent piles of shit!”
Stewart and the Daily Show writers get in their election-year shots in a special 24-page section--plus a pullout feature that could have been produced by Socialist Worker: a boxing poster for a match pitting “Skull vs. Bones: The Thrilla in Vanilla. This time, it’s presidential.”
There are some misses when the book stoops to stupid and sometimes offensive stereotypes--something that seems to happen especially often when the subject roams beyond the borders of the U.S. And as on the Daily Show, Stewart and his fellow writers tend to be cynical about anyone associated with politics, including progressive and left-wing activists outraged by the very hypocrisy that the book points out, but committed to doing something about it.
But if your spirits are dragging under the weight of the hypocrisy and lies of this miserable election, you’ll want a copy of America (The Book) on hand for election night and after.
Today's Stories
October 28, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Kerrycrats and the War
Friday, October 22, 2004
College costs spike again - Oct. 19, 2004
College costs spike again - Oct. 19, 2004
College costs spike again
Tuition climbs fastest at public schools, while aid helps lower-income students less, study finds.
October 19, 2004: 10:58 AM EDT
By Jeanne Sahadi, CNN/Money senior writer
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) – If only salaries would rise as rapidly – and as consistently – as college costs.
The average tuition for undergrads attending four-year public universities jumped 10.5 percent this year. That helped to push the average price of attendance, including room, board and fees, up $824 to $11,354.
That's one of the findings in "Trends in College Pricing 2004," a report released Tuesday by the College Board, a non-profit membership association of 4,500 schools, colleges and universities.
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The tuition increase at public schools isn't as steep as it was last year – when average tuition rose a record 13 percent – but it is still high by historical standards.
The average tuition at four-year private colleges, meanwhile, rose 6 percent, raising the total cost of attendance by $1,459 to $27,516.
Sticker price vs. net price
While college costs can lead to sticker shock, in reality what many students and their parents actually pay is less than the advertised price.
The College Board found that 25 percent of full-time undergrads at public schools and 60 percent of private college students received institutional grant aid, which is money that never needs to be repaid.
PUBLIC COLLEGES & UNIVERSITIES
The average cost of tuition and fees by region, from most to least expensive:
Region Avg tuition/fees '04-05
New England $6,839
Middle states $6,300
Midwest $6,085
Southwest $4,569
South $4,143
West $4,130
*Middle states are defined as NY, NJ, PA, DE, MD
Source: The College Board
Those grants, in combination with federal tax credits and deductions for tuition plus federal grants, lowered the cost of attendance by an average of more than $3,300 per student at public four-year institutions, and $9,400 at private institutions in 2003-04, the latest year for which data are available.
But the load is still a heavy one. Despite the growth in funding for grant aid over the years, the College Board found that compared with 10 years ago, the net cost of attendance (in 2003 dollars) has risen $1,000 for public university undergrads and $2,000 for private-college undergrads.
What families can't cover with grants and savings they finance with loans, which have grown at a faster rate than grant aid in the past two years.
And the Board found that an increasing percentage of student loans is coming from private sources, which tend to be more expensive than subsidized federal loans.
Low-income students see less benefit
The College Board notes that to just look at the average aid per student or the average net price of college after accounting for aid and tax benefits doesn't tell the whole story.
PRIVATE COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES
The average cost of tuition and fees by region, from most to least expensive:
Region Avg tuition/fees '04-'05
New England $25,660
Middle States $21,439
West $19,998
Midwest $18,690
South $17,317
Southwest $15,867
*Middle states are defined as NY, NJ, PA, DE, MD
Source: The College Board
It doesn't reflect, for instance, the changes in how grant aid is distributed. While grant funding has increased overall in the past 10 years, merit-based aid, which tends to favor middle- and upper-income students, has grown at a much faster rate than need-based aid for lower-income students, the College Board's senior policy analyst Sandra Baum said.
For example, funding for the federal Pell grants, a staple of aid for low-income students, rose 6 percent in 2003, but there also was an increase of 7 percent in the number of Pell recipients. As a result, the average grant fell 1 percent in constant dollars.
What's more, the purchasing power of the Pell grant has declined during the past 25 years. In 1980-81, a Pell grant covered 35 percent of the total annual cost of attending a public university. In 2003-04, it covered 23 percent.
And because of income restrictions and other factors, the federal tax credit and tax deduction for tuition benefit more middle- and upper-income families, Baum noted.
Why costs are rising
The College Board doesn't examine the reasons for tuition increases in its report. But Baum said she sees a correlation between the rise in tuition to the decline in state funding at public schools and to the reduction in endowment income and private giving at private schools.
She also attributes the price hikes at both private and public schools in part to the rising costs of health care – a component of compensation, which is a big part of school budgets – and to the cost of technology, which schools invest in to maintain state-of-the-art facilities.
Bachelor's means more bucks
In a separate report, "Education Pays," the College Board looked at the earnings premium of adults who earned a college degree versus those who have a high-school diploma or a couple of years of college.
In 2003, those workers with bachelor's degrees earned a median of $49,900. Those with a few years of college but no degree had median earnings of $35,700, while those with a high-school diploma earned a median income of $30,800.
Over a 40-year career, the Board estimated, a college graduate is likely to earn about 73 percent more than a high school graduate. Top of page
College costs spike again
Tuition climbs fastest at public schools, while aid helps lower-income students less, study finds.
October 19, 2004: 10:58 AM EDT
By Jeanne Sahadi, CNN/Money senior writer
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) – If only salaries would rise as rapidly – and as consistently – as college costs.
The average tuition for undergrads attending four-year public universities jumped 10.5 percent this year. That helped to push the average price of attendance, including room, board and fees, up $824 to $11,354.
That's one of the findings in "Trends in College Pricing 2004," a report released Tuesday by the College Board, a non-profit membership association of 4,500 schools, colleges and universities.
Get Federal Student Grants Now
Discover the amazing formula that practically forces the government to give you...
www.bizmove.com
USA Grant Money?? - Student Grants
Discover billions of government dollars waiting to be uncovered in a truly...
www.usagrantmoney.com
Obtain Free Federal Cash Grants Now
Don't buy that grant guide until you read our reviews. We rate 10 top grant...
www.grant-rating.com
The tuition increase at public schools isn't as steep as it was last year – when average tuition rose a record 13 percent – but it is still high by historical standards.
The average tuition at four-year private colleges, meanwhile, rose 6 percent, raising the total cost of attendance by $1,459 to $27,516.
Sticker price vs. net price
While college costs can lead to sticker shock, in reality what many students and their parents actually pay is less than the advertised price.
The College Board found that 25 percent of full-time undergrads at public schools and 60 percent of private college students received institutional grant aid, which is money that never needs to be repaid.
PUBLIC COLLEGES & UNIVERSITIES
The average cost of tuition and fees by region, from most to least expensive:
Region Avg tuition/fees '04-05
New England $6,839
Middle states $6,300
Midwest $6,085
Southwest $4,569
South $4,143
West $4,130
*Middle states are defined as NY, NJ, PA, DE, MD
Source: The College Board
Those grants, in combination with federal tax credits and deductions for tuition plus federal grants, lowered the cost of attendance by an average of more than $3,300 per student at public four-year institutions, and $9,400 at private institutions in 2003-04, the latest year for which data are available.
But the load is still a heavy one. Despite the growth in funding for grant aid over the years, the College Board found that compared with 10 years ago, the net cost of attendance (in 2003 dollars) has risen $1,000 for public university undergrads and $2,000 for private-college undergrads.
What families can't cover with grants and savings they finance with loans, which have grown at a faster rate than grant aid in the past two years.
And the Board found that an increasing percentage of student loans is coming from private sources, which tend to be more expensive than subsidized federal loans.
Low-income students see less benefit
The College Board notes that to just look at the average aid per student or the average net price of college after accounting for aid and tax benefits doesn't tell the whole story.
PRIVATE COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES
The average cost of tuition and fees by region, from most to least expensive:
Region Avg tuition/fees '04-'05
New England $25,660
Middle States $21,439
West $19,998
Midwest $18,690
South $17,317
Southwest $15,867
*Middle states are defined as NY, NJ, PA, DE, MD
Source: The College Board
It doesn't reflect, for instance, the changes in how grant aid is distributed. While grant funding has increased overall in the past 10 years, merit-based aid, which tends to favor middle- and upper-income students, has grown at a much faster rate than need-based aid for lower-income students, the College Board's senior policy analyst Sandra Baum said.
For example, funding for the federal Pell grants, a staple of aid for low-income students, rose 6 percent in 2003, but there also was an increase of 7 percent in the number of Pell recipients. As a result, the average grant fell 1 percent in constant dollars.
What's more, the purchasing power of the Pell grant has declined during the past 25 years. In 1980-81, a Pell grant covered 35 percent of the total annual cost of attending a public university. In 2003-04, it covered 23 percent.
And because of income restrictions and other factors, the federal tax credit and tax deduction for tuition benefit more middle- and upper-income families, Baum noted.
Why costs are rising
The College Board doesn't examine the reasons for tuition increases in its report. But Baum said she sees a correlation between the rise in tuition to the decline in state funding at public schools and to the reduction in endowment income and private giving at private schools.
She also attributes the price hikes at both private and public schools in part to the rising costs of health care – a component of compensation, which is a big part of school budgets – and to the cost of technology, which schools invest in to maintain state-of-the-art facilities.
Bachelor's means more bucks
In a separate report, "Education Pays," the College Board looked at the earnings premium of adults who earned a college degree versus those who have a high-school diploma or a couple of years of college.
In 2003, those workers with bachelor's degrees earned a median of $49,900. Those with a few years of college but no degree had median earnings of $35,700, while those with a high-school diploma earned a median income of $30,800.
Over a 40-year career, the Board estimated, a college graduate is likely to earn about 73 percent more than a high school graduate. Top of page
MSNBC - Bush quietly signs corporate tax-cut bill
MSNBC - Bush quietly signs corporate tax-cut bill
Bush quietly signs corporate tax-cut bill
$136 billion measure assailed for catering to special interests
The Associated Press
Updated: 4:44 p.m. ET Oct. 22, 2004
WASHINGTON - With no fanfare, President Bush Friday signed the most sweeping rewrite of corporate tax law in nearly two decades, showering $136 billion in new tax breaks on businesses, farmers and other groups.
Intended to end a bitter trade war with Europe, the election-year measure was described by supporters as critically necessary to aid beleaguered manufacturers who have suffered 2.7 million lost jobs over the past four years.
But opponents charged that the tax package had grown into a massive giveaway that will add to the complexity of the tax system and end up rewarding multinational companies that move jobs overseas.
There was no ceremony for the bill-signing. White House press secretary Scott McClellan announced it on Air Force One as Bush flew to a campaign appearance in Pennsylvania. Bush mentioned the new tax law at the beginning of a health care event in Canton, Ohio.
“I signed a bill that’s going to help our manufacturers — that will save $77 billion over the next 10 years for the manufacturing sector of America,” Bush said. “That will help keep jobs here.”
The handling of the corporate tax bill was in contrast to Bush’s action on Oct. 4 when he sat before television cameras on a stage in Des Moines, Iowa, to sign three tax-cut breaks popular with middle-class voters and reviving other tax incentives for businesses.
Bush’s campaign rival, Sen. John Kerry, missed the vote on the corporate tax breaks. Kerry spokesman Phil Singer said there were many important things in the bill but that “George Bush filled the bill up with corporate giveaways and tax breaks for multinational companies that send jobs overseas. In his first budget, John Kerry will call for the repeal of all the unwarranted international tax breaks that George Bush included in this bill.”
The Joint Tax Committee said the overall bill would not increase the deficit because the $136 billion in tax cuts over the next decade were balanced by $136 billion in tax increases.
Democrats contended the true costs of the tax cuts would be nearly $80 billion higher because Republicans used accounting gimmicks such as having popular provisions expire after a few years.
advertisement
Keith Ashdown, a spokesman for the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense, agreed.
"Our concern is they’ve used smoke and mirrors and accounting gimmicks to make the legislation look much smaller than it is," he said.
He also called it a giant step backward for efforts to simplify the tax code.
The original purpose of the legislation was to repeal a $5 billion annual tax break provided to American exporters that was ruled illegal by the Geneva-based World Trade Organization.
Repeal of the tax break was needed to lift retaliatory tariffs that are now being imposed on more than 1,600 American manufactured products and farm goods exported to Europe.
The bill replaces the $49.2 billion export tax break with $136 billion in new tax breaks over the next decade for a wide array of groups from farmers, fishermen and bow and arrow hunters to some of America’s largest corporations.
The legislation also includes a $10.1 billion buyout of quotas held by tobacco farmers. A Senate provision that would have coupled this buyout with regulation of tobacco by the Food and Drug Administration was dropped by the conference committee that resolved differences between the two chambers.
The measure is the most sweeping overhaul of corporate tax law since 1986. It provides a wide range of tax benefits for native Alaskan whalers, importers of Chinese ceiling fans and NASCAR race track owners.
The centerpiece is $76.5 billion in new tax relief for the battered manufacturing sector, but manufacturing is broadly defined to include not just factories but also oil and gas producers, engineering, construction and architectural firms and large farming operations.
The bill also includes a $5 billion tax break primarily for residents of seven states that have no income tax. The measure allows taxpayers to take a deduction for sales tax instead.
Bush quietly signs corporate tax-cut bill
$136 billion measure assailed for catering to special interests
The Associated Press
Updated: 4:44 p.m. ET Oct. 22, 2004
WASHINGTON - With no fanfare, President Bush Friday signed the most sweeping rewrite of corporate tax law in nearly two decades, showering $136 billion in new tax breaks on businesses, farmers and other groups.
Intended to end a bitter trade war with Europe, the election-year measure was described by supporters as critically necessary to aid beleaguered manufacturers who have suffered 2.7 million lost jobs over the past four years.
But opponents charged that the tax package had grown into a massive giveaway that will add to the complexity of the tax system and end up rewarding multinational companies that move jobs overseas.
There was no ceremony for the bill-signing. White House press secretary Scott McClellan announced it on Air Force One as Bush flew to a campaign appearance in Pennsylvania. Bush mentioned the new tax law at the beginning of a health care event in Canton, Ohio.
“I signed a bill that’s going to help our manufacturers — that will save $77 billion over the next 10 years for the manufacturing sector of America,” Bush said. “That will help keep jobs here.”
The handling of the corporate tax bill was in contrast to Bush’s action on Oct. 4 when he sat before television cameras on a stage in Des Moines, Iowa, to sign three tax-cut breaks popular with middle-class voters and reviving other tax incentives for businesses.
Bush’s campaign rival, Sen. John Kerry, missed the vote on the corporate tax breaks. Kerry spokesman Phil Singer said there were many important things in the bill but that “George Bush filled the bill up with corporate giveaways and tax breaks for multinational companies that send jobs overseas. In his first budget, John Kerry will call for the repeal of all the unwarranted international tax breaks that George Bush included in this bill.”
The Joint Tax Committee said the overall bill would not increase the deficit because the $136 billion in tax cuts over the next decade were balanced by $136 billion in tax increases.
Democrats contended the true costs of the tax cuts would be nearly $80 billion higher because Republicans used accounting gimmicks such as having popular provisions expire after a few years.
advertisement
Keith Ashdown, a spokesman for the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense, agreed.
"Our concern is they’ve used smoke and mirrors and accounting gimmicks to make the legislation look much smaller than it is," he said.
He also called it a giant step backward for efforts to simplify the tax code.
The original purpose of the legislation was to repeal a $5 billion annual tax break provided to American exporters that was ruled illegal by the Geneva-based World Trade Organization.
Repeal of the tax break was needed to lift retaliatory tariffs that are now being imposed on more than 1,600 American manufactured products and farm goods exported to Europe.
The bill replaces the $49.2 billion export tax break with $136 billion in new tax breaks over the next decade for a wide array of groups from farmers, fishermen and bow and arrow hunters to some of America’s largest corporations.
The legislation also includes a $10.1 billion buyout of quotas held by tobacco farmers. A Senate provision that would have coupled this buyout with regulation of tobacco by the Food and Drug Administration was dropped by the conference committee that resolved differences between the two chambers.
The measure is the most sweeping overhaul of corporate tax law since 1986. It provides a wide range of tax benefits for native Alaskan whalers, importers of Chinese ceiling fans and NASCAR race track owners.
The centerpiece is $76.5 billion in new tax relief for the battered manufacturing sector, but manufacturing is broadly defined to include not just factories but also oil and gas producers, engineering, construction and architectural firms and large farming operations.
The bill also includes a $5 billion tax break primarily for residents of seven states that have no income tax. The measure allows taxpayers to take a deduction for sales tax instead.
Yahoo! News - Foreign Observers See Problems in Election
Yahoo! News - Foreign Observers See Problems in Election: "Foreign Observers See Problems in Election
Thu Oct 21,12:55 PM ET
Add to My Yahoo! Politics - Reuters
By Alan Elsner
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Substantial threats to the integrity of the U.S. presidential election remain despite an improvement in election practices since 2000, an international delegation of election observers reported on Thursday.
Photo
Reuters Photo
The delegation of 20, including lawyers, diplomats, civic leaders and veteran election monitors from 15 countries, visited five key states last month to review preparations for the Nov. 2 balloting.
They plan to return to Florida, Ohio and Missouri on Election Day, although officials in some counties have so far not agreed to allow them access to polling places and vote counting centers.
'We hope voters in the United States will feel confidence with the presence of international observers and realize they are part of a world community,' said Brigalia Bam, chairperson of South Africa's independent electoral commission.
Australian human rights lawyer Irene Baghoomians urged local election officials in parts of Ohio and south Florida, who have so far failed to allow the delegation access on Election Day, to change their minds.
'We do not see any harm from increased accountability and transparency,' she said.
International interest in the fairness of the U.S. election was fueled by problems that emerged in the bitterly disputed 2000 vote. This delegation was sponsored by Global Exchange, a human rights organization. Several other overseas groups are also planning to send observers to monitor the election.
The group made several recommendations, although it acknowledged that it was probably too late for many of them to be implemented less than two weeks before the election.
It strongly recommended that new electronic touch screen voting machines that have been introduced in many states in the past four years be equipped to produce a voter-verified, recountable paper record.
CALL FOR PAPER TRAIL
'Transparency at the polls is critical and cannot be readily established without voter verification,' the report said. 'If such verification is not available, arrangements for independent auditing should be put in place.'
Noting that tests of the machines have produced frequent errors, the delegation said the assumption that newer technology automatically led to more effective voting systems was short-sighted.
It urged that open source computer coding be incorporated in voting machines. At the moment, the source is proprietary and belongs to the companies that make the machines.
The report criticized the fact that U.S. elections are administered by political partisans, saying that it fell short of international norms.
In Missouri, secretary of state Matt Blunt is Republican candidate for governor and will have to certify his own election if he wins. In Ohio, Republican secretary of state J. Kenneth Blackwell has made crucial decisions on voter registration which may affect his political future and ambitions to run for higher office.
In 2000, Florida's then-secretary of state Katherine Harris played a key role in the dispute that ultimately led to the election of George W. Bush as president. She herself was elected to Congress as a Republican two years later.
Other concerns raised by the report included inadequate training of poll workers, who sometimes only received one hour of instruction every three years regardless of changes to the election laws.
The delegation condemned the disenfranchisement of an estimated 4.7 million ex-felons which it said fell short of international standards."
Thu Oct 21,12:55 PM ET
Add to My Yahoo! Politics - Reuters
By Alan Elsner
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Substantial threats to the integrity of the U.S. presidential election remain despite an improvement in election practices since 2000, an international delegation of election observers reported on Thursday.
Photo
Reuters Photo
The delegation of 20, including lawyers, diplomats, civic leaders and veteran election monitors from 15 countries, visited five key states last month to review preparations for the Nov. 2 balloting.
They plan to return to Florida, Ohio and Missouri on Election Day, although officials in some counties have so far not agreed to allow them access to polling places and vote counting centers.
'We hope voters in the United States will feel confidence with the presence of international observers and realize they are part of a world community,' said Brigalia Bam, chairperson of South Africa's independent electoral commission.
Australian human rights lawyer Irene Baghoomians urged local election officials in parts of Ohio and south Florida, who have so far failed to allow the delegation access on Election Day, to change their minds.
'We do not see any harm from increased accountability and transparency,' she said.
International interest in the fairness of the U.S. election was fueled by problems that emerged in the bitterly disputed 2000 vote. This delegation was sponsored by Global Exchange, a human rights organization. Several other overseas groups are also planning to send observers to monitor the election.
The group made several recommendations, although it acknowledged that it was probably too late for many of them to be implemented less than two weeks before the election.
It strongly recommended that new electronic touch screen voting machines that have been introduced in many states in the past four years be equipped to produce a voter-verified, recountable paper record.
CALL FOR PAPER TRAIL
'Transparency at the polls is critical and cannot be readily established without voter verification,' the report said. 'If such verification is not available, arrangements for independent auditing should be put in place.'
Noting that tests of the machines have produced frequent errors, the delegation said the assumption that newer technology automatically led to more effective voting systems was short-sighted.
It urged that open source computer coding be incorporated in voting machines. At the moment, the source is proprietary and belongs to the companies that make the machines.
The report criticized the fact that U.S. elections are administered by political partisans, saying that it fell short of international norms.
In Missouri, secretary of state Matt Blunt is Republican candidate for governor and will have to certify his own election if he wins. In Ohio, Republican secretary of state J. Kenneth Blackwell has made crucial decisions on voter registration which may affect his political future and ambitions to run for higher office.
In 2000, Florida's then-secretary of state Katherine Harris played a key role in the dispute that ultimately led to the election of George W. Bush as president. She herself was elected to Congress as a Republican two years later.
Other concerns raised by the report included inadequate training of poll workers, who sometimes only received one hour of instruction every three years regardless of changes to the election laws.
The delegation condemned the disenfranchisement of an estimated 4.7 million ex-felons which it said fell short of international standards."
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Voting and Counting
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Voting and Counting: "Voting and Counting
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: October 22, 2004
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Electoral College
Bush, George W
If the election were held today and the votes were counted fairly, Senator John Kerry would probably win. But the votes won't be counted fairly, and the disenfranchisement of minority voters may determine the outcome.
Recent national poll results range from a three-percentage-point Kerry lead in the A.P.-Ipsos poll released yesterday to an eight-point Bush lead in the Gallup poll. But if you line up the polls released this week from the most to the least favorable to President Bush, the polls in the middle show a tie at about 47 percent.
This is bad news for Mr. Bush because undecided voters usually break against the incumbent - not always, but we're talking about probabilities. Those middle-of-the-road polls also show Mr. Bush with job approval around 47 percent, putting him very much in the danger zone.
Electoral College projections based on state polls also show a dead heat. Projections assuming that undecided voters will break for the challenger in typical proportions give Mr. Kerry more than 300 electoral votes.
But if you get your political news from cable TV, you probably have a very different sense of where things stand. CNN, which co-sponsored that Gallup poll, rarely informs its viewers that other polls tell a very different story. The same is true of Fox News, which has its own very Bush-friendly poll. As a result, there is a widespread public impression that Mr. Bush holds a commanding lead.
By the way, why does the Gallup poll, which is influential because of its illustrious history, report a large Bush lead when many other polls show a dead heat? It's mostly because of how Gallup determines 'likely voters': the poll shows only a three-point Bush lead among registered voters. And as the Democratic poll expert Ruy Teixeira points out (using data obtained by Steve Soto, a liberal blogger), Gallup's sample of supposedly likely voters contains a much smaller proportion of both minority and young voters than the actual proportions of these voters in the 2000 election.
A broad view of the polls, then, suggests that Mr. Bush is in trouble. But he is likely to benefit from a distorted vote count.
Florida is the prime, but not the only, example. Recent Florida polls suggest a tight race, which could be tipped by a failure to count all the votes. And votes for Mr. Kerry will be systematically undercounted.
Last week I described Greg Palast's work on the 2000 election, reported recently in Harper's, which conclusively shows that Florida was thrown to Mr. Bush by a combination of factors that disenfranchised black voters. These included a defective felon list, which wrongly struck thousands of people from the voter rolls, and defective voting machines, which disproportionately failed to record votes in poor, black districts.
One might have expected Florida's government to fix these problems during the intervening four years. But most of those wrongly denied voting rights in 2000 still haven't had those rights restored - and the replacement of punch-card machines has created new problems.
After the 2000 debacle, a task force appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush recommended that the state adopt a robust voting technology that would greatly reduce the number of spoiled ballots and provide a paper trail for recounts: paper ballots read by optical scanners that alert voters to problems. This system is in use in some affluent, mainly white Florida counties.
But Governor Bush ignored this recommendation, just as he ignored state officials who urged him to 'pull the plug' on a new felon list - which was quickly discredited once a judge forced the state to make it public - just days before he ordered the list put into effect. Instead, much of the state will vote using touch-screen machines that are unreliable and subject to hacking, and leave no paper trail. Mr. Palast estimates that this will disenfranchise 27,000 voters - disproportionately poor and black.
A lot can change in 11 days, and Mr. Bush may yet win convincingly. But we must not repeat the mistake of 2000 by refusing to acknowledge the possibility that a narrow Bush win, especially if it depends on Florida, rests on the systematic disenfranchisement of minority voters. And the media must not treat such a suspect win as a validation of skewed reporting that has consistently overstated Mr. Bush's popular support.
"
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: October 22, 2004
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Columnist Page: Paul Krugman
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E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com
TIMES NEWS TRACKER
Topics
Alerts
Presidential Elections (US)
Election Results
Electoral College
Bush, George W
If the election were held today and the votes were counted fairly, Senator John Kerry would probably win. But the votes won't be counted fairly, and the disenfranchisement of minority voters may determine the outcome.
Recent national poll results range from a three-percentage-point Kerry lead in the A.P.-Ipsos poll released yesterday to an eight-point Bush lead in the Gallup poll. But if you line up the polls released this week from the most to the least favorable to President Bush, the polls in the middle show a tie at about 47 percent.
This is bad news for Mr. Bush because undecided voters usually break against the incumbent - not always, but we're talking about probabilities. Those middle-of-the-road polls also show Mr. Bush with job approval around 47 percent, putting him very much in the danger zone.
Electoral College projections based on state polls also show a dead heat. Projections assuming that undecided voters will break for the challenger in typical proportions give Mr. Kerry more than 300 electoral votes.
But if you get your political news from cable TV, you probably have a very different sense of where things stand. CNN, which co-sponsored that Gallup poll, rarely informs its viewers that other polls tell a very different story. The same is true of Fox News, which has its own very Bush-friendly poll. As a result, there is a widespread public impression that Mr. Bush holds a commanding lead.
By the way, why does the Gallup poll, which is influential because of its illustrious history, report a large Bush lead when many other polls show a dead heat? It's mostly because of how Gallup determines 'likely voters': the poll shows only a three-point Bush lead among registered voters. And as the Democratic poll expert Ruy Teixeira points out (using data obtained by Steve Soto, a liberal blogger), Gallup's sample of supposedly likely voters contains a much smaller proportion of both minority and young voters than the actual proportions of these voters in the 2000 election.
A broad view of the polls, then, suggests that Mr. Bush is in trouble. But he is likely to benefit from a distorted vote count.
Florida is the prime, but not the only, example. Recent Florida polls suggest a tight race, which could be tipped by a failure to count all the votes. And votes for Mr. Kerry will be systematically undercounted.
Last week I described Greg Palast's work on the 2000 election, reported recently in Harper's, which conclusively shows that Florida was thrown to Mr. Bush by a combination of factors that disenfranchised black voters. These included a defective felon list, which wrongly struck thousands of people from the voter rolls, and defective voting machines, which disproportionately failed to record votes in poor, black districts.
One might have expected Florida's government to fix these problems during the intervening four years. But most of those wrongly denied voting rights in 2000 still haven't had those rights restored - and the replacement of punch-card machines has created new problems.
After the 2000 debacle, a task force appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush recommended that the state adopt a robust voting technology that would greatly reduce the number of spoiled ballots and provide a paper trail for recounts: paper ballots read by optical scanners that alert voters to problems. This system is in use in some affluent, mainly white Florida counties.
But Governor Bush ignored this recommendation, just as he ignored state officials who urged him to 'pull the plug' on a new felon list - which was quickly discredited once a judge forced the state to make it public - just days before he ordered the list put into effect. Instead, much of the state will vote using touch-screen machines that are unreliable and subject to hacking, and leave no paper trail. Mr. Palast estimates that this will disenfranchise 27,000 voters - disproportionately poor and black.
A lot can change in 11 days, and Mr. Bush may yet win convincingly. But we must not repeat the mistake of 2000 by refusing to acknowledge the possibility that a narrow Bush win, especially if it depends on Florida, rests on the systematic disenfranchisement of minority voters. And the media must not treat such a suspect win as a validation of skewed reporting that has consistently overstated Mr. Bush's popular support.
"
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Voting and Counting
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Voting and Counting: "Voting and Counting
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: October 22, 2004
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Columnist Page: Paul Krugman
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E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com
TIMES NEWS TRACKER
Topics
Alerts
Presidential Elections (US)
Election Results
Electoral College
Bush, George W
If the election were held today and the votes were counted fairly, Senator John Kerry would probably win. But the votes won't be counted fairly, and the disenfranchisement of minority voters may determine the outcome.
Recent national poll results range from a three-percentage-point Kerry lead in the A.P.-Ipsos poll released yesterday to an eight-point Bush lead in the Gallup poll. But if you line up the polls released this week from the most to the least favorable to President Bush, the polls in the middle show a tie at about 47 percent.
This is bad news for Mr. Bush because undecided voters usually break against the incumbent - not always, but we're talking about probabilities. Those middle-of-the-road polls also show Mr. Bush with job approval around 47 percent, putting him very much in the danger zone.
Electoral College projections based on state polls also show a dead heat. Projections assuming that undecided voters will break for the challenger in typical proportions give Mr. Kerry more than 300 electoral votes.
But if you get your political news from cable TV, you probably have a very different sense of where things stand. CNN, which co-sponsored that Gallup poll, rarely informs its viewers that other polls tell a very different story. The same is true of Fox News, which has its own very Bush-friendly poll. As a result, there is a widespread public impression that Mr. Bush holds a commanding lead.
By the way, why does the Gallup poll, which is influential because of its illustrious history, report a large Bush lead when many other polls show a dead heat? It's mostly because of how Gallup determines 'likely voters': the poll shows only a three-point Bush lead among registered voters. And as the Democratic poll expert Ruy Teixeira points out (using data obtained by Steve Soto, a liberal blogger), Gallup's sample of supposedly likely voters contains a much smaller proportion of both minority and young voters than the actual proportions of these voters in the 2000 election.
A broad view of the polls, then, suggests that Mr. Bush is in trouble. But he is likely to benefit from a distorted vote count.
Florida is the prime, but not the only, example. Recent Florida polls suggest a tight race, which could be tipped by a failure to count all the votes. And votes for Mr. Kerry will be systematically undercounted.
Last week I described Greg Palast's work on the 2000 election, reported recently in Harper's, which conclusively shows that Florida was thrown to Mr. Bush by a combination of factors that disenfranchised black voters. These included a defective felon list, which wrongly struck thousands of people from the voter rolls, and defective voting machines, which disproportionately failed to record votes in poor, black districts.
One might have expected Florida's government to fix these problems during the intervening four years. But most of those wrongly denied voting rights in 2000 still haven't had those rights restored - and the replacement of punch-card machines has created new problems.
After the 2000 debacle, a task force appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush recommended that the state adopt a robust voting technology that would greatly reduce the number of spoiled ballots and provide a paper trail for recounts: paper ballots read by optical scanners that alert voters to problems. This system is in use in some affluent, mainly white Florida counties.
But Governor Bush ignored this recommendation, just as he ignored state officials who urged him to 'pull the plug' on a new felon list - which was quickly discredited once a judge forced the state to make it public - just days before he ordered the list put into effect. Instead, much of the state will vote using touch-screen machines that are unreliable and subject to hacking, and leave no paper trail. Mr. Palast estimates that this will disenfranchise 27,000 voters - disproportionately poor and black.
A lot can change in 11 days, and Mr. Bush may yet win convincingly. But we must not repeat the mistake of 2000 by refusing to acknowledge the possibility that a narrow Bush win, especially if it depends on Florida, rests on the systematic disenfranchisement of minority voters. And the media must not treat such a suspect win as a validation of skewed reporting that has consistently overstated Mr. Bush's popular support.
"
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: October 22, 2004
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Columnist Page: Paul Krugman
Forum: Discuss This Column
E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com
TIMES NEWS TRACKER
Topics
Alerts
Presidential Elections (US)
Election Results
Electoral College
Bush, George W
If the election were held today and the votes were counted fairly, Senator John Kerry would probably win. But the votes won't be counted fairly, and the disenfranchisement of minority voters may determine the outcome.
Recent national poll results range from a three-percentage-point Kerry lead in the A.P.-Ipsos poll released yesterday to an eight-point Bush lead in the Gallup poll. But if you line up the polls released this week from the most to the least favorable to President Bush, the polls in the middle show a tie at about 47 percent.
This is bad news for Mr. Bush because undecided voters usually break against the incumbent - not always, but we're talking about probabilities. Those middle-of-the-road polls also show Mr. Bush with job approval around 47 percent, putting him very much in the danger zone.
Electoral College projections based on state polls also show a dead heat. Projections assuming that undecided voters will break for the challenger in typical proportions give Mr. Kerry more than 300 electoral votes.
But if you get your political news from cable TV, you probably have a very different sense of where things stand. CNN, which co-sponsored that Gallup poll, rarely informs its viewers that other polls tell a very different story. The same is true of Fox News, which has its own very Bush-friendly poll. As a result, there is a widespread public impression that Mr. Bush holds a commanding lead.
By the way, why does the Gallup poll, which is influential because of its illustrious history, report a large Bush lead when many other polls show a dead heat? It's mostly because of how Gallup determines 'likely voters': the poll shows only a three-point Bush lead among registered voters. And as the Democratic poll expert Ruy Teixeira points out (using data obtained by Steve Soto, a liberal blogger), Gallup's sample of supposedly likely voters contains a much smaller proportion of both minority and young voters than the actual proportions of these voters in the 2000 election.
A broad view of the polls, then, suggests that Mr. Bush is in trouble. But he is likely to benefit from a distorted vote count.
Florida is the prime, but not the only, example. Recent Florida polls suggest a tight race, which could be tipped by a failure to count all the votes. And votes for Mr. Kerry will be systematically undercounted.
Last week I described Greg Palast's work on the 2000 election, reported recently in Harper's, which conclusively shows that Florida was thrown to Mr. Bush by a combination of factors that disenfranchised black voters. These included a defective felon list, which wrongly struck thousands of people from the voter rolls, and defective voting machines, which disproportionately failed to record votes in poor, black districts.
One might have expected Florida's government to fix these problems during the intervening four years. But most of those wrongly denied voting rights in 2000 still haven't had those rights restored - and the replacement of punch-card machines has created new problems.
After the 2000 debacle, a task force appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush recommended that the state adopt a robust voting technology that would greatly reduce the number of spoiled ballots and provide a paper trail for recounts: paper ballots read by optical scanners that alert voters to problems. This system is in use in some affluent, mainly white Florida counties.
But Governor Bush ignored this recommendation, just as he ignored state officials who urged him to 'pull the plug' on a new felon list - which was quickly discredited once a judge forced the state to make it public - just days before he ordered the list put into effect. Instead, much of the state will vote using touch-screen machines that are unreliable and subject to hacking, and leave no paper trail. Mr. Palast estimates that this will disenfranchise 27,000 voters - disproportionately poor and black.
A lot can change in 11 days, and Mr. Bush may yet win convincingly. But we must not repeat the mistake of 2000 by refusing to acknowledge the possibility that a narrow Bush win, especially if it depends on Florida, rests on the systematic disenfranchisement of minority voters. And the media must not treat such a suspect win as a validation of skewed reporting that has consistently overstated Mr. Bush's popular support.
"
Thursday, October 21, 2004
Palestinian children are not terrorists
Palestinian children are not terrorists: "Palestinian children are not terrorists
By MARIANNE ALBINA
GUEST COLUMNIST
Terrorist is the label all too frequently attached to Palestinian children. Today, many Palestinian youngsters feel misjudged by a world choosing to condemn them rather than know them.
These children are confronted with a hard struggle: to find ways to clear their name and reputation in the media. They want others to realize their only fault was to be born under an occupation that stripped away their childhood.
The life of Palestinian children is far from normal. Their daily trips to school take hours instead of minutes. According to The Washington Post, there are 659 checkpoints, roadblocks, trenches and earthen walls in the West Bank. In recent days, Israeli settlers have twice attacked the Christian Peacemaker Team as they accompanied Palestinian children to their school. Those who do reach their schools are disoriented and tired, ill prepared to absorb anything on the syllabus that day.
Palestinian children quickly realize their parents cannot protect them. They think it's normal to witness the death of friends, Israeli gunmen firing into certain schools and the razing of homes. This is disastrous for us and not without consequence for Israel.
Recently, I was unable to give a guarantee to a child that Israeli soldiers would not harm him. In such an uncertain environment, children become helpless, aggressive, afraid, extremely disobedient or compliant, depressed and fatigued. The Gaza Community Mental Health Program has noted children are plagued by serious psychological ills caused by the stresses of military occupation.
Many Palestinian organizations are aware of what youngsters are going through and work to promote their well-being. These groups help Palestinian children channel their anger and positively serve their nation.
Today, due to the efforts of organizations such as the Palestinian Youth Association for Leadership and Rights Activation, some of these children resist the occupation by utilizing their creativity, ambition and enthusiasm. They invest significant energy in the search for meaningful and non-violent ways of contributing to freedom. Some help the victims of the occupation; others prefer to write about the current situation and help spread awareness.
While Palestinian children have chosen different paths in resisting the occupation, they are all trying their best to revive the nation's dying hope of a dignified life. Yet, as the occupation strikes over and over again, children lose confidence that justice is possible.
Contrary to the belief of many, young Palestinians are able to do much more than fling stones in desperation at tanks. If we help, children realize the importance of never giving up, no matter how trying their circumstances. It is not easy. And the world lets them down by voicing principles that are not enforced in the occupied territories.
I urge you not to misjudge our young heroes who are trying to secure a normal life. The courage of the children of Birmingham, Ala., half a century ago is not unknown to our own children. What is missing is the needed media coverage and American empathy as day in and day out another Palestinian child is killed or injured.
We should protect the lives of Palestinian and Israeli children. At this writing, more than 550 Palestinian children and 100 Israeli children have been killed in the past four years. I am convinced by my short visit here that Americans are fair-minded and care for all children.
The U.S. government's backing for almost all of Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's actions, however, comes at the expense of justice for Palestinians and safety for Israelis and for Palestinians. Children need the help of the American people rather than the one-sided rhetoric of your presidential and vice presidential candidates.
Marianne Albina, a Palestinian activist, is on a national speaking tour with Partners for Peace. She will speak at 7 p.m. Monday at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center. Call the World Affairs Council at 206-441-5910 for more information.
"
By MARIANNE ALBINA
GUEST COLUMNIST
Terrorist is the label all too frequently attached to Palestinian children. Today, many Palestinian youngsters feel misjudged by a world choosing to condemn them rather than know them.
These children are confronted with a hard struggle: to find ways to clear their name and reputation in the media. They want others to realize their only fault was to be born under an occupation that stripped away their childhood.
The life of Palestinian children is far from normal. Their daily trips to school take hours instead of minutes. According to The Washington Post, there are 659 checkpoints, roadblocks, trenches and earthen walls in the West Bank. In recent days, Israeli settlers have twice attacked the Christian Peacemaker Team as they accompanied Palestinian children to their school. Those who do reach their schools are disoriented and tired, ill prepared to absorb anything on the syllabus that day.
Palestinian children quickly realize their parents cannot protect them. They think it's normal to witness the death of friends, Israeli gunmen firing into certain schools and the razing of homes. This is disastrous for us and not without consequence for Israel.
Recently, I was unable to give a guarantee to a child that Israeli soldiers would not harm him. In such an uncertain environment, children become helpless, aggressive, afraid, extremely disobedient or compliant, depressed and fatigued. The Gaza Community Mental Health Program has noted children are plagued by serious psychological ills caused by the stresses of military occupation.
Many Palestinian organizations are aware of what youngsters are going through and work to promote their well-being. These groups help Palestinian children channel their anger and positively serve their nation.
Today, due to the efforts of organizations such as the Palestinian Youth Association for Leadership and Rights Activation, some of these children resist the occupation by utilizing their creativity, ambition and enthusiasm. They invest significant energy in the search for meaningful and non-violent ways of contributing to freedom. Some help the victims of the occupation; others prefer to write about the current situation and help spread awareness.
While Palestinian children have chosen different paths in resisting the occupation, they are all trying their best to revive the nation's dying hope of a dignified life. Yet, as the occupation strikes over and over again, children lose confidence that justice is possible.
Contrary to the belief of many, young Palestinians are able to do much more than fling stones in desperation at tanks. If we help, children realize the importance of never giving up, no matter how trying their circumstances. It is not easy. And the world lets them down by voicing principles that are not enforced in the occupied territories.
I urge you not to misjudge our young heroes who are trying to secure a normal life. The courage of the children of Birmingham, Ala., half a century ago is not unknown to our own children. What is missing is the needed media coverage and American empathy as day in and day out another Palestinian child is killed or injured.
We should protect the lives of Palestinian and Israeli children. At this writing, more than 550 Palestinian children and 100 Israeli children have been killed in the past four years. I am convinced by my short visit here that Americans are fair-minded and care for all children.
The U.S. government's backing for almost all of Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's actions, however, comes at the expense of justice for Palestinians and safety for Israelis and for Palestinians. Children need the help of the American people rather than the one-sided rhetoric of your presidential and vice presidential candidates.
Marianne Albina, a Palestinian activist, is on a national speaking tour with Partners for Peace. She will speak at 7 p.m. Monday at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center. Call the World Affairs Council at 206-441-5910 for more information.
"
Wednesday, October 20, 2004
Aljazeera.Net - US to use federal pension to fight debt
Aljazeera.Net - US to use federal pension to fight debt: "US to use federal pension to fight debt
Friday 15 October 2004, 1:21 Makka Time, 22:21 GMT
The pension funds will keep the government running
Related:
Dollar trades near one-week low
US Reserve raises interest rate
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US President George Bush's administration has weathered a pre-election mauling by announcing emergency measures to skirt a $7.38-trillion debt limit.
Treasury Secretary John Snow said he would use pension money to keep the government running.
In a letter to US Senate majority leader Bill Frist on Thursday, Snow said he was immediately suspending payments to a federal employees' retirement scheme, the Government Securities Investment Fund (G-Fund).
The missing money would be repaid in full later, with no net effect on the fund or retirees, he promised.
The treasury secretary said he was forced to take the emergency accounting step because congress had not acted on his 2 August request for the government's legal debt limit to be raised.
Any move by congress to raise the debt limit could be politically embarrassing.
Reaction
Bush, Kerry are in a statistical tie
before the 2 November elections
Democrats pounced on the news as evidence of fiscal mismanagement by the administration, less than three weeks before Bush faces Democratic challenger Senator John Kerry in the 2 November presidential election.
'George Bush continues to make history for all the wrong reasons: He's the first president to go without creating a new job since the Great Depression and now he's run up more debt in [a] shorter period of time than all the presidents combined in the 200 years from Washington through Reagan,' said Kerry campaign spokesman Phil Singer.
'On top of that, this is the third time he's broken his promise not to raise the debt ceiling. His fiscal mismanagement is taking its toll on America and it's time for a fresh start,' he said in a statement.
Failure
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi described Snow's manoeuvre as 'a shameful admission' that the administration's economic policies had failed the American people.
'His [Bush's] fiscal mismanagement is taking its toll on America and it's time for a fresh start'
Phil Singer,
Kerry campaign spokesman
The overall US debt - the total accumulated financial liabilities of the country - now amounted to $7.38 trillion, she said.
'The Republican leadership knew that the debt limit would be reached this month but did not want an embarrassing vote on raising the debt ceiling until after next month's election so Republicans are now resorting to extraordinary accounting measures to avoid that vote.'
In the year before Bush came to office, his predecessor Bill Clinton produced a $236-billion annual budget surplus.
In fiscal 2004, ended 30 September, Bush's team is estimated to have incurred a record annual budget deficit of $415 billion, according to the bipartisan congressional budget office.
The official 2004 budget figures, showing the gap between annual government spending and income, are due this week."
Friday 15 October 2004, 1:21 Makka Time, 22:21 GMT
The pension funds will keep the government running
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US President George Bush's administration has weathered a pre-election mauling by announcing emergency measures to skirt a $7.38-trillion debt limit.
Treasury Secretary John Snow said he would use pension money to keep the government running.
In a letter to US Senate majority leader Bill Frist on Thursday, Snow said he was immediately suspending payments to a federal employees' retirement scheme, the Government Securities Investment Fund (G-Fund).
The missing money would be repaid in full later, with no net effect on the fund or retirees, he promised.
The treasury secretary said he was forced to take the emergency accounting step because congress had not acted on his 2 August request for the government's legal debt limit to be raised.
Any move by congress to raise the debt limit could be politically embarrassing.
Reaction
Bush, Kerry are in a statistical tie
before the 2 November elections
Democrats pounced on the news as evidence of fiscal mismanagement by the administration, less than three weeks before Bush faces Democratic challenger Senator John Kerry in the 2 November presidential election.
'George Bush continues to make history for all the wrong reasons: He's the first president to go without creating a new job since the Great Depression and now he's run up more debt in [a] shorter period of time than all the presidents combined in the 200 years from Washington through Reagan,' said Kerry campaign spokesman Phil Singer.
'On top of that, this is the third time he's broken his promise not to raise the debt ceiling. His fiscal mismanagement is taking its toll on America and it's time for a fresh start,' he said in a statement.
Failure
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi described Snow's manoeuvre as 'a shameful admission' that the administration's economic policies had failed the American people.
'His [Bush's] fiscal mismanagement is taking its toll on America and it's time for a fresh start'
Phil Singer,
Kerry campaign spokesman
The overall US debt - the total accumulated financial liabilities of the country - now amounted to $7.38 trillion, she said.
'The Republican leadership knew that the debt limit would be reached this month but did not want an embarrassing vote on raising the debt ceiling until after next month's election so Republicans are now resorting to extraordinary accounting measures to avoid that vote.'
In the year before Bush came to office, his predecessor Bill Clinton produced a $236-billion annual budget surplus.
In fiscal 2004, ended 30 September, Bush's team is estimated to have incurred a record annual budget deficit of $415 billion, according to the bipartisan congressional budget office.
The official 2004 budget figures, showing the gap between annual government spending and income, are due this week."
Air America Radio | America's Progressive Talk Radio Network
Air America Radio | America's Progressive Talk Radio Network: "Nightline Demolishes Anti-Kerry Swift Boat Story
kerry_navy
ABC News Nightline went to Vietnam and interviewed villagers who witnessed the firefight in February 1969 that led to John Kerry being awarded a Silver Star. The incident is a center piece of the allegations made by the so-called 'Swift Boat Veterans for Truth', whose leader John O'Neill has claimed that there was no firefight and that Kerry shot dead a fleeing teenager. Nightline's detailed interviews with the villagers, including former Viet Cong fighters who took part in the incident, verified Kerry's account of events. When confronted by Nightline's Ted Koppel, a clearly rattled O'Neill refused to address the content of the report. Read more here.
Bushwomen The W Effect
"
kerry_navy
ABC News Nightline went to Vietnam and interviewed villagers who witnessed the firefight in February 1969 that led to John Kerry being awarded a Silver Star. The incident is a center piece of the allegations made by the so-called 'Swift Boat Veterans for Truth', whose leader John O'Neill has claimed that there was no firefight and that Kerry shot dead a fleeing teenager. Nightline's detailed interviews with the villagers, including former Viet Cong fighters who took part in the incident, verified Kerry's account of events. When confronted by Nightline's Ted Koppel, a clearly rattled O'Neill refused to address the content of the report. Read more here.
Bushwomen The W Effect
"
BostonHerald.com - Election 2004 Coverage: Gore warns of grab by Bush
BostonHerald.com - Election 2004 Coverage: Gore warns of grab by Bush: "Gore warns of grab by Bush
By Noelle Straub
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
WASHINGTON -Former Vice President Al Gore, who lost the bitterly contested 2000 election, is warning of a repeat of the recount nightmare in Florida.
``The widespread efforts by (President) Bush's political allies to suppress voting have reached epidemic proportions,'' he charged yesterday. ``Some of the scandals of Florida four years ago are now being repeated in broad daylight even as we meet here today.''
He said the Bush team used an Enron jet to ferry ``their rent-a-mob to Florida in 2000 to permanently halt the counting of legally cast ballots.''
In a stinging indictment of his former rival, Gore accused Bush of forbidding dissent, disdaining facts and ignoring his mistakes in a ``recklessness that risks the safety and security of the American people.''
``It is love of power for its own sake that is the original sin of this presidency,'' Gore said in a speech at Georgetown University sponsored by the liberal group MoveOn.org.
But Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said, ``Al Gore seems intent on shattering whatever minuscule credibility he has left with baseless, mean-spirited personal attacks and conspiracy theories.''
"
By Noelle Straub
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
WASHINGTON -Former Vice President Al Gore, who lost the bitterly contested 2000 election, is warning of a repeat of the recount nightmare in Florida.
``The widespread efforts by (President) Bush's political allies to suppress voting have reached epidemic proportions,'' he charged yesterday. ``Some of the scandals of Florida four years ago are now being repeated in broad daylight even as we meet here today.''
He said the Bush team used an Enron jet to ferry ``their rent-a-mob to Florida in 2000 to permanently halt the counting of legally cast ballots.''
In a stinging indictment of his former rival, Gore accused Bush of forbidding dissent, disdaining facts and ignoring his mistakes in a ``recklessness that risks the safety and security of the American people.''
``It is love of power for its own sake that is the original sin of this presidency,'' Gore said in a speech at Georgetown University sponsored by the liberal group MoveOn.org.
But Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt said, ``Al Gore seems intent on shattering whatever minuscule credibility he has left with baseless, mean-spirited personal attacks and conspiracy theories.''
"
Air America Radio | America's Progressive Talk Radio Network
Air America Radio | America's Progressive Talk Radio Network
Suppressed: CIA 9/11 Report That Holds Bush Administration Accountable
BUSH_DEFENSE
The Los Angeles Times is reporting that a top level CIA report showing the Bush administration blind to the threat of Al Qaeda before 9/11 has been suppressed by the Bush administration
The Bush administration is suppressing a CIA report on 9/11 until after the election, and this one names names. Although the report by the inspector general's office of the CIA was completed in June, it has not been made available to the congressional intelligence committees that mandated the study almost two years ago. 'It is infuriating that a report which shows that high-level people were not doing their jobs in a satisfactory manner before 9/11 is being suppressed,' an intelligence official who has read the report told me, adding that "the report is potentially very embarrassing for the administration, because it makes it look like they weren't interested in terrorism before 9/11, or in holding people in the government responsible afterward.
Suppressed: CIA 9/11 Report That Holds Bush Administration Accountable
BUSH_DEFENSE
The Los Angeles Times is reporting that a top level CIA report showing the Bush administration blind to the threat of Al Qaeda before 9/11 has been suppressed by the Bush administration
The Bush administration is suppressing a CIA report on 9/11 until after the election, and this one names names. Although the report by the inspector general's office of the CIA was completed in June, it has not been made available to the congressional intelligence committees that mandated the study almost two years ago. 'It is infuriating that a report which shows that high-level people were not doing their jobs in a satisfactory manner before 9/11 is being suppressed,' an intelligence official who has read the report told me, adding that "the report is potentially very embarrassing for the administration, because it makes it look like they weren't interested in terrorism before 9/11, or in holding people in the government responsible afterward.
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Job Market - s.f. bayarea forums - craigslist
Job Market - s.f. bayarea forums - craigslist
Tech sector job cuts up < SayHuh > 10/19 13:43:21
Nuff said...
Copyright 2004 U.P.I.
United Press International
October 18, 2004 Monday
Report: tech sector job cuts soaring
CHICAGO, Oct. 18 (UPI)
Announced job cuts in the U.S. tech sector soared 60 percent in the third quarter to 54,701, the highest figure since last year's fourth quarter cuts of 82,328.
The leading factor behind the increase was a dramatic 127 percent surge in the number of job cuts among computer firms, Chicago outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas said Monday.
Computer companies announced 30,624 computer job cuts in the third quarter, 56 percent of the 54,701 cuts in the technology sector, which includes computer, electronics, telecommunications and e-commerce.
Third-quarter technology cuts were up 60 percent from 34,213 job cuts in the previous quarter and were 14 percent higher than the 47,998 job cuts announced by the tech sector in the third quarter a year ago.
So far this year, high-tech firms have announced 118,427 job cuts, which account for 16 percent of the 724,320 announced job cuts in all industries through September 30. The percentage of cuts in high tech has increased since the second quarter when they represented 13.5 percent of all job cuts.
http://forums.craigslist.org/?ID=20285053
Tech sector job cuts up < SayHuh > 10/19 13:43:21
Nuff said...
Copyright 2004 U.P.I.
United Press International
October 18, 2004 Monday
Report: tech sector job cuts soaring
CHICAGO, Oct. 18 (UPI)
Announced job cuts in the U.S. tech sector soared 60 percent in the third quarter to 54,701, the highest figure since last year's fourth quarter cuts of 82,328.
The leading factor behind the increase was a dramatic 127 percent surge in the number of job cuts among computer firms, Chicago outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas said Monday.
Computer companies announced 30,624 computer job cuts in the third quarter, 56 percent of the 54,701 cuts in the technology sector, which includes computer, electronics, telecommunications and e-commerce.
Third-quarter technology cuts were up 60 percent from 34,213 job cuts in the previous quarter and were 14 percent higher than the 47,998 job cuts announced by the tech sector in the third quarter a year ago.
So far this year, high-tech firms have announced 118,427 job cuts, which account for 16 percent of the 724,320 announced job cuts in all industries through September 30. The percentage of cuts in high tech has increased since the second quarter when they represented 13.5 percent of all job cuts.
http://forums.craigslist.org/?ID=20285053
The Online Beat
The Online Beat
Orwellian Twist on the Campaign
10/18/2004 @ 11:42am
E-mail this Post
"Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind." -- George Orwell
George Orwell shaped our imagination of a future in which a propagandistic media produced a steady stream of up-is-down, right-is-wrong, war-is-peace lies in order to impose the will of a governing elite upon the subject citizenry.
Orwell reckoned this ultimate diminution of democracy would come in the year 1984. Imperfect genius that he was, the author missed the mark by twenty years. But, after watching the controversy regarding the Sinclair Broadcast Group's scheme to air the truth-impaired mockumentary Stolen Honor in an attempt to stall the momentum John Kerry's campaign gained from the presidential debates, it becomes evident that the future Orwell imagined is unfolding.
Forget about the anti-Kerry fantasy film Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal. That comic attempt at a documentary is nothing more than a 42- minute "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth"-style television commercial produced by a former longtime employee of Tom Ridge, the secretary of George W. Bush's Department of Homeland Security--an agency that pays daily homage to Orwell with everything from its name to those color-coded terrorism warnings.
But don't forget about the Sinclair Broadcast Group. If you want to see the Orwellian media future that the Bush administration envisions, pay close attention to Sinclair. This cobbled-together collection of television "properties" is not a network but a media holding company that owns 62 of the most miserable excuses for broadcast outlets in the country. "Quality" has never been a watchword for Sinclair, a firm that pioneered the one-size-fits-all approach to mass media. When Sinclair buys a station in some long-suffering community, it fires the local staffers and begins feeding the locals a steady diet of disembodied and disengaged "content" spewed out of the company's media mill near Baltimore.
Sinclair has even experimented with the so-called "distance-casting" of weather reports. Sinclair's stormbots read local forecasts for communities around the country while standing in front of ever-changing weather maps at the firm's suburban Baltimore bunker.
But the main product of Sinclair's media mill is the slurry of right-wing dogma drooled from the lips of corporate vice president for corporate relations Mark Hyman. Ideologically in-synch with the bosses at Sinclair--who have given over $170,000 to Republican causes over the past decade, including $59,000 so far in this year's campaign--Hyman force-feeds editorials to all 62 company- owned stations in order to shore up the conservative cause to the 25 percent of all American households reached by Sinclair outlets.
Hyman makes Sean Hannity sound like a sensible moderate. The Sinclair mouthpiece specializes in scorched-earth attacks on anyone who sees through the distortions of the Bush administration. He refers to members of Congress who criticize the war in Iraq as "unpatriotic politicians who hate our military." Whenever mainstream media outlets practice anything akin to journalism, Hyman condemns the offending outlets as the "hate America crowd."
During the current campaign, Hyman has been a one-man propaganda machine, spinning out anti-Kerry commentaries and repeating even the most discredited lies about Kerry's Vietnam record on stations that broadcast in at least eleven of this year's seventeen battleground states.
Over the past month, Hyman has produced eleven broadcast editorials that explicitly attack Kerry, one that explicitly attacked Teresa Heinz Kerry, two that explicitly attacked Democratic candidates for Congress and two that generically attacked Democratic candidates for Congress. If Hyman's goal is to make Fox look "fair and balanced" by comparison with Sinclair, he's succeeding. And, in recent days, he has spun into overdrive.
When the controversy about Sinclair's decision to scrap regular programming in order to air Stolen Honor heated up, Hyman went into Orwellian overdrive. He accused the nation's broadcast and cable networks-- -including, presumably, Rupert Murdoch's Republicans Uber Alles Fox network--of collaborating to "suppress" anti-Kerry news. Because they have not aired Stolen Honor or given time to the embittered Kerry critics featured in the production, Hyman says: "They are acting like Holocaust deniers." When Democrats suggested that Sinclair's decision to air the anti-Kerry documentary so close to the election should be seen as an in-kind contribution to Bush, Hyman replied. "if you use that logic and reasoning, that means every car bomb in Iraq would be considered an in-kind contribution to John Kerry."
Orwell would have had to stretch even his creative powers to come up with a propagandist who compares the decisions of news departments not to cover discredited claims with the denial of Nazi genocide.
Hyman is, of course, wrong. And, despite the delusional content of his statements, it is difficult to imagine that Hyman does not know he is wrong. But, of course, the Orwellian propagandist does not blink in the face of reality. He just lies louder.
To quote Orwell, "This kind of thing is not a good symptom."
Hyman's willingness to ramp up the distortions is a deliberate tactic. He seeks to confuse the issue by suggesting that fantastical claims about decades-old events are somehow more newsworthy than the developments of the day.
Make no mistake: Airing a "documentary" produced by campaigners who seek to defeat a candidate is fundamentally different from reporting the news out of Iraq. But issues of truth and falsehood have never been a significant concern for the "Dear Mr. Fantasy" of the right. Hyman does not bother to abide even by the exceptionally low standards of accuracy that prevail among conservative commentators. Rather, he peddles partisan talking points that are written with an eye toward aiding Republicans and afflicting Democrats--and he guides a network that does the same, by refusing to air even non- controversial Democratic National Committee commercials, and be censoring an ABC-TV Nightline broadcast that named Americans killed in Iraq.
Not that long ago, Hyman in particular and Sinclair in general would have been fairly harmless. Corporations were only allowed to own only a handful television stations nationally. But rule changes pushed through by the Federal Communications Commission and the Congress--in the form of the Telecommunications Act of 1996--have eased the limitations dramatically.
Thus, we have one-size-fits-all companies such as Sinclair, which do the bidding of the Washington elites in order to assure that they will continue to benefit from rule changes that favor consolidation of media ownership and homogenization of television content.
That combination is where the Orwell equation is unlocked.
No, Sinclair does not dominate all US airwaves. But its model could well come to be dominant. Sinclair has been in the forefront of remaking television in an era of loosened ownership restrictions and slackening standards.
Without serious reforms--which would restore limits on the number of stations any one company can own could own, set standards for local content and, perhaps, even restore the Fairness Doctrine--the Sinclair model could well become the norm. No firm has lobbied harder than Sinclair for the further loosening of media ownership rules and regulations. Given a second term, Bush and his aides would undoubtedly be even more supportive of Sinclair's lobbying agenda and of the big media's campaign to reshape the communications landscape. Indeed, Bush's reelection would do much to assure that Orwell's worst fears of the 20th century will become the reality of the 21st.
"If Sinclair is allowed to go forward, it will set a precedent that endangers our very democracy," says US Rep. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, one of the leading congressional advocates for media reform. "There can be little doubt that other broadcasters will follow suit and American television could become little more than the political mouthpiece for its corporate owners. If that happens, the sad truth is that American television could end up looking more like that of authoritarian countries like the former Soviet Union and China, which are widely despised for broadcasting the 'party line,' rather than (serving as) a forum for the free exchange of diverse political views that is so necessary to a vibrant democratic society."
There is an alternative to this dark scenario. Sinclair can and should be challenged--economically and politically. Various groups are organizing on both fronts. At the Stop Sinclair website, there are online petitions and details about how to contact Sinclair's local stations, advertisers and shareholders. David Brock's Media Matters has great background on the political agenda of the makers of Stolen Honor and Sinclair. And at SinclairWatch, there are details about when the licenses of Sinclair stations around the country are up for renewal and information on how to file complaints that can form the basis for challenges to those renewals.
Ultimately, however, the protests, boycotts and challenges to Sinclair's licenses are necessary steps in the short term. But the only way to insure against an Orwellian future is to assure that, if Bush is defeated, one of the first priorities of a Kerry administration is the restoration of the rules and regulations that limit the growth of media monopolies.
Step one is to change the make-up of the Federal Communications Commission that has not merely allowed but encouraged those abuses. Kerry could start by replacing FCC chair Michael Powell, the best friend big media has ever had in so critical a regulatory role, with the one commissioner who has consistently defended the public interest, Michael Copps.
Copps understands the crisis. Referring to the Orwellian twist Sinclair is attempting to put on the 2004 presidential election, Copps said, "This is an abuse of the public trust. And it is proof positive of media consolidation run amok when one owner can use the public airwaves to blanket the country with its political ideology--whether liberal or conservative. Some will undoubtedly question if this is appropriate stewardship of the public airwaves. This is the same corporation that refused to air Nightline's reading of our war dead in Iraq. It is the same corporation that short-shrifts local communities and local jobs by distance-casting news and weather from hundreds of miles away. It is a sad fact that the explicit public interest protections we once had to ensure balance continue to be weakened by the Federal Communications Commission while it allows media conglomerates to get even bigger. Sinclair, and the FCC, are taking us down a dangerous road."
If George Orwell were around, he would tell us that it is the road to 1984. "The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world," he would warn, adding that, if we do not act, "Lies will pass into history."
*****************************************************************
John Nichols' book on Cheney, Dick: The Man Who Is President, has just been released by The New Press. Former White House counsel John Dean, the author of Worse Than Watergate, says, "This page-turner closes the case: Cheney is our de facto president." Arianna Huffington, the author of Fanatics and Fools, calls Dick, "The first full portrait of The Most Powerful Number Two in History, a scary and appalling picture. Cheney is revealed as the poster child for crony capitalism (think Halliburton's no bid, cost-plus Iraq contracts) and crony democracy (think Scalia and duck-hunting)."
Dick: The Man Who Is President is available from independent bookstores nationwide and by clicking here .
Orwellian Twist on the Campaign
10/18/2004 @ 11:42am
E-mail this Post
"Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind." -- George Orwell
George Orwell shaped our imagination of a future in which a propagandistic media produced a steady stream of up-is-down, right-is-wrong, war-is-peace lies in order to impose the will of a governing elite upon the subject citizenry.
Orwell reckoned this ultimate diminution of democracy would come in the year 1984. Imperfect genius that he was, the author missed the mark by twenty years. But, after watching the controversy regarding the Sinclair Broadcast Group's scheme to air the truth-impaired mockumentary Stolen Honor in an attempt to stall the momentum John Kerry's campaign gained from the presidential debates, it becomes evident that the future Orwell imagined is unfolding.
Forget about the anti-Kerry fantasy film Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal. That comic attempt at a documentary is nothing more than a 42- minute "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth"-style television commercial produced by a former longtime employee of Tom Ridge, the secretary of George W. Bush's Department of Homeland Security--an agency that pays daily homage to Orwell with everything from its name to those color-coded terrorism warnings.
But don't forget about the Sinclair Broadcast Group. If you want to see the Orwellian media future that the Bush administration envisions, pay close attention to Sinclair. This cobbled-together collection of television "properties" is not a network but a media holding company that owns 62 of the most miserable excuses for broadcast outlets in the country. "Quality" has never been a watchword for Sinclair, a firm that pioneered the one-size-fits-all approach to mass media. When Sinclair buys a station in some long-suffering community, it fires the local staffers and begins feeding the locals a steady diet of disembodied and disengaged "content" spewed out of the company's media mill near Baltimore.
Sinclair has even experimented with the so-called "distance-casting" of weather reports. Sinclair's stormbots read local forecasts for communities around the country while standing in front of ever-changing weather maps at the firm's suburban Baltimore bunker.
But the main product of Sinclair's media mill is the slurry of right-wing dogma drooled from the lips of corporate vice president for corporate relations Mark Hyman. Ideologically in-synch with the bosses at Sinclair--who have given over $170,000 to Republican causes over the past decade, including $59,000 so far in this year's campaign--Hyman force-feeds editorials to all 62 company- owned stations in order to shore up the conservative cause to the 25 percent of all American households reached by Sinclair outlets.
Hyman makes Sean Hannity sound like a sensible moderate. The Sinclair mouthpiece specializes in scorched-earth attacks on anyone who sees through the distortions of the Bush administration. He refers to members of Congress who criticize the war in Iraq as "unpatriotic politicians who hate our military." Whenever mainstream media outlets practice anything akin to journalism, Hyman condemns the offending outlets as the "hate America crowd."
During the current campaign, Hyman has been a one-man propaganda machine, spinning out anti-Kerry commentaries and repeating even the most discredited lies about Kerry's Vietnam record on stations that broadcast in at least eleven of this year's seventeen battleground states.
Over the past month, Hyman has produced eleven broadcast editorials that explicitly attack Kerry, one that explicitly attacked Teresa Heinz Kerry, two that explicitly attacked Democratic candidates for Congress and two that generically attacked Democratic candidates for Congress. If Hyman's goal is to make Fox look "fair and balanced" by comparison with Sinclair, he's succeeding. And, in recent days, he has spun into overdrive.
When the controversy about Sinclair's decision to scrap regular programming in order to air Stolen Honor heated up, Hyman went into Orwellian overdrive. He accused the nation's broadcast and cable networks-- -including, presumably, Rupert Murdoch's Republicans Uber Alles Fox network--of collaborating to "suppress" anti-Kerry news. Because they have not aired Stolen Honor or given time to the embittered Kerry critics featured in the production, Hyman says: "They are acting like Holocaust deniers." When Democrats suggested that Sinclair's decision to air the anti-Kerry documentary so close to the election should be seen as an in-kind contribution to Bush, Hyman replied. "if you use that logic and reasoning, that means every car bomb in Iraq would be considered an in-kind contribution to John Kerry."
Orwell would have had to stretch even his creative powers to come up with a propagandist who compares the decisions of news departments not to cover discredited claims with the denial of Nazi genocide.
Hyman is, of course, wrong. And, despite the delusional content of his statements, it is difficult to imagine that Hyman does not know he is wrong. But, of course, the Orwellian propagandist does not blink in the face of reality. He just lies louder.
To quote Orwell, "This kind of thing is not a good symptom."
Hyman's willingness to ramp up the distortions is a deliberate tactic. He seeks to confuse the issue by suggesting that fantastical claims about decades-old events are somehow more newsworthy than the developments of the day.
Make no mistake: Airing a "documentary" produced by campaigners who seek to defeat a candidate is fundamentally different from reporting the news out of Iraq. But issues of truth and falsehood have never been a significant concern for the "Dear Mr. Fantasy" of the right. Hyman does not bother to abide even by the exceptionally low standards of accuracy that prevail among conservative commentators. Rather, he peddles partisan talking points that are written with an eye toward aiding Republicans and afflicting Democrats--and he guides a network that does the same, by refusing to air even non- controversial Democratic National Committee commercials, and be censoring an ABC-TV Nightline broadcast that named Americans killed in Iraq.
Not that long ago, Hyman in particular and Sinclair in general would have been fairly harmless. Corporations were only allowed to own only a handful television stations nationally. But rule changes pushed through by the Federal Communications Commission and the Congress--in the form of the Telecommunications Act of 1996--have eased the limitations dramatically.
Thus, we have one-size-fits-all companies such as Sinclair, which do the bidding of the Washington elites in order to assure that they will continue to benefit from rule changes that favor consolidation of media ownership and homogenization of television content.
That combination is where the Orwell equation is unlocked.
No, Sinclair does not dominate all US airwaves. But its model could well come to be dominant. Sinclair has been in the forefront of remaking television in an era of loosened ownership restrictions and slackening standards.
Without serious reforms--which would restore limits on the number of stations any one company can own could own, set standards for local content and, perhaps, even restore the Fairness Doctrine--the Sinclair model could well become the norm. No firm has lobbied harder than Sinclair for the further loosening of media ownership rules and regulations. Given a second term, Bush and his aides would undoubtedly be even more supportive of Sinclair's lobbying agenda and of the big media's campaign to reshape the communications landscape. Indeed, Bush's reelection would do much to assure that Orwell's worst fears of the 20th century will become the reality of the 21st.
"If Sinclair is allowed to go forward, it will set a precedent that endangers our very democracy," says US Rep. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, one of the leading congressional advocates for media reform. "There can be little doubt that other broadcasters will follow suit and American television could become little more than the political mouthpiece for its corporate owners. If that happens, the sad truth is that American television could end up looking more like that of authoritarian countries like the former Soviet Union and China, which are widely despised for broadcasting the 'party line,' rather than (serving as) a forum for the free exchange of diverse political views that is so necessary to a vibrant democratic society."
There is an alternative to this dark scenario. Sinclair can and should be challenged--economically and politically. Various groups are organizing on both fronts. At the Stop Sinclair website, there are online petitions and details about how to contact Sinclair's local stations, advertisers and shareholders. David Brock's Media Matters has great background on the political agenda of the makers of Stolen Honor and Sinclair. And at SinclairWatch, there are details about when the licenses of Sinclair stations around the country are up for renewal and information on how to file complaints that can form the basis for challenges to those renewals.
Ultimately, however, the protests, boycotts and challenges to Sinclair's licenses are necessary steps in the short term. But the only way to insure against an Orwellian future is to assure that, if Bush is defeated, one of the first priorities of a Kerry administration is the restoration of the rules and regulations that limit the growth of media monopolies.
Step one is to change the make-up of the Federal Communications Commission that has not merely allowed but encouraged those abuses. Kerry could start by replacing FCC chair Michael Powell, the best friend big media has ever had in so critical a regulatory role, with the one commissioner who has consistently defended the public interest, Michael Copps.
Copps understands the crisis. Referring to the Orwellian twist Sinclair is attempting to put on the 2004 presidential election, Copps said, "This is an abuse of the public trust. And it is proof positive of media consolidation run amok when one owner can use the public airwaves to blanket the country with its political ideology--whether liberal or conservative. Some will undoubtedly question if this is appropriate stewardship of the public airwaves. This is the same corporation that refused to air Nightline's reading of our war dead in Iraq. It is the same corporation that short-shrifts local communities and local jobs by distance-casting news and weather from hundreds of miles away. It is a sad fact that the explicit public interest protections we once had to ensure balance continue to be weakened by the Federal Communications Commission while it allows media conglomerates to get even bigger. Sinclair, and the FCC, are taking us down a dangerous road."
If George Orwell were around, he would tell us that it is the road to 1984. "The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world," he would warn, adding that, if we do not act, "Lies will pass into history."
*****************************************************************
John Nichols' book on Cheney, Dick: The Man Who Is President, has just been released by The New Press. Former White House counsel John Dean, the author of Worse Than Watergate, says, "This page-turner closes the case: Cheney is our de facto president." Arianna Huffington, the author of Fanatics and Fools, calls Dick, "The first full portrait of The Most Powerful Number Two in History, a scary and appalling picture. Cheney is revealed as the poster child for crony capitalism (think Halliburton's no bid, cost-plus Iraq contracts) and crony democracy (think Scalia and duck-hunting)."
Dick: The Man Who Is President is available from independent bookstores nationwide and by clicking here .
Monday, October 18, 2004
Sinclair documentary about Kerry
I am against Sinclair's showing of a "documentary" about Kerry's swift boat in Vietnan.
Sinclair owns about 68 TV stations mianly in the batlle-ground states which represents about 25% of the people who watches tv. This is not fair for Kerry's campain. This is the problem when one person owns a conglomerate. So all major networks advertise for Bush's gang.
Look at the major networks ownerships:
- CBS is owned by Viacom group
- ABC is owned by the Disney's group (including Saudi Arabia's who are Bushes' budies).
- NBC is owned by General Electric.
- FOX is ownwd by the Bill Murdoch.
Contact one of Sinclair's advertisers in your area
Unless they agree in showing the documentary : "Farenheit 911" from Michael Moore in an equal time.
Excite News
Excite News: "Job Cuts in Tech Sector Soar, Report Finds
Email this Story
Oct 18, 10:45 AM (ET)
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. technology sector suffered another round of widespread layoffs during the third quarter, with computer firms slashing jobs most aggressively, a report said on Monday.
'High-tech job cuts are on the way up as the end of the year approaches,' said John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas. 'Behind this trend is the fact that technology companies have virtually no pricing power,'
Job cuts in technology jumped 60 percent between July and September to 54,701, compared with 34,213 layoffs in the second quarter. Computer companies alone saw job cuts jump 127 percent, to 30,624.
Manufacturers in the sector are having trouble making money since they have been forced to lower prices in order to attract consumers, Challenger said. So they end up firing workers in order to maintain healthy profit margins.
Worse yet, the growing number of layoffs is not being countered by any move to hire, Challenger added.
"
Email this Story
Oct 18, 10:45 AM (ET)
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. technology sector suffered another round of widespread layoffs during the third quarter, with computer firms slashing jobs most aggressively, a report said on Monday.
'High-tech job cuts are on the way up as the end of the year approaches,' said John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas. 'Behind this trend is the fact that technology companies have virtually no pricing power,'
Job cuts in technology jumped 60 percent between July and September to 54,701, compared with 34,213 layoffs in the second quarter. Computer companies alone saw job cuts jump 127 percent, to 30,624.
Manufacturers in the sector are having trouble making money since they have been forced to lower prices in order to attract consumers, Challenger said. So they end up firing workers in order to maintain healthy profit margins.
Worse yet, the growing number of layoffs is not being countered by any move to hire, Challenger added.
"
The New York Times > Washington > Campaign 2004 > The Democrats: Campaigning Furiously, With Social Security in Tow
The New York Times > Washington > Campaign 2004 > The Democrats: Campaigning Furiously, With Social Security in Tow: "THE DEMOCRATS
Campaigning Furiously, With Social Security in Tow
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
Published: October 18, 2004
PEMBROKE PINES, Fla., Oct. 17 - Accusing President Bush of plotting a 'January surprise' to cut Social Security benefits, Senator John Kerry told voters here and in Ohio on Sunday that Mr. Bush's plans for privatizing the entitlement program could cost them as much as 45 percent of their monthly checks.
'That's up to $500 a month less for food, for clothing, for the occasional gift for a grandchild,' Mr. Kerry warned elderly and middle-aged worshipers at a black church in Columbus, Ohio, as he brought to the fore a major issue in the 2000 election that he had rarely touched on.
His comments on Social Security came as Mr. Kerry headed to Florida for a get-out-the-vote swing timed to Monday's start of early voting there. He and his running mate, Senator John Edwards, are crisscrossing the state, courting African-American and elderly voters in core Democratic areas like Broward and Palm Beach Counties, new voters on college campuses in Tallahassee and Gainesville and swing voters in up-for-grabs places like Tampa, Orlando and even the heavily Republican Fort Myers.
Kerry aides said local Democratic elected officials would bus their constituents to the polls beginning on Monday as if every day were Election Day. 'We've got 14 Election Days,' said Tom Shea, the campaign's Florida director.
Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards will return to the state next weekend, aides said, and at least one more visit to Florida is likely.
Mr. Kerry will court the elderly in Tampa in a major speech on Monday about health care, in which aides said he would assail Mr. Bush for ignoring the looming shortage of flu vaccines until it was too late to avert.
At a sunny afternoon rally here before thousands who chanted 'No more Bush,' he touched that theme, noting that Mr. Bush had visited Florida on Saturday. 'He was talking to a bunch of seniors,' Mr. Kerry said, 'and he was talking to them about prayer and flu shots. And that's appropriate, because you don't have a prayer of getting a flu shot.'
Mr. Bush, who like Vice President Dick Cheney did not campaign Sunday, is to give a speech on terrorism on Monday. With that in mind, Mr. Kerry's advisers said he would mention the flu-shot crisis in his health care speech to try to undercut the president's security credentials.
'If you can't get flu shots sent out to the American people,' Mr. Kerry said in the rally here, 'how are you going to protect them against bioterrorism?'
In taking on Mr. Bush over Social Security, Mr. Kerry cited a report in Sunday's New York Times Magazine that quoted Mr. Bush, in a private meeting with top Republican donors last month, describing his second-term agenda.
'I'm going to come out strong after my swearing in,' Mr. Bush told the so-called Regents, The Times Magazine reported, 'with fundamental tax reform, tort reform, privatizing of Social Security.' Mr. Bush added that re-election would give him two years, until the next midterm elections, to act: 'We have to move quickly, because after that I'll be quacking like a duck.'
In public, Mr. Bush frequently promotes a plan for letting younger workers invest a portion of their Social Security taxes in private retirement accounts. But those workers' taxes pay for today's retirees' benefits, and Mr. Bush has not said whether he would borrow or cut benefits to make up for the diversion.
In a campaign commercial released Sunday, as well as speaking from the pulpit of Mount Olivet Baptist Church in Columbus, Mr. Kerry said the Bush plan for retirement accounts would cut benefits for Social Security recipients by 30 percent to 45 percent.
'The president's privatization plan for Social Security is another way of saying to our seniors that the promise of security is going to be broken,' he said, calling it a 'disaster for America's middle class.'
'Even the president's own economic advisers say that this'll blow a $2 trillion hole in Social Security,' he added. 'And guess who is going to pay for it: you will.'
The commercial, meanwhile, announces ominously that 'the truth is coming out,' and concludes: 'The real Bush agenda? Cutting Social Security.'
In a conference call with reporters late Sunday, Bob Shrum, a top Kerry consultant, noted sharply that when he raised the quotation with Ken Mehlman, the Bush campaign manager, on the NBC program 'Meet the Press' in the morning, Mr. Mehlman did not dispute its accuracy.
"
Campaigning Furiously, With Social Security in Tow
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
Published: October 18, 2004
PEMBROKE PINES, Fla., Oct. 17 - Accusing President Bush of plotting a 'January surprise' to cut Social Security benefits, Senator John Kerry told voters here and in Ohio on Sunday that Mr. Bush's plans for privatizing the entitlement program could cost them as much as 45 percent of their monthly checks.
'That's up to $500 a month less for food, for clothing, for the occasional gift for a grandchild,' Mr. Kerry warned elderly and middle-aged worshipers at a black church in Columbus, Ohio, as he brought to the fore a major issue in the 2000 election that he had rarely touched on.
His comments on Social Security came as Mr. Kerry headed to Florida for a get-out-the-vote swing timed to Monday's start of early voting there. He and his running mate, Senator John Edwards, are crisscrossing the state, courting African-American and elderly voters in core Democratic areas like Broward and Palm Beach Counties, new voters on college campuses in Tallahassee and Gainesville and swing voters in up-for-grabs places like Tampa, Orlando and even the heavily Republican Fort Myers.
Kerry aides said local Democratic elected officials would bus their constituents to the polls beginning on Monday as if every day were Election Day. 'We've got 14 Election Days,' said Tom Shea, the campaign's Florida director.
Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards will return to the state next weekend, aides said, and at least one more visit to Florida is likely.
Mr. Kerry will court the elderly in Tampa in a major speech on Monday about health care, in which aides said he would assail Mr. Bush for ignoring the looming shortage of flu vaccines until it was too late to avert.
At a sunny afternoon rally here before thousands who chanted 'No more Bush,' he touched that theme, noting that Mr. Bush had visited Florida on Saturday. 'He was talking to a bunch of seniors,' Mr. Kerry said, 'and he was talking to them about prayer and flu shots. And that's appropriate, because you don't have a prayer of getting a flu shot.'
Mr. Bush, who like Vice President Dick Cheney did not campaign Sunday, is to give a speech on terrorism on Monday. With that in mind, Mr. Kerry's advisers said he would mention the flu-shot crisis in his health care speech to try to undercut the president's security credentials.
'If you can't get flu shots sent out to the American people,' Mr. Kerry said in the rally here, 'how are you going to protect them against bioterrorism?'
In taking on Mr. Bush over Social Security, Mr. Kerry cited a report in Sunday's New York Times Magazine that quoted Mr. Bush, in a private meeting with top Republican donors last month, describing his second-term agenda.
'I'm going to come out strong after my swearing in,' Mr. Bush told the so-called Regents, The Times Magazine reported, 'with fundamental tax reform, tort reform, privatizing of Social Security.' Mr. Bush added that re-election would give him two years, until the next midterm elections, to act: 'We have to move quickly, because after that I'll be quacking like a duck.'
In public, Mr. Bush frequently promotes a plan for letting younger workers invest a portion of their Social Security taxes in private retirement accounts. But those workers' taxes pay for today's retirees' benefits, and Mr. Bush has not said whether he would borrow or cut benefits to make up for the diversion.
In a campaign commercial released Sunday, as well as speaking from the pulpit of Mount Olivet Baptist Church in Columbus, Mr. Kerry said the Bush plan for retirement accounts would cut benefits for Social Security recipients by 30 percent to 45 percent.
'The president's privatization plan for Social Security is another way of saying to our seniors that the promise of security is going to be broken,' he said, calling it a 'disaster for America's middle class.'
'Even the president's own economic advisers say that this'll blow a $2 trillion hole in Social Security,' he added. 'And guess who is going to pay for it: you will.'
The commercial, meanwhile, announces ominously that 'the truth is coming out,' and concludes: 'The real Bush agenda? Cutting Social Security.'
In a conference call with reporters late Sunday, Bob Shrum, a top Kerry consultant, noted sharply that when he raised the quotation with Ken Mehlman, the Bush campaign manager, on the NBC program 'Meet the Press' in the morning, Mr. Mehlman did not dispute its accuracy.
"
The New York Times > Magazine > Without a Doubt
The New York Times > Magazine > Without a Doubt
Without a Doubt
By RON SUSKIND
Published: October 17, 2004
Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ''if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.'' The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.
''Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: ''This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them. . . .
''This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,'' Bartlett went on to say. ''He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.'' Bartlett paused, then said, ''But you can't run the world on faith.''
Forty democratic senators were gathered for a lunch in March just off the Senate floor. I was there as a guest speaker. Joe Biden was telling a story, a story about the president. ''I was in the Oval Office a few months after we swept into Baghdad,'' he began, ''and I was telling the president of my many concerns'' -- concerns about growing problems winning the peace, the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and problems securing the oil fields. Bush, Biden recalled, just looked at him, unflappably sure that the United States was on the right course and that all was well. '''Mr. President,' I finally said, 'How can you be so sure when you know you don't know the facts?'''
Biden said that Bush stood up and put his hand on the senator's shoulder. ''My instincts,'' he said. ''My instincts.''
Biden paused and shook his head, recalling it all as the room grew quiet. ''I said, 'Mr. President, your instincts aren't good enough!'''
The democrat Biden and the Republican Bartlett are trying to make sense of the same thing -- a president who has been an extraordinary blend of forcefulness and inscrutability, opacity and action.
But lately, words and deeds are beginning to connect.
The Delaware senator was, in fact, hearing what Bush's top deputies -- from cabinet members like Paul O'Neill, Christine Todd Whitman and Colin Powell to generals fighting in Iraq -- have been told for years when they requested explanations for many of the president's decisions, policies that often seemed to collide with accepted facts. The president would say that he relied on his ''gut'' or his ''instinct'' to guide the ship of state, and then he ''prayed over it.'' The old pro Bartlett, a deliberative, fact-based wonk, is finally hearing a tune that has been hummed quietly by evangelicals (so as not to trouble the secular) for years as they gazed upon President George W. Bush. This evangelical group -- the core of the energetic ''base'' that may well usher Bush to victory -- believes that their leader is a messenger from God. And in the first presidential debate, many Americans heard the discursive John Kerry succinctly raise, for the first time, the issue of Bush's certainty -- the issue being, as Kerry put it, that ''you can be certain and be wrong.''
What underlies Bush's certainty? And can it be assessed in the temporal realm of informed consent?
All of this -- the ''gut'' and ''instincts,'' the certainty and religiosity -connects to a single word, ''faith,'' and faith asserts its hold ever more on debates in this country and abroad. That a deep Christian faith illuminated the personal journey of George W. Bush is common knowledge. But faith has also shaped his presidency in profound, nonreligious ways. The president has demanded unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides and his kindred in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision -- often swiftly, based on a creed or moral position -- he expects complete faith in its rightness.
The disdainful smirks and grimaces that many viewers were surprised to see in the first presidential debate are familiar expressions to those in the administration or in Congress who have simply asked the president to explain his positions. Since 9/11, those requests have grown scarce; Bush's intolerance of doubters has, if anything, increased, and few dare to question him now. A writ of infallibility -- a premise beneath the powerful Bushian certainty that has, in many ways, moved mountains -- is not just for public consumption: it has guided the inner life of the White House. As Whitman told me on the day in May 2003 that she announced her resignation as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency: ''In meetings, I'd ask if there were any facts to support our case. And for that, I was accused of disloyalty!'' (Whitman, whose faith in Bush has since been renewed, denies making these remarks and is now a leader of the president's re-election effort in New Jersey.)
The nation's founders, smarting still from the punitive pieties of Europe's state religions, were adamant about erecting a wall between organized religion and political authority. But suddenly, that seems like a long time ago. George W. Bush -- both captive and creator of this moment -- has steadily, inexorably, changed the office itself. He has created the faith-based presidency.
The faith-based presidency is a with-us-or-against-us model that has been enormously effective at, among other things, keeping the workings and temperament of the Bush White House a kind of state secret. The dome of silence cracked a bit in the late winter and spring, with revelations from the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and also, in my book, from the former Bush treasury secretary Paul O'Neill. When I quoted O'Neill saying that Bush was like ''a blind man in a room full of deaf people,'' this did not endear me to the White House. But my phone did begin to ring, with Democrats and Republicans calling with similar impressions and anecdotes about Bush's faith and certainty. These are among the sources I relied upon for this article. Few were willing to talk on the record. Some were willing to talk because they said they thought George W. Bush might lose; others, out of fear of what might transpire if he wins. In either case, there seems to be a growing silence fatigue -- public servants, some with vast experience, who feel they have spent years being treated like Victorian-era children, seen but not heard, and are tired of it. But silence still reigns in the highest reaches of the White House. After many requests, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said in a letter that the president and those around him would not be cooperating with this article in any way.
Without a Doubt
By RON SUSKIND
Published: October 17, 2004
Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ''if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.'' The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.
''Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: ''This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them. . . .
''This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts,'' Bartlett went on to say. ''He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence.'' Bartlett paused, then said, ''But you can't run the world on faith.''
Forty democratic senators were gathered for a lunch in March just off the Senate floor. I was there as a guest speaker. Joe Biden was telling a story, a story about the president. ''I was in the Oval Office a few months after we swept into Baghdad,'' he began, ''and I was telling the president of my many concerns'' -- concerns about growing problems winning the peace, the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and problems securing the oil fields. Bush, Biden recalled, just looked at him, unflappably sure that the United States was on the right course and that all was well. '''Mr. President,' I finally said, 'How can you be so sure when you know you don't know the facts?'''
Biden said that Bush stood up and put his hand on the senator's shoulder. ''My instincts,'' he said. ''My instincts.''
Biden paused and shook his head, recalling it all as the room grew quiet. ''I said, 'Mr. President, your instincts aren't good enough!'''
The democrat Biden and the Republican Bartlett are trying to make sense of the same thing -- a president who has been an extraordinary blend of forcefulness and inscrutability, opacity and action.
But lately, words and deeds are beginning to connect.
The Delaware senator was, in fact, hearing what Bush's top deputies -- from cabinet members like Paul O'Neill, Christine Todd Whitman and Colin Powell to generals fighting in Iraq -- have been told for years when they requested explanations for many of the president's decisions, policies that often seemed to collide with accepted facts. The president would say that he relied on his ''gut'' or his ''instinct'' to guide the ship of state, and then he ''prayed over it.'' The old pro Bartlett, a deliberative, fact-based wonk, is finally hearing a tune that has been hummed quietly by evangelicals (so as not to trouble the secular) for years as they gazed upon President George W. Bush. This evangelical group -- the core of the energetic ''base'' that may well usher Bush to victory -- believes that their leader is a messenger from God. And in the first presidential debate, many Americans heard the discursive John Kerry succinctly raise, for the first time, the issue of Bush's certainty -- the issue being, as Kerry put it, that ''you can be certain and be wrong.''
What underlies Bush's certainty? And can it be assessed in the temporal realm of informed consent?
All of this -- the ''gut'' and ''instincts,'' the certainty and religiosity -connects to a single word, ''faith,'' and faith asserts its hold ever more on debates in this country and abroad. That a deep Christian faith illuminated the personal journey of George W. Bush is common knowledge. But faith has also shaped his presidency in profound, nonreligious ways. The president has demanded unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides and his kindred in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision -- often swiftly, based on a creed or moral position -- he expects complete faith in its rightness.
The disdainful smirks and grimaces that many viewers were surprised to see in the first presidential debate are familiar expressions to those in the administration or in Congress who have simply asked the president to explain his positions. Since 9/11, those requests have grown scarce; Bush's intolerance of doubters has, if anything, increased, and few dare to question him now. A writ of infallibility -- a premise beneath the powerful Bushian certainty that has, in many ways, moved mountains -- is not just for public consumption: it has guided the inner life of the White House. As Whitman told me on the day in May 2003 that she announced her resignation as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency: ''In meetings, I'd ask if there were any facts to support our case. And for that, I was accused of disloyalty!'' (Whitman, whose faith in Bush has since been renewed, denies making these remarks and is now a leader of the president's re-election effort in New Jersey.)
The nation's founders, smarting still from the punitive pieties of Europe's state religions, were adamant about erecting a wall between organized religion and political authority. But suddenly, that seems like a long time ago. George W. Bush -- both captive and creator of this moment -- has steadily, inexorably, changed the office itself. He has created the faith-based presidency.
The faith-based presidency is a with-us-or-against-us model that has been enormously effective at, among other things, keeping the workings and temperament of the Bush White House a kind of state secret. The dome of silence cracked a bit in the late winter and spring, with revelations from the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and also, in my book, from the former Bush treasury secretary Paul O'Neill. When I quoted O'Neill saying that Bush was like ''a blind man in a room full of deaf people,'' this did not endear me to the White House. But my phone did begin to ring, with Democrats and Republicans calling with similar impressions and anecdotes about Bush's faith and certainty. These are among the sources I relied upon for this article. Few were willing to talk on the record. Some were willing to talk because they said they thought George W. Bush might lose; others, out of fear of what might transpire if he wins. In either case, there seems to be a growing silence fatigue -- public servants, some with vast experience, who feel they have spent years being treated like Victorian-era children, seen but not heard, and are tired of it. But silence still reigns in the highest reaches of the White House. After many requests, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said in a letter that the president and those around him would not be cooperating with this article in any way.
Take Our Airways Back
Take Our Airways Back: "Take Our Airways Back
by Gov. Howard Dean, M.D.
Last week, communications giant Sinclair Broadcasting announced that they would require all 62 of their television affiliates to pre-empt regularly scheduled programs and air a film that casts Sen. John Kerry in a very unfavorable and false light. Many of these stations, affiliates of ABC, CBS, NBC and UPN, are in battleground states like Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa and Michigan. This essentially becomes free advertising for the Bush-Cheney campaign in some very important and influential states during this election season.
This is not the first time Sinclair Broadcasting stations were required to do something that advanced the right-wing agenda. Last spring, Sinclair refused to allow any of its ABC affiliates to carry a Nightline episode that honored soldiers who had been killed in Iraq. The episode was a way to memorialize and remember the soldiers that gave their lives fighting for our country. But at the time, the executives at Sinclair Broadcasting unilaterally decided that the program 'appears to be motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq'.
This election cycle, executives of Sinclair Broadcasting have contributed tens of thousands of dollars in political contributions, 97 percent of which have gone to Republican candidates. Their vice president for corporate relations and their spokesperson, Mark Hyman, is also a conservative commentator for Sinclair Broadcasting. Every day a one-to-two minute report by Hyman is distributed to stations that promotes the agenda of the Republican Party.
Incidents like this are not good for America. Today the Democratic candidate for president is victimized. In the future, it may be a Republican.
Federal Communications Commissioner Michael J. Copps recently said, 'This is an abuse of the public trust. And it is proof positive of media consolidation run amok when one owner can use the public airwaves to blanket the country with its political ideology -- whether liberal or conservative. . . .Sinclair and the FCC are taking us down a dangerous road.'
Kowtowing to large corporations, like Sinclair Broadcasting, is President Bush's specialty. And, behavior like this will only continue to grow by other media conglomerates if President Bush is re-elected. He is clearly more interested in doing the bidding of big corporations than he is in jobs and health care for ordinary Americans.
The media needs to be re-regulated and corporate ownership of media outlets needs to be limited in favor of independent and local family ownerships. But, we can make a difference today. If you live in a city with a Sinclair Broadcasting station, I encourage you to consider calling companies that advertise on that station. This is already working in some cities, like Madison, Wis. - a restaurant that was advertising on the local Sinclair Broadcasting station received numerous complaints and decided to pull their advertising.
Since the public owns the airways, Sinclair Broadcasting and other big corporations ought to be required to act in a way which supports democracy, not attacks it. Sinclair Broadcasting has violated the fundamental responsibilities they are accountable for in a democratic society. If the president will not do his job to rein in corporate power, we will have to stand up for American democracy ourselves.
"
by Gov. Howard Dean, M.D.
Last week, communications giant Sinclair Broadcasting announced that they would require all 62 of their television affiliates to pre-empt regularly scheduled programs and air a film that casts Sen. John Kerry in a very unfavorable and false light. Many of these stations, affiliates of ABC, CBS, NBC and UPN, are in battleground states like Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa and Michigan. This essentially becomes free advertising for the Bush-Cheney campaign in some very important and influential states during this election season.
This is not the first time Sinclair Broadcasting stations were required to do something that advanced the right-wing agenda. Last spring, Sinclair refused to allow any of its ABC affiliates to carry a Nightline episode that honored soldiers who had been killed in Iraq. The episode was a way to memorialize and remember the soldiers that gave their lives fighting for our country. But at the time, the executives at Sinclair Broadcasting unilaterally decided that the program 'appears to be motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq'.
This election cycle, executives of Sinclair Broadcasting have contributed tens of thousands of dollars in political contributions, 97 percent of which have gone to Republican candidates. Their vice president for corporate relations and their spokesperson, Mark Hyman, is also a conservative commentator for Sinclair Broadcasting. Every day a one-to-two minute report by Hyman is distributed to stations that promotes the agenda of the Republican Party.
Incidents like this are not good for America. Today the Democratic candidate for president is victimized. In the future, it may be a Republican.
Federal Communications Commissioner Michael J. Copps recently said, 'This is an abuse of the public trust. And it is proof positive of media consolidation run amok when one owner can use the public airwaves to blanket the country with its political ideology -- whether liberal or conservative. . . .Sinclair and the FCC are taking us down a dangerous road.'
Kowtowing to large corporations, like Sinclair Broadcasting, is President Bush's specialty. And, behavior like this will only continue to grow by other media conglomerates if President Bush is re-elected. He is clearly more interested in doing the bidding of big corporations than he is in jobs and health care for ordinary Americans.
The media needs to be re-regulated and corporate ownership of media outlets needs to be limited in favor of independent and local family ownerships. But, we can make a difference today. If you live in a city with a Sinclair Broadcasting station, I encourage you to consider calling companies that advertise on that station. This is already working in some cities, like Madison, Wis. - a restaurant that was advertising on the local Sinclair Broadcasting station received numerous complaints and decided to pull their advertising.
Since the public owns the airways, Sinclair Broadcasting and other big corporations ought to be required to act in a way which supports democracy, not attacks it. Sinclair Broadcasting has violated the fundamental responsibilities they are accountable for in a democratic society. If the president will not do his job to rein in corporate power, we will have to stand up for American democracy ourselves.
"
Sunday, October 17, 2004
Send Bush back to crawford
Bush has just about 2 more months!
Bush's accomplishments:
Bush's accomplishments:
- Invaded Afghanistan and Iraq for no reason, killing more than 30,000 civilians.
- Ran the highest debit in US history: half trillion dollars.
- Health Care costs are on the rise!
- Signed the worst Medicare bill (Helping the bid pharmaceutical companies!!)
- There are more than 50 million Americans without health care.
- Cut the majority of social programs.
- Manufacturing and computer jobs are been outsourced overseas.
- Unemployment are the highest in US history.
- Worst environmental laws, helping out the big companies.
- Giving the majority of army contracts to Halliburton (Dick Cheney's company).
- Gas prices at the pumps area at $2,5 to $2 8/gal.
- Bush wants the cut Social Security benefits for seniors.
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