He is pretty dumb! All he did was increase the number of Repulicans in the House and return the Senate to Republican control in less than two years.
—Debate is raging at http://www.ariannaonline.com/interact/phorum
How Long Will Amerika & International Community Put Up With Bush?
The present course of the Bush administration quite plainly threatens regime change. Not changes in Iraq's regime, although American military power may well bring that about, but a transformation of the entire pattern of the United States' relationships with the world. Americans have long been taught that international alliances and cooperation form the bedrock of our standing in the modern world. Global economics depends on that kind of cooperation; global politics builds on it. Talking about the United States as a hyperpower obscures the fact that we exist within an international system. That system required decades to craft, but now finds itself under threat after only two short years of the Bush administration.
· Hyperpower [TomPaine]
Vote Early, Vote Often: or Even Better Vote Virtually
There was a new wrinkle added in Florida, and in many other places as well -- 'touch-screen' voting systems. Now the beauty of these systems is that they leave no paper trail. None whatsoever. No way to recount ballots, because ballots don't actually exist.
And who, you may be wondering, manufactures and administers these voting machines? As reporter Lynn Landes noted, Republicans dominate the voting machine business.
In fact, the companies that control the voting machine business are owned by an interwoven network of right-wing extremists > with a long record of pumping money into Republican campaigns.
The touch-screens worked great though, according to all avenues of the media, yielding a final result less than two hours after the last polls in the Panhandle closed. And what was that final result? The reelection of Jeb Bush, of course. If anyone bothered to read past the headlines of the smooth Florida election though, they found that, according to poll monitors, touch screen machines in eight Miami-area precincts were counting ballots cast for Democrat Bill McBride as votes for his opponent, Jeb Bush.
Premier polling services
Lynn Landes contacted John Zogby of Zogby International, one of the country's, and asked him if over the years he had noticed increased variation between pre-election predictions and election results. Zogby said that he didn't notice any big problems until this year. Things were very different this time.
No limits on its criminality
What we have here is a number of elements coming together: a political party that has proven itself to place no limits on its criminality when it comes to the manipulation of elections and the timely closure of the media's exit polling service whose polling results were wildly at odds with the announced results; an alleged dropping of the ball by pretty much all of the pollsters across the country who had been taking the pulse of voters in the weeks leading up to the election; and the introduction of paperless, touch-screen voting systems that lend themselves very nicely to unseen and undetectable manipulations.
Does this prove widespread fraud? No, it does not. But neither can it be proved that the election results are valid. That's the beauty of paperless systems. No trail to follow. No recounts. No investigations.
Inspection of electronic voting systems impossible
As Michael Ruppert reported: There was one other great message from this election. On Wednesday morning I watched a crawl on the bottom of the CNN news screen. It said, 'Proprietary software may make inspection of electronic voting systems impossible.'
It was the final and absolute coronation of corporate rights over democracy.
· deMockery [AriannaOnLine]
