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Al Gore 2004
Here’s the video of Gore’s recent speech criticizing the Bush administration. Finally, someone willing to stand up to the right-wing dictatorship.
Some of you liked the speech, and others didn’t:
Dianne L
Couldn't
stand to watch the entire Gore production and don't have time to respond at
length now, but what I did see I found very shallow, hallow and much, much too
late to bestow any sort of "statesman" status on Uncle Albert.
Are we all supposed to fall on our knees in joy that he's back, whatever that
means? What do we do with the feelings of betrayal and anger that we still
carry since December 2000-January 2001, when he was responsible for shutting
down the Black Caucus' dissent on January 6, 2001 to the horrific
Constitutional crimes perpetrated against the American people by the illegal
installation of Bush as "president"; when he was responsible for
telling Democratic members of Congress NOT to make an issue of the stealing of
OUR votes (I heard this from Sen. Ron Wyden's lips, first person); when he
recently thundered at the Iowa Jeff-Jack Dinner that the illegitimate twit
now squatting in the White House is "my Commander-in-Chief"?????
Gore
had his chance to "blow" Bush, and he blew it - Gore has shown
himself to nothing more than something that rhymes with "sore".
Marsha
B
He
sounded so down to earth, not at all the uptight person we listened to during
the 2000 campaign. But he MUST shave that beard. It's not even a good
looking beard, and we haven't had a predident with a beard since right after the
Civil War! Benjamin Harrison (stolen from Samuel Tilden), I'm pretty sure.
I've got to find a good directory that gives addresses for these folks. ---
Bu$hron - love it.
Kevin
K
Gore
wasn't that great. It seemed like
practice or a rehersal for him. And
if he won't confront Bush about Enron, Afghan oil interests, full disclosure and
investigation of 9/11, influence of the Carlyle Group, the lie of his
compassionate conservatism, the theft of the election, etc., etc., then who the
hell wants him to run?
Mary M
FIRE
IN THE BELLY*
It’s The Congress, Stupid!
Tonight,
at a Democratic fundraiser in Tennessee, Former Vice President Albert Gore Jr.
reentered the political arena again, ending his absence with a fire in the belly
speech to those attending. It was
refreshing to hear from a true leader, unlike the one we have in Washington DC
now. A man who could actually put
well defined thoughts into a powerful message.
For this past year, many have been thirsting for a message like this, and
tonight, we got to drink from this much needed cup.
As we head into the midterm elections of 2002, we have to keep Mr.
Gore’s message to us flowing like a river of truth, and take back control of
congress, as Mr. Gore cited to keep Mr. Bush in checks and balances.
That is our primary focus, and where it must be from this night going
forwards. We must take to heart
this message by our leader, and run with it.
We must turn his and our words into actions.
That is because so much is at stake.
Now more than ever...
[I]t
is my feeling that after tonight’s speech by Mr. Gore, the media will start to
attack him in either print or broadcast media, and that is where you and I come
in, friends. We must launch an all
out assault on any journalist that tries to rip into Mr. Gore. That will be hard
work, but work that needs to be done for our country.
We all MUST REMEMBER we have to have the FIRE IN THE BELLY message to
take out to our fellow citizens, where we turn them into voters.
And our focus MUST be,
IT’S THE CONGRESS, STUPID! Let us
start with this upcoming election to take back our country, and put Bush back
into the checks and balance system. After
we have accomplished our primary goal, then our focus is where it should be.
Taking back the White House, and sending Bush and Cheney packing.
[If you click through to read the whole
message and you’re asked to join the U.S. Democrat group, I urge you to do
so.—Caro]
Moi
There’s a groundswell building, folks, take heart. Visits to MakeThemAccountable.com went from 35,300 in December to 55,600 in January, with almost a million hits. I’m getting more email than ever. Where in September there were 150 people on the daily mailing list, there are now 628. I see more centrist and liberal posters on the Internet message boards than conservative ones.
We’re starting to take our country back. Let’s not let up, as long as the right-wing threat exists.
truthout.com
t
r u t h o u t | Marc Ash
Interview
| Greg Palast
February 2, 2002
ma
. t r u t h o u t | Greg, welcome to TO. We have been looking over your new
book, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy."
Greg
Palast | Yes, now there is some prophecy in there that is coming too true,
unfortunately.
ma
. t r u t h o u t | You raise a number of hot-button issues. You revisit
Florida. How far are we away from Florida at this point? What do we know that we
didn't know before? What's the relevance to where we're at right now?
Palast
| Well, we have a president that thinks he can take office without being
elected. There are not many limits on what he thinks he can get away with,
including, for example, handing out pieces of American policy to his donors.
It's serious business. It's a serious business when the votes don't count in
this country. So, what I was trying to do, what I had done for BBC and when I
expanded the book to include a report that I had never previously published is
to show exactly how Bush, the Bush family, stole the presidential vote -- and
the republicans of Florida. And what we do is provide evidence which I did for
investigations for BBC television and for The Guardian newspaper of Britain -- a
shame that it had to be British media which had to find out who got elected
president -- but you'll see that information in there, the material I have yet
to broadcast and publish.
In
particular, the core of this whole thing is that in the year before the
election, Katherine Harris' office, her Department of Elections, purged
thousands upon thousands of voters, half of them black, from the voter rolls.
She did that on the grounds that they were felons who aren't allowed to vote in
the state of Florida. In fact, most of those people were barely guilty of being
black and very few of them, very few -- it looks like 5 percent -- may have been
felons without the right to vote. That's how your president was elected.
ma
. t r u t h o u t | You raise in this book a number of issues concerning
corporate greed, corporate corruption, misuse of governmental power, or
influence over governmental power by corporate influence --
Palast
| Sounds pretty grim, huh?
ma
. t r u t h o u t | For the person who sits back and says to themselves:
corporations provide employment to millions nationwide here in this country, and
certainly in Europe also --
Palast
| They provide unemployment, too, as the Enron workers know. That's what the
Enron workers are getting. They're getting worthless stock for their pension and
no future, no job. I think one of the problems is that there is a fantasy that
the world went through beginning with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan that
we could turn over our planet to the entrepreneurs and the money makers will not
only make money but they will make wonderful things for us. They will reduce our
electric bills. They'll provide safe and cheap water from around the world. The
engine of the market competition will create a miracle of new expanded
production. Well get rid of these bureaucrats, their little rule books and we'll
let business get to work. And build economies. You know, I don't have any
particular problem, if that were the result. The problem is that that's not how
it's turned out. Not in the least…
[Greg Palast is a very important voice for
freedom from the corporate stranglehold. Be
sure to click through and read this entire interview.
You can also hear Greg interviewed by Mike
Webb tonight, Sunday February 3, at 6:00 PM PST (8:00 PM Central) on KIRO in
Seattle, but you don’t have to live in Seattle to listen via the Internet.
Click here and then click on the
text, “On the Air.” If you
haven’t listened to KIRO before, you’ll be asked to register, but it’s
free and perfectly safe. You may
also be prompted for a software upgrade, and that’s safe too.
Be sure to visit the Unconservative
Listening page for more shows to listen to via the Internet.—Caro]
The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
Since the publication of his award-winning Salon.com report of the same name – named Politics Story of the Year 2000 – Greg Palast has dug even further into the scandal that brought George W. Bush into the White House. This new information is available for the first time in his forthcoming book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Greg will be on tour soon, and you can help promote his book:
Be part of Greg Palast's upcoming book tour - organizers in every community wanted. To host a reception, contact a speaking venue or book an appearance to promote "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy", please contact Rose Carrano at 646-638-2181 or rosecarrano@earthlink.net. Thank you.
Read his columns—they're archived on his website.
The New York Times
Gore
Rebukes Bush, and Tries to Mend Fences at Home in Tennessee
NASHVILLE, Feb. 2 — Declaring that "I intend to rejoin the national debate," Al Gore re-emerged in his home state tonight and unleashed a searing critique of George W. Bush's policies on issues from the economy to the environment to campaign finance to health care.
While he did not waver from his steadfast support for the White House's handling of the war, this speech was the first in which Mr. Gore has derided Mr. Bush's programs since they faced off in what was perhaps the most contentious presidential competition ever. Mr. Gore even invoked former President Bill Clinton — whom he steered clear of for much of the presidential campaign — in accusing Mr. Bush of squandering the last administration's economic successes.
"Not long ago, our economy was very strong because we made the right decisions, decisions that reflected our values," Mr. Gore declared at a fund-raising reception here for the Tennessee Democratic Party. "Whatever anyone wants to say, I believe Bill Clinton and I did a good job on the economy. But now, our economy is back in recession, an unbelievable $4 trillion in projected surpluses have disappeared in a single year and public investments in priorities like job training, school construction and health care are once again being slashed."
On the environment, Mr. Gore said, "They're
trying to open up the most beautiful and pristine wilderness in Alaska.
"Noting that a campaign finance reform bill would have been his first
priority as president, Mr. Gore did not cite the Enron
After more than a year of virtual political
seclusion, Mr. Gore sounded tonight as if he were back in the heat of a campaign
against Mr. Bush. But he told the crowd here what he has told friends:
"whether or not I will" run "as a candidate in 2004, I don't yet
know."…
Message from Guy I
I saw Al Gore on Cspan and finally felt a ray of hope for the progressive cause. He started off with the obligatory praise of Bu$hron with regard to "The War", but then took off the gloves and started hammering The Great Dicktatorship on a wide range of domestic issues. It looks like Gore will be in offensive mode for the next 2 1/2 years and I'm glad to see it. He sounded and looked like the REAL president.
I didn't watch the SOTU speech itself since I have a standing rule to never invite salesmen, Bu$hron, or any other type of shill into my home, but when I saw Gephardt's response to it I was left with an empty feeling and remembered his previous candidacy which made me feel despondent for the chances of him removing Bu$hron. After watching the always tepid and sometimes even cowardly statements of Gephardt/Daschle for a year it was inspiring to see Democrat Gore finally stand up and tell it like it is.
Gore's speech didn't get mainstream coverage, but I don't think it needed to since it's purpose at this time (along with his campaign activities this year) is to let Democrats know that there really is someone at the helm that every other Democratic leader has chosen to leave unmanned. With his speech I think Gore served notice that he's the person who will articulate the progressive message and remove Bu$hron.
I think Bu$hron is just as much a house of cards who's stock is as overvalued as Enron and it's stock was and all it will take to bring him down is for Gore to blow at him.
[I couldn’t find the video archived at
C-SPAN. I’ve written to them, but
if anyone finds it, please let me know. I’d
like to watch it myself, and I know others would, too.—Caro]
Salon.com
Vote
of no confidence
A self-described "election junkie" surveys dozens of books about the
2000 presidential contest and arrives at some troubling conclusions.
-
- - - - - - - - - - -
By John W. Dean
Jan.
30, 2002
The failure of the mainstream news media, particularly television news, during Election 2000 is a central theme of University of California philosophy professor Douglas Kellner's book, "Grand Theft 2000: Media Spectacle and a Stolen Election."
Kellner asserts that the mainstream news media "failed in their task of providing probing investigative journalism, intelligent analysis and critique of partisan positions, and independent analysis of the stakes of the combat in the events such as the struggle for the presidency that followed Election 2000." Employing the tools of critical social and media theory analysis (but explaining his findings in lay terms), he persuasively documents the basis of his conclusions, not only regarding the media's failure, but also supporting his contention that the Republicans stole the presidency.
Before joining the UCLA faculty in 1997, Douglas Kellner was at the University of Texas in Austin. As an experienced Bush watcher, he offers this heads up: "The coming Bushgate will be the inexorable and possibly cascading torrent of revelations that will uncover the slimy political and economic history of the Bush dynasty, the particular scandals that George W. Bush has been involved in, the correlation between the contributors to the Bush campaign and his actual policies, and the hopeful uncovering and dissemination of the manipulations, machinations, and possible criminality involved in his theft of Election 2000."
Given the current headlines about
Enron's colossal failure and its close ties to the Bush administration, it is
not easy to dismiss Kellner's charge as mere Bush bashing by a left-leaning
scholar. To the contrary, I found myself carefully rereading parts of Kellner's
book where he addresses the media's failure "to pursue George W. Bush's
family history, scandalous business career, dubious record as governor, lack of
qualifications for the presidency, and serious character flaws."
If Kellner is correct, Enron may prove a calamity for George Bush. Still, if Enron is covered by the mainstream media as poorly as Kellner asserts they covered the 2000 election, Bush will survive it.
[Dean
reviews a number of books about the election, but this one has the immediacy of
having predicted the Enron scandal. Don’t
forget that BuzzFlash is featuring Kellner’s book.
You can contribute
to BuzzFlash and get a great book at the same time.—Caro]
[Y]ou should know a few bottom-line facts I learned from my reading. For these, the evidence is overwhelming, and the conclusions are inescapable, if not irrefutable:
·
Al Gore, to win in Florida, should
not have restrained his Florida team, worrying unnecessarily that the
establishment elite would be unhappy with him, for if he had taken the attitude
of his opponent -- Bush was prepared to tie up the election indefinitely, if
necessary -- he could have prevailed in the Florida recount. He had more actual
votes than Bush, not to mention more voters who were disenfranchised by Florida
election errors. In truth, he won the Florida vote, but lost the recount.
·
Florida Governor Jeb Bush's
behind-the-scenes efforts and influence are still not fully known, but his
presence was felt everywhere during the recount, assuring his brother's team a
win. Jeb Bush's influence helped open doors for George W. Bush, and closed doors
for Gore. This part of the story still remains to be told.
·
The U.S. Supreme Court's
intervention into the Florida recount was pure partisan politics, driven by the
court's conservative majority, and their actions resulted in one of the high
court's most shameful decisions ever.
·
Finally, until we modernize our
presidential election processes and procedures with new laws (and, if necessary,
a constitutional amendment to abolish the outmoded electoral college), another
presidential election debacle could easily, and very likely will, occur again.
CNN.com
Supreme
Court justice to launch morals program
January 27, 2002 Posted: 10:35 AM EST (1535 GMT)
By Terry Frieden
CNN Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON (CNN) --
Dismayed by what he called a lack of "moral outrage" among some
high school students following the September 11 terrorist attacks, U.S. Supreme
Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has created a program to teach students about
"fundamental values and universal moral precepts."
Kennedy will launch his
"Dialogue on Freedom" initiative Monday at a school in Washington with
the help of first lady Laura Bush.
The program --
sponsored by the American Bar Association -- will also enlist the help of
lawyers and judges, who Kennedy hopes will visit high schools to talk about core
democratic values in light of the terrorist attacks…
[What hypocrisy!
How about core democratic values IN LIGHT OF THE THEFT OF THE 2000
PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION???!!!! When
Kennedy voted to thwart the will of the people and award to George Bush?
These people don’t have the first idea of what democracy means.
Or morality, either.—Caro]
Iwon.com
O'Connor
Wishes Bush V. Gore Had Never Come Up
January
25, 2002 11:31 pm EST
WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - The first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court, Sandra Day O'Connor, said
in an interview Friday she wished the justices had never had to make the
decision that all but delivered the White House to President George W. Bush.
"There
was a great deal of criticism. It was a difficult case. It's too bad that it
came up," O'Connor said of the Bush V. Gore decision. She spoke to NBC's
"Dateline" television program in a rare media interview by a Supreme
Court justice.
O'Connor
joined the majority in the 5-4 vote that stopped court-ordered ballot recounts
in Florida in December 2000. Republican candidate Bush had wanted the recounts
stopped, and Democrat Al Gore conceded the presidential election the next day.
Asked
if she wished the case had never come to the Supreme Court, O'Connor said,
"Of course I do. We don't enjoy being thrust into the middle of political
controversy. We don't always have a choice in what comes here."
But
she refused to discuss the atmosphere in the court as the justices made the
historic decision, saying that would be inappropriate…
[They “don't
always have a choice in what comes here”?
She pretends the Court had no choice in whether to hear the case.
I’m not a lawyer, but I can tell you that the Court could have, SHOULD
have, refused to hear the case, as did the U.S. District Court in
Atlanta.—Caro]
She
did reveal however that she and Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist had dated
each other when they were both attending Stanford law school. "We went to a
few movies," O'Connor said. She married another Stanford student, John
O'Connor…
[Frightening.
Absolutely frightening. I
guess that was during the time when Rehnquist was intimidating African Americans
who tried to vote back in his home district in Phoenix.—Caro]
Tallahassee Democrat
Posted
on Sat, Jan. 26, 2002
NAACP
urged to get out the vote
Rev. Joseph
Wright talks politics
The
gathering, which featured readings from the Bible, gospel music and political
commentary, was held as part of the NAACP's statewide conference.
"I
want to encourage you to vote," Wright, president of the Tallahassee
Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, told the packed audience. "I want
you to carry your friends and your relatives and your neighbors to the polls.
And register them to vote."
Wright
was a supporter of Gov. Jeb Bush until recently. Last month, he apologized for
that support, saying that while the governor was a good man and a friend, he
could no longer support Bush initiatives such as One Florida and Service First.
He blamed Florida's faltering economy on mismanagement of state government.
During
Friday's meeting, he also called into question the legitimacy of President Bush.
Wright said he noticed irregularities when he served on a special state task
force on election reform.
"I
saw something that was quite strange to me, and I'm sure you've seen it, too -
particularly when it came to the presidential elections," Wright said.
"I will truly tell you unequivocally and emphatically, the race was taken.
That was not done by an act of nature. That was done by the act of a
politician."…
[We must get out the vote all over the
country. We must show them that we
will not take the theft of an election lying down.—Caro]
Online Journal
Media
distorted Florida court ruling to invent Bush victory
By
Nancy Kuhn
December 15, 2001—In its ongoing effort to aid
and abet George W. Bush's illegal occupation of the White House, the
corporate-owned, pro-Bush media sunk to a new low in their desperation to hide
the truth that Al Gore got the most votes in Florida and clearly won the 2000
presidential election.
In its much ballyhooed count of the undervoted
Florida ballots, the media consortium that hired the respected National Opinion
Research Council (NORC) to inspect some 170,000 ballots promised to prove once
and for all who won Florida and thereby the 2000 presidential election. The
problem was that the media consortium didn't like the results of what NORC
found. And even when the consortium applied the rules each of the 67 counties
said they would have used in determining the intent of the voters, the result
was inescapable: Al Gore won.
The way the media consortium hid this truth was to
distort the Florida Supreme Court's ruling. The media consortium didn't include
in its recount a several thousand legal undervotes for Al Gore in Broward and
Palm Beach counties that the Bush campaign had illegally blocked the canvassing
boards in these counties from tallying. When these legal Gore votes are added to
the vote totals, Gore wins under all scenarios, including in the counties where
Gore had requested manual recounts.
What the media consortium failed to report was
what the Florida Supreme Court's ruling actually said. The Florida high court's
ruling clearly called for "the counting of all uncounted votes where the
intent of the voter is clear."
With the revelation by Newsweek reporter Michael
Isikoff of the existence of emails sent by Terry Lewis, the judge assigned to
oversee the counting of the uncounted ballots, instructing the counties to also
count the overvotes where the intent of the voters was clear, it's inescapable
that Judge Lewis knew that the Florida Supreme Court wanted all uncounted votes
where the intent of the voters was clear to be counted.
The truth is, there are no scenarios that George W. Bush would have won under had the U.S. Supreme Court not stopped the counting of legal votes in Florida…
Palm Beach Post
Chad
theories continue to pile up
By
Joel Engelhardt, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 31, 2001
What
if they held the most talked-about election in American history and a year
later, when no one seemed to care anymore, you thought you had found the smoking
gun?
You
came upon something so intuitively simple you have to wonder why no one
mentioned it when every less-than-scintillating detail surfaced during those
dreadful days of count and recount, dimpled chad and political spin?
Well,
you'd put it on a Web site.
That's
just what University of Iowa Associate Professor Douglas Jones did after he
began tinkering with the famous Votomatic machines used in Florida and
throughout the country to cast votes on Election Day…
Jones
found he could create an impenetrable jam with just 317 punches on a Votomatic.
It took him longer, 668 punches, to create a logjam on the Data Punch machine,
the king of under-votes in Palm Beach County.
That
doesn't surprise Ahmann, who said the Votomatics are designed for just 100 to
125 votes per election. After repeated use, they must be cleaned -- although
folding up and moving the machines between elections is enough to shake loose
some chads, he said.
But
Jones said he couldn't dislodge the chad jam, except by banging the machine
repeatedly on his desk. Anyone voting directly above those jams would have been
stymied…
The New
Yorker
COMMENT
Issue
of 2001-12-24 and 31
Posted 2001-12-17
Is
it O.K. to talk about the recount yet? It wasn't the right time on September
10th, because the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center had
only just finished organizing the data gleaned from its meticulous examination
of a hundred and seventy-five thousand uncounted Florida ballots. It wasn't on
September 12th, because the news organizations that had commissioned the study
were otherwise occupied. It was the right time on
November 12th, apparently: that was the day the news organizations got around to
publishing their analyses of the results. But, judging from the lack of
discussion that has ensued, it abruptly became the wrong time again on November
13th. Maybe it'll never be the right time. But what the hell. Let's talk about
it anyway.
The first
thing to say about the media recount (its formal name was the Florida Ballots
Project) is that it was a praiseworthy endeavor—well designed, unbiased,
thorough, and public spirited. The consortium of news organizations—its eight
members were the New York Times, the Washington Post,
the Wall Street Journal, the Tribune Company, the
Palm Beach Post, the St. Petersburg Times,
CNN, and the Associated Press—did something admirable.
The second
thing to say is that the courage that spurred the consortium into existence, a
year ago, flagged at the end. Given that the consortium's goal was to catalogue
all, or as many as possible, of the votes that had been cast by Florida citizens
but not recorded by Florida authorities, one might have expected its members to
emphasize the finding that corresponded to its goal. That finding, it turned
out, was that, no matter what standard or combination of standards is applied,
Al Gore got a handful more votes than George W. Bush. Faced with this
conclusion, the consortium changed the question to who would have won if the
original statewide recount had not been aborted. The reassuring answer to that
question, again by a handful, was Bush…
In
any case, there is no longer any doubt that more Florida voters intended
to vote for Gore than for Bush…
September
11th … extinguished the last traces of any appetite for a discussion that
might call into question the legitimacy of a President who has his hands full
and who needs, and has, the support of a nation united in the struggle against
terror. But by then, it must be said, the damage to democracy had already been
done. Someday, perhaps, our anachronistic system of picking Presidents will be
brought into line with the fundamental American idea of political equality among
citizens. An unhappy legacy of the election of 2000 is that that day now seems
more distant than ever.
USA Today
12/12/2001 - Updated 11:13
PM ET
'Bush
vs. Gore': Filed, not forgotten
By Joan Biskupic, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — A year after the Supreme Court ended
Florida's recount of presidential ballots and handed the White House to George
W. Bush, the ruling in Bush vs. Gore has largely slipped from the public
consciousness. But in the world where law meets politics, it remains a driving
force.
The ruling is being cited in lawsuits that challenge
error-prone punch-card voting machines in some states. More subtly, it lurks in
political debates here, most recently over Bush nominees for posts at the Labor
Department and the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.
At the Supreme Court itself, however, Bush vs.
Gore has been filed away. The nine justices appear to have moved past the
tension created by the 5-4 decision and have moved into a new term. And like the
rest of the nation, they have been absorbed by the attacks on Sept. 11 and the
war on terrorism.
If time had not erased the traces of rancor at the
court from the divisive ruling, Oct. 26 did. That's the day anthrax was found in
an off-site court mail facility. The justices were forced into makeshift
quarters at a federal appeals court and each began taking antibiotics.
The justices who mentioned Bush vs. Gore in
speeches this year — either to defend or criticize the ruling — now say
privately that it causes little tension among them today.
"In a cultural sense, Bush vs. Gore has
to be understood as an election-results case," Emory University law
professor David Garrow says. "Any election result seems hugely momentous on
those Wednesday mornings after the Tuesday election. But with the passage of
time, how many of those seem hugely momentous?"…
Two newspaper projects scrutinizing the balloting
found that if the recounts had continued in the four challenged Florida
counties, Bush still would have won by a slight margin. Both studies found that
if all the disputed ballots were counted statewide — an idea the Supreme Court
endorsed but that neither side pursued — Vice President Gore would have won
Florida and the election.
But the nation has moved on. Last month, a USA
TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll found that most Americans no longer view the 2000
presidential election as a constitutional crisis or major problem, as most did
last December…
Message to USA Today regarding the
above article
To:
editor@usatoday.com
What the newspaper recounts have all shown, without a shadow of a doubt, is that the people of Florida wanted Al Gore to have their state's electoral college votes, which would have made him President of the United States. It is in your best interest to downplay this fact, because the Gannett Company, that owns you, will benefit directly from the deregulation of the media promised by George Bush. This same deregulation will be detrimental to the American people, but hey, who am I to stand in the way of the stampede of greed that has hit this country like a terrorist attack.
The American public would know a lot more about this issue, and could not help but care that the Supreme Court disgraced itself last year and that the wrong man is in the White House, IF IT ONLY KNEW THAT WAS THE CASE. You are complicit in hiding these facts, and I assure you that history will not be kind.
Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com
Miami Herald
Published Thursday,
At Miami fundraiser, Gore hints about a higher profile
BY TYLER BRIDGES
He gave no indication whether he
might run for president again in 2004, but he is taking the steps that would
position him for a campaign.
Gore's visit -- which featured a half-million dollar
fundraiser for the Democratic Party Wednesday night -- coincidentally came on
the one-year anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that killed his
chances of winning a recount that might have allowed him to overtake then-Texas
Gov. George W. Bush in Florida.
Making light of the legal fight in the closest
presidential election in a century, Miami attorney Benedict Kuehne presented
Gore with a ``Team Recount'' T-shirt that he and other Gore lawyers wore in this
year's Miami Corporate Run 5K.
Broward County Commissioner Sue Gunzburger gave Gore a
voided punch-card ballot signed by her and the two other members of the county's
canvassing board, Judge Robert Rosenberg and Judge Robert Lee.
``I told him he might like to have it as a souvenir of
the 2000 election,'' Gunzburger said following an afternoon meeting at the
Fontainebleau Hilton Resort in Miami Beach.
Still wearing his much-discussed post-election beard,
Gore ``was warm and friendly and told some pretty funny anecdotes about the
adjustment back to private life,'' said lawyer Kendall Coffey, who played a
prominent role on Gore's ballot recount legal team.
Gore held similar meetings with small groups of
supporters at the hotel throughout the day and was the headliner at a Democratic
Senatorial Campaign Committee fundraiser at night…
The Roanoke Times
Monday, December 10, 2001
Ho-hum news in the post-Sept. 11 climate
Geoff
Seamans: Don't tell anyone, but Gore apparently carried Florida
By GEOFF SEAMANS
I'LL LET history decide whether Sept. 11 was a turning point in the history of the republic, or a one-day horror for which justice was expeditiously exacted and further threats nullified, or something in between.
But it does seem to have been a turning point, for the worse, in the effort to reform the creaky election machinery of this country.
Among the casualties of Sept. 11 was the discovery that a full and fair recount in Florida probably would have awarded the state's electoral votes by a razor-thin margin, and hence the 2000 presidential election, to Al Gore rather than George W. Bush.
Had that discovery been made and reported before Sept. 11, it would not have undone Bush's legal claim to the presidency.
But it would have been big news
that would have cast new doubt on his moral claim to the presidency. And it
likely would have reinvigorated the faltering effort to make voting in America
as accurate as, say, ATM banking…
Remember all the derision of
supposedly stupid old people?
Palm Beach Post
Sunday, December 9
Poll
workers ignored flaws in pre-vote machine tests
By
Joel Engelhardt and Scott McCabe, Palm Beach Post Staff Writers
Sunday, December 9, 2001
In
the dawn hours of the Election Day that would forever change Palm Beach County,
Carl Cummis, age 83, and his crew of poll workers struggled feverishly to
prepare.
They
had one hour to turn the county library west of Boca Raton into a polling place,
complete with 15 tested and ready voting booths. Cummis and his crew scurried
through the rigorous procedures taught by Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore
and repeated on countless election mornings.
But
when it came time to put the machines through their paces -- to punch out every
chad to make sure nothing could block voters from registering their choice for
president and two dozen other elected offices -- evidence shows Cummis and many
of his compatriots in polling places across Palm Beach County made mistakes.
Somehow,
they dimpled ballots. Somehow, they left hanging chads. Somehow, they didn't
punch holes they were supposed to punch.
The
failure of the machine tests illuminates another dark side of the election that
thrust Palm Beach County into the glare of the national spotlight: Even poll
workers struggled to punch chads the morning of Nov. 7, 2000. And yet, they did
nothing about it, letting voters cast ballots all day on those same machines…
Thirty
times poll workers skipped the right side of the ballot, punching out chads only
for the six presidential candidates on the left side and providing more
potential evidence of the confusion wrought by the two-page butterfly ballot.
The
problems with test ballots also help deflate another Election 2000 claim: that
it's impossible to dimple a ballot when trying to vote. After the election, one
election worker even purposely stuffed a machine with chads and said he still
couldn't produce a dimple.
But
the poll workers could…
The
rate of error on the test ballots surpassed that recorded by the contested
election's end, when 10,311 Palm Beach County ballots -- 2.2 percent -- went
uncounted because the voter recorded no choice for president. A March Palm Beach
Post review of those ballots showed that more than 5,000 contained a dimple of
some sort.
consortiumnews.com
By Robert Parry
December 5, 2001
Major national news outlets have gone silent in the face of evidence that they published misleading stories about the Florida presidential recount.
The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, the Washington Post and other leading news organizations relied on a dubious hypothesis to craft stories last month portraying George W. Bush as the recount winner, when the recount actually showed that Al Gore won if all legally cast votes were counted.
The news outlets assumed, incorrectly as it turned out, that so-called “overvotes,” which heavily favored Gore, would have been ignored if the Florida court-ordered recount had been allowed to proceed and that therefore Bush would have won even without the intervention of five conservative allies on the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote,” the New York Times front-page headline read. “Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush,” declared the Washington Post.
After those stories were published on Nov. 12, however, new evidence emerged showing that this pro-Bush hypothesis was wrong. It turned out that the judge in charge of the recount was moving to include the “overvotes” when Bush got the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene.
But rather than run corrections, the major news organizations chose to duck the fact that they had messed up one of the biggest political stories in U.S. history.
After learning of this foul-up via the Internet, some citizens complained in letters and e-mails, but the news outlets have responded by turning their backs on the complaints. There has been virtually no debate or commentary in the major news media about the mistaken assumption at the heart of those front-page stories.
The silence has sent another message: that the news media believes that something as fundamental to democracy as making sure the person with the most votes wins is a kind of trivial pursuit interesting only to Gore “partisans.” In this time of crisis, the news media seems to be saying, it isn't important that the occupant of the White House got there in an anti-democratic fashion -- and if that happens to be the case, it's best not to talk about it…
Why, many Americans wonder, is the national press corps acting in a way that seems so disrespectful of the democratic process? The answer is, partly at least, fear and self-interest.
While conservatives continue to charge that the national news media has a “liberal” bias, the reality for at least the past two decades has been that working journalists who got labeled “liberal” or who offended the powerful conservative establishment in Washington could expect their careers to be damaged, if not terminated, as occurred in the CNN and Webb cases.
As self-protection, journalists therefore have learned to bend over backwards to avoid offending conservatives. Journalists have no similar fear of liberal press critics…
Neither they nor any of the other reporters who demonstrated unprofessional hostility toward Gore have suffered the fates of the CNN producers on the poison-gas story or Gary Webb on the contra-crack stories. [For the most detailed coverage of the Gore exaggeration topic, see the archives at Bob Somerby’s Daily Howler Web site.]
To make this caricature of Gore as a pathological liar stand out in even starker contrast, the campaign press corps chose to ignore or play down exaggerations and even outright lies told by Bush and his running mate, Dick Cheney…
The anti-Gore bias carried into the
post-election battle for a full-and-fair count of the Florida votes. From the
start, commentators leaned heavily on Gore to concede, though his lead in the
popular vote was swelling to over a half million votes and he was only a few
votes shy of a majority in the Electoral College even without Florida.
But the most fitting final comment on
Election 2000 may be the silence of major news outlets in the face of evidence
that they misreported the results of their own recount – and in doing so,
awarded legitimacy to George W. Bush, the man who lost the election but won the
White House…
[Parry doesn’t mention the main reason why reporters were so hard on
Gore and so easy on Bush. If you
haven’t read Democracy,
General Electric Style, it’s time you did.—Caro]
Chicago Reader
C O V E R F E A T U R E
Stand
By Your Man
(archived at MakeThemAccountable.com)
For the last year Carolyn Kay has
devoted her life to proving that Al Gore should be president. Now she knows she
was right.
Author: Tori Marlan Date: November 16, 2001 Appeared in Section 1 Word count: 2609
In mid-September, a consortium of news organizations announced that it was postponing its analysis of the ballots that were cast but not counted in Florida during the mess that was the 2000 presidential election. The decision didn't sit well with those who were eagerly awaiting proof that George W. Bush had stolen the election. Word quickly traveled the Internet that Al Gore had won and won big, and that the media had spiked the story to avoid undermining the legitimacy of a suddenly popular president who was leading the nation to war.
Propagating these ideas--perhaps with more success than anyone--was a late-blooming activist from the South Loop named Carolyn Kay. The 57-year-old Kay, who grew up in Louisiana and all but slept through the civil rights movement, seems like an unlikely lefty. She worked at USO recreation centers in Vietnam during the war and got an MBA in the late 70s. She didn't care about politics until the "Gingrich revolution" of the mid-90s. She got "furious" during President Clinton's impeachment trial and "frightened" by the 2000 presidential campaign, when, she says, "it became apparent to me that the mainstream media had joined the Bush camp." The media reported "every outrageous lie the Bush team came up with about Gore, and when they were proven to be false no one retracted them," she says, mentioning articles that claimed Gore said he'd invented the Internet.
Kay turned to the Web and the alternative and foreign press for campaign coverage she could trust, and she began distributing her findings to family and friends in an E-mail newsletter. A month before the election, with opinion polls predicting a tight race, she realized she needed to reach a wider audience. A freelance computer consultant, Kay drew on her technical skills to create Make Them Accountable, a Web site intent on holding "politicians accountable for their actions" and "the news media accountable for their conservative bias." She posts--and comments on--excerpts of previously published articles, publishes her own original pieces as well as original pieces by like-minded contributors, and promotes specific political actions, such as boycotts and letter-writing campaigns. Visitors to www.makethemaccountable.com can also listen to daily commentaries in which Kay expounds on "whatever moves me" or "makes me angry."
One thing that made Kay angry shortly after she launched her Web site was the
U.S. Supreme Court's decision to halt the limited manual recount that was under
way in a few select counties in Florida. Several days later, on December 12, the
Supreme Court found the recount unconstitutional, in part because the state had
no uniform standards for determining what constituted a legal vote. The ruling
left Bush with a compromised victory--and Kay with a renewed sense of outrage.
The way she saw it, democracy had been dealt a crippling blow: in America, every
vote was supposed to count…
