It’s interesting how much was clarified in the first hours of the war. On Thursday, the Palestine Liberation Front released a statement announcing the identity of the first verified casualty: PLF “1st Lieutenant” Ahmed Walid Raguib al-Baz was killed in Baghdad, “while confronting the treacherous US air bombardment on Iraq”.
The PLF is the terrorist group that, among other triumphs, hijacked the Achille Lauro back in the 1980s and pushed Leon Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-bound American Jew, into the Mediterranean.
What was a PLF terrorist doing attending a war council of Saddam’s inner circle in Baghdad? Well, I leave that to all the experts who’ve assured us that Baghdad has no ties to terror groups.
That was just the first of several myths to fall in the opening shots. If Hans Blix and Jacques Chirac are really interested in continuing with inspections, some of those missiles the Iraqis insisted they no longer have are now available for inspection in the sand on the Kuwaiti side of the border.
Andrew Lazarus
Speaking for myself, I’ve never denied Saddam’s connections to Palestinian terror groups. (Iran and Syria have similar ties.)
What I deny is a conneciton between Saddam AND THE 9/11 ATTACKS AND AL QAEDA. There is ZERO evidence for this.
Is this so hard to understand?
Jeff
Right, there are no ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda except for those iddy, biddy terrorist training camps (http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,779359,00.html) and sheltering known Al Qaeda terrorists. Not to mention, his placing a $25,000 reward for the families of suicide bombers. Although this last example has nothing to do with 9/11, it does demonstrate that perhaps the world might be better off without Saddam.
Andrew Lazarus
Ansar al-Islam thrives in *KURDISH IRAQ*, in the Northern no-fly zone. Saddam’s writ no longer runs there. BBC Story http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2146517.stm .
Did you not know this, or do you just repeat approved talking points regardless of their accuracy??
The question is really not whether the world would be better off without Saddam. It would probably also be better off without Mugabe, whoever is running Burma right now, and maybe Castro. In someplaces, maybe they think GW Bush needs to be taken out. The question, to my mind, is whether the (barely elected) President of the United States has the right to depose anyone else in the world at his whim. Kinsley on this: http://msnbc.com/news/888245.asp?0dm=O1AWO
John Cole
Clearly, the world would be a better place without all of those actors, save Bush. The world would also be better if Michael Kinsley were gainfully employed. I quit reading him three years ago (he has become a self-contradicting pedant), but thanks for the link.
Jeff
I had no idea that enforcing decades of violations of numerous UN violations constituted a “whim.” I guess this war must also be at the “whim” of Tony Blair who “whimsically” laid out in excruciating detail the basis for this war at (http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/story/0,11538,916789,00.html) In part, Blair “whimsically” noted:
So let me explain the nature of this threat as I see it.
The threat today is not that of the 1930s. It’s not big powers going to war with each other. The ravages which fundamentalist political ideology inflicted on the 20th century are memories. The Cold war is over. Europe is at peace, if not always diplomatically.
But the world is ever more interdependent. Stock markets and economies rise and fall together. Confidence is the key to prosperity. Insecurity spreads like contagion. So people crave stability and order.
The threat is chaos. And there are two begetters of chaos. Tyrannical regimes with WMD and extreme terrorist groups who profess a perverted and false view of Islam.
Let me tell the house what I know. I know that there are some countries or groups within countries that are proliferating and trading in WMD, especially nuclear weapons technology.
I know there are companies, individuals, some former scientists on nuclear weapons programmes, selling their equipment or expertise.
I know there are several countries – mostly dictatorships with highly repressive regimes – desperately trying to acquire chemical weapons, biological weapons or, in particular, nuclear weapons capability. Some of these countries are now a short time away from having a serviceable nuclear weapon. This activity is not diminishing. It is increasing.
We all know that there are terrorist cells now operating in most major countries. Just as in the last two years, around 20 different nations have suffered serious terrorist outrages. Thousands have died in them.
The purpose of terrorism lies not just in the violent act itself. It is in producing terror. It sets out to inflame, to divide, to produce consequences which they then use to justify further terror.
Round the world it now poisons the chances of political progress: in the Middle East; in Kashmir; in Chechnya; in Africa.
The removal of the Taliban in Afghanistan dealt it a blow. But it has not gone away.
And these two threats have different motives and different origins but they share one basic common view: they detest the freedom, democracy and tolerance that are the hallmarks of our way of life.
At the moment, I accept that association between them is loose. But it is hardening.
And the possibility of the two coming together – of terrorist groups in possession of WMD, even of a so-called dirty radiological bomb is now, in my judgement, a real and present danger.
And let us recall: what was shocking about September 11 was not just the slaughter of the innocent; but the knowledge that had the terrorists been able to, there would have been not 3,000 innocent dead, but 30,000 or 300,000 and the more the suffering, the greater the terrorists’ rejoicing.
Also, is “barely elected” sort of like being a “little bit pregnant”?
Andrew Lazarus
The easy one, barely elected means fraudulently. But I’ll let that lie.
Tony Blair’s support for the Iraq war is one of the legitimate arguments in its favor. Unlike Bush, he’s hardly doing it to distract and fragment the domestic opposition party. You’ll notice that Blair refers to the possibility that Iraq and Al Qaeda might come together IN THE FUTURE. Under the constraints imposed by the UN, this seems unlikely. George Bush continues to maintain, in the face of all his intelligence agencies’ work, that Saddam and Al Qaeda are already allied, and that Saddam participated in some way in the 9/11 attacks. That just doesn’t appear to be so. (Indeed, there’s much more evidence that Bush’s good friends in Saudia were involved.)
And, yes, I mean “whim”. Our ally Turkey and our ally Israel are in violation of UN Resolutions: that’s not the but-for cause here.
We are not invading Iraq because it participated in 9/11. (We invaded Afghanistan for that, and with my support.) AND WE ARE NOT INVADING IRAQ BECAUSE OF ITS VIOLATION OF UN RESOLUTIONS. Indeed, we haven’t found any of those promised WMD, although this could change. We didn’t invade Iraq because Saddam is a horrific sadist; indeed we boast the support of Uzbekistan, whose human rights record is only very slightly better. It’s logically possible that even though we MANIFESTALLY aren’t invading Iraq for any ONE of these reason, we are invading it because of all three put together, plus the fact that unlike North Korea it’s a military weakling. But I have another explanation. We appear, frankly, to have invaded Iraq precisely to show the rest of the world that America is so powerful it can remove Saddam Hussein whether they like it or not. So George Bush picks Iraq, Jeb Bush will pick Cuba, and Noelle Bush will take over Colombia. I can’t wait.
Suman Palit
thats interesting.. didn’t know that the PLF was active in Iraq..
Andrew Lazarus
I only now made it to the end of the quotation from Mr Steyn.
“If Hans Blix and Jacques Chirac are really interested in continuing with inspections, some of those missiles the Iraqis insisted they no longer have are now available for inspection in the sand on the Kuwaiti side of the border.”
Except they turned out NOT to be banned missiles. Did Steyn get caught up in an unconfirmed rumor, or is he dusting off some old Rape of Belgian Nuns stories with a new twist.
John Cole
At the time he wrote it, they were being reported as SCUDS.
John Cole
At the time he wrote it, they were being reported as SCUDS.
Leroy
“The easy one, barely elected means fraudulently. But I’ll let that lie.”
Of course you’ll let it lie, because like all of your ilk, you have nothing to stand on. Electoral college? Recount? Supremem Court? Nothing, absolutely nothing to stand on except your tounges and the bad taste you have in your mouths and the reason there is even an anti war movement. Forget 1998 did you? Or Kosovo?
Your sentiment is pretty normal (as well as not knowing how the electoral process works)for liberals and demorats, but is incredibly dubious and has no ground to stand on. Many Americans are uneducated in this area (of electoral college) and thusly spurn the thought of actually getting involved in politics. Politics have become very confusing since the activisim of the 60’s and the judicial creation of laws instead of the legislation of them. The Federal judiciary has come to rule this country and pretty much made the voice of the people inept.
At first there were three ideas for choosing a POTUS. The Congress picks em, the State Legislature picks em or the popular vote of the people pick em. The framers took the third idea and made it work. Direct election, or pure popular vote, was rejected because people would naturally vote for who they knew, and the landscape of electors would be enormous and regional. This could easily lead to an election without a POTUS elected because no one would emerge with a popular majority sufficeint to govern the entire country. Then there was the problem with the most populous states and cities being the deciding class, thus leaving the rest of the population of the country out in the pasture. A candidate could easily win popular vote by simply campaigning in the largest cities and leaving the will and the opinion of the rest of the population to flounder, because it’s worth was next to nil.So the electoral college was created, and using each state’s popular vote, the people still decide the POTUS, even though through pure popular vote, the challenger can still have more votes. It’s a way of making ‘all men equal’.
Still, the electoral college, created by the Founding Fathers to keep all of the states equal, works like this –
Each State is allocated a number of Electors equal to the number of its U.S. Senators (always 2) plus the number of its U.S. Representatives (which may change each decade according to the size of each State’s population as determined in the Census). The political parties (or independent candidates) in each State submit to the State’s chief election official a list of individuals pledged to their candidate for president and equal in number to the State’s electoral vote. Usually, the major political parties select these individuals either in their State party conventions or through appointment by their State party leaders while third parties and independent candidates merely designate theirs. Members of Congress and employees of the federal government are prohibited from serving as an Elector in order to maintain the balance between the legislative and executive branches of the federal government.
After their caucuses and primaries, the major parties nominate their candidates for president and vice president in their national conventions traditionally held in the summer preceding the election. (Third parties and independent candidates follow different procedures according to the individual State laws). The names of the duly nominated candidates are then officially submitted to each State’s chief election official so that they might appear on the general election ballot.
On the Tuesday following the first Monday of November in years divisible by four, the people in each State cast their ballots for the party slate of Electors representing their choice for president and vice president (although as a matter of practice, general election ballots normally say “Electors for” each set of candidates rather than list the individual Electors on each slate). Whichever party slate wins the most popular votes in the State becomes that State’s Electors-so that, in effect, whichever presidential ticket gets the most popular votes in a State wins all the Electors of that State. [The two exceptions to this are Maine and Nebraska where two Electors are chosen by statewide popular vote and the remainder by the popular vote within each Congressional district]. On the Monday following the second Wednesday of December (as established in federal law) each State’s Electors meet in their respective State capitals and cast their electoral votes-one for president and one for vice president. In order to prevent Electors from voting only for “favorite sons” of their home State, at least one of their votes must be for a person from outside their State (though this is seldom a problem since the parties have consistently nominated presidential and vice presidential candidates from different States). The electoral votes are then sealed and transmitted from each State to the President of the Senate who, on the following January 6, opens and reads them before both houses of the Congress. The candidate for president with the most electoral votes, provided that it is an absolute majority (one over half of the total), is declared president. Similarly, the vice presidential candidate with the absolute majority of electoral votes is declared vice president. In the event no one obtains an absolute majority of electoral votes for president, the U.S. House of Representatives (as the chamber closest to the people) selects the president from among the top three contenders with each State casting only one vote and an absolute majority of the States being required to elect. Similarly, if no one obtains an absolute majority for vice president, then the U.S. Senate makes the selection from among the top two contenders for that office.
Being unhappy with the government at the time often leads to change. It’s people that don’t call their senators and don’t write them letters that eventually add to the apathy of the citizenry concerning the state, and add to the state the power over the citizenry. Don’t like a judical appointment? Let your congresscritter know, especially if they are on the judiciary committee? Don’t like that a judge’s nomination was squashed? Call and write. Don’t like a state or federal law, at least try to extend your opinon to the lawmakers and legislaters.
So you may feel that way about how the POTUS got in, but it’s not really how things work.
The electoral college did not ‘crown’ Bush, it’s simply the way it works. The college could have cast the votes differently than what their states citizenry voted in some states, but I believe it’s only been done one time in our entire history. You see the electors are chosen the same day the candidates for POTUS are, depending on the party. Do you think the Republicans, having won the electoral college, thusly winning enough elector postions would instead vote for Gore, against the wishes of their states constituents and citizens? No of course not. This is the one single problem that the system has against third parties, as well as the criteria created for federal matching funds in the general election.
Here are the states that are not bound by law to cast their votes for the candidate that won the popular vote –
ARIZONA – 8 Electoral Votes
ARKANSAS – 6 Electoral Votes
DELAWARE – 3 Electoral Votes
GEORGIA – 13 Electoral Votes
IDAHO – 4 Electoral Votes
ILLINOIS – 22 Electoral Votes
INDIANA – 12 Electoral Votes
IOWA – 7 Electoral Votes
KANSAS – 6 Electoral Votes
KENTUCKY – 8 Electoral Votes
LOUISIANA – 9 Electoral Votes
MINNESOTA – 10 Electoral Votes
MISSOURI – 11 Electoral Votes
NEW HAMPSHIRE – 4 Electoral Votes
NEW JERSEY – 15 Electoral Votes
NEW YORK – 33 Electoral Votes
NORTH DAKOTA – 3 Electoral Votes
PENNSYLVANIA – 23 Electoral Votes
RHODE ISLAND – 4 Electoral Votes
SOUTH DAKOTA – 3 Electoral Votes
TENNESSEE – 11 Electoral Votes
TEXAS – 32 Electoral Votes
UTAH – 5 Electoral Votes
WEST VIRGINIA – 5 Electoral Votes
These are the states that the electors are bound by state law or pledge to cast their vote for the winning popular vote candidate –
ALABAMA – 9 Electoral Votes
Party Pledge / State Law – &#sect; 17-19-2
ALASKA – 3 Electoral Votes
Party Pledge / State Law – &#sect; 15.30.040; 15.30.070
CALIFORNIA – 54 Electoral Votes
State Law – &#sect; 6906
COLORADO – 8 Electoral Votes
State Law – &#sect; 1-4-304
CONNECTICUT – 8 Electoral Votes
State Law &#sect; 9-175
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA – 3 Electoral Votes
DC Pledge / DC Law – &#sect; 1-1312(g)
FLORIDA – 25 Electoral Votes
Party Pledge / State Law – &#sect; 103.021(1)
HAWAII – 4 Electoral Votes
State Law – &#sect;&#sect; 14-26 to 14-28
MAINE – 4 Electoral Votes
State Law – &#sect; 805
MARYLAND – 10 Electoral Votes
State Law – &#sect; 20-4
MASSACHUSETTS – 12 Electoral Votes
Party Pledge / State Law – Ch. 53, &#sect; 8, Supp.
MICHIGAN – 18 Electoral Votes
State Law – &#sect;168.47 (Violation cancels vote and elector is replaced).
MISSISSIPPI – 7 Electoral Votes
Party Pledge / State Law – &#sect;23-15-785(3)
MONTANA – 3 Electoral Votes
State Law – &#sect;13-25-104
NEBRASKA – 5 Electoral Votes
State Law – &#sect; 32-714
NEVADA – 4 Electoral Votes
State Law – &#sect; 298.050
NEW MEXICO – 5 Electoral Votes
State Law – &#sect; 1-15-5 to 1-15-9 (Violation is a fourth degree felony.)
NORTH CAROLINA – 14 Electoral Votes
State Law – &#sect; 163-212 (Violation cancels vote; elector is replaced and is subject to $500 fine.)
OHIO – 21 Electoral Votes
State Law – &#sect; 3505.40
OKLAHOMA – 8 Electoral Votes
State Pledge / State Law – 26, &#sect;&#sect; 10-102; 10-109 (Violation of oath is a misdemeanor, carrying a fine of up to $1000.)
OREGON – 7 Electoral Votes
State Pledge / State Law – &#sect; 248.355
SOUTH CAROLINA – 8 Electoral Votes
State Pledge / State Law – &#sect; 7-19-80 (Replacement and criminal sanctions for violation.)
VERMONT – 3 Electoral Votes
State Law – title 17, &#sect; 2732
VIRGINIA – 13 Electoral Votes
State Law – &#sect; 24.1-162 (Virginia statute may be advisory – “Shall be expected” to vote for nominees.)
WASHINGTON – 11 Electoral Votes
Party Pledge / State Law – &#sect;&#sect; 29.71.020, 29.71.040, Supp. ($1000 fine.)
WISCONSIN – 11 Electoral Votes
State Law – &#sect; 7.75
WYOMING – 3 Electoral Votes
State Law – &#sect;&#sect; 22-19-106; 22-19-108
So then, even though it may seem to the normal guy on the street that mob rules or true Democrasy should be the way to go, this is a Constitutional Republic and the electoral college gives the votes of everyone from the big states and cities to the small states and rural farmland, the same weight. Heck over 700 times in our history, a request or idea for overhaul of the electoral college has been put before Congress. It seems lawyers want to see it done away with, and that political historians can show why it shouldn’t. Over 80% of the US citizens don’t understand how the electoral college works and why it works, so in the end they may indeed get the government to change it. But by that time, I’m guessing our little reign here on earth will have passed or it’ll be a global undertaking, not a sovereign nation’s.
Here’s something I found interesting. It is about the outright foreknowledge of the need for a recount by Gore’s staffers and was headed by Joe Sandler, a lawyer that deals exclusivlely in election recount suits.
“WEST PALM BEACH, FLORIDA
If Al Gore eventually wins Florida and the presidency, historians will likely trace his victory to the early morning hours after he retracted his concession to George W. Bush. In those crucial first hours of November 8, while the Bush campaign was still waiting for the results of Florida’s first tally, Team Gore was already beginning to fight a recount the same way it fought the campaign itself: ferociously.
Gore’s advisers had actually begun preparing for a recount battle even before Election Day. Weeks before November 7, Joe Sandler, the Democratic National Committee’s general counsel and the lawyer who helped defend Maryland Governor Parris Glendening against a recount challenge in 1994, had convened a team to draft a memo on recount laws in every state that might be close. Late on election night, in the Nashville campaign bunker dubbed “the boiler room,” Sandler’s memo became Team Gore’s initial operations manual. “We knew that [Florida] was going to be a battleground,” says one Gore recount staffer. “We knew that the law required the canvass to start the next day. We knew that we needed people there to watch the canvass.”
Working from a Rolodex of Democratic faithful, Gore staff began putting together a team of field operatives and lawyers to fan out across Florida in search of voting irregularities. “We got as many down there as quick as we could,” says one coordinator of the effort. Many of the Gore campaign’s get-out-the-vote personnel moved instantly to the recount effort. Jill Alper, the former DNC political director who helped mastermind the Democrats’ successful voter-turnout program in 1998, sent dozens of lawyers and get-out-the-vote operatives to Florida on Joe Lieberman’s campaign plane. (The plane touched down in Tallahassee at the same time as Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s plane from Texas.) A trio of operatives from national field director Michael Whouley’s hometown of Boston also pitched in. John Sasso, once Michael Dukakis’s chief strategist, is leading recount efforts in Broward County, while Dukakis’s former field director, Charlie Baker, is working in Gore’s Tallahassee recount headquarters. Jack Corrigan, a Gore campaign lawyer and another former top Dukakis aide who has witnessed several election recounts, is in Palm Beach. Having failed to take back the House or the Senate, many Democrats see the Florida mission as a final crusade. “You pick up the phone and say, `We need you to get on the plane, we need you there now,’ and they are there,” says one of Whouley’s aides. “It was really quite moving.”
The Gore campaign didn’t just send people to Florida fast; it sent the party’s top recount experts. In preparation for the incredibly close election, the DNC’s Sandler had kept several recount specialists on call for election night. Robert Bauer, who worked on the contested elections of Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu in 1996 and Nevada Senator Harry Reid in 1998, was immediately dispatched to the Sunshine State. Another recount expert, Chris Sautter, had been asked to spend election night in Nashville in preparation for just such an eventuality. He ended up staying in Washington, but at 4 a.m. on November 8 he got a call from campaign headquarters. “They told me to take a 7:30 a.m. flight to Tallahassee,” Sautter recalls. He dropped everything and packed his bags for Florida.
Sautter is a veteran of some of the nastiest and most famous recount battles of recent years. He represented Democrat Frank McCloskey in a recount effort in the 1984 race for Indiana’s eighth congressional district against Republican Richard McIntyre. The contest became known as the “bloody eighth”: Although the Indiana secretary of state declared McIntyre the winner, Congress, which has the final word in congressional recounts, seated McCloskey. Sautter also helped Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder fend off a recount challenge in his 1989 election, and, along with Bauer, Sautter defended Representative Sam Gejdenson in a 1994 recount that Gejdenson ultimately won in the Connecticut Supreme Court. Sautter also helped California’s Loretta Sanchez after defeated Republican Representative Bob Dornan challenged her victory in 1996.
Along with Timothy Downs and Jack Young, both attorneys now working for the Gore recount committee, Sautter wrote a book in 1994 called The Recount Primer in which he laid out strategies for just the kind of battle now occurring in Florida. “It’s been pretty much the recount guide for Democratic candidates since then,” says Sautter. He has been passing out numerous copies of the guide to operatives since he arrived in Florida, and it has served as the political corollary to the DNC legal memo the Gore campaign relied upon on election night.
The Gore campaign’s efforts have closely tracked Sautter’s recommendations, which he summarized in a 1990 article for Campaigns and Elections that later served as the basis for his book. “The best advice to give any candidate unlucky enough to be caught in a recount is to hire a good lawyer,” Sautter wrote then. “But you can’t conduct a recount without organization. Many recounts–like many close campaigns–are won in the trenches with dedicated, low-paid field staff and volunteers fighting for votes one at a time.” That’s exactly the kind of minutiae the Gore campaign has been focusing on in Florida–for instance, going to court in Palm Beach this week to demand that “dimpled” chads be counted as votes after the county adopted a stricter standard. “Practically every recount turns up missed ballots,” writes Sautter, who advises candidates to search for signs of voter intent.
Other advice from Sautter’s 1990 article is also clearly being followed in Florida. He wrote, presciently, “When razor-thin margins separate candidates on election night, the final outcome often turns on complex legal maneuverings and an arduous vote recount conducted in the weeks that follow. If your campaign is unprepared to challenge results, it doesn’t stand a chance.” “If you are behind,” he continued, “and there are reliable reports of problems–such as fraud or eligible voters being turned away–which could affect the outcome, invite the press to investigate complaints.” Sound familiar?
To carry out Sautter’s strategy, the first thing the Gore campaign had to do was gather a massive amount of information. “Under direction of the lawyers, the field operatives had their people collect a lot of data,” says one person involved with the recount effort. “You are only as strong in these things as your data. We made it a priority in the first couple of days to collect a lot of info.” The information collected in the field included the method of voting in every county, examples of undercounting, and anecdotal evidence of any irregularities. One of the biggest efforts took place in Palm Beach County, where Democratic lawyers set up shop in a strip mall where thousands of Palm Beach residents came to sign affidavits attesting to their confusion over the infamous butterfly ballot.
All the election data was collected and stored on a computer, which allowed the campaign in the first 48 hours to decide upon the counties in which it would request manual recounts. “We had a graph on the computer with every county and different kinds of info,” says one top recount adviser. The computer graphed the differences in votes between the election-night count and the recount in each county so the campaign staff could see where the biggest net changes had occurred. And then, with the help of information collected in the field, they tried to determine the causes of the changes.
Ironically, at early meetings of senior Gore officials in Florida, including Ron Klain, Warren Christopher, and Bill Daley, some lawyers said the Gore campaign should offer the proposal the vice president would extend a week later–a statewide hand recount. But, according to one participant in the meetings, Gore officials “were disinclined to file in any county that didn’t have a problem.” (Of course, that’s not entirely true, since the Gore team didn’t initially request hand recounts in Republican-leaning counties where there were irregularities.) After the machine recount showed Bush’s lead dropping to around 300 votes, Gore campaign lawyers were privately ecstatic–confident that they would pick up the rest when the ballots were counted by hand. “It’s pretty rare that the majority of changes go toward one candidate,” says one Gore lawyer. “So for us to pick up fourteen or fifteen hundred votes was very encouraging.”
As this article goes to press, the courts are considering whether hand recounts should proceed. Accordingly, the Democrats are busy with the next–and perhaps last–phase of their campaign. In order to make sure every potential Gore vote is counted, Sautter has spent the last week in all four contested counties, training Democratic observers who will watch the canvassing boards recount the ballots. He has trained some 400 Democrats already. The trainees get in-depth lessons about the intricacies of chads and other ballot trivia, so they can spot any Gore vote the county votecounters might miss. Sautter even gives the observers a special form to document any irregularities in the count and provide the campaign with data that could be useful in future court action. The forms show pictures of ballots, which allow the observers actually to record what every challenged ballot looks like. If one of the county workers confuses a dimpled chad with a tri-chad, Gore’s observers will make a note of it. Sautter explains, “For example, if we had a number of pregnant ballots, we could take the notes back and say there was a certain percentage that were pregnant, a certain percentage that comes under the one-chad category, etc. If it goes to court, we can describe everything with some accuracy.” A week after election night, the Democrats’ post-campaign campaign is more than just up and running. Gore staffers think it may already have won the day. As Sautter puts it, with an air of satisfaction, “My job is largely done.” ”
Isn’t it also strange how Dade and Broward, throughout history have been deciding factors in elections, and have become known as the two counties that will show up with 100% turnout for the guy that needs the votes?
Fraudulent. Please, pick a better argument. Even the Supreme Court of the US voted with a majority that Gore’s attorney’s were full of hot air.
Leroy
Dealing with Iraq for more than one reason seems to be a problem with some. Of course legally through the UN it is via international and US law that we end the ceasefire and deal with Saddam as Gore and Clinton, along with various other Democrats demanded we did back in 1998, said we should (and for all the resaons those like Gore, Clinton,Leahy, Kerry and Biden stated). Dealing with Saddam for many reasons is the reason we go now, and the simple fact of helping Blair is why we didn’t go sooner. Resolutions comparing Iraq to Israel? Look them up and understand that one is passive and more or less a suggestion and one is under cease fire and aggressive and a simple and total demand.
To think that Iraq did not help or deal with Al Queada (especially with the evidence of Khallid and the Yousef families most likely being killed and replaced during the 1991 Gulf War) or other terroists is simple blinder caused ignorance. They outright paid homicide bombers in Israel to do their acts, have terrorist camps, and terrorise their own people.
Thinking that they are not a major peice, that if dealt with, will deal a huge blow to terrorism all over the world (meaning Islamist vs western), is short sighted. Dealing with fundamentalist Islamic terrorism that was breeded and helped along by Carter’s lame dealings with it in the late 70’s, in Iraq and thusly impacting the rest of the mid east, would be more than short sighted actually.
Andrew Lazarus
Leroy, your article is on Gore is nonsense. (Did you snarf it from Free Republic?) I think the tipoff was “Even the Supreme Court of the US voted with a majority that Gore’s attorney’s were full of hot air.”
EVEN???!!!??? (Four justices, you may recall, denounced their colleagues as full of hot air.)
I don’t have a problem with the Electoral College, or rather, I might philosophically, but I accept it lawful.
Just to blow a few holes in your theory (1) Bush filed Florida lawsuits before Gore (cash bet if you don’t believe me); (2) Florida law provides an automatic recount in close elections, so hiring recount staff was hardly strange; (3) There wasn’t any provision of Florida law to demand a statewide recount, when Gore suggested he and Bush agree to such a recount Bush refused, and since the fix was in from the very beginning (O’Connor: “Gore won? That’s terrible!”), had such a recount taken place and had Gore won it, the Supreme Court could have thrown it out as unjustified under Florida Law.
You might check out the works of the many CONSERVATIVE legal experts (e.g., now-Judge McConnell) who disparaged the Supreme Court’s “We like Bush better” decision.
This is pretty off-topic for the original post; we should take it elsewhere.