World Can't Wait: November 2, NYC
Stanley W. Rogouski | 01.11.2005 22:04 | Analysis
On November 2nd, in over 60 cities across the country, including high schools and colleges in many of these cities, The World Can’t Wait Drive Out the Bush Regime will launch what it claims is "the first national movement in American history dedicated to driving a sitting president out of office."
World Can't Wait: November 2, NYC
World Can't Wait says its call "is to leave work, leave school, and make history, to participate in a national series of events."
By Stanley W. Rogouski
www.worldcantwait.org
Keywords: Alternatives, Analysis, Local, Activism,
On November 2nd, in over 60 cities across the country including high schools and colleges in many of these cities, The World Can’t Wait Drive Out the Bush Regime launches the first national movement in American history dedicated to driving a sitting president out of office. Our call is to leave work, leave school, and make history, to participate in a national series of events, demonstrations, direct action, to begin a mass movement that will have, as its eventual goal, to drive Bush out of power and out of out lives.
Don't stand on the sidelines; don't stay in school. Join this movement, the stronger we are on the 2nd, the stronger the movement will be after the 2nd. Send this email to your friends, your lists, and everyone you know that wants to change the direction this country is being led. The future of the planet depends on our action now. Check out the web site at www.worldcantwait.org.
212-969-0772
Rally 12pm at Union Square (14th Street).
March west on 14th, up on 8th Ave to End at Times Square.
Speakers include: Rev. Luis Barrios- St. Mary's Episcopal Church, Jodie Evans-Code Pink, Rev. Earl Kooperkamp-St. Mary's Episcopal Church, Lynne Stewart-Criminal Defense Attorney, Tom Duane- New York State Senator, Still We Rise Coalition, Esther Kaplan- author “With God on Our Side”
The Staten Island meetup Spot for all High School Students will be at Borough Hall. We will be gathering on the Richmond Terrace side of the building. 9:30 am for the 10 am ferry;10:00 am for the 10:30 ferry;10:30 am for the 11:00 ferry Student Leaders Needed: contact
jason@tellercreations.com
http://www.nycwcw.blogspot.com/
Schools Walking Out in NYC!
Hunter College West: 11:00 a.m 68th and Lexington- hunterworldcantwait@yahoo.com
New York University: 11:30 a.m Washington Square Park Fountain, march to Union Square Organizing Meetings: Fridays at 5PM in Kimmel, 7th floormailto: nyu@worldcantwait.org, 310-503-9372
City College of New York: NAC Building 10:00 A.M 138th st-ccny@worldcantwait.org
Baruch CUNY:11 am 24th and Lexington
Westchester Community College: 10:30 am meets at Court House in White Plains
High Schools Walking Out in NYC
Midwood High School - 9:30 am in front of the school
Roslyn High School - 10:30 am walk out
Saunders High School 9- 9:30 Walkout
Beacon High School - NO SCHOOL
Notre Dame School- 11 am rally 327 W.13th b/w 8th and Hudson
Pablo Neruda Academy- meet at 9:30 am at Parkchester Subway stop
Lehman High School
Bay Ridge High
LaGuardia High School
DeWitt Clinton High School
A Phillip Randolph High School
Leadership High School
Eleanor Roosevelt High school
Union Dale High School- Long Island
Bronx Science
Why don’t we simply wait for the election of 2008 or campaign for Democrats in 2006 and then push them to issue articles of impeachment? Let’s look at what’s fallen down the memory hole since November of 2000.
On November 7th of 2000, Albert Gore Jr. won the election for President of the United States.
A recount in Florida which would have put him over the top was stopped by a riot of Republican congressional staffers, none of whom were ever so much even charged with a crime. How many people remember this? What would have happened to them had they been anti-war protesters trying to disrupt the Republican Convention? Or “Critical Mass” activists trying to organize a bike ride at Union Square? And why didn’t the press cover it?
By the time the case came up before the Supreme Court, it was a moot issue since we had already seen that neither the Gore campaign nor the Democrats would fight the stolen election. Most likely they knew just what an extremist and incompetent president Bush would be and were hoping for the “pendulum to swing”. They were sitting around doing nothing, waiting for Bush to self-destruct, to sweep the Congressional elections in 2002 and to retake the White House in 2004.
Sounds familiar doesn’t it?
The only problem is that Bush and his campaign staff decided not to self-destruct. Once in the White House on January of 2001, they already had a fully developed plan to remake the US government in their image. All they needed was the right excuse. At lunchtime on September 11th, 2001, while the rest of us were still in shock from the worst terrorist attack in American history, the infrastructure put into place all through the first half of 2001 swung into action. The Bush Regime rammed though the Patriot Act. They dusted off their Power Point presentations (the ones with the boxes titled “smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud” and “freedom for the Iraqi people”) and turned them into hard fact. They steamrolled the Democratic Congress in October of 2002 into authorizing them to invade Iraq. They opened up the federal coffers to “faith based” Christian extremists to allow them to build permanent institutions that would carry over even if the Republicans lost in 2004. They unleashed Arial Sharon in the West Bank. The rolled back environmental protections and started taking a sledgehammer to the Wall of church/state separation.
If this all seems familiar, remember, none of this is in dispute and none of it is coming from “left wing extremists”. I’m only repeating what has been well-documented in the “mainstream media” and now by the Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. If you think the rhetoric coming from the “World Can’t Wait” organizers is “unrealistic” or “shrill” or “extreme”, then remember. It’s essentially the same rhetoric that is coming out of mainstream elite liberals like Maureen Dowd or Paul Krugman, the progressive wing of the Democratic Pary, and traditional conservative Republicans like Tom Wilkerson, Brent Scowcroft, Paul O’Neil, Richard Clarke, and Larry Johnson. None of it, not the stolen election in 2000, not the highly suspicious vote in Ohio in 2004, not the marriage of an extremist Evangelical Christian agenda to the federal government, not the manipulation of the press or public opinion, not the cocked up war in Iraq, not the restrictions of civil liberties or the extraordinary decision to ignore long established international regulations on rules of war and treatment of prisoners, none of this is in dispute.
You think I’m exaggerating?
Here’s a quote from the World Can’t Wait’s call:
“People look at all this and think of Hitler — and they are right to do so. The Bush regime is setting out to radically remake society very quickly, in a fascist way, and for generations to come. We must act now; the future is in the balance.”
And here’s a quote from the Senator from Illinois, Dick Durbin:
“If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings.”
Senator Durbin, of course, was bullied into recanting his statement by the Republican “guided” media, the pro-Israeli lobbying infrastructure in Washington, by Chicago democratic boss Richard Daley, and by his own reluctance to lose the power and status
that getting along by going along will give you. Slipping up and telling the truth in Washington isn’t tolerated kindly. And he learned that lesson the hard way.
Durbin apologized and went back to the accepted role of the Democratic Party, which is basically to “sit around and do nothing while Bush self-destructs”.
Durbin joined his fellow Democrats in sitting around and doing nothing while Bush self-destructs and Bill Frist and his fellow evangelical Christian extremists raised the specter of the “nuclear option” to intimidate congress and ram though extremist judges.
Durbin joined the rest of his fellow Democrats in sitting around and doing nothing while Bush self-destructs and voting 97-0 last month to continue funding the war in Iraq (a war which he himself had brought up the image of Fascism and Communist totalitarianism to describe).
Durbin joined his fellow Democrats in sitting around and doing nothing while Bush self-destructs and approving John Roberts as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and setting in place the machinery that’s eventually going to overturn Roe vs. Wade and Griswold. Durbin joined his fellow Democrats in sitting around and doing nothing while Bush self-destructs and the Bush regime continued to torture prisoners at Gitmo.
While Durbin and his fellow Democrats are sitting around doing nothing waiting for Bush to self-destruct, American citizens like Jose Padilla are still being held in jail without being charged with a crime.
And while Senator Durbin and his fellow Democrats sat around and did nothing while they waited for Bush to self-destruct, 2000 American soldiers and anywhere between 25,000 and 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians have died.
I was about to make some snide remark about Senator Durbin, make a joke about him going back to his limo after swallowing his pride, but then I realized that if I don’t take concrete actions to remove Bush from office, I’m much worst then Senator Durbin. At least he dangled the truth in front of us before being smacked down. What have I done?
On my IBM ThinkPad, I have a screensaver. If you’re French, or British, or Canadian, you’ve seen it. If you’re an American, you haven’t. It’s a photo of an Iraqi girl (she’s about 5 or so) covered in blood after watching her parents get slaughtered by American troops in front of her eyes. She’s covered in her parents’ blood. It serves as a reminder. What we’re afraid of in the United States is already hard fact in the rest of the world. What I’m worried about in my little suburb in New Jersey is already hard fact in New Orleans. Every time I think about my worst, most paranoid fears something like police kicking in my door, it’s already a mundane fact of life in Baghdad. That photo is there to remind me. I can’t afford to sit around and do nothing while Bush self-destructs.
And yet, if I’m not subject to the same amount of terror that poor people in the rest of the world are, I can also learn from them.
I can learn from the Ukrainian people, who took to the streets to protest the stolen election in their country. They didn’t sit around and do nothing while the people who stole the election self-destructed.
I can learn from the Indonesian people, who removed Suharto from power in 1998.They didn’t sit around and do nothing while the dictatorship self-destructed.
I can learn from the workers in Poland in the 1980s who overthrow Communist totalitarianism. They didn’t sit around and do nothing while the Stalinist bureaucrats self-destructed.
I can learn from black American in the early 1960s who overthrew the one party totalitarian state in the south, not by voting for Kennedy or the Democrats, but by an extended campaign of putting their lives at risk, breaking unjust laws, and, finally, marching on Washington. Jim Crow didn’t self-destruct while people sat on their asses and did nothing.
Don’t sit around and do nothing. They won’t self-destruct.
By Stanley W. Rogouski 212-969-0772 http://www.rogouski.com/blog/ 212-969-0772
World Can't Wait says its call "is to leave work, leave school, and make history, to participate in a national series of events."
By Stanley W. Rogouski
www.worldcantwait.org
Keywords: Alternatives, Analysis, Local, Activism,
On November 2nd, in over 60 cities across the country including high schools and colleges in many of these cities, The World Can’t Wait Drive Out the Bush Regime launches the first national movement in American history dedicated to driving a sitting president out of office. Our call is to leave work, leave school, and make history, to participate in a national series of events, demonstrations, direct action, to begin a mass movement that will have, as its eventual goal, to drive Bush out of power and out of out lives.
Don't stand on the sidelines; don't stay in school. Join this movement, the stronger we are on the 2nd, the stronger the movement will be after the 2nd. Send this email to your friends, your lists, and everyone you know that wants to change the direction this country is being led. The future of the planet depends on our action now. Check out the web site at www.worldcantwait.org.
212-969-0772
Rally 12pm at Union Square (14th Street).
March west on 14th, up on 8th Ave to End at Times Square.
Speakers include: Rev. Luis Barrios- St. Mary's Episcopal Church, Jodie Evans-Code Pink, Rev. Earl Kooperkamp-St. Mary's Episcopal Church, Lynne Stewart-Criminal Defense Attorney, Tom Duane- New York State Senator, Still We Rise Coalition, Esther Kaplan- author “With God on Our Side”
The Staten Island meetup Spot for all High School Students will be at Borough Hall. We will be gathering on the Richmond Terrace side of the building. 9:30 am for the 10 am ferry;10:00 am for the 10:30 ferry;10:30 am for the 11:00 ferry Student Leaders Needed: contact
jason@tellercreations.com http://www.nycwcw.blogspot.com/ Schools Walking Out in NYC!
Hunter College West: 11:00 a.m 68th and Lexington-
hunterworldcantwait@yahoo.com New York University: 11:30 a.m Washington Square Park Fountain, march to Union Square Organizing Meetings: Fridays at 5PM in Kimmel, 7th floormailto:
nyu@worldcantwait.org, 310-503-9372 City College of New York: NAC Building 10:00 A.M 138th
st-ccny@worldcantwait.org Baruch CUNY:11 am 24th and Lexington
Westchester Community College: 10:30 am meets at Court House in White Plains
High Schools Walking Out in NYC
Midwood High School - 9:30 am in front of the school
Roslyn High School - 10:30 am walk out
Saunders High School 9- 9:30 Walkout
Beacon High School - NO SCHOOL
Notre Dame School- 11 am rally 327 W.13th b/w 8th and Hudson
Pablo Neruda Academy- meet at 9:30 am at Parkchester Subway stop
Lehman High School
Bay Ridge High
LaGuardia High School
DeWitt Clinton High School
A Phillip Randolph High School
Leadership High School
Eleanor Roosevelt High school
Union Dale High School- Long Island
Bronx Science
Why don’t we simply wait for the election of 2008 or campaign for Democrats in 2006 and then push them to issue articles of impeachment? Let’s look at what’s fallen down the memory hole since November of 2000.
On November 7th of 2000, Albert Gore Jr. won the election for President of the United States.
A recount in Florida which would have put him over the top was stopped by a riot of Republican congressional staffers, none of whom were ever so much even charged with a crime. How many people remember this? What would have happened to them had they been anti-war protesters trying to disrupt the Republican Convention? Or “Critical Mass” activists trying to organize a bike ride at Union Square? And why didn’t the press cover it?
By the time the case came up before the Supreme Court, it was a moot issue since we had already seen that neither the Gore campaign nor the Democrats would fight the stolen election. Most likely they knew just what an extremist and incompetent president Bush would be and were hoping for the “pendulum to swing”. They were sitting around doing nothing, waiting for Bush to self-destruct, to sweep the Congressional elections in 2002 and to retake the White House in 2004.
Sounds familiar doesn’t it?
The only problem is that Bush and his campaign staff decided not to self-destruct. Once in the White House on January of 2001, they already had a fully developed plan to remake the US government in their image. All they needed was the right excuse. At lunchtime on September 11th, 2001, while the rest of us were still in shock from the worst terrorist attack in American history, the infrastructure put into place all through the first half of 2001 swung into action. The Bush Regime rammed though the Patriot Act. They dusted off their Power Point presentations (the ones with the boxes titled “smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud” and “freedom for the Iraqi people”) and turned them into hard fact. They steamrolled the Democratic Congress in October of 2002 into authorizing them to invade Iraq. They opened up the federal coffers to “faith based” Christian extremists to allow them to build permanent institutions that would carry over even if the Republicans lost in 2004. They unleashed Arial Sharon in the West Bank. The rolled back environmental protections and started taking a sledgehammer to the Wall of church/state separation.
If this all seems familiar, remember, none of this is in dispute and none of it is coming from “left wing extremists”. I’m only repeating what has been well-documented in the “mainstream media” and now by the Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. If you think the rhetoric coming from the “World Can’t Wait” organizers is “unrealistic” or “shrill” or “extreme”, then remember. It’s essentially the same rhetoric that is coming out of mainstream elite liberals like Maureen Dowd or Paul Krugman, the progressive wing of the Democratic Pary, and traditional conservative Republicans like Tom Wilkerson, Brent Scowcroft, Paul O’Neil, Richard Clarke, and Larry Johnson. None of it, not the stolen election in 2000, not the highly suspicious vote in Ohio in 2004, not the marriage of an extremist Evangelical Christian agenda to the federal government, not the manipulation of the press or public opinion, not the cocked up war in Iraq, not the restrictions of civil liberties or the extraordinary decision to ignore long established international regulations on rules of war and treatment of prisoners, none of this is in dispute.
You think I’m exaggerating?
Here’s a quote from the World Can’t Wait’s call:
“People look at all this and think of Hitler — and they are right to do so. The Bush regime is setting out to radically remake society very quickly, in a fascist way, and for generations to come. We must act now; the future is in the balance.”
And here’s a quote from the Senator from Illinois, Dick Durbin:
“If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings.”
Senator Durbin, of course, was bullied into recanting his statement by the Republican “guided” media, the pro-Israeli lobbying infrastructure in Washington, by Chicago democratic boss Richard Daley, and by his own reluctance to lose the power and status
that getting along by going along will give you. Slipping up and telling the truth in Washington isn’t tolerated kindly. And he learned that lesson the hard way.
Durbin apologized and went back to the accepted role of the Democratic Party, which is basically to “sit around and do nothing while Bush self-destructs”.
Durbin joined his fellow Democrats in sitting around and doing nothing while Bush self-destructs and Bill Frist and his fellow evangelical Christian extremists raised the specter of the “nuclear option” to intimidate congress and ram though extremist judges.
Durbin joined the rest of his fellow Democrats in sitting around and doing nothing while Bush self-destructs and voting 97-0 last month to continue funding the war in Iraq (a war which he himself had brought up the image of Fascism and Communist totalitarianism to describe).
Durbin joined his fellow Democrats in sitting around and doing nothing while Bush self-destructs and approving John Roberts as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and setting in place the machinery that’s eventually going to overturn Roe vs. Wade and Griswold. Durbin joined his fellow Democrats in sitting around and doing nothing while Bush self-destructs and the Bush regime continued to torture prisoners at Gitmo.
While Durbin and his fellow Democrats are sitting around doing nothing waiting for Bush to self-destruct, American citizens like Jose Padilla are still being held in jail without being charged with a crime.
And while Senator Durbin and his fellow Democrats sat around and did nothing while they waited for Bush to self-destruct, 2000 American soldiers and anywhere between 25,000 and 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians have died.
I was about to make some snide remark about Senator Durbin, make a joke about him going back to his limo after swallowing his pride, but then I realized that if I don’t take concrete actions to remove Bush from office, I’m much worst then Senator Durbin. At least he dangled the truth in front of us before being smacked down. What have I done?
On my IBM ThinkPad, I have a screensaver. If you’re French, or British, or Canadian, you’ve seen it. If you’re an American, you haven’t. It’s a photo of an Iraqi girl (she’s about 5 or so) covered in blood after watching her parents get slaughtered by American troops in front of her eyes. She’s covered in her parents’ blood. It serves as a reminder. What we’re afraid of in the United States is already hard fact in the rest of the world. What I’m worried about in my little suburb in New Jersey is already hard fact in New Orleans. Every time I think about my worst, most paranoid fears something like police kicking in my door, it’s already a mundane fact of life in Baghdad. That photo is there to remind me. I can’t afford to sit around and do nothing while Bush self-destructs.
And yet, if I’m not subject to the same amount of terror that poor people in the rest of the world are, I can also learn from them.
I can learn from the Ukrainian people, who took to the streets to protest the stolen election in their country. They didn’t sit around and do nothing while the people who stole the election self-destructed.
I can learn from the Indonesian people, who removed Suharto from power in 1998.They didn’t sit around and do nothing while the dictatorship self-destructed.
I can learn from the workers in Poland in the 1980s who overthrow Communist totalitarianism. They didn’t sit around and do nothing while the Stalinist bureaucrats self-destructed.
I can learn from black American in the early 1960s who overthrew the one party totalitarian state in the south, not by voting for Kennedy or the Democrats, but by an extended campaign of putting their lives at risk, breaking unjust laws, and, finally, marching on Washington. Jim Crow didn’t self-destruct while people sat on their asses and did nothing.
Don’t sit around and do nothing. They won’t self-destruct.
By Stanley W. Rogouski 212-969-0772
http://www.rogouski.com/blog/ 212-969-0772
Stanley W. Rogouski
e-mail:
212-969-0772
Homepage:
http://www.worldcantwait.org
Comments
Hide the following 2 comments
Lessons to learn
02.11.2005 00:08
I opposed the war in Iraq before it started and I oppose it now.
I'd agree that the 2001 election result was a sham; Bush should never have been appointed in the first place.
But there isn't any doubt who won in 2004.
You might not like the choice of the American people and you might not like what's happened as a consequence. But I hope you'll have the common sense to want it more than a civil war and will have the good patience to spend the next three years trying to persuade people to vote differently next time.
If you believe that the situation is so extreme that it requires you to tear up the rule book and employ exceptional measures, all I can observe is that you seem to have learned your political philosophy from your own president.
By the way, this is a British website. Do you expect us to walk out of school to bring down your president too?
Zorro
Vote Machine Hacked, no paper trail, Bush actucaully lost election
02.11.2005 21:46
...also I am aware this is a Brit website...maybe you guys could bring down Tony Blair using the same tactices?
Published on Saturday, November 6, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked
by Thom Hartmann
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 some believe 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
Also See:
Florida Secretary of State Presidential Results by County 11/02/2004 (.pdf)
Florida Secretary of State County Registration by Party 2/9/2004 (.pdf)
While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking – the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.
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 9,676 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 counties where optical scanners were used. 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 touch-screen counties, where investigators may have been more vigorously looking for such anomalies, high percentages of registered Democrats generally equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry. (I had earlier reported that county size was a variable – this turns out not to be the case. Just the use of touch-screens versus optical scanners.)
More visual analysis of the results can be seen at
One possible explanation for this is the "Dixiecrat" theory, that in Florida white voters (particularly the rural ones) have been registered as Democrats for years, but voting Republican since Reagan. Looking at the 2000 statistics, also available on Dopp's site, there are similar anomalies, although the trends are not as strong as in 2004. But some suggest the 2000 election may have been questionable in Florida, too.
One of the people involved in Dopp's analysis noted that it may be possible to determine the validity of the "rural Democrat" theory by comparing Florida's white rural counties to those of Pennsylvania, another swing state but one that went for Kerry, as the exit polls there predicted. Interestingly, the Pennsylvania analysis, available at
Even more significantly, Dopp had first run the analysis while filtering out smaller (rural) counties, and still found that the only variable that accounted for a swing toward Republican voting was the use of optical-scan machines, whereas counties with touch-screen machines generally didn't swing - regardless of size.
Others offer similar insights, based on other data. A professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, noted that in Florida the vote to raise the minimum wage was approved by 72%, although Kerry got 48%. "The correlation between voting for the minimum wage increase and voting for Kerry isn't likely to be perfect," he noted, "but one would normally expect that the gap - of 1.5 million votes - to be far smaller than it was."
While all of this may or may not be evidence of vote tampering, it again brings the nation back to the question of why several states using electronic voting machines or scanners programmed by private, for-profit corporations and often connected to modems produced votes inconsistent with exit poll numbers.
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.) And they had left no tracks whatsoever, Harris said, noting that it would be nearly impossible for the election software – or a County election official - to know that the vote database had been altered.
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.
According to congressional candidate Fisher, 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."
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."
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