Boxer's Rebellion

In the days leading up to the certification of the Electoral votes in Congress, I wrote to my Senator asking her to stand up and call attention to the issue of voting irregularities. As I live in California and the senator in question is one of the most liberal members of that body, I thought she might, might have the strength of character to do so. She didn't four years ago following the Florida debacle but Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 called attention to the appalling malaise of that august body and sparked a glimmer of hope for this last election. So I wrote to Senator Boxer imploring her to stand with Congressman John Conyers and the other House Democrats to simply examine the question of voting irregularities throughout the country and especially in Ohio and Florida. When she actually did so I quickly sent her a follow-up thank you note as well.
That attention garnered me this response--admittedly a form letter--which I have edited for formatting and identity protection only:

Thank you for writing to express your concerns about the electoral process.
I thought that you would be interested in the following statement, which I made on the floor of the United States Senate on January 6:
For most of us in the Senate and the House, we have spent our lives fighting for things we believe in always fighting to make our nation better.
We have fought for social justice. We have fought for economic justice. We have fought for environmental justice. We have fought for criminal justice.
Now we must add a new fight the fight for electoral justice.
Every citizen of this country who is registered to vote should be guaranteed that their vote matters, that their vote is counted, and that in the voting booth of their community, their vote has as much weight as the vote of any Senator, any Congressperson, any President, any cabinet member, or any CEO of any Fortune 500 corporation.
I am sure that every one of my colleagues Democrat, Republican, and Independent agrees with that statement. That in the voting booth, every one is equal.
So now it seems to me that under the Constitution of the United States, which guarantees the right to vote, we must ask:
Why did voters in Ohio wait hours in the rain to vote?
Why were voters at Kenyon College, for example, made
to wait in line until nearly 4 a.m. to vote because there
were only two machines for 1300 voters?
Why did poor and predominantly African-American communities have disproportionately long waits?
Why in Franklin County did election officials only use 2,798 machines when they said they needed 5,000? Why did they hold back 68 machines in warehouses? Why were 42 of those machines in predominantly African-American districts?
Why did, in the Columbus area alone, an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 voters leave polling places, out of frustration, without having voted? How many more never bothered to vote after they heard about this?
Why is it when 638 people voted at a precinct in Franklin County, a voting machine awarded 4,258 extra votes to George Bush? Thankfully, they fixed it but how many other votes did the computers get wrong?
Why did Franklin County officials reduce the number of electronic voting machines in downtown precincts, while adding them in the suburbs? This also led to long lines.
In Cleveland, why were there thousands of provisional ballots disqualified after poll workers gave faulty instructions to voters?
Because of this, and voting irregularities in so many other places, I am joining with Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones to cast the light of truth on a flawed system which must be fixed now.
Our democracy is the centerpiece of who we are as a nation. And it is the fondest hope of all Americans that we can help bring democracy to every corner of the world.
As we try to do that, and as we are shedding the blood of our military to this end, we must realize that we lose so much credibility when our own electoral system needs so much improvement.
Yet, in the past four years, this Congress has not done everything it should to give confidence to all of our people their votes matter.
After passing the Help America Vote Act, nothing more was done.
A year ago, Senators Graham, Clinton and I introduced legislation that would have required that electronic voting systems provide a paper record to verify a vote. That paper trail would be stored in a secure ballot box and invaluable in case of a recount.
There is no reason why the Senate should not have taken up and passed that bill. At the very least, a hearing should have been held. But it never happened.
Before I close, I want to thank my colleague from the House, Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones.
Her letter to me asking for my intervention was substantive and compelling.
As I wrote to her, I was particularly moved by her point that it is virtually impossible to get official House consideration of the whole issue of election reform, including these irregularities.
The Congresswoman has tremendous respect in her state of Ohio, which is at the center of this fight.
Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones was a judge for 10 years. She was a prosecutor for 8 years. She was inducted into the Women's Hall of Fame in 2002.
I am proud to stand with her in filing this objection.

Sincerely,


Barbara Boxer
United States Senator

CBS: Another Casualty in the Propaganda War

So CBS fires four people for sloppy work and Dan Rather is set to retire from the Evening News anyway so... And I can hear all the right-wingers snickering like Sydney Greenstreet, "Heh, heh, heh, that was almost too easy. The public's trust of mainstream media has been effectively dashed upon the rocks. Whatever is left will be drowned out by our friends at Fox. None of the others will even think about reporting anything we don't like now that they know what will happen to them...heh, heh, heh, heh..." I feel like I've fallen through the Looking Glass when the only place I see words like this...

Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly, no such questioning [as MSNBC does of CBS] of them and their constant, easily provable lying. But CBS, Michael Moore, and anyone else the lying right decides to lynch gets numerous major stories by the entire major press. One story by CBS gets more scrutiny than 1 year of constant lying by Fox News hosts; two hours of Michael Moore film gets more scrutiny than 2 years of Rush Limbaugh’s daily 3-4 hours of flat out lying propaganda – which the President condones by going on his show and calling him his “good friend.”

...is from an unassociated internet source. The lie of the "so called 'liberal' media" has so permeated our culture that it is as accepted as easily as Bush's "mandate" of barely over 50%. The constant barage from Fox/Hannity/O'Reilly/Limbaugh and the absence of a countering statement from...well ANYwhere has left us as brainwashed as it took to make us buy Brittney Spears CDs.

Which brings us to the question of why the Bush/Limbaugh right goes through the trouble and expense of setting all of this up, while neither the middle, left, or actual right does? Why have O’Reilly, Murdoch, Bush, Limbaugh, Drudge, and the rest of the Fox/Limbaugh brand propagandists managed to set up such a massive media network of 24 hours a day lying, blame shifting, and partisan spinning while the other sides have not?

This is a great point of consternation for the left. How come their people have not done this for them? Why have the Bush/Limbaugh Republicans set all of this up while the rest have done nothing?

The answer is simple: because they have to.

It only takes 5 seconds to say, “President Bush’s tax cuts will create deficits.” It is an obvious, simple, undeniable point. Numbers before and reality after the cuts occur prove it without much need for explanation.

On the other hand, to convince people that the obvious truth is not true requires constant work, constant, brainwashing repetition of lies and misrepresentations. And just as importantly, it requires absolute control...Because just as important to the convincing people not to notice obvious truth or reality is spending endless hours lying about where the other side stands so that the Bush/Limbaughians can manage to blame the other guys for the mess their horrible policies have created...

source: The Moderate Independent

Winston Smith has been here

Is it just me? I've noticed an odd little bit of historical revision a la 1984 going around. People are saying that the US has finally stepped up with its pledge of $350 million after having been criticized for its initial pledge of $35 million. The problem is, our initial pledge was for just $15 million. That is the amount (coupled with the rest of the West) that prompted the "stingy" remark.

(from a transcript of Sec'y of State Colin Powell and Mr. Ed Fox, Assistant Administrator for United States Agency for International Development):
As the Secretary had said, not only have we responded, both in terms of the short run, with $400,000 to the various embassies and also a large commitment to the International Red Cross and Red Crescent, but it's anticipated that we'll add another -- at least immediately -- another probably $10 million, for a total of about $15 million, in our initial response to this tragedy.

It's bad enough we took a "let them eat cake" attitude at first but this dishonest brainwashing attempt to rewrite history is frightening and appalling.
I realize the last four years have fraught with one crisis after another (the loss of an Aries spy plane into China's hands, 9-11, anthrax scares, Afganistan & the Taliban, Iraq, hurricanes in FL, and now the earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean) but with the exception of bailing out his brother's state, this administration has shown a startling inability of dealing with stress. And now we see them trying to ameliorate their past mistakes. And it's working!

GOP is both Pot and Kettle

Right now GOP members of the US House of Representatives are bemoaning the Dems questioning the Ohio election process. "They refuse to accept their loss and want to try to force a victory after the results have been certified," is the gist of their arguments (no matter that it completely misrepresents the Dems position). But in an example of awe-inspiring hypocrisy, Republicans in Washington state are demanding a new election because of problems they see in that state's governor's race. The audacity of the party in power is freak show from which one just cannot look away. It's sick and yet compelling. Hmm...that also explains Rush Limbaugh and Faux News' appeal as well.

CNN.com - GOP alleges flaws with Washington governor's election - Jan 6, 2005

Box(er)ing Day

Peeking at a stream of C-SPAN (yeah, should be working but this is history in the making). I read earlier today that Senator Boxer would stand with Representative John Conyers so that that abysmal scene we saw in Fahrenheit 9/11 so that the highly questionable events in Ohio can be examined. So take that Mike Malloy of Air America Radio who just last night was decrying that no one had the spine to stand up. I missed that particular event but am now watching the House debate.
No one expects to change the results of the election; that is not the purpose of these objections. (Hmm, Rep. Nancy Pelosi is saying the same thing even as I type this...)
I find the Republicans nauseatingly disingenuous by trying to paint the Dems as "sore losers" trying to acheive a back door victory. This is about the most basic foundation of a democracy: a fair and accurate voting process. As Representative Pelosi says, "Other rights are illusory if the right to vote is undermined."
...[time passes]...
Geez, and here's yet another Republican blathering on about how "this election has been decided" and how the Dems are "trying to change the past". And then there's ANOTHER Republican going on about the Ohio recount. These fosils couldn't see the point if jabbed it in their beady little rat-eyes. The objections are not about the count of the votes collected, it's about how those votes got collected in the first place: touch-screens with no paper trail (build by a company that supported Bush), active discouragement of voters, denial of provisional ballots, etc. etc. etc.
[sigh] I don't think I can watch much more of this. But won't it be interesting to see what the SCLM ("so-called liberal media") and the bloviators of Faux News say about these procedings.
...[time passes]...
Whoa...you go, Congressman Kucinich! He's getting fired up. Good words, too.

Shirley & Bob

Whether you agree with their politics or not, Shirley Chisholm and Bob Matsui represented some of the best of American democracy. Mrs. Chisholm opened so many doors for women and for people of color. Controversial, to be sure...didn't she stand with the Black Panthers over some protest in Oakland?...she could motivate and/or anger both ends of the political spectrum.

During her failed presidential bid, Chisholm went to the hospital to visit George Wallace, her rival candidate and ideological opposite, after he had been shot -- an act that appalled her followers.

"He said, `What are your people going to say?' I said: `I know what they're going to say. But I wouldn't want what happened to you to happen to anyone.' He cried and cried," she recalled.
source

I will always fondly recall Congressman Matsui. I once had the opportunity to question him when he hosted some area high school newspapers in a "press conference". And, a few years later when I got entangled in the bureaucracy of the SSA, a letter to my congressman yielded swift and possitive results. Thank you, Congressman Matsui for your service to me and for your years of service to your Sacramento district and to our nation.



Shirley Chisholm, 1924-2005

Robert Matsui, 1941-2005