Relax about Ohio, Relax about the guy tailing me (Keith Olbermann)
Mood:  cheeky
Topic: Voting
NEW YORK? Anybody else notice that when you politely refer to the Secretary of State of Ohio, you have to call him ?Mr. Blackwell,? just like that guy who compiles the goofy worst-dressed list?

Mr. Kenneth Blackwell is the subject of three actions regarding the Ohio vote that you haven?t seen on television yet. Each (the Cobb/Badnarik Recount bid, the Alliance for Democracy legal challenge, and the Ohio Democratic Party suit over provisional ballots) has an undertone suggesting time is of the essence, and that he is wasting it. The accusation may or may not be true, but it also may or may not be relevant.

The Glibs? recount effort was underscored last week by their letters to Blackwell insisting he hurry up and finish certifying the count well before the announced deadline of December 6, because otherwise, there won?t be enough time for the recount before the voting of the Electoral College on December 13. The Alliance attorney Clifford Arnebeck told The Columbus Dispatch that his quite separate legal challenge to the election must be addressed immediately because ?time is critical.? The local Democrats haven?t been commenting on their low-flying suit - more about that later. They?re just smiling quietly to themselves.

Cobb, Badnarik, Arnebeck, and everybody else actually has more time than they think. I addressed this topic with the wonderfully knowledgeable George Washington University Constitutional Law professor, Jonathan Turley, back on Countdown on November 9th. He noted the election process is a little slower? and has one more major loophole? than is generally known. It begins on December 7th, the date ?when you essentially certify your electors? it gives a presumption to the legitimacy to your votes. And then, on the 13th, the electors actually vote.?

But, Turley noted, ?those votes are not opened by Congress until January 6. Now, if there are controversies, such as some disclosure that a state actually went for Kerry (instead of Bush), there is the ability of members of Congress to challenge.? In other words, even after the December 13th Electoral College Vote, in the extremely unlikely scenario that a court overturns the Ohio count, or that the recount discovers 4,000 Gahanna-style machines that each recorded 4,000 votes too many for one candidate, there is still a mechanism to correct the error, honest or otherwise.

?It requires a written objection from one House member and one senator,? Turley continues. Once that objection is raised, the joint meeting of the two houses is discontinued. ?Then both Houses separate again and they vote by majority vote as to whether to accept the slate of electoral votes from that state.?

In these super-heated partisan times, it may seem like just another prospective process decided by majority rule instead of fact. But envision the far-fetched scenario of some dramatic, conclusive new result from Ohio turning up around, say, January 4th. What congressman or senator in his right mind would vote to seat the candidate who lost the popular vote in Ohio? We wouldn?t be talking about party loyalty any more - we?d be talking about pure political self-interest here, and whenever in our history that critical mass has been achieved, it?s been every politician for himself (ask Barry Goldwater when Richard Nixon trolled for his support in July and August, 1974, or Republican Senator Edmund Ross of Kansas when his was to be the decisive vote that would have impeached President Andrew Johnson in 1868).

The point of this dip into the world of political science fiction is that the Ohio timeframe is a little less condensed than it seems. The drop-dead date is not December 13, but January 6.

It is noteworthy that the announcement of a legal challenge made it into weekend editions of The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Columbus Dispatch, the Associated Press wires, and other publications. The Columbus paper even mentioned something curious. ?Earlier this week, the Ohio Democratic party announced it would join a lawsuit arguing that the state lacks clear rules for evaluating provisional ballots, a move the party said will keep its options open if problems with the ballots surface.?

This makes a little more sense out of a confusing item that appeared in an obscure weekly paper in Westchester County, New York, last Wednesday, in which a reporter named Adam Stone wrote ?A top-ranking official with Democratic Senator John Kerry?s presidential campaign told North County News last week that although unlikely, there is a recount effort being waged that could unseat Republican President George Bush.? Stone quotes Kerry spokesman David Wade as saying: ?We have 17,000 lawyers working on this, and the grassroots accountability couldn?t be any higher - no (irregularity) will go unchecked. Period.? Gives a little context to Senator Kerry?s opaque mass e-mail and on-line video statement from Friday afternoon.

The Ohio newspaper coverage suggests that even the mainstream media is beginning to sit up and take notice that, whatever its merits, the investigation into the voting irregularities of November 2nd has moved from the Reynolds Wrap Hat stage into legal and governmental action. Tripe does continue to appear, like Carol Pogash?s column in today?s San Francisco Chronicle. Its headline provided me with a laugh: ?Liberals, the election is over, live with it.? I?ve gotten 37,000 emails in the last two weeks (now running at better than 25:1 in favor), and the two most repeated comments by those critical of the coverage have been references to the ratings of Fox News Channel, and the phrase ?the election is over, (expletive deleted), live with it. I hesitate to generalize, but this does suggest a certain unwillingness of critics to engage in political discourses that don?t have no swear words in ?em.

Meantime, The Oakland Tribune not only devoted seventeen paragraphs Friday to the UC Berkeley study on the voting curiosities in Florida, but actually expended considerable energy towards what we used to call ?advancing the story?: ?The UC Berkeley report has not been peer reviewed, but a reputable MIT political scientist succeeded in replicating the analysis Thursday at the request of the Oakland Tribune and The Associated Press. He said an investigation is warranted.?

In fact, he - MIT Arts and Social Sciences Dean Charles Stewart - said more than that. ?There is an interesting pattern here that I hope someone looks into.? Stewart is part of the same Cal Tech/MIT Voting Project that had earlier issued a preliminary report suggesting that there was no evidence of significant voting irregularity in Florida. Dean Stewart added he didn?t necessarily buy the Berkeley conclusion - that the only variable that could explain the ?excessive? votes in Florida was poisoned touch-screen voting - and still thought there were other options, such as, in the words of The Tribune?s Ian Hoffman ?absentee voting or some quirk of election administration.?

Neither MIT nor Cal Tech has yet responded to the comments of several poll-savvy commentators, and others, that its paper was using erroneous statistics. Its premise, you?ll recall, was that on a state-by-state basis, the notorious 2004 Exit Polls were within the margin of error and could be mathematically interpreted as having forecast the announced presidential outcome. It has been observed that the MIT/Cal Tech study used not the ?raw? exit polls - as did Professor Steven Freeman of Penn did in his study - but rather the ?weighted? polls, in which actual precinct and county official counts are mixed in to ?correct? the organic ?Hey, Buddy, who?d you vote for? numbers. The ?weighted? polls have been analogized to a football handicapper predicting that the New Orleans Saints would beat the Denver Broncos 24-14, then, after the Broncos scored twenty points in the first quarter, announcing his prediction was now that the Saints would beat the Broncos 42-41, or even, that the Broncos would beat the Saints 40-7.

None of the coverage of the Berkeley study clarified a vitally important point about its conclusions regarding the touch-screen wobble in the fifteen Florida counties, and that has led to some unjustified optimism on the activist and Democratic sides. Its math produced two distinct numbers for ?ghost votes? for President Bush: 130,000 and 260,000. This has led to the assumption in many quarters that Cal Tech has suggested as many as 260,000 Florida votes could swing from Bush to Kerry (enough to overturn the state). In fact - and the academics got a little too academic in summarizing their report and thus, this kind of got lost - the two numbers already consider the prospect of a swing:

a) There may have been 130,000 votes simply added to the Bush total. If proved and excised, they would reduce the President?s Florida margin from approximately 350,000 votes to approximately 220,000;

b) There may have been 130,000 votes switched from Kerry to Bush. If proved and corrected, they would reduce (by double the 130,000 figure - namely 260,000) the President?s Florida margin from approximately 350,000 votes to approximately 90,000.

On the ground in Florida, uncounted ballots continue to turn up in Pinellas County. Last Monday, an unmarked banker?s box with 268 absentee ballots was discovered ?sitting in plain sight on an office floor, with papers and other boxes stacked on top of it,? according to The St. Petersburg Times. On Friday, the same paper reported that County Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark found twelve more?ten provisionals in a blue pouch at a loading dock, and two absentees in a box headed for a storage facility. ?I?m sick about this,? the paper quoted Clark, whose office also whiffed on 1400 absentee ballots on Election Day 2000, and counted another 600 twice. Asked by a reporter if the election is over, she replied ?I certainly hope so.?

Well, I know how Ms. Clark feels. To close, a little anecdote from Big Town: I approached Seventh Avenue from the east and the guy in the black trenchcoat was walking north.

He got that little surprised look of recognition in his eyes and said ?Keith! How are you?? We shook hands and he added, with apparent nervousness, ?I?ll just be tailing you for the next block.? I laughed and said I was used to it.

Now, I?ve been getting recognized in public since 1982, and I had a stalker for eight years who once talked her way into ESPN and wound up being escorted to my desk? so I think I can tell the difference between a fan and a threat (this was a fan; a threat doesn?t come up and announce he?s going to tail you). I relate this just because of the timing. In the last week, I have read that I?ve been fired, suspended, muzzled, threatened (that, I think, was my NBC colleague Kevin Sites, who reported the Marine prisoner shooting in Iraq? our mailbox had a couple of those), and in the middle of it, I get a ?What?s the frequency Kenneth moment? from a fan who was just trying to be funny.

The laugh was genuine. As was my decision to cross the street.

Write me at KOlbermann@msnbc.com

Rep. Ron Paul seeks to yank program, decries use of drugs on children
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Protect Your Children
WND | September 9, 2004
By Ron Strom

Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, plans to offer an amendment in the House of Representatives today that would remove from an appropriations bill a new mandatory mental-health screening program for America's children.

"The American tradition of parents deciding what is best for their children is, yet again, under attack," writes Kent Snyder of the Paul-founded Liberty Committee. "The pharmaceutical industry has convinced President Bush to support mandatory mental-health screening for every child in America, including preschool children, and the industry is now working to convince Congress as well."

As WorldNetDaily reported, the New Freedom Initiative recommends screening not only for children but eventually for every American. The initiative came out of the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, which President Bush established in 2002.

Critics of the plan say it is a thinly veiled attempt by drug companies to provide a wider market for high-priced antidepressants and antipsychotic medication, and puts government in areas of Americans' lives where it does not belong.

Writes Snyder: "The real payoff for the drug companies is the forced drugging of children that will result ? as we learned tragically with Ritalin ? even when parents refuse."

Paul's amendment to the Labor, HHS and Education Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2005 would take the new program out of the funding bill.

The congressman, who is known for his strict adherence to the Constitution, wrote in a letter to his colleagues: "As you know, psychotropic drugs are increasingly prescribed for children who show nothing more than children's typical rambunctious behavior. Many children have suffered harmful effects from these drugs. Yet some parents have even been charged with child abuse for refusing to drug their children. The federal government should not promote national mental-health screening programs that will force the use of these psychotropic drugs such as Ritalin."

The New Freedom Commission found that "despite their prevalence, mental disorders often go undiagnosed" and recommended comprehensive mental-health screening for "consumers of all ages," including preschool children.

The commission said, "Each year, young children are expelled from preschools and childcare facilities for severely disruptive behaviors and emotional disorders."

Schools, the panel concluded, are in a "key position" to screen the 52 million students and 6 million adults who work at the schools.

The state of Illinois has already approved its own mental-health screening program, the Children's Mental Health Act of 2003, which will provide screening for "all children ages 0-18" and "ensure appropriate and culturally relevant assessment of your children's social and emotional development with the use of standardized tools."

Members of the Illinois Children's Mental Health Partnership have held several public hearings on the program in recent months, hearing from parents and others who oppose the mandatory screening.

Karen R. Effrem, M.D., is a physician and leading opponent of mandatory screening. She is on the board of directors of EdWatch, an organization that actively opposes federal control of education.

"I am concerned, especially in the schools, that mental health could be used as a wedge for diagnosis based on attitudes, values, beliefs and political stances ? things like perceived homophobia," Effrem told WorldNetDaily.

"There are several violence-prevention programs that do say if a person is homophobic, they could be considered potentially violent."

Continued Effrem: "This mental-health program could be used as an enforcement tool to impose a very politically correct, anti-American curriculum."

Effrem emphasized the new program has no guarantees of parental rights, noting some children have died because parents were coerced to put their kids on psychiatric medications.

Snyder says the following groups have come out in opposition to the screening program: Eagle Forum, Gun Owners of America, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, Concerned Women of America, Freedom 21, the Alliance for Human Research Protection, and the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology.

A screening program in Paul's home state began nearly ten years ago. The Texas Medication Algorithm Project, or TMAP, was held up by the New Freedom Commission as a "model" medication treatment plan that "illustrates an evidence-based practice that results in better consumer outcomes."

The TMAP ? started in 1995 as an alliance of individuals from the pharmaceutical industry, the University of Texas and the mental health and corrections systems of Texas ? also was praised by the American Psychiatric Association, which called for increased funding to implement the overall plan.

But the Texas project sparked controversy when a Pennsylvania government employee revealed state officials with influence over the plan had received money and perks from drug companies who stand to gain from it.

Allen Jones, an employee of the Pennsylvania Office of the Inspector General says in his
whistleblower report the "political/pharmaceutical alliance" that developed the Texas project, which promotes the use of newer, more expensive antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs, was behind the recommendations of the New Freedom Commission, which were "poised to consolidate the TMAP effort into a comprehensive national policy to treat mental illness with expensive, patented medications of questionable benefit and deadly side effects, and to force private insurers to pick up more of the tab."

Jones points out, according to a British Medical Journal report, companies that helped start the Texas project are major contributors to Bush's re-election. Also, some members of the New Freedom Commission have served on advisory boards for these same companies, while others have direct ties to TMAP.

All I know is what I don't read in the papers (Keith Olbermann)
Mood:  caffeinated
Topic: Voting
SECURE UNDISCLOSED LOCATION? I?m beginning to think like Jim Bunning now.

So far in this post-election trip through Alice?s looking glass we?ve had:

?a University of Pennsylvania professor defending the accuracy of exit polling in order damn the accuracy of vote counting;

?a joint CalTech/MIT study defending the accuracy of exit polling in order to confirm the accuracy of vote counting;

?a series of lesser academic works assailing the validity of the Penn and CalTech/MIT assessments;

?and now, a UC Berkeley Research Team report that concludes President Bush may have received up to 260,000 more votes in fifteen Florida counties than he should have, all courtesy the one-armed bandits better known as touch-screen voting systems.

And, save, for to the CalTech/MIT study "disproving" the idea that the exit poll results were so wacky that they required thoroughly botched election nights in several states, the closest any of these research efforts have gotten to the mainstream media have been "Wired News" and "Countdown."

I still hesitate to endorse the ?media lock-down? theory extolled so widely on the net. I've expended a lot of space on the facts of political media passivity and exhaustion, and now I?ll add one factor to explain the collective shrugged shoulder: reading this stuff is hard. It?s hard work.

There are, as we know, lies, damn lies, and statistics. But there is one level of hell lower still? scholarly statistical studies. I have made four passes at "The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections,? and the thing has still got me pinned to the floor.

Most of the paper is so academically dense that it seems to have been written not just in another language, but in some form of code. There is one table captioned ?OLS Regression with Robust Standard Errors.? Another is titled ?OLS regressions with frequency weights for county size.? Only the summary produced by Professor Michael Hout and the Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Time is intelligible.

Of course, I?m reminded suddenly of the old cartoon, with the guy saying ?I don?t understand women,? and the second guy saying, ?So? Do you understand electricity??

In his news conference yesterday at Berkeley (who attended? Who phoned in to the conference call? Why didn?t they try?) Professor Hout analogized the report to a ?beeping smoke alarm.? It doesn?t say how bad the fire it is, it doesn?t accuse anybody of arson, it just says somebody ought to have an extinguisher handy.

Without attempting to crack the methodology, it?s clear the researchers claim they?ve compensated for all the bugaboos that hampered the usefulness of previous studies of the county voting results in Florida. They?ve weighted the thing to allow for an individual county?s voting record in both the 2000 and 1996 elections (throwing out the ?Dixiecrat? effect), to wash out issues like the varying Hispanic populations, median income, voter turnout change, and the different numbers of people voting in each county.

And they say that when you calculate all that, you are forced to conclude that compared to the Florida counties that used paper ballots, the ones that used electronic voting machines were much more likely to show ?excessive votes? for Mr. Bush, and that the statistical odds of this happening organically are less than one in 1,000.

They also say that these ?excessives? occurred most prominently in counties where Senator Kerry beat the President most handily. In the Democratic bastion of Broward, where Kerry won by roughly 105,000, they suggest the touch-screens ?gave? the President 72,000 more votes than statistical consistency should have allowed. In Miami-Dade (Kerry by 55,000) they saw 19,300 more votes for Bush than expected. In Palm Beach (Kerry by 115,000) they claim Bush got 50,000 more votes than possible.

Hout and his research team consistently insisted they were not alleging that voting was rigged, nor even that what they?ve found actually affected the direction of Florida?s 27 Electoral Votes. They point out that in a worst-case scenario, they see 260,000 ?excessives? - and Bush took the state by 350,000 votes. But they insist that based on Florida?s voting patterns in 1996 and 2000, the margin cannot be explained by successful get-out-the-vote campaigns, or income variables, or anything but something rotten in the touch screens.

It?s deep-woods mathematics, and it cries out for people who speak the language and can refute or confirm its value. Kim Zetter, who did an excellent work-up for "Wired News,"got the responses you?d expect from both sides. She quotes Susan Van Houten of Palm Beach?s Coalition for Election Reform as saying ?I?ve believed the same thing for a while, that the numbers are screwy, and it looks like they proved it.? She quotes Jill Friedman-Wilson of the touch-screen manufacturer Election Systems & Software (their machines were in use in Broward and Miami-Dade) as responding ?If you consider real-world experience, we know that ES&S? touch-screen voting system has been proven in thousands of elections throughout the country.?

What?s possibly of more interest to us poor laymen is what isn?t in the Berkeley report.

As I mentioned previously, they don?t claim to know how this happened. But more importantly, they say that they ran a similar examination on the voting patterns in Ohio, comparing its paper ballot and electronic results, and found absolutely nothing to suggest either candidate got any ?bump? that couldn?t otherwise be explained by past voting patterns, income, turnout, or any other commonplace factor.

In other words: No e-voting machines spontaneously combusting in Ohio.

?For the sake of all future elections involving electronic voting,? Professor Hout concluded, ?someone must investigate and explain the statistical anomalies in Florida. We?re calling on voting officials in Florida to take action.?

Anybody want to belly up to this bar?

Thougths? E-mail me at KOlbermann@msnbc.com

Didn't you run for president once? (Keith Olbermann)
Mood:  mischievious
Topic: Voting
SECURE UNDISCLOSED LOCATION? There has been a John Kerry sighting.

?Regardless of the outcome of this election, once all the votes are counted? and they will be counted? we will continue to challenge this administration,? the 2004 Democratic candidate said in a prepared statement released today. ?I will fight for a national standard for federal elections that has both transparency and accountability in our voting system. It is unacceptable in the United States that people still don?t have full confidence in the integrity of the voting process.?

Since his concession, Kerry?s silence on the questions of voting irregularities in Florida, Ohio, and elsewhere, has perplexed those pursuing those questions, helped render largely passive the media who should?ve been doing so, and provided virtual proof to others that there weren?t any questions at all. His supporters have been mystified at news this week that millions of dollars from his war chest went unspent. His lawyers have been characterized as flying below the radar as the Libertarian and Green Parties have pushed their recount in Ohio.

He has seemed to his supporters and many neutrals, in short, as being AWOL.

The statement doesn?t exactly dispel that aroma. It came by way of an e-mail to supporters? but not to the media? and a video on his otherwise update-free campaign website, which maintains the frozen-in-time November 2 front page that makes it look like the political equivalent of Miss Haversham?s cobweb-strewn house in Dickens? "Great Expectations."

The primary topic of the mass e-mail isn?t even this election or future ones. It?s about a petition drive for universal child health care legislation Kerry intends to introduce on the first day of the new Congress. Whether the voting stuff was added as a sop to supporters loudly wondering where he? and the unspent $15,000,000? has been, is conjecture.

But the video is just plain weird. The phrasing of the start of the relevant passage??Regardless of the outcome of this election?? is open to the same kind of parsing and confusion usually reserved for the latest release from Osama Bin Laden. Those seven words are extra-temporal; they are tense-free. In them he could be describing an election long-since decided, or one whose outcome is still in doubt.

And the timing and delivery of the message are equally confusing. No notification to the media? When much of the mechanism of political coverage is kick-started by statements like this one? And its issuance on a Friday afternoon? the moment of minimum news attention so famously titled ?Take Out The Trash Day? on the NBC series ?The West Wing??? is perplexing, if not suspicious.

It has the vague feel of deliberate ambiguity, as if Kerry is saying to those who are plagued by doubts about the vote just seventeen days ago, that he agrees with them, but they shouldn?t tell anybody. It?s exactly what these confusing times do not need: more confusion.

Thoughts? E-mail KOlbermann@MSNBC.com

Scholars on the votes, Ohio undervotes (Keith Olbermann)
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Voting
SECURE UNDISCLOSED LOCATION? We return to Academic Dueling In Our Time, already in progress.

A UC Berkeley sociology professor, director of his school?s Survey Research Center, is scheduled to conduct a news conference at 1 p.m. ET today at which his ?research team? will report that ?irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more excess votes? to President Bush in Florida.

The advance word of the news conference gives little detail, but suggests Professor Michael Hout might be treading out onto thin ice. His study is said to show ?an unexplained discrepancy between votes for President Bush in counties where electronic machines were used versus counties using traditional voting methods.?


The Berkeley group may have new material, but if not, it could be pinioned by the fact that some of the apparent variations between optical scanning and other voting methods in Florida, might also be explained by? or, even better explained by? historical voting patterns in Florida?s Dixiecrat counties of the north, and the Panhandle.

Regardless, this is now shaping up as the BCS of presidential election analysis. A joint report out of the CalTech and MIT voting project? suggesting that the much-decried exit polling of election night really wasn?t outside the margin of error at all when analyzed on a state-by-state basis? had already been countered by a Penn professor?s report using the exit polling for Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

Now it?s not just CalTech and MIT versus Penn? but also UC Berkeley versus CalTech and MIT.

Stay tuned for the halftime show.

And stay tuned for the latest disaster from Ohio.


For 40 years, the Dayton Daily News reports this morning, Shirley Wightman has worked at polling places on election days. Two weeks ago, she says, turnout was high - 611 voters - and she and her colleagues paid careful attention to their punch-card, chad-filled, voting stations in Washington Township, Ohio.

?We checked the machines periodically,? Ms. Wightman told the paper, ?and I could see nothing wrong with them.?

Yet when the votes were tallied, 168 of the 611 voters had made no choice for president. Unless these were the famed undecideds we heard so much about in the closing weeks of the campaigns, something went terribly wrong. 27 and a half percent of the voters in that ?Washington X? precinct in Montgomery County officially didn?t have a presidential preference.

This was the high point of the Daily News? investigative analysis of the still-unofficial voting results in its county? or more properly, perhaps, the low point. The paper discovered that of the 284, 650 votes in Montgomery, a total of 5,693 registered no valid vote for president. And the percentages were significantly higher in the 231 precincts that wound up voting for Kerry (2.8%) than did the 354 that wound up voting for Bush (1.6%).

Besides Washington X, a second County precinct exceeded 27% ?undercount,? as the election professionals, such as they are, call it. Washington X, Kettering 3-A, and five of the other top ten ?undercount? precincts by percentage wound up supporting Bush.

Since, as the papers note, political scientists suggested that the poor and the lesser-educated are presumed to have more trouble with punch card voting, there are several logical disconnects here. Given the outcomes in those two precincts, Washington X and Kettering 3-A, were those mostly Bush voters who managed to blank out more than a quarter of their own ballots, or did the precincts wind up voting for Bush because more than a quarter of the ballots had no valid presidential vote?

What happened in the voting precincts in Moraine, Ohio? 2,557 votes were cast at seven sites there. The President won the city by 2%. The number of ballots without a valid presidential vote was 5.6%.

What do the state undercounts in Ohio look like? Did they reduce Bush?s margin of victory? Did they eliminate votes for Kerry? What the hell happened?

The least likely explanations are that these people couldn?t make up their minds, or screwed up only the presidential part of their ballots.

?It is very difficult to believe that a quarter of the people would not vote for president, especially in a year like this,? University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato? an old friend of Countdown? told the Daily News. ?If I were the election officers in those areas I would be doing some very extensive checks of those machines.?

As the Ohio recount nears, the number of hotspots continues to multiply. You are aware of the remarkable late night voting lines throughout the state, and the mysterious Glitch of Youngstown which initially registered negative 25,000,000 votes. There is the Gahanna machine which gave one presidential candidate 4,000 extra votes in a community of 600. And the farcical ?walling off? of the vote counting in Warren County, because the county head of security was told face-to-face of an FBI terrorism warning there - except the FBI says it didn?t issue any terrorism warnings there.


The Associated Press today carries a report of 2,600 ballots in nine precincts around Sandusky, Ohio that were counted twice? as that paper puts it? ?likely because of worker error.? The Clyde precinct showed a voter turnout of 131%, to the dismay of the head of the elections board, Barb Tuckerman.

Ms. Tuckerman, in one of the great quotes of the election, told the News-Messenger of Fremont, Ohio: ?I knew there was something amiss.?

Tell me about it, Barb.

What do you think? E-mail me at KOlbermann@msnbc.com

Mental Health and World Citizenship
Mood:  don't ask
Topic: Protect Your Children
Mental Health and World Citizenship

Dr. Dennis Cuddy | August 11 2004

In a recent article, I related that the Bush administration's Secretary of Education Rod Paige last October 3 declared that the U.S. is pleased to rejoin UNESCO where we could develop common strategies to prepare our children to become "citizens of the world."

Then on June 21 WorldNetDaily published "Life With Big Brother: Bush to screen population for mental illness" describing President Bush's "New Freedom Initiative" that would have every citizen receive a mental health screening. What one needs to guard against is the use of mental health to pursue world government.

The theme of the administration of President Woodrow Wilson was "The New Freedom" and it pursued the ideals of PHILIP DRU: ADMINISTRATOR, written in 1912 by President Wilson's chief adviser, Col. Edward M. House, who wrote of "socialism as dreamed of by Karl Marx." Education would be a primary vehicle for achieving the objective, and John Dewey, the father of progressive education, promoted socialism. He said the society or group is most important, and that independent individualists have a form of "insanity."

Read More...

Under the American socialism planned for our future, government will increasingly control our lives via mental health screening and education, among other means. Only if the American people resist these efforts as soon as possible will we be successful in thwarting the plans of the power elite.

Bush Chooses Rice to Replace Powell
Mood:  vegas lucky
Bush Chooses Rice to Replace Powell
By Tom Raum
The Associated Press

Monday 15 November 2004

Washington - President Bush has chosen national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to replace Colin Powell as secretary of state in his second term, a senior administration official said Monday.

Powell, a retired four-star general who often clashed with more hawkish members of the administration on Iraq and other foreign policy issues, resigned in a Cabinet exodus that promises a starkly different look to President Bush's second-term team.

The White House on Monday announced Powell's exit along with the resignations of Education Secretary Rod Paige, Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. Veneman had said last week she wanted to stay.

Stephen Hadley, deputy national security adviser, will replace Rice, the official said on condition of anonymity.

Combined with the resignations earlier this month of Commerce Secretary Don Evans and Attorney General John Ashcroft, six of Bush's 15 Cabinet members will not be part of the president's second term, which begins with his inauguration Jan. 20. An administration that experienced few changes over the last four years suddenly hit a high-water mark for overhaul.

Known for his moderate views and unblemished reputation, it was Powell who went before the United Nations in February 2003 to sell Bush's argument for invading Iraq to skeptics abroad and at home. But Powell's case was built on faulty intelligence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Still, the former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman remained the most popular member of the administration, more so than even Bush.

In a resignation letter dated Nov. 12, Powell told Bush that, with the election over, it was time to "step down ... and return to private life." The Army man for 35 years said he would stay on "for a number of weeks, or a month or two" until his replacement was confirmed by the Senate.

Asked what he plans to do next, the 67-year-old Powell said, "I don't know."

In a statement, Bush called Powell "one of the great public servants of our time."

Most of the speculation on a successor to Powell has centered on Rice, who is generally seen as more hawkish and is one of Bush's closest advisers. She is widely considered the president's first choice for the top diplomat job despite reports that she intends to return to California - she was provost at Stanford University - or was hoping to replace Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary.

Aides to Rice declined to comment. In Ecuador for a meeting of defense ministers, Rumsfeld gave no indication that he is on the verge of stepping down. "I have not discussed that with the president," he said when asked if he planned to resign.

Also mentioned as a possible Powell replacement was U.N. Ambassador John Danforth, the former Republican senator from Missouri. Danforth described Powell as "a great person" and "an outstanding public servant." As to whether he might succeed Powell, Danforth said, "It hasn't been mentioned by me or to me."

Powell, one of the architects of the 1991 Persian Gulf War in the administration of Bush's father, often sparred in private with hard-line administration officials such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld over how to proceed in Iraq and the role of the international community.

In his most memorable presentation, Powell soldiered on and delivered the administration line before the United Nations and a world audience on the rationale for ousting Saddam Hussein.

"Secretary Powell's departure is a loss to the moderate internationalist voices in the Bush administration," said New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a former U.N. ambassador in the Clinton administration. "Hopefully, his replacement will be a pragmatist rather than an ideologue."

The resignations come as Bush faces major challenges on both the foreign policy and domestic fronts. Internationally, the threat of terrorism looms, the fighting in Iraq continues with upcoming January elections in doubt and the Middle East landscape has shifted with the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

On the home front, Bush has called for ambitious second-term legislative priorities, including overhauling the tax code and Social Security.

Paige, 71, the nation's seventh education secretary, is the first black person to serve in the job in which he oversaw Bush's signature education law, the No Child Left Behind Act. The leading candidate to replace Paige is Margaret Spellings, Bush's domestic policy adviser who helped shape his school agenda when he was the Texas governor.

Abraham, 52, a former senator from Michigan, joined the administration after he lost a bid for re-election, becoming the nation's 10th energy secretary. Abraham struggled to persuade Congress to endorse the president's broad energy agenda.

Sources said that Abraham intends to stay in Washington, where he plans to work in private law practice.

Veneman, 55, the daughter of a California peach grower, was the nation's first woman agriculture secretary. Speculation on a potential replacement has centered on Chuck Conner, White House farm adviser; Allen Johnson, the chief U.S. negotiator on agricultural issues; Bill Hawks, undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs, and Charles Kruse, president of the Missouri Farm Bureau Federation.

Rep. Charles Stenholm, D-Texas, who lost his bid for re-election, said he was flattered that his name had been mentioned as a possible Veneman successor, but he has "not been contacted by anyone that counts."

In an appearance at the daily State Department midday briefing, Powell said he had a full end-of-year agenda. The most popular member of Bush's Cabinet in international circles, he was often viewed as a voice of moderation in an administration that many foreign leaders, particularly in Europe, regarded as too willing to work unilaterally.

Powell's resignation drew expressions of praise and regret overseas.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair described Powell as "a remarkable man and ... a good friend to this country over a very long period." German Defense Minister Peter Struck called Powell's retirement "regrettable" and described him as "a reliable partner in conversation in the area of defense policy."

In his resignation letter, Powell said, "I am pleased to have been part of a team that launched the global war against terror, liberated the Afghan and Iraqi people, brought the attention of the world to the problem of proliferation, reaffirmed our alliances, adjusted to the post-Cold War world and undertook major initiatives to deal with the problem of poverty and disease in the developing world."

The resignations are on a par with what other presidents who have won second terms have experienced.

In 1984, President Reagan named a new attorney general and new Treasury, Interior, Labor, Energy, Education and Health and Human Services secretaries. In 1996, President Clinton tapped new secretaries at State and Defense as well as Commerce, Labor, Transportation, Energy, and Housing and Urban Development.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said none of those who are resigning would leave before successors were chosen.

Meanwhile, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, attending a meeting in Hawaii, declined to say whether he, too, would resign - but told reporters he has not submitted a letter of resignation. "The couple elements of this decision are if and when," Ridge said. "And when those decisions are made, I'd prefer to share it with the president first."

Ten Reasons Not to Move to Canada
Now Playing: Eminem - Mosh
Published on Wednesday, November 3, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
Ten Reasons Not to Move to Canada
by Sarah Anderson

Ready to say screw this country and buy a one-way ticket north? Here are some reasons to stay in the belly of the beast.

1. The Rest of the World. After the February 2003 antiwar protests, the New York Times described the global peace movement as the world's second superpower. Their actions didn't prevent the war, but protesters in nine countries have succeeded in pressuring their governments to pull their troops from Iraq and/or withdraw from the so-called "coalition of the willing."Antiwar Americans owe it to the majority of the people on this planet who agree with them to stay and do what they can to end the suffering in Iraq and prevent future pre-emptive wars.

2. People Power Can Trump Presidential Power. The strength of social movements can be more important than whoever is in the White House. Example: In 1970, President Nixon supported the Occupational Safety and Health Act, widely considered the most important pro-worker legislation of the last 50 years. It didn't happen because Nixon loved labor unions, but because union power was strong. Stay and help build the peace, economic justice, environmental and other social movements that can make change.

3. The great strides made in voter registration and youth mobilization must be built on rather than abandoned.

4. Like Nicaraguans in the 1980s, Iraqis Need U.S. Allies. After Ronald Reagan was re-elected in 1984, progressives resisted the urge to flee northwards and instead stayed to fight the U.S. governments secret war of arming the contras in Nicaragua and supporting human rights atrocities throughout Central America. Iraq is a different scenario, but we can still learn from the U.S.-Central America solidarity work that exposed illegal U.S. activities and their brutal consequences and ultimately prevailed by forcing a change in policy.

5. We Can't Let up on the 'Free Trade' Front Activists have held the Bush administration at bay on some issues. On trade, opposition in the United States and in developing countries has largely blocked the Bush administrations corporate-driven trade agenda for four years. The President is expected to soon appoint a new top trade negotiator to break the impasse. Whoever he picks would love to see a progressive exodus to Canada.

6. Barack Obama. His victory to become the only African-American in the U.S. Senate was one of the few bright spots of the election. An early opponent of the Iraq war, Obama trounced his primary and general election opponents, even in white rural districts, showing he could teach other progressives a few things about broadening their base. As David Moberg of In These Times puts it, 'Obama demonstrates how a progressive politician can redefine mainstream political symbols to expand support for liberal policies and politicians rather than engage in creeping capitulation to the right.'

7. Say so long to the DLC. Barry Goldwater suffered a resounding defeat when he ran for president against Lyndon Johnson in 1964, but his campaign spawned a conservative movement that eventually gained control of the Republican Party and elected Ronald Reagan in 1980. Progressives should see the excitement surrounding Dean, Kucinich, Moseley Braun, and Sharpton during the primary season as the foundation for a similar takeover of the Democratic Party.

8. 2008. President Bush is entering his second term facing an escalating casualty rate in Iraq, a record trade deficit, a staggering budget deficit, sky-high oil prices, and a deeply divided nation. As the Republicans face likely failure, progressives need to start preparing for regime change in 2008 or sooner. Remember that Nixon was reelected with a bigger margin than Bush, but faced impeachment within a year.

9. Americans are Not All Yahoos. Although I wouldn't attempt to convince a Frenchman of it right now, many surveys indicate that Americans are more internationalist than the election results suggest. In a September poll by the University of Maryland, majorities of Bush supporters expressed support for multilateral approaches to security, including the United States being part of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (68%), the International Criminal Court (75%), the treaty banning land mines (66%), and the Kyoto Treaty on climate change (54%). The problem is that most of these Bush supporters weren't aware that Bush opposed these positions. Stay and help turn progressive instincts into political power.

10. Winter. Average January temperature in Ottawa: 12.2?F.

I Smell A Rat
Mood:  irritated
Topic: Voting
I Smell a Rat
By Colin Shea
FreezerBox.com

Friday 12 November 2004

I smell a rat. It has that distinctive and all-too-familiar odor of the species Republicanus floridius.

We got a nasty bite from this pest four years ago and never quite recovered.

Symptoms of a long-term infection are becoming distressingly apparent.

The first sign of the rat was on election night.

The jubilation of early exit polling had given way to rising anxiety as states fell one by one to the Red Tide.

It was getting late in the smoky cellar of a Prague sports bar where a crowd of expats had gathered.

We had been hoping to go home to bed early, confident of victory.

Those hopes had evaporated in a flurry of early precinct reports from Florida and Ohio.

By 3 AM, conversation had died and we were grimly sipping beers and watching as those two key states seemed to be slipping further and further to crimson.

Suddenly, a friend who had left two hours earlier rushed in and handed us a printout.

"Zogby's calling it for Kerry."

"He smacked the sheet decisively.

Definitely.

He's got both Florida and Ohio in the Kerry column.

Kerry only needs one."

Satisfied, we went to bed, confident we would wake with the world a better place.

Victory was at hand.

The morning told a different story, of course.

No Florida victory for Kerry - Bush had a decisive margin of nearly 400,000 votes.

Ohio was not even close enough for Kerry to demand that all the votes be counted.

The pollsters had been dead wrong, Bush had four more years and a powerful mandate.

Onward Christian soldiers - next stop, Tehran.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

I work with statistics and polling data every day.

Something rubbed me the wrong way.

I checked the exit polls for Florida - all wrong.

CNN's results indicated a Kerry win: turnout matched voter registration, and independents had broken 59% to 41% for Kerry.

Polling is an imprecise science.

Yet its very imprecision is itself quantifiable and follows regular patterns.

Differences between actual results and those expected from polling data must be explainable by identifiable factors if the polling sample is robust enough.

With almost 3.000 respondents in Florida alone, the CNN poll sample was pretty robust.

The first signs of the rat were identified by Kathy Dopp, who conducted a simple analysis of voter registrations by party in Florida and compared them to presidential vote results.

Basically she multiplied the total votes cast in a county by the percentage of voters registered Republican:

this gave an expected Republican vote.

She then compared this to the actual result.

Her analysis is startling.

Certain counties voted for Bush far in excess of what one would expect based on the share of Republican registrations in that county.

They key phrase is "certain counties" - there is extraordinary variance between individual counties.

Most counties fall more or less in line with what one would expect based on the share of Republican registrations, but some differ wildly.

How to explain this incredible variance?

Dopp found one over-riding factor:

whether the county used electronic touch-screen voting, or paper ballots which were optically scanned into a computer.

All of those with touch-screen voting had results relatively in line with her expected results, while all of those with extreme variance were in counties with optical scanning.

The intimation, clearly, is fraud.

Ballots are scanned; results are fed into precinct computers; these are sent to a county-wide database, whose results are fed into the statewide electoral totals.

At any point after physical ballots become databases, the system is vulnerable to external hackers.

It seemed too easy, and Dopp's method seemed simplistic.

I re-ran the results using CNN's exit polling data.

In each county, I took the number of registrations and assigned correctional factors based on the CNN poll to predict turnout among Republicans, Democrats, and independents.

I then used the vote shares from the polls to predict a likely number of Republican votes per county.

I compared this 'expected' Republican vote to the actual Republican vote.

The results are shocking.

Overall, Bush received 2% fewer votes in counties with electronic touch-screen voting than expected.

In counties with optical scanning, he received 16% more.

This 16% would not be strange if it were spread across counties more or less evenly.

It is not.

In 11 different counties, the 'actual' Bush vote was at least twice higher than the expected vote.

13 counties had Bush vote tallies 50 - 100% higher than expected.

In one county where 88% of voters are registered Democrats, Bush got nearly two thirds of the vote

- three times more than predicted by my model.

Again, polling can be wrong.

It is difficult to believe it can be that wrong.

Fortunately, however, we can test how wrong it would have to be to give the 'actual' result.

I tested two alternative scenarios to see how wrong CNN would have to have been to explain the election result.

In the first, I assumed they had been wildly off the mark in the turnout figures

- i.e. far more Republicans and independents had come out than Democrats.

In the second I assumed the voting shares were completely wrong, and that the Republicans had been able to massively poach voters from the Democrat base.

In the first scenario, I assumed 90% of Republicans and independents voted, and the remaining ballots were cast by Democrats.

This explains the result in counties with optical scanning to within 5%.

However, in this scenario Democratic turnout would have been only 51% in the optical scanning counties

- barely exceeding half of Republican turnout.

It also does not solve the enormous problems in individual counties.

7 counties in this scenario still have actual vote tallies for Bush that are at least 100% higher than predicted by the model

- an extremely unlikely result.

In the second scenario I assumed that Bush had actually got 100% of the vote from Republicans and 50% from independents

(versus CNN polling results which were 93% and 41% respectively).

If this gave enough votes for Bush to explain the county's results, I left the amount of Democratic registered voters ballots cast for Bush as they were predicted by CNN (14% voted for Bush).

If this did not explain the result, I calculated how many Democrats would have to vote for Bush.

In 41 of 52 counties, this did not explain the result and Bush must have gotten more than CNN's predicted 14% of Democratic ballots

- not an unreasonable assumption by itself.

However, in 21 counties more than 50% of Democratic votes would have to have defected to Bush to account for the county result

- in four counties, at least 70% would have been required.

These results are absurdly unlikely.

The Second Rat

A previously undiscovered species of rat, Republicanus cuyahogus, has been found in Ohio.

Before the election, I wrote snide letters to a state legislator for Cuyahoga county who, according to media reports, was preparing an army of enforcers to keep 'suspect' (read: minority) voters away from the polls.

One of his assistants wrote me back very pleasant mails to the effect that they had no intention of trying to suppress voter turnout, and in fact only wanted to encourage people to vote.

They did their job too well.

According to the official statistics for Cuyahoga county, a number of precincts had voter turnout well above the national average:

in fact, turnout was well over 100% of registered voters, and in several cases well above the total number of people who have lived in the precinct in the last century or so.

In 30 precincts, more ballots were cast than voters were registered in the county.

According to county regulations, voters must cast their ballot in the precinct in which they are registered.

Yet in these thirty precincts, nearly 100.000 more people voted than are registered to vote

- this out of a total of 251.946 registrations.

These are not marginal differences

- this is a 39% over-vote.

In some precincts the over-vote was well over 100%.

One precinct with 558 registered voters cast nearly 9,000 ballots.

As one astute observer noted, it's the ballot-box equivalent of Jesus' miracle of the fishes.

Bush being such a man of God, perhaps we should not be surprised.

What to Do?

This is not an idle statistical exercise.

Either the raw data from two critical battleground states is completely erroneous, or something has gone horribly awry in our electoral system

- again.

Like many Americans, I was dissatisfied with and suspicious of the way the Florida recount was resolved in 2000.

But at the same time, I was convinced of one thing:

we must let the system work, and accept its result, no matter how unjust it might appear.

With this acceptance, we placed our implicit faith in the Bush Administration that it would not abuse its position:

that it would recognize its fragile mandate for what it was, respect the will of the majority of people who voted against them, and move to build consensus wherever possible and effect change cautiously when needed.

Above all, we believed that both Democrats and Republicans would recognize the over-riding importance of revitalizing the integrity of the electoral system and healing the bruised faith of both constituencies.

This faith has been shattered.

Bush has not led the nation to unity, but ruled through fear and division.

Dishonesty and deceit in areas critical to the public interest have been the hallmark of his Administration.

I state this not to throw gratuitous insults, but to place the Florida and Ohio electoral results in their proper context.

For the GOP to claim now that we must take anything on faith, let alone astonishingly suspicious results in a hard-fought and extraordinarily bitter election, is pure fantasy.

It does not even merit discussion.

The facts as I see them now defy all logical explanations save one

- massive and systematic vote fraud.

We cannot accept the result of the 2004 presidential election as legitimate until these discrepancies are rigorously and completely explained.

From the Valerie Plame case to the horrors of Abu Ghraib, George Bush has been reluctant to seek answers and assign accountability when it does not suit his purposes.

But this is one time when no American should accept not getting a straight answer.

Until then, George Bush is still, and will remain, the 'Accidental President' of 2000.

One of his many enduring and shameful legacies will be that of seizing power through two illegitimate elections conducted on his brother's watch, and engineering a fundamental corruption at the very heart of the greatest democracy the world has known.

We must not permit this to happen again!

Powell Said Poised to Leave Bush Cabinet
Mood:  incredulous
Topic: Politics
Powell Said Poised to Leave Bush Cabinet
By George Gedda
The Associated Press

Monday 15 November 2004

WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Colin Powell has told top aides he intends to resign from President Bush's Cabinet, high-ranking State Department officials said Monday.

Powell, who long has been rumored planning only a single term with Bush, told his aides that he intends to leave once Bush settles on whom to succeed him, said the officials, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Word of Powell's imminent departure kicked off a new week of Cabinet shuffling for Bush, who is planning his second term.

"I do expect some announcements shortly regarding members of the Cabinet," White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters at the White House Monday morning. "There are a few resignation. I expect four today."

McClellan said he did not expect any announcements Monday on replacements, however.

The White House was preparing an announcement to confirm Powell's resignation. According to one official, Powell expects that his departure date will be sometime in January. It was not immediately clear whether he would leave before Bush's second inauguration, on Jan 20.

Most of the speculation on a successor has centered on U.N. Ambassador John Danforth, a Republican and former U.S. senator from Missouri, and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Powell has had a controversial tenure in the secretary of state's job, reportedly differing on some key issues at various junctures with Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. Powell, however, has generally had good relations with his counterparts around the world, although his image standing has been strained by the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

Powell, a former chairman of the military Joint Chiefs of Staff, led the Bush administration argument at the United Nations for a military attack to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, arguing a weapons-of-mass-destruction threat that the administration could never buttress.

Powell submitted his letter of resignation to the President on Friday. He will go about his usual schedule and will continue at full speed until a successor is named and in place, a senior administration said.

Powell was scheduled to meet later Monday with Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom and was to attend a meeting of Asian in Chile Wednesday and a mutinational conference on Iraq next week.

He told some two dozen staff members of his projected departure at the start of the day.

For many months, Powell had been viewed as a one-term secretary of state but he has always been vague about his intentions. He had said repeatedly in recent weeks that he serves at "the pleasure of the president."

One senior official said that Powell's departure was part of a much broader Cabinet shakeup, details of which should be disclosed soon.

There had been speculation that Powell might elect to stay on until after the Iraqi elections at the end of January, but the senior official made no reference to that possibility.

Iraq has dominated Powell's attention during his nearly four years as secretary of state. Powell will perhaps be best remembered for that U.N. Security Council appearance on Feb. 5, 2003, during which he argued that Saddam must be removed because of its possession of weapons of mass destruction.

There is no evidence that those claims had any foundation. Powell has maintained all along that the use of force of by the American coalition in Iraq was justified.