Disgruntled Democrats vs Radical Republicans

This thread is for the extreme Right or Left. If you've got a wacky idea or theory concerning 'Democratic Plots' and 'Republician Conspiracies' or visa versa for that matter, please sound off. Lets hear it...

But Above All, I Wish you Freedom :hug: dd: :goofer:
Ben

 

No theory... the republican's STOLE the 2004 election from John Kerry by a coordinated effort of vote-rigging. In order to believe that the vote was actually honest, you would also have to believe ALL of the following seven impossible things:
1. There is no fraud implied when Florida reported 7.59 million votes, when the actual number of voters was only 7.35. No problem there... it's only a couple hundred thousand... anybody can make a mistake like that.
2. There is nothing unusual about the fact that predominantly republican precincts in Ohio (where the election commissioner is a rabid republican) reported more votes than there were registered voters, while democratic precincts reported participation rates under 10%. In Cuyahoga county alone more than 93,000 extra votes were tallied over the number of registered voters. No problem, right?
3. It's just a curiosity for the record books that Bush won re-election despite approval ratings less than 50%, the first time in history this has happened.
4. Florida computer programmer Clinton Curtis must have been lying when he said in a sworn affidavit that his employers at Yang Enterprises and their general counsel (Jeb Bush's running mate Tom Feeney) asked him to create a computer program to undetectably alter electronic vote totals. Mr Curtis stated that he initially thought he was creating the program to test security of the voting machine software, but was later told confidentially that the program was needed to control the vote in Florida.
5. Diebold (voting machine manufacturer) CEO Walden O'Dell must have just been joking around when he said in his August 14, 2003 GOP fundraising letter that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year". (He very pointedly did NOT commit to registering an honest vote)
6. Exit polling is a well understood technique and experience has shown it to be valid within a known margin of error. Therefore it must have just been a fluke that those polls were so far off that there was less than a 1 in 450,000 chance that the exit polls could have missed a Bush victory. And it must be simply an interesting coincidence that the exit polls were right on in every precinct won by Kerry, but were only wrong in precincts where Bush won. Gee... isn't that curious?
7. And it must be yet another stunning coincidence that the exit polls were wrong ONLY in those precincts that had no paper ballots to check against the electronic totals. Funny stuff huh?

Now folks, unless you're the Red Queen of Alice's Wonderland and are able to believe impossible things, it should be very clear that the man who has led our country into a war of imperial conquest for oil, who is using our dedicated military for unjust purposes, did not actually win the election and is leading our country in controversial direction illegitimately using a campaign of lies and without the support of the people. History will unltimately tell... but I think George Bush will be judged as the worst president this country has ever had. If our country survives this crisis with our laws and principles intact... which is by no means certain given that Bush has now given himself the power to declare martial law and and use troops against our own people... then let us hope that the next president can help repair some of the damage that has been done. Assuming it's not already too late.

 

A sane voice at cointalk (finally):hug: :bow:

 

ttt, bump...

 

Change just four (4!) words, and you have the Democratic platform of 1862.

Now folks, unless you're the Red Queen of Alice's Wonderland and are able to believe impossible things, it should be very clear that the man who has led our country into a war of imperial conquest for SLAVES, who is using our dedicated military for unjust purposes, did not actually win the election and is leading our country in [a] controversial direction illegitimately using a campaign of lies and without the support of the people. History will [ultimately] tell ... but I think ABRAHAM LINCOLN will be judged as the worst president this country has ever had. If our country survives this crisis with our laws and principles intact ... which is by no means certain give that LINCOLN has now given himself the power to declare martial law and use troops against our own people ... then let us hope that the next president can help repair some of the dame that has been done. Assuming it's not already to late.

 

What to believe

Have we elected the best of the worst, or the worst of the best ?

 

I like this thread. I'm going to have to get back to you though. So many choices, so many choices...

 

Speaking of Lincoln... we moved down here to Arkansas from Northern Michigan. Up north, I grew up thinking of Lincoln as a heroic president, and the Civil War as a period of time that we studied in history books. When we moved here I was in for a shock. The conflict is NOT referred to as the "Civil War"... it is always spoken of as "The War of Northern Aggression", and Abraham Lincoln is NOT revered, but villified. And the war is NOT merely a subject of classroom history, but for many people in the traditional south it is STILL very much on their minds as an event of much personal and family humiliation. So the point of view has a lot to do with how history is viewed... the winners get to write the books. Being from the north, I had not the faintest idea of the point of view of folk that grew up around here. I learned fast though... the very first day we were here I was asked "What is the difference between a Yankee and a Damn Yankee?" It's an old one but I had never heard it before. Anybody know the answer?

 

Growing up in East Texas I'd suspect it had something to do with a CarpetBag? Also we were taught about Lincoln and how he unified the nation. You MUST be in a really rural area or something.

 

I live in the south and my family is from the deepest south (which is east texas and georgia) and members of my family fought on the side of the south and I have seen no active hatred of abe though northerners arent the most loved people round those parts ...the war preserved the union and was a first step toward freeing the slaves...The south suffered without doubt but in the end, it was for the good.

Oh, and the replacing Bush with abe thing? I have seen that little trick done before by liberals replacing Blacks and Slave with Gays in an attempt to paint people who would deny gays rights as being as bad as those who looked to deny blacks their rights...so it works in for both sides and is pretty much a transparent useless tactic...I dont think history will be kind to Bush but time will tell.

 

Any questions about Danny Bonaduce's opinion and where his political allegiance lies?
WARNING, lots of BEEPS!

 

That's funny. I think history is already in on this one but by all means, move to a slave state like Muslim Suddan.

Ruben

 

Thats a crock but the Democrats did steal the election from Nixon for Kennedy in 1960 and continue to practice voter suppression in every major city in America, including and especially New York.

Voter fraud, jeez ever here of Tammany Hall, Meade Espesito and Richard Daley.

Ruben

 

The Campaign Tangle Begins

By Bob Liff

As candidates prepare to fan out across the city to gather signatures on nominating petitions, an old political aphorism is about to come back into play: It's good to know the law, but it's better to know the judge.

New York's cumbersome election laws are notorious around the country, producing more court challenges than all other states combined.

The best known recent cases involve Republican presidential shenanigans, including a federal lawsuit last year that forced state GOP leaders to add Arizona Senator John McCain's name to the primary ballot statewide. Four years earlier, it took Steve Forbes' deep pockets and teams of lawyers to force his way onto a ballot where state GOP leaders wanted to grease the skids for Kansas Senator Bob Dole's nomination.

But it is in the local, less noticed races - for city council, district leader, the state legislature - where the power of county party organizations come into play. These are cases in which party-paid lawyers ask judges who owe their seats to the same party organizations to rule on challenges to the nominating petitions filed by challengers unblessed by the party leaders.

It is a system in which petty technicalities become the fodder for a series of summertime lawsuits that keep a small group of lawyers gainfully employed. Mistakes in filling out petitions become labeled fraud. Judges order candidates to send troops of loyalists to nearby borough offices of the Board of Elections to go line-by-line over thousands of signatures on the petitions in search of those that can be kicked out. With enough signatures declared invalid, the candidates are then denied a place on the ballot.

The system has been made a tad more democratic in recent decades through a series of federal lawsuits that overturned state rulings that had favored the machine. But machinations still allow many elections to be decided in courtrooms long before voters get to go to the polling place.

The party organizations themselves go to incredible lengths to make sure their own petitions are valid, and filed on time. A favorite war story involves Harold Fisher, the late Metropolitan Transportation Authority chairman who was the chief lawyer and chief judge-picker for the Brooklyn Democratic organization when it was headed by the legendary boss Meade Esposito.

Fisher was in a car accident late one night in the 1960s as he drove the organization's petitions to the Board of Elections offices, then on Varick St. in Lower Manhattan. No one was injured in the accident, but it left the rear end of Fisher's car bashed in.

The petitions, of course, were in the trunk. As the midnight deadline neared, Fisher drove the car onto the freight elevator at the board headquarters, and drove it off onto the board's floor. There technicians logged in the car and slapped a seal on the trunk, which was opened with a crowbar the next day to free the petitions for more normal processing.

By far, most candidates lose their place on the ballot for failing to collect enough valid signatures. For a citywide race such as mayor or public advocate, 7,500 such signatures are required. There are 4,000 needed to appear as a candidate for borough president. Candidates for City Council must get signatures from 900 registered voters who live in the district in which they are running. The signatures this year must be collected between June 5 and July 12.

In some of this year's City Council races, which thanks to term limits and the public financing of campaigns have attracted as many as a dozen candidates in a single district, there simply do not exist enough registered voters in some districts to put every would-be candidate on the ballot. So, some candidates will not even get past the initial screening of the signatures by the Board of Elections.

But a goodly number of those who do could find themselves forced to defend the validity of the collected signatures in court.

It used to be worse. In the 1980s, petitions were declared invalid for such mind-numbing technicalities as addresses in which "street" or "avenue" were not spelled out, but written as "st." or "ave."

Then there were the truly arcane requirements for the cover sheets, those pages placed on top of the petitions that are supposed to list the numbers of signatures contained inside.

The requirements tripped up at least two incumbent legislators, Bedford-Stuyvesant's Al Vann and Roger Green, who wound up kicked off the Democratic primary ballot. But both won re-election anyway, by getting on the ballot of other political parties, either on the Liberal Party line, or in Green's case, a newly-created party called the Children First.

There was even one case in which Democratic powers kicked into high gear and used challenges to knock every other candidate of every other party off the ballot on some technicality or another in order to help the veteran lawmakers survive.

Legislators eventually were shamed into easing many of the requirements. No longer do candidates have to pore through voter lists to add the precise number of the election district or the assembly district in which each voter resides.

The most recent line of attack for party leaders has been to challenge the validity of the so-called subscribing witnesses, the people who sign a petition's cover sheet attesting that they collected or witnessed the collecting of the signatures. In a recent lawsuit, involving the tiny Independence Party and a special city council election in Staten Island, a judge threw out a requirement that the subscribing witness had to live within the district where he was collecting the signatures for the petition.

That was a requirement that clearly benefited party organizations who have built up cadres of supporters throughout the city. But the party machinery could get around their own residential requirement, because many machine loyalists are also registered as commissioners of deeds, an obscure title granted by the City Council which authorizes people to attest to the validity of signatures anywhere in the city.

But individual challengers and the smaller parties (Independence, Liberal, Conservative, Right to Life and Working Families) did not have the clout to get their loyalists registered as commissioners of deeds, and they often found it an insurmountable obstacle to get the right party members to the right district within the right time. Hence the successful lawsuit.

The Democrats decided not to take this last federal ruling lying down. While the federal decision was based on a series of cases expanding opportunities within party primaries, another line of cases upheld the parties' status as private organizations with rights to control their own destinie.

So party leaders tried to circumvent the federal court ruling by passing a party rule reinstating the old subscribing witness rule, meaning a person would have had to live in the district where they were collecting signatures. At the same time, the Assembly elections committee began drafting state legislation to do the same thing. Neither effort, however, bore fruit and the court ruling stands.

The rule this year, therefore, is that any city voter can collect petition signatures anywhere in the city, provided that voter is registered in the party the candidates are running in. The ruling was intended as a means to help minor parties and challengers. But party leaders, and union leaders with large cadres of mobile loyalists, could likely turn it to their own advantage by dispatching troops throughout the city to collect signatures without having to worry about where the petition gatherer lives.

After the whole process is over, the survivors are rewarded by getting to face the voters.

Oh yeah, the voters. Remember them?

 

There's something symmetrical about the conviction of yet another boss of the Brooklyn Democratic party and the nearly simultaneous celebration of the Voice's 50th anniversary. We can always count on Brooklyn, or its clubhouse equivalents elsewhere, to give us reason to go on, to serve up big targets as transparent as they thought our notch-on-the-belt motives were.

The godfather of our city political coverage, the recently deceased Jack Newfield, used to do annual Thanksgiving tributes to a select group of genuine local heroes. We might just as well have ritualistically thanked the rogues and wire-pullers, the campaign givers and takers, who've made this investigative job of ours such a canned hunt for so many years. In the old days, starting in the '60s, Newfield's clanging manual typewriter could take down any machine skel overnight, beating him into indictment, resignation, or cooperation, sometimes with verbs alone. We thought a deadline meant we had to kill someone by closing time.

Every news desk has something unique that makes it tick, a twist all its own. Ours has always been piñata politics. We could not have been happier that Ed Koch got 12 whole years at City Hall; we got to write every last truthful and troubling thing we ever thought about him.

When Rudy Giuliani was term-limited out after two terms, we just kept writing about him anyway, squeezing as much copy out of him as his multimillion-dollar consulting firm was squeezing out of 9-11. It helped that we never got answers to our questions while Rudy was in office, so things felt much the same when he was gone. For that matter, we believe no one can top our record of George Pataki exposés—from his bodyguard to his family vegetable stand—and yet he has never so much as spoken to anyone who works at this paper, proving how overrated access may be.

To us, Meade Esposito, the ex-boss of Brooklyn also on the tab of at least three crime families, morphed into Clarence Norman, who's now faced with twice the number of criminal cases (four to Meade's two), but is charged with stealing gas and tolls on his way to Albany, which Esposito ruled from a bar on Court Street. Esposito once forced me to tell him why we hated him, and when I said it was because he'd "corrupted an entire judiciary," his baffled reply was: "What else?" How could you not keep writing that story as long as it begged to be told? Same with Liberal Party plutocrat Ray Harding. Our best work on him, which put his son and Giuliani high stepper Russell in jail, helped push his 50-year- old party into ballot oblivion.

We've always gotten up in the morning, at least in part, to bag a bad guy. Al D'Amato called us vipers in his autobiography, as coveted a journalism prize as a Pulitzer any day. In the middle of his criminal trial, Stanley Friedman, once the most powerful party honcho in the state, demanded to know what he had to do to get a decent sentence—"I'm not looking for a paragraph," he said—in the Voice, and we just laughed. Koch branded us "wackos" so we invented our own Emmys, the annual Wacko Awards, and gave them to every stuntman and bad actor on our set, especially Ed's gang.

If one of us had a sacred cow, somebody else milked it, so that even the "great liberals" on the city beat have taken pages of well-deserved punishment, from Mario Cuomo, John Lindsay, Bella Abzug, Al Sharpton, Mel Miller, Chuck Schumer, Geraldine Ferraro, and Eliot Spitzer to Hillary Clinton. We've never let politics-in-common silence a good government grudge. In fact, as quiet as it is kept, though our local politics has always been decidedly liberal, we've long been better at goring our own. We like to think of ourselves as equal-opportunity garbage collectors, as nonpartisan as the wrongdoing itself, never looking past the wrist of any hand in the public till.

 

You mean you actually believe that a majority of voters chose George Bush? Yes I'm sure a few were duped by the Swift Boat Vermin liars (paid for by our friend Karl Rove, the biggest liar of all) but the data is quite clear... if you bother to look... that this election was rigged.

I consider voting fraud among the greatest possible crimes. Not only were John Kerry's civil rights denied, but the precious right to vote and be heard was stripped from tens of thousands of American citizens by people who were so bent on power and greed that principle and morality mean nothing to them.

 

I care what Danny Bonaduce and the other yahoo think why? Entertainment folk sing and dance for a living and they have as much right to express their opinions as the rest of us do. Do I have to care what they think or give their opinions extra weight because they are well-know? Absolutely not!

I don't care if they are stumping for the Dems or the Reps, their opinion is just one opinion out of the millions of opinions in this country and that is all the credence they should be given by anyone. Although, I am inclined to give Danny Bonaduce a little less credence than most because he can't even tell the male prostitutes from the female prostitutes and he wants me to respect George Bush. Go Danny!

 

Being from the land of Lincoln I have to say.... I guess all of the monuments in Washington and here in Illinois and around the country(save the South) as well as his face all over our money means that opinion will gradually change in this country and we will ultimately revile one of our greatest leaders who paid the ultimate price for this land. I guess Right-wing Christians can rewite history for stupid people so I suppose it's possible for something this unlikely to occur in the future. I hope that I'm already dead when it happens, I just can't live among the mentally challenged without getting extremely angry for very long. :goofer:

 

My, My Moen, your really disgruntled... Lets see what happens in two years. I really wish 'Pelosi, et al' the best. For the good of the nation...

 

I read an article that talked about exit polling and how it has become almost an exact science over the years. They have perfected the models to the point where they are acurrate to less than like 1 percent. However, for some reason, the exit polling models didn't pan out last time and even after pouring over the data and their models, experts could find no fault with any of the figures or their models.

Without being able to find any flaws in the modeling or the data, Bush opperatives dismissed the errors as people lying about who they voted for in numbers so large that the results where skewed. This would be the first time that this has ever occurred in all the years of polling. So we are supposed to believe Karl Rove over seasoned scientists once again. :desk: