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New Civilization News: jazzoLOG Concedes |
Category: Politics 11 comments 19 Nov 2004 @ 11:28 by vaxen : The Maqui...ever hear of them? Oh, remember Rudyard's "When the Saxons began to hate?" You may find some encouragement there, too. Meanwhile buck up mate. Long and bitter winter at the forge, this year, is to be expected. No big thing we've gone through much worse. Tyranny is a pimple on the ass of G'D. Sooner or later G'D wakes up and squeezes that pimple and all is well for another season. You played your part well. Tending to the family fires can be a great meditation, too. Infinitely more satisfying 'then real politik.' Here, here! A toast, then, for jazzoLOG. In losing you've won! 20 Nov 2004 @ 05:10 by koravya : Raise the Toast Indeed, to jazzoLOG, the truly noble warrior, who fights with all his heart for what he believes in, for what he knows is true. 20 Nov 2004 @ 05:21 by vaxen : A Toast: Sieg! http://signs-of-the-times.org/signs/images/nazi-prop3.jpg Sieg Heil! http://signs-of-the-times.org/bush-hitler.htm 20 Nov 2004 @ 05:35 by vibrani : Jazz why do you think I and others have been suggestion you start meditating? It's about breathing, relaxing, and connecting with God yourself. ********* My first trip to Karme Choling, Buddhism Tibetan style (Kagyu lineage), was a week-long intensive in 1975 entitled Battle of the Ego, which featured 7 hours of meditation practice a day. I later met Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche at a dharmadhatu in Toronto. Thanks. ---jazz ******************** Great, did you keep it up? Even for a half hour a day? Nora 20 Nov 2004 @ 23:58 by Quinty @68.226.90.181 : Four Years of Plague, Famine, and Fire? Kind of a lurid subject heading. But we all feel as if Shakespeare for once didn't quite get it right when he uttered "brave new world." (Or was it the Shake?) What we face the next four years seems much more dreadful than anything the Elizabethans had to face. Even plague, perhaps? After all, "the last, best hope for humanity" appears to be on the rocks. What couldn't happen here seems to be happening here: Sinclair Lewis, that wonderful man, and the hopeful populist thirties aside. (Yes, my parents knew Lewis and Dorothy Thompson and used to visit sometimes up at their place in Vermont. The left intelligentsia runs far and wide and no matter what our superfluous mass media says, they once had an influence. Once upon a time they were widely respected. And they were far more honored than they are today because they wrote the books. And many more people read.) Electronic voting machines have to be gotten rid of. Paper worked in the 18 th century and paper is still the only voting tool which works today, don't you think? Votes have to be verified in order to be certain of fair and honest elections. Even if the computers have been honestly programmed they still make glitches. So what if it takes a few days to count all the paper ballots, all the Xs next to names? Isn't the integrity of the election more important than speed? Do we have to know nanoseconds after the last vote is cast who won? We can wait, don't you think? Even a week? Elections have always been corrupt in this country. In the nineteenth century a glass of whiskey could buy a vote in the deep south and a few hundred dollars could sway an election. Boss Daley gave it to JFK in 1960 and LBJ won his 1948 Senate seat because, as someone well described it, they were so enthusiastic for Lynden that "they even rose from the dead to vote for him." The obvious theft of the 2000 election in Florida only pointed out how corrupt elections are and can be. Does anyone believe Karl Rove is an honest man? Or Jeb Bush? Or that most hateful of selfish and ruthlessly ambitious of petty politicians, Katharine Harris? I think Katha Pollit may have had it right: "Maybe this time the voters chose what they actually want: Nationalism, pre-emptive war, order not justice, "safety" through torture, backlash against women and gays, a gulf between haves and have-nots, government largesse for their churches and a my-way-or-the-highway President." But we'll see. We can put nothing past this crop in the White House. John Negroponte is our ambassador to Iraq? The US facilitator for the Honduran death squads? No, we can't put anything past them. Good luck Richard. We are all going to need it. 21 Nov 2004 @ 10:49 by jazzolog : I've Been Holding Out On You Guys I have to confess I got an email from John Kerry Friday evening at 5:59. I thought, "Oh great, I publish my concession essay to the world...and now Kerry decides to rumble around!" So I didn't say anything. Yesterday I worked on the woodpile and inventoried my own emotions and relationships more thoroughly than I have done since May. But I got an email this morning that sent me into the Internet underground again, and I must say there is credible momentum building about demands for recounts and accusations of hacking and fraud. The most interesting guy I ran into during these 2 hours is Keith Olbermann at MSNBC, whose work I've never seen since we don't get cable TV. Olbermann's background over the last 20 years is sports, and I understand he was central to setting up the highly successful ESPN radio network. He stopped specializing in phys ed a few years ago, and now is chasing political conspiracy. I'm thinking about joining his team. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ MSNBC.com November 19, 2004 | 5:39 p.m. ET Didn't you run for president once? (Keith Olbermann) 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 dont have full confidence in the integrity of the voting process. Since his concession, Kerrys 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 shouldve been doing so, and provided virtual proof to others that there werent 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 doesnt exactly dispel that aroma. It came by way of an e-mail to supporters but not to the media and a video http://www.johnkerry.com/petition/everychild.php on his otherwise update-free campaign website, which maintains the frozen-in-time November 2 front page http://www.johnkerry.com/ that makes it look like the political equivalent of Miss Havershams cobweb-strewn house in Dickens "Great Expectations." The primary topic of the mass e-mail isnt even this election or future ones. Its 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 passageRegardless 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 shouldnt tell anybody. Its exactly what these confusing times do not need: more confusion. Thoughts? E-mail KOlbermann@MSNBC.com November 19, 2004 | 9:40 a.m. ET All I know is what I don't read in the papers (Keith Olbermann) SECURE UNDISCLOSED LOCATION Im beginning to think like Jim Bunning now. So far in this post-election trip through Alices looking glass weve 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 one "New York Times" reference http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0914FC3F5D0C7A8DDDA00894DC404482 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" {link:http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65665,00.html} and "Countdown." http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/ 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 Ill add one factor to explain the collective shrugged shoulder: reading this stuff is hard. Its hard work. There are, as we know, lies, damn lies, and statistics. But there is one level of hell lower still scholarly statistical studies. {link:http://www.computerworld.com/governmenttopics/government/policy/story/0,10801,97614,00.html} I have made four passes at The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections, http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/new_web/VOTE2004/index.html 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, Im reminded suddenly of the old cartoon, with the guy saying I dont 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 didnt they try?) Professor Hout analogized the report to a beeping smoke alarm. It doesnt say how bad the fire it is, it doesnt accuse anybody of arson, it just says somebody ought to have an extinguisher handy. Without attempting to crack the methodology, its clear the researchers claim theyve compensated for all the bugaboos that hampered the usefulness of previous studies of the county voting results in Florida. Theyve weighted the thing to allow for an individual countys 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 theyve found actually affected the direction of Floridas 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 Floridas 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. Its 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 youd expect from both sides. She quotes Susan Van Houten of Palm Beachs Coalition for Election Reform as saying Ive 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. Whats possibly of more interest to us poor laymen is what isnt in the Berkeley report. As I mentioned previously, they dont 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 couldnt 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. Were calling on voting officials in Florida to take action. Anybody want to belly up to this bar? Thoughts? E-mail me at KOlbermann@msnbc.com Subscribe to the 'Countdown' newsletter. Countdown airs weeknights, 8 p.m. ET on MSNBC. URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/ 23 Nov 2004 @ 09:34 by jazzolog : Are The Dems Recounting Ohio---Or Not? While the federal suit for recount was filed officially yesterday by Cobb and Badnarik {link:http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-recount23nov23,0,3222925.story?coll=la-home-politics} , Keith Olbermann was burning the midnight oil last night trying to figure out whether Kerry is in on this or not~~~ November 22, 2004 | 11:15 p.m. ET Hanging Chads and Hanging Participles (Keith Olbermann) NEW YORK - You dont have to wait for the Ohio Presidential Recount to get confused. Just pay attention to the recasting of news releases from the Ohio Democratic Party. Early Monday afternoon, Ohio Chairman Dennis White released a comparative bombshell inside the still tiny world of the Recount-Conscious. It bore the headline Kerry/Edwards Campaign Joins Ohio Recount and advised that assuring Ohioans receive an accurate count of all votes cast for president has prompted the Democratic Party to join the initiative to recount the results of the November 2 presidential election. But by 8 PM Eastern, a second press release was out, with two notable tweaks. Now the headline read Kerry/Edwards Campaign Participates In Ohio Recount, and the lead sentence read has prompted the Democratic Party to participate in the initiative to recount the results The switch from join to participate reduces the Democratic commitment from virtual co-sponsorship to nearly the level of acquiescence. In late afternoon, Ohio Dems spokesmen Dan Trevas told us that the remains of the national Kerry/Edwards campaign had approved the original press release and gave us the authority to proceed with this. Tomorrow we expect to have a letter from them to Kenneth Blackwell which would ask Ohios Secretary of State to proceed with a recount. But the lead Kerry lawyer on the ground in Ohio, Daniel Hoffheimer, was more cautionary. What they meant to say is that the Kerry/Edwards campaign will be putting witnesses in the Boards of Elections if a recount is asked for We are not requesting a recount. At this point, the words are being that carefully chosen and, evidently, debated. So dont think when John Kerry said in his web-exclusive statement and video Friday that Regardless of the outcome of this election, once all the votes are counted he wasnt being deliberately vague. Similarly nuanced were the words of the Ohio Democratic chair, Mr. White: As Senator Kerry stated in his concession speech in Boston, we do not necessarily expect the results of the election to change Howard Fineman, chief political correspondent of Newsweek and since the days of our old The Big Show an MSNBC analyst, summed up the exact inexactitude of Kerry and the Democrats about Ohio, on the Monday Countdown. They keep saying these little things designed to make clear, at least to their supporters and the whole blogosphere out there, that they take the possibility (of a Kerry victory) and the need for a recount seriously. Fineman put it in terms that the mainstream cant ignore. He told me hed talked to Ohios Mr. Blackwell earlier in the evening. There in fact will be a recount, Howard said with a sigh that encapsulated all of the Florida 2000 Experience. We will be talking about chads once again. As Kerry himself calculated early on November 3rd, the Provisional Ballots alone obviously could not provide anything close to enough bona fide Democratic votes to overcome President Bushs 135,000 vote plurality in the Ohio election night tally. But as Howard also pointed out - and my colleague David Shuster so thoroughly extrapolated in a previous post on Hardblogger - the Provisionals plus the Undercount could make things very close indeed. The punch-card ballots where it looks like nobody marked anything when read by an optical scanning machine, might produce thousands of legitimate votes if hand-counted and judged by Ohios strict laws defining how many corners of the proverbial chads have to be detached to make a vote valid. In Ohio, the reality of the recount is beginning to sink in, and local governments arent happy about it. The Associated Press ran a story Monday afternoon in which its reporter quoted the incoming president of the Ohio Association of Election Officials, Keith Cunningham. The inference is that Ohio election officials will not count every vote, said the man who is currently head of the Board of Elections in Allen County (thats the Lima area, northwest of Columbus). Thats just insulting; its frivolous and simply harassment. Advised of the recount push by the Green and Libertarian Parties, and their plan to sue to force a second tally even before Secretary of State Blackwell is scheduled to certify the first count, Cunningham said his statewide group might sue back to prevent a recount. I need to see if this is merely my opinion or reflects the opinion of the association. The issue may boil down to money. The Glibs had raised $235,000 as of Monday morning, an amount which covers the $113,600 bond they had to provide as demanded by Ohio election law, plus some of their own organizational expenses. But Cunningham said the actual expenses would crush county governments, and a spokesman for Blackwell said the final cost could be $1.5 million. So there it is. There will be a recount in Ohio. Unless there wont be. And the Kerry campaign staff will participate in it. Unless thats too strong a word for them. Keep those email coming at KOlbermann@msnbc.com http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/ 24 Nov 2004 @ 12:00 by jazzolog : Screwed By Democrats From Dan Tokaji last night~~~ 11/23/2004 Preliminary Relief Denied in Ohio Recount Case U.S. District Judge James Carr has denied a preliminary injunction and TRO, in a case seeking to compel Ohio election officials to complete a recount by the December 7 "safe harbor" date. His order can be found here http://www.electionlawblog.org/ on Rick Hasen's blog, and the moving papers in the case (Rios v. Blackwell) are here http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/key-recounts.html#Rios on the Election Law @ Moritz website. The plaintiffs in the case include the Libertarian and Green Party candidates for President. They claim that the failure to conduct a recount by the "safe harbor" date -- discussed in the post immediately below -- violates their constitutional and statutory rights. Judge Carr doesn't reach the merits of their claims, instead resting on the fact that there's no possibility of the plaintiffs being harmed, given that they can't possibly prevail in the election. My take: I think Judge Carr was correct to deny preliminary relief. He was also right to avoid the merits, at least at this stage, given the tricky issues that it raises. But this leaves a serious problem unresolved. As I mentioned yesterday, Ohio's recount and contest scheme makes it difficult if not impossible for the state to meet the December 7 "safe harbor" date, by which contests over presidential electors must be resolved in the state is to ensure its chosen electors will be the ones counted in Congress. In fact, Ohio's scheme makes it difficult for the recount and contest process to be completed by the date on which the Electoral College meets (December 13). Perhaps some of the blame lies with Secretary Blackwell for not proceeding more quickly. But the biggest problem, it seems to me, lies in Ohio's statutory scheme. It seems clear that the statute needs to be fixed. Whether the courts have a role to play in the process is less clear. As an initial matter, it's hard to see how the Plaintiffs can plausibly claim a violation of any right under Art. I, Sec. 2 of the Constitution, providing that electors shall be appointed in such manner as the Legislature may direct. The only real argument is that Blackwell should declare the election by December 3, the date on which the Secretary of State is by statute supposed to send notice to the chosen electors. (He's said that he may not do it before December 6.) But this doesn't really solve the problem, since there still wouldn't be enough time for a recount and contest. Nor can Plaintiffs plausibly claim that the federal safe harbor law (3 U.S.C. 5) has been violated. It's up to states to determine whether they wish to take advantage of this safe harbor, and I think it's doubtful that this statute confers any privately enforceable rights. That leaves Plaintiffs' claims under the First and Fourteenth Amendment. Maybe there's a due process argument, arising from the fact that the State of Ohio has prescribed a recount and contest procedure that can't realistically be completed in time for it to be meaningful. While this claim isn't very clearly fleshed out in Plaintiffs' moving papers, and it might be declared moot after the electoral college meetts, it would be nice to see this issue litigated now -- rather than in the context of a truly disputed election four, eight, or twelve years hence. Capable of repetition yet evading review? - posted by Dan Tokaji @ 11:51 PM http://equalvote.blogspot.com/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Yes Dan, and of course had the Democrats joined the suit the other day, Judge Carr could not have ruled out the possibility of the results in Ohio being overturned by the recount...and hence the whole United States election. ---RC 20 Aug 2005 @ 00:34 by Dennis Lewis @67.101.101.220 : Quotation from Dennis Lewis on breathing I just came across this quotation taken from my book (with at lease one glaring editing mistake) "Free Your Breath, Free Your Life." I appreciate your interest in my work, but since this quotation is more than just a few sentences, permission should have been asked for and full attribution given. Oh well...that's the way it goes these days on the Internet. In any case, those who want to learn more about my book (published by Shambhala in 2004 and copyright by me) can visit http://www.freeyourbreath.com. With best wishes, Dennis Lewis 22 Aug 2005 @ 13:00 by jazzolog : Thank You Dennis Lewis for your comment, and I hope you will forgive negligence in November caused by my post-election stess disorder. It's wonderful you were published by Shambhala, a company many of us at this site honor and whose whole catalog we wish we had on our shelves. I didn't know that because I think, reaching back into a dim past, I found that quotation on a Workman's calendar from some past year. Of course they don't credit where they get their stuff either, and want everyone to visit www.workman.com and ask their permission for a quotation. I thought I was doing my best to credit and advertise the thoughts and creative ideas I admire, but I'm sure I can do better. I'll try, and it's an honor to me you visited this Log. I hope that link you provided gets up and working soon, because right now it leads to www.directnicparking.com/ . Here's a neat page on Dennis~~~ http://www.authentic-breathing.com/about_dennis_lewis.htm 22 Aug 2005 @ 15:00 by Dennis Lewis @67.101.148.102 : Typo in my last address Thanks for your explanation. These things do happen, as I well understand. Somehow a typo crept into the address I gave for "Free Your Breath, Free Your Life." The book address should be http://www.freeyourbreath.com Other entries in Politics 1 Jul 2010 @ 02:21: PHILIPPINES’ NEW PRESIDENT: AKBAR OR NERO? 4 Jun 2010 @ 08:30: SCUTTLE EU NOW, BEFORE 4TH REICH OPTION AWAKENS! 17 Nov 2008 @ 10:11: My 'story' I just uploaded to change.gov 8 Nov 2008 @ 16:06: A Boy Named Sue and the False American Dream 7 Nov 2008 @ 16:01: No He Can't... 6 Nov 2008 @ 09:16: History is NOW 5 Nov 2008 @ 16:58: Obamas World - Africa and the World beyond Poverty !? - but how? - what world? 5 Nov 2008 @ 14:02: Proud to be An American 26 Oct 2008 @ 15:26: Systemic Intelligence: How to teach Systemic Thinking effectively 26 Oct 2008 @ 10:27: OBAMA IS AMERICA’S MAN OF THE HOUR
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19 Nov 2004 @ 10:51, by Richard Carlson