Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

I cast my vote today oh boy.
I voted democrat cuz George Bush sucks.
And though my vote is very small,
I hope they count them all
what will it take to make
the creepy evildoers fall?
I'd love to tur ur ur ur ur ur urn you ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ooo ah ah ah ah ah ah on.........


aw come on, join me!
add a verse!
H

hey hesty...

how do you do that?.... vote early, I mean?
I didn't think you could do that. Maybe it's an Oregon thing....
Hmm....

Oregon votes by mail. I got my ballot on Friday so my vote is cast already. I took it in and dropped it in the ballot box myself....I mean heck, who knows, the mailman might of tore it up right?
heh
As far as I know it's cast.
What a circus.
I just hope we get Bush out of there.
Think we will?
Am I stupid to think Kerry has a chance?

How you doin these days Mnaz?
H

actually, hes, I'm sicker 'n a dog right now, tryin' to battle through
the flu.... I was too weak to even indulge my internet addiction on
Sun. and Mon., but I think I've "turned the corner"..... barely.

Hmmm........ All voting is by mail?

Somehow that doesn't sound so good to me. That sounds like a system that could be tampered with.

I still like the original concept (at least in WA).... official neighborhood polling places and punchcard ballots.... a physical record of each vote. (supplemented by absentee ballots).
It's hard for me to trust the mail, or electronics, when it comes to voting....

Gee Mnaz, I'm sorry to hear you are sick....sounds awful....you take good care of yourself and get better.....

and yeah, who the hell knows what the hell is gonna happen to our votes.....
but, mines in there!
take care mnaz.....
H

Both of you:

My friends-- watch out for the flu and take it seriously. I know how damp Oregon is. I was born there in July of 1945; on the same day the Trinity Bomb exploded, I was crying and puking in the Salem Deaconess Hospital.

I like our neighborhood voting arrangement here in LA. My wife and I trot across to Sierra Elementary School where ladies with blue hair call out our names in stentorian tones as the official ballots ( each about 12 inches long and 4 inches wide) are handed to us ceremoniously. Then we go into a shaky canvas booth strung up on wires in the multi-purpose room where the Bluebirds and Boy Scouts meet every week, and punch our cards.

When they are dumped into the box through the slot, one of the bluehairs intones:

"Mr. Waterman has voted!"


I think there should be a mild and reasonable amount of ceremony about voting. It's supposed to be one of the more important acts we commit as citizens.

But Howard Zinn is right: what you do before and after that few minutes you spend voting is what's really important.

I wish I could say I think Kerry will win, but I don't. People in this country are properly frightened, and those who watch tv all the time ( virtually everyone) are convinced that Bush is a "strong leader" who will "protect" them.

They will vote their fear.

Of course I hope the electorate will be reasonable and vote out of something other than fear. But they would have to have informed themselves of a possible difference between the candidates ( of which there is precious little). And that costs most people too much time and effort.

That's one of the reasons Hamilton was afraid of too much democracy.

And none of this even takes into account Diebold machines, Florida ( and bro Jeb) and other skullduggery.

I wish you both well, and get well soon mnaz!


Zlatko

Hester and mnaz:

Here's Robert Kuttner's take on the election:


(paste)





THE ART OF STEALING ELECTIONS

by Robert Kuttner

The Republicans are out to steal the 2004 election -- before, during, and after Election Day. Before Election Day, they are employing such dirty tricks as improper purges of voter rolls, use of dummy registration groups that tear up Democratic registrations, and the suppression of Democratic efforts to sign up voters, especially blacks and students.
On Election Day, Republicans will attempt to intimidate minority voters by having poll watchers threaten criminal prosecution if something is technically amiss with their ID, and they will again use technical mishaps to partisan advantage.

But the most serious assault on democracy itself is likely to come after Election Day.

Here is a flat prediction: If neither candidate wins decisively, the Bush campaign will contrive enough court challenges in enough states so that we won't know the winner election night.

The right stumbled on a gambit in 2000, which could become standard operating procedure in close elections: If the election ends up in the courts, all courts eventually lead to the Supreme Court, which, as we learned, can overrule state courts -- and pick the president.

This year is even more ripe for abuse, because the 2002 Help America Vote Act, a "reform" written substantially to Republican specifications, toughened ID requirements. It also gave voters a right to cast "provisional" ballots if their names are missing from the rolls. Good impulse, but someone, ultimately a court, must decide whether they should have been permitted to vote, and that's almost impossible to resolve on Election Day.

In addition, states are experimenting with a variety of new voting systems, to avoid a repeat of the technical glitches that made it easy for Republicans to steal Florida in 2000. And experiment is the right word; much of this technology isn't ready for prime time.

In our voting systems, we now have a witches' brew of 19th-century local amateurism married to 21st-century technology that is not yet reliable. The technical mess functions as an enabler of the assault on voting.

There was a time when Democrats were the party that occasionally stole elections. Lyndon Johnson very likely stole his 1948 victory in the Texas Democratic primary, which launched his Senate career. President Kennedy actually joked about the notorious vote rigging in Chicago, which quite possibly tipped Illinois to him in 1960. (He would have won the Electoral College very narrowly without Illinois.)

It was Richard Nixon, that scoundrel's scoundrel, who resisted the temptation to mount a court challenge to the Illinois result because he felt the country couldn't take it. Imagine longing for the days when we had Republican leadership as principled as Nixon's.

But the days of urban Democratic machines that voted dead people are long gone. The press has reported isolated abuses, such as a few Florida snowbirds trying to register in more than one state. But any fair comparison of election abuses this year will reveal that one party is expending energy to register as many supporters as possible and assure that that their votes will be counted, while the other one is registering its supporters but also systematically trying to keep the opposition's votes from being cast. There is simply no comparable Democratic program of ballot suppression.

Maybe we should invite election observers from Afghanistan and Iraq.

We may not know the winner until the Electoral College meets in December, and perhaps not even then if contested elections are still tied up in court. It's not even clear whether the ultimate arbiter would be the Supreme Court or the House of Representatives.

If the courts took away the people's right to choose the president, and George Bush in effect stole two elections in a row, this would surely produce a constitutional crisis and a crisis of legitimacy.

But what if they gave a constitutional crisis and nobody came? The most ominous outcome of all would be public passivity, echoing 2000. That would confirm that the theft of our democracy was real.

Call me partisan, but the best insurance against this horrific outcome would be a Kerry win big enough so that even Karl Rove would not dare to mount this maneuver. A razor-thin race virtually invites it. And if Bush wins handily, our democracy will have other problems.

© 2004 Boston Globe

Zlatko....

That sounds just like the voting situation here in Seattle, except the
ladies usually have gray hair. Yeah.... about the new electronic voting they have in some places.... how in the world can those votes ever really be verified after they dissolve into the circuitry and memory banks? What really happens to votes when, say, servers start crashing? I'm still not convinced. Punchcards are the way to go. The only reason they "failed" in Florida in 2000 was a partisan GOP coup which prematurely truncated the recount effort, in my opinion.

Well Zlatko, I guess we're related in a sort of "doomsday" sense. I was born in August of 1960, exactly fifteen years to the day after the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki....
I'm definitely feeling that doomsday vibe, these days. Maybe it was always there and I ignored it like any sane person does. I don't know....

I agree that Kerry will lose this election, and it just isn't supposed to happen like this. We are about to re-elect an unappealing, smirking candidate who essentially stole the last election and can barely put two sentences together; a man who attacked and occupied another country under false pretenses and botched the job in the process, while giving away every corporate tax cut imaginable and cleaning out the treasury. I don't get it.

I'm not sure that Bushco's fear politics entirely account for this nonsense. I think the religious angle is playing a much greater role than I ever suspected..... Kinda makes me want to brush up on my
"Last Days" prophetic doctrine from those Christian fundamentalist days of my youth....

m.

Dear mnaz:


Thanks for your reply.

The "last days" feeling has come and gone before. I am old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis ( I was in highschool then) and not wanting my girlfriend to march in the band parade in San Francisco during a football game because we all thought every city on the West Coast would be vaporized in a few days or hours . . .

I think the only thing that might precipitate a true crisis in this country would be for gasoline to go up to about eight dollars a gallon at the pump ( it's already at nearly five in the Isles).

The other would be for college students to get drafted and start dying at the rate they did in Vietnam. But DUB reassures everyone he won't do that. Perhaps President Jeb (appointed by the Supreme Court in 2008?) would (?).

So you're in Seattle and forty-four years old, eh?

Will wonders never cease? I always thought of you as a razor-edged and brainy graduate student from Boston of about twenty-four years ( as my old friend from Croatia, Zlatko, used to say. My codename commemorates him).

Me, I'm the old man in the salt-and-pepper beard.

But I earned every one of these Ronald Reagan-style neck flaps and Kerry-engraved eye wrinkles.

Not in politics, though, thank Gods and Goddesses ( particularly Minerva).

Hi Hester-- nice three-way converse here, eh?


Zlatko

Hey Mnaz, I didn't know you were sick. I took that "still coughing" reference as irony, not illness. I'm sorry to hear it and I hope you recover rapidly. I spent a few days fighting something off, but I think I won.

How odd ... you say your birthday is August 16, 1960? What a coincidence. Mine is August 18, 1960, and I have a sibling with Aug 16 of another year.

What happened to all the heat generated by your posts at Arcanum? Everyone seems to have disappeared since I signed off last night. Maybe Rhino is off at work and/or doing some research on his position.

This election is literally giving me nightmares. I had a hard time getting to sleep last night, even at close to two in the morning. Therefore, I hope you're not right, Zlatko, but I fear that you are. Mnaz started some threads at Arcanum challenging the conservs to defend their votes, and so far, not much luck, just generalizations. I am just trying to think comforting thoughts right now, because there isn't much else I can do. This isn't just another election, and I've never been more scared of the possible consequences of the wrong choice.

Before I took my ballot in, I spent a few moments with myself, feeling pleased as punch that I was about to drop my little opinion in the big box.
But sadly, the few minutes after I had voted, I felt anger and apathy that somehow, it wouldn't really matter.
Zlatko, after reading your post and the article I can't help but feel sadness. Was there ever really any wholesomeness around presidential elections or is that just some bs that my own wholesomeness created?
I can't understand why someone would run for an election and then force a win, refuse to lose. It's like blatently rigging a horserace, and fully expecting a person to make a fair bet! Is that what America is now? A rigged lot of elections and an absurd fantasy that we are a free country? Perhaps the best slogan of all for america anymore is that "there's a sucker born every minute"
I fear I hath believethed too much!
H

Zlatko...

Yes.... episodes and feelings of impending global doom have come and gone. There were a few people at my old church who swore that it was possible to calculate the year of Christ's return..... I think they had it at 1996, if I recall.

But now we have a rather hardline and outspoken fundamentalist-type as President about to be handed a second term; a President who "takes orders from God" and who has already invaded two Muslim countries; all of this as the oil is starting run out, and oil-rich regions head toward what is likely to be a period of nearly continuous conflict and contention between the native peoples of these regions and competing industrialized nations trying to secure access to the oil. I wonder if these nations would stand by and watch if Bush decided to take another strategic country or two. I doubt it.... The scariest thing about "taking orders from God" is that as a consequence, the "law of man" must take a beack seat to the "law of God" sometimes, with potentially disastrous results....

Hey Cat......... it's August 6th, actually.....

I'm not sure what happened to the rhino-man over at AC. Maybe he'll come up with something. I just think nobody's been able to answer my question because there's no convincing answer. Bush took us to war over WMD, and now we know there were no WMD. You really can't defend that. What you're left with is trying to tear down Kerry until most of the public comes to believe that he's even worse than Bush. I think that's why this has been such a negative campaign from the Bushites.... they didn't have much else to offer....... Ah yes..... God bless America!

Dear Hester:


Greetings! I hope you and Astoria and your new job are doing fine.

I strongly recommend that you, mnaz and abcrystcats all look at a new posting of mine on "Culture." It's called "A GI's Mother Looks at Iraq."

It's by Teri Wills Allison, the mother of a soldier in Iraq, and it speaks to what I look for when I look for a change in the minds of the electorate.

Teri Wills Allison is an informed and articulate spokesperson, however. I only wish more Americans would spend some time educating themselves about President Bush's policies before they vote.


--Z