Kerry concedes defeat: Bush is officially re-elected

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GuruJane

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#27

funkyfreo

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#28
Jane I don't think it is any great revelation that the extreme left and right actually have much in common.
 

PowerKop

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#31
GuruJane said:
Miller ... finally the Dems see sense and concede gracefully. Demon Dave just hasn't caught up yet, but his sorts of views are fast becoming irrelevant..

From my pov as a leftist, am hoping this will see the end of the disastrous stranglehold the pseudo Michael Mooreists have had on the Dems (and Labor here) and both parties can start to rebuild.

And now for the Trifecta ...

Tony Blair and New Labour ...
maybe Mark Latham should try to replicate the New Labour Blair was able to produce. Great time to start building for the next election. I understand Latham is a supporter of "the third way" and centre left politics. I have just done an assignment on the "third way" and think it definately has merit as a political ideology.
 

Bombers 2003

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#32
GuruJane said:
Pretty OTT site that, although this article from it is a fair history of the movement, even though I don't think it mentions the radical left, jewish/secular component in the development of neo conservatism ... which is a synthesis with the radical right:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/000tzmlw.asp?pg=2
Looking at that at Ann Coulter stuff,now i know why people like Tim,Medusala,MillerCHF,etc cant tell the difference between the Left and the Right.Are Blot and Coulter the same person in Drag?.
 

GuruJane

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#33
Mark Perica said:
Here is "Neocon 101" from the Christian Science Monitor web site. It confirms secular Jews founded the movement but they were called "neocons " because they ceased to be left wing :http://www.csmonitor.com/specials/neocon/neocon101.html
Thanks for finding that. It's pretty much a fair summation of the neo con movement. There was also a very good Four Corners program on the neo cons in the lead up to the Iraq War ... which "revealed" the nefarious secular, left wing jewish origins of the movement!

I have commented here before that the "neo cons" came into their own on 9/11 ... because everything they had been predicting since 1979 had come true. In another accident of history they had a president in the white house who was receptive to the argument that only the US using its unprecedented power to force democratic and economic reform in the Muslim world would get to the gut reasons for the rise of extremeist muslim fascism.

The neo cons have now been joined by the radical right, and if you like the conservative "evangelical" right. But make no mistake about it - it is intellectually and policy driven by secular, mainly jewish thinking that originated from the left. That's why Rumsfield and not even Cheney can be classified as a neo con. No true neo con would have been off sucking up to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s! No true neo con would have let the Baathists off after the Gulf War!
 

evo

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#34
Mark Perica said:
Here is "Neocon 101" from the Christian Science Monitor web site. It confirms secular Jews founded the movement but they were called "neocons " because they ceased to be left wing :http://www.csmonitor.com/specials/neocon/neocon101.html
That neo-con 101 description appears to desribe GuruJane to a tee.How you can claim to be a "real leftist" is beyond me.
 

RogerC

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#36
I might be wrong, but I've just spent half an hour trawling through any threads applicable to the US elections, and I can't find one mention of vote fraud. Just because the mainstream media won't touch it doesn't mean it isn't a big story. There's been stuff going on in Ohio and Florida that looks very, very fishy.

Between the hillbillies on this board who find it impossible to raise themselves from simple denigration of anyone to the left of Hitler, and most of the rest, who can actually spend seven pages debating whether the deliberate shooting of an unarmed, injured Iraqi constitutes a contravention of the Geneva convention, you'd think we could find some time to discuss something of real interest.

Here's some stuff to chew over:

In 29 Ohio precincts, more votes were officially cast than there are voters registered.

In the nation's first academic study of the Florida 2004 vote, University of California, Berkeley graduate students and a professor have found intriguing evidence that electronic-voting counties there could have mistakenly awarded up to 260,000 votes to President Bush.

Exit polls indicated a comfortable win to Kerry. Yet the results swung right back to a large Bush win. Exit polls are generally regarded as reliable predictors of elections results - they are even used to help track poll fraud in other countries. Yet in the USA it's the exit poll results that are bing questioned. Which would be ok if they were uniformly out. But they weren't.

In most stated - and particularly in those where punch card voting was used - exit polls reflected actual results pretty accurately. But in those areas where Diebold electronic voiting machines were used, there was little correlation between exit polls and results.

More interestingly, the swing was all toward the Republican Party. In some cases way beyond what could statistically be expected.


Look, that's just the tip of the iceberg. You can find out a lot more if you care to go looking for it. I just can't believe it's not being discussed here.
 

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DaveW

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#37
Welcome back RogerC. (Wherever it is you went.)

There's been a little bit out there about voter fraud this time around, but I'm sceptical myself.

Why? The popular vote.

Bush won the popular votes by some three percentage points. Roughly 51% to 48%.

If the nation as a whole voted that solidly for Bush, why is it so hard to believe that key swing states Florida and Ohio didn't do that same?

I think Kerry was fortunate to keep the electoral college numbers as close as they were.

If Republicans were engaging in massive voter fraud, they must've done it on a nationwide scale.
 
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Admin #38
DaveW said:
If Republicans were engaging in massive voter fraud, they must've done it on a nationwide scale.
Not at all, it would have only taken 70,000 voters to change sides in Ohio for Kerry to president right now. And with a lack of a paper trail, voting fraud could be relatively easily hidden. Most of the alledged discrepencies happened in democratic counties where higher number of Bush votes would not stand out so much.

Moreover, the electoral process must have the full confidence of the electorate and any questions of failings in the system should be vigorously explored.

But without any really substantial evidence of voter fraud, merely anecdotal stories, then claims of voter fraud sound a bit like sour grapes combined with conspiracy theories
 

DaveW

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#39
Jim Boy said:
Not at all, it would have only taken 70,000 voters to change sides in Ohio for Kerry to president right now. And with a lack of a paper trail, voting fraud could be relatively easily hidden. Most of the alledged discrepencies happened in democratic counties where higher number of Bush votes would not stand out so much.
I'm aware Ohio would have swung the election. But I think Ohio was representative of the nation as whole.

The national popular vote represented (sadly) a desire to stick with Bush.

So let me re-state what I said above: Bush won a clear majority of country, so why not would he not have won a clear majority of the bell-weather state of Ohio?

Moreover, the electoral process must have the full confidence of the electorate and any questions of failings in the system should be vigorously explored.
Oh no question. And I don't doubt that there is some dodgy stuff that goes on. I just strong doubt it was enough to sway this election.

But without any really substantial evidence of voter fraud, merely anecdotal stories, then claims of voter fraud sound a bit like sour grapes combined with conspiracy theories
Agreed.
 

RogerC

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#40
There's a group in the US called BlackBoxVoting who are attempting to gather together the evidence. It looks as if there'll be a recount in Ohio - inasmuch as they can do that with the lack of a paper trail when electronic voting is used.

It's not all anecdotal, Jim Boy. If it were, it wouldn't have got as far as recounts. The exit polling results, for example, are actual figures and statistical comparisons. And you can't call excess votes (in 29 precincts!) simply anecdotal.

If you're interested, pop over to whatreallyhappened.com and sift the crap from the reasoned debate.
 
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Admin #42
DaveW said:
I'm aware Ohio would have swung the election. But I think Ohio was representative of the nation as whole.
Not relevant, sadly the way that the electoral system works in the US means that Ohio and Florida were targetted as the swing states. Whoever won these would win the election. Thus a huge amount of energy was spent on these states while other states, for whom it was always known who would win, had very little exposure to campaigning.

That has the potential to skew the voting patterns in swing states completely out of line with the rest of the country. Also if you were going to go for fraud, you'd only do it in these two states. Anywhere else would be pointless.
 

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#44
Jim Boy said:
Also if you were going to go for fraud, you'd only do it in these two states. Anywhere else would be pointless.
Look, I wasn't suggesting the vote was rigged on a nationwise scale. I was simply drawing a bad conclusion from what I think is a bad premise. (e.g. if 1 = 2 then 3 = 4.)

I'll agree to disagree with you about Ohio/Florida not being a microcosm for the country as a whole.
 
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Admin #45
DaveW said:
Look, I wasn't suggesting the vote was rigged on a nationwise scale.
And neither am I. You can accuse me of nit-picking but you did suggest a nationwide scale of fraud was necessary when you said, "If Republicans were engaging in massive voter fraud, they must've done it on a nationwide scale.". I merely pointed out that you wouldn't go any further than fraud in one or two states, if that's the path you wanted to follow.
 

DaveW

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#46
Well let me add to the beginning of that statement to put it back in its proper context.

Given the wide popular vote margin, if Republicans were engaging in massive voter fraud, they must've done it on a nationwide scale.

I stand by that. I think you know what I was getting at.
 

Hawkforce

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#48
RogerC said:
Ho ho ho. Nice to hear from one of the hillbillies.
I don't know what happened to you Roger, or even when it happened, but at some point you crossed the line from "healthy sceptical inquiry" to "insane paranoic conspiracy".

Now you are a tool of diverse forces - both right and left extremes.

If you want to see how genuinely disenfranchised people react to electoral fraud have a gander at the streets of Kiev.

For solace, check your right-wing nutcase mates at "anti-war.com". There you will find an explanation for how this is a "neo-con" construct - and not a popular uprising...


Alternatively you can rejoin the realm of the sane and realise that you've been sucked in by diverse reactionary forces who have abused your natural liberal inclination to have you supporting clearloy totalitarian positions.

It's your choice.

Just ask yourself - Do YOU know more about disenfranchisement than a recently ex-soviet nation?

Or are you a pampered white Westerner who must know better than the average Ukraine civilian?
 

RogerC

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#49
Oh Hawky, have a listen to yourself.

"Insane paranoic conspiracy"? "Tool of diverse forces"? "neo-con construct"?

"..sucked in by diverse reactionary forces who have abused your natural liberal inclination to have you supporting clearly totalitarian positions"?


You send me paragraph after paragraph of politico-psychobabble, and then accuse me of being sucked in??

I make a couple of simple points - exit polls in the US election only seem to be out of synch with actual votes in swing states like Ohio and Florida; and only when compared to poll results measured by Diebold machines; and pretty much entirely to the advantage of the Republican Party.

And you accuse me of - well, I don't know what but it clearly has something to do with me belittling the citizens of the Ukraine.

Well, well, well - so questioning the results of the US election has now become a totalitarian position. What is the world coming to?

Get out that banjo boy - you're gonna need it.
 

GuruJane

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#50
RogerC said:
I make a couple of simple points - exit polls in the US election only seem to be out of synch with actual votes in swing states like Ohio and Florida; and only when compared to poll results measured by Diebold machines; and pretty much entirely to the advantage of the Republican Party.
Oh dear, oh very dear.

From personal experience let me recommend Avanza as a possible first step.
 
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