on the bermuda triangle that is iraq

Today, Tim Grieve writes in Salon.com's War Room:

First the WMD, then the $9 billion

Before Congress gives George W. Bush an additional $80 billion for Iraq, and before his friends in the media engage in any more hand-wringing about the U.N. oil-for-food program, somebody on the right might want to start asking about the nearly $9 billion that the Coalition Provisional Authority can't quite seem to find.

The U.S. inspector general assigned to audit the reconstruction effort says that "severe inefficiencies and poor management" by the CPA make it impossible to know what has become of $8.8 billion worth of Iraqi money that the CPA once controlled. Among the problems the inspector general found: The CPA may well have been paying "ghost employees" to provide security in Iraq. As CNN reports, auditors found 8,206 guards on the payroll at one Iraqi ministry but could validate the existence of only 602 of them. Perhaps this helps explains why Condoleezza Rice insists that there are 120,000 trained Iraqi security personnel when others, like Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, put the number at around 4,000.

Former CPA chief and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Paul Bremer says the inspector general's findings are overblown and based on a lack of understanding about the problems on the ground in Iraq. In a response to the audit findings, Bremer said that it was more important to buy peace by getting money to Iraqi employees than it was to keep track of where the money was going and that it was better to live with a flawed payroll system than to "stop paying armed young men" who might have been providing security.

-- Tim Grieve

on iraq, and parallels to the vietnam war

(thanks to patachon for posting this bit of history on Daily Kos)

U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote :
Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror

by Peter Grose, Special to the New York Times (9/4/1967: p. 2)

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3-- United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.

According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.

The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong to destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a preliminary assessment of the nation election based on the incomplete returns reaching here.

rest of article here

on the use of appropriate language

kak·is·toc·ra·cy (kk-stkr-s)
n. pl. kak·is·toc·ra·cies

Government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens.

source: dictionary.com
used recently by eric alterman, www.thenation.com

the power of nightmares

from the Nation. Katrina van den Heuvel writes:

"Last week, the BBC re-broadcast a provocative documentary series which challenges the idea that Al Qaeda is the center of a uniquely powerful, unified and well-organized international terrorist conspiracy.

"The attacks on September 11th," according to the film's director Adam Curtis--one of Britain's leading documentary filmmakers--"were not the expression of a confident and growing movement. They were acts of desperation by a small group frustrated by their failure which they blamed on the power of America. It is also important," Curtis adds, "to realize that many within the Islamist movement were against this strategy." (This view accords with those held by terrorism experts--like Peter Bergen--who argue that Al Qaeda is largely a spent force that has changed from a tight-knit organization capable of carrying out 9/11 to more of an ideological threat with loose networks in many nations.)

"The film also challenges other accepted articles of faith in the so-called war on terror, and documents that much of what we have been told about a centralized, international terrorist threat "is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicans. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services and the international media."

"The series does not claim that terrorism poses no threat, nor does it challenge the idea that radical Islamism has led to gruesome violence throughout the world. "The bombs in Madrid and Bali showed clearly the seriousness of the threat--but they are not evidence of a new and overwhelming threat unlike any we have experienced before. And above all they do not--in the words of the British government--'threaten the life of the nation.' "

"First broadcast in Great Britain last November, The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear has yet to air on this side of the Atlantic. Why is it that no television outlet in the United States has yet to broadcast this critically-acclaimed film?. . . [cut]

"America has become trapped by that fear--riven by nightmare visions of 'sleeper cells' in its midst for which there is little or no evidence. The series attempts to explain why this strange state of affairs has come about and it argues that politicians have found in fear a way of restoring their power. In a populist consumerist age where their authority and legitimacy has declined dramatically politicians have simply discovered in the War on Terror a way of making themselves indispensable to their populations again by promising to protect us from something that only they can see."

"Curtis has promised to send me a copy of the documentary. But millions of Americans deserve to see a film that offers a rigorously documented and credible counter to the conventional narrative of a "war on terror."

"If you agree, write HBO and ask why it isn't showing this BBC documentary. You can also call on PBS stations to be true to their missions by asking them to air The Power of Nightmares.

on a similar note...here's someone getting told what-for on Fox

check out this short clip that's going around and around. Fox newscaster was NOT prepared. :)
click here

on why ann coulter sucks, or, someone actually cares about facts...

found this gem by quickiemart on dailykos's blog

"It's rare that the media ever nail Ann Coulter for her obfuscations and misrepresentations but it happened in prime time, in Canada last night. . .Last night, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's excellent investigative news program, "the Fifth Estate," broadcast a one-hour special on the hijacking of the American media by conservative bullies whose knowledge of foreign policy seems to run the gamut from A to B and who tend toward scream-o-ramas in which dissenters are accused of being unpatriotic.

"Of course, it included Coulter who gloated to correspondent Bob McKeown about how her side is "winning and they're loosing." But in the next segment during a rant about how Canada is disloyal for not sending troops to Iraq, Coulter was finally exposed. It just isn't clear from the exchange if she is genuinely confused or purposefully misrepresenting the truth. . .

"Transcript below. (I recorded this from my television last night.)

"Coulter: "Canada used to be one of our most loyal friends and vice-versa. I mean Canada sent troops to Vietnam - was Vietnam less containable and more of a threat than Saddam Hussein?"

McKeown interrupts: "Canada didn't send troops to Vietnam."

Coulter: "I don't think that's right."

McKeown: "Canada did not send troops to Vietnam."

Coulter (looking desperate): "Indochina?"

McKeown: "Uh no. Canada ...second World War of course. Korea. Yes. Vietnam No."

Coulter: "I think you're wrong."

McKeown: "No, took a pass on Vietnam."

Coulter: "I think you're wrong."

McKeown: "No, Australia was there, not Canada."

Coulter: "I think Canada sent troops."

McKeown: "No."

Coulter: "Well. I'll get back to you on that."

McKeown tags out in script:

"Coulter never got back to us -- but for the record, like Iraq, Canada sent no troops to Vietnam."

on iraq

apparently, we've given up searching for weapons of mass destruction. Salon.com points out that the NY Times story was buried on p. A10, in a short, 240-word blurb.

truly disturbing information about what happened in Fallujah: UK Guardian site

but hey! i really would like some MORE information about how Social Security is in SUCH A CRISIS that only President Bush can save us! Sounds a bit like the hype over the WMDs, come to think of it. Pump the fear, push the pre-emptive policies... (see Krugman on why there is no such crisis)

more outrage, every day

so, i'm back to the blog. there's just so much to be mad about, i can't keep quiet.

--on the measly $15/$35 million the US has pledged: we gave 3 BILLION to florida. granted, there was a lot of destruction there. but let's talk about being a good global citizen, for a second. do you know that the GOP is planning on spending $30 million on the inauguration? makes me sick, when i think about how little we are prepared to spend on the needy in other parts of the world. interesting: despite Colin Powell's statements, we are the ultimate scrooge.

"The United States contributes about a tenth of one percent of its income in aid to poor countries -- an abysmal rate that falls below that of all industrialized nations, and is dwarfed by the giving rate of Canada (0.26 percent), Germany (0.28 percent), the United Kingdom (0.34 percent), and France (0.42 percent)." (http://www.salon.com).

And from The New York Times Editorial today: "According to a poll, most Americans believe the United States spends 24 percent of its budget on aid to poor countries; it actually spends well under a quarter of 1 percent."

so, please make a donation to one of the international aid groups directly. you can do it through the American Friends Service Committee, Doctors without Borders, American Red Cross, and many others.

Ok, and let's get serious about the mess we are in in Iraq. Salon.com tells us today the following dismal statistics:

-- The U.S. military suffered at least 348 deaths in Iraq over the final four months of the year, more than in any other similar period since the invasion in March 2003.

--The number of wounded surpassed 10,000, with more than a quarter injured in the last four months as direct combat, roadside bombs and suicide attacks escalated. When President Bush declared May 1, 2003, that major combat operations were over, the number wounded stood at just 542.

-- The number of attacks on U.S. and allied troops grew from an estimated 1,400 attacks in September to 1,600 in October and 1,950 in November. A year earlier, the attacks numbered 649 in September, 896 in October and 864 in November.

welcome to 2005.

Former Bush campaign official indicted

they play dirty, yes they do.

so this guy was employed by bush's campaign until very recently, even though this allegation had broken and appeared very likely to be proven.

check it out: planned phone-jamming in 2002

so don't tell me they won 'fair and square' this time, ok?

on fraud, "actionable" and otherwise

check out this post. it's worth a read, especially for all you legal eagles out there.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/30/185532/75

ohio-ukraine connection, redux

so apparently african americans really, really like fringe third-party candidates. read here.

seems that a number of cleveland precincts voted much more heavily for the libertarian and constitution party whackos than ever before--when nader received a total of 8 votes in two counties, this year Peroutka and Badnarik together got 378 votes! Wow!

"The same pattern showed up in 10 Cleveland precincts in which Badnarik and Peroutka received nearly 700 votes between them. In virtually all those precincts, Kerry's vote was lower than Al Gore's in 2000, even though there was a record turnout in the black community this time, and even though blacks voted overwhelmingly for Kerry."

uh, what about ohio?

so you may have noticed--or not--that we still don't know about the total vote count in ohio. interesting, huh? three weeks later? what's up with that?

nytimes has an article on that here

more to the point, James Galbraith points out that the same electoral irregularities that are causing such an uproar in Ukraine have been largely ignored here in the US press. here's his column in salon.

we know that the distribution of voting machine was manipulated on a partisan basis.

why is no one angry?

taking a stand

hello all

i have been pretty quiet this week (getting some work done), but also mulling over the arguments being made, quite vociferously, by different camps of progressives about the election 'glitches.' some think that there are too many "anomalies" to be truly anomalous, and that we need to have a recount in ohio, at least, to find out the integrity of the election. others are saying "whoa! you are just in denial! we need to fix the party! there was no fraud." examples of both of these can be found at:
www.gregpalast.com and www.thomhartmann.com on the 'check the vote' side; david corn on www.thenation.com and farhad manjoo on www.salon.com on the 'get over it' side.

but, i guess i'm going to throw my hat in the ring after reading YET ANOTHER 'anomaly' story today. in this tale, the optical scan machines read the democratic column as liberatarian votes. that's right, and you know how we know? there is a paper trail with optical scans, so when they did the handcount, the local race changed from being won by a republican to being won by a democrat. that's right. and note, the machine was manufactured by... (drum roll)...diebold.

now, it's a local race. but we know that this happened here, and that mysteriously, thousands of votes got added for bush in a county in ohio, and that, mysteriously, the machines started counting backwards in florida, and that many, many people reported (in texas, ohio, florida and more) that when they pressed the touch-screen for kerry, their vote was recorded for bush.

i say, let's have a recount. and while we're doing that, could someone please, please, please fix the damn system! let's have a uniform ballot, non partisan election officials, and verifiable paper trails. let's pour just one-one hundredth of the money we are squandering in Iraq into our own democracy. let's have full public funding of election campaigns, with spending caps, and free airtime equally allocated to all candidates. let's get it right, for once.

possible fraud claims expanding

ok, so we should keep an eye on this stuff. i haven't wanted to jump on it too soon, given my propensity for conspiracy theories. the exit polls just don't add up to the results, and there are just too many anomalies. read and see for yourself. many think that we just lost on gay marriage, that rove is a superhuman genius, that the moral values thing worked. other analyses dispute that idea.

anyway, for me, the theories out there for why florida swung from "537" votes for bush to over 350,000 just aren't cutting it, especially not with exit polls predicting a big win for kerry.

anyway, see for yourself.

in nebraska: 10,000 'extra' votes in one county

olbermann of msnbc reports "remarkable results out of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In 29 precincts there, the County’s website shows, we had the most unexpected results in years: more votes than voters. I’ll repeat that: more votes than voters. 93,000 more votes than voters." also, reportedly, Warren County in Ohio was contacted by Homeland Security, told it was on high alert, and their election official 'locked down' the vote count, which meant that there were no observers of the count, at all. warren county is a fast growing conservative base.

press "John Kerry", but vote "George Bush" in Ohio: "Touch screen voting machines in Youngstown OH were registering "George W. Bush" when people pressed "John F. Kerry" ALL DAY LONG. This was reported immediately after the polls opened, and reported over and over again throughout the day, and yet the bogus machines were inexplicably kept in use THROUGHOUT THE DAY." and in florida too.

votes in florida disappearing: "Officials found the software used in Broward can handle only 32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the system starts counting backward."

hacking would explain the exit polls in florida: "Franklin County, with 77.3 percent registered Democrats, went 58.5 percent for Bush. Holmes County, with 72.7 percent registered Democrats, went 77.25 percent for Bush. "Yet in the larger counties," Hartmann noted, "where such anomalies would be more obvious to the news media, high percentages of registered Democrats equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry…. And, although elections officials didn't notice these anomalies, in aggregate they were enough to swing Florida from Kerry to Bush. If you simply go through the analysis of these counties and reverse the 'anomalous' numbers in those counties that appear to have been hacked, suddenly the Florida election results resemble the Florida exit poll results: Kerry won, and won big."

election protection log of problems

former employee of ES&S reportedly on the computer mainframe in Ohio, against all protocol

MIT number cruncher finds a statistical probability of 50000:1 that Bush would carry all remaining states by more than 4% after the 4 p.m. exit polls. Cites 4 possible ways this could happen: (1) Significantly greater lying or refusal to speak to pollsters in Bush voters versus Kerry voters; (2) Consistent/systematic errors in weighting demographic groups; (3) A surge of Bush voters after 4 p.m., in all states; (4) Systematic tampering/hacking of reported vote totals, in Bush’s favor.

demand an investigation here

hacking the vote?

so many of you have probably now heard about the additional 4000-something votes that popped up for Bush in one Ohio town (with only 680 actual voters), and the 4200 votes that disappeared in North Carolina. Now, some are speculating that the exit polls were perhaps not so wrong, after all, and that the vote was hacked.

check out the story here.

bush is on a Man Date?

hee hee. got that from one of the blogs. anyway, here's some info about how slim this margin of victory was--and why this election was NOT a mandate. it reflects a still largely divided populace, and does not give bush the authority to claim his actions are 'the people's will.' not that that will stop him anyway...

from american progress report:

ELECTION – NOT SUCH A MANDATE: Following President Bush's victory over Sen. John Kerry on Tuesday, conservative media followed Vice President Cheney's lead in declaring the election "a decisive mandate for Bush's agenda, and mainstream media outlets have followed their lead." In fact, the president's popular vote margin was the smallest since 1976 (with the exception of 2000) and, according to the Wall Street Journal's Albert Hunt, the president's victory represented "the narrowest win for a sitting president since Woodrow Wilson in 1916." Percentage-wise, Bush's victory was the narrowest for any wartime president in American history. And while President Bush did win more votes than any presidential candidate in U.S. history, "Kerry's vote total – 55.7 million – was still greater than any U.S. presidential candidate in history prior to 2004. That means more Americans cast their vote against Bush than against any other presidential candidate in U.S. history."

on red, blue and purple

it freaks me out to look at the US map when it's just red states and blue states. makes me feel outnumbered, small, and scared. so i really liked seeing this purple map--showing the relative leanings of a state, putting into perspective just how red or how blue any particular state is. and it confirms what we know: that most of america is really pretty much in the middle.

and, it warmed my heart to read this posting on dailykos.com, about shifting partisanship in various states. take a look:

We may have lost the election, but the country is getting bluer.
Chris Bowers developed the Partisan Index to gauge the relative partisan standing of any given state. So courtesy of Bowers, here are the states moving from pro-RNC Partisan Index to pro-DNC Partisan Index:
2004 2000
IA DNC +2.1 RNC +0.2
NV DNC +0.4 RNC +4.1
NH DNC +4.2 RNC +1.8
NM DNC +1.3 RNC +0.5
OH DNC +0.5 RNC +4.0
OR DNC +8.0 RNC +0.3
WI DNC +3.4 RNC +0.3

Here are other states in which we made significant gains:
2004 2000
CO RNC +3.2 RNC +8.9
ME DNC +11.0 DNC +4.6
MI DNC +6.4 DNC +4.6
MN DNC +6.4 DNC +1.9
PA DNC +5.2 DNC +3.7
VA RNC +5.6 RNC +8.5
VT DNC +23.6 DNC +9.4
WA DNC +10.4 DNC +5.1

bah! to the red and the blue 

on the youth turnout

so, don't believe all the bellyaching about the youth vote being lame this year. apparently the young'uns did turn out, and did have a significant impact. check this out : at least 20.9 million Americans under 30 voted on Tuesday. That is an increase of 4.6 million voters from 2000. Four years ago, just 42.3 percent of young people voted. This year more than 51.6 percent did. Young people were especially active in battleground states, with turnout at 64.4 percent of eligible voters.

got that? in battlegrounds, turnout rates of almost 65%.

why we need electoral reform

Kerry Won
Greg Palast
November 04, 2004

Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of votes cast are voided—known as “spoilage” in election jargon—because the ballots cast are inconclusive. Palast’s investigation suggests that if Ohio’s discarded ballots were counted, Kerry would have won the state. Today, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports there are a total of 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded votes plus the 155,000 provisional ballots.
Greg Palast, contributing editor to Harper's magazine, investigated the manipulation of the vote for BBC Television's Newsnight. The documentary, "Bush Family Fortunes," based on his New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, has been released this month on DVD .
Kerry won. Here's the facts.
I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face one more hung chad. But I don't have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage called American democracy, it's my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry.
Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.
So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, "Who did you vote for?" Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters don't know.
Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. [See TomPaine.com, "An Election Spoiled Rotten," November 1.]
Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote game are, I'm sorry to report, hanging chads and pregnant chads, plus some other ballot tricks old and new.
The election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something called "spoilage." Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded. When the bobble-head boobs on the tube tell you Ohio or any state was won by 51 percent to 49 percent, don't you believe it ... it has never happened in the United States, because the total never reaches a neat 100 percent. The television totals simply subtract out the spoiled vote.
And not all vote spoil equally. Most of those votes, say every official report, come from African American and minority precincts. (To learn more, click here.)
We saw this in Florida in 2000. Exit polls showed Gore with a plurality of at least 50,000, but it didn't match the official count. That's because the official, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, excluded 179,855 spoiled votes. In Florida, as in Ohio, most of these votes lost were cast on punch cards where the hole wasn't punched through completely—leaving a 'hanging chad,'—or was punched extra times. Whose cards were discarded? Expert statisticians investigating spoilage for the government calculated that 54 percent of the ballots thrown in the dumpster were cast by black folks. (To read the report from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, click here .)
And here's the key: Florida is terribly typical. The majority of ballots thrown out (there will be nearly 2 million tossed out from Tuesday's election) will have been cast by African American and other minority citizens.
So here we go again. Or, here we don't go again. Because unlike last time, Democrats aren't even asking Ohio to count these cards with the not-quite-punched holes (called "undervotes" in the voting biz).
Ohio is one of the last states in America to still use the vote-spoiling punch-card machines. And the Secretary of State of Ohio, J. Kenneth Blackwell, wrote before the election, “the possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state’s primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity.”
But this week, Blackwell, a rabidly partisan Republican, has warmed up to the result of sticking with machines that have a habit of eating Democratic votes. When asked if he feared being this year's Katherine Harris, Blackwell noted that Ms. Fix-it's efforts landed her a seat in Congress.
Exactly how many votes were lost to spoilage this time? Blackwell's office, notably, won't say, though the law requires it be reported. Hmm. But we know that last time, the total of Ohio votes discarded reached a democracy-damaging 1.96 percent. The machines produced their typical loss—that's 110,000 votes—overwhelmingly Democratic.
The Impact Of Challenges
First and foremost, Kerry was had by chads. But the Democrat wasn't punched out by punch cards alone. There were also the 'challenges.' That's a polite word for the Republican Party of Ohio's use of an old Ku Klux Klan technique: the attempt to block thousands of voters of color at the polls. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida, the GOP laid plans for poll workers to ambush citizens under arcane laws—almost never used—allowing party-designated poll watchers to finger individual voters and demand they be denied a ballot. The Ohio courts were horrified and federal law prohibits targeting of voters where race is a factor in the challenge. But our Supreme Court was prepared to let Republicans stand in the voting booth door.
In the end, the challenges were not overwhelming, but they were there. Many apparently resulted in voters getting these funky "provisional" ballots—a kind of voting placebo—which may or may not be counted. Blackwell estimates there were 175,000; Democrats say 250,000. Pick your number. But as challenges were aimed at minorities, no one doubts these are, again, overwhelmingly Democratic. Count them up, add in the spoiled punch cards (easy to tally with the human eye in a recount), and the totals begin to match the exit polls; and, golly, you've got yourself a new president. Remember, Bush won by 136,483 votes in Ohio.
Enchanted State's Enchanted Vote
Now, on to New Mexico, where a Kerry plurality—if all votes are counted—is more obvious still. Before the election, in TomPaine.com, I wrote, "John Kerry is down by several thousand votes in New Mexico, though not one ballot has yet been counted."
How did that happen? It's the spoilage, stupid; and the provisional ballots.
CNN said George Bush took New Mexico by 11,620 votes. Again, the network total added up to that miraculous, and non-existent, '100 percent' of ballots cast.
New Mexico reported in the last race a spoilage rate of 2.68 percent, votes lost almost entirely in Hispanic, Native American and poor precincts—Democratic turf. From Tuesday's vote, assuming the same ballot-loss rate, we can expect to see 18,000 ballots in the spoilage bin.
Spoilage has a very Democratic look in New Mexico. Hispanic voters in the Enchanted State, who voted more than two to one for Kerry, are five times as likely to have their vote spoil as a white voter. Counting these uncounted votes would easily overtake the Bush 'plurality.'
Already, the election-bending effects of spoilage are popping up in the election stats, exactly where we'd expect them: in heavily Hispanic areas controlled by Republican elections officials. Chaves County, in the "Little Texas" area of New Mexico, has a 44 percent Hispanic population, plus African Americans and Native Americans, yet George Bush "won" there 68 percent to 31 percent.
I spoke with Chaves' Republican county clerk before the election, and he told me that this huge spoilage rate among Hispanics simply indicated that such people simply can't make up their minds on the choice of candidate for president. Oddly, these brown people drive across the desert to register their indecision in a voting booth.
Now, let's add in the effect on the New Mexico tally of provisional ballots.
"They were handing them out like candy," Albuquerque journalist Renee Blake reported of provisional ballots. About 20,000 were given out. Who got them?
Santiago Juarez who ran the "Faithful Citizenship" program for the Catholic Archdiocese in New Mexico, told me that "his" voters, poor Hispanics, whom he identified as solid Kerry supporters, were handed the iffy provisional ballots. Hispanics were given provisional ballots, rather than the countable kind "almost religiously," he said, at polling stations when there was the least question about a voter's identification. Some voters, Santiago said, were simply turned away.
Your Kerry Victory Party
So we can call Ohio and New Mexico for John Kerry—if we count all the votes.
But that won't happen. Despite the Democratic Party's pledge, the leadership this time gave in to racial disenfranchisement once again. Why? No doubt, the Democrats know darn well that counting all the spoiled and provisional ballots will require the cooperation of Ohio's Secretary of State, Blackwell. He will ultimately decide which spoiled and provisional ballots get tallied. Blackwell, hankering to step into Kate Harris' political pumps, is unlikely to permit anything close to a full count. Also, Democratic leadership knows darn well the media would punish the party for demanding a full count.
What now? Kerry won, so hold your victory party. But make sure the shades are down: it may be become illegal to demand a full vote count under PATRIOT Act III.
I used to write a column for the Guardian papers in London. Several friends have asked me if I will again leave the country. In light of the failure—a second time—to count all the votes, that won't be necessary. My country has left me.