United States of JesusLand; Time's Black Tuesday; Images from the FWD Void; E-Voter Fraud Abundant

A friend just forwarded this to me. I don't know where these images came from or if they've spread across the internet/email world yet or not, but I think they certainly represent a common feeling among 49% of Americans right now. A feeling of "Isn't it ha-ha laugh-out-loud-funny that we're gonna be screwed this bad for at least four more years?"

(Actually, I think the "Jesusland" graphic is old -- at least, I remember seeing something similar after the 2000 elections. And a couple of other websites have also posted this uncredited image since I first posted this here, including MichaelMoore.com.)

Lately I've been feeling such personal schadenfreude -- a strange delight not just in the misfortune of others, but in the misfortune experienced by the entire country. Because you get what you vote for. And as we sink deeper into debt, eventually people are going to realize exactly what it is their vote got 'em, and it ain't good. (When the debt collectors come calling, will Bush simply blow them up? Is that his true plan for erasing the national debt?)

Unlike the images above, the Daily Mirror cover below is very real:




Of course, not everyone believes that this many Americans voted for Bush. Wired Magazine has set up a special E-Vote news section to report the various malfunctions and potential (and proven) problems associated with the new computer-voting technology. The latest news is that at least 4,500 votes were lost in North Carolina thanks to UniLect overestimating (lying about?) the storage capacity of their machines.

And BlackBoxVoting.org (the Bev Harris site) is trying to uncover what it believes to be massive fraud in the 2004 elections: "We are working now to compile the proof, based not on soft evidence -- red flags, exit polls -- but core documents obtained by Black Box Voting in the most massive Freedom of Information action in history."

And Greg Palast at TomPaine.com has written a captivating piece about why he believes Kerry won Ohio, New Mexico, and the presidency itself.

Some of this may simply be sour grapes, but many of the facts are frightening. It's curious that Kerry and Edwards didn't stick to their promise to "fight for every vote," and instead conceded the race and wandered off into the sunset, leaving faulty voting machines free to damage future races. Once more, the Democratic establishment fails to live up to expectations, and limps lamely away from the battle -- it may be 2000 and poor, pathetic Al Gore all over again.

And this just in from the Associated Press:

"An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus [Ohio], elections officials said. Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna.

Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct. Bush's total should have been recorded as 365. "

This may have been nothing more than an innocent technical error that was quickly corrected. But one can't help but be suspicious when this took place in a state where Wally O'Dell -- the CEO of the Diebold touch-screen voting system -- infamously promised last year (in writing) that "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president..."

And the list of Vote Fraud Links keeps growing with every passing day, despite the media staying mostly timid about the issue. Even Ralph "the Spoiler" Nader has jumped into the fray, asking for a recount in (at the very least) New Hampshire because "reports of irregularities in the vote reported on the AccuVote Diebold Machines in comparison to exit polls and trends in voting in New Hampshire. These irregularities favor President George W. Bush by 5% to 15% over what was expected."

Although Kerry won N.H., a recount would presumably give both Kerry and Nader a larger portion of the popular vote, while also exposing the more vital problem of how ridiculously inaccurate the current vote-count systems truly are. Nader is also taking issue with the electronic-voting-machines' lack of a paper trail. Now, there's little chance of a recount helping Bush, since he's already won the presidency -- and Nader obviously can't win the election -- so it looks like Nader is once again taking a stand for the liberal half of America (and not secretly working for the Repubs, as some Dems have suggested) while the Democratic establishment hides in a bunker, waiting for 2008.

Still, it's doubtful that Nader will ever again have the following he once had, as he burned so many bridges this time around.

In the long run, there's almost no chance of a full recount in Ohio and Florida or any other state, and some liberals will continue to accuse Bush of stealing this election for the next four years, while both Democrats and Republicans accuse each other of voter fraud on the local level (some county-wide recounts around the U.S. may actually have an impact on the winners of local posts). But what's really important here -- and the reason why the mainstream media and the general public need to pay attention to the voter-fraud issue -- is the idea that greater oversight and accuracy are needed.

I've heard a few Republicans imply that even though Bush may have accidentally gotten a few thousand extra (illegal) votes here and there, it's perfectly copacetic because they believe old-school Democrats JFK and LBJ rigged votes in the 1960s and may have had dead people voting for them, so, hey, all is fair in love and war.... As if the sins of the past instantly atone for the sins of the present.

After the 2000 debacle, the hanging-chad, absentee ballot, and provisional ballot problems should no longer have been issues -- but once again thousands of votes didn't get counted or may have been counted incorrectly for exactly the same reasons as last time. And paperless electronic machines (proven to be hackable and prone to frequent malfunctions) should not have been used without all the kinks and security issues being worked out. But they were.... oh, they were.

Kerry Can't Carry; Bush Can't Be Beat; Edwards Is Awkward; Cheney Steals the Show Election

New York City is in literal mourning today. The city is dead quite and a lot of people are threatening to move to Canada, Australia, or Ireland. I've overheard some making scary death threats that I won't mention in detail because they'd be federal crimes (nothing I'd take too seriously -- just the anger and anguish of a city and a people scorned).

You hear the whispers on the subways and the buses, on the streets and between the thin cubicle walls.

The charming John Edwards was supposed to save the day, but in the end he brought NONE of the South, the wanker. We should have run Screamin’ Dean. Dean-Clark. Dean-Kerry. Dean-McCain. Dean-Powell. Dean-Kucinich. Dean-Nader. At least it would have been an interesting race. Kerry-Edwards never had the verve.

The dirty tricks, the electronic voting machines (that just happen to be owned by Republican-funding companies), the missing absentee ballots, the registrations that went lost or were destroyed, the votes that were somehow placed in ballot boxes before the elections even began... and these are just the cases that were discovered, so there's certainly more that went undetected... so, yes, perhaps parts of the election were stolen.

But not all of it. If you look at the electoral map, you see a United States that may vote 47% Democratic in the popular vote, but you also see a country that by state and (most especially) by land-mass votes Republican by more than 2 to 1.

So what's really frightening is not the prospect of George Bush being in office for four more years, but instead the implications of the overall election. The Republicans took the presidential race by nearly four-million popular votes, swept the House of Reps, gained even more ground in the Repub-controlled Senate, snatched up the majority of governorships, and seem to be dominating local races.

And 11 states voted against gay marriage; some even voted against civil unions and partner-benefits. If homosexuality itself had been up for a vote, those same states probably would have voted against the right to be gay altogether.

Seriously: The 2004 election turned out to be a mandate for war (anywhere, at any time), for Christianity as a government-funded institution, for fossil-fuel, for the outsourcing of jobs in exchange for cheap goods, for the invasion of privacy (a vote for Bush was a vote for the euphemistically named Patriot Act and the moral crusader John Ashcroft), for a corrupt and controlling FCC, for rich men and corporate crooks and Halliburton gobbling up our tax money, for partisan Fox news and the Murdoch empire, for corporate and monopolistic domination, and for the damnation of the environment and the melting polar caps and the ozone layer.

It was a mandate against all homosexuals (even the nice, funny gay men in popular sitcoms, reality TV shows, and Julia Roberts films that Americans seemingly embraced in the last few years), against France and Canada and socialism and universal health care and fine wine and smelly cheese, against gun control (even automatic weapons should be handed out to the public, despite Columbine and the high rate of gun deaths and the ease with which terrorists, pissed of teenagers, angry husbands, criminals, psychotics, drug dealers, and the rest are able to acquire weapons on the secondary market with every loosening of the gun laws), against Michael Moore and the entire Democratic party, against Ralph Nader and the third-party system.

This was a vote for a government that has wildly spent our tax dollars, ran up record federal debts, plunged us into multiple wars (which they've been unable to satisfactorily win), tapped our phones, hacked our computers, spit on the late Superman's and President Regan's graves (severely limited stem-cell research!), done nothing about rising health care costs or the failing social security system (Canadians and Australians have full health coverage and great dole systems without having to pay out significantly more taxes than Americans).

The Bush Administration, hand-in-hand with the Republican houses of Congress, has savaged our economy by redistributing even more of the common-man's wealth to the rich (bringing back trickle-down economics!), and this is a government that the majority of voting Americans want (even around 10% of registered Democrats voted for Bush in this election, with Republican’s keeping their turncoats down to a lower percentage).

With a record turnout of people at the polls and tens of thousands of newly registered voters -- what many thought was a clear sign of a country looking for change, of a sure-win for Kerry -- the Democrats were swamped by Bush lovers. Of course, the latest reports say that many young voters simply didn’t turn up to vote...

Every state in the heartland of the U.S. and every southern state chose George W. Bush. It didn't matter that he'd lost the popular election in 2000. It didn't matter that our faulty Electoral College voting system had put the less popular man in charge of the country for four years (with the help of the Supreme Court and George's brother's trickery in Florida). It didn't matter that New York City was violently attacked during Bush's watch, or that the people of NYC and Los Angeles (the cities most likely to suffer in any subsequent terrorists attacks) voted overwhelmingly Democrat.

Shouldn't the country have looked to NYC for guidance regarding who would be the best president during our War on Terror? It was, after all, the city that actually suffered and still stands the most vulnerable. NYC voted against Bush, and yet somehow Bush won the country on a platform that hyped his terrorist-fighting abilities. Why? And why -- despite the "liberal" media -- do so many hard-working people in the South and Midwest not realize that the Democrat and Green and Reform parties are the LABOR parties, while the Republicans are the RICH MAN'S party? Even a cursory glance at the party platforms (and accomplishments) shows that this is not just a cliché.

The Democrats have many failures, but in the end they do represent the needs of the common man far more than the Republicans. But somehow (because the Republican politicians make a big show of wearing cowboy boots and going to church?) they're perceived as being fellow BBQ & Beer Lovers who the common folk can relate to. This method of voting would have resulted in the political heroes of yesteryear -- the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin -- being spurned today for their high IQ's.

The military draft will come. Higher taxes (or bankruptcy) will come. More homophobia will come. Federally mandated morality will come. We can only hope that a reactionary element will also rise, and transform the blubbering, moderate Democratic Party into a stronger bastion of labor and union causes. That the third parties will rise in power. That proportional representation and the end of the Electoral College will come to pass. But it could very easily go the opposite way.

Tread lightly on this snake. It's got fangs.

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~ If you're thinking about moving to Australia, you should learn some Aussie slang first, mate. Ya dill whacka.