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Higher Logic

BLOGGERMANN: GEORGE, JOHN, & WARREN by Keith Olbermann

NEW YORK— Here’s an interesting little sidebar of our system of government confirmed recently by the crack Countdown research staff: no Presidential candidate’s concession speech is legally binding. The only determinants of the outcome of election are the reports of the state returns boards and the vote of the Electoral College.

That’s right. Richard Nixon may have phoned John Kennedy in November, 1960, and congratulated him through clenched teeth. But if the FBI had burst into Kennedy headquarters in Chicago a week later and walked out with all the file cabinets and a bunch of employees with their raincoats drawn up over their heads, nothing Nixon had said would’ve prevented him, and not JFK, from taking the oath of office the following January.

This is mentioned because there is a small but blood-curdling set of news stories that right now exists somewhere between the world of investigative journalism, and the world of the Reynolds Wrap Hat. And while the group’s ultimate home remains unclear - so might our election of just a week ago.

Stories like these have filled the web since the tide turned against John Kerry late Tuesday night. But not until Friday did they begin to spill into the more conventional news media. That’s when the Cincinnati Enquirer reported that officials in Warren County, Ohio, had “locked down” its administration building to prevent anybody from observing the vote count there.

Suspicious enough on the face of it, the decision got more dubious still when County Commissioners confirmed that they were acting on the advice of their Emergency Services Director, Frank Young. Mr. Young had explained that he had been advised by the federal government to implement the measures for the sake of Homeland Security.

Gotcha. Tom Ridge thought Osama Bin Laden was planning to hit Caesar Creek State Park in Waynesville. During the vote count in Lebanon. Or maybe it was Kings Island Amusement Park that had gone Code-Orange without telling anybody. Al-Qaeda had selected Turtlecreek Township for its first foray into a Red State.

The State of Ohio confirms that of all of its 88 Counties, Warren alone decided such Homeland Security measures were necessary. Even in Butler County, reports the Enquirer, the media and others were permitted to watch through a window as ballot-checkers performed their duties. In Warren, the media was finally admitted to the lobby of the administration building, which may have been slightly less incommodious for the reporters, but which still managed to keep them two floors away from the venue of the actual count.

Nobody in Warren County seems to think they’ve done anything wrong. The newspaper quotes County Prosecutor Rachel Hurtzel as saying the Commissioners “were within their rights” to lock the building down, because having photographers or reporters present could have interfered with the count.

You bet, Rachel.

As I suggested, this is the first time one of the Fix stories has moved fully into the mainstream media. In so saying, I’m not dismissing the blogosphere. Hell, I’m in the blogosphere now, and there have been nights when I’ve gotten far more web hits than television viewers (thank you, Debate Scorecard readers). Even the overt partisanship of blogs don’t bother me - Tom Paine was a pretty partisan guy, and ultimately that served truth a lot better than a ship full of neutral reporters would have. I was just reading last night of the struggles Edward R. Murrow and William L. Shirer had during their early reporting from Europe in ’38 and ’39, because CBS thought them too anti-Nazi.

The only reason I differentiate between the blogs and the newspapers is that in the latter, a certain bar of ascertainable, reasonably neutral, fact has to be passed, and has to be approved by a consensus of reporters and editors. The process isn’t flawless (ask Dan Rather) but the next time you read a blog where bald-faced lies are accepted as fact, ask yourself whether we here in cyberspace have yet achieved the reliability of even the mainstream media. In short, a lot gets left out of newspapers, radio, and tv - but what’s left in tends to be, in the words of my old CNN Sports colleague Nick Charles, a lead-pipe cinch.

Thus the majority of the media has yet to touch the other stories of Ohio (the amazing Bush Times Ten voting machine in Gahanna) or the sagas of Ohio South: huge margins for Bush in Florida counties in which registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans 2-1, places where the optical scanning of precinct totals seems to have turned results from perfect matches for the pro-Kerry exit poll data, to Bush sweeps.

We will be endeavoring to pull those stories, along with the Warren County farce, into the mainstream Monday and/or Tuesday nights on Countdown. That is, if we can wedge them in there among the news media’s main concerns since last Tuesday:

Who fixed the Exit Polls? Yes - you could deliberately skew a national series of post-vote questionnaires in favor of Kerry to discourage people from voting out west, where everything but New Mexico had been ceded to Kerry anyway, but you couldn’t alter key precinct votes in Ohio and/or Florida; and,

What will Bush do with his Mandate and his Political Capital? He got the highest vote total for a presidential candidate, you know. Did anybody notice who’s second on the list? A Mr. Kerry. Since when was the term “mandate” applied when 56 million people voted against a guy? And by the way, how about that Karl Rove and his Freudian slip on “Fox News Sunday”? Rove was asked if the electoral triumph would be as impactful on the balance of power between the parties as William McKinley’s in 1896 and he forgot his own talking points. The victories were “similarly narrow,” Rove began, and then, seemingly aghast at his forthrightness, corrected himself. “Not narrow; similarly structured.”

Gotta dash now. Some of us have to get to work on the Warren and Florida stories.

In the interim, Senator Kerry, kindly don’t leave the country.

<snip>

Has this hit mainstream news yet? By "this" I mean the exit polls, Bush x 10 machines, etc.? Thoughts, comments, rants (which there will be)?

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JTP

Allow me to help ya out here.

www.democraticunderground.com --- Several variations here...
www.dailykos.com
http://atrios.blogspot.com/
http://wonkette.com/


Those have all the latest takes on the 2004 GOP election conspiracy.

Stephanie S.

This website has a list of a lot of the problems reported with voting machines, screwed up voter registration, etc.

http://www.votersunite.org/electionproblems.asp

Machine Malfunctions


This site Verified Voting has a map and state-by-state voting issues.

Evidence Mounts that Vote May Have Been Hacked - Florida

Somehow I doubt that there were enough problems to change the results.

peace

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"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." —George W. Bush, Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005 (Listen to audio)

S2

I think I'll stand by for a while on this one.

Higher Logic

Thanks for the insightful reply and clear labeling of this as a "conspiracy." There were obviously glitches, unless you want to refute that *shrug*

 

MickityMike

And of course out of all of these "glitches," they all went for Bush.

You didn't hear about the "glitch" regarding the 2,000 votes for Kerry already on the machines in Philly?

Did you hear about the numerous, I guess you could call them "glitches", incidents of Bush/Cheney campaign HQs being broken into?

The Reichstag, she's a-burnin'.

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Stephanie S.

Well, if you who claim conspiracy bothered to look at say, the Voters Unite link, you would find that it's not about Bush or Kerry. It's about protecting voters rights. Perhaps you think conspiracy because you recall the purging of the voters in Florida in 2000. Whether Bush, Kerry, MickityMike, or Jesus Christ were running for president, voters rights should always be protected.

peace

HappyMan

I say there will always be a margin of error, if that margin is kept very small I will reserve working myself up into a purple snit for other issues.


Also, it is very important that states and local communities administer their own elections. I do not want the federal government over seeing national elections. If Wanker county botches their vote, it's their problem, and they need fix it

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jewishjake420

I find it strange though that the head of the voting machine company had a republican party for Bush at his house in which he vowed to put Bush back in office for a second term.

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Stephanie S.

Careful, Jake. Someone will come along with a brilliant statement about you wearing a tinfoil hat. Anyone suggesting corruption on the part of the Bush Administration must surely be a quack, don'tcha know?

peace