In other words: A discussion of The Bush Administration
Flo'dah
Or make that Fraudida.
Much of Florida's vote will be counted by electronic voting machines with no paper trails. Independent computer scientists who have examined some of these machines' programming code are appalled at the security flaws. So there will be reasonable doubts about whether Florida's votes were properly counted, and no paper ballots to recount. The public will have to take the result on faith.
Yet the behavior of Gov. Jeb Bush's officials with regard to other election-related matters offers no justification for such faith. First there was the affair of the felon list. Florida law denies the vote to convicted felons. But in 2000 many innocent people, a great number of them black, couldn't vote because they were erroneously put on a list of felons; these wrongful exclusions may have put Governor Bush's brother in the White House.
This year, Florida again drew up a felon list, and tried to keep it secret. When a judge forced the list's release, it turned out that it once again wrongly disenfranchised many people - again, largely African-American - while including almost no Hispanics.
Yesterday, my colleague Bob Herbert reported on another highly suspicious Florida initiative: state police officers have gone into the homes of elderly African-American voters - including participants in get-out-the-vote operations - and interrogated them as part of what the state says is a fraud investigation. But the state has provided little information about the investigation, and, as Mr. Herbert says, this looks remarkably like an attempt to intimidate voters.
Given this pattern, there will be skepticism if Florida's paperless voting machines give President Bush an upset, uncheckable victory.
In Bob Herbert's own words, Florida's relentless effort to quash and stifle anything that could be seen as a paper trail to actually count a vote goes straight to Jeb Bush, who gives the Dept. of Law Enforcement its marching orders. "The vile smell of voter suppression is all over this so-called investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. ... The long and ugly tradition of suppressing the black vote is alive and thriving in the Sunshine State."
Speaking of which, here are two sunshining examples from this week's Top Ten Conservative Idiots:
7. Katherine Harris
Here's another story that slipped through the net last week. It seems that our favorite ex-Secretary of State/election thief Katherine Harris is now an expert on national security. Or is she? Harris said recently that she "regrets" claiming there was a plot to blow up a power grid in Indiana after it was revealed she was making it up. At a rally for George W. Bush, Harris told the audience that the mayor of Carmel, Indiana, had informed her that "a man of Middle Eastern heritage had been arrested and hundreds of pounds of explosives were found in his home," according to the Associated Press. "He had plans to blow up the area's entire power grid," said Harris. Um, wrong. City officials, after seeing the story in the newspaper, said, "We're not aware of any plans to blow up Carmel's power grid." Oh, and, "The mayor never talked to Katherine Harris. They never had that conversation." So where did Harris get the idea that terrorists were planning to attack Carmel, Indiana? Probably from the same place she got the idea that Bush won Florida fair and square - out of her butt.
8. Johnnie Byrd
Florida House Speaker Johnnie Byrd is determined to run government "like a business." And, in the wake of Enron, Halliburton, Tyco, et al, that should probably sound some alarm bells. In true conservative style, Byrd has spent the last two years fighting to cut services for Florida's poor - and has now rewarded 500 state employees by giving them each a $1000 bonus. Yes, that's half a million dollars of taxpayer money. Said Doug Gallagher - one of Byrd's Republican Senate opponents - "If he's got a private sector company and he wants to do something like that, that's fine. But I think it really sends the wrong message to use tax dollars in that fashion." But I think Byrd has this all wrong. If he really wants to run Florida's government like a Bush-style business he should have laid off a bunch of people, outsourced their work to India, given the half-million dollars to himself, cooked the books, gone bankrupt, and then been arrested for fraud. Looks like Johnnie Byrd has got a lot of learning left to do.
You know what they say, a Byrd in the hand is worth two in George Bush.
- Michael 10:49 AM - [PermaLink] -
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