"Some Republican strategists are increasingly upset with what they consider the overconfidence of President Bush and his senior advisers about the midterm elections November 7–a concern aggravated by the president's news conference this week.this has billmon all paranoid.
"They aren't even planning for if they lose," says a GOP insider who informally counsels the West Wing. If Democrats win control of the House, as many analysts expect, Republicans predict that Bush's final two years in office will be marked by multiple congressional investigations and gridlock."
* willpitt:
"George W. Bush gave a press conference this past Wednesday in an attempt to snatch back the conversation from North Korea's nukes and Mark Foley's instant messages. A reporter from CNN asked him about the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health report that puts the civilian death toll in Iraq at 655,000. "I am, you know, amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they're willing to - you know, that there's a level of violence that they tolerate," he responded.
Yes. That's what he said.
This is, to a degree, not terribly surprising. Mr. Bush has a penchant for casually saying the most abominable things imaginable without blinking. Recall, if you will, the days following the attacks of September 11. A pall of poison smoke still hung low over New York City. Americans were suddenly living in fear of blue skies and airplanes. The as-yet-unsolved anthrax attacks on congress and the media had us all collecting our mail with oven mitts while holding our breath.
On October 4th, 2001, less than a month after the attacks, Mr. Bush said, "We need to counter the shock wave of the evildoer by having individual rate cuts accelerated and by thinking about tax rebates."
Yes. That's what he said."
* Paul Lehto:
"I'm against emergency paper ballots and am starting to say so in various writings. Ironically, emergency paper ballots will greatly help to snatch Democratic defeat from the jaws of Democratic victory.
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Problems with Emergency Ballots:
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: All of the votes that get siphoned off into absentees and "emergency paper ballots" will be very disproportionately Dem votes. That will mean that in many critical races the Dems will start off LOSING on election night and will have to fight not just on November 7 (election day) to have votes counted, but on November 8, again on November 9, November 10, November 11, November 12, November 13, November 14, November 15, November 16, November 17, November 18, November 19 .... in fact DON'T PLAN ON EATING ANY TURKEY ON THANKSGIVING DAY because it puts you to sleep with typtophan and then your votes will definitely not be counted. Seriously, the election STARTS on November 8 in any jurisdiction where folks are investing in an absentee or emergency paper ballot strategery (sic). And this long slog back through the slime of media defeat based on election night touch screen DRE results will be subject to definite legal risks of court-ordered stoppage of the count, because the emergency paper ballots are being deployed without the HAVA-required and LAVA-provided legal infrastructure required by HAVA and Bush v. Gore to be set prior to the election and not made up after the election.... As such, the entire class is subject to being considered "illegal ballots" and although notice of this risk is not required in order to make this claim, we are surely on notice that emergency paper ballots may well lack the necessary legal authorization because folks pushed for LAVA and obviously it DID NOT PASS. In any event, the Busby Bilbray race was the first federal election after the January 2006 HAVA deadline and it took them over three weeks after the June 6 election to finish counting the ballots, and there will be MORE of them in November. They of course reported DRE results immediately.
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Would people take to the streets? They didn't with Busby Bilbray but this is obviously bigger and folks didn't know the premature swearing in of Bilbray would be argued to terminate any further judicial inquiry into that election. But now they have the microwave weapons expressly ready for testing on mobs as expressly stated by the Air Force Secretary, and they have habeas corpus suspended, and Halliburton apparently has built those huge detention camps. Can you feel the intimidation yet? This will attempt to chill dissent even if it were all a bunch of lies and propaganda. Most likely, in November We will see how much of a land of the free and a home of the brave we have left."
1 comment:
Lehto's outrage is well-earned, but there's reason to take heart. That idiot in the Air Force who suggested testing microwave weapons on citizens ignores the unspoken fact that Nixon's order for the National Guard to open fire at Kent State did a great deal to hasten his downfall. There are people who remember. That this administration keeps doing everything it can think of to start a shooting war at home doesn't mean they'll get it. Bush hasn't signed the Military Commissions Act yet, even though he promised to do it immediately. You can be sure that if they try to use that shit on Americans, they'll spend a lot in time and resources rolling in the dirt. Has Halliburton built those detention centers? We don't know, but with the level of interest being as high as it is, it's hard to imagine that if and when they do it will be much of a secret, no matter how hard they try to conceal it. And a paltry $385 million won't provide much capacity, given Halliburton's demonstrated history of stunning ineptitude in managing construction projects.
I believe Bush and Cheney want to do all these things. But I've come to realize they simply don't possess the mental horsepower to pull it off; otherwise, they'd have done it by now, plus killed millions more people. I hope I'm right, because the average individual in the U.S. is so unhappy now, a full-blown rebellion could erupt with very little more provocation. Then, we're quite likely to have martial law and all the contingent accessories that go with it.
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