Yellow Dog

That's right--the person who _should_ have been President of the United States, AL GORE, is schedule to give a major speech on Monday in Washington in which he reflects on how the US is becoming a police state. He will focus on how the Bush administration has created a "Constitutional crisis" by acting without the authorization of the Congress and the courts to spy on Americans and otherwise abuse basic liberties.

Oh, to think where we might have been had Gore assumed the presidency that was rightfully his. Here's where we would NOT be: we would not be in Iraq; we would not be spending 2 billion of our taxpayer dollars on the war; we would not be in a major deficit; we would not be mired in corruption thanks to slimy Bush "pioneers" like Abramoff; we would not be investigating leaks into the outing of CIA agents; we would not be worrying that the government is listening in on our phone calls and monitering our emails without a warrant.

And for those skeptics who think the argument that Gore really won in 2000 is just a bunch of sour grapes, take a look at this study by a respected political scientist Lance DeHaven-Smith--a professed "independent" who has written nine books and who has studied Florida's elections and politics for 25 years and has compiled legal documents, statistical analyses and public records. Following is an excerpt from an interview:

Q: One of the most interesting points you make in the book is that the focus on undervotes (ballots containing no vote for president)—the hanging, dimpled and otherwise pregnant chads—was misplaced. Instead, you explain that a study by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, which looked at all the ballots that were initially rejected on election night 2000, revealed a surprise: most of these uncounted votes were in fact discarded because they were over-votes, instances of two votes for president on one ballot. What do you think the NORC study tells us about the election?

LdHS: It’s an embarrassing outcome for George Bush because it showed that Gore had gotten more votes. Everybody had thought that the chads were where all the bad ballots were, but it turned out that the ones that were the most decisive were write-in ballots where people would check Gore and write Gore in, and the machine kicked those out. There were 175,000 votes overall that were so-called “spoiled ballots.” About two-thirds of the spoiled ballots were over-votes; many or most of them would have been write-in over-votes, where people had punched and written in a candidate’s name. And nobody looked at this, not even the Florida Supreme Court in the last decision it made requiring a statewide recount. Nobody had thought about it except Judge Terry Lewis, who was overseeing the statewide recount when it was halted by the U.S. Supreme Court. The write-in over-votes have really not gotten much attention. Those votes are not ambiguous. When you see Gore picked and then Gore written in, there’s not a question in your mind who this person was voting for. When you go through those, they’re unambiguous: Bush got some of those votes, but they were overwhelmingly for Gore. For example, in an analysis of the 2.7 million votes that had been cast in Florida’s eight largest counties, The Washington Post found that Gore’s name was punched on 46,000 of the over-vote ballots it, while Bush’s name was marked on only 17,000.

Read the whole thing and weep. Weep for what might have been had we had an intelligent, informed president who respects diplomacy, respects the environment, respects the privacy of American citizents, and respects the Constitution.
Research In Review at Florida State University