Thanks for prompting me to compile these little notes - they should make for a good scrapbook some day.

- John

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  1. QUOTES
  2. JOKES &C.
  3. LINKS
  4. MY MUSINGS

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1. QUOTES

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Queen Amidala: "Is there any other way?"
Senator Palpatine: "Our only other choice would to be to submit a plea to the courts."
Queen Amidala: "There's no time for that. The courts take even longer to decide things than the Senate."

- Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace

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Admiral Josh Painter: "This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it."

- The Hunt For Red October

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Doctor Juliet Parrish: "Things have gotten totally out of control."
Chris Faber: "Well you see, war has a tendency to do that, ma'am."

- V: The Final Battle

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Brother at the Funeral: The next time, just take one bite, and END IT!

- Seinfeld, "The Double Dipper"

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He then gave an order: "Cut the living child in two and give half to one and half to the other." The woman whose son was alive was filled with compassion for her son and said to the king, "Please, my lord, give her the living baby! Don't kill him!" But the other said, "Neither I nor you shall have him. Cut him in two!" Then the king gave his ruling: "Give the living baby to the first woman. Do not kill him; she is his mother."

- 1 Kings 3:25-27, New International Version

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Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.

- Joseph Stalin

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2. JOKES &C.

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To the citizens of the United States of America,

Following your failure to elect a candidate President of the USA to govern yourselves and, by extension, the free world, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence. Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume a monarch's duties over all states, commonwealths and other territories.

To aid in the transition to a British Crown Dependency, please comply with the following acts:

Tax collectors from Her Majesty's Government will be with you shortly to ensure the acquisition of all revenues due (backdated to 1776).

Thank you for your cooperation, and have a nice day!

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I am writing to let you know that today I filed a lawsuit against the Lottery Commission and the Powerball administrators.

Last Wednesday evening I went to Quick Trip to buy a Powerball ticket. When I was choosing my numbers on the official Powerball entry slip, I became confused. The numbers were too close together and I had to choose a specific quantity of numbers from one box and only one from another box, and because of all this confusion I picked the wrong numbers. I intended on picking the numbers that just happened to be the winning combination on Wednesday night's drawing, but I became confused and couldn't negotiate the difficult entry form. I explained this to the lottery officials and told them that I was the rightful winner of the $64 million dollar jackpot and they said "NO, you filled out the entry form incorrectly, you will get nothing."

Perhaps some of you experienced the same confusion and you can join me in a class action suit against the Lottery for this trickery and deceit that they have created.

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NEW YORK (AP) --The New York Mets announced today that they are going to court to get an additional inning added to the end of Game 5 of the World Series.

The batting, pitching, and bench coaches for the Mets held a press conference earlier today. They were joined by members of the Major League Players Union.

"We meant to hit those pitches from the Yankee pitchers," said the Mets batting coach. "We were confused by the irregularities of the pitches we received and believe we have been denied our right to hit."

One claim specifically noted that a small percentage of the Mets batters had intended to swing at fast balls, but actually swung at curve balls. It was clear that these batters never intended to swing at curve balls, though a much higher percentage were not confused by the pitches.

Reporters at the press conference pointed out that the Mets had extensively reviewed film of the Yankees pitchers prior to the World Series and had in fact faced the Yankees in inter-league play earlier in the year.

"The fact remains that some of the pitches confused us and denied us of our right to hit," said the Mets batting coach. "The World Series is not over yet and the Yankees are celebrating prematurely."

Major League Baseball has reviewed the telecast of all the World Series games and recounted the balls and strikes called by the umpires of each game.

"While some of the strikes called against the Mets were, in fact, balls, there were not enough of them to change the outcome of the World series," the commissioner said.

Another portion of the Mets legal claim stated that, based on on-base percentage, the Mets had actually won the World Series, regardless of the final scores of the games. "It's clear that we were slightly on-base more often than the Yankees," said a Mets spokesman. "The World Series crown is rightly ours."

The manager of the Mets has remained in relative seclusion, engaging in some light jogging for exercise. He has stated that he believes "we need to let the process run its course without a rush to judgment."

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Reportedly from an article by a Zimbabwe politician:

  1. Imagine that we read of an election occurring anywhere in the third world in which the self-declared winner was the son of the former prime minister and that former prime minister was himself the former head of that nation's secret police (called the CIA).
  2. Imagine that the self-declared winner lost the popular vote but won based on some old colonial holdover (called the electoral college) from the nation's pre-democracy past.
  3. Imagine that the self-declared winner's 'victory' turned on disputed votes cast in a province governed by his brother.
  4. Imagine that the poorly drafted ballots of one district, a district heavily favoring the self-declared winner's opponent, led thousands of voters to vote for the wrong candidate.
  5. Imagine that that members of that nation's most despised caste turned out in record numbers to vote in near-universal opposition to the self-declared winner's candidacy.
  6. Imagine that hundreds of members of that most-despised caste were intercepted on their way to the polls by state police operating under the authority of the self-declared winner's brother.
  7. Imagine that six million people voted in the disputed province and that the self-declared winner's 'lead' was only 327 votes. Fewer, certainly, than the vote counting machines' margin of error.
  8. Imagine that the self-declared winner and his political party opposed a more careful by-hand inspection and re-counting of the ballots in the disputed province or in its most hotly disputed district.
  9. Imagine that the self-declared winner, himself a governor of a major province, had the worst human rights record of any province in his nation and led the nation in executions.
  10. Imagine that a major campaign promise of the self-declared winner was to appoint like-minded anti-choice and human rights violators to lifetime positions on the high court of that nation.

None of us would deem such an election to be representative of anything other than the self-declared winner's will-to-power. All of us, I imagine, would wearily turn the page thinking that it was another sad tale of pitiful pre- or anti-democracy peoples in some strange elsewhere.

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3. LINKS

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Breaking News

Maps

Other

Humor

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4. MY MUSINGS

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11:51AM FRI 10-NOV-2000

I started writing this little article, but stalled because most of it is self-evident. Here's my take though:

Top 5 Entities to Blame for the Election Mess

5. Eighth Congress of the United States

BECAUSE The Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution - passed by Congress (the same Congress that authorized President Jefferson's request for $2,500 to fund the Lewis and Clark expedition) on 12/9/1803 and ratified 6/15/1804 - established the Electoral College, making it possible for a presidential candidate to win the popular vote but lose the election...

AND The most proposed constitutional amendment, to repeal this system, has never come close to passing because politicians are entrenched in campaigning within such a system...

CAUSING Gore to have won the popular vote, but possibly lose the election.

4. Linda Tripp

BECAUSE Clinton received oral sex from a 21-year-old unpaid White House Intern (first during a tryst in 11/15/1995 made possible due to the Gingrich-led shutdown of most of the Federal Government)...

AND Monica saved, at Linda Tripp's suggestion, a semen-stained blue dress from one such encounter...

AND Linda Trip had broke Maryland state law §10-402(a)(1-3) and illegally recorded telephone conversations she had with Monica Lewinski...

CAUSING Ken Starr extend his four-year $84 million dollar investigation into an Arkansas land deal to ultimately remove blood from the arm of the POTUS on 8/3/1998...

RESULTING IN American's shunning of Clinton's behavior and his subsequent lack of campaigning for Gore and Gore's ensuing smaller showing in the election.

3. George Bush and Al Gore

Needs no explanation.

2. Ralph Nader

Needs no explanation.

1. The Stupid Voter

Antiquated voting systems aside, punch the damn card right next time. Also includes those that didn't bother to vote.

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4:02PM FRI 10-NOV-2000

I agree that it's too late to legally change things about the ballot's design despite the fact that there's no way to explain away the anomalous votes for Buchannan and high number of double-punched votes. Republicans are throwing out a lot of numbers to counter this data. For example, their response to the 19,120 ballots voided by overvoting in contrast to the 3,783 voided on the U.S. Senate ballot portion is to say that just as many happened in the last election - but their numbers however include the 10,000 votes thrown out in the previous election due to blank ballots as well as overroted ballots - not at all a proper comparison. They also claim that Buchannan got more votes than that in the Republican Primary. Well call me silly but I think turnout and voting is going to be different between parties than across parties - again not a valid comparison. These aren't good ways to start your administration when you haven't even received the most number of votes nationwide.

And as for the legalities of the ballot: "2000 Florida Statutes Title IX - Chapter 101 - Section 101.151 Specifications for general election ballot. 3a) Beneath the caption and preceding the names of candidates shall be the following words: "To vote for a candidate whose name is printed on the ballot, place a cross (X) mark in the blank space at the right of the name of the candidate for whom you desire to vote." The ballot design did not follow these rules when they placed the X mark in the blank space to the LEFT, hence it is an illegal ballot.

Yet again, suing things after the fact isn't the way to go. You have to stick with the properly counted votes, not call a "do-over" just because you didn't like the outcome. Nixon did this and more in 1960 (eventually), and I would hope that Gore would follow in turn should the final Florida numbers not go his way. Don Regan, Reagan's chief of staff, had a very good 10 minute commentary on the whole situation on the News Hour last night. Sending attack dogs to nitpick every little thing (and over extend all sorts of allegations) isn't good for the country.

But if Florida were for some reason to go for Gore, there's little doubt that Bush would turn the tables with the same stunts in the close states that went for Gore, and demonstrate the same behavior that the GOP is now admonishing. Mark my words on this. And no doubt if the shoe was on the different foot, however, many people would think otherwise on the Florida issue; what's amazing about this whole affair is that it illustrates ideology at its worst. As a professor of mine once said: 'Do you have the beliefs, or do the beliefs have you?' Most people are acting according to the latter: not a single Republican is remotely acknowledging that there are any problems with the results, and neither are any Democrats finding the ballot layout, which was approved by a Democratic election supervisor, acceptable.

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7:36PM FRI 10-NOV-2000

I'm starting to get really scared with neither candidate backing down on their shameful behavior here. Bush is setting up a cabinet three days after the election without a certified winner, and Gore is not reigning in the barrage of lawsuits (like those will be clear cut and solve anything). Get the most accurate count you can (and hey, if the numbers swing 1,500 in a re-count with the race in the balance by 300, you *should* do the hand count to make sure of the numbers) and then, guys, you've got a decision on who should be president, better luck next time.

But alas, remember how I said that Bush would turn the tables with the same stunts in the close states that went for Gore, and demonstrate the same behavior that the GOP was admonishing, and yet threatening to do at the same time if the monkey knife fight escalates?

Well they are - there's nothing wrong with asking for a first recount in New Mexico, but going to court to stop hand recount of Florida ballots, essentially because 'it shouldn't happen' (read, no legal basis for doing so), makes them look rather hypocritical for criticizing the litigiousness of Gore's team and their legal request for a hand count to obtain an accurate measure.

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8:46PM FRI 10-NOV 2000

Cathy's dad threatened enough bodily harm if I voted for Nader that I convinced myself again that Gore was the best vote. Glad someone got a Nader vote in, though, and how's Gov. Jesse? Paul would get my vote over him, however.

The more this develops the more I feel like I'm stuck in some sort of surreal dimensional conversion to a Tom Clancy or John Grishman novel - but this is wackier than any novel someone could make up.

A few more odd tidbits I've read:

1) According to NPR, Cuba offered to send officials to help monitor the vote counting in Florida. Glad to see Fidel still has a sense of humor after the Elian mess.

2) While reading a book arguing for abolishing the electoral college (which featured an example a hypothetical election in 1996 during which a "runner-up president" got the electoral votes - it was written in 1991 right after the Gulf War and the authors saw no feasible way that Bush could lose in 1992, but I digress) I learned that the Electoral College's vote is ratified by the US Senate, and ultimately, the Senate Chair, who is none other than the US Vice President.

3) Another twist is of course that the Electoral College members could vote against how they have been charged by their states. Unlikely, but then again so it most of what is going on. Those rural hicks who get 2 Senate Votes the same as New York and California, however, are loathe to give up the EC in our federal republic.

4) Technically, the Palm Beach ballot could actually be argued to be illegal (the ballot law includes the phrase "at the right of the name of the candidate"). But our country is sick of lawsuits (case in point: The infamous McDonald's hot coffee burning lawsuit verdict was mocked, whereas most people don't know that the burned lady was in her 80s and suffered 3rd degree burns over most of her mid-section and crotch) - it's too late to do anything about the anomalous votes.

But if Florida were for some reason to go for Gore, there's little doubt that Bush would turn the tables with the same stunts in the close states that went for Gore, and demonstrate the same behavior that the GOP is now admonishing, and yet threatening to do at the same time if the monkey knife fight escalates.

5) Some of my co-workers voted on computer touch screens - no chance of double voting there -while the Palm Beach punchcards made me proud of my Philadelphian 1930s lever-based voting machines.

6) Bush, the "uniter not a divider," got a whopping 9% of the black vote.

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1:54PM MON 13-NOV 2000

"The one thing we don't do is roll over," says an aide. "We fight." In league with the campaign - which is preparing talking points about the Electoral College's essential unfairness - a massive talk-radio operation would be encouraged. "We'd have ads, too," says the aide, "and I think you can count on the media to fuel the thing big-time. Even papers that supported our opponent might turn against him because the will of the people will have been thwarted." Local business leaders will be urged to lobby their customers, the clergy will be asked to speak up for the popular will and the team will enlist as many opponents as possible to scream as loud as they can. "You think 'Democrats for Democracy' would be a catchy term for them?" asks an adviser. The universe of people who would be targeted by this insurrection is small - the 538 currently anonymous folks called electors, people chosen by the campaigns and their state party organizations as a reward for their service over the years.

Funny thing about the above quotes, is they they're from a Bush Aide, made before the election, when they anticipated, based on a bigger projected Nader swing, losing the electoral and winning the popular. Taken from "BUSH SET TO FIGHT AN ELECTORAL COLLEGE LOSS" 11/1/2000 Daily News (New York).

Anyway, antiquated voting systems and their stupid users aside, I don't see how anyone can claim that the will of the voters, including the 30,000 Palm Beach voters whose votes were not counted by the computer, was that this lazy drunken cokehead be elected.

I keep thinking to some extent that if the tables were reversed, the political parties perspectives and legal stances would likewise be flipped and still bickering (well, Bush sure would, as shown in the quotes above - and you've probably quickly abandoned you're favoring of a run-off election as you did when Perot was in the ring, now that Nader is spoiling a Gore win), but the more I think about it, the present situation typifies what the two parties stand for:

The will of the people is readily ignored when it suits the ruling power's purposes, and worthy and legitimate calls to investigate matters are thwarted with a push to seize power, with nothing short of a legal appeal to forbid a recount, while impassioned cries for ensuring the will of the people is properly interpreted that arise from the opposition are met with an accompanying bullying rhetoric (you drop this and we'll drop that, or else we'll turn up our oppressive posture). That's fascism at its core. This is a guy that supports laws criminalizing sodomy, opposes hate crime statutes, and so on and so on. C'mon, are you not even pro-choice anymore?

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4:39PM TUE 14-NOV 2000

Sick of the sophmoric jokes circulating, I wrote a satire of my own:

AUCHWITZ (AP) - Himler Bush, the National Socialist Party candidate who opposes hate crime statutes and supports laws criminalizing sodomy, today announced that he will rigorously support the restriction of a time limit to the Nurnberg Trials. "Sure, we may be guilty of placing human beings into pressure chambers so that their lungs exploded, starving people to death, and performing countless toxic chemical experiments on humans, all cumulating in mass murder of genocidal proportions, but hey, if the courts cannot convict us in a rapid manner, for the sake of the county's International relations and standing, I should be set free," Bush said. "It's not my fault that the photographs of the Dachau Gas Chambers are late arriving at the courtroom because there was confusion developing them, and hell, I can't even pronounce 'Zyklon B' properly." Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor in the trials, voiced a strong opinion that the Trials should continue until a verdict is reached. His objections, however, were quickly drowned out by ridicule and propaganda from Bush-supporting tribunal members.

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12:14AM WED 22-NOV 2000

I just watched James Baker's "It is not fair" speech and believe it marks a pivotal moment in this election. This evening the Florida state supreme court decided to allow the recounts to continue and be counted, in contrast to the Florida Secretary of State's (who took time off from her job to campaign for Bush, who is co-chair of his Florida campaign, and who spent $30,000 of taxpayer money for a phone campaign for Bush - now really, if Jeb can step down due to a conflict of interest, just what conflicts aren't possible with her) announcement that she will ignore them.

Justices are political appointees, but especially as this was a unanimous decision, I would view in this case as esteemed legal scholars who for the most part know what they're doing (in contrast to congress, which, I hear now from an undecided mail-in election in Washington, may be back to a 50-50 split, and which everyone properly assumes that one hundred individuals representing different states will all vote on important issues according to the party line they've been whipped into following).

The ruling also suggested that this matter is well within the state's rights to settle, and federal judicial intervention is not welcome. Republicans, having a strong federalist slant, have traditionally favored state's rights in such situations, yet Baker's statement strongly hinted at appealing the ruling to the federal courts. His speech consisted of a dozen or so sentences, each beginning with "It is not fair." Repetition can be a powerful oratory tool, but it helps when you're defending your country against fascism (Churchill's "We shall fight them...") rather than trying to make a fascist seizure of power yourself. To me the speech came off more like one of Eyeore from Winnie the Pooh's sighing statements, especially after Gore's conciliatory remarks, during which he again asked for a meeting with Bush.

The thing with Gore now is that he finally has the upper hand, and has really backed Bush into a corner. The Democrats saw how close the Florida vote was, and knew the simple basics of the laws (as evidenced by them winning the supreme court case) and how recounts of punched ballots end up (usually as a whole more votes are counted due to hanging chads and the like), so they requested a recount only in three strong-showing counties, knowing that if only those areas were re-counted, the odds were that Gore would gain the most votes. Simple numbers and well within the law for him to request the vote, but Bush's camp played it wrong by suing to stop the selective recounts rather than asking for a state-wide recount, and now they're made to look the fool for having to ramblingly threaten to appeal a state supreme court ruling to the federal supreme court.

It's amazing how all the Republican ridiculing of Gore's complaints and calls for a careful recount so quickly collapsed into the Republicans themselves now being the whiners.

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4:03PM WED 22-NOV 2000

Yeah the overseas gripes are tricky, but very telling. I didn't know about military POs not date stamping things. Interesting situation, of course, because in this case the Gore team pushed the letter of the law (throw them out if they're not dated) while the Bush camp stressed every vote should count (and even rallying the troops by accusing Gore of not allowing the military to vote - boy it's good we don't live in a military-run system or those kind of accusations could easily get out of hand).

Of course these stances by the candidates are the exact opposite the recount positions the two have when it comes to the public vote in Florida: Gore says every vote, even if improperly punched, should be counted, even if it needs to be done by hand; while Bush is pushing, via his Florida campaign co-chair, the letter of the law for finalizing the tally and prohibiting voters that didn't use a stylus properly from having their vote counted. It really illustrates the anything goes posturing happening here. But it looks much more likely that Gore will relent on the undated votes than Bush will let up on his "It is not fair" crusade.

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8:53AM MON 27-NOV 2000

Especially now that the Florida vote has been certified, I'm hearing more and more talk about Gore being a sore loser and trying to steal the election. When the chargers of such accusations can and are willing to likewise claim any of the following, I'll be more inclined to take their opinions seriously.

The first two are clearly untenable, and the third is unfortunately unknown, mostly because the GOP has pushed every imaginable technique towards blocking a recount, while the fourth claim contradicts all sense.

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5:19PM TUE 12-DEC 2000

Imagine it's six months from now.

A new president has been sworn in and is leading his party in a new wave of reforms - but not so sweeping as his campaign promised - and is being met with strong opposition from the other party. But most American's lives aren't that touched one way or the other, and 65% of all Americans claim to have voted for the current president. The election controversy seems to have faded away, and is now shelved in the country's collective memory along with the Clinton impeachment and the Iran-Contra scandal.

But an inquisitive reporter, say from the New York Times or the Washington Post, using the Freedom of Information Act, has recently obtained access to the Florida ballots, and with the help of some reliable and unbiased counting methods, has shown that, beyond a reasonable doubt, the current President did *not* receive the most votes in Florida. Not by a long shot.

What will happen? Well, the same thing that happened right after the election, of course. People's opinions - from ordinary citizens right up to the members of the US Supreme Court - will be dictated by who they wanted to be in office.

It's all downhill from here, so I'm ending this little journal. See you all in 2004!

- John

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Last Updated Tuesday, December 12, 2000