Ohio election story is going to come back - Matt Taibbi

[Terre]

Although I can't find a date on the article I have to assume it's very recent because it just came to my Inbox via a Yahoo "blackwell lockdown" search I requested EONS ago. I did a search on Taibbi, but came up with nothing, so if it's a duplicate, do let me know and I'll delete.

HIGHLY IRREGULAR by Matt Taibbi

File this under "Where ya been my friend?"

Here's a few paragraphs, but I urge you to read the rest, it's worth it:

I was in Washington last week, covering a story in Congress, when a friend invited me to a panel discussion in the basement of the Capitol building. I agreed before he told me what the subject was. Boy was I bummed when I saw the title on the e-circular:

What went wrong in Ohio? A Harper's Magazine Forum on Voting Irregularities in the 2004 Election.

Oh, Christ, not that, I thought.

It had always seemed to me that I understood the psychology of the Ohio story without having to examine the facts involved. I thought the story appealed most directly to a group of people who were still reeling after 2000, an election which George W. Bush not only lost according to the popular vote, but plainly stole in the electoral college.

Yet, Bush remains president. And not only has he remained president, he hasn't even had the decency to act embarrassed about it. He's remained president right out in the open, in front of our faces, like he's proud of that shit.

a little more:

Even when they had a completely plausible excuse to at least investigate the Ohio charges on their own—after Michigan congressman John Conyers issued a lengthy report detailing the Ohio indiscretions—the big dailies still blew off the case. The New York Times mentioned the Conyers report only in the context of a 381-word page A16 item in January about John Kerry endorsing the election results ("Election Results to Be Certified, With Little Fuss From Kerry," 1/16/05). That piece ended with a quote by Dennis Hastert, who dismissed the Conyers report as the work of the "loony left."

I can only speak for myself, but I think that as a result of all of this, I was inclined to dismiss as a waste of time any discussion of what happened in Ohio. The story wasn't going anywhere. Even if there was evidence of wrongdoing, how could it possibly be more incontrovertible than the evidence in Florida? And given that nothing happened when Bush stole the election in front of the entire world in Florida, why bother making a fuss now in Ohio—especially since John Kerry was clearly many millions of votes less of a victim than Al Gore?

Well, I don't think that way anymore.

There's much more, and he ends by saying: "More facts next week, plus an interview with Sherrod Brown—and a guide to what to do next."

I do love "refresher" courses. :woohoo:

[NMDemDist2]

1. kicked and nominated n/t

[ooglymoogly]

18. here is some more on matt taibbi

mike taibbi and boston kept circling in my head while reading this and so i found the connection http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/index.php?/sideblog/comments/325/ plus interesting note on anti christ and town drunk christopher hitchins...and more about moore...what more could you ask for? be sure and read the posts they are funny..."matt said fuck on cspan. he's so hot right now".

[SmokingJacket]

2. The Harper's Magazine article on this was GREAT by the way.

By Mark Crispin Miller, in the most recent issue. You know it all already, but it's wonderful to see it in a (more or less) mainstream magazine....

[Terre]

3. Actually I'm ashamed to admit I haven't

I've been sorta wound up in working on contributing for the www.downingstreetmemo.com website, and now specifically a comprehensive timeline for it, in between trying to keep current on Rovie, et al, that I'm runnin' out of hours in the day.

You can bet I'll buy it though on my next trip into town. Thanks for the heads-up.

[whometense]

10. I agree.

I didn't see much new in it, but I imagine a lot of Harper's readers did. I thought it was a very well put-together overview.

[Carolab]

4. WOO HOO!!! Thank you MATT! n/t

[Carolab]

5. 7/27/2005 - 8/2/2005 issue date -- CURRENT ISSUE!!

n/t

[Bill Bored]

6. I will read it. His dad was an investigative TV reporter in NYC. nt

[intheflow]

7. Kick

[Fly by night]

8. Ah, the synergy. Ah, the sound of a waking bear.

Boy oh boy, two new articles in less than a week on the stolen election in Ohio. Thanks again to MCM for his phenomenal article and its ripple effects. I hope Harper's sets a record for newsstand sales and new subscriptions.

I will be forwarding info on both MCM's and Taibbi's articles to my email lists this evening, along with a few more suggestions for keeping the story out there. (I hope lots of you are going to Atlanta for Jesse Jackson's Voting Rights march the first week of August. I'll post a thread if there hasn't been one yet.)

[Amaryllis]

9. Can't wait for the "what to do next"part!

[hootinholler]

11. He's got this right on...

And if we ignore this now, we're putting proven methods for easily ripping off major elections in the hands of the same party that had no qualms whatsoever about lying its way into a war in Iraq. In the hands of a merely corrupt political party, a bad election or two would be no big deal. But these clowns we have in power now imagine themselves to be revolutionaries, and their psychology is a lot like that of the leadership of Enron, pre-meltdown—with each passing day that they get away with it, they become more convinced by a delusion of righteousness.

Summed up nicely.

-Hoot

[Terre]

12. I LOVED that part

and boy was it ever hard to pick and choose what to include in the post.

Amaryllis - I hear ya. I'm on pins and needles already.

[FreedomAngel82]

13. Oh wow

And this being from Taibbi! I saw his interview on Jon Stewart and he appeared not to care much for Kerry so him saying this I think is big news. Has anybody checked out his book?

[roguevalley]

14. matt writes for these people weekly:

http://www.nypress.com/17/26/news&columns/MattTaibbi.cfm

great paper and read his review of Tom Friedman's book. A howler

[drm604]

15. Article date

"Although I can't find a date on the article"

If you go to your link and look at the upper right you'll see that it says "Vol 18 - Issue 30 - July 27-Aug 2, 2005", so this is apparently a recent article. Even so, while I wish I could see some reason for optimism in this article I don't see anything new in it and I have no reason to believe it's going to light some kind of spark, unless he has something really new and spectacular next week, and if he does why didn't he just say it now? I'm not familiar with "New York Press", does anyone here know if it's widely read or taken seriously? It bills itself as "New York's Premier Alternative Newspaper" which doesn't sound too promising.

I have Conyer's report, and although I haven't read it all yet, what I have read there and elsewhere makes it obvious that there was a dedicated effort to subvert the vote in Ohio. But still, no one seems to care. :banghead: The Harpers' article gives me some hope. Harpers is more mainstream, but it does appeal to a more intellectual crowd so it may just end up being smeared and dismissed like everything else. Sigh.

[Terre]

17. I'm cautious as well

but any attention brought to this issue is ALWAYS welcome. BTW, I think I looked EVERYWHERE on that page (except where it was) for a date. lol Thanks.

The one thing that struck me the most, was that he was one the types of people we were trying to beat over the head with this information, and this was/is their thinking:

Like a lot of people in this country (and like most all of my colleagues in the journalism world), my instinctual reaction to the Ohio electoral-mess story has always been one of revulsion and irritation. Almost on principle I had refused even to look at any of the news stories surrounding the Ohio vote; there is a part of me that did not want to be associated with any sore-loser hysteria of the political margins, and in particular with this story, the great conspiratorial Snuffleupagus of the defeated left.

That he can do an about-face is encouraging. These are the people we should have had with us from the get-go.

With *'s ratings in the tank, and soon to be running on empty (Thank God) a revival of this story hopefully can gain some traction. If more people are beginning to wake-up and smell the turdblossom's, it may just happen that they'll look at what we've been screaming about for the last 9 months.

[meganmonkey]

16. Excellent!

What a good article - can't wait till the next installment!!!

:bounce:

[dchill]

19. Excellent!

Kick.

[dchill]

20. Kick II

[FreedomAngel82]

21. Kick

Is his article out Monday?

[Fly by night]

22. kick

[roseBudd]

23. Sherrod Brown used to be OH SoS, I'd like to know if when he was...

SoS were punchcard ballots punched with precinct codes as they are in Indiana. Currently under Blackwell punchcard ballots require a header card to be tabulated correctly. Why would anyone choose to not use the available almost foolproof technololgy, prepunched precinct codes. Lets see, header cards make it easier to send ballots to the wrong tabulation program.