William Rivers Pitt: A Day of Chicken-Counting Scoop.co.nz

[helderheid]

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0609/S00098.htm

Friday, 8 September 2006, 12:09 pm
Opinion: William Rivers Pitt
A Day of Chicken-Counting

By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
From: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/090606A.shtml
Wednesday 06 September 2006

The Labor Day weekend is traditionally considered the starting gun for Congressional midterm races. The work to gain or hold seats has been going on for months, of course, but Labor Day is when everyone is supposed to start paying attention. Only 63 days remain until the votes are cast. Remember, remember the seventh of November.

Anyone reading the newspapers over this past weekend, however, may have been left with the inescapable sense that the outcome of these midterms is a fait accompli. The printing press punditry appears to have decided that the GOP is doomed, that the Democrats will at minimum regain control of the House of Representatives, if not the entire Congress. One could not turn around on Monday without bumping into an article predicting blood on the moon for the Republican Party.

The New York Times's article was titled "G.O.P. Seen to Be in Peril of Losing House," and read, "After a year of political turmoil, Republicans enter the fall campaign with their control of the House in serious jeopardy, the possibility of major losses in the Senate, and a national mood so unsettled that districts once considered safely Republican are now competitive, analysts and strategists in both parties say."

The Washington Post's headline was "More GOP Districts Counted as Vulnerable," and the article beneath read, "Facing the most difficult political environment since they took control of Congress in 1994, Republicans begin the final two months of the midterm campaign in growing danger of losing the House while fighting to preserve at best a slim majority in the Senate, according to strategists and officials in both parties. Over the summer, the political battlefield has expanded well beyond the roughly 20 GOP House seats originally thought to be vulnerable. Now some Republicans concede there may be almost twice as many districts from which Democrats could wrest the 15 additional seats they need to take control."

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http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0609/S00098.htm

[rpannier]

1. Interesting

Thanks

[gasperc]

2. and let's up it even more, 100 seats

with the Path to 9/11 a willfull deception and a $40million in kind donation to the GOP, we need to push as hard as possible to wrestle every last seat from the GOP.

ABC executives knew the content of this film, this is a willful act coordinated by the highest levels of ABC and the government, Rove's fingerprints are all over this


read this from an ABC screenwriter:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/9/7/152756/7128

[dogday]

3. Remember Zogby and the Odds-Makers in Vegas?

Their prediction? I can't help thinking about that after all this time, that sticks with me....

[helderheid]

4. does me too.

[helderheid]

5. More

The election fraud debate frames the problem incorrectly. The question should not be whether there is widespread election fraud. It should be: 'Why should we trust the results of elections?' It's not good enough that election results be accurate. We have to know they are accurate - and we don't."

The editorial board of the New York Times wrote on Tuesday, "A recent government report details enormous flaws in the election system in Ohio's biggest county, problems that may not be fixable before the 2008 election. Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, hired a consulting firm to review its election system. The county recently adopted Diebold electronic voting machines that produce a voter-verified paper record of every vote cast. The investigators compared the vote totals recorded on the machines after this year's primary with the paper records produced by the machines. The numbers should have been the same, but often there were large and unexplained discrepancies. The report also found that nearly 10 percent of the paper records were destroyed, blank, illegible, or otherwise compromised."

According to Diebold's web site, there are more than 130,000 of their electronic voting machines deployed across the United States. They are used in Iowa, California, Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, Colorado, Indiana and elsewhere. Many of the states with these machines have elections in November that will centrally determine whether the GOP can maintain its majority in congress. At this point, there is absolutely no reason to believe the counting of the votes in these states will be done with any kind of accuracy.

The pundits can prognosticate all they want about looming electoral catastrophe for the GOP. Anyone who counts these chickens before they hatch is a fool.

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