It will be almst impssible to blow the 2006 election.

[Jackpine Radical]

But I have faith in the Democratic leadership. If anyone can rise to the challenge, it will be them.

[rubberducky]

1. Key word "almost"

[OrangeCountyDemocrat]

2. I'm Telling Ya.....

We're going to lose. Perhaps not badly, but we WILL lose.

We're Democrats, and losing is what we do best. Why break a streak of failure.

Oh, I'll vote, and hope everyone else does to. But it won't really matter in the end. It's all been decided, and peons like myself don't factor in.

[SammyWinstonJack]

5. We Democrats "lose" and the repugs STEAL!

[kerry-is-my-prez]

7. I never understood why people felt that way - but I do now.....

This admin. just does whatever they damn well please despite what Congress, the Supreme Court, etc. says or does anyways.

[Bill McBlueState]

11. In what sense do you mean lose?

If the only standard is whether we take back control of both houses of Congress, we may well lose.

But state-by-state, we'll have a lot of victories. Massachusetts and Ohio are both likely to have Democratic governors for the first time in over a decade. Pennsylvania's going to throw out one of the biggest douchebags ever to set foot on the floor of the Senate. And in Connecticut, the Democratic candidate for Senate is running ads on mainstream network affiliates that criticize the Iraq occupation in terms that, two years ago, were relegated to remote corners of the internet.

We're going to win small battles all around the country. The question is just how many.

[BeFree]

20. No. We can win this.

But not with attitudes like your's.

What it will take is most of us ganging up on the radical republicans and pushing hard to get our dem candidates elected. And watching the vote counting very closely.

Peons like you can count - can make a difference. I used to be a peon like you claim to be, but once I got involved in politics, I found a world of opportunity to make changes.

[Buzz Clik]

3. errrr... no.

[gully]

4. This vote was designed by Rove, before a major election to discourage

Dems/leftists. Worked like a charm.

[Der Blaue Engel]

16. BINGO.

I'm so disgusted right now I can't even compose a reasonable post, but you've hit the nail on the head.

[AndyA]

6. Ummm...are we talking about the SAME Democratic leadership?

The Democratic leadership that in the last 24 hours has stood by and allowed the Constitution to be shredded? The same leadership that is giving George Bush dictatorial powers?

Finding worse leadership would be difficult. Surely we aren't talking about the same leadership. There is no leadership in the Democratic Party. Turn on C-span and watch them roll over and play dead for the GOP.

[Jackpine Radical]

18. Yeah. We're talking about the same "leadership."

Now go back & read my original post. If this crew were in charge of an iceberg & ran into the Titanic, the iceberg would sink.

[leftchick]

8. this bill is the first step

they think it will make them look "tuff on terra". Guess What?? It makes them look like fucking Nazi Appeasers! :grr:

[brettdale]

9. rigged and silence

The only fear should be, if they rig it and then the silence from the Mainstream media.

[Randy Ranger]

17. If it is rigged

We will need to take it to the streets and not concede

[David Dunham]

10. Low gas prices could cost us the 06 election. We need to fight hard.

[lastknowngood]

12. You are sure right there. Cheering on the shrub and his minions

while they rape and pillage the constitution the Bill of Rights and our national treasury has pretty much driven me to just stay home. I don't see any purpose in voting for the cowards who won't even fight.

[NewYorkerfromMass]

13. and we enjoy cheering on the failure of the Dems?

I swear so many liberals, progressives, and Democrats themselves (even here) seem to be wishing for the defeat of the Dems.

[bowens43]

14. It's not the leadership I'm worried about.

Haven't you read the dozens of posts here on DU from people urging us not to support the Democratic candidates?

It's 2000 all over again. It's just like when the fucking greens in Florida voted their 'conscience' instead of using their brains. The result was Bush in the oval office, 911, the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the Patriot Act, domestic spying , Gitmo, Abu Ghraib and the torture bill.

We see many DUers about to make the same mistake the greens made then. In order to be able to brag about supporting their principles they are willing to allow 2 more years of neo-con control and who knows how many more torture bills.

The leadership wants to win, many here don't think that its important.

[Peace Patriot]

19. But, Bowens43, the vast majority of the Greens, and the vast majority of

former Nader voters, as well as the vast majority of new voters, all voted for Kerry in 2004! You should read Steven Freeman's book, "Was the 2004 election stolen?"

This amazing grass roots coalition, with everybody pulling together to oust the Bush Junta, failed, because, back on Oct. 29, 2002, the Bushites pulled off their key coup--electronic voting run on "trade secret" code by Bushite corporations.

This is the most important fact about our election system--WHO is counting the votes, and HOW. It overrides all other factors, all other strategies, all other issues. The fascist cabal behind Diebold/ES&S is (s)electing our representatives, almost everywhere. And sometimes they (s)elect people who might be elected anyway--they need that appearance of democracy. But mostly they're putting a "thumb on the scales" for Bushites, warmongers and corporatists. These people--whether Democrats or Republicans--do not represent the American people, or their constituencies. And that is just blatantly obvious when you look at all the numerous polls showing what Americans think--of the war, of torture, of the deficit, and, indeed, of every major Bush policy, foreign and domestic--great majority opposition, way up in the 60% to 70% range. There is simply no justification for the votes of these Diebold Democrats in Congress, who would vote for torture (63% of the American people oppose torture 'under any circumstances!).

Now, I'm not against playing this smart. We must. That's all we have left is our smarts. We lost our democracy a couple of years ago (with corporate-controlled electronic voting). Depending on the race, I think people should support even 'mole' Democrats in order to try to form a majority in Congress with good Democratic leaders at the head of it, with these mole 'Democrats' getting pressured the other way (and eventually getting pushed out). And I've even talked about supporting the War/Corporate Democrat that Diebold/ES&S may (s)elect as president in '08. All candidates have to have some base of support in order to get Diebolded into office. So they all need us to some extent, at least at (s)election time. But my SOLE GOAL in such support would be to work on election reform--for instance, to get a W/C Democrat like Hillary, to reform the election system after she's in office. (Interestingly, she is one of only two Dem Senators who voted against HAVA--the other was Charles Schumer--possibly because of New Yorker's attachment to their old, reliable, unriggable lever machines.)

That's what I mean by playing it smart. We are looking at a fascist coup. How do crawl back out from under this Junta? We may have to do it, say, the way Latin Americans are doing it--by years and maybe decades of work at restoring transparent elections.

I think it's off-base--strategy-wise--to dis Green voters, or to worry so much about people voting their consciences. When they abandoned their consciences, in 2004, and voted for Kerry (who had voted for the war), what good did it do them? We're all in this together--suffering under direct Bushite corporate control over election results. I know a lot of Greens, and a lot of disaffected voters, and they're all good people. We need a common strategy to defeat fascism, beginning with defeating fascist control of our election system. And you don't get there--to a common strategy--by dissing good people who have a conscience about torture. Instead, show them a way to get a Congress that DOESN'T endorse torture. Step one: getting rid of these rigged voting machines.

[bowens43]

21. I understand that most of them voted for Kerry in 2004

But 90,000 of them voted for Nader in Florida in 2000. Bush 'won' be just a few hundred votes. You can bet that if Nader wasn't on the ballot those folks would have voted for Gore.

Look what we are seeing here (not on this thread) is DUers advocating not voting or voting against Democrats because of the torture vote. This should stop. This election is too important to piss it away because a few dems cast a bad vote.

I agree , election reform is our top issue but if we don't gain control of congress we'll never see election reform.

[Peace Patriot]

15. The date was Oct. 29, 2002. That's when the Democratic Party

leadership sold away our democracy, with the passage of the "Help America Vote Act" by the Anthrax Congress and Bush's signing of this democracy-killing legislation.

You are looking at the result, the Diebold Congress, in which nearly all the Republicans, and a third to half of the Democrats are hand-picked by two rightwing corporations--Diebold and its brethren ES&S--who together "counted" 80% of the nation's votes in 2004, using TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code. Diebold/ES&S not only (s)elected Bush, they (s)elected this rubber-stamp Congress.

These are not Democrats, and to say that they will rise to the challenge of defeating a Democratic majority in Congress is to be imprecise. These are fascist moles whose purpose is to contribute enough votes in Congress to keep the wars going, and the tax cuts for the rich, and fascist policies like torture, and to prevent investigation of massive theft and other crimes. The OTHER Democrats--the ones who would have been elected anyway--have to struggle against these moles in their own party. They all supported electronic voting run by Bushite corporations, but for different reasons. Some are collusive, some very corrupt, some got strongarmed, and some were/are fearful. And the moles are just moles. They aren't Democrats, and, like the Republicans, they don't represent anybody, except for a tiny rightwing faction of the country and its billionaire funders. How the real Democrats got bushwhacked into supporting rigged electronic vote tabulation is a book that I'm sure will be written some day. For now, look to Bilderberg operatives like Christopher Dodd, who misinformed other Democrats (Kerry, for instance). (Dodd was a major architect of HAVA, along with the biggest crooks in the Anthrax Congress, Tom Delay and Bob Ney.)

What I'm saying is that it was all over back then, in Oct. '02. The death warrant of our democracy was written that day. We are seeing the death throes.

I do think we have a slim window of opportunity to turn this around, and I think how we can do it is by massive Absentee Ballot voting this fall--aimed at a huge revolt of the citizenry against these rigged machines at the state/local level. If we can get rid of the electronic voting systems, we might have a chance.

See "What do you expect of the Diebold Congress? at
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x2851762