Nader and La Follette: History Repeats Itself. Should Nader’s run be cast in the same tones as Robert La Follette’s 1924 campaign as an independent against “a conservative Republican and an only marginally less conservative Democrat”?

Described as an antiracist educator, organizer and writer, Tim Wise of Alter Net writes an Open Letter to the Pioneer Fund, delighted to discover he shares their interest in “the proposition that people of different

ethnic and cultural backgrounds are, on the basis of heredity, inherently

unequal and can never be expected to behave or perform equally” , as their charter proclaims. Wicked tongue firmly ensconced in cheek, he wants them to fund his investigation into the reasons for Causasian genetic inferiority, as demonstrated by their “disproportionate drug use, binge drinking, and propensity for serial murder.”

It may be that nothing can wean whites from their insatiable appetites for

drugs and alcohol. If so, then just as your founder, Wickliffe Draper, once

said blacks were “genetically inferior,” and “ought to be repatriated to

Africa,” so too will you surely be brave enough to call for a full-fledged “back

to Europe” movement, so as to rid the U.S. of millions of narcotized

Caucasian parasites.

As one of your grantees, Richard Lynn says, it might even be necessary to

“phase out” inferior cultures: a prospect that might apply to whites if they’re

unwilling or unable to clean themselves up. Such is the price of progress.

Wanted: Homeland for 300 Webheads. ‘Most college students don’t tend to say things like “Whether or not we see a

nation of liberty on this planet could hinge largely on my competence.” Then

again, most college students aren’t self-proclaimed royalty… He doesn’t use slang or even

contractions, and he signs his correspondence “Yours in Liberty.” His chief

hobby is improving his qualifications for princehood by studying political

philosophy and keeping up with international news.’ By one writer’s count, the web is home to 118 self-defined virtual “micro-nations” with self-declared sovereignty. And some of them are looking for territory in the actual world. Alter Net

Here, in full, is a dispatch from Phil Agre (Red Rock Eaters mailing list owner), who has rapidly pulled together alot of concerns about the Florida vote situation:

[People have been sending me a flood of material about the Florida

vote, so much that I can hardly keep up with it as I’m typing here.

The situation is a mess, and it just gets worse. I’ve gathered URL’s

for a great deal of relevant information, and I urge you to pass

it along to everyone who can use it. I’m getting so much material,

the situation is evolving so fast, and the relevant Web sites are so

overloaded, that I cannot guarantee that I have summarized everything

100% accurately, or that the URL’s all still work. I’ve done my best.

Earlier I passed on a report that a locked ballot box had been discovered

in a Democratic area. Now the cnn.com Web site reports that, according

to “Miami-Dade County election officials”, this box contained no ballots:

http://www.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/11/08/ballotbox.found/

There is a lot of vague talk about other missing ballot boxes, but this

is the only one that has been formally reported to my knowledge.

But the missing ballot box was hardly the only problem, or the worst.

For example, there are the misleading “butterfly ballots”. Here is an

article from the Sun-Sentinel newspaper in Palm Beach County:

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/daily/detail/0,1136,36000000000123102,00.html

This article is being continually updated. The Sun-Sentinel Web site is

overwhelmed, so keep trying.

You can see an image of the misleading ballot on these pages:

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/elections/palmbeachballot.htm

http://cnews.tribune.com/news/image/0,1119,sunsentinel-nation-82373,00.html

The Democrats are asserting that this ballot design was illegal under

Florida law:

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/politics/AP-ELN-Florida-Ballot-Confusion.html

Bob Kerrey is calling for a new vote in Florida:

http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/11/07/results/

The problem has two aspects. First, statistical arguments and massive

anecdotal evidence suggest that the misleading ballot produced easily

enough bad votes to throw the election. Second, one of the authors of

the Sun-Sentinel article just said on public radio that something like

20,000 more ballots than one would statistically expect were discarded

in the strongly Democratic areas where the misleading ballots were used.

There is a brief statistical discussion of the issue here:

http://cuwu.editthispage.com/2000/11/08

This page should include a dramatic plot of the voting data, but it only

seems to appear under certain browsers. Here’s another URL for the plot:

http://madison.hss.cmu.edu/palm-beach.pdf

Here are some more articles on the subject:

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20001108/el/eln_ballot_confusion_1.html

http://www.time.com/time/campaign2000/story/0,7243,60132,00.html

I have enclosed another statistical discussion by Jeff Harris, a former

official at the Office of Management and Budget now working a public

policy consultant in Los Angeles. I have also enclosed a message by a

friend, also in Los Angeles, who was involved in an investigation of a

rigged election out here. He knew about the 1988 case in Florida, and

I found his message interesting. People have made further claims about

the 1988 election that they aren’t willing to put their names on, so I

won’t repeat them.

Nobody to my knowledge is arguing that the ballots were consciously

designed to bias the election. They are only arguing that the ballots

were badly designed, illegal, and very likely had the effect of changing

the outcome on the national level.

Enough about the butterfly ballots. Here are some other subjects…

For a while last night, the cnn.com Web site said that CNN was trying

to investigate an apparent discrepancy between the Florida voting figures

that were reported to the press and the actual count. If I understood

the sequence of events correctly, these discrepancies may have had an

impact on the bizarre sequence of events last night, possibly motivating

Al Gore’s premature concession call to George W. Bush. I was watching

the numbers minute-by-minute until about 5am EST, and there certainly did

seem to be a discrepancy. But I have not heard anything further about the

matter on cnn.com or elsewhere.

The Wall Street Journal mentions complaints of voter intimidation

(or fraud or something) based on claims that at least one conservative

radio host in Florida broadcast an assertion that, due to high turnout,

Democrats should vote on Wednesday. In the few days before the election

I saw just that claim, framed as a joke, in messages circulating on

the Internet. But then other messages said that it was Republicans

who should vote on Wednesday. In any case as I say these messages were

clearly jokes. If a radio host made such assertions in anything but a

clearly joking way then that would be a serious matter as well.

The police have locked the elections office of Volusia County, Florida

(which Gore won) after they caught an employee removing bags from it.

http://orlandosentinel.com/news/1108guard.htm

http://cbsnews.com/now/story/0,1597,247897-412,00.shtml

You can get county-by-county numbers at cnn.com. The numbers do look

strange for the down-ballot candidates compared to other counties.

It is worth remembering that Dade and Broward counties in south Florida

have big-time histories of voter fraud. For a story on one recent

episode, see today’s issue of Feed:

http://www.feedmag.com/templates/daily_master.php3?a_id=1389

One Florida journalist mentioned on public radio that the whole Miami

area is full of ex-CIA people including right-wing anti-Castro activists

and many of the major figures of the Watergate scandal, and that people

in Florida are not surprised to hear of strange goings-on in that area.

I also recommend the concise analysis at http://www.orvetti.com/.

My conservative friends are telling me what a pissy loser Al Gore is

for contesting this problematic vote in Florida. So it’s worth noting

that the Bush campaign was quite prepared to contest an election if

(as widely predicted) he won the popular vote but not the electoral:

http://www.nydailynews.com/2000-11-01/News_and_Views/Beyond_the_City/a-86769.asp

On a different and flakier subject, Consortium News reports that a voter

has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission that the

New York Times made improper in-kind contributions to the Bush campaign

by repeating large numbers of false statements about Al Gore from Bush

press releases:

http://www.consortiumnews.com/110700a.html

The complaint probably won’t (and shouldn’t) succeed, but it does point

to a real and serious problem:

http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.The.New.Science.of.C.html

I’ve been told of all sorts of scenarios involving compromises between

the Gore and Bush campaigns, but I see no evidence that these things are

really happening.

I have also received all sorts of unsubstantiated reports of problems

with the vote in Florida, including rumors about suspicious turnout

levels and the handling of write-ins (and not just in the southern part

of the state). But I don’t want to report any of these reports until

someone can document them. The only reason I’m mentioning them is

because people (who I don’t know) claim to have heard about them in the

Florida media, which is something but not very much. At the same time,

I would encourage students of Florida politics to study the numbers all

across the state very carefully. You can start at cnn.com.

I am also hearing unsubstantiated reports of street protests. Have

you noticed the widespread pattern of inadequate provision for voters

in African-American communities? These include Miami and New York.

In St. Louis, large numbers of voters who had been waiting in line

were sent home by an appeals court after a day of chaos; according

to cnn.com, George W. Bush won Missouri by fewer than 80,000 votes.

phonespell.org: “Enter a 6 to 10 digit phone number and we’ll show you what words and phrases your phone number spells.

Moving? Pick a new 7 or 8 digit phone number by typing in an available exchange (first 3 to 5 digits) and see what one-word numbers you

can choose from. ”

Annals of the Age of Depravity: San Jose woman kept 5-year-old son in car trunk, police say (11/07/2000) [SJ Mercury via Obscure Store]

From a reader’s suggestion: “Keeping Time”. “We have learned to measure time via a system that is

actually more accurate than the phenomena, the events and the

movements that gave rise to it namely the movements of the earth, the

rotation and revolution of the earth. We’ve got the calendar pinpointed,

tuned so perfectly that we can refer it to the oscillation of a caesium

atom in the National Bureau of Standards. I like to think we’ve gone

about as far as we can go. Our shortest unit of time the femtosecond , a

very valid unit to be used in physics, is so small that if the distance

between the earth and the moon were a second the femtosecond would

be the width of a human hair. So maybe we haven’t stopped yet as long

as there are physical laboratories around the world we’ll probably just

keep splitting hairs won’t we.”

Dewey Defeats Truman? It’s 1:30 a.m. Eastern time and I’m going to bed to the sound of anchors intoning “too close to call, too close to call” ad nauseum. It’s certainly looking from this jaundiced vantage point as if we can look forward to four more years of these Slate “Bushisms of the Day”. I just heard, however, that it’s only in 25 of the 50 states (and D.C.) that the electors are bound to vote the way their state electorates determined. In an election as close as this — I really don’t know the answer to this — will the losers try to bring some political influence to bear on the electoral votes of the other 25 states?

Thank God, at least, the ad nauseum of the campaign season is over for another four years. And that the end of the Clinton follies is in sight. As Jonathan Freedland reflects in The Guardian,

His fellow Americans will miss him –

more, perhaps, than they realise. They’ll

miss the two terms of peace and record

prosperity, of course, but they might even

miss the psychodrama: an eight-year

rollercoaster ride so turbulent that those

who followed it become queasy at the

recollection. They’ll miss the daily

triumphs and disasters of a character of

Shakespearean complexity, a president

who stirred in the American people

passions of love and hatred unseen since

the days of John F Kennedy and Richard

Nixon – and almost never aroused by a

single man. Above all, they will miss his

signature feature, one which may well

have redefined the presidency itself: an

almost eerie gift for empathy.

I don’t know if I’d exactly call it empathy, which has a particularly complimentary connotation among us mental health professionals. Certainly, he does have an eerie — but somewhat pitiful — skill at using interpersonal insights to his advantage.