2004 General Elections

I believe this is a historic first : I am calling an NYT editorial ... ahem ... brilliant.

[via Revenge of the Irate Moderates - New York Times]:

The rebellion against Mr. Lieberman was actually an uprising by that rare phenomenon, irate moderates. They are the voters who have been unnerved over the last few years as the country has seemed to be galloping in a deeply unmoderate direction. A war that began at the president's choosing has degenerated into a desperate, bloody mess that has turned much of the world against the United States. The administration's contempt for international agreements, Congressional prerogatives and the authority of the courts has undermined the rule of law abroad and at home.

The New York Times ought to extend the classification of irate democrats to many of the bloggers involved in getting the Lamont nomination in, and they ought to start from the top with DailyKos and his blogosphere.

Mainstream media has had a field day characterizing the Kososphere as lefty wing crazies and radicals but like my other friend Michael likes to say, for a bunch of former republicans one would be hard-pressed to find anybody who is a progressive or social libertarian.

Sometimes I wonder about Democrats. We don't know whether the elections were stolen in Florida, 2000, Georgia, 2002, and Ohio, 2004. Think about that. We DON'T KNOW. Other elections around the country, including a couple in San Diego, California, have had suspicious outcomes and flaws.

One concern are voting machines. America, after 2000, decided it needs to upgrade its voting machines. Fine. That sounds good. But ONLY if it improves the efficiency and accuracy of our voting system.

Today in NYC and around the nation we are faced with a choice: upgrade to DRE machines where the vote is all done on a touch screen, or PBOS machines where the vote is done in Scantron fashion with a real paper ballot, but computer tabulation. These are the only choices being offered by manufacturers.

Democrats got burned potentially in three election years in a row. And part of the problem are these new machines. Both DRE and PBOS machines have had problems. The difference is that if an election board wants to completely check the accuracy of an election, it can be done with PBOS machines. It can't with DRE machines.

With PBOS, as a last resort, a non-partisan or bi-partisan election board can fairly and accurately count the paper ballots that are left as a record of the vote. In fact, the voter him or herself can check before leaving the voting booth to see that the vote is properly cast. With DRE machines it is all in the computer and the software is a company secret. That means, with DRE machines we will never and can never know how the votes are recorded and tabulated. Only the company knows. That puts private companies in charge of our vote, and puts oversight of the accuracy of an election in the hands of the companies that are selling us the machines.

This is the post formerly known as : Jerome, honey, do you really want to be called "Baby Turdblossom"? Instead become the next Chuck DeFeo. It was edited for the sake of brevity.

[via American Prospect Online - Hard Sell]:

“Absent Gore, the person people favor is Feingold,” explained Kenneth Bernstein, a.k.a. TeacherKen, a white-bearded social studies instructor at the Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, Md., who also advises congressional candidates on education policy and spoke at the conference. On Sunday morning, Bernstein gathered for a final coffee with MyLeftWing’s Maryscott O’Connor and NYU cultural anthropology professor Jeffrey Feldman, who writes a column he calls Frameshop. The consensus at the table was that Warner had come off all wrong, from his extravagant party to his slick campaign video to his speech, which focused too much on autobiography and not enough on acknowledging the importance of the netroots -- a mistake Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid did not make in his Saturday night address, which heaped praise on the bloggers and their new medium.

[...]

all the griping was clearly having an impact on Warner's internet strategist Jerome Armstrong by Sunday morning, who dismissed the snipers as "ideological" and "pretty left wing."

"It wasn't going to be a love-in to begin with,"Armstrong sighed as the final brunch session of the conference wound down. "This was a great opportunity for bloggers to meet Warner. But also, the whole blogosphere and broader press was focused on this event. Coming here was a no-brainer."

I find it very interesting that you co-authored a book that focuses in part on the scourge of politicals consultants while becoming a political consultant (actually, Online Strategy Director, correct?) for presidential hopeful, Mark Warner. I honestly cannot wrap my head around that one yet.

What I find more fascinating is the way you and your crew at MyDD.com have been streering the blog towards proving : (1) You represent a monolithic constituency called "the Netroots(tm)"; (2) Because you represent this constituency, said Netroots is neither ideological nor left-wing.

Which is why when I coincidentally read the following Karl Rove quote after reading your abovementioned, I just felt sick to my stomach.

Crack open your umbrellas ... there may be pigs flying.

Doug McIntyre, star of McIntyre in the Morning is a republican apologist who has woken up to reality and apologizes for, not just voting for Bush but using his radio show to ennable his administrations lies and abuses of power.

I'm speechless:

[via McIntyre in the Morning 790 KABC-FM]:

It was the wrong course. All of it was wrong. We are not on the road to victory. We’re about to slink home with our tail between our legs, leaving civil war in Iraq and a nuclear armed Iran in our wake. Bali was bombed. Madrid was bombed. London was bombed. And Bin Laden is still making tapes. It’s unspeakable. The liberal media didn’t create this reality, bad policy did.

Most historians believe it takes 30-50 years before we get a reasonably accurate take on a President’s place in history. So, maybe 50 years from now Iraq will be a peaceful member of the brotherhood of nations and George W. Bush will be celebrated as a visionary genius.

But we don’t live fifty years in the future. We live now. We have to make public policy decisions now. We have to live with the consequences of the votes we cast and the leaders we chose now.

After five years of carefully watching George W. Bush I’ve reached the conclusion he’s either grossly incompetent, or a hand puppet for a gaggle of detached theorists with their own private view of how the world works. Or both.