Posts by Russell Brown
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If only they'd make sure they were hot and hunky naked men charging across the field, i wouldn't mind so much ;-)
Well, if you'll settle for semi-naked, that's basically rugby, innit? My friend Big Gay Paul enjoyed the rugby even more after he came out.
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But tellingly Conyers didn't push for overturning the election either. I think they spotted irregularities that when they added up the votes weren't going to make a difference.
It wasn't a matter of overturning the election result but of stopping the 20 electoral votes from Ohio from being registered, at which point it would be too late.
And Conyers and other Democrats, for only the third time in history, did just that.
Inevitably, they lost in both Houses (voting was entirely along party lines) but it's simply incorrect to say the Democrats didn't challenge the conduct of the election. After they lost the action to stop the votes being registered the Conyers report was produced demanding a sweeping inquiry. I just can't see how you can imply they had a look, decided nothing much was up, and walked away.
There were also two civil actions (one mounted by the Libertarian Party candidate) that were rendered moot when the electoral votes were confirmed.
And don't put too much faith in recounts as practiced in the US. In the first instance, a recount means 3% of the votes in each precinct are recounted, and even that doesn't seem to have been done properly. The civil litigants cited 29 violations of electoral law in the conduct of the recount, some of which (such as using a pre-selected, rather than random, sample) could have easily affected the result, or covered up previous irregularities.
The whole thing stank, basically. And it's incorrect to say the Democrats thought otherwise.
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The former seems to be predominantly a Republican issue, while the latter is generally restricted to Democratic voters. And despite the first being reasonably able to significantly influence election outcomes while the second could never add more than a few thousand illegitimate votes nationwide, they both receive the same airtime, and the same emphasis, muddying the waters significantly.
Classic Rove. Your opponent has strong ground, and you're weak, on electoral fraud. So you attack them on ... electoral fraud.
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There's one big hole in the Ohio was stolen theory - the Dems never fought it. They fought bitterly, all the way to the Supreme Court, over Florida. Had Kerry believed that Ohio was rigged he would have done the same.
There was quite a bit of disquiet at Kerry's speedy concession at the time - perhaps he was mindful of the way Gore got clobbered pretty hard with the "bad loser" stick after Florida, and didn't want that label if he ran again.
But it's not correct to say the Democratic Party didn't pursue the issue. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House judiciary committee presented the report that said this:
We have found numerous, serious election irregularities in the Ohio presidential election, which resulted in a significant disenfranchisement of voters. Cumulatively, these irregularities, which affected hundreds of thousand of votes and voters in Ohio, raise grave doubts regarding whether it can be said the Ohio electors selected on December 13, 2004, were chosen in a manner that conforms to Ohio law, let alone federal requirements and constitutional standards.
This report, therefore, makes three recommendations: (1) consistent with the requirements of the United States Constitution concerning the counting of electoral votes by Congress and Federal law implementing these requirements, there are ample grounds for challenging the electors from the State of Ohio; (2) Congress should engage in further hearings into the widespread irregularities reported in Ohio; we believe the problems are serious enough to warrant the appointment of a joint select Committee of the House and Senate to investigate and report back to the Members; and (3) Congress needs to enact election reform to restore our people's trust in our democracy. These changes should include putting in place more specific federal protections for federal elections, particularly in the areas of audit capability for electronic voting machines and casting and counting of provisional ballots, as well as other needed changes to federal and state election laws.
With regards to our factual finding, in brief, we find that there were massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio. In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio.
It's impossible to to say for sure whether, or to what extent, there was electoral fraud in Ohio. But the bizarre irregularities are a matter of record. If it wasn't fraud, it amounted to incompetence and inappropriate behaviour of a degree that should have seen heads roll. And, frankly, would have in any other western democracy.
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If you're interested in US politics you might want to read Rahm Emanuel's
(D - IL) latest speech on the Bush Administration...When you put it all together like that... damn.
I'm in no doubt at all that history will regard this period in American political history as a bizarre and shameful one.
The detail of who got favours in the first 18 months of the Iraq "reconstruction" is genuinely mind-boggling. Kids with no other qualification than that they'd finished university and had worked on the Bush campaign got plum jobs and contracts. Some of them committed massive frauds, others were just incompetent.
You can watch the Channel 4 documentary God's Next Army on Google video. It looks at the evangelical university Patrick Henry College, which has delivered a tide of the faithful to Washington jobs. Same deal with Pat Robertson's Regent University - check Bill Maher's recent rant about that:
You know how whenever there's a major Bush administration scandal it always traces back to some incompetent political hack appointment and you think to yourself, "Where are they getting these screw-ups from?" Well, now we know: from Pat Robertson. I wish I were kidding, but I'm not. Take Monica Goodling, who before she resigned last week because of the U.S. attorneys scandal, was the third most powerful official in the Justice Department of the United States. Thirty-three, and though she had never even worked as a prosecutor, she was tasked with overseeing the job performance of all 95 U.S. attorneys. How do you get to be such a top dog at 33? By acing Harvard, or winning scholarship prizes? No, Goodling did her undergraduate work at Messiah College -- home of the "Fighting Christies," who wait-listed me, the bastards -- and then went on to attend Pat Robertson's law school ...
{snip}
But there's more! As there inevitably is with the Bush administration. Turns out she's not the only one. Since 2001, 150 graduates of Regent University have been hired by the Bush administration. And people wonder why things are so screwed up. Hell, we probably invaded Iraq because one of these clowns read the map wrong. Forget religion for a second, we're talking about a top Justice Department official who went to a college founded by a TV host. Would you send your daughter to Maury Povich University? And if you did, would you expect her to get a job at the White House? I'd be surprised if she got a job on the "Maury" show. And then it hit me: This is why Bush scandals never catch on with the public -- they're all evangelicals of course, and nobody is having sex.
So there you have it: It turns out that the Justice Department is entirely staffed with Jesus freaks from a televangelist diploma mill in Virginia Beach.
The video is here.
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And this thing with the streakers... Since when were we so goddamn American? What are we, Puritans?
No, I just don't want to see actual sporting events become a channel for commercially-sponsored attention-seekers. Lisa Lewis's vision of mass bikini-streaks just sounds idiotic and tedious.
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Anyway (I feel naughty doing this, but it's worth a look).:
Best DPF comments thread EVER!
And yet, in the midst of the madness, there was this really rather good 10 predictions about the child discipline bill by James Cairney:
1. The Bill will become law.
2. Good parents will continue to be good parents.
3. Bad parents will continue to be bad parents
4. Some good parents will continue smack their children during those stressful moments (and they will continue to feel shitty for doing it, long after the child has forgotten about it). They will not be prosecuted.
5. Some parents will continue to discipline their children with force, and gain an increased contempt for the law generally. The majority will not be prosecuted, a small number will be.
6. Some parents will work at developing 'non-smack' parenting strategies.
7. The police will be more inclined than at present to prosecute for apparent violence in the home, when there are notifications etc.
8. An increased number of parents will be accused of violence against their children at the time of relationship break ups and custody claims, it will become yet another tool in custody disputes.
9. John Key will assume power and will not change it, as it will not have made a lick of practical difference to the vast majority of people.
10. As with the right to hit one's wife for correction, the right to strike children will slowly cease to be accepted by society.I do believe he's correct.
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Me too.
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Didn't Lincoln make a toy called The Screaming Me me which was used as a name by an Auckland band?
That was the Screaming Meemees. Is Simon Grigg in the house?
BTW, Maori folks were known to be highly amused to hear tell of a group called the "Screaming Mimis" ...
A bit more input from kids would be a good idea. Does it strike anyone else as surreal that Keys doing this stuff while the trial of the two parents who have been charged with killing their 3 year-old is going on and witnesses are saying that smacking was commonplace in that household.
Are you some sort of commie? Don't you know that there's a clear bright line between "good" smacking and "bad" smacking, and that parents who practice "good" smacking never, ever lose the plot and veer into "bad" smacking? Why, they're practically different species.
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I really don't know what it was I said that called for that. I was just expressing my opinion that the diagnosis may have been wrong. I do have some knowledge about what I'm talking about; I was framing my statements in such a way as to make them judgment calls rather than statements of absolute fact.
But I'll be more inclined to keep my opinions to myself from now on.
No, don't do that. It wouldn't be like you anyway ;-)
But I was annoyed by your insistence on long-distance diagnosis and your declaration, sans real evidence, that the clinical finding of the American doctor "might have been wrong". I was somewhat regretting raising the topic in the first place.
An autism spectrum disorder doesn't preclude other personality traits or problems, which Cho clearly had. But I had my suspicions before the a-word came up in the news: a history of being bullied, inability to make eye contact or pick up social cues, seriously inappropriate behaviour (several years ago we had problems with another ASD kid who tried to further his friendship with Jim by making nasty phone calls - good kid, he just didn't understand what he was doing), the inarticulacy and the monotonal voice all fit with ASD.
It is possible for ASD people to lack understanding of the impact of their behaviour on others, and for a rigid moral code to run off the tracks (say, in railing against the idle rich). But most people on the spectrum are gentler than the rest of us. As I've said, autism isn't a predisposition for mass-murder any more than being Korean is. It just seems to me that a failure to confront Cho's problems in childhood (which never eased) was a contributory factor to the disaster he became.
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