Elections a joke

The word is in on the Iraqi elections and it’s not good. Juan Cole is a professor of history at the University of Michigan and he has some thoughts on the subject. In fact, he’s appalled. Well, aren’t we all? Anyway, his take:

I'm just appalled by the cheerleading tone of US news coverage of the so-called elections in Iraq on Sunday. I said on television last week that this event is a "political earthquake" and "a historical first step" for Iraq. It is an event of the utmost importance, for Iraq, the Middle East, and the world. All the boosterism has a kernel of truth to it, of course. Iraqis hadn't been able to choose their leaders at all in recent decades, even by some strange process where they chose unknown leaders. But this process is not a model for anything, and would not willingly be imitated by anyone else in the region. The 1997 elections in Iran were much more democratic, as were the 2002 elections in Bahrain and Pakistan.

Notice that he doesn’t mention the 2004 US elections.

Moreover, as Swopa rightly reminds us all, the Bush administration opposed one-person, one-vote elections of this sort. First they were going to turn Iraq over to Chalabi within six months. Then Bremer was going to be MacArthur in Baghdad for years. Then on November 15, 2003, Bremer announced a plan to have council-based elections in May of 2004. The US and the UK had somehow massaged into being provincial and municipal governing councils, the members of which were pro-American. Bremer was going to restrict the electorate to this small, elite group.

Cole notes that campaigning was carried on in secret, and most folks didn’t have a clue as to who they were voting for, with the results:

This thing was more like a referendum than an election. It was a referendum on which major party list associated with which major leader would lead parliament.

And here I thought everything was just peachy. Oh, well.

Your basic update, Russian style

Former Soviet big noise and head dude, Mikhail Gorbachev has called the elections in Iraq "fake."

Think about it: here's a guy who is no doubt an expert on fake elections, so if he says the Iraqi elections were fake, I for one believe it.

You're a cynic, Mr. Bush

Recent comments by some pundits have caused me to consider that Bush might be even more of a low-life than I had thought.

When asked about how wingnut religos were to be paid back for their support in the last election, Doyle McManus on Washington Week In Review (01/28/05 PBS) said that Bush had no plans. McManus explained that the Shrub still supports an amendment banning same-sex marriages, but has no plans (read ‘intentions’) to alter the status quo in re Roe vs. Wade, stem cell research and the like, thus, not to pay them back at all.

So, while the Shrub will take help from the wingnuts, he is cynical about it, even to the point of leaving his supporters in the lurch.

Payback is a bitch, heh?

Voting in Iraq

It seems that most of the voting begin done by Iragis is going off fairly well, with only 40 or so voters (or potential voters) killed so far. American-based Iraqis are voting in Orange County here in California, some travelling from as far away as Washington state.

Regardless of your position on the war, you got to admit that democracy is a heady brew.

I wish the Iraqis all the best, and I hope we get out of their faces soon.

Serving, but not elected

Jesse Jackson has teamed up with Greg Palast in an article in Wednesday’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer, accusing the Shubbery of racism and Jim Crowism. Actually, they weren’t harsh enough, since I personally think the whole pack of Repugs should be horsewhipped. Hmm.

More than 133,000 votes remain uncounted in Ohio, more than George W. Bush's supposed margin of victory. In New Mexico, the uncounted vote totals at least three times the president's plurality -- and so on in other states.

The ballots left uncounted, and that will never be counted, are so-called spoiled or rejected ballots -- votes cast by citizens, but never tallied. This is the dark little secret of U.S. democracy: Nationwide, in our presidential elections, about 2 million votes are cast and never counted, most spoiled because they cannot be read by the tallying machines.

Not everyone's vote spoils equally. Cleveland State University Professor Mark Salling analyzed ballots thrown into Ohio's electoral garbage can. Salling found that, "overwhelmingly," the voided votes come from African American precincts.

This racial bend in vote spoilage is not unique to Ohio. A U.S. Civil Rights Commission investigation concluded that, of nearly 180,000 votes discarded in Florida in the 2000 election as unreadable, a shocking 54 percent were cast by black voters, though they make up only a tenth of the electorate. In Florida, an African American is 900 percent more likely to have his or her vote invalidated than a white voter. In New Mexico, a Hispanic voter is 500 percent more likely than a white voter to have her or his ballot lost to spoilage.

And so it is that Bush never actually won the Presidency, along with Cheney. We knew this all along, of course, and I’m glad that Palast is still hammering away at, as the corporate media have certainly abandoned the story. But to continue:

This election saw an explosion in a new category of uncounted, ballots:rejected provisional ballots. In Ohio alone,more than 35,000 of these votes were never tallied. Once again, the provisional ballots were cast overwhelmingly in African American precincts.

Why so many? In November, for the first time since the era of the Night Riders, one major political party launched a program of mass challenges of voters on Election Day. Paid Republican operatives, working from lists prepared by the party, fingered tens of thousands of voters in Ohio, Florida and elsewhere, questioning their right to a ballot.

One of these secret "caging lists" was obtained by BBC Television from inside Republican campaign headquarters in Florida. Every one of the voters on those sheets resided in African American neighborhoods,excepting a few in precincts of elderly Jewish voters.

Who won the presidential race? Given the millions of ballots spoiled and provisional ballots rejected, the unfolding mystery of the exit polls and widespread use of electronic voting machines, we will never know whether John Kerry or George W.Bush received the most votes in Ohio and other swing states.

But we can name the election's big winner: Jim Crow.

This raises the question: if the election is rigged, does the simple act of “inauguration” actually put the man in the White House, legally?

In the news this morning

Some idiot decided this morning that he was going to kill himself by parking his car in front of the Metrolink train as it came barreling along, carrying over two hundred passangers, but chickened out at the last moment and walked away. Right. Walked away, leaving the car, a Jeep Wagoneer parked on the tracks. Along comes the morning commuter, hits the Jeep and "destablizes", smacking into a northbound train, everybody gets derailed and takes out a parked freight train in the bargain. Ten people dead and over a hundred injured.

This nutjob could have saved everybody a lot of grief and just volunteered for Iraq.