Did you all see this? Jesse Jackson Calls Bush Election a Court-Led Coup This man is pure propaganda all by himself.....He is strengthening my resolve to try to determine just exactly how many voters in the US this election were not citizens of the country, and how many other votes were cast that should not have been....Hopefully, all of us will work to this end also. I'd like to believe that most thinking people wouldn't let this man call the shots....
Dec 18 8:22pm ET
go2net.com
By Sarah Tippit
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - As President-elect George W. Bush continued building his new administration on Monday, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, meeting in Los Angeles with religious and civil rights leaders, questioned the election's legitimacy.
Blacks, Holocaust victims, college students and other Democratic-minded Americans were intentionally excluded from the voting process, Jackson said, by a right-wing conspiracy that engineered delays and fraudulent vote counts.
"What we have is a coup d'etat led by the U.S. Supreme Court," Jackson said at a press conference. "The civil rights struggle for votes to count will continue," he added.
Jackson said that certain justices, influenced by "an extreme right wing agenda," purposely influenced election returns in their ruling that ended the impasse over the presidential election and handed the White House to Bush.
As a result, Jackson said he planned a series of nonviolent rallies in January to prove that, among other things, the election may have violated the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The rallies will commence Jan. 15, the birthday of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., and they will continue at federal buildings throughout the United States, until Bush's inauguration on Jan. 20, Jackson said.
Jackson's charges come at a time when dozens of watchdog groups and media outlets prepare to recount ballots by hand in an effort to quell questions that still linger over thousands of discounted ballots around Florida that may have changed the election's outcome had they been included in the totals.
In addition, news reports have surfaced that appear to question the impartiality of Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Clarence Thomas.
Bush, the Republican governor of Texas, won the White House when Gore, who had sought a hand recount of thousands of contested ballots in Florida, conceded defeat on Wednesday, one day after a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling that prevented any new recounts from going forward.
Jackson cited a Newsweek magazine article released on Sunday that reported Sandra Day O'Connor being upset during an election-night party when she heard Florida was first called for Vice President Al Gore, exclaiming, "This is terrible."
O'Connor, 70, had been Republican majority leader of the Arizona State Senate before being appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.
Jackson also charged that the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, who was nominated for the Supreme Court by President Bush, the president-elect's father, in 1991, works for the conservative Washington D.C. think tank Heritage Foundation and has been aiding the Bush campaign.
O'Connor and Thomas were part of the 5-4 Supreme Court majority that stopped the hand count of disputed votes in a number of Florida counties.
Because of their alleged partisanship, Jackson said he believed O'Connor and Thomas should have recused themselves.
Bush spoke by telephone with Jackson in recent days and said that he would work to prevent minorities from being disadvantaged at polling places, according to news reports.
"The loser won and the winner lost. Our Democracy deserves better than that," Jackson said. |
