Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Gold/Mining/Energy : Strictly: Drilling and oil-field services -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: kodiak_bull who wrote (79712)	11/22/2000 9:26:06 AM
From: Second_Titan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 95453

API DOE Data The 6 million barrel crude stock increase appears to be from roughly 1% less refinery runs and the 4.5 million barrels registered leaving the SPR. 1% runs would equal ~1.5 M barrels. Of course the 1.5 would have increased products a bit. But for an untrained eye it seems the SPR made the increase.

To: kodiak_bull who wrote (79712)	11/22/2000 9:34:46 AM
From: JungleInvestor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 95453

OT: Another excellent article by Michael Kelly: washingtonpost.com Send in the Thugs By Michael Kelly Wednesday, November 22, 2000; Page A27 By God, I love lawyers--and campaign hacks and political thugs. I feel great about the fact that the Gore campaign has turned the choice of the next president into just another chapter of the eight-year saga of the Clinton-Gore endless war room, another to-the-death fight between the usual armies of litigators and propagandists. On Fox News the other day, after the Gorees won a round, a particularly oily little talking jurisdoctorate-head informed me that this was "a great day for democracy." Thanks, oily one! Like all of my fellow citizens who did not attend law school, I am incapable of deciding for myself what is a great and what is a not-so-great day for democracy. And thanks for so much more--for Alan Dershowitz and Jesse Jackson. There is no wrinkle in the fabric of our republic that cannot be smoothed out by a little pressure and a little heat from these great statesmen. Jackson's suggestion that Republicans were practicing Jim Crow tactics to deny the votes of blacks was of incomparable help in calming public passions, as was his reference to the Holocaust. And thanks for whoever's bright idea it was to ship union goons into Palm Beach County; tense times are always made better by the presence of large, muscular men bellowing, "No recount, no peace!" Thanks for guaranteeing that, no matter what, something close to half of the voters will come out of this believing that an election was stolen and that the new president is illegitimate. In this last regard, we must especially thank Paul Begala. Begala, a Clinton-Gore operative who is both a lawyer and a political thug, and who is not a journalist but who plays one on television, wrote this on MSNBC.com the other day: "Yes . . . tens of millions of good people in Middle America voted Republican. But if you look closely at that map [showing states won by George W. Bush in red] you see a more complex picture. You see the state where James Byrd was lynched--dragged behind a pickup truck until his body came apart--it's red. You see the state where Matthew Shepard was crucified on a split-rail fence for the crime of being gay--it's red. You see the state where right-wing extremists blew up a federal office building and murdered scores of federal employees--it's red. The state where an Army private who was thought to be gay was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat, and the state where neo-Nazi skinheads murdered two African Americans because of their skin color, and the state where Bob Jones University spews its anti-Catholic bigotry: they're all red too." Mr. Begala can be counted on to spelunk the lowest level of the sewer. But even for him, the passage above must stand as the ultimate smear. The 48 percent of the vote that went for Bush--it's really not legitimate (and therefore neither is a President Bush) because, you see, that vote came from states (29 of them) populated by murderers and bigots and homophobes and neo-Nazis and terrorists. But above all, thugs 'n' lawyers, thanks for the legacy. Here is an iron rule of politics: If it works once, it will be done forevermore. Whenever one side or the other pulls a particularly outrageous stunt in politics, the other side, off-camera, thinks this: Hmmm, that's interesting. If the particularly outrageous stunt is gotten away with, the true lesson derived by both sides is: Let's do that again. This is why the Clinton-Gore selling of the White House was such a bad thing: The greedheads-in-chief didn't trash one White House; because they got away with it, they guaranteed the trashing of future White Houses. So too with the vote-rigging in Florida. There have been close presidential elections before, and there have been elections in which the loser was certain he had been robbed. But never before has any presidential candidate done what Gore has done; never before has the loser taken to the courts rather than accept the verdict rendered--at this point, twice over. Even if Gore ultimately loses in Florida, he will have come very, very close to winning. Moreover, he will have done this with his image-skin more or less intact. For Gore has already won an astonishing propaganda victory: With the help of reasonably sympathetic coverage from a largely Democratic and liberal national press corps, he has managed to spin his extraordinary, radical, unprecedented behavior as reasonable--and legitimate. This probably ensures that future close presidential elections will produce future Gore Losers, marching off to the courts and the cameras with their armies of lawyers and thugs, demanding recounts, rewriting the rules and the laws, convincing more and more Americans that their electoral system is, like those in most of the world, just another rigged game. Thanks, Al, we needed that. © 2000 The Washington Post Company

To: kodiak_bull who wrote (79712)	11/22/2000 10:23:07 AM
From: chowder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 95453

Hi Kodiak! Found this, any comment? ------------------------------------------------------------ The Other Roe How the GOP may appeal a Florida court loss. By John Hood, president of the John Locke Foundation & a political commentator in North Carolina During oral argument before the Florida supreme court about the election-certification deadline and the propriety of hand counting, GOP attorney Michael Carvin was pressed hard by two justices on the question of selective hand counts in Democratic counties. The remedy, they suggested to Carvin, for selective hand counting would seem to be a statewide count, which Bush could have initiated. "Was there something that prevented your client from requesting recounts in the other counties?" they asked. For many Republican observers worried about the process unfolding in Florida, this question has been on their minds, too. Never mind that, according to some Bush operatives, recounts even in Republican-leaning counties might net more Gore votes (based on which precincts had more "over-voted" or "under-voted" ballots). To outsiders, the notion that the Bush campaign could decline to request hand recounts across the state and then claim unfairness in the selective counties seemed questionable, at best. But Carvin's answer to the Florida justices offers insight into what the campaign may really be up to. He warned that "federal law will not allow this court or the Florida legislature to change the rules of the election after the election has taken place." Given that Bush has already failed in federal district and appeals court to get the hand recounts halted, most analysts have ignored this statement. Others have noted that federal courts usually defer to state courts on election matters. I'm betting, however, that the Bush forces have carefully studied a five-year-old decision by the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which meets in Atlanta and governs Florida. It's called Roe v. State of Alabama, and may end up rivaling another Roe case in notoriety. Here's what happened in a nutshell. Two 1994 statewide elections in Alabama — for state treasurer and, ironically, for chief justice of the state supreme court — were extremely close. In deciding the winners, the issue of how to handle absentee ballots arose. Alabama had a statute on the books that allowed absentee ballots to be included in certified election results only if they were enclosed in an envelope bearing the signatures of 1) the voter and 2) either a notary public or two witnesses. But Democratic election officials attempted to count absentee ballots in the 1994 election that had only the signature of the voter on the envelope. It appeared likely that counting these ballots would confirm a small lead by the Democratic candidate for treasurer and possibly overturn a Republican victory in the chief justice race. Democrats prevailed in the state courts. A state trial court ordered the contested absentee ballots to be counted. But plaintiff Larry Roe, representing voters in the November election, went to federal district court arguing that counting the questionable ballots would dilute the legitimate votes cast in the election and thus would violate the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In early December, the district court granted a preliminary injunction and ordered Alabama Secretary of State James Bennett to certify the results without the contested ballots. He and a group of voters who had cast the contested ballots then appealed to the 11th Circuit in Atlanta. The appeals court upheld the injunction, but ordered the Alabama supreme court to determine whether state law permitted or excluded the questionable ballots. Not surprisingly, the high court in Alabama — which, like the Florida court, had a reputation for liberalism — decided that it was okay to count the ballots despite their lack of appropriate signatures. The decision was based in part on the argument that some of Alabama's 67 counties had counted such ballots in the past. Fortunately, the 11th Circuit didn't accept the state court's response at face value, and ordered the federal district court to determine the facts. After a three-day trial and the testimony of 48 witnesses, the district court ruled that in all but one county, the practice prior to the November 1994 election had been uniformly to exclude the ballots. The Alabama supreme court's finding to the contrary had been based on affidavits from local elections officials who subsequently offered very different testimony in federal court. In October 1995, the 11th Circuit upheld the district court's ruling and ordered the contested ballots excluded from the totals (except for those in the one county that had previously counted them, but it didn't change the result). Relevant to the presidential tussle in Florida is the clear lesson of the Roe case: that states cannot effectively change the process of counting votes after an election, which the state courts in Alabama tried to do. Moreover, the 11th Circuit specifically rejected the claim that Alabama's vote-counting procedures did not invite federal scrutiny because they didn't involve federal constitutional issues. The appeals court, which would have jurisdiction in Florida litigation, recognized that Fourteenth Amendment issues were present when a state attempted to change retroactively its electoral process. Raleigh attorney Thomas Farr, who is general counsel of the North Carolina Republican party and who told me about the Roe case, argues that "allowing only a few counties to count ballots based upon the subjective opinion of partisan election officials, operating without guidelines, effectively changes the rules for counting ballots after an election in violation of Roe v. Alabama." If events in Florida confer enough votes on Gore to give him the election, expect to see litigation based on the other Roe.