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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (11206)7/12/2004 2:03:28 PM
From: JeffA  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 90947
 
Listed herein are the 8 names of the DEMOCRATS that requested the UN to be involved in our elections.

I will start the petition to have them tried for treason and summarily hanged.

THE NEW WORLD DISORDER
The congressmen who want
U.N. observers in U.S. vote
9 representatives appeal to Kofi Annan for intervention in presidential election

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: July 7, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern

© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com

WASHINGTON – The United Nations has turned down a controversial request by nine members of the U.S. Congress to assign international observers to the U.S. presidential election in November.

The request came in the form of a letter drafted by Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas, and signed by eight other members of the House.

"We are deeply concerned that the right of U.S. citizens to vote in free and fair elections is again in jeopardy," the lawmakers wrote to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

Besides Johnson, the other representatives signing the letter to Annan – all Democrats – were Julia Carson of Indiana; Jerrold Nadler, Edolphus Towns, Joseph Crowley and Carolyn B. Maloney, all of New York; Raul Grijalva of Arizona, Corrine Brown of Florida, Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, Danny K. Davis of Illinois and Michael M. Honda of California.
Johnson was an early supporter of Sen. John Edwards' campaign for the presidency. Yesterday Edwards was selected as John Kerry's Democratic Party running mate.

"Generally, the United Nations does not intervene in electoral affairs unless the request comes from a national government or an electoral authority – not the legislative branch," said U.N. spokeswoman Marie Okabe.

Nevertheless, the proposal by Johnson and the other members of the House has raised the hackles of Republicans and others who saw irony in the timing of the announcement – just before America's Independence Day celebrations.

"Let me get this straight," wrote Joe Mariani in GOPUSA.com. "A group of Democrats want to bring some people from countries like North Korea, Iran, Syria, China and Cuba – people that have never seen a democratic election in their lifetimes – to sit in judgment on our elections? What kind of voodoo politics is that? The last time a foreign body had any direct influence over the political process of this country, the situation was corrected by a war for our freedom from British rule. Are these so-called Americans so willing to surrender that hard-won right of self-determination now, and to such a shamelessly scandal-ridden group of anti-American dictatorships and terrorist sympathizers? We may as well dissolve the Union now and save ourselves the pain of watching it done for us."

The Democrats said they feared a repeat of the 2000 election, which was won by George W. Bush, a Republican, through the Electoral College count even though he lost the popular vote.

The Democrats had asked in the letter for "international election monitors" to watch for "questionable practices and voter disenfranchisement on Election Day."

The Democratic Congress members wrote that they did not think sufficient reforms had been implemented to prevent another voting debacle.

"As the next Election Day approaches, there is more cause for alarm rather than less," the letter said.

Because the U.N. Charter bars violations of sovereignty, the State Department, or perhaps the Federal Election Commission, would have to invite observers, said U.N. officials. Monitoring would also have to be approved by the Security Council or the General Assembly.

Since the rule of thumb for vote monitoring is one observer for each 100 polling sites, about 2,000 foreigners would have to be deployed from Key West to Anchorage.

Johnson's letter points to "widespread allegations of voter disenfranchisement" in Florida and other states in 2000, and it cites an April report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that found potential for "significant problems" this time around.

"As lawmakers, we must assure the people of America that our nation will not experience the nightmare of the 2000 presidential election," Johnson wrote. "This is the first step in making sure that history does not repeat itself," she added.

The Nov. 7, 2000, election was decided 36 days later when the U.S. Supreme Court made two rulings that stopped Democratic challenger Al Gore's attempt to recount some of the Florida votes. A number of independent investigations confirmed President Bush won the state's 25 electoral votes, giving him a total of 271 to Gore's 267.

Tom Kilgannon, president of Freedom Alliance, a group dedicated to protecting American sovereignty, admonished Johnson and her colleagues.

"Your appeal to the secretary general is alarming and embarrassing," he said. "As a Member of Congress sworn to uphold the Constitution and represent the people of the United States, it is disturbing, to say the least, that you would entrust the most sacred act of American democracy – our presidential election – to an international institution, which is unaccountable to the American people and mired by scandal and corruption."

Kilgannon said the request "undermines U.S. sovereignty, demoralizes American servicemen who are fighting to build democratic governments abroad and sends the message worldwide that the United States is nothing more than a Third World nation unable to police itself."

Stories about the action by the members of Congress appeared all over the world – from Tehran to Uraguay and to China.

Read Joseph Farah's commentary, "Treason in Congress," in today's edition of WorldNetDaily



To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (11206)7/12/2004 3:18:16 PM
From: Oeconomicus  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 90947
 
An ambulance chaser.

More on that from today's WSJ:

Edwards & Co.

By WALTER OLSON
July 12, 2004; Page A16

John Edwards famously proclaims to all comers that he has no apologies about the cases he handled as a personal injury lawyer, which has not quite sufficed to prevent some of his best-known cases from coming under critical scrutiny.

In a Jan. 31 New York Times article, Adam Liptak and Michael Moss explored doubts about Mr. Edwards's lucrative specialty of blaming infants' cerebral palsy on mistakes by obstetricians . . .

In a Feb. 25 National Journal column, Stuart Taylor Jr. criticized Mr. Edwards's successful bid for $4 million in punitive damages against a trucking company after a crash, on top of $2.5 million in compensatory damages . . .

The Kerry campaign -- now trying vigorously to soften its running mate's business-bashing image -- counters that whatever grumblings may be heard from docs and other sore losers, Mr. Edwards at least wasn't the kind of plaintiff's lawyer who really gives the bar a bad name. He never sued whole industries in class actions, they've been pointing out, or grabbed big fees in cases where clients got peanuts. They might add that even his most vocal critics have not charged Mr. Edwards with using unethical means to chase business, or signing up people to sue who weren't really injured, or steering cases to "special" jurisdictions where he had a cozy relationship with the judge, or exploiting ties to political officials to shake the legal plum tree.

No, it's not Mr. Edwards who's done all those things -- it's many among his chief backers. . . from day one he's been at pains to construct a tightly organized fund-raising and electoral machine whose dominant figures, with scarcely a known exception, are wealthy plaintiff's lawyers like himself. In fact, most of his key backers are drawn from the tiny handful of tort lawyers even more successful than he, sometimes by orders of magnitude. Mr. Edwards is estimated to have quit with $38 million, but that's pocket change to many veterans of the tobacco and asbestos wars.

Who are these men? A sampling:

• Fred Baron. The Dallas-based lawyer, a key Democratic kingmaker, served as the Edwards campaign's finance chairman, and his firm of Baron & Budd was the senator's No. 2 donor; some see him as the Smiling One's single most important backer. A former president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, he's already moved up to co-chair the key group coordinating Democratic and Kerry efforts, the Kerry-Edwards Victory '04 committee.

Mr. Baron also personifies many of the worst abuses of the asbestos litigation, which has already inflicted dozens of bankruptcies on American business and whose price tag is expected to spiral to $275 billion or more. Twenty years ago, the focus of this litigation was cases filed on behalf of seriously ill plaintiffs against companies that had played an important role in the asbestos trade; now, the docket is dominated by apparently unimpaired plaintiffs suing companies whose involvement with asbestos was comparatively peripheral. No firm is more closely identified with this shift than Baron & Budd, which has drawn fire from some plaintiff's firms (not to mention defendants) for its zeal in signing up outwardly unimpaired clients who then absorb money and court time that might otherwise have been devoted to the seriously ill.

It gets worse. In 1997 a junior Baron & Budd lawyer inadvertently handed over to opponents a 20-page memo entitled "Preparing for Your Deposition," which revealed exactly why the firm's clients so often testified in ways helpful to their legal case. "It is important to maintain that you NEVER saw any labels on asbestos products that said WARNING or DANGER," the memo advised. "Do NOT say you saw more of one brand than another, or that one brand was more commonly used than another. . . . You NEVER want to give specific quantities or percentages of any product names. . . . Be CONFIDENT that you saw just as much of one brand as all the others. All the manufacturers sued in your case should share the blame equally!" By dint of strenuous lawyering, Baron & Budd managed to weather the ethical firestorm, and Mr. Baron still defends his firm's conduct as lawful and proper.


It goes on with discussions of John O'Quinn, Tab Turner and Paul Minor - others of Edwards' top early backers from the tort jackpot world. And ends with:

Famously unapologetic, the Edwards campaign merely shrugged this spring when Sen. Kerry's press secretary assailed the North Carolinian's White House bid as "wholly funded by trial lawyers." More remarkable yet was how Edwards's spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri had earlier responded to similar sniping: "We have no problem if 100% of our money came from trial lawyers." On the relatively few issues on which Mr. Edwards has taken a high profile in the Senate, agenda items for the trial bar (e.g., blocking limits on future post-terrorism lawsuits) have comprised a high share. There's every reason to believe that the men behind Mr. Edwards have a clear expectation of entering Washington next January as victors, and closer to the center of power than they've up to now dared to dream.

online.wsj.com

PS: Four aces grub. Or a picket fence with a gate. ;-)