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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (81646)	10/29/2004 8:13:27 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793626

WONDER LAND 10,000 Lawyers Mass to Attack 2004 Election You vote on Tuesday. On Wednesday the lawyers tell us who won. BY DANIEL HENNINGER Friday, October 29, 2004 12:01 a.m. Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com. Next Tuesday you get to vote for President. Next Wednesday, the lawyers get to decide who won. Why get upset? We've allowed the lawyers to ruin most everything else in American life--from the practice of medicine to the practice of prayer. Might as well let them drive the entire political system over the cliff. "Right now we have 10,000 lawyers out in the battleground states on Election Day, and that number is growing by the day." So Michael Whouley told the Associated Press last week. Mr. Whouley is commander in chief of the division of lawyers Mr. Kerry has drafted to invade the voting precincts of Ohio, Florida and any other state still inhabited by enough free-thinking Republicans and Democrats to make the election there close. Bob Bauer, counsel to the Democratic National Committee, said last month: "Our SWAT teams . . . will have done nothing but prepare through the fall. We want to be able to send teams out to fight these wars simultaneously." SWAT teams? These "wars?" As Al Davis, the political philosopher who runs the Oakland Raiders, might have described the current state of our politics: "Just sue, baby." Beyond this army of white shirts with a license to throw rocks at the vote, the Democratic rear brims with legal go-fers and spear-carriers. Yesterday Common Cause, which preposterously still identifies itself as "nonpartisan," sent out an e-mail announcing it will have teams of analysts--"including political scientists"--to take voters' phone calls about "registration problems, mechanical problems and voter identification issues, among others." The New York Public Interest Research Group, NYPIRG, says it is formally affiliating itself with the Common Cause effort. Also yesterday the Department of Justice announced plans to send 840 federal observers plus 250 civil-rights division personnel across the country to "protect election-related civil rights." Some of the places on the watch-list are household words in the annals of election-day card tricks: Cicero, Ill.; East Chicago, Ind.; Shannon County, S.D. (the Pine Ridge Indian reservation, where the state's disputed 2002 Senate election ran aground); Passaic County, N.J.; Suffolk County, N.Y.; and most amusing of all, Manhattan itself. The Republicans of course are massing their own army of litigators whose purpose is to "respond" (counter-sue) the moment after Mr. Kerry's lawyers file. (And people thought trial-attorney superstar John Edwards was brought on to the ticket for his charisma.) At this rate, casting a ballot Tuesday will amount to little more than giving a deposition in the legal Armageddon that is the 2004 election. Republican legal strategists expect the Wednesday-morning attack to come from Mr. Kerry's lawyers on two fronts: close states and minority precincts inside those states. If a state result is close enough to challenge, Democratic lawyers likely would file suit in state or federal court, hoping to find a sympathetic judge who'd rule that Mr. Kerry had won the state. The assumption behind this strategy is that the U.S. Supreme Court will have no stomach in 2004 for revisiting Bush v. Gore on a Republican appeal. Liberal law academicians softened up the Justices by carpet-bombing Bush v. Gore with vitriolic public denunciations. Alan Dershowitz, characteristically, called it "the single most corrupt decision in Supreme Court history." If the Court abandons the field, a lower court judge's pro-Kerry state ruling could stand. Randomized judicial assignments normally would make this a long-odds strategy, but if the Kerry lawyers file 12 state lawsuits, they need only one win to score big. If the Democratic legal team needs votes to raise the nominal Wednesday morning total, the GOP's first-responders expect they'll sue to find them in minority precincts. For months the Democrats have been talking about "minority intimidation" at the polls. John Kerry himself said in July, "Don't tell us that disenfranchising a million African-Americans and stealing their votes is the best we can do in America." This has loaded the intimidating burden of "racism" onto any Republican challenge to irregularities in minority precincts, for example over registration or the new "provisional" ballots. Under the new, paradoxically named, Help America Vote Act passed by Congress, a person can show up to vote, claim to be registered and force befuddled election officials to verify the truth of this assertion later. But the unlisted "voter" gets to vote. Ohio is widely expected to be the Gettysburg in this partisan war. That's because many Ohioans still vote with punchcards. This is the source of the famous "undercount" phenomenon: a ballot with a clearly punched-out vote for sheriff, but an uncertain "punch" for President. A forced recount in one of these precincts has upside only for Mr. Kerry. If the precinct historically votes Democratic, the chances that any of the undercount is for Mr. Bush would be almost statistically zero and the chances for Mr. Kerry are huge--or so a local election official might conclude after being sued. This scenario is almost certainly why Justice Department monitors are going to places like Wayne County (Detroit), Philadelphia County, Bernalillo County (Albuquerque) and eight world-famous counties in Florida. I asked a noted expert on election law if there was an easy way to shut down the legal war once it starts. He said, "No." It would simply grind forward. The easiest way to avoid this humiliation would be to produce a clear electoral college/popular vote win. And so Republicans are urging supporters beaten down by constant pistol-whippings from liberal friends in New York and California to get out and vote. The second cleanest solution--once unthinkable--is to output an electoral-college tie and quickly let the House of Representatives elect George Bush. This is the political solution we should have gotten in 2000. In 2004 it probably would produce the street riots recently adduced by Mrs. Edwards. Still, that's better than letting the lawyers turn the United States' 55th presidential election into the laughingstock of Venezuela. Copyright © 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

To: LindyBill who wrote (81646)	10/29/2004 8:15:58 AM
From: gamesmistress	Respond to of 793626

From Fraters Libertas. Right now I tend to agree with him, though I would like to see the expression on Dan Rather's face when he announces the re-election of George Bush :-/: Starve The Beast Up to this point, I have not been able to get too worked up about the missing munitions story. I suppose it's because I've become so cynical and jaded about the motives of the mainstream media and the bias inherent in the system (help! I'm being repressed!) at places like CBS and the New York Times that nothing surprises me anymore. I've become so desensitized that I merely shrug when I read that it appears likely that the New York Times, CBS, Democratic campaign operatives, and a UN stooge worried about job security colluded in a last minute attempt to influence the outcome of the US presidential election. Meh. As Homer might say, "Yeah, but what are you going to do?" This morning, I realized that this story was actually a clarion call to action for conservatives. But not a one-off, write angry letters, boycott select advertisers, kind of reaction. This story once again points out the need for a long term, all encompassing response to the bias in the mainstream media. The most effective approach to weight loss is not yo-yo dieting, but rather a lifestyle change that includes eating better and exercising. We need to take such an approach to the media. We need to make long lasting media lifestyle changes. I used to believe that the best way to fight the liberal media was to engage them on their turf. I used to subscribe to the Star Tribune, sent letters to the editor, and submitted commentary pieces. But now I've reached the conclusion that the proper approach is to delegitimatize and marginalize the most egregious offenders. And the way to do this is to cut them off entirely. The fuel that feeds their fire is advertising revenue. Advertiser revenue that is generated on the belief that consumers are reading, listening, or watching each particular media outlet. Newspapers and magazines don't make their money on subscriptions. They use (and in some cases, inflate) their subscription base to sell advertising. Television and radio use their ratings to sell advertising. In order to fight media bias, we must stop feeding the fire. The multi-headed media beast must be starved. I urge you to step back and take an inventory of your media lifestyle. It's time to make some changes. If you subscribe to the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, or any other newspaper with an outright liberal bias, you must cancel your subscription immediately. There are no more excuses. Yes, you're going to miss out on some sections of the paper that you've come to enjoy and rely on. Tough. The conduct of the these institutions in this campaign leaves no question as to where they stand. Conservatives cannot, in good conscience, continue to subscribe to newspapers that are so obviously committed to doing whatever it takes to promote a left wing agenda and liberal candidates. Starve the beast. It goes beyond newspaper subscriptions. You need to take a good hard look at the advertisers who stream revenue into these papers and consider whether you want to continue patronizing them. They are the ones keeping the papers in business and should be held to account. This goes beyond the major dailies too. Why should I buy a product or service from a company that helps propagate the childish political rantings of an alternative weekly like the City Pages? Take your business elsewhere, but be sure to tell those companies that you're choosing not to do business with exactly why. I don't think that many business owners make a connection between their advertising and the political bias of these papers. But they should. I understand that if you own a business your primary motivation is to succeed, and to do that you need to attract customers. But at what price? Are you willing to sell your political soul for a few pieces of silver? Starve the beast. The same goes for "mainstream" magazines. Time, Newsweek, and US News and World Report? Gone. Seriously. What are you possibly getting out of them that you can't find on the internet anyway? While you're at it, you might as well throw People on the ash heap of history as well. You'll sleep better at night. Starve the beast. Television news. First off, no one should ever watch CBS News again under any circumstances. On Election Night the normal temptation is in flip back and forth between the various cable and networks news channels to try to stay on top of everything. But next Tuesday you must not even think about hitting CBS News. In fact, you really should never watch anything on CBS ever again. Really. What's more important to you: who the next president is or CSI:Toledo? Sacrifices people. We all need to make sacrifices. I will grant a special dispensation for those living in AFC cities to be allowed to watch football on CBS. I would also encourage you to not watch the news on ABC, NBC, or CNN. If you must, don't tell anyone that you do and if you ever have a chance to fill out a Nielson survey make sure that you shut them out. Starve the beast. If, for some inexplicable reason, you are still giving money to public radio or television, kindly cease and desist this practice immediately. You are funding the Garrison Keillors and Bill Moyers of the world. Need I say more? Starve the beast. We can whine and complain all we want about the conduct of CBS News and the New York Times and how unfair they are blah, blah, blah. But unless we're willing to make systemic changes in our behavior as media consumers, we're going to be in the same place next time around wondering why we're always on the short end of the stick. Stop reading their crap. Stop watching their crap. Most importantly, stop buying their crap. Stop feeding the beast. posted by The Elder at 4:50 AM l link