Just giving you some of the latest comments on the election. The media has made many hints to the fact that Ohio is a mess...
Even though the inauguration will probably go forward in January, because in most people's minds it's a done deal, before that there still could be an upset to the idea that the Bush cabal has a 'mandate' and 'political capital to spend.'
To my thinking even if Bush didn't legitimately win, there were still a very many Americans who supported and enabled him. This is upsetting to me because I do not think what the US has done in Iraq is legitimate but is out-and-out atrocity. I would like to think more people would feel this 'war' is wrong.
Here is the latest updates from the blog - some of it is clowing and refers to previous blogging - over the last few days from Keith O. at MSNBC who is still working on it:
December 27, 2004 | 12:11 p.m. ET
Kerry lawyer: does the re-election warrant the public trust? (Keith Olbermann)
NEW YORK - I spent the weekend holding the latest statement from John Kerry's Ohio attorney up to the light, to see if I could read the secret treasure map written in invisible ink on the other side.
In signing on to the Glibs' court bid to preserve all the evidence of what has been a severely compromised recount, Daniel Hoffheimer told us at Countdown: "Only then can the integrity of the entire electoral process and the election of Bush-Cheney warrant the public trust."
Surely, I'm not going out on a limb here to infer that at the moment, Mr. Hoffheimer and the Kerry-Edwards campaign don't think the entire electoral process and the election of President Bush warrant the public trust.
I mean, the infamous "regardless of the outcome of the election," phrase in Kerry's only post-concession comment on the mangled vote was so subtle in both temporality and meaning that it could have been inserted in a statement dealing with any eventuality ranging from a clearly determined vote that was in the past, to a still undecided result.
But not Hoffheimer's. Them's (to borrow the language of the noted political pundit Yosemite Sam) fightin' words. Fightin' words issued last Thursday evening, as America got out of town for a holiday weekend. Fightin' words that came just eight working days before the Electoral College votes are opened before Congress, and Maxine Waters or John Conyers or anybody else in the House can crawl all the way out on the limb of formal challenge, and it won't matter a jot if there isn't one Senator to crawl out there with them.
It's unfathomable that Kerry would sign the requisite written challenge. Given his incredibly nuanced response to the entire voting irregularities story, and his evident aspiration to become the Adlai Stevenson or even William Jennings Bryan of the 21st Century, becoming the Senate sponsor of the challenge would seem about as likely and about as consistent as a motorist doing 20 in the right hand lane, suddenly accelerating to 110 and doing the full Bill Murray Groundhog Day bit into the quarry.
Kerry's signature might not even be sought. There has been "very serious" contact among the staffs of leading Democrats in both houses about the implications of the challenge, according to a congressional figure privy to that contact. He estimates for us that the chance of a Senator actually signing on has in the last week risen from almost nothing, to upwards of one third.
And there is still that coda from Hoffheimer's statement. By itself, it is the thrown gauntlet, and yet it is produced at a time when gauntlets are pretty much symbolic protests. Unless, perhaps, that is the strategy here. The Ohio election was undeniably full of holes, but barring developments unforeseen, the collective verified hole is not likely to be big enough to drive a truck carrying 10,000 uncounted votes through it.
However, the recount has been butchered, badly enough that even an editorial in Sunday's Toledo Blade noted "the miserable performance of much of the American electoral system." The Green Party says that 86 of the 88 counties violated Ohio voting law and pre-selected what were to be randomly chosen precincts for hand recounts. It claims that only one county (Coshocton) ran a full hand recount of all of its votes, and, oopsie, its certified total number of votes rose from 16,000 on election night, to 17,000 after the recount (evenly split, we might add, between Bush and Kerry, but indicating 6% of all votes disappeared). The official recount in Fairfield County found added 1,130 votes to the first count of 66,378. Representative Conyers last week wrote again to Triad Systems asking them to refute charges that they had "remote access" to their voting equipment in Fulton and Henry Counties (read as: they could change computer stuff over the internet). In the kindest of all possible lights, a Triad employee tried to save the elections officials of Hocking County the 'trouble' of a full hand recount at Christmas time by helping them find a precinct whose second tally would match the first one.
Is the political premise here to redirect attention from the hazy confusion of election day voter suppression or unexplained lockdowns or troubled equipment, to the simpler-to-digest black-and-white issues of the recount? "Law says A. You did Z." The full Hoffheimer statement includes this: "Senators Kerry and Edwards... want to be sure that all circumstances involved in the Ohio election, including the recount, should be put before the Court and disclosed to the American people." For the record, Hoffheimer's full statement to Countdown is included at the bottom of this entry.
Excepting the possibility that the Greens/Libertarians/Kerry-Edwards suit will be immediately dismissed, this court action in Ohio is not going to be processed quickly enough to affect the inauguration. It could, instead, become a kind of institutionalized protest, the exact kind of lingering, evolving post-post game show that Al Gore swore the Democrats off of in 2000. It could become, in effect, the slow-moving symbol of the final line Hoffheimer's statement, questioning public trust in "the entire electoral process and the election of Bush-Cheney..."
Voters and politicians will have to determine if that is an appropriate playing field for political discourse for the next two or four years.
Speaking of discourse, I've received a handful of e-mails since I mentioned in passing in last Tuesday's post, the claims of a Florida computer software worker that he was asked to write a 'vote-switching program' in 2000. There have been several points raised that can, I think, be pretty easily cleared up here:
Several e-mails noted that the programmer, Clint Curtis, testified before the Conyers Voting Forum in Columbus, Ohio, earlier this month. Well, yes and no. He did tell his story there, but it's instructive to note that he was not asked to do so until after Representative Conyers left the forum, and had turned the chairing of the meeting over to a local politician. This wasn't a case of Conyers rushing to catch a bus, nor a problem with too many witnesses, nor a coincidence.
For weeks, say sources at various levels of the formal investigations into the voting irregularities, Mr. Curtis has promised them corroboration of his accusations even if it was just the statement of someone to whom he said, in 2000, 'hey, this guy just asked me to write a vote-switching program.' These sources say they've received no such corroboration, and certainly none has been presented publicly.
One e-mailer complained that the denial by the politician accused by Mr. Curtis of soliciting the program seemed pretty tepid, and confined itself largely to his comment "I don't remember meeting Mr. Curtis." Well, the ambiguity of the denial is partially my fault. Much of the remarks were boilerplate and repetitive, but I did leave out a fairly salient one, in which he said these were: "some of the most ridiculous, fictional charges you could ever imagine." I wouldn't classify that as a 'non-denial denial.'
Two readers asked why we didn't simply put Mr. Curtis on 'Countdown' or otherwise interview him. Unfortunately, there is a question of the size of the platform here. If the details of his charges can be found on an innocuous website with limited readership, it doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things if the possibility that they are partially or totally untrue, turns out to be the correct one. But if that's the case if this is actually the story of a guy out to hurt a politician and we put him on national television, I will have effectively recreated the Swift Boat Veterans fiasco. Under those circumstances, especially in the absence of corroboration, the truth becomes secondary, and the damage is the only verifiable thing.
Lastly (and, for my money, most entertainingly): I noted that an attorney for Curtis's former employers, for whom he was working when he claims to have been asked to develop the nefarious program, described him to MSNBC as a 'disgruntled former employee.' However, an e-mailer writes, at the time of his departure from the firm, the company gave him a going-away card. I had to smile at this evidence. When I left ESPN in 1997, the company gave me a tape of my oddest moments on the air, a huge farewell banner, and a going-away party that lasted until sunrise and was so joyous that the authorities were summoned. Still, I have to be the first one to say it: if anybody has the right to call me a 'disgruntled former employee,' it's ESPN.
As promised, the full text of the statement to Countdown from the evening of December 23 of Daniel J. Hoffheimer, State Legal Counsel, Ohio, Kerry-Edwards 2004, Inc., (and, yes, he's referring to himself in the third person here):
"Daniel Hoffheimer, State Legal Counsel for the Kerry-Edwards campaign, told MSNBC today that Kerry-Edwards will support the third-party candidates in asking the Federal Court in the Ohio recount lawsuit to order the preservation of the evidence obtained during the recount and to expedite discovery of the facts. Hoffheimer said that various problems and errors have occurred in a number of Ohio's 88 county boards of elections during the recount, which will conclude next week. Hoffheimer acknowledged that the most publicized of these problems was the machine manipulation in Hocking County but said that the developing evidence will reveal other problems as well. He said that Senators Kerry and Edwards are very concerned that the law for conducting the recount should be uniformly followed. They want to be sure that all circumstances involved in the Ohio election, including the recount, should be put before the Court and disclosed to the American people. Only then, Hoffheimer said, can the integrity of the entire electoral process and the election of Bush-Cheney warrant the public trust."
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KOlbermann@msnbc.com December 23, 2004 | 11:26 p.m. ET
Of Coffins, comp days, conspiracies and Christmas (Greg Kordick, Countdown Senior Producer)
"You angel of death, you're going to kill Clinton. We need to lock you up. Enjoy your vacation." It was with seemingly stunned disbelief Mr. Olbermann left that message on my cell phone. It was with equal disbelief I listened, standing on the streets of Montreal's Old Town. I laughed, but in that same instant, the realization hit: no vacation will ever be the same as long as the Big Bloggermann was following the news and following my movements away from work. You see, when I take a break from the Countdown, news breaks, and it's often of the variety that can never be fixed (unless you pull a Ted Williams and get cryogenically frozen).
Allow me to introduce myself since the boss man saw fit to publicly out me. To my adoring public I'm Greg Kordick, to my cohorts on the Countdown staff, the angel of death.
Keith mentioned this in a recent blog several days ago to deflect from Internet conspiracy theories that HIS week-long hiatus from MSNBC was more of a management-imposed permanent vacation, rather than a much deserved week off. Readers of the Internets, I can vouch for the fact that this is indeed a week respite of Keith's choosing and there is nothing more sinister at play. I however feel the need to dispel the Countdown conspiracy theory that when I cash in a comp day... celebrities cash it in for good... it is the Holidays after all... and I don't want Hollywood publicists now worrying about my comings and goings and the health of their clients.
On December 21st Keith wrote: "If you really want to worry about vacations, keep track of the days taken off by our crack line producer Greg Kordick... this year, on his days off, the following people have died: Ray Charles, Rick James, President Reagan, Rodney Dangerfield, Christopher Reeve, Marlon Brando, and Faye Wray. The jury in the Scott Peterson case came back on one of his days off, and returned its sentence on another one."
This whole conspiracy began in June. I was on vacation on Cape Cod. While I was off several stories broke during our normal newscast time which is generally unusual for 8pm at night. This week of breaking news culminated in the big one, the death of Ronald Reagan. When I returned to work, I walked in the door and was jokingly told you killed Reagan. Several days later I left work early. Five minutes out the door, the news broke that Capitol Hill was being evacuated hours before the president's body was to lie in state. Where was Greg? Then I take my birthday off, Ray Charles dies. The conspiracy takes hold but Keith is not a believer yet.
Fast forward. I take July 1st off because I'm stuck working on the company holiday for Independence Day. Marlon Brando dies. Everyone takes notice, Keith and I included. Fast forward to August. I return home to the Midwest. Look out, we're on death watch. I'm off for a 4-day weekend. Rick James and Fay Wray die. Fast Forward to September. I'm in Montreal. The news breaks that President Clinton needs emergency heart bypass surgery. Keith calls me in Montreal to express disbelief in the coincidence and the staff feels things aren't looking good for Mr. Clinton. Forget what the doctors say... the grim reaper of news is up north. His surgery is scheduled for a Tuesday and I'll be back at work. The staff breathes a sigh of relief. Clinton's surgery is a day early and pulls through fine. Maybe the death spell is gone, but there is definitely a firm belief that bad news breaks. While in Canada, the Russian school tragedy and Hurricane Frances dominate the headlines.
The conspiracy now hits my family and friends. I go home for a quick three day weekend in October and convey the story, laughingly, that my friends back at Countdown are just waiting to see who will die, or what will happen next. Monday morning comes. I wake up, say hello to my mother and there's no greeting back. "Christopher Reeve is dead." My mother couldn't bring herself to say it but her look said it all. What was her son's twisted connection to all of this? That same day it's announced Ken Caminiti dies.
At this point, it's obvious; I will never have another peaceful vacation again. I will always be looking over my shoulder at the nearest TV or hitting cyber cafιs everywhere to catch the latest headline on msnbc.com. Case in point, mid December, I take a 4-day weekend to Key West. Friday night I log on quickly. I didn't kill Bernard Kerik but I sure as heck killed his dreams of making Homeland Security director. (Perhaps I killed his nanny... has she turned up anywhere yet... anyone... anyone... Bueller?) I'm flying home the following Monday. The plane touches down... I get to my car and turn on the radio... penalty phase over in the Scott Peterson trial. The decision was reached while I was still in the air. I didn't need to really see the live coverage, but I watched anyway. Death.
Since Keith outed me as the cable producer Angel of Death, I've had a chance to reflect on the conspiracy theory... and it is just that, a conspiracy. A quick check of the overall picture will bear that all out. People die every day. I was at work for the deaths of Yasser Arafat, Janet Leigh, Geoffrey Beene, Johnny Ramone, Julia Child, Isabel Sanford, Tony Randall, Alan King, Estee Lauder, Alistair Cooke, Peter Ustinov, Robert Pastorelli, Paul Winfield, Marge Schott, Jack Paar, Bob Keeshan, John Ritter, Johnny Cash and Dick the Goldfish to name a few. Unscientifically speaking, 86 percent of all celebrity deaths of 2004 happened while I was on the clock or within pagers distance of being called in to work to cover the story if need be. The exit polls are wrong. Finally tally is in. No Recount necessary. Case Closed.
For those that choose to STILL believe in the conspiracy, I want you to relax over the holidays. I'm not going anywhere... I will be very near MSNBC World Headquarters so all should be well. (But for those who want to play the home game of the Countdown Conspiracy, I am taking Thursday December 30th off... watch msnbc and msnbc.com for breaking developments).
I demand no apology from Mr. Olbermann for the inference that my days off lead to less than pleasant events in the world, in fact, I thank him for allowing me to use his space to get my version of reality out there. All I want for Christmas is for you guys to stop construction on the Gitmo style holding cell out back in Secaucus so I'm forced to never leave MSNBC. It's not funny. And please... please let 2005 be the year I can R.I.P. (Relax In Peace.)
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.
On a separate programming note, we put the finishing touches to our Countdown Holiday show Tuesday night. Countdown's Favorite Things 2004 airs Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve... and a few times over the weekend. It's the highlights from the show over the last year... and it had us laughing in the control room not once but twice as we had to go back and fix a few hiccups here and there. If you can't make the usual show times during the holidays, this show is definitely a must TiVo so you can watch it and rewatch it at your leisure. You'll regret it if you miss it.
Thoughts? E-mail us at
KOlbermann@msnbc.com December 22, 2004 | 6:48 p.m. ET
Challenges and the challenged (Keith Olbermann)
SECURE UNDISCLOSED LOCATION So much for my vow of not posting again during my vacation.
However, a lot of facts from the previous post have been clarified or muddied and the news, to paraphrase one of my snarkiest friends in the business, "doesn't stop when you're off; it goes on another three to four hours a day."
Representative John Conyers of Michigan is awaiting a staff report before deciding whether or not to formally challenge Ohio's electoral votes a week from tomorrow. Ted Kalo, the Minority General Counsel of the House Judiciary Committee, advises us by email that Conyers "is waiting until all the facts are in," but notes that Representative Maxine Walters of Los Angeles has already spoken publicly about her willingness to be the house signatory on the challenge. Whether or not there's a senator willing to do the same is still an open question.
Mr. Kalo also points out details that make the recount situation in Hocking County, Ohio, seem far less closed than the County's Assistant Prosecutor led me to believe. I guess I'm still a little naοve on such things, but it would seem to me that in telling his story of a "comedy of errors" involving the inspection of the main vote tabulator there by a representative of the voting machine manufacturer, Triad Systems, David Sams might have been mentioned that in addition to being Assistant Prosecutor, he is also (per Mr. Kalo) the legal representative of the Hocking County Board of Elections during the recount.
I thought we had a bad jobs situation in Ohio. How come so many civil servants there have to double up?
Kalo, and the Green Party's recount coordinator for Southeastern Ohio, Orren Whiddon, both point out that the issue in Hocking is not so much what was or wasn't done to the machine, but the efforts of the Triad man to find out which of Hocking's precincts was to be subjected to the mandatory 3% hand recount.
One of our producers had asked Deputy Prosecutor Sams about how the subject of the unusual inquiries was dealt with at the informal "board meeting" Sams conducted Monday. Asked why the Triad employee would've asked about precincts at all, Mr. Sams replied, "I don't remember, to be honest, what he answered to that. But it was really just a comedy of errors. There was no impropriety."
Both Mr. Kalo and Mr. Whidden spoke highly of Sams, but suggest he missed the point. The Green Party rep notes that Ohio law is specific about the 3% sample that must be hand recounted in each county: it's supposed to be selected randomly. If the effort is made either by an election official, or somebody else (like a manufacturer's rep) to decide in advance which 3% of the vote is to be recounted, the concept of random selection is thoroughly contaminated and once again, a puff of smoke rises from the entire recount process.
Mr. Whidden told me by phone this afternoon that there are a lot of puffs of smoke. "86 of Ohio's 88 counties have pre-selected their random precincts," he claims. Their motivations and even Triad's may not be as nefarious as would appear. Ohio law states that if the 3% hand recount doesn't match the original vote, the entire County's vote must be recounted by hand. These County Board of Elections, especially in the smaller jurisdictions, are comprised largely of volunteers, and a full, hand recount means an incredible amount of work, which as human nature would suggest, they'd prefer to avoid.
Unfortunately, it also means that if you were trying to fix a vote in Ohio, or cover it up in a recount, you had merely to identify which precincts were least likely to be chosen (rather than randomly selected), and do your dirty work in them.
Which brings us back to Triad and what its rep was doing, trying to find out which precincts in Hocking would be recounted by hand, and offering tips to help make sure the recount matched the original vote. "Highly respected company," Whidden notes. "Triad has a rule against corporate donations to political parties; their employees may, but they don't. Not a Diebold situation. They answer questions openly. They believe in customer service." The problem arises when the customer service, even innocently, dovetails with the same mechanism that guarantees that the precinct selection isn't random, and full hand recounts don't occur.
Whidden points out how it's supposed to be done. In one county for which he acted as a supervisor, Athens, "the board of elections took the names of each of its precincts, put them on slips of paper, put the pieces in a coffee can, and kept pulling the slips out until they had precincts that totaled to 3% of the county vote. Great, great job."
So there's the early picture from Ohio: the best-respected of the computer companies, Triad, tries to help one of its customers out. The customer wants to go home without doing the heavy lifting that the law requires, but which to them seems utterly academic. The process is repeated across the state. Benign intentions; potentially pernicious outcomes.
Which brings us back again Washington. There, Mr. Conyers wrote yesterday to the various chairmen, network presidents, and news division leaders at ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, and the Associated Press, requesting that they release to the House Judiciary Committee "the raw exit poll data from the 2004 November presidential election you purchased from Mitofsky International and Edison Media Research." I suppose I should have some inside information on NBC's response, but I don't. Responses from the other networks have thus far spoken of the need to wait for final reports to be compiled from the data which would seem to be exactly the opposite of the point Conyers is making.
HISTORICALLY CHALLENGED:
Lastly, I mentioned here Tuesday that I'd been advised by one of my extremist readers that Adolf Hitler was a Left-winger; that, in fact, all fascists were.
Little did I know that this revisionist history has been a popular subtext on talk radio for several years (I stopped listening to anything Rush Limbaugh said after he came to my desk in Bristol, Connecticut about a decade ago and told me his dream was to work for ESPN how'd that work out for him, by the way?)
I got a flood of emails pointing out that on the basis of economic policy the original means by which "right" and "left" came into use in Europe and here the Fascists of Italy and Germany were a little to the right of Atilla the Hun. There were also useful reminders that the Germans and Italians backed Franco in the Spanish Civil War (with American leftists coming in against them as "The Lincoln Brigade"), along with a lot of simple guffaws.
One of the loudest was provided unintentionally by somebody who had drunk this particular kool-aid. "You do realize the Nazis were the 'National-Socialist German Workers' Party,' don't you? How many socialists in your experience have been what you would call 'right-wingers?'"
As I noted to my correspondent, the answer is probably contained in the following set of facts:
The Communist state in what was, until 1990, East Germany was officially called "The German Democratic Republic," and it was never mistaken by anybody for a democracy.
The Communist behemoth in China is officially "The People's Republic," and it's never been mistaken by anybody for a Republic (although if it were, its leaders would be called, by dint of pure linguistic logic, Republicans).
The football championship is officially called "The Super Bowl," and when the game isn't particularly super, they don't go offering everybody refunds.
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KOlbermann@msnbc.com. December 21, 2004 | 9:43 a.m. ET
Maria 
A blog is an on-line journal??? Bloggers are people who create on-line journals? 
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