Electric Monkey Pants

Over at Brad’s Blog (get this: it’s a blog by a guy named Brad!) David Edwards (okay, now I’m confused) writes about Robert Kennedy Jr.’s appearance on the Tucker Carlson disaster some people call a show.

Tucker Carlson continued an assault on Kennedy and his article throughout the short interview. Kennedy fights for time to respond and does a good job indicting the media (and Tucker) for ignoring a very obvious problem. Tucker responds by saying that if the stolen election were real then it would have been a news story — as if truth and reality only exists if the media reports on it.

In the end, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., managed to remain poised and believable. This interview alone may have done little to prove to MSNBC’s viewers that there is significant evidence of a stolen election — but the piece did prove one thing to us: Tucker Carlson is a complete ass.

But we already knew that.

I would love to see Tucker Carlson get humiliated again like when Jon Stewart destroyed him on Crossfire, but this is serious business. It’s too bad that they didn’t have a more substantive discussion, although I doubt Kennedy expected a fair hearing. Still, at least the show aired and people saw it. Hopefully some of them will seek out the Rolling Stone article.

Greg Palast has more on the theft of the 2004 election over on his site.

This is a fact: On November 2, 2004, in the State of Ohio, 239,127 votes for President of the United States were dumped, rejected, blocked, lost and left to rot uncounted.

And not just anyone’s vote. Dive into the electoral dumpster and these “spoiled” votes have a very dark color indeed.

In another life, I taught statistics. And these statistics stank: the raw data tells us that if you are a Black voter, the chance of you losing your vote to technical errors in voting machinery is 900% higher than if you were a white voter.

Any guesses as to whom those African-Americans chose for president on those junked ballots? Check Ohio’s racial demographics, do the numbers, and there it is: Kerry won Ohio. And that, too, is a fact. A fact that could not get reported in the USA.

Pretty much says it all, doesn’t it? If you’re black, your vote has an incredibly high chance of not being counted. Why? Because black people vote for Democrats almost 90% of the time. Black people are very predictable when it comes to voting and, conversely, Republicans are very predictable when it comes to fraud. They go after the weak and minorities are in a weak position because they’re, well, minorities.

Of course, that should not be taken to imply that the Democrats are any better. In fact, the most baffling part of these allegations is how strongly opposed to any additional investigations the Democrats are; despite the fact that they’ve clearly suffered the most. Kinda makes you wonder… What if the two major parties got together and decided to “trade off” and split their time in power evenly between the two? Sounds pretty dastardly, right? Like a bad movie. But if you know anything about the history of party politics in the USA, it’s not such a stretch. The Republicans and Democrats instantly become best friends when it comes to excluding third parties. They’ve found something they can agree on: Real competition sucks!

Well, it’s impossible to know if the allegations are true at this point; hell, all the voter disenfranchisement might not’ve even been necessary. Maybe people really were stupid enough to vote Bush in again… but I doubt it.

Maybe you’ve turned your brain off in order to resolve the logical paradox. The story I just linked to investigates political bias in partisans and offers a clear reason not to be a partisan: They’re not thinking!

Democrats and Republicans alike are adept at making decisions without letting the facts get in the way, a new study shows.

-snip-

We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning,” said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. “What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts.”

-snip-

The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.

“None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged,” Westen said. “Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones.”

Notably absent were any increases in activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning.

A “total lack of reason” in politics? No way! 🙂 Okay, so I saw this one coming. But it’s a nice summary of the fact that we do most of our political “thinking” with our emotions and not our logical brains. You’ll see a fair amount of emotion on this site, but I try to wait until after I’ve examined the facts to get emotional about the issues I talk about. It’s hard not to feel something when somebody tells you (and offers statistical proof) that our election might’ve been rigged. But it’s important to try and remain impartial until the dust has settled. I have my suspicions, but I cannot say with 100% certainty that it was stolen. There’s just to many variables for little-ol’-me to decide after a few hours of thought. I encourage you to keep an open mind and withhold judgment until all the facts are in. That includes dismissing these allegations out of hand.

Please: don’t be a partisan hack. Think!

Proof that Republicans prevented more then 350, 000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted–enough to have put John Kerry in the White House. A fascinating, factually accurate, and well written article.

from Digg.com

read more | digg story

Holy shit! Rolling Stone comes out swinging in this article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy makes the case for re-examining the 2004 election results in an article stuffed with citations and accusations of impropriety by our Republican overlords.

Was the 2004 election rigged? Consider a few examples:

After carefully examining the evidence, I’ve become convinced that the president’s party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) — more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio’s Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn?t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes — enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)

This looks bad. I’m still reading the whole article, but I wanted to get this story on the blog. What do you think? Comment below.