Well John, can I speak of poetry? Actually, I mean poetic justice.

We know that 5 votes were the quantity of votes that Bush won by in 2000. The 5 neoCons on the Supreme Court voted Bush in 5-4.

But there is a moral side to the crime ... in the sense of poetic justice or karma as it is called in pop culture.

Yes, I think an MSM rag tells it like it is:

The first three months of the new Democratic Congress have been neither terrible nor transcendent. A Pew poll had it about right: a substantial majority of the public remains happy the Democrats won in 2006, but neither Nancy Pelosi nor Harry Reid has dominated the public consciousness as Newt Gingrich did when the Republicans came to power in 1995. There is a reason for that. A much bigger story is unfolding: the epic collapse of the Bush Administration.

(Time, emphasis added). History and justice are on the trail of the criminals who have usurped power and corrupted the political process. And when those two catch up with the neoCons they will be morphed into neoConvicts.

Hey ... I love poetry in motion its soooo karmical.

Thanks for the tip of the hat John. Votes cast privately (secret ballot) and counted Publicly.

The "secret" ballot is misnamed a bit, it simply preserves the right of the voter to tell or not tell who they voted for, and is sort of a part of the chain of custody of the ballot, because if the voter could show the ballot to others, that increases the chance of unintended alterations, illegal pressure, and votebuying (risks brought right back to us by vote by mail and absentee ballots).

The secret ballot is not truly a secrecy "exception" to an otherwise totally public process, because in this "secrecy" the only damage a voter can do is to mess up THEIR OWN ballot. This differs by a magnitude of infinity from secret vote COUNTING, in which one person has access to and can fail to count or miscount ALL ballots. There were over 122 million votes cast for president in 2004, so the COUNTING of the vote is approximately 122 million times more important than the individual (and sacred) right to vote itself. In case you find my expression of vote counting as infinitely more important than verifying the individual right to vote (which itself is sacred and very important), then please substitute 122 million times for "infinity" and accept my apologies. However, I stand by the notion that 122 million multiplied by "sacred" equals INFINITY. You do the math.

As far as my math goes, I'm not going to "show my work" any more than the secret software does. So there. You can flunk a 6th grade math test by not showing your work based on the inference of cheating alone. They don't want to "show their work" in vote counting, which is simple addition, 1 plus 1 equals two. NO subtraction, multiplication, division or creative accounting is allowed, yet they refuse to show their work. The inference is that they are cheating and any normal teacher would flunk the secret software or make them do it over.

The refusal of government SERVANTS to perform simple acts of addition publicly for the inspection of the people who are the MASTERS in any representative democracy or republic leads not only to the inference but to the inescapable conclusion of illegitimacy in elections, because the consent of the governed is required for legitimacy of power.

That consent of the governed can not be proved, indeed there is NO EVIDENCE OF IT AT ALL, only vote totals popping out of computers, and in the case of optical scan systems, in theory there are warehoused ballots whose chain of custody grows more dubious with each passing hour. The consent of the governed will not, and indeed by laws of trade secrecy most recently enforced in Sarasota's FL 13 congressional election contest SHALL NOT be PROVED to We the People, the truth of an election being deemed by the court therein to be less important than the trade secret rights of the secret software makers/secret counters. This abominable judicial ruling came despite the willingness of the plaintiffs in FL-13 to enter into an agreement (read: conspiracy) to keep all of this information secret as well they were so desperate to get at the truth. No matter.

As trade secrets are considered a property right by the vendors of secret software, the heart of democracy is a wholly OWNED subsidiary of corporate America, where simple acts of addition will not be performed publicly. This flunks the democracy test.

As I've written, the compromise of a right is the same as the violation of the right. We need only ask ourselves the question, does secret vote counting violate any rights? In fact, there are many such violations but I'll give one of the biggest examples.

Recall, first, that Governments exist in real representative democracies to SECURE and to GUARANTEE rights, not as GRANTORS of those same rights. We all remember the words of the Declaration of Independence, telling us of the "unalienable right", elsewhere called "the great inalienable right" of We the People to cast off our present government and form another or elect another government.

This great inalienable right, exercised either by Revolution as in 1776 or by the exercise of the right to vote (aptly called "the right that protects all other rights") is not at all "secured" to We the People by a government that creates and tolerates secret counts of votes and refuses to prove its own legitimacy to We the People.

It is abundantly clear that We the People could not cast off or change a government that the majority of us considered evil, so long as the votes are counted in secret, because the evil government or simply the undesirable government can manipulate the secret vote counts. This means that our government has FAILED to SECURE our rights or to GUARANTEE even the most sacred, great INALIENABLE rights of the people.

Is there a greater crime, or a greater treason, against our republic than this?

"Any expense or burden such compliance [with election laws & rights] creates is trivial when compared to the value of the goal of maintaining our Republic. Integrity of our government can be no greater than the integrity of elections which put our government officials in office. It is therefore the duty of every registrar to endeavor to comply with the election statutes regardless of the personal inconvenience it may create." - Waters v. Gnemi, 907 So. 2d 307, 336 (Miss. Sup. Ct. 2005)

Is there a clearer act of disloyalty to We the People?

Spread the word, but don't burn out with frustration right away, it takes time to spread the word, and there needs to be coordination of voice among the American people, the very coordination we'd normally get if we all came together at the same time on election day under proper conditions. That's what's needed in order for we the People to feel our power, and to get it back.

Incremental Sabotage
This is what the Resistance used against the Nazis in WW11, and it worked; small, seemingly insignificant acts which wore down the Nazi war machine to the point where none of the soldiers felt safe to venture out by themselves. This is the frame of mind that we should be in. We are every bit as occupied as Iraq, only because they look and sound like fellow Americans, you can't tell if they're friend or foe. And the only way you will be able to assign them to a category is to determine where they stand on Holt's HR811. That is the ultimate Litmus test, that if they don't want to participate in the most democratic form of voting, then they have no business calling themselves Democrats. Not even so-called Blue Dog Democrats, because that's trying to have it both ways. And they're part of the occupying forces that is hell-bent on winning the next election,
and you can bet that the tabulating machines will be properly calibrated this time- there will be no screwups like last November. These people see us as the enemy, the Dark Side that is causing all the turmoil and preventing a return to happier days. In their minds, we are deluded and misguided, that we should settle for small victories instead of throwing out their carefully crafted plans for perpetual governance, but the flaw in that thinking is, that perpetuity is non-existant. The drive for the almighty dollar is killing the planet, and the scenario that haunts me is an old science fiction theme come true; that aliens visit our dead world in the future and wonder how we could've been so short- sighted, so blind to what was happening that we wound up killing ourselves and every living creature on the planet, even the cockroaches. So, incremental sabotage is called for. A true patriot would do everything in his or her power to prevent the looming catastrophe that would be the result of another reign of back-to-back Republican misery, and don't kid yourself that it couldn't happen- why do you think there's so many Republicans running for their party's nomination? So- small, secretive acts of tossing in monkey wrenches into the machine works, freeway blogging, emails, faxes - the possibilities are only limited by your imagination. Tomorrow, visit www.hr811.com, for more on this subject.

Dredd:

I think it's interesting that Joe Klein picks the same three "big Bush stories" that Novak picked for his anti-Bush column from about a week ago.

The paragraph from Klein's Time article:

The three big Bush stories of 2007--the decision to "surge" in Iraq, the scandalous treatment of wounded veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys for tawdry political reasons--precisely illuminate the three qualities that make this Administration one of the worst in American history: arrogance (the surge), incompetence (Walter Reed) and cynicism (the U.S. Attorneys).

We can all surmise why Novak stopped at what he called a "trifecta", but I would say there has been at least a quadfecta. Novak seems to have forgotten a story about an outed CIA agent who blew away every lie they've been telling in the media about her under oath recently.

Why is Klein ignoring the CIA agent story. Are they trying to steer the conversation away from anything that might invoke a treason or traitor charge.

Just wondering!

Dredd?

Larry ...

Agreed ... I never cease to wonder about the DC MSM. I note that some of the Washington media are at best "conflicted".

One of the prominent DC "journalists" is conflicted because his wife works for McCain.

There is "journalistic incest" and promiscuity afoot.

Yeah. Thanks for responding, I was interested in your answer. I wish I could trust "Time" magazine because they've had some pretty good articles lately, but to leave out THE biggest story in an article about the biggest stories is frustrating.