http://www.ericblumrich.com/gta.html
Just some facts would be great, I think its dismissable but check with you guys I guess 
Its a Flash about George W Bush’s win in Florida by the way. I should have included that, damn no quick edits :smack:
Obviouly a highly-biased presentation - but not far off the truth. The same story is dealt with in the same manner by Michael Moore in Stupid White Men. There are a few elements that put a slight balance on the situation - including that voters identified as felons were supposedly notified and given a right of appeal should the information be incorrect.
Link doesn’t work for me, I get a “404 Not Found” error.
I found the thing at another address, but I won’t post the link because it’s total bullshit. It’s the typical example of “lies, damned lies, and statistics”, implying – practically stating – that Katherine Harris eliminated 55,100 Gore votes in Florida when he lost by 537, and was rewarded with a Congresswoman position.
This really belongs in GD
Click on the reporter’s name at the end of the flash – it’s a link to his report.
So do you deny that the purging of voters lost Gore votes?
Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce myself, I am the college roommate of the individual who owns that domain. I knew Mr. Blumrich for approximately 5 years (I lived with him for just over a year or so.), and I can state that during the time period of 1988 to 1996 he was, literally, a card carrying Communist (no shit, he really joined the party).
Mr. Blumrich’s a damn fine artist, there’s no way I’d try to argue otherwise, but as far as politics go, he was a radical even back when I knew him. At best he pulls his data from questionable sources, and mixes it together in such a manner as to emphasize what he considers to be negative aspects. I’d trust his statements on politics as well as I’d trust those of Rush Limbaugh or Michael Moore (that is: not at all). As far as art goes, I’d take his word on things. YMMV.
Guys, this is GQ. So far all I have seen is ad hominem. How about some argument like: The ad says this but the documentation is this?
How about this then: Gore lost his home state of Tennessee (probably the only Presidential candidate to do so), and had he won his home state, the results of Florida wouldn’t have mattered a whit. Now, how in the heck could the folks have known that the election was going to hinge on Florida in advance long enough to rig the election there? I’d say unless Bush has a time machine (in which case, why didn’t he use it before we went into Iraq?), there’s simply no way for them to have rigged the election.
Oh sure, they could have rigged the elections in other states as well, but if you’re going to go to the trouble of rigging an election, there’s much easier ways of doing this. There’s one company that provides exit-poll results for almost all media outlets. That company doesn’t appear to have a website, but here’s a somewhat paranoid discussion about them.
If you’re going to rig an election, it seems to me that it’d be easiest to bribe these guys, and then fudge the paperwork in the states you lost, rather than gambling on two states (since there were Bushs in power in Florida and Texas) to pull you through.
how about the debate as to why she’s now a congress woman; did she deserve that after stopping all those people from voting?
Apparently the voters in Florida thought so. Unless you’re going to claim that she rigged that election as well.
Tuckerfan:
All you’ve really told us is that this guy was “a card carrying Communist” and a “radical.”
I’m more interested in whether you can disprove any of the assertions that appear in his Flash movie? This is SDMB, my friend, and the guilt-by-association that passed for political debate in the 1950s doesn’t really cut it here.
Well, you know, it’s a bit of a weakness of mine, since I knew the guy personally to take everything he says about politics with a massive grain of salt. Still, let’s look at what the flash has to say, shall we?
It states that the company which was handed the contract by the state of Florida decided to not only “scrub” the names of ex-felons from the roles, but also those individuals with the same last names of the felons. Now, I don’t have any cites, but I’d be willing to bet that at least one felon has the last name of “Smith” or “Brown” or some other very common surname. Do you honestly think that all the people with that last name would be Democrats? Are you going to say that even greater than 50% of people with any last name would be in one particular party? Because if you’re shaving everyone with a certain last name out of the voting roles, you’re eliminating people from all parties, and could possibly be cutting your own throat with that.
Additionally, the flash goes on to state that Harris provided DBT with the birthdates of the felons, and anyone who shared a birthdate with that felon was removed from the rolls. Well, now, again, you’re running the risk of cutting people with that birthdate who agree with you.
Of course, one has to ask why on Earth the state would provide such information to DBT? If you stop and think about it, the reason is fairly simple: to cross-reference the names of the individuals with their birthdate in order to weed out the folks who weren’t supposed to be able to vote. Note that the site states “Harris wanted more” every time it mentions additional information being given to DBT. Making the claim that Harris was out to purge as many voters (what party affiliation they all have, I’ve no idea) as possible.
Now, really, if you’re going to rig an election, are you going to do a “blind purge” and dump people based solely on their birthdate and/or last name? And if you are rigging an election, are you going to have the outcome be decided not by an overwhelming number of votes, but by SCOTUS? If I were to be rigging an election, I’d want to make damn sure that my favored candidate won by a healthy majority, and not a SCOTUS choice (notice how Saddam did in the last Iraqi elections).
Given the overall ineptitude that the Bush Administration has displayed, do you think that they’d manage to pull this all off in the one state which happened to be the key state in the election and put this all into place years before the election took place? You’re really giving them too much credit, I think. Is DBT a bunch of incompetant boobs who need to be prevented from getting another government contract? You betcha.
Is the only reason that people bitch about the voting problems in Florida (when several other states apparently had problems as well) because Gore lost that state by such a narrow margin? You betcha again.
I saw this flash a long time ago and this is where I called bullshit. If you have 365 felons, and eliminate everyone that shares a birthday with them, then statistically you’ve just eliminated every voter in the state of Florida.
On the other hand - and I’m not saying this in support of the flash, this is just my guess as to how Tuckerfan’s argument would be countered - minorities are over-represented in our penal system. They also tend to favor the Democrat party.
On preview: did the flash say birthday or birthdate?
Birthdate. And it doesn’t matter what group is most heavily represented in the prison system (in this instance), if you’re culling groups based entirely on what date they were born, you’re going to get a random cross-section of the population, and not any particular demographic. Culling by last name in Florida isn’t going to be all that effective, either, since it’s such a hodgepodge of different nationalities that if you wiped out all the hispanic names (for example), you’d be eliminating a number of folks of Cuban descent, who tend to vote Republican (since the Pubbies seem to think that the embargo against Cuba is actually doing something other than reducing that nation to abject poverty).
Not to mention immigrants often legally adopt American names, since it’s easier for us to pronounce “Smith” correctly than it is something like “!Mbangaxzith” (note, this is not an actual name as far as I know, I made it up since I couldn’t think of how to spell any of the complicated surnames I’ve seen over the years), so odds are that at least one person convicted of a felony will have a last name which was “adopted” by either themselves or their immigrant forefathers and is common among large groups of Americans.
I just watched it again. It says birthday.
Knowing Eric (Oh, and mhendo, now that I think about it, I could really have done some “character assassination” stuff on Eric if I wanted to [e-mail me and I’ll discuss what it was like living with him, sorry, but nobody else get’s those details, just mhendo to prove to him that I’m not pulling some kind of McCarthy stunt], but none of that has anything to do with his politics. I wasn’t kidding when I said that he’d joined the Communist Party and I’m sure he’d be more than happy to confirm it.), he meant birthdate and not birthday.
It’s the kind of detail which wouldn’t matter too much to him to get right. (The difference between birthday and birthdate, no doubt he earnestly believes everything that’s in that flash, and isn’t deliberately fabricating anything, but he’s not trying to fact check it, or even think it through.)
Seriously, the guy’s a fantastic artist and if you need artwork done, he’s the man I’d recommend.
That’s completely irrelevant to the question at hand.
Huh? It’s been widely reported that Jeb promised before the election to “deliver” Florida to George. It didn’t require clairvoyance to know that it was going to be a close race, and that Florida, a swing state with a lot of electoral votes, could very well be pivotal.
You lost me. Exit polls don’t determine the winner. How exactly would that scenario work?
I’m guessing he got his information from this report by British journalist Greg Palast. http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/cta/progs/newsnight/palast.ram It’s actually pretty close to what’s said in the report, but he got a few details wrong. For example, it’s the same surname and similar DATE of birth. What Palast is saying is that since blacks are overrepresented in prisons, and tend to vote Democrat, that striking names of felons from the voter rolls will tend to eliminate black voters. He doesn’t explain very well how using the same surnames eliminates additional legitimate voters, but I would assume he’s saying that black people born around the same time are going to tend to share the same surnames. It doesn’t really take a lot of imagination to see how that could work. There are still a lot of black people with last names that date back to slavery times, like Washington, Jefferson, etc., or if they are immigrants or descendents of immigrants, they’re going to tend to have African surnames. It apparently was considered important enough for the U.S. Civil Rights Commission to investigate.
But really, the important questions that haven’t been answered are:
-Is it right that the Florida election commission hired a private company whose board of directors consists of prominent republicans, to purge the voter rolls?
-Did D.B.T. furnish a list of supposedly ineligible voters that was 95% innacurate, as charged by Palast?
-Is it right that Katherine Harris, who co-ran Bush’s campaign, was also in charge of certifying the election results?
-Is it true that D.B.T. was paid millions of dollars to make confirmation phone calls to check the accuracy of the list, but made no such calls?
Ms. Harris was first offered the job of ambassador to Chad, but she turned that down. 