You’re wrapped in a tight, small circle once again - a “reasonable person” is one who does not suspect tampering, while one who does is “fringe left” - by your own convenient definition. :rolleyes:
Only if randomly distributed. Virtually all identifiable statistical variation is in one direction, though.
Huh? I’m espousing the “why should I vote, they’re just going to rig the election anyway” argument. Not making any specific claim about the 2004 election.
Well, as a reader ofslashdot,, and try to get independant confirmation in order to get friends concerned. But first, a Quicktime Cartoon from Boom Chicago!
Now, an independent site:
Diebold to Pay $2.6M Due to Insecure Voting Machines
Next, slashdot:
2004 Election Weirdness Continues
That was just a few I have seen. Some might be unproven, but my hackles are still raised.
Oh, dayum. Truly the terrorists have won.
Please look at the editorial pages of the LA Times for the past year, and identify ONE positions the paper has espoused that you believe is fairly characterized as “conservative.”
I can identify many that I believe are fairly characterized as “liberal.”
Do you believe the LA Times editorial page is conservative, or liberal, or is best described some other way?
If you did say that, then that would put you squarely in the camp that’s saying that there may have been a conspiracy to manipulate the election (which of course merits investigation). The whole point is that the statistics seem to show that something was going on that was beyond random chance or inaccurate polling. What was going on and who was responsible (if anyone) is the question that needs to be answered. I don’t hold out much hope that it will be answered, but it should be.
I’m hoping you were kidding, but it does point out that I misused the word. I should have said that I was enunciating the position not that I espouse it. Whoops!
Your notion that you would have some kind of point if the LA Times could be identified as a liberal media outlet is an interesting one. There have been some reports of election rigging inthe mainstream media, but not very many. Nothing compared to the kind of reportage that Florida got. There are probably some alarmed reasonable people, too. Just not enough. Yet.
You said:
I sought to examine this position by pointing out that the LA Times is a large, widely read, liberal newspaper. If your theory is correct, what is stopping the LA Times from publishing these cries of alarm? They are clearly not part of the vast conservative array of media.
Bricker: Good luck. I tried to make the exact same argument, even down to a reference to the LA Times, in this thread started by E.C. in the Pit. It doesn’t work.
Everyone knows that the LA Times (and other so called ‘mainstream media’) isn’t running stories on the stolen 2004 election constantly for the same reason that the major media don’t run stories on the Roswell alien invasion…because the government is surpressing the story!! Lack of solid evidence doesn’t even come into it.
-XT
Er, thats ‘suppressing’…no idea what ‘surpressing’ is.
-XT
Will you at least concede
(1) If voting fraud happened or will happen, there’s no way to tell.
(2) This is a Bad Thing.
(3) Something should be done to make votes more easily verifiable (a paper trail)
Surpressing is when you plan a big 40th birthday party for your wife but when everyone jumps out from behind the furniture and yells she insists that she’s only 34.
And since next week is your 20th wedding anniversary people now assume that you are a pervert who married a 14-year old.
No.
Well, maybe. If voting fraud happened on the scale of the margin of the 2000 election (less than 1,000 votes in one state tipping the scales) then YES. If were’re talking the 2004 election, then NO.
If (1) is true, then (2) is true.
Assuming (3) doesn’t create more problems than it solves, yes.
At the risk of seeming obnoxiously reasonable 
:
I would offer that the problem is not that the media as a whole has a bias one way or the other (specific outlets, of course, are demonstrably biased), it’s that conservative organizations (in general) are better organized and more focused on creating “momentum” in public opinion.
True.
But they are not monolithic in this ability. If Trent Lott makes a comment about how a Strom Thurmond presidency might have been a good thing, the tide quickly turns the other way.
I’ll concede that conservatives have an edge on organization and presentation, but it’s an edge, not an overwhelming, lock-down control. And if there were any substantial evidence of massive (election-altering) vote tampering, there’d be no question it would see the light of day.
Additionally, there are enough media types out there that would take a story on voter fraud electing a president and run with it for as long as they could. It would rival Watergate in scope.
It would give them star status and make thier organizations tons of money as ratings and circulation go up. The cable networks would cover it almost 24 hours a day.
It is naive and unrealistic to believe that there is some sort of story like this out there and nobody cares.
Is it really that hard to believe that a hacker could have fiddled with the results? When votes are tabulated on a computer, all it takes is a few keystrokes and voila!
I’m not saying it was hacked. I have no proof of this. What I am saying is that the possibility is disturbing enough to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT!
All I’m asking for is a show of intellectual integrity here. Something beyond blind partisanship.