and/or a Supreme

using our public airwaves to steal our democracy for fascists.

They had former Bush Sr Administration James Baker on every TV station saying 'the votes have been counted...over and over and over...' This was a blatant lie but boy did that get Republicans riled up declaring that Gore was trying to steal it. And they played that clip of James Baker over and over and over.

Having said that, the corporate media used its' propaganda power in enabling Bush to power long before the election even started beginning in March of 99 with continuous slander and libel against Gore while giving Bush a free pass to the White House.

The corporate media has blood on its' hands.

That Lying Liar!

He spent weeks in Florida just before the election preaching to his sheep to 'stay the course.'

I hope those 90,000+ idiots can sleep at night.

Nader had zero to do with the treason against the American people in 2000.

Nader and anyone else who wants to run for the presidency in this country have every right to do so. Nader broke no laws, it's how our democracy works. If you want to change the laws, then work on doing so, I for one do not want to prevent anyone from running for office, unless they are a criminal.

The actual treasonous bastards on the SC thank you for covering for them, though. That meme is a right wing meme, and has been from day one.

The Felonious Five committed treason.

Ralph Nader had zero to do with the theft of the 2000 election.

No matter how many times the few remaining, lonely voices still attempting to push this to cover for the actual criminals, however inadvertantly, say so.

although 'not technically so'. The reason he used 'not technically so' is because, as he explained, to break a law there has to be one. But Congress never wrote a law that declared the SC stealing an election to be a crime. Because it never occurred to anyone that it could or would actually ever happen.

http://www.thenation.com/article/none-dare-call-it-treason?page=0,5
None Dare Call It Treason

The author does seem a bit slippery in calling the decision treason.

Thanks for posting the excerpts.

USSC, he acknowledges that there was no precedent for this kind of crime in the law, mainly because it was not imagined. He is one of America's top prosecutors so while he is outraged at what the called, 'defiling the law', he understands that without a specific statute, it is necessary to add a disclaimer to the charge of treason.

Others were not so circumspect in their writings about this crime. But Bugliosi is stickler for the law.

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court...

The Gang of Five are not traitors. They have not waged war or befriended the military enemies of the United States. The Gang of Five are the enemies of the United States!

Because you've got to be smoking something to say that. Why would the right wing care about Nader knocking Gore out of the race? They think Bush won on his own. It's a left wing idea that Nader was a part of Gore's defeat and it always has been. You must get real.

to take the attention away from the biggest crime ever committed against the American people by their own plants on the SC.

Rove is very clever. I was there, arguing with right wingers on mixed forums at the time, and that was their favorite response to anyone who raised the very real issues surrounding that treasonous decision. Always, they claimed that 'liberals are just refusing to admit that their favorite moron, Ralph Nader, took votes from Gore and that is how Bush won'.

And that is why to see it now being pushed by some on the Left, makes me wonder sometimes.

Nader had zero to do with the theft of that election. See my post above (or maybe below with Vincent Bugliosi's article on that crime, written right after. You will notice that Nader is not even a factor in his deductions. For good reason.

Plenty of Democrats and progressives were upset about Nader as a spoiler. I was here when it happened. It wasn't rightwingers pushing that. It was recognizing what Nader had done. Why the hell do you think Michael Moore got down on his knees in front of Nader in 2004 and begged him not to run?

Please go sell that bullshit somewhere else.

crime of the century. Gore won the election, you seem to forget that. Simple logic says that if Gore won, the election was stolen, period and had NOTHING to do with anyone OTHER than the thieves who stole it.

The constant whining about Nader's perfectly legal action, while ignoring the crime that was the actual cause of what happened, is pure BS and always was, and yes, it was jumped on by the far right to distract from what their party did back then. I was there talking to them trying to get them to understand what happened.

Not one legal analysis of that crime has EVER included Nader's legal run for the WH as a cause of the election being handed to Bush. To continue to whine about it is simply petty and has no basis in fact.

Q.E.D.

You're free to go about your Naderlicious way.

you are free to go straight to ignore, with all the other sarcastic, derisive, unpleasant folk incapable of mounting a cogent argument without insulting others.

you just made:

From my comment, where I supposedly 'backed off' the notion that this was a rightwing idea:

Whether you are saying that knowing you are wrong or not is of no consequence to me. I don't care if you're lying or you're ignorant. Whichever you find less insulting, assume I said that.

The fact is, the truth is PLENTY of progressives and Democrats before and after the 2000 election were upset with Nader for running and expressed it at the time. It was not a right wing thing at all. And why you are here pushing the notion that it was always and only a rightwing thing, I don't know. But you're wrong, so wrong that I don't know how you remember to breathe. And as long as you're here making excuses for Ralph Nader in 2000, I will be here correcting the record and showing you to be wrong.

So there's that.

an open forum when this crime was committed. That means there were right and left posters on the board. We were all upset with Nader or anyone else, eg, the hundreds of thousands of democrats who voted for Bush, not to mention the Right Wingers who were purging voters and manipulating the machines etc. That board was fierce. Right wingers dominated it.

When people like ME insisted a crime had been committed, they attacked me by using the claim that 'if your liberal friend Nader had stayed out of the race, maybe your hero Gore might have won'. This was a defense by them against the facts, that Gore had WON the election, regardless of Nader, regardless of the hundreds of thousands of Dems who voted for Bush, regardless of all the cheating.

But the one thing they did NOT want to discuss was the fact that GORE WON and that NONE OF THOSE OTHER FACTORS had anything to do with the fact that the election was stolen from him. And it feels very strange now to be making the same arguments here that I made then, to keep the focus on the fact that GORE WON and the ELECTION WAS STOLEN BY THE SC.

Maybe you needed to be have been in the middle of the right wing all out attempt to defend the SC at the time, and they did it every way they could, and one of those ways was to use NADER as a reason for Gore's loss, except that GORE DID NOT LOSE.

I will NOT forget it, I received death threats for refusing to allow them to distract from the massive crime that had just been committed by USING Nader and any other distraction they could find. And it's sad to see the same thing happening here frankly.

I don't know why you would deny what you clearly wrote. But I don't have to live in your head.

I'm sorry you got death threats. That's stupid and no one should have to go through that. But that doesn't give you permission to spread false statements about Ralph Nader and then pretend you didn't say them.

Now lie about that.

he could do it.

And if he did, he could pull votes from the Democrats and the Republicans?

Are you saying we should prevent US Citizens from running for elected office? Is it written in the Constitution that there are only two political parties in this country? No, and do you know why?

One doesn't have to be on drugs to recognize how much this meme has been pushed to distract us from what actually happened...

The "it's all Nader's fault" canard is part of the smoke and mirrors.

You're not the only one who finds this particular right wing meme tiresome...

I hope he can sleep at night.

Gore ran a horrible campaign.

They did it for the promise of favors from the Bush FCC.

for opening the Internet to the people.

The Internet magnified the American Peoples' freedom of speech power more than anything since the First Amendment was adopted over two hundred years ago.

However the corporate media came to view the growing Internet as threatening their top down, one way business model of telling the American People what reality was for profit and power.

It was the instantaneous, mass two way communication and dissemination of information that scared them, the corporate media couldn't control it, the genie was out of the bottle, having said that, they would and will certainly try.

The ownership and upper management saw the writing on the wall and as their enmity of Gore grew, they decided to play Zeus to Gore's Prometheus having their puppet pundits play the role of the vulture taking bites from Gore's significant credibility with continuous slander and libel ie: "Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet," etc. etc. etc. for the better part of two years prior to the selection of 2000 while they gave an incompetent Bush a free pass to the most powerful job in the land.

In the final analysis the race of 2000 was close enough for Bush to steal because Gore championed the Internet and the established corporate media absolutely had it in for him. If the corporate media actually had the grace and integrity to give Gore credit for his leadership and legislative achievements instead of slandering him about it, he would have won in a landslide.

As in those foolish enough to believe that Bush was the same as Gore. Anyone who did their research on Dumbya would have known that he would be much, much worse than his dad.

In order to win votes you have to appeal to enough of the voters. He didn't and he lost.

Blaming the voters he failed to appeal to sounds kind of foolish.

...you can say the two little socialist parties in Florida each also let Bush pull this off.

Many things let them "pull this off":
The "felon purge" that threw legal voters off the rolls
The misleading butterfly ballots
The fact that the machines were not set to reject under- or over-votes on the spot and resolve the issue before the voter left
Not challenging illegal absentee ballots (like ones dated after the election) despite the Republicans feeling no inclination to do likewise. Thanks Joe Lieberman!

Let's not forget the Clinton-era anti-labor, anti-consumer, "pro-business" polices (NAFTA, media consolidation, offshoring, etc.) that let Nader get any traction with his myopic "no difference" line.

And that's before looking at electronic voting machines, since I don't remember off the top of my head if they were a factor in Florida in 2000.


This was the closest election in American history, and the Supreme Court made a politically-based decision that went against the supposed "originalist"views of the majority and was so naked they said the decision should not be used for precedent in the future.

But hey, why hit them with that when there's a chance to grind your axe about Naderites again?

So yes, third parties Destroyed America.

If Ralph Nader had ran for Congress that year, instead of satisfying his ego, we could have had him as a great voice in Congress, and no Bush II.

Have fun with your axe grinding.

You are speaking as if Gore lost. He did not, the election was stolen, NOT by Nader whose actions were perfectly legal. The election was stolen by the SC in order to prevent Gore from taking his rightful place in the WH.

It's instructive to see the attempt to let the SC criminals off the hook by looking for a scapegoat to divert attention from the crime of the century.

Can I ask you a question? Why are you covering for those criminals? Not one legal analyst has ever used Nader as a factor in the theft of the 2000 election. So why do we continue to see this attempt to let them off the hook?

Gore won, Nader and Bush lost. What happened after that had nothing to do with Nader.

I have to live under results of their action -- so should they.

"President Barack Obama's campaign has recruited a legion of lawyers to be on standby for this year's election as legal disputes surrounding the voting process escalate... Since the disputed 2000 presidential election, both parties have increasingly concentrated on building legal teams - including high-priced lawyers who are well-known in political circles - for the Election Day run-up. The Bush-Gore election demonstrated to both sides the importance of every vote and the fact that the rules for voting and counting might actually determine the outcome. The Florida count in 2000 was decided by just 537 votes and ultimately landed in the Supreme Court."

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014152936

FULL story at link.
Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20120627/D9VL56IG0.html

James Fucking Douchebag Baker said that over and over again during that horrible month after the 2000 election, repeated by the fucking Republican echo chamber. The media reported the chair throwing battle, not the least interested in the facts that nobody knew who actually won the election and maybe the only way was a total recount of FL votes.

Total fail. And we got 8 years of Bush as a result. Still pissed off about this.

tell the children to remember the villains

and how many lives would not have been lost in a costly war that nobody wanted in Iraq. Not even to mention 9/11. It will be remembered as the worst mistake we've ever made imo. In contemporary times.

Placing politics and wealth above the good of the country - the GOP motto.

It was a bloodless coup. They did not intend to lose no matter what.

including Congress and everyone involved that could have changed the outcome.

How did that happen except that the ballots were flawed?

but then attempted to make their intention clear, by (for example) circling the name of the candidate that they *really* wanted to vote for.

Last edited Thu Jun 28, 2012, 02:13 AM - Edit history (1)

The Republicans' threat to still submit a Republican slate of electors to the electoral college regardless if the recount continued and Gore prevailed, was an unconstitutional move which if truly carried out would have enabled the Electoral College to not count Florida's slate. Of course, we do know who presided over that vote, but that still would have not changed the unalterable facts. It is unconstitutional to change the way a state government selects its slate of electors after an election has been held but before the electoral college meets. Florida's state constitution outlined how that slate would be decided, and even the state legislature could not constitutionally change the state constitution and changed that process after the vote but before the electoral college met. This is irrefutable. That of course did not stop the Republicans from threatening it and many people believing they would do exactly this.

Three counties in Florida NEVER submitted its final tallies for consideration in any of the re-examination of the ballots conducted by the papers at a later time. They refused and even though pressure was applied until the last minute, these three counties still held out. It would have been impossible to have a truly accurate assessment by the papers without all counties' ballots being considered. This is a little known fact.

Yes one can disagree with the ruling by simply saying the Supreme Court had no constitutional authority to even challenge the Florida Supreme Court's decision. The clear reading of the U.S. Constitution turns the running of the Presidential election over to the states, and each state is to have in its State Constitution a specific outline for how the election will be handled. The U.S. Supreme Court has no authority to challenge the results of a Presidential election conducted by any state as long as the state constitution is in place and is followed. None. Well, actually it has no authority to challenge a state's slate that should do that; that is the responsibility of the Electoral College, and there is precedent it has happened.

And beyond that using a law that was enacted during the days of the Pony Express delivering the slate of electors to the Electoral College, the Safe Harbor provision which deadline was enacted so that the horses would leave the states on time in order to arrive before the votes were counted is no excuse in the 21st Century to discount 51 million votes nationwide. None.

That is it for this evening. Hope I didn't make any silly mistakes because of the lateness of the hour, but this is one issue that always merits a comment regardless of the lateness of the evening.

Sam

The bottom line is the USSC installed an illegitimate poser in the White House, it was nothing short of a coup.

Vin

I'm pretty sure we all knew a bloodless coup had occurred. Took a while to come out of shock.

I hope a historian has the five thousand or more messages per day that raced through the Table Talk Florida threads at Salon. Instant reaction to history being made.

The only echo that stays in my head is "How much harm can he do?" someone asked me rather smugly as if I were making an unseemly fuss by insisting that Americans would die because of the court's decision.

n/t

Its because of decisions like Bush v. Gore and Citizens United that the approval rating of the Supreme Court stands at only 44% and 75% of people say the justices' decisions are sometimes influenced by their personal or political views. The Supreme Court has no one to blame but themselves.

and Lieberman helped

History is written by the winners

and we lost

My vote was not counted and not one Senator gave a damn.

What did they know/what were they told that the rest of us were left out of? History is not finished with this coup, at least outside this country.

They do seem to have an underlying fear of standing up to the crooks.

understand how they let it happen. It was so blatant.

I went to bed in NM with the exit polls showing Kerry ahead by quite a bit, but woke to news that the exit polls did not match the 'actual' outcome. After that, I got involved in a successful effort to demand auditable, voter-verified ballots. We were fortunate in NM that we now have those, but damn, I believe they stole two elections by 'electronic (only) voting machines'.

AND CAGED 50,000 VOTERS OUT OF THEIR POTENTIAL VOTES.

But very few were reporting it and nobody was listening anyway.

Better late than never, I suppose...

what has happened since. Damn we need a time machine.

The coup has happened.

...as written by life-long Republican, Vincent Bugliosi:

http://faculty.rcc.edu/sellick/None%20Dare%20Call%20It%20Treason.pdf

it is important, historically and structurally, but it can't be undone now.

I think one thing to take away from this is to make sure that our ballots are marked the way we want them to be before we turn them in. It's a little thing, I admit, but it sometime that can be done.

Jim Baker was given the job of making sure George Jr. was sworn in and in his own words he "fixed" it.

It's not too late to go back and get some accountability. They stole the election.

Most of our really pressing problems can be traced back to that time in 2001 when an un-elected president was installed in office.

That was the end of the republic as we knew it. If we ever hope to fix the problem we have to go back to the root cause and recognize the shock and the consequences that followed in it's wake. We'll probably never fix it but if we want to try we've got to go back to the 2000 election and examine the mistakes.

but said he had a powerful conservative mandate anyway, then governed that way.

Our great hope and change agent took an actual, enormous mandate from the people for progressive change and governed like he stole his election.

Is going to go down as the worst in our nation's history. Scalia, Thomas, O'Connor, Reinquist and Kennedy are traitors, and this new bunch is not any better. This alone is a huge reason why every liberal needs to get out and vote for President Obama and for a Democratic Congress this fall. It's imperative that we get two more liberal-leaning justices without an asshole Republican Congress obstructing the President's first choice.

the Brooks Brothers Mob should have been machine gunned when they stormed the recall, using the SYG laws.. If, even after the official results showed that Gore was the president, the corrupt 5 had given the presidency to Stupid. the SCOTUS building should have been taken over by force and the perpetrators handed over to the DoJ or dealt with summarily. That's what would have happened in a civilized country. The so-called 2nd Amendment Dems should have jumped at the chance to preserve the nation. But as usual they were of no help against this highest of crimes.

When the coup was allowed to stand, the fascists knew they could get away with, literally anything. As that truth has been proven consistently over the last 12 years.

how millions of tax dollars were used to rig the election...

It crashed in New York City. To me, still under suspicious circumstances.

The hell with 2000 and 2004. Nothing can be done about that now.

They are preparing to steal this one. Organize and mobilize.

[img][/img]

When he was a REPUBLICAN putting on a show for the cameras.

Republicans claim this guy just couldn't see votes for Bush when it was the other way around. He would repeatedly look at it from every angle, drawing out the time and then say, "Vote is undetermined" and pass it on to hear the others on the board say, "Vote for Gore" after a single glance.

Funny how the guy INSTANTLY said, "Vote for Bush" every time one of THOSE came up.

I REALLY hate these people.

Supreme Court bashing, perhaps. Florida election machinery bashing, perhaps. Why do you see a reminder that, if a full recount had tried to determine voting intentions as best as possible for all cases, Gore would have won, as "dem bashing"?

Kerry for not "fighting" yet, let Dems like McAullife and party leadership off the hook. They were more interested in HRC than anything else. Kerry and Momma T and true people that supported them worked their tails off.

People may disagree, but there are people that counter with facts, yet they continue to fall on deaf ears with "Kerry caved, folded, didn't fight, let ME down, threw the election, I sent him money etc." Rove fans love it when we eat our own.

Maybe he should just come out and say what he really did, but it will never shut the haters up here.

IGT we can excuse Gore, but blame ONLY Kerry and find fault in anything he does, yet let an inept DNC chair and party off the hook.

The only post that gets remotely close to what you claim is #52. And since the thread starter has only been on DU for two weeks, I think you can't even be incorrectly using 'OP' to mean 'original poster' and referring to some long-running feud with them.