I thought "J" was taken by Hurricane Jeanne, but I guess I was wrong. History's greatest monster is at it again:
Voting arrangements in Florida do not meet "basic international requirements" and could undermine the US election, former US President Jimmy Carter says.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, the Bush junta just can't be trusted can it? Been to St. Louis lately Jimmuh? I heard a piece on NPR over the weekend concerning the presence of international observers of the election here in St Louis because of problems in the past. Throughout an extended discussion, there was no mention of the fact that 100% of all elected officials in the City of St. Louis are Democrats and have been for a long time, that voters in the City of St. Louis are overwhelmingly Democrats, and that the judge in the City of St. Louis who issued the order to keep polls open late in St. Louis is a Democrat.
Part of the problem in understanding the issues here lies with what is meant by "St. Louis." Those of you not from anywhere around the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers may think of St. Louis as a large metropolitan area with a population of about 2,500,000 people. But the City of St. Louis is a small, and shrinking, conclave of about 350,000 people run by a hopelessly corrupt city government surrounded by growing, successful suburbs that are increasingly trending Republican. All of the problems you heard about in the 2000 election occurred in the City of St. Louis where Democrats ended up screwing Democrats because their level of corruption is exceeded only by the level of their incompetence when it comes to conducting an election. Even now, after promises to fix the problems in 2000:
Sloppy paperwork and bad math were blamed for St. Louis being the last jurisdiction to report its final results to the state in Tuesday’s primary election.
Final results from the city weren’t reported until 3:30 a.m. yesterday, more than four hours after St. Louis County reported its results.
The St. Louis Board of Elections said workers made counting errors at individual precincts.
"The issue is not voter fraud," said Gary Stoff, the board’s Republican director. "The issue, if you will, is sloppiness and not doing the paperwork properly."
Derio Gambaro, chairman of the election board, said the entire process would be reviewed before the general election in November.
"We are not going to be there until 3:30 in the morning in November," Gambaro said.
Gambaro said the city announced preliminary results at 7 p.m. Tuesday and updated them a few hours later. Close to midnight, somebody noticed problems.
Election officials discovered that in about 15 percent of the city’s roughly 200 precincts, there were discrepancies between the number of ballots tabulated by voting machines and the number counted by election judges.
Election officials discovered adding and subtracting errors by poll workers. Stoff said some workers did not properly account for spoiled ballots. Other times they counted a packet as containing 50 ballots when it held 100.
I guess we should be thankful that all the known dogs registered in 2000 have been purged from the voter lists. No word about the large number of voters registered for the 2000 election with vacant lots as their residence of record. But back to history's greatest monster -- I remember the good old days when ex-presidents stayed out of the fray and accepted that their time was past. In a way that may be too obscure for some readers, this reminds me of what my brother-in-law told his parents once when they complained about his child-rearing practices:
"My children are my responsibility. You had your chance with me. If you raised me right, then you shouldn't be complaining. If you raised me wrong, what makes you think I want to give you another chance?"