-------------------------- eGroups Sponsor -------------------------~-~> <FONT COLOR="#000099">eGroups eLerts It's Easy. It's Fun. Best of All, it's Free! </FONT><A HREF="http://click.egroups.com/1/9698/2/_/1406/_/975422280/"><B>Click Here!</B></A> ---------------------------------------------------------------------_-> Please send as far and wide as possible. Thanks, Robert Sterling Editor, The Konformist http://www.konformist.com Time for a Revolt, er, Revote! Or, How George W. Bush, the Rich Kid Who Gets Away With Everything, is About to Get Away With His Own Little Putsch UPDATE 11/26/00 -- The U.S. Supreme Court, two of whose nine justices were appointed by George Bush Sr., made a "surprise" decision last week to hear an appeal from George Bush Jr. to further suppress votes (SURPRISE!). Bush wants to invalidate human recounts in three large Florida counties, in order that he, Junior, may become president. According to a story in the Los Angeles Times, the court will likely decide on the basis of an obscure 1887 law that has never been applied. The law states that elections cannot be decided by rules enacted after the voting is closed. So what's more important, the sanctity of a dormant, 113-year-old statute, or insuring that all votes are fairly counted. The answer is clear, according to the Bush people? It's the law no one's ever heard of. Anything to perpetuate the Bush family dynasty. Meanwhile, with projections showing that current recounts (if completed by today's 5pm EST deadline) could cut the Bush lead to fewer than 90 votes, the Republican power grab looks more and more like a Brown Shirt putsch. (And while we're with the Nazi metaphors, here's a news flash: according to a recent news report, former Justice Department prosecutor and Nazi-hunter John Loftus has turned up documents showing that the Bush family fortune came directly from investments made by Dubya's grandfather in the Third Reich.) In Miami-Dade County, the canvassing board called off its recount - despite 10,000 ballots there that have never been counted at all -- after a mob of Republican "demonstrators" nearly stormed their 19th floor meeting room. Now it turns out (in another, just, simply shocking development) that far from being the "spontaneous display of outrage," the protest was well orchestrated by Republicans from outside of Florida. ABC News reported on its Web site that the mobile demonstration was operated out of a trailer that, shortly after accomplishing its task in Miami-Dade County, wheeled on up to Broward County, another pro-Gore stronghold where it Gore's gains in the recount sliced Bush's statewide lead nearly in half. In fact, conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot, in a column praising the Miami-Dade near-riot, wrote that he personally witnessed John Sweeney, a Republican congressman from New York, bark the final order to the vigilante throng, commanding the obstreperous right-wingers (who should never have been allowed to congregate inside the county building anyway) to "shut it down" as it appeared the canvassing board was going ahead with plans to tally the 10,000 or so uncounted ballots. As Salon.com's Jake Tapper reported, "paid members of the Bush campaign excite the partisan crowds with their overheated rhetoric, hand out free T-shirts with incendiary slogans and otherwise engage in various under-the-radar shenanigans.... The tactics are legal, but hardly statesmanlike. Within the laughable claims that all the Bush staffers are just 'volunteers' lies, apparently, Bush's plausible deniability." Beyond the threats of mayhem, the Republicans have used all means at their disposal in a vicious but effective propaganda campaign filled with accusations ranging from the frightening (the inflammatory canard that Democrats deliberately attempted to throw out military ballots) to the laughable (one Republican charged that Democratic vote-counters were actually eating pieces of "chad"). Look, you can save the e-mails accusing us of shilling for Gore, or any of that crap. We've never been fans of Big Al. Frankly, we hope he has learned a bitter lesson from this whole sordid experience. Gore has spent his entire life functioning in, and perpetuating, a system of corporate-controlled, money-driven politics with the expectation that this system would eventually reward him by anointing him U.S. president. It must seem darkly ironic to him that now, just as he appeared to have reached that goal, ever element of that same machine is working to shut him out and to install a candidate who, by his very shallowness and inanity, would function as a far more effective (i.e. malleable) frontman for the big-business oligopoly. Sorry, Al. We feel bad for you. We really do. However, and this is a big however, we do believe, quaint as it may seem, that participatory government is a good thing. And the minimum -- MINIMUM -- requirement of participatory government is a system in which every citizen can cast a vote that counts. Al Gore, according to the latest nationwide tallies, has topped 50 million votes. This makes him the second-most voted-for presidential candidate in U.S. history -- and in terms of sheer vote numbers, the most popular non-incumbent candidate ever. (Only Ronald Reagan, an incumbent in 1984, topped Gore's current vote total.) Yet in all likelihood, Gore will not become president. The Gore Squad, whatever its self-interested motives, is attempting to keep that system of minimal participatory government in business, by insuring that every vote is counted fairly. The Bushublicans are doing everything in their power to rob citizens of the barest essentials of their already minuscule ability to influence their government, and to seize control by any means they can. And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming... If you are interested in a free subscription to The Konformist Newswire, please visit http://www.eGroups.com/list/konformist/ and sign up. Or, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject: "I NEED 2 KONFORM!!!" (Okay, you can use something else, but it's a kool catch phrase.) Visit the Klub Konformist at Yahoo!: http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/klubkonformist
