Posted on 10/08/2002 5:49:46 PM PDT by rintense
President Bush headed to Knoxville, Tennessee to speak to workers at Alcoa regarding the war on terror, and once again called on Congress to pass the Homeland Security and terrorism insurance bills. Before heading to Alcoa, Bush spoke in favor of Republican gubernatorial candidate Van Hilleary at the Cherokee Aviation Hanger. Bush also asked Attorney General Ashcroft to seek an injunction under the Taft-Hartley Act, ending the lockout and requiring work at the ports to resume at a normal pace. The injunction is done as a cooling off period for both parties involved. Enjoy your daily dose of Dubya!
I was in the relatively conservative Atlanta chapter, in the mid-70's, when Karen DeCrow, and then Ellie Smeal, both from the leftist-liberal side of NOW hijacked it. Karen was a _big_ Native Indian from Syracuse -- it was odd seeing her with her four big bouncer-type body guards at the National Convention in Philadelphia.
And in Baltimore, Chicago and Los Angeles, allegations are surfacing of roving bands of voters who were taken in buses from precinct to precinct to vote in place of registered voters who had moved away or who had never voted before.
"We are relatively certain people were being taken from polling place to polling place and allowed to vote," said Republican national committeewoman from Maryland, Ellen Sauerbrey.
But not everyone believes that motor voter is all bad. Maryland Republican activist and statistician Henry C. Marshall has done a comprehensive analysis of new registrations in Maryland over the past five years and found that motor voter has actually reduced the Democrats' share from 61.2 percent of total voters to 57.1 percent.
Part of the shift has been a surge in new voters registering as Independents. But it has also resulted from cleansing the voter rolls of the estimated 17-20 percent of voters who leave the state every year. Under motor voter rules, the state board of elections may use change-of-address forms filed with the MVA to purge former residents from the rolls. Marshall believes the biggest problem is not motor voter itself, but the failure to require new voters to provide proof of citizenship when they sign up to vote. "In 1996, 11 percent of the people voting in Maryland were non-citizens," Marshall believes. Out of the 1,793,991 votes officially cast, that amounts to 197,339 illegal votes. While it's virtually impossible to verify such figures, they suggest the potential scope of the problem nationwide, especially in states with close elections.
The midnight coup
Ellen Sauerbrey became an unwilling expert on election fraud following her 1994 bid to become Maryland's governor, which she lost to Democrat Parris Glendening. All during election night as precincts reported in, Sauerbrey remained ahead. Then, close to midnight, results started pouring in from precincts in Baltimore City, giving Glendening a 5,993-vote victory. It was the closest race in Maryland in 70 years.
To this day, Sauerbrey and her running mate, former Howard County police chief Paul Rappaport, believe the election was stolen by Democratic party operatives who stuffed ballot boxes and altered voting machines after the polls were closed.
Sauerbrey's failed challenge of the 1994 election results dragged through the courts for more than six months, and her opponents accused her of being a sore loser.
Drake Ferguson, a private investigator who headed a volunteer group that helped document Sauerbrey's allegations of voter fraud, found that 75 percent of Baltimore City's 408 precincts had "severe flaws" in election-day records, including election cards that were either unsigned or had names different from the printed name on them.
The group also claimed that 5,832 more votes were tallied in Baltimore City than there were voters who checked in at precincts or cast absentee ballots -- mirroring Glendening's election margin almost exactly. They found that keys to voting machines had been duplicated, and that some people had voted more than once. Sauerbrey even remembers investigators reporting back to her that they had traced the addresses listed by scores of Baltimore City voters to boarded-up houses and to vacant lots.
But Glendening's appointee to head the state board of elections, Linda Lamone, rejected Sauerbrey's allegations of fraud, noting that a Democratic trial court judge and the state attorney general, also a Democrat, had found they had "no merit."
I'm hoping some of you may have also seen it and notice that "under God" is clearly missing. If I saw it right, we should probably hit them with many e-mails of complaint for their taking such editing license with our Pledge of Allegiance.
I appreciate his style of communication. Straight, forward, to the point...and truthful.
A Southern California Gay former Radical Feminist at that. Who'd a thunk.
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