Letters to the Editor
bloomsbury
Published Letters: 407 Editor's Choice: 5
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caging and cheating
[Read the article: Clinton denies she said Obama can't win]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If Obama can't win it will because of things like this:
CNN’s Ohio exit polls broadcast just after midnight on election day in 2004 gave out these figures: Among women voters, Kerry won 53% of the vote compared with 47% for Bush. Among men voters, Kerry won 51% of the vote while Bush won 49%. So how did Kerry lose Ohio? It’s really very simple. In America you can cast your vote but you have absolutely no guarantee that it will be counted. In every election ballots cast are simply thrown away, and the votes thrown away run into the millions. They are called ‘spoiled’ votes, supposedly unreadable and therefore invalid. They are just not counted.
In Ohio, 153,237 ballots were thrown away – more than the Bush ‘victory’ margin of 5,988. In Iowa Bush ‘won’ by 13,498 votes but 36,811 votes were thrown away. In all 3.5 million votes cast in 2004 were never counted. As Joe Stalin said: ‘It’s not the people who vote who count, it’s the people who count the votes.’ Tens of thousands more votes were lost because voters were prevented from ever casting a vote. And this is where the nasty spectre of race rears its ugly head. In Ohio 14.4% of black votes cast were not counted but only 1.6% of white votes cast were not counted. In Florida over half (54%) of the ‘spoiled’ votes thrown away as invalid were cast by black voters who, as the Republicans know only too well, usually vote Democrat. Only 13% of America’s population is black but black voters have a 900% higher chance of having their vote classed as ‘spoiled’. Yes, it could be a coincidence but what are the odds? Especially when it favours only the Republicans. In Florida, in 2000, black voters cast 54% of the 179,855 ballots ‘spoiled’. It’s possible to calculate that Al Gore would have received a vote in Florida that was 77,000 votes higher, had the spoiled votes been counted. Bush won Florida by 537 votes.
In Bernalillo County, Albuquerque, Precinct 512, Bush received 206 votes even though only 166 votes were cast.
Bush also won Precinct 558 where 178 absentee voters cast 319 votes.All of them for Bush.For Kerry, strangely, the reverse was true. In Precinct 46 the gremlins had been busy. Of 207 ballots cast, 114 had no vote recorded for President. Precinct 46 is a Democrat stronghold.The number of dead people who voted in New Mexico was 2,087. This was half of Bush’s winning margin. They can only do this with the black vote. The white vote is too diverse and can go either way. If Obama is the candidate they can be even more certain that they can 'cage' and discard the black vote. The only black voters who know they were cheated of their vote are those who are turned away at the polling station, falsely accused of being felons or told they're not on the roll. But millions of black voters have their votes discarded and they don't even know about it.
Perhaps the crowning idiocy of the whole sad mess that is the American electoral system is the poll tape from one U.S. Precinct in 2004 which Greg Palast had photographed for his 2007 book, Armed Madhouse. This poll tape doesn’t even show John Kerry listed as a candidate in the election. But even when voters go to the trouble of actually writing in the candidates’ name the message still does not compute, if the candidate is a Democrat. In San Diego, in 2004, the Democratic candidate for mayor lost by 2,108 votes. Even though 5,551 absentee ballots had her name clearly written on them the Republican election officials decided that these 5,551 votes could be tossed out because they hadn’t ticked the box next to her name. An aberration? Not really. In 2004, at least half a million absentee ballots were received but not counted.
Hillary Clinton is only being responsible in pointing out how impossible it is for Obama to win.
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the President is teflon
[Read the article: Why did Clinton wait to release her tax return?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Wouldn't it be great if George W. Bush had been subjected to one scintilla of the examination that Hillary Clinton will get?
Wouldn't it be wonderful if Americans had known before he was elected that he was a retard, a criminal, a war monger, a failed businessman who went awol from the armed forces and avoided service in Vietnam because his father was rich and that his family was in bed with the bin Laden family and the Saudis and that his clique wanted to start a world war? Gee, somehow it just slipped under the radar, like the plane that hit the Pentagon. Tsk, tsk, tsk. He's a Republican, for God's sake! Things like that are just a given. Naive of me to carp.
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very funny
[Read the article: Can Stephen Colbert save America?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Late night comedy? What do you think the Bush Administration is? You have a President who said in a public forum "I know that fish and human beings can live in peace." He also said he was going to terrorise America - and that's the only promise he ever kept. Stewart, Colbert and Maher pay good money for lines like the ones Bush comes up with. The best comment on all of this is that Timothy Bottoms played George in 'That's my Bush' written by the creators of South Park and he also played George in a movie about 9/11. Nuff said. If you want to see the most ludicrously bad movie ever made, I recommend the 9/11 movie to you.