[Mb-civic] FW: A lobotomy for Democracy

[Michael Butler]

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From: "Hussey, Dermot" <Dermot.Hussey at xmradio.com>
Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 10:15:31 -0500
To: "'michael at michaelbutler.com'" <michael at michaelbutler.com>
Subject: FW: A lobotomy for Democracy


A Lobotomy For Democracy

John Maxwell

"The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which
all other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a
man to slavery." - Tom Paine


In the 1940s I remember reading an American magazine which was
trumpeting a new cure for anti-social behaviour. This now discredited
surgical operation was called prefrontal lobotomy or leukotomy, in which
the nerves connecting the frontal lobe to the higher centres of the
brain were cut. The procedure, invented by a Portuguese surgeon, won him
a Nobel Prize. Lots of supposedly anti-social people were 'cured' by
this operation,"

As it turned out, the operation destroyed the personality and left the
victims emotional zombies. One woman said that after the operation her
daughter was present physically but her soul was somewhere else.

Troublemakers among the rich and famous were often subjected to the
operation. Rosemary Kennedy, sister of JFK, was given a lobotomy on the
orders of her dad, Joseph Kennedy. The result was so awful that she was
confined to a mental institution for the rest of her life. Frances
Farmer, a famously beautiful actress, was thought by her parents to be
too unruly.

"She was a radical political activist, communist sympathiser and of a
rebellious and aggressive nature ... After several squabbles with the
authorities, in 1942 she was wrongfully declared 'mentally incompetent',
committed by her parents to various asylums where all therapies failed
to tame her into "normalcy". In 1948 her parents ordered a lobotomy.
"She was released in 1953 from the Hospital, no longer a threat to
society.."- Renato M.E. Sabbatini, PhD ,The History of Psychosurgery in
Brain & Mind Magazine, June 1997.

Prefrontal lobotomy cured lots of troublesome ailments including
"nymphomania", socialism and the insatiable thirst for freedom.

Defining Moment

For me, the defining moment of the recent US Presidential Election came
about an hour before midnight. All night the CNN anchor, General Blitzer
had been refusing to reveal the results of the exit polls; CNN didn't
want to mislead people. But it was nevertheless becoming clear that John
Kerry was going to be the next President of the United States. Robert
Novak was a panellist on Blitzer's show. Wan, demoralised, and
apparently near to complete collapse, Novak told Blitzer that he had
just been in touch with his GOP cronies in Ohio who told him that all
appeared to be lost.

What Novak did not know was that help was on the way in the shape of the
Diebold company, makers of electronic voting machines. Within hours,
Kerry was no longer winning but on the road to conceding the election to
Mr G W. Bush.

The Republicans had stolen the presidency of the United States for the
second time inn a row.

Suspension of Disbelief

The most significant thing about the state of US politics is the
compliant posture of the national press. They seem ready to believe
anything. They appear to have been lobotomised, physically present but
missing their souls.

Mark Twain got it right: Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only
take your life. It is far better that you fear the press, for they will
steal your Honor. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is
created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons
who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on
their way to the poorhouse "

(Thanks to Tom at (http://www.informationclearinghouse)

Exit polls, - asking people just after they voted who they voted for,
are not precise indicators, because they are sample surveys . But they
have always been more precise than the pre-election sampling. For years
the networks have depended on them. Only in 2002, in Florida, was there
any question of their reliability. And we soon found out why.

According to the US media on Tuesday night, the exit polls got it wrong.
This of course can only mean that people who voted for Bush told the
pollsters that they voted for Kerry. a most unlikely event.

And it would be interesting to discover why CNN and other news media
changed their published exit poll data after Wednesday morning.

Jonathan Simon of Alliance for Democracy notes, "Statistical
discrepancies were identified in key battleground states that exceeded
the margin of error of the exit polls. In Ohio, for instance, a 'shift'
of 3.1% toward Bush converted a 52% - 48% exit poll "victory" for Kerry
into a 51% - 49% electoral "victory" for Bush. Other critical states
showed similar anomalous results, each of which should occur less than
5% of the time. In the group of 12 critical states selected for
analysis, exit poll vs. tabulated vote shifts exceeded the polls' margin
of error in 4 cases, which according to statistical analysis [should]
occur only 0.2% (or one five-hundredth) of the time in the absence of
significant mistabulation of votes."

Simon also notes that exit polling appears inexplicably to have been
significantly more accurate in nonbattleground states than in the states
that were crucial to a Bush victory.

A civil rights group,Citizens for a Legitimate Government (CLG) (
(www.legitgov.org)) declares: "Rather than objectively exploring reasons
for these identified discrepancies, the networks now glibly claim exit
polling based on scientific methodology is completely unreliable, and
have all but forgotten that there was a deep and widespread concern
about the reliability and security of the vote tabulating apparatus
leading up to this election."

CLG continues: "A statement by Wally O'Dell, the CEO of Diebold,
providers of Ohio's electronic voting equipment in August 2003, may have
foreshadowed the November 2 results, at least in Ohio. O'Dell, acting as
a Republican fundraiser at the time wrote, "I am committed to helping
Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president".. ...George Bush seemed
to take O'Dell's pledge at face value, hardly deigning to campaign in
Ohio, which was a confusing strategy to many pundits given the state's
cliffhanger closeness and critical importance."


A crucial statistic

One crucial statistic made me quite sure that the election was stolen.
It is a well recorded phenomenon that after an election result is known,
more people will claim to have voted for the winner than actually did.

After this election is a remarkable fact that only 51% of the US
electorate said they happy Mr Bush had been elected. The post-election
bandwagon effect is well documented. Response error tied to
over-estimation of voting is one of the oldest and most persistent types
of response error to be documented. ...[Stanley Presser] reports that such
response errors tend to range between 12 and 16 percent ... with the error
tending to be larger the closer a survey was done to the election.(
Robert H Prisuta A post election Bandwagon effect 1992 and Stanley
Presser: Can Context Changes Reduce Vote Over-reporting; Public Opinion
Quarterly, Wier 1990)

In this case, and as far as I can discover, only in this case does the
percentage claiming to have voted for the winner fall below the
percentage actually voting for him.

The US press in its cocoon of fantasy, pretends to believe that this
result is possible and accurate.

John Kerry and John Edwards, before the election, made great play of the
line that every vote counted and every vote must be counted. No one can
- without his consent - be deprived of his rights.. It says so even in
Third World constitutions..

President Carter's warning

Shortly after he returned from Venezuela in August, former President
Carter warned that the voting arrangements ion the United States for the
Presidential election could not be considered satisfactory. fair and
above board. This was in contrast to Venezuela, where they also used
voting machines, made in the USA, but those machines had a paper trail.

Many people foresaw the theft of the election. In an article for The
Nation, earlier in the year, (How They Could Steal the Election This
Time) Ronnie Dugger revealed that five out of every six US voters would
be casting votes in machines which could easily be programmed to produce
the wrong result. She predicted : The result could be the failure of an
American presidential election and its collapse into suspicions,
accusations and a civic fury that will make Florida 2000 seem like a
family spat in the kitchen. Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's Labor
Secretary, has written, "Automated voting machines will be easily
rigged, with no paper trails to document abuses." Senator John Kerry
told Florida Democrats last March, "I don't think we ought to have any
vote cast in America that cannot be traced and properly recounted."
Pointing out in a recent speech at the NAACP convention that "a million
African-Americans were disenfranchised in the last election," Kerry says
his campaign is readying 2,000 lawyers to "challenge any place in
America where you cannot trace the vote and count the votes" [
www.thenation.com/ Greg Palast, "Vanishing Votes," May 17, 2004].

The probability that the election was stolen becomes even more likely
when it is recalled that GOP majority Leader in the House Tom DeLay, and
the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, have for two years prevented a
vote on a bill requiring that all electronic voting machines should have
an auditable paper trail. Congressman Rush Holt introduced the bill
requiring all electronic voting machines to produce a voter-verified
paper ballot. The bill was co-sponsored by a majority of the members of
the House of Representatives, GOP and Democrat.

There were serious anomalies in the reported Florida vote. According to
the results there were 1,392,639 new voters There were 7,355,296 votes
cast in this election as against 5,963,657 in 2000 when according to the
official results, Bush got 2,912,790 in 2004 to Gore 's 2,912,253 a
difference of less than 600.

The split in 2000 was approximately 50/50. In this election Kerry got
3,459,293 or 47% while 3,836,216 or 53% voted for Bush. Despite the
Democrats outperforming the GOP 60/40 in registering new voters, Kerry
got half a million more while Bush got twice as many. Unbelievable. We
must believe, contrary to all the known facts, that there was a swing to
Bush of 8%! Bush got 32% more in 2004 than four years before, while
Kerry increased Gore's total by only 19% !!

But there was no swing. According to one exit pollster both candidates
retained 90% of their party's 2000 vvoters. So the swing came in the
computers. In Florida people complained that their votes were recorded
for Bush although they had voted for Kerry.


Amazing and unbelievable

Republicans were so worried about their failure in signing up new voters
that they set out to intimidate and disqualify as many voters as
possible. Can anyone, even including the US press, believe that these
figures are anything but bogus?

The real problem is that many people cannot believe that the Republicans
could be so argrrant and barefaced to do what it is obvious that they
must have done. On KLAS-FM on Wednesday morning, the two presenters
initially thought I was being funny when I said the election had been
stolen. But it isn't funny and forecasts horrendous consequences as we
shall see in Falluja shortly and perhaps Haiti.

After the 2000 election I predicted that we were in for a hard time. I
didn't think it was going to be this bad. I had no idea that democracy
itself and its handmaiden, the press, were scheduled for prefrontal
lobotomies.

The ultimate irony, of course, was provided by the American media who
solemnly pronounced that Bush won the election on moral values, despite
Enron, Halliburton, Iraq WMD, Abu Ghraib the Patriot Act and the host of
other scandals.

If that represents morality, perhaps we should all get prefrontal
lobotomies.

Even then, we should remember the strruggle doesn't end unless you give in.

Copyright(c)2004John Maxwell

johnn.maxwell02 at uwimona.edu..jm




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