Lots of things you can do to help stop the madness without even having to get out of your chair...
More urgent news relating to the voter fraud investigation (yeah! MoveOn.org is finally getting involved!)
Questions are swirling around whether the election was conducted honestly or not. We need to know -- was it or wasn't it?
If people were wrongly prevented from voting, or if legitimate votes were mis-counted or not counted at all, we need to know so the wrongdoers can be held accountable, and to help prevent this from happening again. That's why we believe that:
"Congress must investigate the integrity of the voting process in the 2004 election."
In the news today Kerry and his people have also been taking an interest in Ohio, and the New Hampshire investigation is under way. (I'll take back everything I ever said about Ralph Nader if he can use his position as a candidate to force the states to investigate this mess).
Almost singlehandedly keeping the ball rolling in the media:
Organizations in need of urgent help to keep the investigations going:
And there's a huge and very simple "to write to" list here with links and everything, all you've got to do is click and email :-)
Just checking in to let everyone know I haven't slit my wrists... During the weekend I went and got Mac Panther and found out when I was upgrading I had an "overlapped extent allocation" on my main hard drive, which resulted in me trying to upgrade for about 48 hours, then finally installing it on my backup drive just so I could get to my hard drive to backup files, then I had to do a CLEAN INSTALL (gulp!). I've never done one of those before, ever, and I'm still reinstalling everything. I had to dump half of my backup drive to get everything on there because I could not get my Toast to work (sigh), so I couldn't even dump anything onto a CD.
I haven't even tried to reinstall Suitcase yet, I tried the little Font Book think that came with the system, don't think it's going to make a dent in my fonts... Meanwhile I have stacks of eBay stuff piling up to list. But at least my newly reformatted Mac seems to be running much quicker now. Sparky also bought me a new LCD monitor, which came today and my eyes are still getting used to it but it's gorgeous! I read CNET's reviews for a week solid before picking this one out and I'm so glad I did. Now all of the photos I did on my old CRT monitor look really washed out, even my weblog looks much lighter.
So now I have a lot more desk space, a giant malfunctioning 19" CRT monitor sitting in the middle of the floor along with my fax machine, which is working fine, we just decided to drop the phone line it was on because all we were getting was paper-wasting junk mail. And supposedely I can now fax with Panther. We're going to keep the fax machine around, just in case, it's not really worth enough to sell and anything is better than having to go to Kinko's to fax.
I even had to get a new USB hub, I have no idea why, but my old one just sort of stopped working. And continuing on our buying spree for this week, I bought a halogen desk lamp which I'd always said I'd never buy, but I saw it on the way out of Microcenter and it was reasonable, and I'm SO sick of having bad lighting in my office so I caved. And so far, I have to admit I really like it. I'm trying to convince the cat that it's not a good thing to play around, I think she believes it's the sun, but she's been getting too close for my comfort. I had a friend with one at my old office and he used to burn things on it (banana peels being one of his more fragrant ideas).
Back to work, I'm drowning in eBay stuff because I took a hiatus last week (which turned out to be a good thing because apparently eBay's systems were screwed up all week). But now I'm behind because I couldn't use my computer for several days and I need to make at least a little bit of money this week to buy groceries, etc.
Crap, I just went to Apple to get the link for Panther and in 24 hours they have an even newer update than the one I spent the weekend installing (aaaaggh!)... not tonight...
When I woke up yesterday, I had this really bright idea... I was going to take a little image of the US and superimpose a black mourning ribbon that said "2004" on it and make a little JPG that people could put on their websites to represent how most of the US really feels. And make a little page they could link to explaining what it meant. But the more the day went on, the more I realized that instead of mourning, we need to act. Do something right now before all of this Enron accounting we call our Presidential election has been run through the shredders.
So instead, I've been trying to think of ways to get involved in trying to fix, or at least expose the truth about this election. If you watch the mainstream "liberal" media, they're all trying to cover their own asses and say that the exit polls must have been wrong, and that the majority of Americans really don't want a chance at health insurance, jobs and peace. No, they're more concerned with whether two gays can get married. That is just SO wrong, on so many levels. I know there is a little cult of Bushies out there that would kill for him in the name of God, but I really don't think the majority of Christians in America are mindless robots.
And for some reason even intelligent, educated people are completely thrown by the fact that computers counted the votes, and computers can't be wrong.... NOT!! It's like the OJ DNA thing, "whoa, science...". That's crazy, even if you have had just casual contact with computers you should know they screw up all the time. And if you've ever gotten a computer virus from an email or a shared disc (does anyone use floppies anymore?) you know easy it is for even one idiot to screw up the system. Imagine what a group of computer savvy corporate jerks could do with millions of dollars and giant corporations behind them.
So I'm with Randi Rhodes, I don't care if people think I'm nuts, I want all of these damned machines examined. There is a group dedicated to doing this already and they are trying hard right now, starting with challenging the election results in New Hampshire, where the variance in the exit poll and the electronic voting tallies are so opposite that it will make your head hurt (click here to see an example graphic comparing exit polls in states with paper ballots compared to those with electronic ballots)
We really don't have to just lower our heads and concede that intelligent Americans are outnumbered by brainless cult members. And we don't need to move to Canada. What makes you think you'd be safe in another country when the US is on an Empire-buuilding rampage? And we can't wait another four years to start thinking about the next election. If they fixed the last two elections, don't you think they already have 2008 all planned out? We don't have to be polite, we need to be demanding AND constructive. So if you can't do anything else, at least go to Black Box Voting.org (the .org NOT the .com people, they're some sort of lookalike scam) and give them the couple of bucks that you might spend on latte or a magazine today to help them with their cause. They've been tracking electronic voting problems since the last "election". The discussions I've heard today even state that some of the voting machines were programmed to start counting BACKWARDS when Kerry's totals reached 50%. I live in Houston, I had friends that worked for Enron, we've seen what can be done to deceive us before, especially if we don't expect people to answer our questions.
And while you're in a mood for justice, sign the petition at Impeach Bush.org (Crap! I just clicked this to check my links, and it says "Site Temporarily Unavailable", here comes Big Brother...)
P.S. The masks are coming off of some of the extreme Neo Cons (and just conservative bullies in general), they seem to feel like they don't even have to pretend to be nice to us anymore. If you don't believe it, watch the re-broadcasts of Bill Maher's last show for the season on HBO this week. He did a live satellite interview with Former U.S. Senator Alan Simpson (R - Wyoming) who went off on him like Zell Miller before he could get two words out. (Interesting threads here and here. It was really quite scary, reminds me of stories my dad told me about growing up in small town Texas during the Depression and how his mom would beat the crap out of him every day for his own good (to make him a better person, my dad is a saint, BTW), and let any of the neighbors beat him too if they thought he needed it.
So if you don't mind old coots and pumped up religious fundamentalists going off on you and whacking you with a stick for "your own good", do nothing. Or move to Canada...
More proof:
Glitch gave Bush extra votes in Ohio