Democrats' crazy talk music to GOP (Teresa, John Kerry, Hillary)

It looks like Teresa Heinz Kerry is rubbing off on her husband. And on Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. For the Republican Party, this is a good thing.

You'll recall that last month, Heinz Kerry put on her shiniest tinfoil hat and blamed the Democrats' loss in November on rigged voting machines. As reported in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, she openly questioned the election results and fixated on areas of the country where optical scanners were used to record votes. "Two brothers own 80 percent of the machines used in the United States," Heinz Kerry intoned, and it is "very easy to hack into the mother machines."

Asked for evidence of her theory, the ketchup heiress refused further comment. Glitches happen. And no technology is fool-proof. But unhinged Democrats have obsessed on the fact that the chief executive of Diebold, the leading vote machine manufacturer, is a Bush supporter in order to turn inevitable errors into a Vote-Swallowing Grand Master Plan.

As liberal journalist David Corn pointed out, "Left-of-center accusers have promoted contradictory theories." On the one hand, they accuse Diebold and other vendors of "putting in the fix via the paperless touch-screen machines." On the other hand, they claim that conspirators in Florida rigged "optical-scan voting, not electronic touch-screen voting." Or is it both?

Corn notes that scholars at Cornell, Harvard and Stanford dismissed the Florida fraud allegations as "baseless." And the Voting Technology Project, a cooperative effort between the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found "no particular patterns" relating to voting systems and the final results.

Immediately after the election, John Kerry avoided the deepest fever swamps of the crackpot left. But Teresa's kooky pillow-talk has apparently taken effect. On Sunday, Kerry dredged up allegations of Republican trickery and voter scare tactics in a speech before the League of Women Voters: "Last year, too many people were denied their right to vote, too many who tried to vote were intimidated."

Kerry activists made much hay about the long lines and shortage of voting machines in swing districts. But their lawsuit in Ohio based on those claims was dismissed. And as Mark Niquette of the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch told ABC's "Nightline," "If you talk to the election officials here in Franklin County, they'll tell you, the main problem was there just weren't enough machines overall, that even Republican-leaning precincts had long lines."

Singing from the same hysteria-promoting hymn book in Minnesota this week, Sen. Clinton further stoked Democratic madness. Sarcastically praising the elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, Clinton pounced: "I believe that the right to vote and the obligation to count all the votes should be promoted not just in the Middle East, but in the Middle West! And in the Northeast! And in the Southeast! And in every. Corner. Of. The. United. States. Of. A-MEH-rica!"

The crowd went wild. Clinton continued: Too many minorities and college students have been "denied an equal right" to vote, she exclaimed. (Her "moderate" solution? An election reform bill that allows illegal aliens and felons and people without IDs to vote.)

The Democrats now seem to believe that the road to the White House is paved with paranoia. Well, let them keep babbling. The evil genius Karl Rove himself couldn't have come up with a better plan.

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Teresa and Hillary are right, there was voter intimidation. I saw it first hand in Florida while volunteering.

The only part they have wrong is that it was Kerry thugs intimidating Bush supporters and voters. I can't count how many times I was told to get lost, and voters who approached me and other BC04 volunteers got vulgar tongue lashings from the Kerrorists. They tried to block our signs and stepped on our stuff. A couple of Kerrorists tried to bait us into physical fights too. Yes, a very welcoming environment for Bush voters, indeed.

This will make it much easier to run vote-buying schemes, because the voter can redeem the correctly filled out receipt for cash. ...A voter reciept can serve no useful function for the purposes of a recount, because it would be patently impossible to retrieve them all, and there is no chain-of-custody over the reciepts, making any retrieved useless and suspect.

Most of the proposals I have heard allow the voter to check and approve the receipt, but then it gets put in a locked box at the site. This would answer both of your objections.

Moreover, there are some clever proposals for creating bar codes and timestamps that authenticate the individual ballot receipts, preventing ballot box stuffing, while preserving anonymity.

I think it's a good idea, as I trust Republican politicians only marginally more than I trust the Dems.

-ccm

Friday April 15 2005

HILLARY CLINTON: A ROLE MODEL FOR FULL DISCLOSURE?

In yesterday's commentary chronicling the tempest surrounding Tom DeLay, I clipped a quote from an aide to Speaker Hastert that appeared in the Chicago Tribune. What caught my attention most, however, was something reporter Jill Zuckman wrote in the paragraph that followed. Here's the whole thing:

But a senior aide to Hastert said DeLay may need to make some public explanations about the charges since the House ethics committee has been unable to organize itself with Democrats protesting Republican-instituted rule changes.

"I'm not sure why he doesn't lay it out, regardless of whether the ethics committee ever meets or not," said the Hastert official, who spoke on condition of not being identified.

"Take whatever there is and say, `Here it is,'" the official said. "You have to at one point say, `Here I am, here it is, what's the question.'"

That strategy recalled the approach taken by former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in the 1990s when she was plagued by questions about unusual profits made from cattle futures. Hastert's adviser, however, rejected the comparison. (emphasis added)

Hillary Clinton randomly cited as a model for full disclosure? This is bizarre. Since Zuckman doesn't attribute it to anyone else, we have to assume she's the one who drew the comparison. More bizarre is that even after Hastert's aide rejected the idea, Zuckman wrote it into the piece anyway.

So what about it: did Hillary lay out all the facts when the cattle future story hit the fan? That's not how I recall it. This NR piece from February 1995 seems to confirm Mrs. Clinton was less than forthcoming:

Has there been any effort to suppress investigation of the transaction? Yes. Mrs. Clinton was adamantly opposed to the appointment of a special prosecutor to look into her and her husband's financial dealings, including her own trading activities, during the late 1970s and 1980s. She attempted to deflect attention from the matter by explaining away her newfound wealth as a gift from her parents, until the Clintons' 1978 and 1979 tax returns were made public and the actual source of her windfall profit was revealed.

Furthermore, despite our repeated and friendly requests to both the First Lady's and the White House's press representatives, none of our questions concerning the elementary details of Mrs. Clinton's trades and the availability of original documentation has been answered.

So what would possess Zuckman to recall Hillary Clinton as a role model of "full-disclosure"? More to the point: how does this little nugget of historical revisionism in any way qualify to be part of a "straight" news story on Tom DeLay?
-- T. Bevan 8:45 am

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