Last night, I wrote the following, but I didn't post it because it didn't quite fit the "mood" of the rest of that entry:

"By the way, there are lots of murmurs about discrepancies in the electronic voting; a couple sound legitimate but might not have made a difference, and some sound pretty crazy. I'm putting a few up here because I've already had a "haven't you heard?" email. I'm not really ignoring the possibility (as I said the other day, I would feel a heckuvalot better about humanity if I thought the election was stolen!), but I want to see more. So, we re-blog, you decide..."
Link 1, Link 2, Link 3, Link 4, Link 5, Link 6

Well, it's a new day, and darned if there isn't a little more to see:

...there is a small but blood-curdling set of news stories that right now exists somewhere between the world of investigative journalism, and the world of the Reynolds Wrap Hat. And while the group’s ultimate home remains unclear - so might our election of just a week ago.

Stories like these have filled the web since the tide turned against John Kerry late Tuesday night. But not until Friday did they begin to spill into the more conventional news media. That’s when the Cincinnati Enquirer reported that officials in Warren County, Ohio, had “locked down” its administration building to prevent anybody from observing the vote count there.

Suspicious enough on the face of it, the decision got more dubious still when County Commissioners confirmed that they were acting on the advice of their Emergency Services Director, Frank Young. Mr. Young had explained that he had been advised by the federal government to implement the measures for the sake of Homeland Security.

Gotcha. Tom Ridge thought Osama Bin Laden was planning to hit Caesar Creek State Park in Waynesville. During the vote count in Lebanon. Or maybe it was Kings Island Amusement Park that had gone Code-Orange without telling anybody. Al-Qaeda had selected Turtlecreek Township for its first foray into a Red State.

The State of Ohio confirms that of all of its 88 Counties, Warren alone decided such Homeland Security measures were necessary. Even in Butler County, reports the Enquirer, the media and others were permitted to watch through a window as ballot-checkers performed their duties. In Warren, the media was finally admitted to the lobby of the administration building, which may have been slightly less incommodious for the reporters, but which still managed to keep them two floors away from the venue of the actual count.

Nobody in Warren County seems to think they’ve done anything wrong. The newspaper quotes County Prosecutor Rachel Hurtzel as saying the Commissioners “were within their rights” to lock the building down, because having photographers or reporters present could have interfered with the count.

[---]

Thus the majority of the media has yet to touch the other stories of Ohio (the amazing Bush Times Ten voting machine in Gahanna) or the sagas of Ohio South: huge margins for Bush in Florida counties in which registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans 2-1, places where the optical scanning of precinct totals seems to have turned results from perfect matches for the pro-Kerry exit poll data, to Bush sweeps.

We will be endeavoring to pull those stories, along with the Warren County farce, into the mainstream Monday and/or Tuesday nights on Countdown. That is, if we can wedge them in there among the news media’s main concerns since last Tuesday:

Who fixed the Exit Polls? Yes - you could deliberately skew a national series of post-vote questionnaires in favor of Kerry to discourage people from voting out west, where everything but New Mexico had been ceded to Kerry anyway, but you couldn’t alter key precinct votes in Ohio and/or Florida; and,

What will Bush do with his Mandate and his Political Capital? He got the highest vote total for a presidential candidate, you know. Did anybody notice who’s second on the list? A Mr. Kerry. Since when was the term “mandate” applied when 56 million people voted against a guy? And by the way, how about that Karl Rove and his Freudian slip on “Fox News Sunday”? Rove was asked if the electoral triumph would be as impactful on the balance of power between the parties as William McKinley’s in 1896 and he forgot his own talking points. The victories were “similarly narrow,” Rove began, and then, seemingly aghast at his forthrightness, corrected himself. “Not narrow; similarly structured.”

Gotta dash now. Some of us have to get to work on the Warren and Florida stories.

In the interim, Senator Kerry, kindly don’t leave the country.

And on Truthout over the weekend...

The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something startling.

While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking – the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.

In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.

In Dixie County, with 9,676 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.

The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.

Yet in the touch-screen counties, where investigators may have been more vigorously looking for such anomalies, high percentages of registered Democrats generally equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry. (I had earlier reported that county size was a variable – this turns out not to be the case. Just the use of touch-screens versus optical scanners.)

More visual analysis of the results can be seen at http://ustogether.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and http://www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm. Note the trend line – the only variable that determines a swing toward Bush was the use of optical scan machines.

• As you know, this "mandate" fraud has been driving me crazy, but Josh Marshall finally did the math:

  "The fact that the president got more popular votes than anybody in the past isn't a measure of the margin of his victory. It's a measure of population growth, which (unless he's more of a bounder than we know) he is not responsible for, and a high-turnout election, for which his unpopularity is as responsible as his popularity."

  Marshall links to this very enlightening electoral map which weights geography with population size; that red doesn't look so monolithic, now, does it?
  
  
• I've got a short-term online subscription to The New Republic and it has a great new piece by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, in which they dismember said Bush/Cheney "mandate" and point out the "bait and switch" herein:

  There is a more fundamental objection to Republicans' claim of a clear mandate for an ambitious domestic agenda:
  
  It is, put simply, a bait and switch.
  
  If one can bear to recall events of only a week ago, the Republican campaign was based on two main pillars: fear and mud. Overwhelmingly, the "positive" case for Bush's reelection rested on the relentless drumbeat of the war on terror. Cheney's remarks typically focused not on domestic issues but on veiled or explicit references to the lurking threat of nuclear incineration.
  
  Meanwhile the second pillar of the Bush campaign was to destroy Kerry's image as a credible alternative through any means necessary. Gross distortions of his record and proposals, shameless efforts to rip his words out of context, and the lowest forms of surrogate-based character assassination were central to the campaign.
  
  The GOP may well have waged the most negative campaign by an incumbent president in modern political history. As The Washington Post reported back in May: "Scholars and political strategists say the ferocious Bush assault on Kerry this spring has been extraordinary, both for the volume of attacks and for the liberties the president and his campaign have taken with the facts. Though stretching the truth is hardly new in a political campaign, they say the volume of negative charges is unprecedented--both in speeches and in advertising."
  
  Karl Rove would not have needed to campaign that way if he believed he had a popular domestic agenda. He knew that he did not. Indeed, in the one setting--the three presidential debates -- where popular attention was focused on the major issues of the day and the differences between the candidates, the popular verdict was clear: Kerry defeated Bush decisively.
  
  In fact, everything we know about American opinion suggests that Bush is out of step with the public on all the issues he is now putting at the top of his "to do" list...

  (there's more, but I don't want to get in trouble for copying the whole thing here)
  
  
• Michael Tomasky nails exactly the point I was trying to make to a friend via email over the weekend, but he does it better - and probably gets paid for it:

  The age of skepticism has won a few and lost a few since Reagan's time. But let's face it: That age is now, in this country, dead.
  
  Today, religion and politics do mix. And they will keep mixing for the foreseeable future.
  
  This does not mean that Democrats and liberalism should placate the Christian right or willingly succumb to Christian Nation. They should not. But it does mean that Democrats and liberals should work much harder to understand and win over the voters of the religious center. The Democratic Party should invest money in talking to -- not polling or focus-grouping; talking to -- these voters, learning the true extent to which they feel alienated from the party, finding out how they think about their religious and political selves, how they weigh their own interpretations of the Scriptures with regard to gay rights on the one hand and helping people in poverty on the other. And liberal intellectuals -- who do tend to be secular, myself admittedly included, and who do sometimes exhibit contempt for religion, myself (I hope) very much not included -- need to understand clearly that the religious right is hardly speaking for every religious person. And we need to understand that we're beyond the point in history when the old arguments will be persuasive.
  
  The religious right has opened up a new battlefield, and, like it or not, we have to play on it.
  
  And the way to begin is by understanding clearly the difference between religious extremists and religious people.

• If you were hoping to show your kids any of our remaining natural wonders in the US, better start making vacation plans.

  "The election is a validation of our philosophy and agenda," Michael O. Leavitt, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said in an interview. "We will make more progress in less time while maintaining economic competitiveness for the country. That is my mission."
  
  [---]
  
  For now, the Bush administration has no intention of regulating the heat-trapping gases, like carbon dioxide, which scientists believe contribute to global warming.
  
  A top priority of powerful Congressional Republicans is the 31-year-old Endangered Species Act.
  
  Representative Richard W. Pombo of California, chairman of the Committee on Resources, has made efforts to raise the hurdles that scientists must clear to ensure a government determination that a species is endangered and cut back the amount of critical habitat required. Habitat designations pave the way for land use controls.
  
  [---]
  
  The energy bill will pass, (Pombo) said, adding that any bill produced in the House would open 2,000 acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for energy exploration.

  Conveniently, for Pombo et al, as the Arctic melts it will make the drilling easier:

  Rising global temperatures will melt areas of the Arctic this century, making them more accessible for oil and natural gas drilling, a report prepared by the United States and seven other nations said on Monday.
  
  [---]
  
  Warmer temperatures would make it easier to drill and ship oil from the Arctic, the report said.
  
  It did not attempt to quantify the costs of drilling and shipping Arctic oil and gas, or estimate how high energy prices would have to be to justify drilling in the region.
  
  [---]
  
  Energy companies would find it easier to transport oil and gas because the warmer temperatures would open sea routes.