"Crashing" @ Fiddler's Elbow

I also had a wonderful time talking to the people I met at the Fiddler's Elbow, but have a different opinion of Markos's presentation. I wrote this about it.

Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of the very successful blog, The Daily KOS was in town today promoting his book about democratic grassroots and the internet called “Crashing The Gate” This book claims to be the route to a new “people-powered politics” to replace an “ineffective, incompetent, and antiquated” Democratic party. The book accurately discribes many of the issues we face.

As a big supporter of Howard Dean in the last election, I was very interested in seeing what ideas were being espoused by an active member of the Democratic internet movement. I stood in line with the book I had just purchased and when it was my turn to talk to Mr. Moulitsas, I told him congratulations on the tremendous success of his web site.

We shook hands as I asked him to be sure and cover the voting machine issue on his website this year. He seemed to want to downplay the danger of the machines saying that they didn’t really need Diebold because they had other ways of causing problems. Since he has a law degree, I think he only wanted to touch on the problems that have already been widely proven. I don’t know if he had heard of the Diebold lawsuits, but sensing his discomfort with the topic, I had my book signed and moved on. I knew I would still probably have a chance to ask him something in front of the audience.

Because Mr. Moulitsas is such a hot topic these days, it was good of him to show up in our red Utah neighborhood. Other then outwardly chastising Senator Leiberman (a big crowd pleaser), and a couple of profanities during the speech, his demeanor seemed to please the crowd for the most part, but for me things went downhill pretty fast!

I don’t think Karl Rove could have done a better job of making the Republican party look strong, by repeatedly saying that Republicans have the ability to motivate, inspire, “hit them in the heart” and get them out to the polls, while Democrats are ineffective, uninterested, unlikely to vote, and for lack of a better word in the body of this message, doomed! He even said that he didn’t sense there was any way Democrats could win in 2006, or even 2008. Apparently we’re going to “Crash The Gate” VERY SLOWLY!

Early in the presentation, Moulitsas repeatedly said that despite the fact that people did not like George Bush and did not think the country was headed in the right direction, Democrats still lost. Finally, an audience member said “Kerry won” to which Moulitsas rolled his eyes and exaggeratedly and said “yeah right!” The chuckling died down quickley and I added my terse and unlawyerly “he did”. Agreement from this audience to either position could not be discerned.

I don’t know about you other Democrats out there, but I have to try, real hard, not to RAPTURE whenever somebody says the Democrats are going to have to work a lot harder if we ever want to WIN an election!

Calm down Larry.

The Democrats haven’t lost a presidential election since 1992. There, I said it!
The Democrats haven’t lost a presidential election since 1992. There, I said it again!

Mark Crispen Miller, (author of “Fooled Again”) is right. It’s not that you can’t prove the election WAS stolen, It’s that you can’t prove it WASN’T stolen. According to Miller, someone of stature will shortly come to the rescue of my credibility!

Of course it’s impossible to prove that an election has been stolen on a machine that only has to be unplugged to destroy the evidence. What CAN be proven though is that almost every election official in the United States is actively working to make sure that evidence will not be available. That’s the story here! Get on it journalists, I’m just an Optician!

When it was my turn to ask a question I offered “Why do you think the exit polls in Keiv Russia work so much better then they do in the United States?” His ready answer was “it’s a methodology issue”

Pause......

Gee, Edison/Mitofsky, that was some shoddy work there in 2004! I wouldn’t take that if I were you! Stand up and fight!

Mr. Moulitsas, for the sake of argument, lets agree that not one vote was stolen using a voting machine programmed to do that. It’s obvious that just about every method imaginable WAS used. If you are going to place your movement at the forefront of Democratic election success, you have got to place election fraud information at the center of your strategy. I categorically disagree with your pronouncement that Democrats aren’t working hard enough! I do agree that they are becoming less motivated!

As for myself, excuse me, but I have to drive an ice pick into my thigh (Comic relief imagery courtesy Mike Malloy (Air America Radio) who also coined this word that I hope the Democrats never have to use again!)

Anticipointment.

Thank you for not getting mad at me. I’ve been worried all day that somebody would hate my message! I remember him saying that he was afraid of being too optimistic too. I certainly hear that! Everybody should see Mark Crispen Miller’s appearance on C-SPAN recently. Especially the part where he says Kerry told him face to face that he knows the election was stolen and then denies it later. You really have to be crazy to believe we lost the election in 2004, and even Marcos says in the book that 2000 was stolen. I don’t hate Marcos in particular, but I’m just furious about the fact Democrats have to start with the premise that we are losing elections. When somebody from my party says that, I feel like I’ve been socked in the head! I hate it when that happens. I was at the primaries for the first time before the 2004 election, and it was crazy. They were running out of ballots and had to copy more. I also heard the party leaders say how great it was! Then Bush wins by a landslide and turns Utah into the laughing stock of the nation after four years of complete incompetence. The Nation magazine ran an article questioning why the Republicans in Utah didn’t even HAVE a primary, saying it would be a waste of time and money. Were they trying to hide lack of support for Bush, or possibly presence of support for Olene? The old boys wouldn’t have liked that, Huh!

I was going to beat the system in Utah last election, and vote absentee (I’ll show them!), and got, a punch card in the mail. There is a law in Utah, that the punch cards, by law, HAVE to be counted by machine on secret software, just like Diebold. That’s why I was so gratified when Dean commented that NO machines should be used. The Accupoll voting machine corporation had a decent paper ballot YEARS AGO when they showed the machines at the first exhibit here. They were the only one. They recently went out of business (I think for lack of government contracts), The president of that company said that if the other vendors had spent as much money on providing ballots as they did on litigating against them, we would have a good system. Come on Marcos, you have got to see what’s going on here! All the young people who got involved for the first time can see what’s going on. Remember, they did a mock election of four high schools in the Salt Lake area, and three of them picked Kerry!

We have been exposed to the FACT that there are a lot of democrats that are no better then republicans. If they get programmed into the machines, we’re no better off, but they can claim the darn things work, can’t they. God, how I hate being a paranoid, flying saucer, conspiracy nutcake (Thanks Orrin).

If the Republicans when to a poker game against the Democrats, and the Democrats said they won, but refused to show their cards, you know what would happen. Can you say “temper tantrum”. Like Marcos seems to say in the book. It’s time for the Demos to say “NO MORE”.