God Bless Keith Olbermann

[Guest guest]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/

 

NEW YORK - Here's an interesting little sidebar of our system of

government confirmed recently by the crack Countdown research staff:

no Presidential candidate's concession speech is legally binding. The

only determinants of the outcome of election are the reports of the

state returns boards and the vote of the Electoral College.

 

That's right. Richard Nixon may have phoned John Kennedy in November,

1960, and congratulated him through clenched teeth. But if the FBI had

burst into Kennedy headquarters in Chicago a week later and walked out

with all the file cabinets and a bunch of employees with their

raincoats drawn up over their heads, nothing Nixon had said would've

prevented him, and not JFK, from taking the oath of office the

following January.

 

This is mentioned because 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.

 

You bet, Rachel.

 

As I suggested, this is the first time one of the Fix stories has

moved fully into the mainstream media. In so saying, I'm not

dismissing the blogosphere. Hell, I'm in the blogosphere now, and

there have been nights when I've gotten far more web hits than

television viewers (thank you, Debate Scorecard readers). Even the

overt partisanship of blogs don't bother me - Tom Paine was a pretty

partisan guy, and ultimately that served truth a lot better than a

ship full of neutral reporters would have. I was just reading last

night of the struggles Edward R. Murrow and William L. Shirer had

during their early reporting from Europe in '38 and '39, because CBS

thought them too anti-Nazi.

 

The only reason I differentiate between the blogs and the newspapers

is that in the latter, a certain bar of ascertainable, reasonably

neutral, fact has to be passed, and has to be approved by a consensus

of reporters and editors. The process isn't flawless (ask Dan Rather)

but the next time you read a blog where bald-faced lies are accepted

as fact, ask yourself whether we here in cyberspace have yet achieved

the reliability of even the mainstream media. In short, a lot gets

left out of newspapers, radio, and tv - but what's left in tends to

be, in the words of my old CNN Sports colleague NickCharles, a

lead-pipe cinch.

 

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. "

 

 

 

 

http://pets.care2.com/

 

" The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men. " --

Plato

" Providing health care to all Iraqis is sound policy. Providing

health care to all Americans is socialism. " -- anon