This just in:
Americans are officially lazier than MexicansProtesters freeze Mexico City's EconomyQUOTE
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Street protests led by the leftist candidate in Mexico's presidential election plunged the capital into chaos for a second day on Tuesday, raising fears of a long and increasingly nasty fight over vote fraud claims.
The mass demonstrations called by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to protest alleged vote-rigging in his close election defeat to conservative rival Felipe Calderon on July 2 have turned Mexico City's swanky business district into a sprawling campsite.
European Union observers say they found
no evidence of fraud, but Mexico's long history of vote fraud has left many leftists suspicious. Lopez Obrador says he has evidence that vote returns were tampered with.
Mexican protesters completely froze Mexico City's economy that day because of possible voter fraud there was no evidence of. Meanwhile in the USA we had mountains of evidence against the legitimacy of our last
two elections. Take for example:
The security problems with voting machines: Confirmed by both Democrat Representative John Coyer as well as a programmer within Diebold, a single hacker with a Wi-fi connection could shift the results of entire precincts just by driving by. Even the GAO decided the security flaws were "vast and unacceptable" throughout the entire national network.
A Diebold spokesman admitted a flaw was actually built into the system to allow election officials to upgrade their software, but Diebold is confident there are no election officials that would use this to cheat... in fact the quote by Diebold's David Bear went like this, "For there to be a problem here, you're basically assuming a premise where you have some evil or nefarious election officials who would sneak in an introduce a new piece of software, I don't believe these evil elections people exist." What he's basically saying is if an official has the motivation to do so they could change the results of their precinct. But of course, who would have the motivation to do so? Well, Ohio 2004's election chief was J. Kenneth Blackwell. He had the above mentioned access. Not long after the election was won, he was given a job as Secretary of Agriculture, and now receives quite a nice paycheck.
In fact, Blackwell personally handled a no-bid contract for Diebold's touch-screen voting machines... while holding stock in the company. Furthermore, under HB3 Blackwell has the sole responsbility of deciding whether these voting machines will be audited or not in an election where he's running for governor.
And that's just voting machines, in the 2004 elections 3.6 million votes were cast but never counted. They were called spoiled votes or rejected provisional ballots. If these missing votes were random it wouldn't matter, but they weren't. In fact, the invalidated votes were primarily against minorities. If you were Latino, your vote was 500% more likely to be not counted than if you were white. If you were black, your vote was 900% more likely not to be counted. If you were Native American, your vote was 2000% more likely not to be counted.
In New Mexico, 89% of votes thrown away were in minority districts. Kerry would have won New Mexico. In Ohio, 155,000 black votes were thrown away. Kerry would have won Ohio.
And after
all that, what happens? Barbara Boxer challenges the results, and for four hours "they went over the evidence" but they didn't. If you watched C-Span, the evidence was largely outnumbered by a Glib Offensive tossing metaphorical tomatoes at Boxer. It was very rare to see anyone in this offensive attack what they were saying, or to even refer to the evidence. In more cases, they were knocking down strawmen or using ad hominems. They even refered to Boxer as a "Michael Moore liberal."
And who in the United States froze a freaking city? In Mexico, the candidate asked for it, and bam, complete and total lock-down of Ciudad del Mexico. And it's not that Americans don't believe the election was stolen, either. According to OpEdNews/Zogby People's poll of Pennysylvania residents, 39% of the state thought the election was stolen. 54% said it was legitimate. This is probably a much closer poll than if you took one of Mexico, but here's the kicker: Of the people who watch Rupert Murdoch's Fox News as their primary source of News, .5% believe it was stolen, and 99% believe it was legitimate. Of the people who watched other news sources as their primary source of News, the people who believe the election was stolen are in the majority. CNN: 70%, MSNBC: 65%, CBS: 64%, ABC: 56%, Other: 56%, NBC: 49%, with Fox at just .5%.
And the best part is, none of the above mentioned information made it to
ANY of the above mentioned news places. The most the new York Times ever mentioned was that it was "the latest concern about touch-screen machines."
What does our media focus on? Some actor got drunk and talked compassion about jews, and that is apparently more interesting news.
So the final resolution of this Novel, if you want a healthy democracy, move to Mexico.
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So, this is not really an argument about the legitimacy of the 2004 election, but why was Mexico up in arms with less evidence while America didn't do anything? Do you blame the media refusing to properly inform the citizens? Do you blame the candidates because neither Al Gore nor John Kerry pushed the issu?. Do you blame the general state of mind of Americans today? Because it seems to me we have the exact same problems now as we did in the early 60s, lying politicians, corruption, war, our firends and family dying for stupid reasons, so what's the difference? Why do the people of America today sit on their asses and let the government get away with it?