my apologies to the democrats...

[skitch]

Remember that old Charlie Daniel's song, "The Devil
went down to Georgia?"
Well, here's a new version entitled:


AL GORE WENT DOWN TO FLORIDA


Al Gore went down to Florida,
He was lookin' for an election to steal.
He was in a bind
Cause he was way behind,
And he was willin' to cut a deal.

When he came across a Gov'ner
Knawin' on a victory and chewin' hard
Veep Gore jumped up on a hickory stump,
And said, "Gov, let me tell you what."
"I bet you didn't know it,
But I'm a contender in Florida too!
And if you care to take a dare,
I'll make a bet with you.
Now you ran a good campaign down here,
But give Al Gore his due.
I'll bet a nation of gold,
And the white house it holds ,
That I got more votes than you!"

The gov'ner said, "My names Dubya,
And it might be a sin....
But I'll take that bet, your gonna regret,
cause this Texan always wins"

(Chorus)
Dubya rally up your troops and fight for that vote hard.
Cause Al Gores loose in Florida and Bill Daley holds
the cards.
If you win you get that shiny nation made of gold,
but if you lose, then Al Gore gets con-trol.

Al Gore opened up his mouth and said "I'll start
this show" And fire burned in the eyes of lawyers,
who knew they'd make some dough.
And he pulled his hand across his lips, and he made
an evil grin.
Then in walked all the Palm Beach voters, Dubya's
chances were lookin' thin.

(Guitar/bass solo)
When Al Gore finished, Dubya said...
"Well, your pretty good ol' son
Now plant your butt in that chair right there
and let me show you how it's done!"

(Chorus II)
Dems in the orange groves, Run George, Run.
You can't lose now in the land of the sun.
Your dads on your side and your brother's in tow,
Gore in the White
House, God, Please NO!

(Fast Fiddle/Guitar solo)

Al Gore bowed his head because he knew that he'd been
beat.
He conceded that golden nation on the Ground at
Dubya's feet.
Dubya said, "Gore, just come on back if ya ever wanna
try again, cause I told you once you tree huggin' dunce,
this Texan always wins!"


Don't take offense...it's just in fun

 

[SeXy ReDHeD]

I love that song!

Hilarious skitch! Gave me a laugh tonight... thanks!

 

[Silverlily]

LMAO

I like that song too, though this version is funnier. Thanks.

 

[Stormystarr]

I'm all for Al, but I have been really depressed tonight, and this made me laugh, thanks, I needed that.

 

[Guest]

Cute little songs don't change the facts.

The GOP put several roadblocks in front of legal recounts. Miami-Dade illegally stopped their recount when a Republican mob, filled with Hill Rats, people who should know better, stormed the counting room.

Florida law is clear, once a recount is started, it can't be stopped. Mobs or no mobs.

It's about more than shaking votes out to win. You start this crap and cut off recounts because you don't want to lose, you might not like it when the Dems pull this in California or Washington State. There is a larger issue here, way beyond either one of these clowns.

Gore suspected, but didn't know that the votes would go his way. It could have netted votes for Bush. It was not exactly the lowest risk strategy. They could have tried to claim massive voter intimidation and kick off racial tension, already brimming in South Florida and Volusia and Leon Counties.

This election isn't fair. It may have started out that way, but now, with Harris's fingerprints all over it, and abusing her discretion, missing votes, this stinks.
She is not Jeb Bush's fixer.

I've counted votes and worked the polls and worked for campaigns in freaking Northern New Jersey, where the dead routinely voted. I know how the process works, and to prevent a freaking recount is wrong. And any GOP pol who says different is lying. Their whole strategy is amoral and they know it.

The ethical and smart strategy would have been to pick counties where they would have gained votes, not question the three largest counties in the state.

I've never seen so many people who know better, who've run elections, lie like this. Inside politics, people must be sickened by this crap. They know nothing out of the ordinary has happened. Several won their seats because of recounts.

You can argue chads and methods of counting, but how do you conduct fraud while the nation watches? How? To even claim it, knowing better, and they know better, is wrong.

They are trying to bully their way into office and it's going to be a disaster if they get away with it. Bush is already a fucking joke, Cheney expected to die in office. Gore may be a robot, but shit, Lieberman isn't.

Doing anything to win is wrong, on either side.

I pray to God the next election isn't close. Because we can't do this. Tarnish the process for one man and expect him to do anything.

I wish they would recount every county, with one standard, so everything would at least be settled. If Bush wins, he wins and we get on with it. But to crawl into the White House is wrong and political suicide. The jokes will dog him like the sex jokes dogged Clinton. Bush will not escape this. he can't.

 

[Purple Haze]

Does anybody wonder why people will ruthlessly try to get the parking spot closest to the mall's entrance, and then go in and walk for three miles?

 

[SeXy ReDHeD]

What a coincidence!

Hee hee, Purple... I have a funny little tale about that.

A friend and I were talking today. She was telling me that when she was young (around 8, 9, 10) her mom would drive around the parking lots endlessly looking for spaces. If, by some unlucky chance, they happened to be in the next row or even the next one after that, when she spotted a space, her mom would tell her to get out and go stand there in the space.

People would flip her off and scream at her and even try to run her down, but her mom would say, "Come on now, they'd never actually hit you!"

I felt bad for her, but was laughing so hard at the same time... I could just picture the little girl standing there while some angry old man waved his hands at her... just for a parking space! Hilarious!

Poor thing!

 

[Mortto56]

"Good one skitch!"

I really like that song by CDB,and you did a fantastic job on that remake.I think Charlie would even like it.

Now as far as the election goes,I'm for Gore.
If anyone hasn't noticed,the state thats giving all the problems is "WHOS BROTHERS".

I just say,go ahead and let Bush win.But in 4 years from now when were all layed off,and the SS is broke,and interest rates are sky high,DON"T FUCKING CRY TO ME ABOUT IT!

 

[tighe]

Just for arguments sake;
Once a candidate concedes, it should be over.
I think that happened the night of the vote.

 

[Ambrosious]

Cute little songs don't change the facts.

The GOP put several roadblocks in front of legal recounts. Miami-Dade illegally stopped their recount when a Republican mob, filled with Hill Rats, people who should know better, stormed the counting room.

Let's not mention The Most Reverend Jesse Jackson and the hordes of democrats that demonstrated INSIDE the Miami-Dade courthouse last week. Nope, we'll skip right over that one. For convenience. It's a whole lot easier to vilify the other guys if you don't bring up your own hate mongering and bashing, huh?

 

[Cheyenne]

Doing anything to win is wrong, on either side.

I pray to God the next election isn't close. Because we can't do this. Tarnish the process for one man and expect him to do anything.

THE SUNDAY TIMES
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/
November 26 2000

Gore plots next step in 'legal coup'

IT IS clearer now than ever before that what we have been
witnessing in America these past two weeks is something only
a smidgen less than an attempted legal coup.

I say "legal" coup because the law can sometimes be
selectively used to circumvent the law. And I say "coup"
because what has been going on is an attempt to snatch
victory from the twice-declared winner in a manner that
violates almost every principle of common sense,
constitutional law and due process.

Moreover, this was clearly a premeditated, conscious
decision by Al Gore's campaign. Gore didn't blunder into
this crisis. He planned for it, prepared for it and has been
micro-managing every aspect of it from the beginning.

The first inklings came in the early hours of election
night, November 8, when William Daley, the Gore campaign
manager, declared to the throngs in Nashville that: "This
campaign goes on!"

Can you imagine a party leader in Britain, after a
cliffhanger of a vote and a pending recount, saying that the
"campaign" goes on? Campaigns are what happen before polling
day. What happens afterwards is mere counting. And that
counting should be done in as calm, as dispassionate and as
sober an atmosphere as possible. When Daley injected that
element of pure politics into the night, we should have
known what was up. Even as he spoke, teams of Democratic
lawyers, experts and spinners were being dispatched to
Florida. The war was on.

As Daley was commandeering the troops, the Gore mouthpieces
were already spinning on television. I was watching
Newsweek's Jonathan Alter with increasing disbelief at
4.30am. "I'm not talking about changing the rules or having
the popular vote somehow supercede the electoral," Alter
presciently opined. "If you look at the history of close
recounts in congressional races, they're always disputed.
You go precinct by precinct and then people say this recount
wasn't fair, we have to do it again.

"And the result after weeks would be a lot of pressure to
say instead of trying to sort out who really won Florida,
let's end this thing. You get a series of irregularities all
over the state of Florida, pretty soon nobody can figure out
who really won. What happens then?"

So the strategy was clear. The Gore team would throw every
legal challenge they could at every recount they could find.
They would routinely invoke the phrase "will of the people"
at every convenient moment to keep reminding people that
Gore had won the popular vote nationally. And they would
simply assert something nobody properly knew - that if "the
will of the people" were followed, Gore would be shown to
have won Florida.

The longer it went on, they surmised, the better chance they
would have of saying, "This is such a mess, let's just give
the White House to the man with the most popular votes." And
they bet that the Republicans would be so blind-sided, they
wouldn't know what had hit them before it was too late.

There were obstacles to stealing an election, of course. The
first problem for the Gore side was that Florida law
mandated a certified result within a week of the election.
If that happened, George W Bush would be declared the winner
and Gore would look like a sore loser.

So the Gore team went to the Florida Supreme Court demanding
that it simply rescind Florida's law. They knew the court
would be on their side - it's one of the most biased,
liberal courts in the country.

Only two months ago, the court simply struck down a ballot
initiative legalising lethal injection as a death penalty
procedure, because the court thought it was "cruel and
unusual punishment". Forget the fact that voters had
supported the measure by 73% to 27%.

Similarly, the court has barred 19 valid initiatives from
even going before the voters in recent years - because the
court, not the voters, regarded them as misleading. To get
around this, Ward Connerly, the anti-affirmative action
activist, proposed four different wordings for an initiative
he tried to get before the voters.

The Florida court simply struck all the wordings down as
"confusing". It is in favour of affirmative action and it
believes its role is to stop voters from having a free vote
on the matter. End of discussion. This is what judicial
tyranny is.

So the Goreites were not surprised when the court
peremptorily stopped the legal certification of the result.
The court cited confusing language in the law, which both
says that Florida's secretary of state must certify results
a week after the election and also that she may make
exceptions for late counties.

Under the law, these questions are routinely settled by the
secretary of state herself, who has "discretion" to resolve
the matter. She can be overruled by the court only if her
actions are "clearly erroneous". Debatable they were - but
"clearly erroneous"? Not a chance, as a lower court judge
rightly ruled.

Still, the Florida court was not one to let legal precedent
guide its actions. It did the Gore team's bidding,
overruling the lower court, legalising recounts with no firm
rules for what constitutes a vote, and then setting an
arbitrary date to complete them: today. Score one for the
legal coup.

So with this court behind them, Gore's aides hired every
hot-shot lawyer they could find and fought on. They first
said that the Palm Beach "butterfly ballot" was illegal -
and sowed confusion for several days. Haven't heard of that
blessed butterfly lately? It was ruled clearly legal by a
judge last week, who barred any re-vote. Never mind. It was
worth a try.

Then Gore tried the racial angle, declaring that black
voters had been intimidated from voting by police, election
workers and even dogs. Forget the fact that black turnout
was at record levels and that, as yet, no such intimidation
has been proved. It was enough to sow more confusion while
Gore's team tried to get hand recounts in four carefully
selected counties where he had big victories.

In one of those counties, Broward, the Democratic-run
canvassing board looked at the number of disputed ballots
and concluded that a hand count was unnecessary. Lo and
behold, a couple of days later, one of those Democrats was
leaned on and unaccountably changed his mind.

When it appeared in Palm Beach County that the hand-counts
weren't turning up enough votes for Gore, the Democratic-run
canvassing board decided to change its rules on what
constitutes a vote and allowed a mere indentation near a
candidate's name to be valid - the now famous "dimpled
chad".

To defend the preposterous notion that such an indentation
is a valid vote, the Gore lawyers cited a case in Illinois
where such votes had been allowed in a recount.

Surprise, surprise, two days later the Chicago Tribune ran a
story showing that that was simply untrue. Those dimpled
ballots had never been ruled valid in such a case. The next
day The Washington Post showed that such ballots had almost
never been included as valid votes in any election in the
country - with the exception of a case in Massachusetts,
where the ballots had been spoilt by rain.

Nevertheless, the Gore team fought on. In Dade County, when
the deadline was approaching and Gore votes weren't emerging
quickly enough, the board decided to meet in a small room,
exclude any Republican observers and the press, and count
only those ballots that were disputed.

When this further change of the rules prompted a near-riot
from vote-counters, the county decided to call off the
entire recount. Undeterred, the Gore team sued the board to
force a recount. That suit mercifully failed.

You could add to this litany of thuggishness the fanatical
Gore effort to disqualify nearly 4,000 absentee ballots from
military personnel for often piddling technical reasons.

The assumption is that most of these votes are for Bush. In
Democratic-run counties, therefore, about 70% of these
ballots were thrown out as invalid. Compare that with the 4%
spoilt ballot rate in Palm Beach, and you can begin to see
the ambition of the Democrats.

As I write, it's still not clear whether Gore will be able
to scrounge enough votes to eke out a victory over Bush
today. But Gore has already said that if the final tally
this evening doesn't give him total victory, he will fight
on and force further recounts.

This is a man who will do anything to win: trash the
constitution, get his lawyers to peddle falsehoods in court,
change counting rules in mid-stream, gerry-rig recounts to
favour him, intimidate anyone who stands in his way. In a
sign of how serious this has become, the Supreme Court has
now decided to step in. It is almost unheard of for the
United States Supreme Court to intervene in an electoral
process that is rightly usually left to the state running
the election.

It is a sign, perhaps, that the justices in Washington have
been able to see the travesty of justice and due process
that the Gore team has been foisting on the election.

I will tell you one thing about this endgame. It is enough
to make any fair-minded person realise that Gore is a danger
to the country and to the constitution. He's beginning to
make Richard Nixon look magnanimous and Bill Clinton look
honest.

I once believed he was a good man, of serious purpose and
honest intent. That belief is no longer tenable.

He is a coldly ambitious man who is prepared to hold the
country hostage to this trauma indefinitely and destroy his
party's slow march back to the centre of American politics
in the process.

We should all be praying that he doesn't make it to the
White House. But the people who should be praying hardest
are those Democrats who still have faith in their party and
reverence for their country.

Copyright 2000 Times Newspapers Ltd.

 

[Rosebud]

LMAO...Skitch that was great, here is one for you too

With apologies to Dr. Suess

I DO NOT LIKE IT, AL GORE I AM

Can we count them with our nose?
Can we count them with our toes?
Should we count them with a band?
Should we count them all by hand?
If I do not like the count,
I will simply throw them out!


I will not let this vote count stand
I do not like them, AL GORE I am!


Can we change these numbers here?
Can we change them, calm my fears?
What do you mean, Dubya has won?
This is not fair, this is not fun
Lets count them upside down this time
Lets count until the state is mine!


I will not let this VOTE count stand!
I do not like it, AL GORE I am!


I'm really ticked, I'm in a snit!
You have not heard the last of it!
I'll count the ballots one by one
And hold each one up to the sun!
I'll count, recount, and count some more!
You'll grow to hate this little chore


But I will not, cannot let this vote count stand!
I do not like it, Al Gore I am!


I won't leave office, I'm stayin' here!
I've glued my desk chair to my rear!
Tipper, Hillary, and Bubba too,
all telling me that I should sue!
We find the Electoral College vile!
RECOUNT the votes until I smile!


We do not want this vote to stand!
We do not like it, AL GORE I am!


How shall we count this ballot box?
Let's count it standing in our socks!
Shall we count this one in a tree?
And who shall count it, you or me?
We cannot, cannot count enough!
We must not stop, we must be tough!


I do not want this vote to stand!
I do not like it AL GORE I am!


I've counted till my fingers bleed!
And still can't fulfill my counting need!
I'll count the tiles on the floor!
I'll count, and count, and count some more!
And I will not say that I am done!
Until the counting says I've won!


I will not let this vote count stand!
I do not like it, AL GORE I am!


What's that? What? What are you trying to say?
You think the current count should stay?
You do not like my counting scheme?
It makes you tense, gives you bad dreams?
Foolish people, you're wrong you'll see!
You're only care should be for me!


I WILL NOT LET THIS VOTE COUNT STAND!
I DO NOT LIKE IT. AND AL GORE I AM!

*****

I did not write this, but received it in an email. I don't know who should get credit for this instant classic.

 

[Guest]

Senior executives for the Fox News Channel acknowledged last night that John Ellis, an executive who played a central role in the first decision on election night to project that George W. Bush had won the presidency, and who is a first cousin of Mr. Bush, spent much of the night in communication with the candidate.

The Fox executives said they had been unaware of the contact and said Mr. Ellis had misused his role with the network, perhaps damaging its reputation.

Mr. Ellis, the head of the election desk for the Fox News Network, acknowledged in an article published this week in The New Yorker magazine that he held repeated phone conversations with Mr. Bush and his brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, throughout election night, giving them indications of the vote.

John Moody, the vice president of editorial news for the Fox News Channel, said, "Did we know he was on the phone to his cousin? No."

"Just as we wouldn't have expected him to tell us the details of a family dinner," Mr. Moody said, "neither would we have expected him to provide information to one of the candidates."

Mr. Ellis's role in the events of election night was seized upon by officials from Vice President Al Gore's campaign last night both as evidence that the Fox channel is biased toward Republican candidates and that the Fox call of the election for Mr. Bush was the start of a chain of events that led to the misimpression that Mr. Bush was, at one time anyway, officially the winner of the still-contested race.

"Fox has been an avowed enemy of the Gore campaign throughout the election," said Mark Fabiani, the campaign's communications director. "To have a network like Fox call it and everybody follow suit was a tremendously damaging thing. It took literally 24 to 48 hours to convince people that Gore had won the popular vote."

Fox was the first to call the race for Mr. Bush, based on his lead with almost all the precincts counted. Each of the other television news organizations drew the same conclusion in a matter of minutes.

Fox executives dismissed the Gore' camp's accusations of bias as part of the nasty political exchanges that have characterized the days since the election, though they acknowledged that the controversy will almost certainly undercut the channel's efforts to counter an image in the television industry as the pro- Republican news channel.

But Fox executives emphasized that Mr. Ellis alone did not make the calls on who won states but merely headed a four-person team. Mr. Moody said that all the team members had to agree on projections before they were submitted to executives and put on the air.

And Ari Fleischer, a spokesman for the Bush campaign, said Fox could be charged with influencing the election, "only if you assume that NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, and PBS all follow Fox and make no independent determinations of their own."

Executives at the other networks denied that they were reacting to Fox when they made the Florida call.

Mr. Ellis declined to comment last night though he did release a letter he wrote to The New Yorker, disputing any suggestion in the piece that he had violated the rules of the Voter News Service — which provides the information about exit polling to the networks — by giving early information on specific data to Mr. Bush.

However, he acknowledged that during the night he did "speak frequently with Governor George Bush and Governor Jeb Bush." They are his first cousins: Mr. Ellis is the son of Nancy Ellis, a sister of former President George Bush.

But Mr. Ellis also pointed out that others on the Fox "decision desk" were communicating with the Gore campaign. Representatives of the Bush campaign made the same point. But neither they nor Mr. Ellis suggested that anyone was talking directly to Mr. Gore on numerous occasions that night.

Asked how it came about that Fox would hire the cousin of one of the candidates to run its vote analysis, Mr. Moody said, "I don't believe you should punish people for who they are related to, as long as they don't misuse either the relationship or their ability to get information."

He noted that Mr. Ellis had only a 30-day consultant's contract, but he cited Mr. Ellis's experience in election analysis, which dates to 1978 when he started out at NBC. Mr. Ellis worked for NBC News through 1989, a period that contained three elections involving his uncle. His professionalism and integrity were never questioned anywhere he worked, Carl R. Wagner, a Democratic consultant and former co-worker, said last night.


http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/14/politics/14FOX.html




Talk About Fuzzy Math; Numbers Abound in Florida
By MICHAEL COOPER

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TALLAHASSEE, Fla., Nov. 27 — There is one number Republicans really like to talk about these days: 537, which elections officials here say is the number of votes by which Gov. George W. Bush won Florida.

Democrats prefer to cite other figures. Today they were talking about the number nine, which they said would be Vice President Al Gore's margin of victory in Florida had the votes been counted differently.

Those were just the latest figures in the numerical stew that is the presidential election in Florida.

Numbers seemed very much on the mind of Senator Tom Daschle, the Democratic minority leader, when he briefed Mr. Gore from here this afternoon by telephone.

"We're encouraged by the numbers that we've seen in Miami-Dade and Palm Beach and some of the other numbers around," he told the vice president. "And we were just given a new tally this morning, that if we counted all of the votes that have already been counted in some of the recount, we'd actually be ahead by maybe nine votes."

Democrats who have been working in the electoral trenches explained the nine-vote figure.

First, they added the results of the hand recount in Palm Beach County, which were not included in the state- certified totals because they missed the deadline on Sunday. The hand recount, Democrats said, gave Mr. Gore a net gain of 215 votes.

Democrats then added 157 votes to Mr. Gore's total from votes that he initially gained when Miami-Dade County began a hand recount of all its ballots, but lost when the county abandoned the effort and sent its original numbers to the state for certification. This brings the figure Mr. Gore would have gotten from hand counts to 372 votes.

To this figure the Democrats added the 51 votes that Mr. Gore lost in Nassau County when officials recounted votes as part of a mandatory statewide machine recount and then decided to use the original tally. This brings the Democrats' tally to 423 extra votes for Mr. Gore. The Democrats went to court today to try to get those votes counted.

Democrats also subtracted 123 votes from Mr. Bush's total to arrive at their 9-vote margin of victory. Almost all of those votes would come from overseas absentee ballots initially rejected for lacking proper postmarks, dates and signatures, among other flaws. More than 10 counties decided to reinstate them.

If Mr. Bush were to lose those 123 votes, which seems unlikely since the Democrats have not yet contested them, his edge would shrink from 537 to 414. And the 414-vote total is 9 votes shy of the 423 votes that Mr. Gore hopes to pick up from Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and Nassau Counties.

There are other important numbers in this race. Republicans are particularly aware of the figure 1,527 — the number of overseas absentee ballots initially rejected when Florida first counted its absentee votes. Although the Republicans have gotten many counties to reconsider those ballots, adding more than 111 votes to Mr. Bush's total, they believe even more should be reinstated. They still have several lawsuits pending about those ballots.

Then there are the 10,750 ballots that were cast in Miami-Dade County, which vote-counting machines did not register as presidential votes.

Democrats like to say that that these are "votes which were never counted in the presidential election." They argue that the ballots may be legible to human eyes, and should therefore be counted by hand.

Republicans say many of them may have been cast by people who wanted to vote in local elections, but not for president. The rest, they say, are probably so unclear that a hand recount could not read them.

Then there are the dimpled digits. In Palm Beach County, Democrats complain, roughly 4,000 ballots bore an indentation, but were not punctured and therefore not counted by the canvassing board as votes.

And in Broward County, where hand counting added to the totals nearly 1,800 votes that had not been previously tabulated, Mr. Bush picked up 579 more votes and Mr. Gore got 1,146, netting him a total of 567 more votes.

Three numbers on the calendar are on many people's minds, too: Dec. 12, when the state must choose its electors; Dec. 18, when the Electoral College meets; and Jan. 20 — someone's inauguration.

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/28/politics/28NUMB.html

ALLAHASSEE, Fla., Nov. 27 — The president of Florida's Senate said today that Gov. Jeb Bush had indicated his willingness to sign special legislation intended to award Florida's 25 Electoral College votes to his brother Gov. George W. Bush of Texas even as the election results were being contested.

Though George W. Bush, the Republican presidential nominee, has been certified the winner of the Florida vote, talk of a special legislative session continued unabated here today as local Republicans fretted about the possibility that the justices on the Florida Supreme Court, all appointed by Democrats, might uphold the challenge by Vice President Al Gore, ultimately awarding him the state's electoral votes.

The driving force behind the calls for a special session is the Republican desire to use the Legislature to trump the state's Supreme Court, should the need arise.

Hours after Mr. Gore, the Democratic nominee, filed papers here formally contesting Florida's election results, John McKay, the Republican who is the Senate president, told reporters about a conversation he had had with Jeb Bush last week in which they discussed whether Mr. Bush should sign the bill.

Such a bill would automatically become law after seven days without the governor's signature. But with Republicans and Democrats racing against a Dec. 12 deadline to name Florida's electors, Mr. McKay said, he told Mr. Bush it would not be useful for legislation to languish.

"I didn't think there was any advantage to laying a bill on his desk for 7 or 10 days," Mr. McKay said of their conversation. "I thought that would be a mistake. I think we all need to stand up and take responsibility."

Asked how Mr. Bush responded to the suggestion, Mr. McKay replied, "I would say that he tended to agree with that."

But Katie Baur, a spokeswoman for Jeb Bush, said the governor had not yet made a decision.

"I don't think he's made up his mind," Ms. Baur said, noting that the Legislature had not even said whether it would convene a special session to write such legislation. "It's too early to speculate."

The governor's reported willingness to sign such a bill is significant because it gives the Legislature's leaders more time as they weigh the political risks of calling a special session, and as they join with George W. Bush in asking the United States Supreme Court to overturn the results of Florida's manual recounts. Today, lawyers for the Legislature filed a friend-of-the-court brief at the Supreme Court that argued the Legislature's right to appoint electors when the results of an election are in dispute.

On a political level, the comments Mr. McKay attributed to Jeb Bush would further indicate an increasingly bold effort by the governor to deliver Florida to his brother. After initially taking a low-key, hands-off approach to the dispute about Florida's election results, Mr. Bush has gradually emerged from near-seclusion as a significant player in the unfolding struggle for power.

Last week, in a conversation with Tom Feeney, the speaker of the House, Mr. Bush said Republican legislators would need to demonstrate political courage in calling a special session. Such a session, he predicted, would exact "a certain price" on the Legislature.

Mr. Bush has also moved quickly to notify the federal government that Florida's 25 electors have been won by his brother.

On Sunday night, barely an hour after the state canvassing commission declared George W. Bush the winner in Florida, Jeb Bush's two most senior lawyers — who had taken leave in recent weeks to work on the Bush recount campaign — delivered the certified election results to the governor's mansion.

Mr. Bush then signed a "certificate of ascertainment," a vital ministerial document by which the state formally delivers its electors to the federal government, in this case the Federal Register of the Archivist of the United States.

Only two other states have delivered certificates. Just today, the archivist received papers from Idaho, conferring four electoral votes, and Louisiana, conferring nine.

Federal law grants states some discretion over when to submit these certificates. The laws says that states should send them "as soon as practicable" and does not specify whether a state should hold off until a contest is resolved.

Governor Bush could have waited until Dec. 12 to send the document about Florida's results. "It takes three to four weeks even for routine certifications to come in," said Michael White, director of legal affairs at the Office of Federal Register. "I don't think the law is that specific."

Should Mr. Gore succeed in contesting the results, Florida could send an updated certificate. "It wouldn't be out of the question to initially certify and to amend that certification subsequently," Mr. White said.

Representative Lois Frankel, leader of Florida's House Democrats, said today that Jeb Bush had acted like an "overanxious brother" in sending the certificate to Washington, even as Mr. Gore contested the final results.

In so doing, Ms. Frankel said, Mr. Bush had raised the possibility that Florida would send dueling slates of electors to the Electoral College. She said, "He's saying, `If my brother gets evicted by the Florida Supreme Court, boys, go ahead and we'll get him elected another way.' "

Meanwhile, as a necessary step toward calling a special session, a new select committee from the state Senate and House is to meet on Tuesday to discuss the Florida election. The session is to include testimony from a team of legal experts retained by Mr. Feeney and Mr. McKay, both of whom are also listed on the slate of official Bush electors submitted by Jeb Bush.

The team is led by Charles Fried, the Harvard law professor and former United States solicitor general during the Reagan and Bush administrations. Another Harvard law professor, Einer Elhauge, has been hired by the House. Roger J. Magnuson, a litigator from Minneapolis, has been hired by the Senate.

The team spelled out the Legislature's legal position today in a friend- of-the-court brief submitted to the United States Supreme Court. The brief argues that the Florida Supreme Court overstepped its authority last week when it ruled that the manual recounts could continue.

Citing the federal code governing the appointment of electors, the brief contends that if the normal process breaks down — and if there is no clear agreement on which candidate's electors should represent the state — the Legislature is responsible for assuring that the state's voters are not shut out of the Electoral College tabulations.

"The Legislature itself, and not the courts, is the arbiter of when a failure to make such a choice has occurred," according to the brief. "If the courts must step in," it continued, "the Supreme Court of Florida cannot have the last word on what is, after all, a question of federal law."

Democrats in the Legislature have complained bitterly about the hiring of the legal team, characterizing the move as a brazen effort to turn the Legislature into an arm of the Bush campaign. By all accounts, the Democrats have been excluded from telephone calls and meetings with the lawyers and the Republican leaders .

Today, in a letter to Mr. Feeney, Mrs. Frankel objected to using state funds to pay the lawyers. Under the retainer agreement with Mr. Elhauge, for example, the House has agreed to pay $350 an hour, up to $60,000, plus expenses.

In her letter, Mrs. Frankel said the money could be better spent upgrading Florida's antiquated voting machinery, and she warned that a special session would "place a dark partisan stain on our Legislature."

"The votes have been cast," she wrote. "They just need to be fairly and accurately counted as will now be determined by the courts of Florida and the United States Supreme Court. The State Legislature should not become an arm of any one presidential campaign."

The complaints have had no apparent impact on the disciplined and determined group of Republicans, who control the House by a 77-to-43 margin and the Senate 25 to 15. Mr. Feeney has said that he feels no obligation under House rules to include Democrats in his discussions with the legal team.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/28/politics/28LEGI.html?printpage=yes

 

[LAVA GODDESSS]

...

ya'll type too much, bottom line,
Do we want the people to elect the prez?
or do we want electoral?

i believe mr gore won by a few hundred the first night. now this can be argued because florida wasn't included. BUT...it showed that a little over half the u.s. wanted mr gore. case closed. now he is fighting. bush can fight too. i don't care anymore, but if bush's "Connections" get him any further, im moving to canada.

 

[skitch]

yeehaa

Rosebud...that was beautiful. lol The way i see it, the entire election is starting to become a bit of a joke. SO, why not makes jokes about it?


Concerning the election...Just goes to show you that the US is more divided than we thought. Whoever wins will win by a slim margin. Me? I voted for Bush. I bet they BOTH wish they'd appealed to the 18-24 y/o voters now!

Let's make love...not drag the courts in, please.

 

[Weird Harold]

BUT...it showed that a little over half the u.s. wanted mr gore. case closed.

Since less than half the population voted, it's more like over half of the country didn't want either Bush or Gore. Nor any of the other candidates.

less than 20% of the population voted for Gore or Bush.

Gore should concede. Of course that would mean he would suffer the embarassment of opening that envelope and having to say "The president of the USA is GWB"

 

[tighe]

Gore did concede, the night of the election.

 

[Guest]

Gore did concede, the night of the election.

No, the person who received the most VOTES in an election should be President. I believe that's how it works in America.

Didn't you read the article, or can you not read? Gore conceded because the information he received told him that he had lost Florida - that information was supplied to the media BY GWB'S COUSIN.

We have at least one clear-cut case of voter fraud in which those involved admitted to tampering with votes to help Bush win, and more will surface.

I hope GWB wins. I'll be laughing when you idiots don't get that tax cut you're hoping for. You will all feel stupid four years from now when voter outrage votes a Democrat majority into Congress and a Democrat into the White House.

All Hail Our Commander-In-Thief, George W. Bush, who will restore integrity to the Presidency by stealing the election!

 

[Ambrosious]

Thank you, Mr Gore. Now go count the votes AGAIN and leave us alone.

 

[Cheyenne]

He did promise us a big tax break, didn't he? Didn't he? Aren't you anxious? What will you do with all of that wonderful tax-break money?

God Bless the Land of The Truck-Driving-Catfish-Eaters!
Long Live the Land of the Gun-Toting-Sleeping-Defense-Attorneys-During-Capital-Punishment cases!

I want my tax break! I my tax break just like the puppet said!

I hope GWB wins. I'll be laughing when you idiots don't get that tax cut you're hoping for. You will all feel stupid four years from now when voter outrage votes a Democrat majority into Congress and a Democrat into the White House.

All Hail Our Commander-In-Thief, George W. Bush, who will restore integrity to the Presidency by stealing the election!

Hey, Riff, why the troll imitation as Voice of Reason? Did your trip reservations not work out?