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DEMOCRATS: GET OVER IT! You've lied, cheated, sighed, drank too much iced tea and even been impeached. Let's move on! I will be the next president no matter what you chads think.

And a Happy New Year to you too!

Gore never won Florida. Only those whoe interpreted the ballots as Gore votes believe so. Others saw that Bush won that vote. Gorons should get over it-they lost! If every state in the US was recounted - many more Bush votes would have been counted in addition to the military votes which Gorons were quick to dispense with. YOU LOST!!!

Boy, you ARE incessant, aren't you? Lately we've devolved to a country with predictive memory loss. When it turned out, four days before Election Day, that Bush had been arrested for drunk driving and then repeatedly lied about it, it didn't cost him a fraction of a percentage point. We'll all forget about this soon enough, the public essentially said, so why not just get it over with and forgive him now? That's what the Supreme Court essentially said when they issued their patently wrong ruling. When no one remembers what you did wrong, being American means never having to say you're sorry.

Never has the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of conservative intellectuals been on more prominent display than in the wake of the decision by five Supreme Court Justices to end the 2000 election in favor of their man. Never mind. If there is one sure bet in American politics, it's historical amnesia. Soon the machinations of James Baker, Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris, Tom DeLay and their allies inside the violent mobs of Miami and the velvet robes of the nation's capital will evaporate into the endangered ozone layer. Al Gore has already brilliantly played his assigned role in the new chapter, moving Chris Matthews almost to tears by giving, "beautifully," what the hysterical MSNBC pundit celebrated as "the most prostrate concession speech I've ever heard." "The vast majority of the people in America," Tim Russert advised, want to wake up and say, "You know, we went through something extraordinary and yet we saw last night the peaceful transfer of power--no troops in the street, no tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue...." Well, if the absence of soldiers seizing cable networks is the ultimate standard of meaningful democratic empowerment, then Russert is right, we're not doing half bad; not up to the standards of, say, the Grecians, but we sure beat the heck out of the Kosovars. In closing, I leave you with the wise words of Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, who was turned into an accidental prophet by virtue of his magazine's inopportune deadline. Our next President, Kristol wrote, "gained office through an act of judicial usurpation. We will not 'move on.' Indeed, some of us will work for the next four years to correct this affront to our constitutional order.... The best that can be hoped for under such circumstances is that this illegitimately gained presidency will give rise to a determination on the part of the people to resume the burden and the privileges of self-government."

From an article entitled Conservatives Are Dumb, by Eric Alterman.

George W. is our first true dauphin: truly unserious, remarkably undistinguished, designated only because he is the eldest son of the last chief executive to produce a line of hopefuls and because his father's friends paved his path to the White House with campaign finance gold.

Bush the Younger over-uses the word principle, as in, "John Ashcroft will perform his duties guided by principle, not by politics." He likes to contrast Republicans, who have principles, with Democrats, who are stuck with politics. Even some of Sen. Ashcroft's friends say what he has are more like fixed ideas than principles, but, in any case, talk of principles should always be suspect when it comes from politicians. Bob Jones University has principles, like "no interracial dating" and "the pope is the Antichrist." Bush the Younger waded in the surf of those hard principles last spring but avoided total immersion. On the other hand, he didn't stay high and dry, either. Votes may have been involved in his speech at the South Carolina university, but principles? It hardly seems so. Deploying the U.S. Supreme Court and the Florida Legislature, with the U.S. Congress as a strategic reserve, to prevent the counting of all possible votes in an election looks more like an act of naked power than an act of principle. Some people whose votes never were counted might even call the strategy of stall and run out the clock unprincipled. Whatever it's called, it didn't reflect any high principles. Finally, "I'm a uniter, not a divider" is a double-edged principle, if it is more than an idle claim. Adolf Hitler was a uniter. "Fuehrer lead, we will follow," the crowds chanted.

Oh, tone it down a bit. I go off on a nice holiday and come home to find this incessant drivel still going on. Al ran a poor campaign - it's his fault W. won. Stop whining about it and get some new plans going for 2001. You'll feel better!!! C

The collective amnesia is already working. Whether or not Gore ran a lousy campaign is irrelevant. Bush is the big money candidate, having spent $60 million more than Gore. To put it simply: it all comes down to Florida. Did more people vote for Gore in Florida or did more people vote for Bush? I don't mean did more people intend to vote for Gore. I mean out of the people who actually showed up on election day and voted, who got the most votes? This is how we judge the winner of elections in America. At least, this is how we are supposed to declare winners. I think it is indisputable that Al Gore had more actual votes cast for him in Florida. The only issue is whether "voting irregularities" have voided (at least for the moment) those votes and therefore deprived American citizens of their right to elect leaders of their own choice. It's important to note that at no time has anyone from the Republican side actually claimed that any substantial portion of the disputed ballots were cast for Bush. Their position is relatively simple: they know the votes were cast for Gore (at least the vast majority of them), they just want to find some way to legally exclude them from the totals. That someone would take this position is absolutely amazing to me. That American citizens did not have their votes properly recorded and were therefore deprived of their constitutional right is not the only thing that bothers me. In addition to trying to disqualify the votes of American citizens who voted for other candidates, Bush actively tried to intimidate people from voting. His supporters called people and gave them false information about what was required to vote to discourage them from going to the polls. That these calls were made is indisputable. Can we prove that Bush was responsible for them? Perhaps we may never tie him personally to these actions from a legal point of view, but he can be directly tied from a moral perspective. I believe sins of omission bring one into the collective guilt of those performing evil acts. For example, after World War II, there were many German citizens who claimed they had no knowledge of the death camps or what happened there. Others claimed they knew what happened, but they could not stop it or do anything about it, so they just continued on with their lives. In my view, God morally obligates us to speak out against evil. By not speaking out, those citizens took upon themselves the collective guilt. Likewise, people trying to get Bush elected performed some evil acts. Now that Bush has been made aware of what happened, he has the obligation to speak out against it and offer recompense as far as it is within his power to do so. In my view, his failure to even publicly condemn the acts makes him as guilty as those who performed them. As I watch Bush and his co-conspirators, I am truly sickened by what I see. Bush has tried to declare votes illegal which almost certainly have gone to his opponent. He has accepted the actions of his supporters who made phone calls to discourage potential Gore supporters from voting. He is not concerned with what the voters have said, but only what he thinks they should have said. We can tell this because he has inhibited the counting process and democracy by having his lawyers issue subpeonas to the canvassing board and by threatening the counters that they would be named in his lawsuits. He has no public criticism for the Republican party operatives who successfully intimidated Dade County from finishing the manual recount. All of these actions are appalling and flagrant abuses against democracy. Although I have always voted Republican, I would encourage you to consider how you vote very carefully in the future. When it comes to government, our most important issue is freedom.

Christian - Freedom ... Now.Forever --- wonderful handle, Chris. Now, if you're serious, I could just hug you -- for giving me the opportunity to ask that one burning question I've been dying to ask someone for what seems like forever: QUESTION: Is there anything good on TV tonight? Hmmmmm, good. C

For the umpteenth time, Gore simply dedicated a more detailed effort toward identifying "voting irregularities" that would likely have been resolved in his favor had they been counted by HIS standards. Bush was never motivated to identify blocks of improperly cast Republican ballots because he was the de facto winner. There were thousands of undercounts in predominantly Republican counties and precincts that were never examined. Furthermore, both candidates attempted to exclude ballots (remember the issue concerning overseas, presumably pro-Republican, ballots?), not simply Bush. Gore attempted to exclude ballots on technicalities, whereas Bush attempted to exclude ballots on the grounds of voter ambiguity.

It is beyond belief that you would contine to hold fast to your shameless partisan line about how the votes were tabulated in Florida. Tell me that where a name is written in it is not indication of voter intent, and that there's some ambiguity there. Yet Sct. of State Bush appointee Harris made sure every "ambiguity" was resolved in favor of Bush. Unless you were there to observe what recount procedures were in place, you have no right to get off on your hackneyd accounts. In Broward County, the head of the canvassing board, Judge Robert W. Lee, said: "Suddenly, I would get an envelope stuffed with 50 challenged ballots, and when I looked at them, almost all of them had been plainly marked. This just wasn't a good faith effort to count votes. "The first time I asked one of the Republican volunteers to explain to me what he was doing, and he told me he didn't have to say anything to me. I had a deputy remove him from the building. I wasn't going to tolerate delays. Indeed, Mr. Bush's supporters were, by their own account, tireless in coming up with ways, they said, to block the "unfair" counting of votes. Why "unfair"? Because all those uncounted votes were for Gore. The biggest shame is that Americans will realize all too slowly the fraud that has been perpetrated upon them. Now let it go, already. History will take its course.

whaat- You forgot to include your last name "abunchofnonsense"- as in "what a bunch of nonsense."

Media recount boosts Gore BRAD SMITH of The Tampa Tribune December 30, 2000 Vice President Al Gore topped George W. Bush by 120 votes in an unofficial look at Hillsborough County's disputed presidential ``undervotes'' by The Tampa Tribune. Gore captured 999 votes and Bush, the president-elect, gained 879 votes in the first manual recount of Hillsborough's 5,533 ballots that machines could not read. Results in Hillsborough, one of the most hotly contested Gore- Bush battlegrounds, are a microcosm of how Bush's razor-thin Florida margin could have changed if some 60,000 disputed undervotes in 67 counties were examined by hand statewide. Susan MacManus, political science professor at the University of South Florida, said the results will still be disputed, even once historical perspective is gained. ``There's always going to be controversy about the standards used. People will say different standards were used by different media,'' she said. Hillsborough is significant because it had Florida's fourth-highest number of undervotes, after Miami-Dade's 10,750, Palm Beach's 10,582 and Broward's 6,686. Sometimes, machines miss votes on these ballots when, for example, a chad isn't fully dislodged from a punch card. News organizations, including The Miami Herald and a consortium led by The New York Times, are conducting statewide reviews of these ballots. Results are not expected for several weeks. News executives say the purpose is to clear up lingering questions. So far, the only other results show Gore gained 130 unofficial votes in Lake County, according to a review by The Orlando Sentinel. Republicans, meanwhile, denounced the latest Hillsborough numbers, and Democrats exulted. ``We carried the county by 11,000 votes, so let Gore have his few votes. Who really cares?'' said Margie Kincaid, Hillsborough's GOP chairwoman. ``I think the media spent their money for nothing. It's all pretty silly and it's not going to change anything. It's just going to confuse a lot of people. It's just an exercise in futility.'' But Hillsborough Democratic Chairman Mike Scionti said the results ``make sense.'' He predicted statewide results of the media recount will show Gore won Florida by 20,000 votes. Undervotes were at the center of a legal storm in last month's 36-day presidential election stalemate in Florida. With the White House at stake, Gore wanted undervotes counted by hand while the Bush camp was opposed, saying the statewide vote was counted twice, on election night Nov. 7 and the next day because results were too close to call. The Florida Supreme Court ordered undervotes counted by hand in a victory for Gore on Dec. 8. But the U.S. Supreme Court stopped it the next day. Three days later, justices said there was no uniform standard for deciding whether dimples, hanging chad and pinpricks were really votes. In the Hillsborough recount, journalists examined each of the 5,533 undervote ballots by hand, checking for dimples, pinpricks, hanging chad and clear punches on the data-processing cards punched by voters to register their choices for elective office. The Tribune spent 19.5 hours sorting through the ballots, finishing a count on Friday that began on Dec. 21 and continued at the county election service center on Dec. 22 and Dec. 28. The newspaper and other news organizations paid $58.12 per hour for election workers to hold up the ballots for counting. Florida law makes ballots public documents available for inspection, but they can only be handled by election officials.

Boy, do I agree - this is a travel site. Go elsewhere for politics or whatever.

P.S. My agreement is with Ron, april, and George.

Instead of brooding over the antics of our Supreme Court Jesters, I'd rather focus on what makes this country great. Such as all that hooey our 7th grade civics teacher told us about how ANYONE can become President of the United States. She was right! It's true! ANYONE just became president. Let this be a lesson to my younger readers -- listen to your teachers!You know, I always like it when life is a win-win situation. Gore won the "popular" vote, so I guess that means George W. won the unpopular vote! Everyone goes home with something. Now everyone Finally Knows the Awful Truth: "One Person, One Vote" Is a Lie. We can do something about it. We need a system of proportional representation. That would guarantee that everyone's voice is heard. Remember that other civics lesson -- "majority rule, minority rights"? Proportional representation means if your party got 10% of the vote, you get 10% of the seats. A number of local governments in the U.S. have switched to this much fairer and representative system. In the meantime, we have our best chance now to dump the Electoral College (or, at the very least, reform it so that every states' electors are proportioned to the percentage each candidate got).

B-o-r-i-n-g!!! Can we cut the political pundit crap and get back to travel? If you're so worked up (both sides) go write Rush Limbaugh or Phil Donahue.

This was in today's Washington Post (a conservative newspaper) in an article talking about Bush appointments of people like Ashcroft to his cabinet.; "Bush seems to have forgotten that he did not win the election. He did not win the popular vote, and he did not -- you and I know in our bones -- win the electoral college vote, either. He won because a bare majority of the Supreme Court wanted him to be president. In his presidency, as in everything else he's done, Bush has relied on a good name, a winning smile and the ability to show up on time.Ever since Election Day, Bush has proceeded as if he were president by divine right. Ashcroft is evidence of that delusion. He is the choice of a man who does not yet know his own limitations, who sees a single vote in the Supreme Court as a landslide, who cannot or will not appreciate that he must earn his mandate after he takes his oath of office, not before." The authors name is Richard Cohen and the whole article can be seen at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2001Jan1.html