starofthesea January 9th, 2008 11:39 pm
What to do? Can you link us to some folks doing something? It is such an important issue. I know some good people surely must be fighting this thoroughly corrupt latest dirty trick.

Guys, I believe it was in large part the Bradley effect. And I'm not so sure about those machines, and also I agree with you that the GOP wants Hillary to be the candidate, as well as the defense industry which has bought her ass. As far as the women voters, which is all I heard about today on Ed Schultz and the crocodile tears: if that is the feminist revolution, I want nothing to do with it. Where were these gals who voted for Hillary when Hillary was sleeping with Rupert Murdoch, the giant corporates and George Bush? Right wing press? Shoot, the whore has already been bought and sold by them!

I also agree that we should be very worried. I'm so worried that I'm in the process of writing a letter to Dennis Kucinich to ask him to withdraw and back Barack, and not to be a freakin spoiler like Nader. But, let's face it,Barack has problems too. Missing tons of Senate votes, voting for war funding, flopping on health care and also taking mucho dinero from the Health Industry, right along with Hillary. He has been excellent however, speaking against Blackwater.

What a mess, damn shame Gore didn't run.

See you guys later.

Hillary put on a nice show didn't she?

Quasar January 9th, 2008 10:57 pm
"But now that more than a few previously undecided NH women have come out and said that they voted for Hillary simply because they saw her cry is a sham and copout."

AlexLawyer January 9th, 2008 8:13 pm
"No one cares that she hasn't shed a tear for the 4000 Americans and million Iraqis who have died in a war....."

Unbelievable that people can fall for those crocodile tears!

AS recently as 1967,there were less than 1000 black elected officials in the whole country.thats because until 1965,a substantial number of african americans were not allowed to vote.today,many blacks are denied the vote due to felony conviction.a substantial number of black people eschew voting because one party baits them,and the other plays them for chumps.the tea leaves,and horse race aside,there is a community of issues associated with the african american community which goes to the core of whats gone gravely wrong with this nation.i can't say it any plainer than that

Very thoughtful analysis. I have a feeling a lot more questions involving race, both warranted and otherwise, will come up in the next month or so. It is undeniable that America still has a huge race problem. I for one look forward to that debate and think it will be very healthy. Being color blind is another form of racism if you ask me. We should be able to embrace our differences while also embracing our equal rights and liberties, and ability to lead regardless of color.

Racism is still very much alive in America today, and it will play a part in the primaries and a big part in the general election if Obama is the Democratic nominee. That is just a fact, period!

I think this accounted for some of it. I also think that a lot of voters, thinking that the Democratic race was going to be a blow-out for Obama, opted at the last minute (which you can do in New Hampshire)to vote in the Republican primary where the race appeared to be much closer and their vote could make a difference.

To me tbe result is fascinating. In Iowa, the caucus process is completely open, transparent and impossible to hack from the outside. The people literally indicate their preferences by going and standing in a groups with the other supporters of that candidate, and everyone in the room can openly count how much support each candidate has. And I believe that all the participants in the caucus could check that their results are being correctly listed as a part of the whole.

In New Hampshire, we are back to our more normal voting machines and vote counting computers.

And, lo and behold, once again we were told that all the pre-election polls are wrong and that there are the surprise results that the two candidates on each side have that have corporate and party establishment and big money support are the surprise winners who have reinvigorated their campaigns.

Why is my first reaction just to say 'yeah, right!'.

Exit polls suggest it was gender, not race. According to CNN, 46% of women went for Clinton, 34% for Obama. Among men, it was Obama 40, Clinton 29. The key thing is the female turnout. Women make up a total of 57 percent of the voters who showed up at the polls for the New Hampshire primary.

Combined with the fact that polls had predicted a strong victory for Obama, these results support a last-minute surge of sympathy among women for Clinton, particularly after she was mocked for showing emotion the day before the election.

I don't think this means a Clinton victory. Both camps will regroup and when people think it over, they will decide they don't want another Clinton White House. But Obama is going to have to fight harder now, because the big money and superdelegates won't desert Clinton yet.

When Edwards withdraws, most of his support will go to Obama, particularly if Edwards and Obama form a ticket.

Mike Bin SC,

The country is still racist. No doubt about it. But, it's in a sort of transition phase where support for Obama might allow people who are only mildly racist to atone for it. So, racism against African-Americans, as it stands in America today, might actually work in his favor.

Now, tha being said, there's another simple explanation for the New Hampshire outcome: New Hampshire is a red state and Hillary is a red candidate. In fact, isn't this a far simpler explanation than the Bradley effect?

No, Obama wasn't defeated by racism. He was defeated by Republicans - with a lot of help from Diebold. They doctored the results to make sure their preferred candidate (Hillary Clinton) was declared the winner, just like they did with Howard Dean and John Kerry in the 2004 Iowa caucuses.

Remember how Dean had a huge lead for weeks leading up to voting day, and then Kerry was mysteriously declared the winner? In that Republican state with Republicans counting the votes, our glorious corporate media also did its part by pretending not to notice.

Barack Obama got the most votes yesterday, and I suspect that Ron Paul also got thousands more votes than the final totals that were declared.

Ain't it funny how the (previously reliable) exit polls have not matched the declared results since the era of electronic voting began? Even sadder is that no one notices, or cares...

Its too bad--Clinton is irritating. At least Obama is a great speaker, its enjoyable listening to him. He could make a bombing run sound poetic.

Ralph Wiggum for president!

Speaking of race - what do the Democratic candidates have to say about the American extradition of Maher Arar, Abdullah Almalki, Muayyed Nureddin and Ahman Abou-Elmaati? If you think Arar's story is damaging to American reputations - let's wait until you hear Almalki's.

What do the Democrats have to say about the many Americans in the same situation?

What does Obama, Clinton and Edwards have to say about them and about preventing similar incidents in the future?

And if they are unwilling to protect the least of these, do you trust them to speak out for the rights of Blacks (and everyone else Obama listed in his speach last night)?

Mediator requests more time for torture inquiry

OTTAWA -- Retired judge Frank Iacobucci says he needs more time to investigate the cases of three men who claim Canadian authorities had a hand in their overseas torture.

Iacobucci will ask the federal government to extend the Jan. 1 deadline set out in the terms of reference for his largely closed-door inquiry.

Iacobucci is looking into the conduct of Canadian officials in the cases of Abdullah Almalki, Muayyed Nureddin and Ahman Abou-Elmaati from 2001 to 2004.

The former Supreme Court justice says he's preparing to interview the three men.

Elmaati says he was tortured in Egypt and Syria, while Almalki and Nureddin say they were tortured in Syria.

Commission lawyers have reviewed more than 35,000 documents and interviewed 39 officials or former officials from the RCMP, CSIS and the Foreign Affairs Department since the inquiry was called last spring.

Iacobucci says more work needs to be done, issues surrounding national security have to be reviewed, and inquiry participants have to be consulted before he can produce a final report.

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20071106/torture_inquiry_071106/20071106/

Obama was not defeated by racism, Obama was beaten by the right wing press.

They are falling all over themselves trying to correct their error, but the fact remains, they predicted the Obama victory, they supplied the drum and they were the ones, leading the orchestra.

The right wing is so eager to get rid of the Clintons that they are willing to elect a man of mixed blood into the big boys club.

In this instance, they failed.

The Republicans WANT Hillary to win, reason being that they have enough ammo on her for a big-time take-down. Never underestimate the craftiness of these people, never. Hillary is their chosen opponent because they know how easily they can beat her at her own game. They've been after the Clintons from the get-go and they tried in the mid-90's to destroy them, but now they smell blood like a bunch of ravenous sharks and they know that they can easily knock Obama out of the way and get Hillary nominated as the Democratic candidate so that they can claw her to pieces in order to regain the White House.

And I agree with "yormsane's" take on all of this. All of the polls had Obama leading by double digits and whammo, suddenly he loses? What's THAT all about? Don't tell me that Hillary's disingenuous tears had anything to do with it. New Hampshire-ites aren't THAT stupid to fall for a trick like that in order to gain sympathy and traction and therefore votes from women voters.

And how is it that the youth vote failed to turn out in NH? In unseasonably warm weather, to boot? Kids, where were you, if this is, indeed, true? How can you let us down like this? Hillary's main constituency seems to be older people, compared to Obama's strength among the younger voters, and according to NPR, New Hampshire has seen a recent surge in new voters moving to that state and I know they can't all be older people looking to retire in chilly northern New England! According to what I'm hearing, the upswing in population in NH is mostly younger people migrating from places like Massachusetts.

So where were THEY yesterday, huh? If they voted in large numbers, why was it for Hillary and not Obama? Is it the fact that she's a Senator from New York, a nearby state, and Obama hails from Chicago in the Midwest? Does Obama have most of his traction in the Midwest and Hillary in the Northeast? How are the western and southern Dems going to vote? Are southern Dems going to vote for a black man or a white woman? Is old, entrenched racism going to be a factor there that will harm Obama's chances?

Hillary is the #1 fave among Ohio Dems, sadly, so she's going to easily take this state vs. Obama, unless he can somehow pull off a big upset here, but unless he can, look for a BIG Hillary win here in Ohio in March. So maybe that "inevitability factor" of hers will come to pass after all. And that will play right into the hands of the ravenous Republican sharks who will do everything in their power to utterly, totally destroy her. So look for Huckabee or McCain to be our next President.....UGH. The thought of either one of them in the White House sends shivers down my spine.......Be afraid. Be very afraid.

One should remeber what happened to the last vastly popular and articulate orator of Afican-American decent. And what happened to him.

Martin Luther King day is Jan. 21.

I agree that electronic voting is rigged but the exit polls from what I've been able to track down supported the outcome yesterday. The entrance polls were off. We could debate the methodology of exit polls since they are adjusted to past results, thus building the fraud in to the model over time, but it appears that last night Clinton got some Edwards voters to switch. Not sure why but that appears to be the case and the exit polling confirms this from what I've seen. If anyone has access to additional data that conflicts with the outcome please post here.

So the debate on CNN on Jan 21 is in honour of Martin Luther King?

Newsworld's analysis agrees with Nader2000 that it was gender rather than race this time around. They are very very curious as to why the poll and voting results were so dissimilar - and I hope that CNN is too - and Jimmy Carter.

At the very least, I think Rick Mercer will look into it further. Yes, Canadians find sick things like this amusing.

BTW - you know who is running Giuliani's campaign - Paul Cellucci! SallyUUKent, that is enough to make my spine shiver.

This is a stupid proposition. Voters responding to pollsters could just as easily have said they were voting for some other candidate as say they were voting for Obama and lying about it. Would a racist really want to go on record or tell anybody they were voting for a Black? I think not.

For the thesis of this article to be correct, the "racist" would also have to have the intention of leading pollsters in one direction so that the polls would be wrong, and they would have had to get together to agree to lie to pollsters

Come on. Can't we get intelligent and common sense minded reports on Common Dreams. I am beginning to think that Common Dreams has lost it sense of fair reporting.

The media may finally have to get used to the American people doing what they think instead of what the media, and so-called experts tell them to think.

Perhaps too many years of listening to media garbage and lies has finally come home to roost. So lets see the experts start kissing butts to the Democrats so they can be in good graces with the in group.

As a program leader of several years for a youth camp that focused on race, gender and religious issues in order to get at building a more inclusive community, I've learned that most (young people at least) can identify racial disscrimination in themselves and others but have a much harder time identifying gender discrimination. In fact, most people seemed more comfortable talking about homosexuality or white-guilt then gender issues, and gender discrimination was the most stongly defended among all discrimination... and these were the more "enlightened" kids.

Wow - What a waste of bandwidth this article is. Obummer takes first place in Iowa and second place in NH and somehow that makes him a looser? Oh wait, I get it, the pollsters are perfect, so if they were wrong we must start fabricating non existent issues of race. Maybe Billary just did a better job of getting here supporters mobilized in the last few days of the campaign there, na.

I think it was Hillary's tears (which I believe were real, not crocodile). I had a gut reaction when I saw her get choked up and then saw how the media and pundits pounced on it (and how John Edwards said you need to be tough to be president). As a woman, it made me feel sympathy for Hillary (and I am not a Hillary fan). It showed that she is a human being, not a monster. I spoke to numerous people about her tears, and they all felt that it humanized her and helped her tremendously. So, female voters in N.H. who might have been torn between Hillary and Barack may have felt a desire to support the woman who was under attack as too "weak" to be President. (Note that the media and pundits didn't jump all over Mitt Romney when he choked up, more than once, on the campaign trail.) There is a double standard here.

Maybe I should be a pundit, like Haroon Siddique. Obviously, when a woman or a black upset the MSM's pudits and polls then it is a victory or defeat for racisim or sexism. Yes in America we like simple emotional solutions. Forget rational thought... give me fear and anger!!

Yes, gender and race still play a major factor in voting, especially when we focus on the candidates and not the issues. When we focus on character and celebrity/status like the Establishment wants, then we discredit what the founding fathers gave to us. Voting becomes a popularity contest, rather than a procedure to produce democratic management of govermental issues. And popularity contests always involve personal predjudices.

Its easy to speculate from all the polls, and unfortunately it creates an expectation.
I feared the polls showing Obama in the lead would do him harm. I think it may have
given people the impression that since he was so sure to win, they could vote for
someone else, like McCain, who the media was garnering sympathy for by saying
things like "it's do or die for McCain" and then you see the guy's picture and
how old he is and you think, "gee they're serious!"

I think you have to take your hat off to Clinton for staying with it 'til the end.
Though in the long haul, if Clinton's husband is going to have to step up and
win her every primary, it is NOT going to bode well for her.

As for race being an issue, I don't really think so. It was still very, very close.
And you have to remember a few weeks ago Obama was predicted ten points
behind.

I'm also motivated by his speech Tuesday night. You could tell the loss affected
him but it didn't affect his poise. The mark of a true leader.

So on to pundit-ing!

Race and Gender, sure
but let's not forget:
Polls are a crock!
Who spent money and on what?
Who are the actual people who worked on the process?
Were they party insiders? Newbies? What were their priorities?

Clinton won by what, 7000 votes, and in the end she and Obama got the same number of delegates....

It's a lot of work, but read the same information from as many different sources you can and then make up your own damn mind!

Who would ever have believed that in the year 2008, bigotry and misogyny would defame an election.

Chunga's Revenge: yeah, you said what I meant in a much more straightforward way. keep posting.

And while I'm at it, I watch Clinton's 'outburst' footage, and -shocker- the media is Full Of Shit!! She wasn't crying, mabye a bit choked up. But remember she was told to use a lower register in her voice to make her sound appealing, plus she was exhausted, and talking about exhausting and emotion. How would you sound? When I first heard this story, I thought she must have acted like widow at an italian funeral.

This is more of pundits trying to clarify their own bullshit (see Chunga's Revenge post)

Every time Obama get beat in the election process, the Boys' Club cries foul. They just can't stand having a girl beat them at anything - even when she is 10 times better. Hilliary didn't cry-she was touched that someone showed concern for her on a personel level [not to mention, probably physically exhausted at all the non-stop campaigning]. We all make mistakes; Hilliary's mistake was believing that Dubba, the current President of the United States, would not lie about something so important as going to war. She, like so many others was deceived, lied to and mislead - get over it! I and many others didn't vote for Dubba and I doubt that the Clintons did either, but Dubba is what we got, what we have and what we have to live with until January 2009. It would be nice if the "progressives" who read this site would stop bashing the one person who could make a real difference in their lives. GO HILLIARY GIRL, GO!

Maybe if people actually knew what Obama really stands for he'd do better. While I don't doubt that racism and sexism play a role in voter's minds, one isn't necessarily a racist if one finds Obama to be all image and oratory. Personally, I think he would be slightly better than Clinton but not much different. Of the three pre-chosen "front runners" Edwards is by far the best but just as one cannot trust our crooked electoral system, I doubt that we can put much veracity in the outcome of these overhyped primaries.

LOL - If people voted out of pity according to the Crying Game theorists, then they should have voted for Kucinich- pity and predjudice galore!

And if i ever get to meet Hillary Clinton, then I'm going to ask "just what the hell was wrong with the very 1st draft of your health care plan?!!"

Racism is woven into the fabric of American culture. Diversity of ethnicity has not yet yielded diversity of thought in this country. To one degree or another we are all racists, it just depends on the moment of interaction.

Racism: The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, esp. so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.

So, a white kid in the suburbs that dotes on a Hip Hop groups and singers, wears the clothes, walks and talks like a rapper is a racist, to a degree... You model who you favor and discard what you dislike, fear or do not understand.

For Obama he is either too black or too white. I agree with the article in that when it comes right down to it there are few people that would not side with their 'own' kind. To bad, but you know we are all racists for even considering race in our daily lives.

I give no weight to any poll because people rarely tell you how they truly feel, they just answer with polite political correctness.

I'm choking up, here. Maybe I'm crying. You'll need a newscaster to interpret which it is. So many astute posters not falling for the nonsense being fed.

Yes, we're being taught to disregard polls (unless it's in the Ukraine, or course)

And why would Obama be ahead in the polls and then lose? Who does the counting. Here's a link to hand counted vs Diebold counted votes.
http://ronrox.com/paulstats.php?party=DEMOCRATS

Not just women, but white women. And not just any woman, but Bill Clinton's wife. More than a fairy tale, Obama is Bill's worst nightmare. It's the fairy tale made real.

Here we have an almost unbelievably eloquent man who is intelligent, graceful, handsome, young, passionate and compassionate, funny, a natural leader and black. But more than just black.

And then we have Hillary. Yes, the women came out for her in New Hampshire. The white women. They came out to rescue her and themselves from that irresistable black man.

Before the NH primary, Bill sounded more than desperate. He sounded threatened. For his wife and his legacy.

Just wait: the closer Obama gets to the nomination and then the inauguration, the more we will see America's true colors. Not red and blue but black and white.

Has this writer never heard of ballot fraud??? Racism is not the issue, it is mainly making sure that candidates who win are the ones that benefit the establishment (read corporate class.) The Democrat who wins will be the one that the fixers believe will most benefit them or hurt them the least.

In the Bradley-Deukmejian election, Californians went to bed having heard that Bradley won. The next morning, it was announced that Deukmejian won because of absentee ballots that had just been counted. Complete BS! The absentee ballots come in days in advance, and they are the ones announced at the BEGINNING of the count at 8 pm, long before any ballot boxes could have been tallied at the precincts and sent to the Registrar-Recorder which come in about 10 pm. That was a stolen election before anyone in California wanted to admit that there was any such thing as ballot fraud.

I was a candidate in Los Angeles County in 1992, and learned a great deal about how it is done. After now Rep. Diane Watson lost her race for County Supervisor in 1992, several universities examined the vote tallies in both the primary and the runoff in November, and they all found that it was a statistical impossibility in both elections that the ballots reported were legitimate. This was the time when Karen Saranita exposed the registration fraud that occurs when there is no ID required to register: Dogs and cats were registered, and in the Watson-Burke race there were massive numbers of duplicate registration voted by absentee ballot (by operatives not the individuals.) Then State Sen. Watson went on to convene a special committee of the CA State Senate to investigate the issue. Her committee, Voting Practices and Procedures (Karen Saranita as chief staffer,) had 3 or 4 statewide hearings in which numerous people, both county registrars and individuals, gave damning testimony about the "irregularities." Some of the problems were also at the polls themselves. And, though CA law recommends that counting software be escrowed with a neutral third party, the legislature has never funded it, thus the counting software of each county before and after the no-printout machines is never examined to make sure that it is not corrupted by the fixers.

This was quite a few years before the no-printout voter machines arrived on the scene. There are still the same registration "irregularities" that the CA League of Women Voters recognized in 1994 in 2007. While the law has changed so that county voting officials must clean up their lists and transmit them to their state's Secretary of State, they are failing to do so.

The Institute for Fair Elections complained in early 2006 to the US Justice Dept. that the State of California has not complied with assuring a legitimate statewide voting list within 90 days prior to the election, but Bush's AG cannot be bothered to enforce the new HAVA law.

We will have election fraud in 2008, primaries and the general election, because nothing much has been done to clean it up, despite all credit to the new Secretary of State of California and other states who have decertified most of the proprietary voting machines.

Until all Americans who care who gets elected get serious about cleaning up our elections, who we get is who the fixers want us to get. Period.

Quasar, I hope you're not right, but I fear that you are onto something. It scares me. Both Bill and Hillary came unglued when Obama won Iowa. A president that stomps her foot, shouts, and cries when things aren't going her way? How could that behaviour have possibly won her New Hampshire?

From my experience as a Dem caucus goer in Iowa, I can tell you that the Hillary fans are typically the blue haired old ladies who just may have a little racism up their sleeve. What we learned coming out of New Hampshire is that we must get the young voters out all over the country. Most of them tend to be color blind and can smell a rat - which is more than can be said for the majority of the blue haired lady crowd.

Ballot fraud is unlikely in this case since New Hampshire uses paper ballots which are hand counted or optically scanned; in either case there is a voter-verified paper record which could be used to detect and tends to deter any rigging of the count.

This is all B.S. The answer is rigged elections. NH uses a mix of both hand-counted paper ballots and Diebold touch screens. The Diebold touch screens gave a 5-7% advantage to Hillary over Obama compared to the paper ballots.

Check this out:

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/january2008/010908_not_counted.htm

Wow the New Hampshire voters showed the world! The New Hampshire Voter had this message: we are independent voters, and just to prove that we will vote for status quo candidates like Hillary and McCain who keep us in the war forever and a day, and represent the plutocrats.

Wow New Hamspshire you sure told them.

This is one of the more preposterous ideas i've heard in a while. Does anybody really believe that a voter would be afraid to admit to supporting Clinton for fear of being seen as racist? You could just as easily suggest that they would be afraid to admit to supporting Obama for fear of being seen as sexist. That is just silly.

Things can change between when the polls were taken and when the vote was taken. The thing is that when it changes this much it should be looked into.

People do not admit to things that they consider to be unpopular (ie the whole race theory), but saying that you are voting for someone other than Obama is not the same as saying that you are in favour of slavery!

I don't know why they keep using those machines!

I am sure that you all have teenagers who can create a voting program where every third vote cast for anyone goes to Bush instead.

If Hillary got 342
Obama 450
and Edwards 474

Then the machine would tell us

Hillary 228
Obama 300
Edwards 316
Bush 422

Repuglicans are circulating an email that shows Hillary, Richardson and Obama standing before a huge American flag saying the pledge of allegiance. All had their hands over their hearts, except Obama whose hands were clasped over his private parts. The email went on to say "how can we trust a man whose middle name is Hussein"?

The senile John McCain sang "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran!" Another war-loving Republican imbecile for president coming up.

Clinton and Obama are war-loving corporate whores, too.

The only decent one is John Edwards. I will write his name in on the ballot.

EDWARDS 2008

As someone familiar with the in workings of surveys, I think there is a need to clarify what the "Bradley effect" actually represents. It does not necessarily represent racism as the author of this article has stated. What it actually represents is social desirability bias, where people give answers to surveys that they think are the most socially desirable or answers that they believe the interviewer would find most socially desirable. It is not so much a desire to disguise racism as a desire to not appear racist.

In this particular case, however, I doubt that there is any "Bradley effect". Obama's candidacy is not a referendum on African American issues and it isn't clear what the social desirability of choosing him over Clinton would be. There were large numbers of undecided voters prior to the vote and at the end of the day, Obama received the same percentage of the votes as the polls said he would receive. The surprise was Clinton, who clearly received increased support from people who either changed their minds or who were previously undecided.

Fraud is also extremely unlikely since the exit polls match the results. It is discouraging, however, that the media is increasingly shying away from reporting the exit poll results of elections, which are used world wide to detect election fraud.

No, Obama wasn't defeated by racism. He was defeated by Republicans - with a lot of help from Diebold. They doctored the results to make sure their preferred candidate (Hillary Clinton) was declared the winner, just like they did with Howard Dean and John Kerry in the 2004 Iowa caucuses.
Barack Obama got the most votes yesterday, and I suspect that Ron Paul also got thousands more votes than the final totals that were declared.

I think Worrisome is spot on for 3 reasons. The woman who wrote the book "Black Box Voting" warned on INN today that:

NH used the very same type of Diebold machines that were hacked in Florida in 2000.

All the exit polls were mysteriously wrong (sound familiar)?

Never underestimate the Clinton machine! They are as dirty, facist and power hungry as the Bush crime cabal and they will win at all costs. Oh and the sudden crying? Priceless and STAGED, please...

Racism, maybe. Highjinks possibly...., If the exit polls don't match the results in a big way, then check how the votes are counted.
According to the Brad Blog, "the New Hampshire votes are counted largely on Diebold optical-scan voting systems, wholly controlled and programmed by a 'very very bad company' named LHS Associates.

Those Diebold op-scan machines are the exact same ones that were hacked in the HBO documentary, Hacking Democracy. Brad Blog has a report which also includes a video of that hack, and footage of the guy who runs LHS Associates.

I strongly suggest everyone go to the Brad Blog for the most in depth and well documented coverage of election integrity issues.

Watching the CNN results come in while sitting in the gym, I noticed a few things. From 7:00 PM to 8:00 PM, the Kucinich and Richardson numbers stopped growing and the Edwards numbers grew just at a steady 17% of the total. All the Democratic votes added to about 60,000 while the Republican votes were about half of that. NH is a very conservative state, and to have 2/3 of the votes going into the Dem selection in itself seemed to say something. The Republicans don't have to be organized and coordinated to be a shrewd group. If I were a Repub and trying to throw a monkey wrench into the mix, I would have been voting for Clinton once I knew the McCain was safe. The NH voters (and North Eastern voters for that matter) are a lot better informed and a lot smarter than the average Joe or Jill out there in the US voting population. If I were a conservative in NH I would also be registered as an Independent and thus have a potential spoiler influence in primaries as well. I believe, and I bet that most in NH believe, that McCain is probably the most electable Repub out there (even if he does come across as a bit crazy) and that his best chances are against Clinton. I believe that among all the Dems still in the running, Clinton will be the most likely one for McCain to beat. That was what the numbers were telling me.

Also, assuming the psychological and behavioral profile I just inferred, I can imagine a good number of the Granite State folks taking pleasure in lying to the pollsters both going into and coming out of the primary.

Machiavelli rules!

I am sure that there were racist voters in N.H. who voted for someone other than Obama because of race JUST AS I AM SURE THAT since our nation's inception, those in power and voters (as we became eligible to vote) voted against women just because they were women. (Parenthetical inserts, below, are mine.)

"Until the philosophy which holds one race (or gender) superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned; that until there are no longer first class and second class citizens of any nation; that until the colour of a (wo)man's skin is of no more significance than the colour of (her)his eyes; that until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all, without regard to race (or gender); that until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but fleeting illusions, to be pursued but never attained."
— Haile Selassie

After the Iowa caucus was anyone asking: "Did mysoginism or Hillary hating cause Senator Clinton to lose the Iowa Caucus or maybe it was guilt for slavery and Jim Crow" Come on now. Maybe in both cases the voters voted for who they perceived to be the best candidate.

Republicans want Hillary to win the democratic presidential nomination as they know she stands as good a chance as a snowball in hell to beat any Republican.

Countr-wide, Hillary represents a conondrum for the democratic party as half the electors dislike her and the other half tolerate her.

If Hillary wins the nomination, that certainly spells a definite no-win situation for the democratic party - her negatives are simply tooooo high.