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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Guide Weather Subscribe Contact Us November 9, 2004 Bush prevailed, fraud did not Harmony prevailed post-election, Nov. 3. Kerry-Edwards while conceding hastened to abjure themselves of suspicion that they might not trust the ballot counting. Bush approached the verge of magnanimity - probably for the last time before 2008. Cheney, the smirker par-excellence, chuckled only out of sight, at the very center of his being presumably. But the innocent of innocents were the voting machines. The very idea that a voting machine might be rigged! Even Kucinich dared not give voice to such a notion. Before, they had been abused, slandered, traduced, vilified. They could be manipulated infinitely, we heard; oversight was impossible. Millions of votes could be changed from the Kerry to the Bush count with a click of a computer key. Whatever evil tricks they might play, the trails could not be followed to the manipulators by even platoons of programming geniuses. There was the anomaly that exit polls did not jibe with the final counts, whereas in previous presidential elections they had been the basis of mid-polling day predictions that turned out infallible in midnight counts. Poor Zogby made a laughing stock with his 316 electoral votes for Kerry estimate as of 5 p. m. Tuesday. So it goes with outmoded faith. In that Bush plurality of four million votes, which was actually a figure not extreme in the pre-election day damning of the machines, was there one miscount attributable to a computerized ballot? Not a hint of such came from the patriotic losers. Edwards in his ringing concession expressed the possibility that somebody somewhere - absolutely without allusion to Florida or Ohio with their brazenly partisan supervisors of the vote counting bureaucracies of each state - might have missed being correctly counted. Human error is a possibility, was the guarded essence of his "every vote counts; count every vote" mantra. No such proviso was uttered about the automatons in charge of vote counting, which are owned by the moneyed pals of Bush-Cheney. They were born again Tuesday night, coming out as shining clean as the Cheerleader-in-Chief and execution partisan himself. Hal Jamison Ashland Historic for all wrong reasons President Bush touts it as a "historic victory!" He's right. It's a unique, unprecedented, truly "historic" one. He sends our young people (not his own, of course) to an illegitimate pre-emptive war in which tens of thousands on both sides have perished, or, minus arms and legs, are maimed for life. Still, daily, the dead pile up. No end in sight. Billions of dollars squandered, thus stripping the U.S. of necessities, and of rights. Once revered, our U.S.A. (now the D.S.A.-Divided States of America) is held in contempt by most of the world. For this, Mr. Bush gets rewarded with a second term in office? Voted in by a largely blind electorate lapping up his self-proclaimed "leadership" boasts. He is rewarded by constituents more obsessed with the need to control gay marriage than by the spectre of flag-draped coffins returning to hysterically-sobbing relatives. How "historic" can an election get? Nancy L. Fox Talent resident in Port Leyden, NY Slim victory is no mandate Following the election, I have read with growing alarm comments made by Dick Cheney that George W. Bush's win gives them a "mandate" for their agenda. Although Mr. Bush spoke of working to deserve the confidence of those who voted for John Kerry, he also said that "I've earned capital in this election and I'm going to spend it." Why is the Bush administration treating this election like a landslide? Forty-eight percent of America voting against him is hardly a "mandate." On the contrary, our bitterly divided nation will split further if the White House continues to ignore the fact that the majority believes this country is headed in the wrong direction. Jody Schmidt Ashland No more blue losers; go green I consider myself to be a political progressive (some would hurl the newfound-epithet "liberal" at me). Mostly, I have supported Democrats for major offices over the last 30 years. While putting away my Kerry/Edwards button, I noticed the huge pile of buttons bearing the names of committed, honorable, yet losing Democratic presidential candidates. So many times I have fallen for the "better of two evils" argument. It has rarely worked, and when it does, it does not feel fulfilling. So, if I'm going to vote for someone who has only a small chance of being elected to a national office, I may as well vote my conscience from hereon in, and choose a party with stated ideas that match my own goals: true democracy, social justice, respect for nature, responsibility and more. I have joined the Pacific Green party. True democracy and change begin at the local level. Plus, as anyone familiar with RGB electronics can tell you, you can't get a complete picture with just red and blue ... you need to add green. Let's make Oregon Green next time. 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