With all the religious insanity out there on the talk shows - I need to be part of it. I need to be on Larry King Live to debate these people about what is real. And why me? Because I'm the founder of the Church of Reality - a religion based on believing in everything that's real.
What I want to do to challenge these religions in debates. I'm ready to take then on in any forum with a significant audience. Every time the word reality is said it challenges their belief systems based on what is real. America has turned it's back on the real world and it's time to bring reality back into religion. If anyone can hook me up - please let me know.
marc@perkel.com
I get at least some consolation in that those who voted for Bush have to pay $2.50 a gallon too and they too have to pay higher taxes for less services and generally suffer like the rest of real America.
But - will they get it when they are paying $5.00 a gallon? I doubt it.
No wonder Bush is taking care of Bolton. Original Story
"I'm with the Bush-Cheney team, and I'm here to stop the count."
Those were the words John Bolton yelled as he burst into a Tallahassee library on Saturday, Dec. 9, 2000, where local election workers were recounting ballots cast in Florida's disputed presidential race between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
Bolton was one of the pack of lawyers for the Republican presidential ticket who repeatedly sought to shut down recounts of the ballots from Florida counties before those counts revealed that Gore had actually won the state's electoral votes and the presidency.
The Dec. 9 intervention was Bolton's last and most significant blow against the democratic process.
The Florida Supreme Court had ordered a broad recount of ballots in order to finally resolve the question of who won the state. But Bolton and the Bush-Cheney team got their Republican allies on the U.S. Supreme Court to block the review. Fearing that each minute of additional counting would reveal the reality of voter sentiments in Florida, Bolton personally rushed into the library to stop the count.
Bolton was in South Korea when it became clear that the Nov. 7, 2000, election would be decided in Florida. At the behest of former Secretary of State James Baker, who fronted the Bush-Cheney team during the Florida fight, Bolton winged his way to Palm Beach, where he took the lead in challenging ballots during that county's recount. Then, when the ballots from around the state were transported to Tallahassee for the recount ordered by the state Supreme Court, Bolton followed them.
It was there that he personally shut down the review of ballots from Miami-Dade County, a populous and particularly contested county where independent reviews would later reveal that hundreds of ballots that could reasonably have been counted for Gore were instead discarded.
Miami-Dade County Elections Supervisor David Leahy argued at the time that 2,257 voters had apparently attempted to mark ballot cards for Gore or Bush but had not had them recorded because they had been improperly inserted into the voting machines. A hand count of those ballots revealed that 302 more of them would have gone for Gore than Bush. That shift in the numbers from just one of Florida's 67 counties would have erased more than half of Bush's 537-vote lead in the state.
But attempts to conduct a hand count were repeatedly blocked by the Bush-Cheney team, culminating with Bolton's Dec. 9 announcement, "I'm here to stop the count." A few days later, the U.S. Supreme Court would stop the count permanently, with a pro-Bush ruling in which five Republican-appointed justices, in the words of noted attorney Vincent Bugliosi, "committed the unpardonable sin of being a knowing surrogate for the Republican Party instead of being an impartial arbiter of the law."
Bolton was a key player in the fight to delay the Florida count long enough to allow for the Supreme Court's intervention, and he got his reward quickly. Despite his record of making controversial and sometimes bizarre statements regarding international affairs, he was selected by the Bush administration in 2001 to serve as undersecretary of state for arms control. And he is now in line to become the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Before he is given that position, and charged with the job of promoting the spread of democracy around the world, however, senators would do well to consider the disregard John Bolton showed for democracy in Florida.