Saturday, Nov. 2, 2000 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (AmpolNS)
-- The media, particularly the cable media, are having a field day
over the Bush camp's calling the Supreme Court in to rule for their side.
The grand ratings bonanza of impeachment, complete with many of the
same players presiding, has put smiles of the faces of the networks
execs. Various pundits of various levels of expertise and partisanship
are punditing 24/7, with most of them guessing at some sort of divided
court ruling, 5-4 for either Gore or Bush.

But wait a minute!
Buried deep towards the end of a typical MSNBC.com bloviation on
what the Supremes might do (http://www.msnbc.com/news/497518.asp),
we find this:

- - - - -

But many legal scholars said a Bush win could make little difference.
Florida's election contest laws are so  flexible, they told NBC's Pete Williams,
that they would allow Gore's lawyers to continue with their lawsuits.

"It's just too late for the United States Supreme Court to do anything meaningful,"
Terence Anderson of the University of Miami Law School told Williams.
"If it rules for the Democrats,  it has no effect.
 If it rules for the Republicans, it has no effect."

- - -

You know, dear readers, I have been wondering: the Republican Party
is bound and determined to win the White House by any means necessary,
up to and including illegally 'correcting' tens of thousands of GOP absentee ballots
in various Florida counties. They have been pressing court cases in Florida,
in Atlanta's 11th Circuit, and in the US Supreme Court itself.

Why, in the name of heaven, are they sending half-bright hacks like Ted Olson
up against Laurence Tribe, the greatest legal mind of the past hundred years?
Is Ted Olson really the best they can do? Or is his presence merely a
condescending chuck under the chin to the Federalist Society, in a case which
has no meaning outside of the court of popular opinion?

Could it be that the Bush move to the Supremes is more of a  swerve,
intended to suck away precious media time and coverage from the real
action? Is this intended to smother the news about the vote-fraud
trial in Seminole County, or the legal action launched by the NAACP,
or the shocking evidence of racially-based voter disenfranchisement
that only foreign papers such as the UK's Financial Times
seem to have the courage to cover properly
(http://news.ft.com/ft/gx.cgi/ftc?pagename=View&c=Article&cid=
 FT3WRE3NLFC&live=true&tagid=ZZZOMSJK30C&subheading=US)?

There's at least one other story currently in media play whose
entire function seems to be to distract from what's really happening
in the Sunshine State. I speak of the infamous December 2,  2000
'Felons voting illegally in Florida' story from the AP
(http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/decision2000/lat_felons001202.htm).

That story has to me all the earmarks of a transparent inoculation attempt.

Against what, you ask?
Against this fact, which has been simmering under the media radar:

12,000 black Florida voters were wrongly disenfranchised by Database
Technologies, a firm hired by SOS Harris allegedly to keep felons off the rolls,
but which has in practice stripped the right to vote from thousands of law-abiding Floridians.

Here's an excerpt from a column by Gregory Palast
(http://www.observer.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,402957,00.html)
of the UK Observer on this subject:

- - -

Blackout in Florida

Vice-President Al Gore would have strolled to victory in Florida if
the state hadn't kicked 12,000 citizens off the voters' registers
five month ago as former felons.

In fact, only a fraction were ex-cons. Most were simply guilty of
being African-American. While 8,000 of those disenfranchised went
through the legal rigmarole of getting on to the voting list, the
rest - enough to have won the state for Gore - did not.

A top-placed election official (not a Democrat) told me that the
government had conducted a quiet review and found - surprise! - that
the listing included far more African-Americans than would statistically
have been expected, even accounting for the grievous gap between
the conviction rates of blacks and whites in the US.

The source of this poisonous blacklist: Database Technologies, a
division of ChoicePoint, and hired by Governor Jeb Bush's frothingly
partisan Secretary of State, Katherine Harris. My thanks to
investigator Solomon Hughes for informing me that DBT is a division
of ChoicePoint. Under fire for misuse of personal data in state
computers, ChoicePoint founder Rick Rozar made a strategic
six-figure soft cash donation to the Republican Party.

- - -

And here are excerpts from a story from the June 22, 2000
edition of the Palm Beach Post:

- - -

Glitch tells hundreds in Florida they are felons

By Marcia Gelbart, Palm Beach Post Capital Bureau
Thursday, June 22, 2000

TALLAHASSEE -- With less than five months left before November's
presidential election, hundreds of Palm Beach County and Treasure
Coast residents came within a few erroneous keystrokes this week of
losing their voting rights.

A computer error by a Boca Raton company that has a $4 million
contract with the state Division of Elections mistakenly singled out
thousands of Floridians -- including 472 in Palm Beach County and
185 from the Treasure Coast -- as felons in Texas and a few other
states. No Floridian convicted of a felony can vote unless his
voting rights are restored by the Office of Executive Clemency.

Initially, 11,986 people were tagged with out-of-state felony
convictions. But after the mishap was realized, following angry
complaints from people erroneously identified as muggers, 
burglars and car thieves, 7,972 people were removed from that list.

- - -

According to the evidence presented in the Palm Beach Post story,
the very company Jeb and Katherine hired to sniff out ex-felons might
itself be chock-full of folks who themselves can't legally vote under Florida law.
Read on:

- - -

 ...The state hired Database Technologies, with headquarters on Blue
Lake Drive, to analyze various computer files and identify people
who register in more than one county, those who have died, or those
who are felons.

To do so, the company -- whose contracts with the FBI were suspended
in 1999 because of suspected ties of the company founder to drug smugglers
-- has access to various federal, state and local agency databases, including
those from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

- - -

The Republicans are starting to sound desperate. Even as they
trumpet the latest Pew Research Polls
(http://www.people-press.org/result00rpt.htm)
showing a rise in the number of Americans willing to accept a Bush
presidency, thanks to Katherine Harris' showy certification of the
incorrect Florida vote totals, they carefully omit mentioning that
the number of Americans who suspect Bush of having used fraud and
trickery has grown in the Pew Polls from 28% to 33%. What would
these numbers look like, if the national US media hadn't chosen to
minimize (if not ignore) the myriad stories of voter disenfranchisement,
both in Florida and elsewhere?