This has been a public service on behalf of the Free Mumia Abu Jamal Coalition, a non-profit
organization.
My name is Leonard Peltier, I'm a Lakota and Chippewa Native American.
I am currently serving two life sentences for the deaths of two FBI agents.
Did you kill the FBI agents?
No, I did not.
President Clinton, what is your position on granting Leonard Peltier executive penalty?
Part of my responsibilities in the last ten weeks of office after the election will be
to review the requests for pardons and executive clemencies and give them a fair hearing and
I pledge to do that.
Now is the time to support executive clemency for Leonard Peltier.
Join thousands on Sunday, December 10th in New York City.
Gather at 11am at Union Square for a walk to a 2pm rally at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza across
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And you're in tune to radio station WBAI New York where you can hear that and many other fine programs throughout the course of any typical broadcast day.
And what you hear next may be one of those fine programs.
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And a very good evening to one and all.
The program is Off The Hook.
Manuel Goldstein here with you.
Isaac, as soon as I figure out which mic you are over there.
I'm the red mic. I'm always the red mic, man.
Is that some sort of like subconscious thing with the color red that you have?
No, no, no. It's just the mic I've been on for years now.
So I'm going to keep using it.
And John joins us too to add balance.
Indeed.
Oh boy. Well, the fun continues in the world.
It's been hilarious.
I get so much of a kick out of just watching everybody drive themselves nuts, you know.
It's just so cool, you know, seeing everything we supposedly stand for falling apart.
People just running in the streets screaming.
But you know, I got to tell you something.
It did hit close to home for me, this whole election nonsense.
In a way that I can't say I'm very happy about.
This is probably the turning point for me where I just have to stand up and say,
all right, enough is enough.
You know, this has to end.
Sunday night.
About 7.25 or so.
Watching the end of Futurama.
It was a really good episode.
Yeah, it was on. It wasn't a football game.
Once there wasn't a football game, you could actually watch Futurama.
And it was a good episode too where the whole world was going to be destroyed
if Bender the Robot said the word ass.
And if you watch the program, you know he says that word all the time.
So what do you think happens?
He says the word.
I don't forget exactly how he says it, what context.
You know, bite my shiny, you know, metallic ass or something like that.
He just says the word ass.
The screen goes black.
We interrupt this program for a special news bulletin.
They are certifying the votes in Florida.
And for the next ten minutes, we just watch people sign papers.
You know, there's nothing amazing about this.
Nothing that couldn't have been conveyed with a little thing at the bottom of the screen.
But no, they had to break in.
They had to say, yeah, they're signing the papers.
Now look, let's watch them sign the papers.
And then when they were finished signing the papers, what do you think happened?
They didn't go back to Futurama to find out what happened when Bender said ass.
No, they ran to the middle of King of the Hill, and that was the end of that.
I have no idea what happened.
I have no idea.
Did you know how that affects somebody?
Couldn't he have said ass on Tuesday last week to get it over with earlier?
Apparently, that's what happened.
He said ass, and then they cut to the certification process.
Yeah, well, you know, what's interesting, though, is that George W. Bush gave his sort of semi-victory speech.
What do you mean semi-victory speech?
Well, it's not really.
He insists that he not be called president-elect.
He's still calling himself governor.
Really?
Yeah, and he hasn't resigned as governor or anything like that.
Well, he's not going to resign as governor until he actually gets into office as president.
Right, which he's not in office as president at this point.
He's president-elect.
No, he's not.
Yes, he is.
Well, he's not calling himself president.
Now, take it up with him, all right?
I'm not going to get into this argument here.
But the point is, the point is...
The media may not be calling him the president-elect, which was a request by Al Gore.
Well, I don't think anybody except his diehard supporters are.
I really don't want to get off on a sidetrack here with this.
Very well.
This is what tends to happen.
He gave his little semi-victory speech at about 9.30 on Sunday night.
Do you think they interrupted the X-Files for that?
No, they did not.
Fox did not interrupt the X-Files.
Well, Fox doesn't air any of that stuff anyway.
I have a theory about this.
Now, Fox, as you know, is very right-wing.
They're owned by Rupert Murdoch.
Well, NBC is owned by GE, which is... what's his name?
GE is not what's his name.
GE is a corporation.
Yes, I understand.
There's no left-wing radical running GE, if that's what you're trying to imply.
No, I'm trying to imply that it's even more right-wing,
and yet the coverage on NBC is about as far left-wing as you can find.
Well, I don't know where you're coming up with that.
I don't know where you're finding...
I want to see it.
Show me later where the left-wing coverage is on MSNBC.
I'd love to see this.
What's his name?
Welch?
Welch?
Walsh?
Something like that?
This is like saying the New York Times is left-wing, which I'm sure you say that too.
All right.
Whatever, whatever.
I don't want to stay on this.
This is a quagmire.
We keep getting stuck in it.
Okay, okay.
My point is...
What was my point?
I totally forgot my point.
Oh, yeah, my theory is that since Fox is...
And you cannot deny this.
Just watch Fox News Channel.
Watch their coverage of news.
They are right-wing.
There's no question about that.
Please don't get into an argument about this.
I think that they did that to help George W. Bush,
because if George W. Bush had interrupted the X-Files,
it would have been like the Heidi Bowl.
It would have been a horrible thing where everybody lashed out against him
for interrupting their favorite program.
And by not interrupting that program, you know, they let things...
And people blamed Al Gore for the Futurama fiasco.
Yeah, I saw that.
That's hurting him.
NBC refused to interrupt Titanic for the announcement on Sunday.
Oh, really?
That's right.
Titanic was running.
I forgot about that.
They said, we're not going to do that.
They only aired it on the West Coast where Titanic didn't even start yet,
because it was going to start...
It's nice to know we have priorities.
Can't interrupt Titanic with something as mundane as a presidential election.
Oh, boy.
Unreal.
But you notice that Al Gore gave his speech last night.
Do you know what time his speech was?
It was like four minutes.
Yeah, but do you know what time it was scheduled for?
This is the funny part.
8.55 p.m.
Now, why do you think he scheduled his speech for a bizarre time like 8.55 p.m.?
So he wouldn't conflict with Monday night football.
There you go.
That's how our country is run, around TV schedules.
But I am mad about the Futurama thing.
You're very mad about it.
Well, it was obvious something was going to happen.
They could have waited an extra 30 seconds.
Could have seen people sign papers for, you know, nine minutes instead of ten minutes.
Really silly.
Really, really silly.
Oh, I'm getting all kinds of mail.
I'm getting all kinds of mail, and I love it.
I love antagonizing people.
First of all, a lot of people are saying, don't talk about the election.
It's pointless.
Don't talk.
You know, why avoid something that's so obviously important?
I mean, this is kind of defining the way our nation is going to be run for the next at least four years.
It's defining the whole electoral process and what we stand for and our beliefs.
You know, you can't ignore things like this.
And, yes, there are applications to the hacker world, to high technology, certainly.
And you have no further to look than the election ballots for that.
And we'll get into some discussion of that a little later.
And we'll take more phone calls, too.
In fact, we might even be on an extra hour tonight, from what I hear.
So I just want to warn the affiliates and stations down the pike that it's possible, if we can't find the 9 o'clock show, that we're going to go an extra hour.
And this is also a wake-up call to the people out there that might be running the 9 o'clock show.
We can't find your show, so maybe you want to come in and help us.
I have a suggestion here, from Maggie.
Okay.
You know, we really can't run the show through IRC.
It gets really distracting.
I understand that.
Let's hear the suggestion.
It's important.
You have DirecTV, don't you?
Yes.
No, no.
You see, that would have made sense, except I was involved in getting somebody to an airport.
And for some reason, the airport was supposed to be my local MacArthur airport.
And it was raining a little bit, so they canceled the flight.
And we had to drive all the way to Kennedy.
And the funny thing is, they didn't tell us about the flight that we could have put this person on.
We had to figure it out ourselves.
It was a whole big mess.
Sad.
Yeah.
But anyway.
Yeah, so it's an issue.
It's a very important issue.
I'd like to know what people think about it.
I've gotten phone calls about that.
It's not something that's off-topic.
It's important.
I mean, yeah.
I think that the two candidates still are pretty much indistinguishable.
And I don't really care one way or another which one winds up.
But I do care about the process.
And right now, the process down there is horrible.
I mean, people in other countries look at this, and they see it as a sham, you know?
People in other countries use guns at this point.
Well, yeah.
I think some people in Florida might be doing that as well.
But we're the only country I know that would embrace a coup, you know?
We'd vote for it.
And that's how you define something like this in another country where, you know, you don't count the votes.
You don't count them.
You just, nah, it's close enough.
Just push them into office.
Yeah, everyone shut up, you know?
Go away.
If you vote for it, it's not a coup.
Yeah, but that's the point.
The point is that they didn't vote for it.
They haven't counted the votes.
There are so many votes that are uncounted.
There are so many allegations of things that went wrong.
They didn't punch a hole for the presidential election.
That's only one.
Those are the thousands of votes that Gore is mentioning.
And guess what?
They were counted.
It just means null.
No, no, no.
Here's the thing, okay?
16,000 votes were thrown out because the holes were punched wrong.
They were double-punched.
Now, four years earlier, there was a similar number thrown out, right?
I don't have those numbers.
Okay.
Well, there were.
Now, that to me indicates that there's a serious problem with the process, with the polling process, if those ballots keep getting thrown out.
And the thing that I really don't understand is, did anybody know about this other than the people that were throwing out the ballots?
Did they tell anybody?
And I'd like to, you know, I'll ask you, Isaac, to do this for the next week.
And I also ask all of the listeners out there to help you find this.
Find me some media coverage four years ago that mentioned that that many ballots were thrown out.
And then you can say, then you can sit there and say, yeah, you know, people are stupid.
They knew there was a problem and they ignored it.
But I don't think anybody knew about it.
I don't think people were talking about it.
I think it was kept a secret that all these ballots were being thrown out.
Now, that's only one thing.
That's only one of many problems with this election.
There's the fiasco in Miami where they actually found lots of votes that were being counted.
Out of nowhere, I suppose.
The machines didn't catch them.
We'll get into the machines in a moment.
We'll get into the machines in a moment because that's the most interesting part.
And I think that's the most pertinent part to this, to where we come from.
All right.
But they had counted, what was it, something like 5% of the votes and they found 150 extra votes for Gore.
And then the angry mob came and started beating on the door.
All of a sudden, all of a sudden, the paid angry mob, the mob of Republican people that were paid to be there.
All including a New York congressman.
I'm sure.
All of a sudden, they changed their minds, said, no, we're not going to count them after all.
And if you heard the president of the canvassing board.
Yeah, he said that had nothing to do with intimidation.
Yeah, I heard that too.
Do you really believe that?
That's the battered wife syndrome.
Wait a second.
That's somebody saying to the cops, it's okay.
You can go away.
We'll resolve this on our own.
You, my friend, left wing Louie here is trying to stop yourself.
Who's left wing Louie?
You're trying to stop.
I'm left wing Louie?
You have a fault with the Republicans for demonstrating?
Hang on a second.
Hang on a second here.
You're marching up and down the streets all the time.
Hold on.
Before you start calling me names here, left wing whatever, I'd be doing the exact same thing if it was Gore.
Like I said, I voted for neither of these people.
I don't care.
I don't care which one winds up there.
But it's so obvious to me that when the margin of error exceeds the difference in votes by so many percentage points, something's wrong.
You have to count them.
You have to look this thing over with a fine-tooth comb.
You've been counted three times.
No, they haven't been.
Four times.
Listen, we've always known the Republican Party as the party of illiteracy.
I didn't know they couldn't count as well.
They're not doing the counting.
The Democrats are doing the counting.
Just because George W. Bush can't count doesn't mean that we shouldn't count the votes.
They have not counted them yet.
They have not counted them properly.
They haven't counted them.
They haven't.
Miami threw out the remaining, what, 95%?
You have three Democrat counties with three Democrat-controlled canvassing boards.
Yeah, I think they should have recounted.
Yeah, we're talking about the other one.
I should have.
What other county?
Miami-Dade.
There's plenty of other counties in the-
The Miami-Dade county.
Yeah, with two Democrats and one Republican.
Where they interrupted the recount.
Okay, you see, you're throwing the issue of trust in here.
I don't care how many Republicans or Democrats there are.
It's law.
Yeah, it's law.
And, you know, the Florida Supreme Court-
You want to talk about the hour before our show last week?
Already ruled on this.
Yeah, they just basically took Florida law, shredded it, and rewrote it from the bench.
Okay, so-
You don't want a problem with that?
The Supreme Court, then, isn't a valid way of deciding these things.
No, absolutely.
A big problem.
You know, it's-
The fiasco in Florida for trying to steal this election is intolerable.
Let's go back.
And, thankfully, it's over.
No, it's not.
It's over.
It's gone.
It's not over because, listen-
It was over Sunday.
It's over.
It's been certified.
Yes, and that difference has been tallied, and the math has been done, and Florida has been certified as the Bush state-
Hang on a second.
The problem is, they did not count lots of votes that were submitted-
They were counted.
They were counted three times.
They were not counted three times.
Sure, they were.
If they were counted three times, you would have gotten the same result each time.
Well, then, I suppose that's perhaps evidence of some sort of manipulation within the system.
Listen, the point is-
Gore continues to steadily rise.
The point is-
What do you want to see this end?
Just try and divorce yourself from who Gore is and who Bush is and just look at the process.
I am.
I'm looking at the law, too.
I do not think you would be saying this if the shoe was on the other foot.
I do not think that.
I think I would.
I think you'd be contesting it.
And I think you'd be right to contest it.
If the Republicans were doing this kind of thing, I would be absolutely disgusted with them.
What kind of thing is it?
Pulling the stuff that they're trying to pull.
The only thing-
Circumventing the law.
The only thing you can accuse the Democrats of is being wimpy here because so many of them-
Yeah.
Do you see any demonstrations?
Do you see any people other than Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton actually leading demonstrations and speaking out?
Because a lot of people still believe this is wrong, so they're there.
They're so afraid to express themselves.
They're so afraid of offending someone.
Well, you know, if this was my candidate down there-
And it's not, but if it was, I'd be down there.
I'd be angry.
I'd be making sure that people heard my voice.
They're not doing that.
They don't deserve to win.
Neither one of these people deserves to win, I think.
And, you know, when January comes around, I think there'll be a sizable amount of people, no matter who it is, that winds up in the White House, a sizable amount of people that will believe this person does not belong there.
I'm sure.
And I think we need a way of expressing our disdain at that point.
I think instead of calling whoever winds up in the White House President Bush, President Gore, just call them Citizen Bush, Citizen Gore, because that's all they will be.
Oh, like Comrade Bush and Comrade Gore?
No.
Okay, that's-
Well, you could do that if you prefer Comrade.
I think Citizen is fine.
All right.
Well, let's move on to the-
Is Citizen a leftist word now?
No, it's not a leftist word.
It doesn't matter.
Regardless, let's move on to the electronic elections that you-
The point is, my only way of resolving this fairly is to recount everything the same way, not different ways for every single town or whatever-
Sounds good.
Or have it re-vote for the whole state.
You can't do a re-vote.
Not going to happen.
Okay, I'm just saying-
You want to do a re-count, you do it Florida-wide.
That's what I'm saying.
Re-count for Florida.
All of Florida?
It's obvious the system failed down there.
I mean, we have to accept this.
It didn't fail.
It was-
No.
The walls of it were broken down at every turn.
Listen, when something goes wrong with a computer, when something goes wrong technological-wise, you have to realize it.
You have to admit it.
You have to say, something is wrong here.
It doesn't work.
Let's do it right.
And if you actually can sit there and tell me that the election worked in Florida, you're on some kind of drug that I have yet to find.
I don't think it worked because the walls and the laws were just trodden over, and the walls were broken down, the law was trodden over, and it's turning into a real catastrophe.
Well, I don't know about these walls and the trodding over, that kind of thing.
It's over.
It was a very close race.
It's gone.
A lot of votes were thrown out for bizarre reasons.
Including a whole bunch of military votes, but we won't go into that.
Military votes, I mean, there were all kinds of things wrong with that as well.
I gave you that last week.
Give me one.
That Florida law basically says that it needs to be postmarked.
Will you throw out the military votes?
I said, you know what?
If we're going to go by Florida law, we'll go by Florida law.
I'll give you that.
But these recounts and this divining of the canvassing board, it's almost comical.
They hold up the card to the light.
If they only use their other hand to touch their forehead, and somehow I'm sensing the voter.
Here is the thing.
It's a war voter, yes.
You can ridicule this as much as you like, but I do trust those people, and those people are Republicans as well as Democrats.
So, I mean, let's just get that right out of the way to start with.
It's got nothing to do with partisan politics.
I'm sure.
These are people looking at ballots, and the fact that they have to look at them to figure out how they should have been cast
tells you the technology does not work.
And I will prove that to you right now, okay?
And I invite people out there as well who may have been involved in the past, in the 60s, 70s even,
in computer programming with punch cards.
How many of you have done that in the past?
Oh, a fair number.
All right.
Now, when you programmed the punch cards, did you ever play with one of these, Isaac?
Yes.
I, in fact, had a friend.
How did you punch the holes?
Did you punch them with a pencil?
With a machine.
With a machine, yes.
Why do you think you used a machine to punch those holes?
So it would perfectly punch.
So it would punch the damn holes.
It would punch perfectly.
Right.
Now, would you run a computer program with a bunch of holes you punched with a pencil?
I don't think so.
I'd like to see the results if you did.
It's not a perfect system.
It's a very imperfect system.
It's a very stupid system.
All right?
And that's why they had to hold the things up to the light to see just, you know,
if there was something, a broken chad or, you know, a pregnant chad.
How about the dimpled chads?
Aborted chad or whatever.
The point is, it's not their fault that the system is so bizarre.
That's just the way the system has been designed.
It's absurd.
It's absurd in this day and age that we have such an antiquated system.
Well, what do you suggest in this day and age?
Well, first of all, I had no idea, and I think a lot of people had no idea,
that they were using this kind of system down there.
And if I had known that, I certainly would have said something like, you know,
this kind of sucks.
This isn't going to work.
You know, I've been involved in local elections in schools that I thought were
controversial, but let me tell you, they were run a whole lot better than this one was.
In the future, I think we need to move to something more technologically advanced.
I'm not talking about voting from your home.
I'm talking about something, you know, more along the lines of, say, you know,
well, you know how ATM machines, you know,
they're fairly secure.
They work.
You know how much money you have.
You have a little receipt.
Wouldn't that be nice if you got a receipt when you voted so that you could look
and say, hey, I voted for Buchanan, you know?
And you knew.
You knew exactly what you did.
You don't have to show it to anybody, but at least you have it as proof that,
you know, you did vote.
And that way, if all of a sudden somebody gets, like, three votes,
and you get 10 of your friends together, and you have receipts that say,
no, we voted for this guy, you know something's wrong.
I just think computer, you know, we use computers for everything.
Why don't we use them for this?
Instead we use this bizarre punch card system that is really silly.
Well, there's a number of electronic voting schemes out there,
but as was mentioned previously, I mean, the real danger of this
is that people are going to try to move it out of the polling place
and into the home or whatever.
Well, that's what you stop.
That just can't happen.
I mean, that's a very dangerous sort of thing because there is,
when you go to a polling place and you throw that curtain behind you,
there's coercion just disappears.
But when you're in your home and you're looking over someone else's shoulder,
you can verify, well, no, you're not voting for that fella.
You're voting for someone else.
Whack.
Who's looking over your shoulder in your home?
I don't know.
Better yet, if it moves out of the home,
there's a chance that votes can very easily be bought because they're verified.
Try to buy my vote right now.
You give me $100 and you tell me to vote for Gore,
I'll say, sure.
Walk into the booth, flip the little bush lever,
pull the thing back, curtain opens, you got a Gore vote,
and I keep the $100.
You see, that's the difference between you and me.
It doesn't quite work.
I wouldn't vote for Gore if you gave me $10,000.
All right?
That's the difference.
I'm using it at the same time.
All right.
I didn't vote for Bush anyway, but besides the point.
I just think we need to use technology, you know, all the advantages.
If it's used wisely.
Of course.
But, you know, this is no technology and it's not used wisely.
You know, you've got the worst of both worlds.
So it's a really bad thing.
It's a bad idea.
If you're interested in electronic voting schemes,
you can visit Lori Kreiner's site at AT&T.
It's www.research.att.com slash tilde Lori, spelled L-O-R-R-I-E.
And who's Lori?
Lori Kreiner is a researcher with AT&T,
and she's been doing a lot of work on electronic elections
and voting systems and stuff like that.
So it's a good site.
Well, they're going to try to introduce something like that in Suffolk County,
something more technologically advanced.
But I heard that they're at least trying to do something.
I mean, you know, you can't look at this system down there
and say that that's a wise way of doing things.
It's ridiculous.
We're talking about something that's, you know, a really important job.
You want to make sure you do it right.
Understood.
And if it stands the way it is right now,
if it stands the way it is right now, we all lose.
You talk about what's good for the country.
Well, this is not good for the country.
I'll tell you that right now.
And if you believe it is, go right ahead.
Then the answer for it not being good for the country is for Gore to concede.
Which he is refusing to do for no apparent reason.
Yeah, for no apparent reason.
Except for his own personal goal of achieving this office.
He's already won the popular vote,
and he's not even claiming that that gives him any right,
even though I think that's...
Because it doesn't. It's not a law.
No, it doesn't, because we have this stupid, ridiculous system where...
Oh, the Electoral College is a stupid, ridiculous system.
Obviously it is.
Obviously.
Okay, wait a minute.
Now we're going to justify how...
How does the Electoral College work?
250,000 people vote for somebody,
and they don't count because we have some bizarre affirmative action type of deal
where farmers get more of a say than people in other parts of the country.
It's ridiculous.
Because it's an issue of states.
Well, it shouldn't be an issue of states.
It should be an issue of individuals.
It's not an issue of individuals, because that would be a mob rule.
Well, I always thought that's how elections worked.
Majority rules. I always thought that's what it was.
A pure popular vote.
What is going to happen in this country?
You're going to have all the concentration of concession
and all the attention being paid on each of the coasts to the cities,
because those have more populace.
Yeah, but you know, when you have more people, you have more votes.
More people should have more votes, because they're people.
They're individual people.
Which is why the state of Florida has, what is it, 27 electors,
and the state of Rhode Island has three.
Okay, listen.
Or four.
If we have a second hour, we can get more into this.
My point was that already he has the popular vote.
Okay, so there's that.
That doesn't count for anything except when you realize
that more people in this country want Gore to be president than Bush.
You can say that.
You can say the majority of Americans want...
Say it.
Majority of Americans...
No, I'm not going to say it, because that's not the point.
You're not facing reality here.
It's the majority of voting Americans.
The majority of voting Americans.
Okay, there's a difference.
Can you say that?
The majority of voting Americans.
No, I'm not going to say it.
It would be hard to fight.
Corrected.
The majority of voting Americans want Gore instead of Bush.
I don't like it any more than anybody else, but that's the way it is.
Now, when it comes down to 300 votes separating Gore
from having the majority of electoral votes as well,
yeah, you better take a damn good look at that
and make sure that that's really 300 votes.
When you have 16,000 thrown out for bizarre reasons,
when you have another 5,000 in Seminole County
that Republicans filled in votes on absentee ballots,
filled in information that they weren't supposed to fill in,
this is illegal.
There was no question about that.
I even heard the right-wing radio station say,
yes, it's technically illegal.
Well, if it's technically illegal, it's illegal.
You know, that's 5,000 votes right there.
So there's a lot of weird stuff going on.
You have minority voters that were harassed,
that had their cars ticketed.
You had senior citizens.
What?
Yeah, there are reports of this.
You've got to read the papers.
In Miami...
I can report that the Martians have landed,
and it won't be true.
Okay, well, you can call people liars, I guess,
but there are many, many reports on election day,
before all this happened,
that people were being intimidated.
Also, senior citizens told they had five minutes to vote.
No more.
That's illegal.
A lot of bad things were happening.
How much of this are you guys going to throw around?
I'm wondering.
When is it going to end?
Well, until it becomes illegal to talk about what goes on.
Okay.
First, it's the butterfly ballot,
but that seems to not be the problem.
Then it becomes an issue of intimidation.
Then it's, you know, the latest one,
the machines are broken.
Did you hear that?
The machines are a terrible thing,
and the machines don't work,
so all the machine votes are worthless.
Are the machines broken?
I don't know.
Well, what's the evidence?
Why don't we investigate now?
What's the evidence?
Hold everything up, and...
I have no idea.
Well, you seem to know that it's not true,
so you must know something about it.
Because it's just one bead in a string of stupidity
trying to steal this election.
Which you don't want to listen to.
No, I don't want to listen to it,
and I really don't want to listen to it anymore.
So let's move on.
The point is...
I promised myself I'd only talk about the election
for 15 minutes tonight,
and we're already up to 25.
Well, the point is that
you have to listen to these things.
You don't have the option to say,
no, I'm not going to listen anymore
and run away with your hands over your head.
Wolf.
Don't you?
There's no wolf.
Wolf.
There's no wolf.
Wolf.
There obviously is something wrong.
You have to acknowledge that.
Divorce yourself from the candidates.
Don't think about who is saying what.
Look at the system.
That is all I am saying.
Look at the system.
The system is broken.
We must fix the system.
We must address these problems.
You can fix the system now,
but prior to the election,
the system was in place,
and you can't change it
as we're trying to figure it out.
You have to use the system
as it existed prior to the election.
I don't know where you're getting that.
I don't know where you're getting it.
If the system breaks down,
they don't have to accept the results.
No.
And the system breaks down.
The system has been in place
before the election.
Yeah.
The election takes place,
and then halfway through,
you decide that the system changes.
You have a piece of bad software
that you've had for 20 years,
and it really fouls up
and gives you the wrong results
the most recent time you run it,
because it's a possibility.
It's a possibility.
What is the right result?
You have to acknowledge the possibility
that the count is wrong.
When you're so close,
when you're 300 votes away
in a state of 6 million voters,
yeah, you do have to acknowledge.
Was it 6 million,
or was it more than that?
That is the system
as it existed previous to the election.
That is the system
that the election has been understood
would take us through
and make the decision.
Okay.
Now, halfway through,
the horse...
This is really pointless,
because all I am trying to say...
Yes, it is.
And you're wrong,
which is what I'm trying to say.
You're bringing partisan politics.
I am not supporting Gore.
I'm not supporting Bush.
Partisan politics?
Yes, you're bringing
partisan politics into this.
I'm saying that it's illegal.
It's a technological issue,
plain and simple.
Then, for the next election,
let's hope that we have
a better system in place.
But for this election,
we have to use the system
that the voting took place.
It's that simple.
Even if it completely failed?
Yes.
Okay.
All right.
You can't just change it
halfway through.
And you're available
to write software, too, I imagine.
I'll do it.
I don't care.
Okay.
All right.
I've got a whole load
of voting systems.
We've got a switchboard
full of calls,
so we want to get to that.
Let me get through
some listener mail real quick.
And hopefully,
we'll have a word soon
as to whether or not
we're going to be on
for an extra hour.
I'd like to know that myself.
Okay.
Let's look at some listener mail.
You can mail us to
oth at 2600.com.
And boy,
I've been getting
a lot of hate mail lately.
I really have.
You, too?
I've been getting it
at different places.
For some reason,
whenever you criticize
certain aspects of society,
people just come down hard.
You know,
it just makes me want
to criticize them all the more.
Like, you know,
when I mentioned
the military thing
a couple of weeks ago,
how it was possible
to make votes
into a commodity,
you know?
Oh, boy,
you should have seen
the mail I got about,
how dare you criticize
the military?
How dare you?
Bible man.
Anyway, you really missed an opportunity to discover how the hacker mentality can be applied to the evolution versus creationism debate.
The scientific community establishment controls what is taught in the public school system and dictates the popular belief system.
Evolution is taught as truth with no opportunity to challenge the theory.
If you try to challenge the theory, you are immediately fitted for a dunce cap and treated as one of those people who did it yourself on the show.
That's right.
You were shown brontosaurus pictures.
We're told the Grand Canyon was made over millions of years ago.
We're given a beautiful picture of the evolution of the horse,
and even we're provided clear evidence of the evolution of man.
You probably weren't informed that the Brontosaurus never existed.
Nor were you told that Mount St. Helens eruption produced surprises
like 500 feet of perfectly striated rock,
with each layer composed of its own unique chemical compositions,
identical to millions of years worth of sedimentary deposits.
You probably were never shown the pictures of the minor equipment
embedded deep inside stalagmites,
which are supposed to take 150 years to grow an inch.
You never were taught that the evolution of the horse has been disproved.
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
I don't know about those claims.
See, this is what we're getting into now.
Now we're talking about whether or not evolution is happening.
It's insane.
I didn't get the tone of it.
Is that saying that evolution didn't happen or did happen?
The tone is that because we question things,
that means we need to question the supposed theory of evolution.
Let me explain.
Theory does not mean that evolution did not happen.
It means we're trying to figure out exactly how it did happen.
Evolution is a scientific fact.
It's still a theory.
It's a theory, but it's like the theory of gravity.
You're not going to go and tell me that gravity doesn't exist.
That's a law.
Yeah, it is a law, too.
But there are theories as to how exactly it works.
The Big Bang is a theory.
If you go on AltaVista, and you're there right now,
even if you type theory of evolution,
you'll probably get just a bunch of religious zealots
telling you that there's no such thing as evolution,
and it's all creationism.
I want to ask these people,
OK, fine, you think creationism is the way the world started.
Where's your proof?
Are you just going to point to some writings on a wall somewhere
and say, hey, that's my proof.
That's all the proof I need.
Spectacular claims require spectacular proof.
Absolutely.
I'm sorry, fantastic claims require fantastic proof.
Fantastic, spectacular, whatever.
Let's see some evidence here.
Dynamite.
Just saying it's not so doesn't make it so.
Or whatever.
Must see.
That's the kind of mail I've been getting lately.
Military, Christianity,
all kinds of things I'm attacking lately.
If you're looked on as a threat
by attacking things simply by questioning them,
that's when you have to start suspecting
the people who are attacking you.
You question everything.
That's what Brontosaurus is doing for evolution.
He's questioning.
Yeah, you question things,
but you look at the evidence.
You don't question everything that exists
because there's one detail
that you're a little bit uncertain about.
Hasn't quite been figured out yet.
Right.
You don't question whether or not evolution is possible
because you don't quite know how Brontosaurus existed.
Wait.
Isn't that what they're doing with the election?
Explain.
They're questioning whether Bush is president
because of this one little detail
that nobody quite figured out.
I don't know.
I don't know if you want to compare the election
to evolution.
It's a little bit less complex.
No, there's no significant theory to explain the election.
All right, let's take some phone calls.
212-209-2900
since we're not going to be on Extra Hour.
I'm kind of relieved.
Have you seen the onions?
I don't need to see the onions.
I read the times.
It's funny enough.
Although I think my favorite article was
Quantum Elections.
You have to be like a physics buff
to really get the jokes in it.
It deals with the intelligent thought
of the voter collapsing into a ballot
and different kind of synchronicities
and tunneling and stuff like that.
It's funny.
Pick a number.
One to ten.
I will choose four.
Speak up, please.
Hello?
You're doing something else, huh?
Running out of the bathtub.
Okay.
Don't call us and go to the bathtub.
That's not right.
What's on your mind?
They said pictures worth a thousand words.
Uh-huh.
There's a photograph of
Pataki and Al Sharpton
shaking hands
down in Palm Beach.
Okay.
You have this reference left
that goes on and on
about
how there's some kind of meaningful
dispute between
people like Pataki
and then Sharpton
when in fact they're shaking hands
down in Palm Beach now.
And as I said,
a picture's worth a thousand words.
They really were shaking hands?
You sure they weren't pushing each other out of the way or anything like that?
No, they love each other in this photograph.
And people got to take a close look at that
and figure out it's time for revolutionary
leadership to stand up to the
Patakis who are getting ready
to execute Mamiya Abu-Jamada.
We can't be their friends on any level.
Okay. Thanks.
Thanks for that wide-ranging
view there. I'll have to look for that picture.
All right.
Good evening. You're on the air.
No.
That's an intelligent comment, though.
Good evening. You're on the air.
Wow. Yes. Hi. Good evening, Emmanuel.
How you doing? You know, you just called in.
Because I just picked the same line I picked the first guy.
So you just called in.
Okay. You got ahead of a lot of people here.
No. I've been holding for a good while.
Got a good head of steam here.
All right. I don't know how you wound up on that line then.
Okay. Go ahead. What's on your mind?
Okay. Yeah. Well, I'm going to try
and skip over...
succinct my things on the election.
But I'm...
I'm really nostalgic for the sage words
of fiber optic
compared to the...
the folks that you have
on your team there
now.
I'm just curious for the
legal experts there what their
notions of judicial review are.
If that
in fact is the law of the land.
If the judiciary
has any role in
mediating or
interpreting laws that are
in dispute.
I'm sorry. Just repeat that question a little
shorter? My attention went out the window.
If anyone
besides yourself believes that judicial
review means anything
according to the
law of the land, which I believe is a
constitution or... I don't know.
Yes. The Florida state constitution
establishes that the Supreme Court of the
state of Florida has final word
on how to interpret the law.
That's understandable, but basically...
Wait a minute.
Shouldn't you just stop there then?
George W. Bush obviously doesn't believe that
since he went on to the US Supreme Court afterwards.
The problem exists in the fact that
Florida took the law
and instead of saying yea or nay
or otherwise interpreting it, established
their own law and their own criteria
for how this thing was supposed to happen.
They also took the case without it being brought to the
state of Florida Supreme Court.
They based this entire assumption
on a case from a completely other state
involving dimpled ballots.
What was it? Chicago? It was an Illinois court or something?
And the
Florida Supreme Court didn't even
review the case because in that Illinois case
dimpled ballots were thrown out.
And yet Florida established
based on that Illinois case that well, we're going to
admit dimpled ballots.
Let's let the caller talk. Yes, caller.
I'm not going to really
press on that because
you made the points there
about states' rights and
the states' right are
appealing to the federal court for relief
and now he has to wait
because he called in the feds.
But I'm just
concerned that
you, Emanuel,
you have a broad mind on matters
during the 80s.
A lot of the laws that ensnared
a lot of hackers in the late
80s and the 90s were being
set up and were
being affected in inner cities where
I'm sure a lot of your
co-hosts really couldn't care
less and really could
allow anything to go down.
And the chickens came
home to roost with the
Kevin Mitnick and the Bernie S.
And
they're going to have to wait for
the hammer to land on their head
eventually, apparently,
with whatever
reorganization is happening with
the government and other forces.
Yeah, we'll see the results of that
in years to come, no question about that.
I'm not looking forward to it, but
unfortunately some people have to
have it land on their head, apparently.
Yeah, well there's a lot of chickens on the way
home to roost.
Actually, isn't it pigeons that are on the way home to roost?
Anyway, thanks for that call.
Let's move on to another one.
Good evening, you're on the air.
How you doing?
I want to say that
one of the reasons that the
counties did the recount
was because the rest of the counties
they refused to do the recount.
They can't?
What do you mean they can't?
No, they refused to do the recount.
They decided not to do it
because they had a choice.
After the sample recount
there was a big percentage of error.
All the other counties
had a choice if they wanted
to do the recount or not.
Those three Democratic counties
decided to do it.
I also am aware that Al Gore offered to
ask all the counties to
recount and George W. Bush did not want to do that.
Yeah.
That's why he wound up with three counties.
I would like to see all the counties recount.
I don't see anything wrong with that.
Plus,
it wasn't a protest outside
where they were counting the ballots.
It was a protest,
but I saw a video of it
taken from inside where they were counting
and the protesters were trying to break into the place.
Do you know why?
Absolutely.
They were pushing on the door and there were cops.
Do you know why?
Why?
Because the canvassing board decided
they wanted to take a whole tray of ballots
into a secret room
where they were going to close out the media
and close out all the rest of the observers.
That is just your conspiracy madness taking over.
First of all, one of the people in there
is a science fiction from fact here.
These people were doing everything they were trying to do
to make the election fair,
to count the ballots.
They went to a smaller room.
There was a reason.
I must admit, I don't know the reason right now.
I'm sure somebody out there does.
There was some kind of a reason
why they couldn't use the big room
at that particular point in time.
If the media was blocked out,
then who was taking the film?
Somebody had to be filming.
There are witnesses.
I think none of them should win.
Oh yeah, and Bush.
He didn't really officially win.
What do you mean he didn't officially win?
Legally, he's still not president.
The whole thing is not over.
As long as it's in court, it's not over.
That's true.
The Electoral College didn't vote yet,
so he's not officially president.
That's the real answer.
The College has yet to cast its votes.
The Secret Service is already around him.
They were around him before
when he was a candidate.
I read somewhere that
they ran him in front of him
like he's the president.
It's kind of funny.
He literally declared himself president.
He will probably win, I believe.
I think it's very funny
that he can just declare himself president.
What happened last year
after the votes came in
and all the elections were certified?
It's understood that the president-elect
is the person who has
a number of Electoral College votes.
It's simply assumed.
In Texas,
Bush has to recount.
You better care about Texas
because Texas is what's going to be running
the country pretty soon.
In Texas, the same problem happened last year
where a Democrat
will leave a mayor.
This Democratic mayor,
he won the election,
the Republican candidate
demanded the recount,
and Bush passed into law
that says that if it's a close race,
that a recount should be done.
It seems to me
that if a race is this close,
the only thing to do with integrity
is to make sure
that every vote has been counted.
Both sides should be doing this.
They should be in Britain.
No, they haven't.
They have not been counted.
You had an angry recount.
You had all the votes
in West Palm Beach thrown out
because the Secretary of State
was in a bad mood that day.
It's not right.
You need uniform standards.
You need fairness across the board.
That's just the way it is.
It's got to be that.
By the way, for those of you
looking forward to a Bush administration,
this is the guy that decreed
June 10th to be Jesus Day.
Yeah, Jesus Day.
Jesus Day?
Yeah. George Jesus Day Bush.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Oh, good evening.
How are you doing?
Okay, just one thing.
Well, actually, two things.
Have you looked at votescam.com?
I've looked at that site, yeah,
but you know, I can only take
so much of this,
and that sort of drives me
and you can indulge me
just for a minute or so.
Well, we can only indulge you
for a minute because we have
other calls.
When we have wrestling,
they know who's going to win.
They put on a show.
Now, this is the ultimate.
If you compare it to that,
we all know Bush is going
to be president.
I don't care.
I mean, I agree.
But they're making a big deal
out of how close it is
and take it a step further.
Now, everyone you look at
on the street could be your enemy.
They voted for Gore.
They voted for Bush.
They're dividing the country.
I mean, there's a lot more
at stake here.
There's a lot more going on
psychologically than anyone
really realized.
Yeah, that's true.
I'm concerned with the
wimpiness of Democratic
people that aren't
stepping forward and saying
what they believe in,
just kind of like cowering
in a corner.
I'm also concerned with
the strident defensiveness
of Republicans.
Not all of them, obviously,
but a lot of them.
A lot of people that are
being shown on TV,
I don't know.
It's a messy situation.
It's one that should be dealt
with in a fair way.
We just have to determine
what that is.
Let's go over here.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Oh, hello.
Yeah, I seem to remember
a time when this show
was about technology.
Yes.
At least on IRC.2600,
there's a great rending
of teeth.
That's just great,
but an IRC channel
is not what a radio station
is all about.
That's one group of people.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Oh, hello, y'all.
OK, yourself?
I'm pretty good.
Let's make it fast.
You said that the Florida courts
had shredded law and reinterpreted law,
or recreated law, or created new law,
blah, blah, blah.
What exactly do you mean?
Give me some details that I can go
take a look at.
They established an arbitrary date
at which these new votes
were supposed to come in.
They directed organizations
to conduct hand counts,
and they basically took
the existing laws passed by legislature
and said, no, we can't make this deadline.
We're going to set the deadline here.
Now, a responsible court
would have just said, you know,
this law is unconstitutional
based on the Florida state constitution,
or it's illegal because of this, that,
or the other thing,
but instead they took that one step further
and established
a new procedure
by which this election could be carried out,
which is above and beyond
any kind of power that they have.
Not to mention the fact that they took this case
without it being brought to them.
It's insanity.
You're talking about the Florida Supreme Court.
I'm talking about this Florida Supreme Court.
Isn't this a state issue?
Isn't that what we're talking about?
This is a wonderful time when all these leftists
are so intrigued and enthralled
with states' rights. It's wonderful.
No, because it's very hypocritical
for Bush to be out there
crying to the U.S. Supreme Court
when he's the one saying that the states
did have a say.
He didn't like what they said, so now he's gone.
If you want to keep this in the state,
you know what the next step is?
The legislature.
The legislature chooses the electors
and they override the Supreme Court
of the state of Florida.
I'm not a legal scholar.
All I know is going to the U.S. Supreme Court
doesn't seem like the right thing to do
in a state issue,
but let's try and move on to another phone call
because we are running out of time.
Hi.
While all this is going on,
let's not forget that this is when
Clinton can get going up
to all kinds of things.
He's signing all sorts of Cyber Privacy Act
decision directives about passwords,
digital IDs, scans.
So we have to watch Clinton's last few acts.
And also,
what's really important about
some of the votes that were no,
that were not,
did not have a choice for president
because some of the other
candidates checked off
and they wanted to disqualify those votes.
That is voter intent
is the issue there.
Yeah, that's my favorite.
Where someone doesn't want to name a president
that's because they don't want any of the above.
And they can't disqualify those.
Gore had made a decision to disqualify
votes that didn't have a choice for president.
Along that line,
one of my favorites was that
some of those protest votes
were pro-liberal, Democrat, Democrat, Democrat,
for all the local elections.
He then assumed that it would be
the intent of the voter to vote for
Gore in the presidential election.
Now you as a Nader voter
who probably did that very thing
with all Democrats in the local Congress.
How do you know she's a Nader voter?
I'm looking at you.
Imagine if you voted for Nader
and yet that didn't happen.
And all of a sudden Al Gore holds up your ballot
and says this man voted all Democrat
Do you for one second assume
that I wouldn't agree that's wrong?
Of course that's wrong.
That's the kind of thing that's going on.
That's one of the kinds of things that's going on.
I think this is happening in every state.
How could it just be Florida?
It probably is happening in every state
but Florida has been decreed
as the state that's going to decide the election.
If this was a simple matter
of just how many people got elected
how many people were voted for
we wouldn't have this kind of problem
but this electoral analysis that we have...
I think it's the Florida State Chamber of Commerce
that was just interested in getting people down there.
It's a big conspiracy.
I don't know.
You think that the punch card system
is the way to go.
If you'd write a computer program with a punch card
that you punch with a pencil
I want to know. I want to see that program run.
It's a lousy system.
It'll work.
It's a higher chance of error but it'll work.
If it was a computer based system
what would happen in Canada?
Canada doesn't have a computer based system.
They have a hand system where you check a box.
That's as simple as you can get
but computers are very simple too.
It's yes or no.
You have a system like that.
No maybes. No pregnant chads.
No nothing like that.
In Canada it's all hand counted
because they have enough polling places
that each polling place only has about 500 votes.
They have that
but computers can do counting.
Why is it only now a real issue?
It didn't work. We just thought it did.
We're out of time.
We'll have to continue this next week
or talk about something else next week
or whatever. I'm sure there'll be new crises.
Keep thinking people.
Keep questioning.
Keep looking for those details that aren't getting reported
because it all ties together.
We'll see you next week. Good night.
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