"Ohio was rife with allegations," Jonathan Turley said on last night's show. He's not merely a superior expert on the Constitution, teaching it at George Washington University's law school, but back during my first incarnation at MSNBC, as host of The Big Show and The White House In Crisis, Jonathan was a regular guest who regularly said that the investigation and impeachment of President Clinton was largely being done within the framework of the Constitution, and as bad as much of it looked, it was well within the margin of error.
Professor Turley is no partisan.
"There was litigation over pockets of voters," he continued, on the subject of Ohio. "There was far more litigation than was indicated in the news programming." He should know - he was on the clock and on the set working for CBS News throughout the campaign, and straight through to 6 AM in the hours after the vote. "So when you look at provisionals and absentees and then those pockets of votes, yeah, there probably is enough of a margin if things broke for Kerry that he could turn the state. Is it likely? No. But it is not impossible."
Turley noted that a complaint now, without John Kerry's sponsorship, is also a longshot: "Without the candidate, judges don't work as hard" when it comes to overturning a set of returns, or a county's report, or a state's. But, he added, "remember that over 70% of Ohio's votes were done with punch cards and we know that when you do a challenge to those, they tend to turn over."
Paging Mr. Gore! Mr. Albert Gore, please report to the blog...
On the show last night there was also confirmation of something I speculated about here 24 hours ago. Craig Crawford, one of our MSNBC political contributors and also a columnist for Congressional Quarterly, admitted that the concession did trigger a kind of "we can all go home now!" exultation in the media. "Since John Kerry conceded," Craig said, "there wasn't that great desire to run out to Columbus and try to figure this out. And the concession is the key because we're often wimps in the media and we wait for other people to make charges, one political party or the other, and then we investigate."
Craig also connected a few unpleasant dots. Kerry, he says, is "definitely interested in running in 2008," and the image of Gore's political death after the 2000 re-count may have played as much of a part in his hurried concession as any realistic appraisal of his chances in reversing the election by reversing Ohio.
Professor Turley is no partisan.
"There was litigation over pockets of voters," he continued, on the subject of Ohio. "There was far more litigation than was indicated in the news programming." He should know - he was on the clock and on the set working for CBS News throughout the campaign, and straight through to 6 AM in the hours after the vote. "So when you look at provisionals and absentees and then those pockets of votes, yeah, there probably is enough of a margin if things broke for Kerry that he could turn the state. Is it likely? No. But it is not impossible."
Turley noted that a complaint now, without John Kerry's sponsorship, is also a longshot: "Without the candidate, judges don't work as hard" when it comes to overturning a set of returns, or a county's report, or a state's. But, he added, "remember that over 70% of Ohio's votes were done with punch cards and we know that when you do a challenge to those, they tend to turn over."
Paging Mr. Gore! Mr. Albert Gore, please report to the blog...
On the show last night there was also confirmation of something I speculated about here 24 hours ago. Craig Crawford, one of our MSNBC political contributors and also a columnist for Congressional Quarterly, admitted that the concession did trigger a kind of "we can all go home now!" exultation in the media. "Since John Kerry conceded," Craig said, "there wasn't that great desire to run out to Columbus and try to figure this out. And the concession is the key because we're often wimps in the media and we wait for other people to make charges, one political party or the other, and then we investigate."
Craig also connected a few unpleasant dots. Kerry, he says, is "definitely interested in running in 2008," and the image of Gore's political death after the 2000 re-count may have played as much of a part in his hurried concession as any realistic appraisal of his chances in reversing the election by reversing Ohio.
There's your leadership, Demwits. Fuck your vote.
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