Libertarians across Kansas come to Manhattan for State Conference

On Saturday the K-State chapter of Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) hosted the organization’s state convention. The convention took place at the Holiday Inn across from campus and lasted from 9 AM to 6 PM. At the conference, speaks talked about a diverse set of topics ranging from local politics to foreign policy. Approximately 90 students and community members from Manhattan, KU, other parts of Kansas, and Missouri attended the conference.  

Elizabeth Francis, President of the K-State chapter of YAL, and one of the convention’s main organizers, said that she was, “absolutely thrilled with the turnout of the convention. Students and non-students turned up to show that the message of liberty is strong in the Mid-west.” Francis also thanked the national level of YAL for allowing K-State YAL to host the conference.

Laura Nicolae, 15, is a freshman at Washburn Rural High School in Topeka and is currently reading, “For a New Liberty” by the libertarian author Murray Rothbard. Nicolae said that her favorite part of the convention was when Ron Paul skyped in to talk to the attendees.

“My favorite part of the convention was definitely getting to talk to Ron Paul because I wanted to do that forever and he is probably my favorite person ever, other than Thomas Jefferson.” Nicolae also said that she enjoyed talking, “to people who are like minded and understand the issues outside of the standard bi-partisan system.”

Cody Wilson, a law student at the University of Texas, talked to the conference about his nearly completed effort to create a gun from a 3D printer. Wilson says that the project has first and foremost, “a symbolic political goal” to show that gun control legislation will not be successful. Wilson says that once the gun is created, “in the next couple weeks,” he will be showing it first to BBC World News so that knowledge of the project will spread to countries that have stronger gun control policies than the United States.

John Matta, the recently elected mayor of Manhattan, talked to the attendees about his opposition to mandatory rental inspections which he said is, “a privacy issue.” He also spoke about his opposition to public transportation. However, Matta said that he would reconsider a proposed transit system, “if we can get a financial commitment from K-State student fees.” The proposed transit system would take students to and from the university, which supporters say would alleviate the problem of parking on campus.

The main speaker at the conference was author Tom Woods, who discussed his opposition to the bailouts after the financial crash of 2007-2008. Woods spoke in favor of the doctrine of nullification where states refuse to enforce laws they believe are unconstitutional. He also argued against an interventionist foreign policy. Woods told the group that, “we represent the third America,” the alternative to the Democrats and Republicans.

Correction: I am an idiot

In December 2010 I wrote a blog post criticizing Harry Reid for joining a Republican filibuster. I also criticized the media for ignoring this fact. It was the fifth post on my blog. Unfortunately, my editorial rested on my misunderstanding of the rules of the Senate.

As I was researching the filibuster of Chuck Hagel, Obama’s nominee for Defense Secretary, I found this sentence an article at the New York Times.

“Because of parliamentary rules, Mr. Reid voted with Republicans to allow him to bring the Hagel nomination back for another vote. Counting Mr. Reid, Mr. Hagel was actually just one vote shy of the 60 needed.”  

The Washington Post says something similar.

“Reid changed his vote to no so that he could use parliamentary rules to quickly reconsider the nomination when the Senate returns from its Presidents Day break Feb 25.”

Wonkblog at the Washington Post provided the most detailed explanation for Reid’s actions.

“As Sarah Binder, a Senate rules expert at George Washington University, told me, it’s not that the majority leader has to vote no. It’s that somebody on the winning side of the cloture vote — in this case, the side voting against cloture — has to file a “motion to reconsider” if the matter is to be taken up again. “I suppose the broader parliamentary principle here is that it would be somewhat unfair to give someone on the losing side of a question a second bite at the apple,” Binder explains. So the rules provide for senators whose opinion has changed to motion for another vote, whereas those whose opinion stays the same don’t get to keep filing to reconsider.

Reid, and other majority leaders before him, have developed a clever workaround: Just change your vote at the last minute if it looks as though you’re going to lose, then move to reconsider. In theory, any supporter of the bill or nomination in question could do the same, but traditionally it’s been the majority leader.”

I am still somewhat confused by the unnecessary mind-boggling Byzantine complexity of the rules of the senate. However, I do understand that Reid joins Republican filibusters not because he is against passing the bill (or confirmation) in question at the time. He joins the filibuster because doing so allows him to pass the bill (or confirmation) as quickly as possible.


The hypocrisy of writing an editorial based on a falsehood, on a blog that was at the time mostly devoted to factchecking, is not lost on me. I conducted research to understand Reid’s motivations at the time, and came up empty. The implied falsehood in my editorial that Reid opposed funding health care for 9/11 first-responders was based upon a misunderstanding of the topic. I was not attempting to deceive anyone. Nevertheless, I am leaving my original post as evidence of my fallibility and ignorance.

 


Post Script: The Senate should change its rules to allow for the Senate majority leader to bring a vote to reconsider a filibuster as soon as they wish without having to vote against something they support.

I really thought I had found a scandalous fact everyone else was ignoring. I suppose it is a good thing only 7 people read that post. I also put false information on the internet without someone correcting me. That is disappointing indeed. 

Conclusion

[Author’s Note: This post is part of the 7 part series Conspiracy Check. The series factchecks the claims of Liberal commentator Thom Hartmann concerning allegations of fraud and treason during 5 presidential elections.]

So where does this leave Hartmann’s claim that Eisenhower was the last legitimately elected Republican president? Hartmann does not make any claims of illegality with regards to Reagan’s reelection. So it seems that he is claiming that no Republican president since Eisenhower took the White House at least once without doing so through fraud or treason.

Hartmann doesn’t mention Nixon’s reelection, but that was when Watergate occurred. Ford was never elected. Hartmann didn’t mention George H.W. Bush’s election, but he was alleged to have been involved in the October Surprise conspiracy. George H.W. Bush was not reelected.

Here are my conclusions on the five conspiracies alleged by Hartmann.

1968: True

1980: Substantial evidence, Possibly True

2000: Texas felon list likely fraudulently won the election for Bush, True

2004: Reasonable suspicion, No clear proof

2012: Nothing more than an unsubstantiated claim from Anonymous

 

Therefore

 

Nixon: Sabotaged the peace process

Reagan: Possibly made a deal to keep American hostages in Iran until the election was over

H.W. Bush: Possibly aided Reagan in doing so

George W. Bush: Most likely was elected due to Texas felon list illegally keeping eligible voters from voting in Florida

 

If the October Surprise conspiracy is true than Hartmann is correct.

 

How accurate were Hartmann’s claims as a whole? He was completely wrong in saying what the result of the Florida Supreme Court ordered recount would have been. He failed to explain that the outcome of the 2000 election in Florida depended on what counted as a legitimate vote. His near certainty that the 2004 election was stolen relies upon a false certainty in the credibility of that year’s exit polls. He fails to explain that Anonymous has yet to provide any proof of their claim of a Republican attempt to steal the 2012 election. His claims surrounding the 1968 and 1980 elections are reasonable; I just am waiting for more evidence before I can believe the October Surprise story.

Nonetheless, Hartmann did point out a lot of important stories in recent American political history I had been unaware of. However, it took me quite a while to determine which parts of those stories were untrue.

 

POST SCRIPT: Here are two articles debunking the false claim that 9/11 was perpetrated by the US government. Here are two articles debunking the false claim that Obama was not born in the United States.

October Surprise (1980)

[Author’s Note: This post is part of the 7 part series Conspiracy Check. The series factchecks the claims of Liberal commentator Thom Hartmann concerning allegations of fraud and treason during 5 presidential elections.]

 

Hartmann’s next conspiracy concerned the 1980 election. Hartmann alleged that Regan made a deal with the Iranians that they would not release the American hostages in Iran until after the election. In exchange for this Reagan allegedly agreed to give the Iranians weapons. The hostage crisis was a major blow to Carter’s reelection campaign.

There is quite a bit of evidence for this conspiracy. Journalist Robert Parry and his colleges at consortiumnews.com have also described the evidence for the October Surprise conspiracy in multiple articles. Israeli intelligence agent Ari Ben-Menashe supports the claim. A Russian intelligence report reached the same conclusion. Former Iranian president Bani-Sadr supported the allegation in a letter to the US Congress. David Andelman, the biographer of French intelligence chief Alexandre deMarenches, testified that de Marenches had told him that the Regan reelection campaign met with Iranians in Paris. Jamshid Hashemi, an Iranian arms trader, says that he arranged meetings between the Iranians and the Regan reelection campaign. Hashemi also alleges that George H.W. Bush met with Iranian representatives in Paris, a charge Bush has repeatedly denied.

Newsweek, the New Republic, and Congress all launched investigations into the October Surprise conspiracy theory and concluded that it didn’t occur. However, each relied on creating an alibi for William Casey such that he could not have attended a meeting in Madrid as Jamshid Hashemi had described. Robert Parry was able to discredit those alibis and in 2011 he found a memo from the George H.W. Bush Library that said that “a cable from the Madrid embassy indicated that Bill Casey was in town, for purposes unknown.”

So is the conspiracy true? Possibly, but I am going to hold off my conclusion until more classified documents from the George H.W. Bush Library that the library describes as relating to the allegation are declassified. However, there is enough evidence that I do not fault Hartmann for believing it is true.

Paris Peace Talks (1968)

[Author’s Note: This post is part of the 7 part series Conspiracy Check. The series factchecks the claims of Liberal commentator Thom Hartmann concerning allegations of fraud and treason during 5 presidential elections.]

Hartmann’s next tale of intrigue was that Nixon sabotaged Johnson’s 1968 Peace talks between North and South Vietnam to end the Vietnam War. Hartmann said that Nixon did this by telling the South Vietnamese that they would get a better deal if he was elected president. The failure of the peace process hurt the Democratic candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and helped Nixon win the election. Hartmann used audio soundbites from President Johnson’s phone conversations discussing what he believed was Nixon’s “Treason” with Senator Dirksen and with Nixon himself. These audio tapes were released by the Johnson presidential library in 2008.

On this conspiracy, Hartmann is entirely correct. Journalist Robert Parry, who helped uncover the Iran-Contra scandal, has written extensively about Nixon’s sabotage of the peace talks. Parry has compiled the evidence for Nixon’s sabotage at the news site consortiumnews.com

Johnson knew about the operation partially as a result of wiretaps on the South Vietnamese embassy and on individuals in contact with them.

The ambassador for South Vietnam in the United States in 1968 was Dui Diem. In his memoir In the Jaws of History Diem described a meeting he had with Nixon along with his campaign advisor John Mitchell and Anna Chennault, who would act as a messenger between the Nixon campaign and South Vietnamese officials, including Diem. Diem also published two messages he had sent to South Vietnam.

“Many Republican friends have contacted me and encouraged us to stand firm. They were alarmed by press reports to the effect that you had already softened your position.”

“I am regularly in touch with the Nixon entourage.”

Nguyen Tien Hung, an advisor to South Vietnamese President Thieu, was coauthor of “The Palace File.” The book includes detailed interviews with Thieu and Chennault. The Palace File reported that Chennault was in contact with Thieu and his brother.

Chennault confirmed that she had been a courier between the Nixon Campaign and South Vietnam in her own Memoir, “The Education of Anna.” She also said that Mitchell had told her, “Anna, I’m speaking on behalf of Mr. Nixon. It’s very important that our Vietnamese friends understand our Republican position and I hope you have made that clear to them.” [Source: Robert Parry’s book America’s Stolen Narrative (page 52)]

This incident does confirm Hartmann’s point that a major scandal involving a presidential campaign (and future president) can go unknown by the press and the public.

Exit Polls and SMARTech (2004)

[Author’s Note: This post is part of the 7 part series Conspiracy Check. The series factchecks the claims of Liberal commentator Thom Hartmann concerning allegations of fraud and treason during 5 presidential elections.]

Hartmann’s next conspiracy concerned the 2004 presidential election. The election came down to Ohio. The private company SMARTech had been given the contract by Ohio’s Secretary of State to back up the vote calculations on election night. SMARTech had significant ties to the national Republican Party. Ohio’s servers crashed and the vote totals were rerouted through SMARTech. Hartmann then strongly implied that SMARTech stole Ohio, and thus the election, for Bush.

 “The vote totals that poured into the system from SMARTech’s computers in Chattanooga flipped the exit polls on their head. The lead that John Kerry had in the exit polls had magically reversed by more than 6 percent, something unheard of in any other nation in the developed world.”

Hartmann’s main source was Craig Unger’s book, Boss Rove. I admit that I have not read Unger’s book. However, Unger did discuss the book on Democracy Now. Unger was asked if he thought Ohio was stolen in 2004.

“CRAIG UNGER: Well, there was no question there was massive fraud. If you want to actually count the votes, unfortunately it’s impossible because so much evidence was destroyed.”

Unger confirmed almost all of Hartmann’s claims in the interview, everything except his conclusion the election was most likely stolen. However, neither Hartmann nor Unger addressed concerns with the exit polls in the 2004 election.

 Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International were the two companies responsible for creating the National Election Poll, the organization that conducted the 2004 presidential exit polls. The two organizations released a report to explain the problems with the exit polls in 2004. The polls were different from the results in many states, not just Ohio. 

”There were 26 states in which the estimates produced by the exit poll data overstated the vote for John Kerry by more than one standard error, and there were four states in which the exit poll estimates overstated the vote for George W. Bush by more than one standard error.”

The report concluded that the error in the exit polls was the result of Kerry voters being more likely to talk to exit poll researchers than Bush voters.

“Our investigation of the differences between the exit poll estimates and the actual vote count point to one primary reason: in a number of precincts a higher than average Within Precinct Error most likely due to Kerry voters participating in the exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters.  There have been partisan overstatements in previous elections, more often overstating the Democrat, but occasionally overstating the Republican.  While the size of the average exit poll error has varied, it was higher in 2004 than in previous years for which we have data.”

Mark Blumenthal wrote extensively on the controversy at Mystery Pollster.

Summarize: [If you want to explain the exit poll discrepancy] Absent further data from NEP, you can choose to believe that an existing problem with exit polls got worse this year in the face of declining response rates and rising distrust of big media, that a slightly higher number of Bush voters than Kerry voters declined to be interviewed. Or, you can believe that a massive secret conspiracy somehow shifted  roughly 2% of the vote from Kerry to Bush in every battleground state, a conspiracy that fooled everyone but the exit pollsters – and then only for a few hours – after which they deliberately suppressed evidence of the fraud and damaged their own reputations by blaming the discrepancies on the weakness in their data.

Please.

Don’t get me wrong. I am disturbed by the notion of electronic voting machines with no paper record, and I totally support the efforts of those pushing for a genuine audit trail. If Ralph Nader or the Libertarians want to pay for recounts to press this point, I am all for it. I know vote fraud can happen, and I support efforts to pursue real evidence of such misdeeds. I am also frustrated by the lack of transparency and disclosure from NEP, even on such simple issues as reporting the sampling error for each state exit poll. Given the growing controversy, I hope they release as much data as possible on their investigation as soon as possible. The discrepancy also has very important implications for survey research generally, and pollsters everywhere will benefit by learning more about it.  

While there is no doubt that there was Florida-like problems in Ohio in 2004, the evidence that the election was stolen is inadequate. Hartmann did not explain that the exit polls disproportionally favored Kerry compared to the final vote tallies in 26 states, not just in Ohio. This missing fact throws his near certainty that the election was stolen into a much different light.

Bush v. Gore (2000)

[Author’s Note: This post is part of the 7 part series Conspiracy Check. The series factchecks the claims of Liberal commentator Thom Hartmann concerning allegations of fraud and treason during 5 presidential elections.]

Hartmann began his discussion of the 2000 election by discussing the Texas felon list that was used to take Florida voters off the roles. The stated purpose of the list, which was used in Florida, was to prevent individuals who had their voting rights taken away from voting illegally. However, Salon did an extensive investigation into the list and found its implementation was riddled with errors. Some voters who were prevented from voting were guilty of misdemeanors rather than felonies, others were felons who had their voting rights restored, and some were cases of mistaken identity. While the exact number of individuals who were improperly taken off the list is unknown, Salon estimated that 7,000 voters could have been improperly taken off the roles based on the error ratio found in one Florida county.

“Hillsborough County’s elections supervisor, Pam Iorio, tried to make sure that that the bugs in the system didn’t keep anyone from voting. All 3,258 county residents who were identified as possible felons on the central voter file sent by the state in June were sent a certified letter informing them that their voting rights were in jeopardy. Of that number, 551 appealed their status, and 245 of those appeals were successful. Some had been convicted of a misdemeanor and not a felony, others were felons who had had their rights restored and others were simply cases of mistaken identity.

An additional 279 were not close matches with names on the county’s own voter rolls and were not notified. Of the 3,258 names on the original list, therefore, the county concluded that more than 15 percent were in error. If that ratio held statewide, no fewer than 7,000 voters were incorrectly targeted for removal from voting rosters.”

As many as 7,000 Florida voters had their voting rights illegally taken away from them in 2000.  Salon pointed out that the improper disenfranchisement by the list disproportionally affected ethnic minorities, who were more likely to be Gore voters. The margin of victory in Florida was 537 votes. Therefore, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris’ policy of improperly removing voters based on a Texas felon list very likely won the election for Bush.

 

Thousands of Gore votes were lost due to the confusing Butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County. Thousands more of Gore votes were lost in Duval County as a result of confusing ballot instructions. In both of these scenarios voters ended up voting for multiple candidates for president and thus invalidated their votes. Had there been a revote in Florida without these confusing ballots, Gore would have likely won the election.

 

However, Hartmann errs when he describes the results of a media consortium investigation into the disputed ballots involved in the Florida recount.

So the Supreme Court gave the presidency to Bush and it wasn’t until a year later in November 2001 that a consortium of Florida newspapers completed a count of Florida ballots. And when the New York Times reported on it they buried in the seventeenth paragraph of the story the bombshell that had the Supreme Court not intervened and had all the ballots been counted in Florida as the Florida Supreme Court had ordered Al Gore would have won no matter how you counted the ballots.

As the Times reports, “If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards, and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won, by a very narrow margin.”

The truth is that the Florida Supreme Court only ordered a statewide recount of undervotes (dimpled and hanging chads) and that a recount of undervotes alone would not have given Gore enough extra votes to win Florida. The first paragraph of the New York Times article Hartmann quotes from contradicts his claim.

A comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots from last year's presidential election reveals that George W. Bush would have won even if the United States Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward.

The votes that would have been necessary for Gore to win the election were those where voters marked the oval for Gore but also wrote his name in on the write in spot. From the Washington Post:

The overvotes that could have provided the margin for Gore were on ballots where voters tried to be extra-clear in their choice and ended up nullifying the vote. They filled in the oval next to a candidate and then filled in the oval for "write-in" and wrote the same candidate's name again.

In many of the scenarios where voters who voted for Gore and also did a write in for Gore were counted, Gore would have won the election. However, disputes among whether a chad was dimpled in scenarios where dimpled chads would count as legitimate votes were numerous enough that the election would have been different whether the standard was 2 out of 3 or 3 out of 3 counters agreeing to whether a chad was dimpled. From the New York Times:

If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards, and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won, by a very narrow margin. For example, using the most permissive "dimpled chad" standard, nearly 25,000 additional votes would have been reaped, yielding 644 net new votes for Mr. Gore and giving him a 107-vote victory margin.

But the dimple standard was also the subject of the most disagreement among coders, and Mr. Bush fought the use of this standard in recounts in Palm Beach, Broward and Miami- Dade Counties. Many dimples were so light that only one coder saw them, and hundreds that were seen by two were not seen by three. In fact, counting dimples that three people saw would have given Mr. Gore a net of just 318 additional votes and kept Mr. Bush in the lead by 219.

The 2000 election in Florida was so close that different results could be obtained by changing which undervotes and overvotes counted as legitimate votes. This is shown quite well by the Washington Post’s interactive applet that displays the results of the consortium recount. Hartmann’s declaration that Gore won the 2000 election did not adequately explain that the winner of Florida depended on what qualified as a legitimate vote.