Rossi as Governor-elect. Ugh.

The Republican Secretary of State, Sam Reed, today confirmed the far-right developer's pet Dino Rossi, as Governor-elect, despite the mandatory manual recount reducing the vote differential from 261 to 42 votes. 42 votes. Maybe I should have knocked on 42 more doors. Maybe you should have. Maybe Chris' campaign strategy SUCKED.

The state party is begging for money again, this time to pay for a hand recount ($700,000). Gregoire's campaign is broke. What I'd really like to know is what happened to those last-minute donations so many of us made to the Kerry campaign to pay for lawyers to investigate and file suit against election improprieties and irregularities. Various reports have had the Kerry campaign sitting on either a $15 million or $45 million surplus and absolutely NOTHING being done about known, documented voting irregularities and outright fraud. Why isn't that money being used for things like this? Where's the Democratic Governor's Association? Where's the DNC? Why are they coming to us again? This well is dry. The only way I'd donate at this point is if I were guaranteed there would either be a hand recount or my money would be refunded. I'm not interested in throwing more money down a rathole for a candidate and a spineless party who may not even press for the recount for fear that someone might be offended.

For crying out loud, the Democrats put together, several years ago, an organization specifically designed to publicize and demand accountability for fraudulent elections - in OTHER COUNTRIES.

"Ironically, the Democratic Party knows how to highlight election fraud and start national movements to bring down administrations that try to steal elections. A Party-affiliated group has helped do it four times in the past four years.

But not in Ohio, Florida, or anywhere else in the USA.

Instead, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (Madeleine K. Albright, Chairman) has joined up with a similar organization affiliated with the Republican Party (the International Republican Institute - John McCain, Chairman), other NGOs, and US government agencies to support the use of exit polls and statistical analyses to challenge national elections in Ukraine, Serbia, Belarus, and the former Soviet republic of Georgia.

In three of those four nations they succeeded in not only mounting a national challenge, but in reversing the outcomes of elections.

The election reversals were accomplished by funding local groups - most made up of a core of activists and college students - who worked to topple regimes that had rigged their own re-elections."

full text of the article: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1129-26.htm

Where in the hell were these people on November 3rd? We should have been rioting in the streets, staging a general strike, and we would have, had there been one single solitary charismatic leader to urge us on. Instead, we sank into a morass of personal misery and disbelief.

I was considering going to the Dems' Holiday Party at the Westin this Sunday, but I suspect it'll be Black Tuesday Redux - another unbelievably dispiriting, miserable evening. I have better uses for my money. We won't be going to the district meeting tonight, either - it's their holiday party and election of district officers, and since neither of us is a PCO (thanks to the turkey that filed in our precinct, swore he'd do the job until it was too late for John to file, and then refused to do ANY of the GOTV or canvassing work) we can't vote. (John ran as a write-in, but only got a handful of votes - it's kind of hard running against someone who's actually ON THE BALLOT.)

Rossi's a frigging crook and a right-wing loon of the worst kind, packaged in a nice suit and a seemingly-genuine smile. One should never forget he's a salesman first and foremost, and the building association's pet. His record in the state legislature has been horrendous. But all the people of this state seem able to see is that he's nice-looking and Chris looks kind of mean and ran a pathetically bad campaign. I don't understand it - she ran two great, aggressive, campaigns for Attorney General. But her gubernatorial campaign was so vague and wishy-washy that no one had any idea what she stood for or intended to do as Governor. What a disappointment. So we're stuck with the crook, who's so closely allied with the Bu$h regime that he named his dog Dubya. Ugh. Ugh. There's no way this should be happening. Patty Murray showed how to run a tough campaign and she won by 12 percentage points against the Republicans' best hope for that Senate seat. Why wasn't Gregoire's campaign paying attention?

The worst thing about this is having to listen to that fat asshole Chris Vance crowing about mandates. 42 votes out of 3 million isn't a mandate, you imbecile - it's within the statistical margin of error.