CBS sucks. The "60 Minutes" Don Siegelman piece & the 60,000 lb election theft elephant they missed

Like many of you, I have been looking forward to the "60 Minutes" piece on Don Siegelman. Finally, I thought (as did many of you, I suspect), the story of the theft of Siegelman's 2002 re-election race for Alabama Governor would receive proper national media attention.

(Links to the Siegelman 2002 election theft story are posted downthread.)

But NOOOO -- all we get is some Freudian slip reference (in one sentence) to the fact that the Rethugs could never beat Siegelman so they had to use the Just-us Department to go after him. Well, CBS, if the Rethugs couldn't beat him, HOW DID HE LOSE HIS 2002 RE-ELECTION?

READ MY LIPS, CBS. The Rethugs could not beat Siegelman. That's why they stole his 2002 election. There is ample documentation to that effect. If you lame-asses can't find it, ask for our help. We've been offering it for years.

CBS = (Journalistic) Carbunkles, Boils and Shit

Time to get on the exercise bike and exorcise the corporate merde from my brain cells.

Eat the rich.

The Rethugs have perfected electronically-enabled election theft for a decade now.

And the corpulent media have starred in the "game" of ignoring the fucking obvious for just as long.

Well joke 'em if they can't take a fuck. Walter Cronkite ought to show up and kick some mascara-slathered butt at the house that Murrow built.

What a bunch of cowards and democracy-killing enablers.

we should only be allowed to Hand Count a certain per cent of OUR Ballots, then YES INDEED it is time to LOCK AND LOAD!! :)

...how was it done in Alabama in 2002?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=2915785

My thanks to Junkdrawer for this thread, which is just one of several here at DU that have laid out the evidence in detail for the more important story in Alabama -- how an unbeatable Democratic governor "lost" in 2002.

Read and weep.

Better yet, read and get mad as hell. At Rethugs, at the Just-us Department and at the corpulent media toadies at CBS.

Why else would they have constructed a Bush hit piece around what was vary likely a forged memo?
They're just a little gun shy now. Don't kick them when they're down.

:rofl:

And, don't forget, Valarie Plame was not a CIA NOC!

Welcome to DU.

Aren't you a little lost this evening?

Or maybe that's a chronic condition.

Question: Are you saying the theft of Siegelman's 2002 re-election race is suspicious because manipulation of voting equipment and others things like caging or because they brought forth a bogus indictment which lead to a loss of credibility in his campaign?

I'm assuming the latter.

Siegelman was elected Alabama governor in 1998.

On Election Day in November 2002, even though his popularity had taken a hit from the constant GOP investigations, Siegelman initially seemed to have been re-elected by a narrow but solid majority. Then, overnight, a Republican-only recount in one county flipped a bunch of votes and put Bob Riley ahead. Sleazy William Pryor -- then the Alabama attorney general, now a recess-appointed federal judge -- intervened to prevent any honest recount, and Siegelman finally conceded the race.

The bogus indictment came in 2006, as Siegelman was attempting to run for re-election. Largely because of it, he lost in the primary. He was then convicted a few weeks later.

The monitor's giving me a migraine tonight, hard to do much reading or research.

This stinks more and more with every passing moment.

that there *were* typewriters at the time that would do the superscript. No time to research it right now - gotta do the election news.

If it *was* a forgery, I bet it was planted by Rove.

One of the first things I realized when I moved out of the U.S. is just how sad and pathetic US news coverage is. At this point NPR and PBS are the ONLY news outlets in the US that have a shred of integrity or credibility with me. The rest I don't even consider journalists.

Dan Burton, Jesse Helm, Strom Thurmond won - Republican got public radio/tv for everything involving news and many interviews and commentary.

Here it's Democracy Now, FreeSpeech tv, Link tv. A few hours compared to Republican saturation from the biggie partners of the Republicans. For tv - more commonly called GE, Murdoch, Viacom, Disney, Time-Warner corporate=military-political-baron tv.

in parts of Alabama.

What a surprise.

The idiots just made the story bigger.

When we have a good idea of what happened, please let's get it out to our networks.

I grew up in Columbus, Mississippi during the 60s. Whenever a civil rights-related story would appear on the national evening news (back when CBS had Walter Cronkite and thus had some journalistic integrity), the sound would go dead. You could see the images (protesters being beaten, hosed, attacked by dogs) but no words accompanied the pictures.

Fast forward to Alabama this evening, which is as bad as Mississippi was 40 years ago.

(Another reason I'm glad I'm from Mississippi.)

Tell me you are kidding

But they did some reporting on the manufactured prosecution issue while the rest of the media ignored it entirely.

many facts left out

timed to air when the Oscars's are on - talk about rating problems

the only good thing - IS the blackout - they shot themselves in the foot - because now people will be talking about it.

At least it's a very good start, and maybe enough people will see it to get Waxman or Conyers on the stick or whoever has jurisdiction in this kd of over-sight.

I remember sweating it out in the wee hours on DU. Looked like Siegelman had overcome his pre-election poll disadvantage -- as high as 4 to 7 points -- to win a tight one via late undecideds to the incumbent, virtually unheard of. In fact, one major political analyst has said he's never seen undecideds break so sharply to the incumbent as in that 2002 Alabama race.

Regardless, my memory is one area with a sharp GOP tilt had reported odd margins, and when a mistake was supposedly discovered it put Riley over the top by a few thousand. I know I looked at it after the election and it was actually Siegelman's early percentage in that county that made zero sense, based on partisanship and history.

Whatever. I'm not looking it up again, weary of pointless exchanges years after the fact. But unless something changed dramatically from the original scenario, that loss was more or less the reversal of our 2004 gov fate in Washington state, where Gregoire was an all but certain loser until thousands of King County votes showed up during the recount, just enough to push her over the top. In each case the outcomes changed and the losers naturally bitched and screamed fraud, but my instinct says the rightful outcome emerged both times.

Gundlach says that Baldwin County ended up as an "outlier" when comparing the 2002 results to either governor 1998 or president 2000. "Outlier" is hyperbolic -- there are bigger deviations in both directions -- but it is somewhat out of trend. What caught Gundlach's eye is that the correction moved Baldwin further from the trend line. Not shocking, but somewhat unexpected.

(Gundlach also noted that the slope relating Siegelman's vote shares in 1998 and 2002 was different in Baldwin County than in two other counties for which he had data. That's iffy. For one thing, one would rather expect vote shares to follow a logistic "S" curve, so the slope will depend in part on the partisan mix of precincts in each county. One of Gundlach's comparison counties was a lot more Democratic.)

I'd feel happier about the analogy to WA if there had ever been a recount in Baldwin County.

The way Siegelman lost was by a bogus second count illegally done by republicans, illegally certified by republicans and Siegelman was prevented from having a good recount by threat of arrest by republicans. There is no mystery here. The only votes that changed in the recount were those of Siegelman and his opponent. Bogus count. Bogus outcome.

Go watch 60 Minutes again if you are confused or check up thread for history links.