Veterans for Common Sense

MANY RESERVISTS FEELING A ‘DRAFT’

By WILLIAM BUNCH
bunchw@phillynews.com

GENNARO PELLEGRINI JR., a 31-year-old Philadelphia police officer, was playing Sony Playstation video games with a nephew one night last April when a single phone call turned his world upside down.

He was just two weeks away from the end of a six-year hitch in the Pennsylvania National Guard, one of several signs that Pellegrini was hitting a new phase in life.

As he neared his third anniversary as a cop patrolling the streets around Fishtown, he was now also engaged to be married. And a highly successful amateur welterweight boxer, he was also training for his first professional fight at the legendary Blue Horizon arena on North Broad.

That’s when the commander from his National Guard armory called with some stunning news. The Pentagon, invoking the fine print in his enlistment papers, was not only extending his tour for up to 18 months, but was calling him up for active duty.

He was told to begin training to go to Iraq by year’s end.

“I was mad,” Pellegrini said last week, and his anger has only grown over the last six months of training in Texas and Louisiana. He said he’s too out of shape to fight, and his fiancee broke up with him. He called the conflict in Iraq “a so-called war” and sees U.S. troops as caught in an impossible situation.

But like it or not, he left yesterday to begin his service.

Pellegrini is one of several thousands reservists or ex-soldiers who are going to the bloody war in Iraq under what the Pentagon calls “a stop-loss” program – but critics are calling “a back-door draft.”

The Philly cop is hardly alone. Officials estimated that some 40,000 National Guard members have had their tours extended involuntarily, most for hazardous duty in Iraq or Afghanistan.

In recent weeks, the Pentagon has been digging deeper, calling on an additional 4,000 ex-soldiers – many of whom left the military years ago to start jobs or raise families – who are part of a pool called the Individual Ready Reserve, or IRR, to resume active duty because troops are stretched so thin.

The Pentagon moves are legal – some 110,000 former troops agreed to belong to the IRR when they left active duty before their eight-year commitment – and officials say there is considerable precedent. Nearly 15,000 IRR soldiers were called up for the first Persian Gulf War in 1991, although for much less than the one-year commitment sought for the new conflict.

Still, with no end to the insurgency in Iraq in sight, the call-ups are starting to exhibit increasing resistance in ways that – like some other aspects of the fighting in Gulf region – may remind some people of the Vietnam era.

The New York Times reported last week that roughly half of the 4,000 IRR call-ups are trying to avoid their service either through official channels or by simply not showing up.

Among the larger pool of National Guard call-ups – the category that Pellegrini belongs to — there are some looking to win conscientious objector status, and several have gone to court seeking legal protection.

In one Sacramento, Calif., case that’s been receiving publicity, a married father of two serving in the California Army National Guard went to court this month in a last-ditch effort to prevent his deployment to Iraq, supposed to happen this week. His lawyers have argued that President Bush lacks the authority to make these “stop-loss” call-ups, but the unnamed soldier has already lost one round, and legal experts doubt he will succeed.

In the meantime, an ad hoc network of military families and anti-war activists has been working closely with soldiers looking for ways to contest their recent call-ups. Officials here say they’re getting increasing calls for aid as the situation on the ground in Iraq seems to deteriorate.

“We get calls every day from people who are in the military reserves who are getting orders to go and who are saying, ‘This is something that I don’t want to do,’ ” said Bill Galvin, of the Center for Conscience and War, based in Washington, D.C.

Galvin said some of the most dire calls are from reservists who have already served one tour in Iraq and are getting orders to go back. “Some of them have said, ‘I’d go to jail before I’d go back there,’ ” he said. “They say they’ve witnessed things or participated in things that have caused them terrible trouble sleeping at night, and they don’t want to put themselves back in the middle of it.”

Meanwhile, many soldiers who could be called up – and their families – wait and worry that they’ll get a phone call like the one Pellegrini received.

“It’s just like a back-door draft,” said Ben Sears, a just-retired West Philadelphia High history teacher whose 28-year-old son is finishing a five-year Army enlistment in San Antonio. He said that Zachary Sears, a graduate of Philly’s Masterman High and of American University, will be placed on the IRR if he doesn’t re-enlist.

“Last week when he was home, he said he’s not going to Iraq,” Sears said. “He really hates the war – he’s always been against it.”

Most reservists and ex-soldiers are like Pellegrini – willing to obey their orders, but not particularly happy about it. Pellegrini said that he was just two weeks away from completing his National Guard obligation when he was called at his rowhouse in Port Richmond.

Yesterday, Pellegrini was slated to leave for a base in Louisiana, destined for an undisclosed location in Iraq. His unit A Company 1/111 from Northeast Philadelphia is slated to serve a year over there, possibly longer.

In the meantime, Pellegrini’s been watching some news on TV, and he doesn’t like what he sees. “This isn’t a war they’re giving us over there – this is policing stuff,” said Pellegrini, who knows a thing or two about law enforcement.

He also knows something about putting up a fight. With a 17-1 record as an amateur, Pellegrini sent James Andre Harris onto the canvas in the 4th round when he fought this May at the Blue Horizon, his one and only pro bout.

Preparing for Iraq may be tougher than anything he’s encountered in the ring. He said his fiancee left him rather than deal with his long absence, and hours of classroom training have left him in worse – not better – physical condition.

Now, he said, “I just want to get it done, come home, and continue my life.”

Medics Testify to Fallujah’s Horrors

Navy Corpsmen Treated Unusually Devastating Injuries at Field Hospital

By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 24, 2004; Page A15

FALLUJAH, Iraq — The first time Jose Ramirez saw a human body ripped apart by a rocket, it took hours for him to regain his composure. Nothing in his training as a Navy medical corpsman had prepared him for the sight of the dead Marine brought in September to the military field hospital outside Fallujah.

“I walked around in shock,” said Ramirez, 26, of San Antonio, a Navy petty officer third class attached to Bravo Surgical Company. “I’ve seen people die before on the emergency room table. But what I was trying not to do, what I was trained not to do, is look at the patient with tunnel vision. It reminded me that I had to get prepared.”

Two months later, when the first wounded American and Iraqi troops arrived at the hospital after storming Fallujah, Ramirez had braced for the worst.

“It doesn’t hit me when I’m working on a patient. But after we’re cleaning up, and I see the blood on the floor or I see someone bagging a piece of arm or leg, I know it’s going to be in my mind for the rest of my life,” Ramirez said.

Fifty-one U.S. troops have been killed and 425 wounded since the ground assault on this insurgent stronghold began on Nov. 8. Although U.S. commanders say they control the city, Marine units are still going door to door to root out the remaining fighters, sometimes with deadly consequences.

Medics at the Bravo Surgical Company’s field hospital, where all the battlefield dead and wounded are brought, said the injuries that troops sustained in the Fallujah fight were unusually devastating, most of them the result of close-range explosions.

“They’re just horrific injuries,” said Chief Petty Officer Damon Sanders, head of the shock stabilization team. “We saw an increasing amount of shrapnel wounds. Typically there are one or two people who take the brunt of the blast, and the rest of the guys take shrapnel.”

Sanders, 36, of Temecula, Calif., said the injuries sustained in Fallujah were more severe than those typically suffered in Iraq, largely because the insurgents had been in control of the city for months and were ready to fight.

“It’s when you’re waiting, you give the enemy time to set up,” he said. “When they’re running, they can’t do as much.”

Marine Lance Cpl. Davi Allen said he saw little action in the first days of the Fallujah offensive. But last week, after the city had mostly been secured, he and his platoon — part of the 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment — were clearing houses in one of the northern neighborhoods that troops swept through at the start of the offensive. After going through about 50 houses, Allen, 21, of Cloverdale, Ore., was looking around the small living room of a residence when he heard gunshots coming from the kitchen.

He looked over and saw a grenade roll into the room. The house’s windows had bars on them, and the grenade was too close to the doorway for Allen to make a run for it. He said he had no choice but to ride it out.

“I balled myself in the corner and waited,” he said. “It blew up behind me.”

Two Marines were injured and one was killed in the attack. Medics brought Allen to Bravo Surgical with 24 pieces of shrapnel in his backside. One of the corpsmen who treated him was Ramirez.

When Allen recounted the tale last weekend, he was standing outside the hospital, sipping a soda. Ramirez dashed by to help carry an injured Iraqi detainee to a waiting ambulance, then came over to talk to Allen. They share an interest in rap music, the two said, and Ramirez repeated a promise to bring Allen some music.

“I knew eventually I’d get hurt,” Allen said, cuts still visible on his hands and arms. “I was lucky just to get a grenade. I just want to go back home and see my wife.”

Ramirez said the hospital prepared for large numbers of wounded troops before the battle began. But he and his colleagues did not prepare for what he called “the walking wounded.” At the last minute, the corpsmen set up a tent to deal with patients who were not brought in on stretchers. Another tent was set up for Iraqi detainees. That freed up some space for the seriously injured, he said, but so many were carried in that a lounge had to be turned into a triage room.

“When they told us we’d go into Fallujah, many of us thought we’d see gunshot wounds, but not people with limbs already amputated due to the blast,” Ramirez said.

He spent a lot of time reassuring troops that they were getting the best care possible. “There was one soldier, and I needed to put an IV in his arm,” Ramirez recalled. “He was really nervous, and I told him, ‘Look man, you just survived a blast.’ “

Sanders said the hospital staff worked around the clock during the height of the battle, particularly as troops pushed into Fallujah’s southern neighborhoods and confronted a hard core of better-trained insurgents.

There are days, Sanders said, that he and his crew will never forget.

“You’re seeing your brothers come in, but you can’t see them. You’re almost like a machine,” he said. “The history we’ve gone through here will forever make us family. If we see each other 10 years from now, not a word will have to be spoken.”

During a recent break, Ramirez imagined facing his mother and what he would say to her. He joined the Navy 8 1/2 years ago to become a medical corpsman after her breast cancer was diagnosed. A single parent, his mother raised him to be the best at what he did, no matter what path he chose, Ramirez said.

“I would honestly be afraid to go back home and tell my family I didn’t perform the best I could,” he said. “I couldn’t look my mother in the eye.”

In the distance, but close enough for the ground to shake, an explosion thundered, sending a dark mushroom cloud toward the clear, blue sky.

“We’ll know soon enough if it was incoming,” Ramirez said, stretching his legs. “I will shoot if I have to. I have shot at people, but that’s not what I’m here for. I’m here to save lives.”

A few minute passed, then a half-hour, and no ambulance raced to the door of the hospital.

“There’s just one thing I want you to know,” Ramirez said, before turning to walk away. “There is a corpsman in the memorial of Iwo Jima. He’s a pharmacist mate, second class, John Bradley. He was there in the fight. Most people don’t know that.”

Recount Can Wait, Federal Judge RulesFrom Times Wire Reports
November 24, 2004

A federal judge in Toledo denied a request by third-party presidential candidates who wanted to force a recount of Ohio ballots before the official count was finished.

Judge James G. Carr ruled that the candidates have a right under Ohio law to a recount, but said it could wait. The judge wrote that he saw no reason to interfere with the final stages of Ohio’s electoral process. Officials have said the results will be certified by Dec. 6.

The lawsuit by Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb and Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik had asked Carr to issue an order requiring the state to immediately begin a statewide recount.

Government Accountability Office to Conduct Investigation of 2004 Election Irregularities

WASHINGTON — November 23 — Reps. John Conyers, Jr., Jerrold Nadler, Robert Wexler, Robert Scott, and Rush Holt announced today that, in response to their November 5 and 8 letters to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the GAO has decided to move forward with an investigation of election irregularities in the 2004 election. The five Members issued the following statement:

“We are pleased that the GAO has reviewed the concerns expressed in our letters and has found them of sufficient merit to warrant further investigation. On its own authority, the GAO will examine the security and accuracy of voting technologies, distribution and allocation of voting machines, and counting of provisional ballots. We are hopeful that GAO’s non-partisan and expert analysis will get to the bottom of the flaws uncovered in the 2004 election. As part of this inquiry, we will provide copies of specific incident reports received in our offices, including more than 57,000 such complaints provided to the House Judiciary Committee.

“The core principle of any democracy is the consent of the governed. All Americans, no matter how they voted, need to have confidence that when they cast their ballot, their voice is heard.”

The Members listed above were joined in requesting the non-partisan GAO investigation by Reps. Melvin Watt, John Olver, Bob Filner, Gregory Meeks, Barbara Lee, Tammy Baldwin, Louise Slaughter and George Miller.

Ohio Dems joins recount effort

Keith Olbermann (Bloggermann), November 21, 2004 | 5:51 p.m. ET

SECAUCUS— The headline might be a little expansive since the national headquarters has not yet echoed it, but it’s still pretty impressive as it is:

“Kerry/Edwards Campaign Joins Ohio Recount.”

The news release was issued this afternoon over the signature of Ohio’s Democratic chairman, Dennis White: “As Senator Kerry stated in his concession speech in Boston, we do not necessarily expect the results of the election to change, however, we believe it necessary to make sure everyone’s vote is counted fairly and accurately.” White called for witnesses, volunteers, and donations.

The statement ends nearly three weeks of official Democratic ambivalence towards the formal recount process in the election’s decisive state. As late as Friday, Senator Kerry’s email to 3,000,000 supporters contained a seemingly ambiguous reference to that process, which began with the phrase “Regardless of the outcome of this election, once all the votes are counted, and believe me they will be counted, we will continue to challenge the administration.”

It had been left to the independent parties, the Greens and Libertarians, to do the initial work demanding a recount in each of Ohio’s 88 counties. Their combined effort led to a bond of $113,600 being posted with the state last Friday to guarantee the coverage of expenses incurred. Just today, the “Glibs” amplified their demands in Ohio, filing a federal lawsuit that, if successful, would require the completion of the “full, hand recount” before the meeting of the Electoral College on December 13.

The Ohio Democrats did not attach themselves to the lawsuit. “The recount can begin after the official results are certified, which likely will be in the first week of December,” reads the news release. “The Democratic party wants to be fully prepared to begin a recount immediately.”

Howard Fineman joins me on Countdown tonight at 8 and Midnight eastern to discuss the ramifications.

E-mail

• November 21, 2004 | 5:51 p.m. ET

Relax about Ohio, Relax about the guy tailing me (Keith Olbermann)

NEW YORK— Anybody else notice that when you politely refer to the Secretary of State of Ohio, you have to call him “Mr. Blackwell,” just like that guy who compiles the goofy worst-dressed list?

Mr. Kenneth Blackwell is the subject of three actions regarding the Ohio vote that you haven’t seen on television yet. Each (the Cobb/Badnarik Recount bid, the Alliance for Democracy legal challenge, and the Ohio Democratic Party suit over provisional ballots) has an undertone suggesting time is of the essence, and that he is wasting it. The accusation may or may not be true, but it also may or may not be relevant.

The Glibs’ recount effort was underscored last week by their letters to Blackwell insisting he hurry up and finish certifying the count well before the announced deadline of December 6, because otherwise, there won’t be enough time for the recount before the voting of the Electoral College on December 13. The Alliance attorney Clifford Arnebeck told The Columbus Dispatch that his quite separate legal challenge to the election must be addressed immediately because “time is critical.” The local Democrats haven’t been commenting on their low-flying suit – more about that later. They’re just smiling quietly to themselves.

Cobb, Badnarik, Arnebeck, and everybody else actually has more time than they think. I addressed this topic with the wonderfully knowledgeable George Washington University Constitutional Law professor, Jonathan Turley, back on Countdown on November 9th. He noted the election process is a little slower— and has one more major loophole— than is generally known. It begins on December 7th, the date “when you essentially certify your electors… it gives a presumption to the legitimacy to your votes. And then, on the 13th, the electors actually vote.”

But, Turley noted, “those votes are not opened by Congress until January 6. Now, if there are controversies, such as some disclosure that a state actually went for Kerry (instead of Bush), there is the ability of members of Congress to challenge.” In other words, even after the December 13th Electoral College Vote, in the extremely unlikely scenario that a court overturns the Ohio count, or that the recount discovers 4,000 Gahanna-style machines that each recorded 4,000 votes too many for one candidate, there is still a mechanism to correct the error, honest or otherwise.

“It requires a written objection from one House member and one senator,” Turley continues. Once that objection is raised, the joint meeting of the two houses is discontinued. “Then both Houses separate again and they vote by majority vote as to whether to accept the slate of electoral votes from that state.”

In these super-heated partisan times, it may seem like just another prospective process decided by majority rule instead of fact. But envision the far-fetched scenario of some dramatic, conclusive new result from Ohio turning up around, say, January 4th. What congressman or senator in his right mind would vote to seat the candidate who lost the popular vote in Ohio? We wouldn’t be talking about party loyalty any more – we’d be talking about pure political self-interest here, and whenever in our history that critical mass has been achieved, it’s been every politician for himself (ask Barry Goldwater when Richard Nixon trolled for his support in July and August, 1974, or Republican Senator Edmund Ross of Kansas when his was to be the decisive vote that would have impeached President Andrew Johnson in 1868).

The point of this dip into the world of political science fiction is that the Ohio timeframe is a little less condensed than it seems. The drop-dead date is not December 13, but January 6.

It is noteworthy that the announcement of a legal challenge made it into weekend editions of The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Columbus Dispatch, the Associated Press wires, and other publications. The Columbus paper even mentioned something curious. “Earlier this week, the Ohio Democratic party announced it would join a lawsuit arguing that the state lacks clear rules for evaluating provisional ballots, a move the party said will keep its options open if problems with the ballots surface.”

This makes a little more sense out of a confusing item that appeared in an obscure weekly paper in Westchester County, New York, last Wednesday, in which a reporter named Adam Stone wrote “A top-ranking official with Democratic Senator John Kerry’s presidential campaign told North County News last week that although unlikely, there is a recount effort being waged that could unseat Republican President George Bush.” Stone quotes Kerry spokesman David Wade as saying: “We have 17,000 lawyers working on this, and the grassroots accountability couldn’t be any higher – no (irregularity) will go unchecked. Period.” Gives a little context to Senator Kerry’s opaque mass e-mail and on-line video statement from Friday afternoon.

The Ohio newspaper coverage suggests that even the mainstream media is beginning to sit up and take notice that, whatever its merits, the investigation into the voting irregularities of November 2nd has moved from the Reynolds Wrap Hat stage into legal and governmental action.  Tripe does continue to appear, like Carol Pogash’s column in today’s San Francisco Chronicle. Its headline provided me with a laugh: “Liberals, the election is over, live with it.” I’ve gotten 37,000 emails in the last two weeks (now running at better than 25:1 in favor), and the two most repeated comments by those critical of the coverage have been references to the ratings of Fox News Channel, and the phrase “the election is over, (expletive deleted), live with it. I hesitate to generalize, but this does suggest a certain unwillingness of critics to engage in political discourses that don’t have no swear words in ‘em.

Meantime, The Oakland Tribune not only devoted seventeen paragraphs Friday to the UC Berkeley study on the voting curiosities in Florida, but actually expended considerable energy towards what we used to call ‘advancing the story’: “The UC Berkeley report has not been peer reviewed, but a reputable MIT political scientist succeeded in replicating the analysis Thursday at the request of the Oakland Tribune and The Associated Press. He said an investigation is warranted.”

In fact, he – MIT Arts and Social Sciences Dean Charles Stewart – said more than that. “There is an interesting pattern here that I hope someone looks into.” Stewart is part of the same Cal Tech/MIT Voting Project that had earlier issued a preliminary report suggesting that there was no evidence of significant voting irregularity in Florida. Dean Stewart added he didn’t necessarily buy the Berkeley conclusion – that the only variable that could explain the “excessive” votes in Florida was poisoned touch-screen voting – and still thought there were other options, such as, in the words of The Tribune’s Ian Hoffman “absentee voting or some quirk of election administration.”

Neither MIT nor Cal Tech has yet responded to the comments of several poll-savvy commentators, and others, that its paper was using erroneous statistics. Its premise, you’ll recall, was that on a state-by-state basis, the notorious 2004 Exit Polls were within the margin of error and could be mathematically interpreted as having forecast the announced presidential outcome. It has been observed that the MIT/Cal Tech study used not the “raw” exit polls – as did Professor Steven Freeman of Penn did in his study – but rather the “weighted” polls, in which actual precinct and county official counts are mixed in to “correct” the organic “Hey, Buddy, who’d you vote for” numbers. The “weighted” polls have been analogized to a football handicapper predicting that the New Orleans Saints would beat the Denver Broncos 24-14, then, after the Broncos scored twenty points in the first quarter, announcing his prediction was now that the Saints would beat the Broncos 42-41, or even, that the Broncos would beat the Saints 40-7.

None of the coverage of the Berkeley study clarified a vitally important point about its conclusions regarding the touch-screen wobble in the fifteen Florida counties, and that has led to some unjustified optimism on the activist and Democratic sides. Its math produced two distinct numbers for “ghost votes” for President Bush: 130,000 and 260,000. This has led to the assumption in many quarters that Cal Tech has suggested as many as 260,000 Florida votes could swing from Bush to Kerry (enough to overturn the state). In fact – and the academics got a little too academic in summarizing their report and thus, this kind of got lost – the two numbers already consider the prospect of a swing:

      a) There may have been 130,000 votes simply added to the Bush total. If proved and excised, they would reduce the President’s Florida margin from approximately 350,000 votes to approximately 220,000;

      b) There may have been 130,000 votes switched from Kerry to Bush. If proved and corrected, they would reduce (by double the 130,000 figure – namely 260,000) the President’s Florida margin from approximately 350,000 votes to approximately 90,000.

On the ground in Florida, uncounted ballots continue to turn up in Pinellas County. Last Monday, an unmarked banker’s box with 268 absentee ballots was discovered “sitting in plain sight on an office floor, with papers and other boxes stacked on top of it,” according to The St. Petersburg Times. On Friday, the same paper reported that County Supervisor of Elections Deborah Clark found twelve more—ten provisionals in a blue pouch at a loading dock, and two absentees in a box headed for a storage facility. “I’m sick about this,” the paper quoted Clark, whose office also whiffed on 1400 absentee ballots on Election Day 2000, and counted another 600 twice. Asked by a reporter if the election is over, she replied “I certainly hope so.”

Well, I know how Ms. Clark feels. To close, a little anecdote from Big Town: I approached Seventh Avenue from the east and the guy in the black trenchcoat was walking north.

He got that little surprised look of recognition in his eyes and said “Keith! How are you?” We shook hands and he added, with apparent nervousness, “I’ll just be tailing you for the next block.” I laughed and said I was used to it.

Now, I’ve been getting recognized in public since 1982, and I had a stalker for eight years who once talked her way into ESPN and wound up being escorted to my desk— so I think I can tell the difference between a fan and a threat (this was a fan; a threat doesn’t come up and announce he’s going to tail you). I relate this just because of the timing. In the last week, I have read that I’ve been fired, suspended, muzzled, threatened (that, I think, was my NBC colleague Kevin Sites, who reported the Marine prisoner shooting in Iraq— our mailbox had a couple of those), and in the middle of it, I get a ‘What’s the frequency Kenneth moment’ from a fan who was just trying to be funny.

The laugh was genuine. As was my decision to cross the street.

Write me at

(Olbermann returns from not very much of a vacation to host Countdown, Monday November 22, 8:00 P.M. ET. Presumably.)

• November 19, 2004 | 5:39 p.m. ET

Didn’t you run for president once? (Keith Olbermann)

SECURE UNDISCLOSED LOCATION— There has been a John Kerry sighting.

“Regardless of the outcome of this election, once all the votes are counted— and they will be counted— we will continue to challenge this administration,” the 2004 Democratic candidate said in a prepared statement released today. “I will fight for a national standard for federal elections that has both transparency and accountability in our voting system. It is unacceptable in the United States that people still don’t have full confidence in the integrity of the voting process.”

Since his concession, Kerry’s silence on the questions of voting irregularities in Florida, Ohio, and elsewhere, has perplexed those pursuing those questions, helped render largely passive the media who should’ve been doing so, and provided virtual proof to others that there weren’t any questions at all. His supporters have been mystified at news this week that millions of dollars from his war chest went unspent.  His lawyers have been characterized as flying below the radar as the Libertarian and Green Parties have pushed their recount in Ohio.

He has seemed to his supporters and many neutrals, in short, as being AWOL.

The statement doesn’t exactly dispel that aroma. It came by way of an e-mail to supporters— but not to the media— and a video on his otherwise update-free campaign website, which maintains the frozen-in-time November 2 front page that makes it look like the political equivalent of Miss Haversham’s cobweb-strewn house in Dickens’ “Great Expectations.”

The primary topic of the mass e-mail isn’t even this election or future ones. It’s about a petition drive for universal child health care legislation Kerry intends to introduce on the first day of the new Congress. Whether the voting stuff was added as a sop to supporters loudly wondering where he— and the unspent $15,000,000— has been, is conjecture.

But the video is just plain weird. The phrasing of the start of the relevant passage—“Regardless of the outcome of this election”— is open to the same kind of parsing and confusion usually reserved for the latest release from Osama Bin Laden. Those seven words are extra-temporal; they are tense-free. In them he could be describing an election long-since decided, or one whose outcome is still in doubt.

And the timing and delivery of the message are equally confusing. No notification to the media? When much of the mechanism of political coverage is kick-started by statements like this one? And its issuance on a Friday afternoon— the moment of minimum news attention so famously titled “Take Out The Trash Day” on the NBC series “The West Wing”?— is perplexing, if not suspicious.

It has the vague feel of deliberate ambiguity, as if Kerry is saying to those who are plagued by doubts about the vote just seventeen days ago, that he agrees with them, but they shouldn’t tell anybody. It’s exactly what these confusing times do not need: more confusion.

Thoughts? E-mail

• November 19, 2004 | 9:40 a.m. ET

All I know is what I don’t read in the papers (Keith Olbermann)

SECURE UNDISCLOSED LOCATION— I’m beginning to think like Jim Bunning now.

So far in this post-election trip through Alice’s looking glass we’ve had:

—a University of Pennsylvania professor defending the accuracy of exit polling in order damn the accuracy of vote counting;

—a joint CalTech/MIT study defending the accuracy of exit polling in order to confirm the accuracy of vote counting;

—a series of lesser academic works assailing the validity of the Penn and CalTech/MIT assessments;

—and now, a UC Berkeley Research Team report that concludes President Bush may have received up to 260,000 more votes in fifteen Florida counties than he should have, all courtesy the one-armed bandits better known as touch-screen voting systems.

And, save, for one “New York Times” reference to the CalTech/MIT study “disproving” the idea that the exit poll results were so wacky that they required thoroughly botched election nights in several states, the closest any of these research efforts have gotten to the mainstream media have been “Wired News” and “Countdown.”

I still hesitate to endorse the ‘media lock-down’ theory extolled so widely on the net. I’ve expended a lot of space on the facts of political media passivity and exhaustion, and now I’ll add one factor to explain the collective shrugged shoulder: reading this stuff is hard. It’s hard work.

There are, as we know, lies, damn lies, and statistics. But there is one level of hell lower still— scholarly statistical studies. I have made four passes at “The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections,” and the thing has still got me pinned to the floor.

Most of the paper is so academically dense that it seems to have been written not just in another language, but in some form of code. There is one table captioned “OLS Regression with Robust Standard Errors.” Another is titled “OLS regressions with frequency weights for county size.” Only the summary produced by Professor Michael Hout and the Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Time is intelligible.

Of course, I’m reminded suddenly of the old cartoon, with the guy saying “I don’t understand women,” and the second guy saying, “So? Do you understand electricity?”

In his news conference yesterday at Berkeley (who attended? Who phoned in to the conference call? Why didn’t they try?) Professor Hout analogized the report to a “beeping smoke alarm.” It doesn’t say how bad the fire it is, it doesn’t accuse anybody of arson, it just says somebody ought to have an extinguisher handy.

Without attempting to crack the methodology, it’s clear the researchers claim they’ve compensated for all the bugaboos that hampered the usefulness of previous studies of the county voting results in Florida. They’ve weighted the thing to allow for an individual county’s voting record in both the 2000 and 1996 elections (throwing out the ‘Dixiecrat’ effect), to wash out issues like the varying Hispanic populations, median income, voter turnout change, and the different numbers of people voting in each county.

And they say that when you calculate all that, you are forced to conclude that compared to the Florida counties that used paper ballots, the ones that used electronic voting machines were much more likely to show “excessive votes” for Mr. Bush, and that the statistical odds of this happening organically are less than one in 1,000.

They also say that these “excessives” occurred most prominently in counties where Senator Kerry beat the President most handily. In the Democratic bastion of Broward, where Kerry won by roughly 105,000, they suggest the touch-screens “gave” the President 72,000 more votes than statistical consistency should have allowed. In Miami-Dade (Kerry by 55,000) they saw 19,300 more votes for Bush than expected. In Palm Beach (Kerry by 115,000) they claim Bush got 50,000 more votes than possible.

Hout and his research team consistently insisted they were not alleging that voting was rigged, nor even that what they’ve found actually affected the direction of Florida’s 27 Electoral Votes. They point out that in a worst-case scenario, they see 260,000 “excessives” – and Bush took the state by 350,000 votes. But they insist that based on Florida’s voting patterns in 1996 and 2000, the margin cannot be explained by successful get-out-the-vote campaigns, or income variables, or anything but something rotten in the touch screens.

It’s deep-woods mathematics, and it cries out for people who speak the language and can refute or confirm its value. Kim Zetter, who did an excellent work-up for “Wired News,” got the responses you’d expect from both sides. She quotes Susan Van Houten of Palm Beach’s Coalition for Election Reform as saying “I’ve believed the same thing for a while, that the numbers are screwy, and it looks like they proved it.” She quotes Jill Friedman-Wilson of the touch-screen manufacturer Election Systems & Software (their machines were in use in Broward and Miami-Dade) as responding “If you consider real-world experience, we know that ES&S’ touch-screen voting system has been proven in thousands of elections throughout the country.”

What’s possibly of more interest to us poor laymen is what isn’t in the Berkeley report.

As I mentioned previously, they don’t claim to know how this happened. But more importantly, they say that they ran a similar examination on the voting patterns in Ohio, comparing its paper ballot and electronic results, and found absolutely nothing to suggest either candidate got any “bump” that couldn’t otherwise be explained by past voting patterns, income, turnout, or any other commonplace factor.

In other words: No e-voting machines spontaneously combusting in Ohio.

“For the sake of all future elections involving electronic voting,” Professor Hout concluded, “someone must investigate and explain the statistical anomalies in Florida. We’re calling on voting officials in Florida to take action.”

Anybody want to belly up to this bar?

Thougths?  E-mail me at

Editorial: Santorum, R-Va. / Is the senator an ‘inhabitant’ of Pennsylvania?

The Penn Hills School District asked Sen. Rick Santorum a $38,000 question. That is whether his children are residents of the municipality to the point that their educations should be paid for by Penn Hills taxpayers.

On Wednesday he gave his answer and it was no.

The senator shouldn’t have felt put upon. It’s the same question that other districts routinely ask of families who impose themselves on a public school system where they do not live — sometimes because of athletics, sometimes because of better education.

Five Santorum children have been home-schooled at their house in Leesburg, Va., through the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School, an education paid for by the Penn Hills district to the tune of $38,000 a year, until it became apparent recently that they don’t live in Penn Hills.

The senator’s office issued a statement two days ago saying he and his wife, Karen, are withdrawing their children from the cyber school. But that doesn’t mean they’ll be attending any of the brick-and-mortar schools of the Penn Hills district either. The commute from the Santorum home in Leesburg, Va., would be onerous.

All of which begs a much bigger question: Is Rick Santorum R-Pa. or R-Va.? No one should represent Pennsylvania in the U.S. Senate because he once lived here or because he visits all 67 counties every year. A traveling salesman can do that.

Article I of the U.S. Constitution says, “No person shall be a Senator … who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen.” Rick Santorum last won election in November 2000, when he owned the house at 111 Stephens Lane in Penn Hills plus a house in Virginia. Where he was an “inhabitant” at the time only he can say.

He faces re-election in 2006, but if that election were held today, the two-term Republican would be hard-pressed to convince voters that he inhabits a house on Stephens Lane. Sure, he and his wife pay taxes on the house. They also use the address for voter registration, but so do two other people. When a Post-Gazette reporter visited the house last Friday, a young man came to the door and declined to comment. He wasn’t Rick Santorum.

It gets worse. The two-bedroom house that the Santorum children called home for education purposes and that gives Mr. and Mrs. Santorum the right to vote in Pennsylvania lacks an occupancy permit. And the property tax break from the homestead exemption claimed by the Santorums on the Penn Hills house is allowed under law only if the dwelling is their “permanent home.”

It’s a strange case of political turnabout. In his initial House race against Rep. Doug Walgren in 1990, challenger Santorum attacked the incumbent from Mt. Lebanon for buying a house and raising his children in McLean, Va. Now Rick Santorum of Leesburg, Va., is saying that he is and he isn’t a resident of Pennsylvania.

Well, which is it?

Although this editorial board has differed with the senator on most of his votes in Washington, we would be the first to point out that he has been an advocate for the interests of Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania.

But this has nothing to do with one’s record. Pennsylvanians fundamentally deserve a senator who lives in Pennsylvania — unless the United States wants to outsource even its Senate seats.

By rights, the Santorums should pay back to Penn Hills the cost of the education provided by local taxpayers for their out-of-state children. What’s more, the senator has to prove to the people of Pennsylvania that he is one of them, not just a visitor from the state of Virginia.

Groups Disappointed by Veteran Health Aid

WASHINGTON  (AP) – Veterans’ health care got a lot of attention in the just-concluded election campaign, but the Republican-led Congress is not devoting as much money to it as veterans groups and even some GOP lawmakers wanted.

The expenditure for veterans’ health care will grow in 2005 to a record $30.3 billion, $1.9 billion more than this year, under the $388 billion spending bill Congress passed Saturday. Yet the total is $1.2 billion less than what the House Veterans Affairs Committee said last February was needed to maintain current benefits and services.

“The demand on the system has never been higher. The cost of health care has never been higher. This is not going to be adequate,” said Richard Fuller, national legislative director of the Paralyzed Veterans of America.

David Autry, spokesman for Disabled American Veterans, said, “With the country at war, politicians make a big show about how much the country owes veterans. … The commitment doesn’t match reality.”

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, led a sustained attack on the Bush administration’s treatment of veterans, saying the health care system for them is underfunded.

President Bush responded that his budget for veterans’ health care for the 2005 government spending year was 40 percent higher than when he took office. Congress added $1.2 billion to his $29.7 billion proposal.

In the end, though, health care for veterans did not rise to the level of terrorism, the economy, moral values and Iraq. Those issues topped veterans’ list of concerns, according to exit polls conducted for The Associated Press and the networks.

Veterans favored Bush over Kerry by 57 percent to 41 percent. Recent major election-day surveys before 2004 did not gather information from voters based on service status. The conventional wisdom among Democratic pollsters was that veterans favored Republicans.

Veterans groups said they are even more worried about the 2006 budget proposal, when Bush won’t have an election looming before him.

“There could be even more bad news for veterans. We’ve heard agencies were told to prepare for cuts. The country is deeper in debt and the war is continuing,” Autry said.

ON THE NET

Veterans Affairs Department: http://www.va.gov

Disabled American Veterans: http://www.dav.org

Paralyzed Veterans of America: http://www.pva.org