Early voting in Florida began today. Within one hour, problems began. Armies of lawyers are on hand and and already heading to court.

I hope no one has forgotten what happened in 2000 and how the Republicans and the Supreme Court stole the election from Al Gore.

TalkLeft was not a blog in those days, but it did provide daily coverage of election news. I have combined the coverage into one page, 2000 Recap, and think that it will be a valuable resource for bloggers and journalists looking for comparisons between 2000 and 2004.

The page is divided into sections: Election Day to Concession Day news, Post Concession Day News (only one article of interest there), Opeds (all from the Democrats point of view), Humor (just two funny pieces, still relevant today) and Court Documents.

Amazingly, almost all of the links still work. I'm not sure how long the page will stay up as some may disagree with my "fair use" statement, so use it and save what you want while it's still available.

Bottom Line: Re-acquaint yourselves with what happened in Florida in 2000, broadcast it and make it more difficult for it to happen again.

The time has come to limit the "chatter" on TalkLeft--constant comments by those who disagree with TalkLeft's positions, designed to overtake the discussion. I am receiving emails from TalkLeft's loyal readers who say that they feel the discussion is no longer valuable because of the constant commenting by three or four of these individuals.

So, here is the new policy. The "chatterers"--and they know who they are --will be limited to four comments of reasonable length during a 24 hour period. All comments over this amount will be deleted without explanation. After the third violation, the chatterer will be banned.

This group includes the relatively new poster "ras" who I notified of this policy last Friday and has ignored it. It does not include Jim (poker player) or Cliff--who although they take the other side, in my opinion stimulate debate. They also are the first to respond every time I put out a call for contributions.

I am not worried about chatterers using different names to get around the rule because I can track them by ISP address and their past comments. Of course, I do not publish this information.

Please feel free to email me with the names of commenters you believe I should be limiting under this new policy. Or , you can leave their names in the comments.

I'm not happy about this new policy as it will take up a lot of valuable time. But I agree with those of you who believe that these commenters are spoiling the disussion for the rest of you. They are trying to dominate the conversation on TalkLeft and it will be not happen.

Also, if you find someone who has broken the new rule and not been held accountable, send me an email and I will delete their excessive comments and add it to their strikes.

Chisum Lee in The Village Voice lays out the importance of the the felon vote.

Companion articles in today's Recorder examines the likely differences in the replacement of the Supreme Court Justices in a Bush Aministration and a Kerry Administration. It describes each potential choice and the reasons for their selection.

The short list for Bush:

4th Circuit Judges Judges J. Harvie Wilkinson III, and J. Michael Luttig, ; Former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson; former Solicitor General Theodore Olson; White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales

The short list for Kerry:

D.C. Circuit Judge David Tatel, former Solicitor General Drew Days, Second Circuit Judge Sonia Sotomayor, California Chief Justice Ronald George and former Stanford Law School Dean Kathleen Sullivan.

Adam Cohen in today's New York Times opines on just how awful a Bush re-election will be to the future of our Supreme Court.

Knights Ridder newspapers has finished a report on Bush's post-war planning and finds it was non-existent:

A Knight Ridder review of the administration's Iraq policy and decisions has found that it invaded Iraq without a comprehensive plan in place to secure and rebuild the country. The administration also failed to provide some 100,000 additional U.S. troops that American military commanders originally wanted to help restore order and reconstruct a country shattered by war, a brutal dictatorship and economic sanctions.

In fact, some senior Pentagon officials had thought they could bring most American soldiers home from Iraq by September 2003. Instead, more than a year later, 138,000 U.S. troops are still fighting terrorists who slip easily across Iraq's long borders, diehards from the old regime and Iraqis angered by their country's widespread crime and unemployment and America's sometimes heavy boots.

"We didn't go in with a plan. We went in with a theory," said a veteran State Department officer who was directly involved in Iraq policy.

Here's what the report is based on:

With so much attention focused on the Presidential race, I all but forgot about some local races that matter a great deal--those for the office of District Attorney.

Colorado voters made a terrible mistake a few years ago when they voted to impose term limits on public officials and neglected to exclude prosecutors. As a result, the Denver metropolitan area, particularly Denver, Jefferson, Adams and Arapahoe Counties, will lose four honest, trustworthy, dedicated and extremely capable top prosecutors who, throughout their careers were concerned about doing justice as well as getting convictions: Bill Ritter, Bob Grant, Dave Thomas and Jim Peters.

The job of the prosecutor is to do justice, not to accumulate convictions, like notches on a gun. Prosecutors should be objective and evenhanded. Their duty is to both protect the public and fairly administer the law.

The Denver Post today had an election guide with short bios for the candidates in the state-wide DA's Races. Most made me want to cringe.

The real losers in the term limits vote are the citizens of Colorado. So many of the contested races for DA are filled with people who sound either clueless as to what the job requires, or so victims' rights and police-oriented that they might not recognize the concepts of justice and balance if they bit them from behind.

TalkLeft has only one endorsement in the ten or so contested races: Scott Storey, who is running against Mary Malatesta for Dave Thomas's spot in the 1st Judicial District (primarily Jefferson county. Here's why we oppose Mary and support Scott:

Mary Malatesta has spent her career rising to the top of the states' death penalty prosecution team. She describes her occupation as "death penalty prosecutor." In her own words, here is why she is running for District Attorney...in a county that might see one or two death penalty cases a year out of the thousands of criminal cases filed and in a state that has executed one person in the last 30 years and has only three people on death row.

Patriot Watch has made a list of The Freedom Five:

Please check out our new page devoted to raising money for those candidates that have supported our individual freedoms and rights since 9-11 or oppose those candidates that have not done the right thing by supporting legislation and other measures that erode our civil liberties and the Constitution.

Here's an interesting of account of some lesser known officials who may be responsible for the Abu Ghraib prison abuse, as well as abuse in some of America's notorious prisons, but for some reason, seem to have slipped under the radar. Author Leah Caldwell posits:

Their involvement implicates the American government and its domestic policy of mass imprisonment and brutalization in the torture of Iraqi prisoners.

First up as culprit is the International Criminal Investigative Training Program (ICITAP), an envoy appointed by Attorney General John Ashcroft.

ICITAP is based in the Department of Justice, but receives funding for individual projects through the Department of State. ICITAP has embarked on many missions since its inception in 1986, from the former Soviet Union to Haiti to Indonesia.

The missions change locations, but their teams have managed to accrue a consistent record of questionable activities while operating under the guise of rebuilding criminal justice systems.

Typically, ICITAP serves to prop up the police and prison systems of American client states. It is a successor to the police training program run by the Agency for International Development. That program was halted in the mid-70's after the Watergate scandal when it became public knowledge that U.S. AID officials were training police and prison officials around the world in techniques of murder and torture, mostly for use against leftist insurgencies. The activities of ICITAP are not new, only the name is.

Among those she names, in addition to the usual suspects: Terry Stewart. Gary DeLand. John J. Armstrong. Lance McCotter. TalkLeft has written fairly extensively on McCotter, here and here and here.

by TChris

A unanimous panel of judges on the Eleventh Circuit struck down a city policy that required protestors to pass through a metal detector. The policy instructed the police to search protestors who made the machine beep. The City of Columbus, Georgia approved the policy in 2002, before an annual protest against the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation at Fort Benning.

The decision includes a stirring rejection of the claim that individual liberty must give way to security needs after 9/11.

"We cannot simply suspend or restrict civil liberties until the war on terror is over, because the war on terror is unlikely ever to be truly over," the 11th Circuit said in a ruling issued late Friday. "Sept. 11, 2001, already a day of immeasurable tragedy, cannot be the day liberty perished in this country."

The privacy interests protected by the Fourth Amendment outweigh the City's desire to engage in mass searches for weapons in the absence of a legitimate reason to suspect that each protestor is armed. The court bravely and correctly refused to trade liberty for safety.

It is quite possible that the demonstrations would be safer if the city were permitted "to engage in mass, warrantless, suspicionless searches," Tjoflat said. "Indeed, it is quite possible that our nation would be safer if police were permitted to stop and search anyone they wanted, at any time, for no reason at all." But the Constitution, [Judge Gerald] Tjoflat wrote, allows for "searches based on evidence — rather than potentially effective, broad, prophylactic dragnets — as the constitutional norm."

Lawyer swat teams will be on site at Colorado polling places and elsewhere November 2 to help those turned away from the polls. If you live in a swing state, check out Colorado's massive effort and compare it with what's going on in your state. Make sure your state is up to snuff:

Democrats are deploying "armies of lawyers," while Republicans have recruited volunteer lawyers in the "hundreds" to man polling places throughout Colorado. The battalions of barristers are poised to cry foul if poll workers break the state's ever-developing election policies, as the parties interpret them....The party lawyers are expected to stand at polling places and gather contact information for voters who, for whatever reason, have problems casting ballots.

....Meantime, a nonpartisan election watchdog group is organizing a team of lawyers at a call center and in as many as 16 counties on Election Day. Fair Vote Colorado will have prewritten pleadings to be filed in court immediately so Coloradans turned away on Election Day can seek remedies before the polls close, said group spokesman Mark Eddy.

Why all the fuss? Colorado is a key swing state. And it has Amendment 36 on the ballot which, if it passes, will divide Colorado's 9 electoral votes according to the popular vote. No more winner takes all. Had this been the rule in 2000, Al Gore would have been President.

The AP has obtained e-mails to Jeb Bush advising him of the problems with Florida's felon voting list and urging him to kill the plan before it went live.

In a May 4 e-mail obtained by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Florida Department of Law Enforcement computer expert Jeff Long told his boss that a Department of State computer expert had told him "that yesterday they recommended to the Gov that they 'pull the plug'" on the voter database.

The e-mail said state election officials "weren't comfortable with the felon matching program they've got," but added, "The Gov rejected their suggestion to pull the plug, so they're 'going live' with it this weekend."

There were 48,000 names on the list. At least 2,500 were ex-felons who had had their voting rights restored.

Most were Democrats, and many were black. Hispanics, who often vote Republican in Florida, were almost entirely absent from the list due to a technical error.

The list was killed in July, but that won't end all the problems. So spread the word,

Election officials have said that anyone who feels they have been inadvertently removed from the voter rolls on Nov. 2 will be allowed to use a provisional ballot that will be examined later to determine eligibility.

The New York Times endorses John Kerry for President. This is no tepid endorsement. It praises Kerry and exhaustively lists the reasons Bush has been an utter failure as our President. In fact, it's brutal. Let's just hope it proves lethal to his candidacy:

There is no denying that this race is mainly about Mr. Bush's disastrous tenure. Nearly four years ago, after the Supreme Court awarded him the presidency, Mr. Bush came into office amid popular expectation that he would acknowledge his lack of a mandate by sticking close to the center. Instead, he turned the government over to the radical right.

Mr. Bush installed John Ashcroft, a favorite of the far right with a history of insensitivity to civil liberties, as attorney general. He sent the Senate one ideological, activist judicial nominee after another. He moved quickly to implement a far-reaching anti-choice agenda including censorship of government Web sites and a clampdown on embryonic stem cell research. He threw the government's weight against efforts by the University of Michigan to give minority students an edge in admission, as it did for students from rural areas or the offspring of alumni.