Regardless of how much control the Bush family has over the glossy magazines, (Barbara Pierce Bush's father owns the interlocking directorate glossies of the Eat Coast) it's true that the NYT is usually not as easily controllable, though the Washington Post was somewhat reined in in the years after Watergate by vindictive pro-Republican corporate advertisers and is now much more soft-spoken about GOP misdeeds.

However, even though the Bushs don't own the _Times_, they have succeeded in getting their spin machine in place there and in the OH papers, as well as the NH papers, as these recount proceedings begin. Meanwhile, NV papers and TV are a little more free-wheeling, while the FL papers, facing possible audits of some county computers, are cringing, fearing they're again going to have to defy their corporate advertisers and, to an extent, their OWNERS.

One other thing to keep in mind with all this about hacking: there's the potential for a non-political story. Someone seems to have hacked into the SC computers. Who? Was this political? Or was it something else? Discounting people who are trying to see how much hacking went on, is looking after Bush to an excessive extent--at the expense of national security. What if al-Qaeda, which has engineers among its membership, has hacked into our computers--just enough to let us know they can do it?

As for MI-5 or MI-6, the Bush family has longstanding ties to it. What happens if we find that Bush is using MI-6 as some sources, such as Loftus and Aarons, suggest he may have done in May of 1984, to surveil large groups of US Jews at the "Jew room" at the NSA.

In other words, the hackers may never be traced to anywhere in the US because they were British. During the post-election TV coverage of the 1984 election, an interview in NYC was conducted with Mondale-Ferraro workers. They stated that on one occasion during a time when they thought they were under surveillance, someone was able to pick up on a microphone line and was able to reverse-tap into it. The result was that "We heard British voices at the other end." Nothing further was said about this on TV at the time, but in light of Loftus and Aarons' findings in _Secret War Against the Jews_ (NY: St. Martin's 1994), I wonder if this might have been the same group that Bush was, according to them, using to surveil US Jews.

Finally, if the technology to surveil was there, the use of phone lines was also there. One possible usage of phone numbers, is to hack into computers, including election computers. Has W expanded his father's ties with MI-6 to include "swapped" election rigging via hacking?

That's one possible scenario. Another, is that we've been hacked by some other offshore group, such as al-Qaeda out of, say, Saudi Arabia.

The new findings in NH, from the 2 1/2 precincts that have been checked so far, is that Kerry has "only" picked up 15 votes and a local GOP candidate seems to have picked up about 100 votes. But expand that "small" Kerry percentage increase to the whole state, and then apply that percentage to a large state like Florida. Now, flash back to Florida in 2000, when Jeb Bush was already Gov. Voila: Gore wins!

Newspaper articles in NH are already decrying this "small" thing. But it's important when it's close. And whatever this election was, it was close in the Electoral College. In three states, NV, NM and IA, with 17 Electoral votes, Bush is leading by less than one percent. That's enough that, if turned around by "small" things like that in NH, the election would be tied up in the Electoral College, at 269 votes apiece for Bush and Kerry. Meanwhile, FL and Oh are going to be recounted and probably audited as well. Here in AR, I think there are grounds to challenge Bush's margin of victory, as well as in Virginia and Louisiana, all states where exit polls and pre-election polls consistently showed Bush winning at best at a Plurality.

And we're not even sure that isn't going to happen yet, even this late, and won't know until after Thanksgiving.

Nor do we know anything for sure about Bush's overall national lead at this point except that it is probably going to DROP. Two hotly-contested Senate seats are still too close to call and being challenged by a number of persons in AK and FL. If the Democrats keep those two seats, they'll be where they were in the Sen. going into this, which means Bush didn't have "coattails" in the Senate, except that he got rid of Daschle in a SD campaign that is being challenged and investigated for the disenfranchisement and intimidation of Native Americans there. How is that a "mandate" for ANYTHING connected with Bush? In other words, if, in the midst of a war, he's this weak in the Electoral College--his claim to fame-- how can we think of him as someone with a mandate?

Final note: apologies for mis-spellings in these e-mails. My server sometimes "slows down" and I type "blind" for periods of time and don't take time to correct all of them. Sorry, for example, about mis-spelling "adage" last time.

Best, Max Standridge