Click Here to read the last UP!!
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Those who
count
the votes decide everything."
Josef Stalin
UP!RISING!
WHEN THE
KISSING
HAD TO STOP
Smoking Gun
You may have seen the associated
press story about the precinct in Cuyahoga county that had less than
1,000 voters, and gave Bush almost
4,000 extra
votes.
But that turns out to be only
the tip of a
very ugly iceberg. The evidence
discovered by some remarkably careful sleuthing would convince any
reasonable court to invalidate the entire Ohio election.
In last Tuesday's election, 29 precincts in Cuyahoga County, Ohio,
reported votes cast
IN EXCESS of the
number of registered voters - at
least 93,136
extra votes total. And the
numbers are right there on the official Cuyahoga County Board of
Elections website:
Bay Village - 13,710 registered voters /
18,663 ballots cast
Beachwood - 9,943 registered voters / 13,939 ballots cast
Bedford - 9,942 registered voters / 14,465 ballots cast
Bedford Heights - 8,142 registered voters / 13,512 ballots cast
Brooklyn - 8,016 registered voters / 12,303 ballots cast
Brooklyn Heights - 1,144 registered voters / 1,869 ballots cast
Chagrin Falls Village - 3,557 registered voters / 4,860 ballots cast
Cuyahoga Heights - 570 registered voters / 1,382 ballots cast
Fairview Park - 13,342 registered voters / 18,472 ballots cast
Highland Hills Village - 760 registered voters / 8,822 ballots cast
Independence - 5,735 registered voters / 6,226 ballots cast
Mayfield Village - 2,764 registered voters / 3,145 ballots cast
Middleburg Heights - 12,173 registered voters / 14,854 ballots cast
Moreland Hills Village - 2,990 registered voters / 4,616 ballots cast
North Olmstead - 25,794 registered voters / 25,887 ballots cast
Olmstead Falls - 6,538 registered voters / 7,328 ballots cast
Pepper Pike - 5,131 registered voters / 6,479 ballots cast
Rocky River - 16,600 registered voters / 20,070 ballots cast
Solon (WD6) - 2,292 registered voters / 4,300 ballots cast
South Euclid - 16,902 registered voters / 16,917 ballots cast
Strongsville (WD3) - 7,806 registered voters / 12,108 ballots cast
University Heights - 10,072 registered voters / 11,982 ballots cast
Valley View Village - 1,787 registered voters / 3,409 ballots cast
Warrensville Heights - 10,562 registered voters / 15,039 ballots cast
Woodmere Village - 558 registered voters / 8,854 ballots cast
Bedford (CSD) - 22,777 registered voters / 27,856 ballots cast
Independence (LSD) - 5,735 registered voters / 6,226 ballots cast
Orange (CSD) - 11,640 registered voters / 22,931 ballots cast
Warrensville (CSD) - 12,218 registered voters / 15,822 ballots cast
The Republicans are so BUSTED.
http://boe.cuyahogacounty.us/BOE/results/currentresults1.htm#top
is the official
website of the Cuyahoga county election board,
providing irrefutable evidence that the vote was off by at least
93,000.
Kerry lost Ohio by approximately
130,000,
so this is not an insignificant
figure that can be ignored, particularly when there are numerous other
indications of voter fraud in Ohio and elsewhere. I think the only
possible alternative is to invalidate the entire Ohio election, if not
the entire national election.
I'd say the
game's up.America, it looks pretty much like you've been had.
Sincerely,
Teed Rockwell, Philosophy Dept., Sonoma State University
up!
ANGRY RESIDENTS STORM STATE HOUSE!
MASSIVE VOTER SUPPRESSION
& CORRUPTION
DEMOCRACY FAILURE
Hundreds of angry Ohio residents
marched through the streets of Columbus, Ohio's Capital, this
evening and stormed the Ohio State House, defying orders and arrest
threats from Ohio State Troopers.
"O-H-I-O, Suppressed
Democracy Has Got To
Go!" they
chanted. After troopers pushed and scuffled with people, nearly a
hundred people took over the steps and entrance to the State's giant
white column capital building and refused repeated orders to disperse or
face arrest.
People prepared for arrests, ready to face jail, writing lawyers phone
numbers on their arms, signing jail support lists and discussing
NON-COOPERATION
and ACTIVE
RESISTANCE (linking arms,
but not fighting back).
A freshly painted banner held on the steps read,
"ONE VOTE DENIED =
DEMOCRACY IN TROUBLE!
100'S OF 1000'S OF VOTES SURPRISED = DEMOCRACY
FAILED”.
An unprecedented massive grassroots voter registration and get out the
vote effort and widespread opposition to Bush went up against the massive
coordinated Republican effort to suppress, intimidate and possibly steal
millions of votes.
In addition to the voter suppression and intimidation is the fact that
Bush campaign co-chair Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell is in charge
of the election and vote counting.
But much deeper questions about
fundamental flaws in the
system hang in the
air.
up!
(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)
UP!
211//
nov 11 2004
la- la- la- lap-toppling da
system!
(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)
(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)
u cant
innerstand yourself without understanding the world
(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)
AT
ANTI-WAR PROTEST IN LA
Enraged, some of the people attempted to block the tanks, but police
quickly cleared the street. The people continued to protest the
presence of the tanks, but after about 10 minutes the tanks drove
off. It is unclear as to why the tanks were deployed to this
location. Uploaded here is video from the event.
up!
New York Times - An article titled "Computer
Voting Is Open to Easy Fraud," presents the troubling results of
a detailed study by Johns Hopkins University. "We found some
stunning, stunning flaws… The systems.... could be tricked by anyone with
$100 worth of computer equipment… Ballots could be altered by anyone with
access to a machine, so that a voter might think he is casting a ballot
for one candidate while the vote is recorded for an opponent."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/24/technology/24VOTE.html
UP!
p.6
p.8
We've Been
Had! by Edgar J.
Steele
p.11
p.13
p.17
p.18
p.21
p.23
p.24
Falluja's
Defiance Of A New
Empire
It’s Bush and Blair who fear free
elections.
UP!
__,,,,_{ô¿ô}_,,,,__
GUN OWNERSHIP IS
ALWAYS DEFENDED BY ‘PATRIOTS’ AS PROTECTING AMERICAN CITIZENS' RIGHT TO
REMOVE ANY GOVERNMENT WHICH ABUSES ITS POWER UNDULY AND FOR TOO
LONG.
WITH THE INCREASING POSSIBILITY THAT THE BUSH ELECTION WAS RIGGED, and
although am not advocating it, COULD SUCH A TIME NOW BE APPROACHING WHEN
AMERICANS MUST
RISE
UP! TO CLEANSE THEIR GOVERNMENT & SYSTEM OF
ANTI-DEMOCRATIC FASCIST ELEMENTS ONCE
& FOR ALL BEFORE REVOKING ALL SUCH GUN RIGHTS
FOREVER?
up!
God
On Our Side
My name it ain’t
nothin
The country I come
from
I's taught and brought up there
And that the land that I live
in
Oh the history books tell
it
The cavalries
cha-arged
The cavalries
cha-arged
For the country was
yo-ung
Oh the
Spanish-American
And the Civil War
too
And the names of the
heroes
With guns in their
ha-ands
Oh the First Wo-orld War,
boys
And the reason for
fighting
But I learned to accept
it
For you don't count the
de-ead
When the Second World
Wa-ar
We forgave the
Germans
Though they murdered six million,
The Germans now
too
I've learned to hate the
Russians
If another war starts,
then
To hate them and fear
them
And accept it all
bravely
But now we got
weapons
If fire them we're forced
to
One push of the
button
But you never ask
questions
In a many a dark
hour
That Je-esus
Christ
But I can't think for
you
Whether Judas
Iscariot
So now as I'm
leavin'
The confusion I'm
feelin'
The words fill my
head
That if God's on our
side
Bob Dylan
up!
Fraser,
I think the American election result might just spur those like me who
are sometimes guilty of sitting and waiting to be the change rather than
waiting for the revolution to happen.
Regards
Chris Hart, Liverpool
up!
ELECTRONIC VOTING
Welcome Back To
Hell
Using a variety of
criminal
methods that they have perfected over the
past 4 years, the George W. Bush-Dick
Cheney-Karl Rove syndicate stole another
election, and extended their illegal occupation of the White House.
Experienced, informed and unblinking
observers were not fooled by any aspect of this utterly predictable
goose-step towards full dictatorship.
But to those who were
“shocked”
as they watched the election night numbers mysteriously slip away amidst
controversy; those who are struggling to understand
“what
happened” let this cold realisation
serve as bracing edification.
Welcome to hell. Welcome to the horrifying reality that
whistleblowers have suffered and fought through every day, over
lifetimes. No more illusions.
This is reality.
It’s A Rigged Game
The US political and economic system,
exemplified by Bush-Cheney, is deeply criminalised. It is designed
to profit by killing things. It thrives on war and
oppression. It is sustained by collusion, fraud, lies, and
cover-up, and the indoctrination and manipulation of minds. It does
not, and never has, represented its people. Its operatives heed no
laws. They “make” law. These facts must be burned into the
consciousness of every decent human being.
As Mike Ruppert writes in [his book]
"Crossing The
Rubicon"
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/
“That profits of crime and
war, which are destructive of human life, of labor, of happy, healthy
neighborhoods (whether in the US or in Afghanistan, Africa and Iraq) are
in effect a keystone of the global economy and a determinant of the
success in a ruthless competition, is a compass needle for human
civilisation. One cannot expect to follow the recipe for roadkill
stew and produce a crème
brulee.”
Criminals do not obey laws. Criminals do not believe in
“democracy.”
Criminals do not “permit” elections.
It is foolish, then, to expend one’s energies in
“clean”
election activities, and expect good results. To quote one of
George W. Bush many recent Freudian non-slips,
“we make
elections.” The 2004 presidential
election was just one more “manufacture.”
How John Kerry Un-Won The
Presidency
How Bush-Cheney stole the
2000 election
was a matter of obvious historical fact, confirmed by post-facto
mainstream media reports of a Gore win, and detailed by numerous
investigators such as Greg Palast in his book
"The Best Democracy Money Can
Buy." Voters complained about
old machines and paper ballots.
Then came the “black box
voting” machines. (for detailed
analysis of black box voting, read the work of Bev Harris:
[www.blackboxvoting.org]
In the 2002 mid-term elections, the Republicans
“shocked”
Democrats by solidifying their power in Congress, using the same
fraudulent methods, along with new and improved black box
technology.
“The technology had a trial run in the
2002 mid-term elections. In Georgia, serviced by new Diebold
systems, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in
what the media called
‘amazing’
upsets, with results showing vote swings of up to 16% from the last
pre-ballot polls. In computerised Minnesota, former Vice President
Walter Mondale -- a replacement for popular incumbent Paul Wellstone, who
died in a
[suspicious]
plane crash days before the vote -- was also defeated in a large
last-second vote swing. Convenient
‘glitches’ in
Florida saw an untold number of votes intended for the Democratic
candidate registering instead for Governor Jeb "L'il Brother"
Bush. A Florida Democrat who lost a similarly
‘glitched’
local election went to court to have the computers examined -- but the
case was thrown out by a judge who ruled that the innards of America's
voting machines are the ‘trade
secrets’ of the private companies who make
them.”
In 2003, black box voting also helped oust Governor Gray Davis and
installed Republican Arnold
Schwarzenegger in the Democratic stronghold
of California.
The probability of a fix was obvious throughout the 2004 presidential
campaign. Corporate media polls continued to predominantly favour
Bush, never dipping his rating below 48%, despite his trouncing in three
straight debates with Kerry, and despite mushrooming war scandals.
This was in stark contrast to independent surveys that showed Kerry with
commanding leads. Kerry momentum, and massive Kerry/anti-Bush voter
turnout, was evident on election day, and confirmed by exit polls with
dominant Kerry numbers.
Once again, criminals do not
“permit”
elections. They make them. This time, the Bush forces
had years of unencumbered time to orchestrate it, from Ohio (where its
notorious secretary of state is the head of the Bush re-election
campaign), and, of course, Jeb Bush’s Florida.
The Triumph Of The Bush
Machines
But there is one overriding fact that has
been left out most of the ridiculous post-election punditry that renders
all other analyses completely irrelevant. It is also the reason why
the smiles on the faces of Bush crime family members are so bright, as
they watched the returns on election night.
Air America Radio’s Mike Malloy gave the most succinct and passionate
explanation on Wednesday, November 3, 2004.
[http://www.mikemalloy.com]
“The American vote count is
controlled by three major corporate players, Diebold, ESS, Sequoia, and a
fourth, SAIC, Science Applications International. All four are
hard-wired into the Bush power structure, the Bush crime
family.”
They have been given millions of dollars
by the Bush regime to complete a sweeping computerisation of voting
machines that were just used in the 2004 election. The technology
involved had a trial run during the 2002 mid-term elections.
Georgia had Diebold machines in every precinct. As a result, a
popular Democratic governor and senator were both in an
“amazing”
16% swing.
Diebold’s Walden O’Dell, a top Bush fundraiser, publicly committed
himself to delivering his home state Ohio’s votes to Bush. At
Diebold, the election division is run by Bob Urosevich. Bob’s
brother, Todd, is a top executive at “rival” ES&S. The brothers
were originally staked by Howard Ahmanson, a member of the
Council For National
Policy, a right-wing steering group
stacked with Bush true believers. Ahmanson is also one of the
bagmen behind the extremist Christian
Reconstruction Movement, which advocates
the theocratic takeover of American democracy.
The 4 companies are interconnected; they are not “competitors.”
Ahmanson has large stakes in ES&S, whose former CEO was Republican
Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. When Hagel ran for office, his own
company counted the votes, and his victory was considered
“an amazing
upset.” Hagel still has a million
dollar stake in ES&S.
Sequoia is the corporate parent of a private equity firm, Madison
Dearborn, which is partner in the Carlyle Group.
http://www.hereinreality.com/carlyle.html
Meanwhile, SAIC is referred to a
“shadowy defense
contractor.” They got into the
vote count game both directly and through spinoffs by its top brass,
including Admiral Bill Owens, former military aide to Dick Cheney, and
Carlyle Group honcho Frank Carlucci and ex-CIA chief Robert Gates.
SAIC’s history of fraud charges and security
“lapses”
haven’t prevented it from becoming one of the largest Pentagon and CIA
contractors, and will doubtless encounter few obstacles in its entrance
into the vote counting business.
The mad rush to install these unverifiable computers is driven by the
Help America Vote
Act, signed by Bush! The chief
lobbying group pushing for the act (while we dumb asses sat out here and
thought, ‘That sounds like a good
idea!’) was a consortium of arms dealers
including Northrup Grumman and Lockheed Martin.
When you hear people saying, ‘take a deep
breath, we will pull through this,'
'we need to work
harder,’
‘we need to
organise’ -- no. We will
not. It’s over.
Unless electronic vote tabulation is history, and these companies are
driven out of business, it’s their country. Not ours.
Larry Chin, Online Journal Associate Editor.
http://onlinejournal.com/evoting/110504Chin/11-05-04_Chin.pdf
up!
TEXT
JOCKEY
// TJ PHRASER
(Fraser Clark) & THE
MEDIA EVOLUTION
MIXING THE TRACTS LIVE ON THE
KEYBOARD @ A MEDIA-MEME RATE OF
160 IPP *
* Ideas Per
Paragraph
TO SUBSCRIBE,
WRITE
“I wanna get
UP!”
TO
fraser@parallel-youniversity.com
TO UNSUBSCRIBE, HIT
REPLY WITH REMOVE IN THE SUBJECT BOX
(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)(\o/)
John Zogby’s polling was generally considered
the most accurate during the crazed 2000 election, and if he maintains
that measure of reliability, you can go to sleep now.
Zogby’s final tracking poll, state by state, released at 5:30 EST,
suggests the prospect of a Kerry win by a margin of 311 Electoral Votes
to 213, with only Colorado and Nevada too
close to call (and representing just
fourteen votes between them).
Oh and by the way, he has Mr. Bush winning the popular vote, narrowly -
an irony of biblical proportions that one Democratic pollster rated a
one-in-three chance just last week.
It should be noted Zogby is doing a lot of extrapolating. In the
two from Column A (Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania), two from Column B (Iowa,
Minnesota, Wisconsin) states, he gives them all to Kerry. But
Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania are listed as
“trending
Kerry” based on exit polling. The
smaller three states show Kerry up by 5-6%.
up!
Voting
Results
in New Hampshire
To The Secretary of State of New Hampshire:
The
Nader/Camejo
campaign requests a hand recount of the ballots in the presidential
election in
New
Hampshire.
Numerous voting rights activists have requested that we seek a recount of
this vote.
We have received reports of irregularities in the vote reported on the
AccuVote
Diebold
Machines in
comparison to exit polls and trends in voting in New Hampshire.
These irregularities favor President George W. Bush by 5% to15% over what
was expected. Problems in these electronic voting machines
and optical scanners are being reported in machines in a variety of
states.
We are requesting that the state undertake this recount or a
statistically significant sample audit of these vote counts.
We would like to make sure every vote counts and is counted
accurately.
Sincerely,
Ralph Nader.
http://www.votenader.org/media_press/index.php?cid=400
up!
I’m Glad Kerry
Lost But…
We've Been
Had!
by Edgar J. Steele
"It's amazing
I won. I was running against peace, prosperity and incumbency."
George W. Bush, June 14, 2001, speaking to Swedish Prime
Minister Goran Perrson, unaware that a live television camera was still
rolling
The Zogby Polls, which usually are pretty
accurate, had Kerry winning a clear majority, not just a plurality, and
sweeping the Electoral College. Exit polls, which are even more
accurate, had Kerry winning going away, especially in the key
"Battleground
States" of Ohio and Florida, both of
which inexplicably ended up in Bush's column at the end.
I noticed that, for once, none of the network anchors really discussed
either type of poll, though CNN has been accused of jiggering its report
of exit poll results. In an excuse switch reminiscent of Iraq being
blamed for possessing weapons of mass destruction, suddenly the blame for
the voting-booth conversion to Bush is being placed upon the desire of
the common man to stamp out homosexual marriage. As comedienne Judy
Tenuta likes to say: "It could happen!"
Yeah...right.
Dick Morris, ex Clinton political consultant, wrote an article for
The
Hill, read by a great many Washington
insiders, in which he said, "This
was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board
as they were on election
night."
It seems clear to me that Bush didn't win
fairly. I think Kerry actually won the
election and allowed Bush to steal it. In retrospect, it appears to
me that Al Gore did the same thing, albeit
less abjectly. But, this time Bush got
caught with his hand in the ballot box. I've just had a
heel-of-the-hand- thumping-forehead "aha" experience. How
could I, of all people, have missed something so obvious?
Yes, I have noted rampant vote
fraud in the past and expected it this time,
as well. I have witnessed it first hand at the local level. I
have read many credible reports from others at all levels, concerning
past vote fraud. Yet, I did not
believe it was so blatant... so massive as
what obviously just occurred. How could I possibly expect others to
see it now if I didn't see it coming? How could I be
so...dumb?
Now comes the hard part: How do we
make clear that free elections in America were a thing of the past as
long as 4 years ago?
Expect the upcoming mid-term election in
2002 to produce more of the same miraculous
Republican victories and give Bush the
60-Republican Senate edge that he needs to advance any legislation
without danger of Democrat filibuster.
The smell left over from Election Day is bad enough, all by itself, but
there is evidence, lots of
evidence, of vote fraud on a scale not seen
since the heydays of Communist Russia.
How on earth did despicable Democrat Tom Daschle get beaten? Mind
you, the only Senators I would be more pleased to see go are Hillary,
Feinstein and the execrable Charles Schumer, but it seems extremely
unlikely that Daschle's constituents would have voted him out of office
in a fair election. Is it just coincidence that Daschle has been a
particularly nettlesome thorn in George W. Bush's side for the past four
years?
The problems in Ohio on election day are starkly outlined by attorney Ray
Beckerman in his Basic Report from Columbus:
"Touch screen voting machines in
Youngstown OH were registering "George W. Bush" when people
pressed "John F. Kerry" ALL DAY
LONG." One precinct in
suburban Columbus reported that nearly 4,000 votes were
"accidentally"
credited to Bush. Mr. Beckerman also reports that lines in
predominantly-Democratic precincts were 5-10 hours in length, versus near
nonexistent in Republican strongholds, for the simple reason that
precincts expected to line up in the Republican column had 5 times as
many voting machines as others.
Beckerman outlines a number of other irregularities in one of this
election's two key "battleground" states, the one that gave the
election to Bush, just as Florida did 4 years ago with a healthy assist
from the US Supreme Court. Is all of this simply coincidental in an
election where the disputed votes decided the outcome?
The other key battleground state, Florida, reported similar
problems: "Several dozen
voters in six states - particularly Democrats in Florida - who said the
wrong candidates appeared on their touch-screen machine's checkout
screen... In many cases, voters said they intended to select John Kerry
but when the computer asked them to verify the choice it showed them
instead opting for President Bush..." (Globe and
Mail, 11/3/04). More
coincidence?
But, the machines don't have to be obviously in error to be rigged.
Ronnie Dugger, in How They Could Steal
the Election This Time, several months
ago described the November 2004 election machinery:
"36 million (votes) will be
tabulated completely inside the new paperless,
direct-recording-electronic (DRE) voting systems, on which you vote
directly on a touch-screen... you get no paper record of your vote... you
never know, despite what the touch-screen says, whether the computer is
counting your vote as you think you are casting it or, either by error or
fraud, it is giving it to another candidate. No one can tell what a
computer does inside itself by looking at it; an election
official
'can't watch the bits
inside,' says Dr. Peter Neumann, the
principal scientist at the Computer Science Laboratory of SRI
International and a world authority on computer-based risks...
“The 4 major election corporations count
votes with voting-system source codes (which) are kept strictly
secret..."
Even if they aren't obviously in error
or secretly rigged, these new machines can still have their tabulations
changed, with nobody the wiser. One of my favorite Internet
columnists, Devvy Kidd, two weeks ago predicted
"monstrous problems that will make
Florida 2000 pale in
comparison." Quoting
from the December 1996 issue of Cincinnatus News Service, a vote
fraud newsletter, Devvy went on to note,
"The missing link in the vote fraud
investigation has been found. The November 1996 issue of Relevance
Magazine reveals that two-way hidden modems are being built into the ever
growing number of computerized optical scanner/direct recording voting
machines in use all across the country from New England to California...
these hidden modems are accessible by remote cell phone technology...
these voting machines can be accessed and manipulated from a central
super computer without a phone line connected to the wall, and without
the local precinct workers knowing that anything is happening at
all." I wonder why Dan Rather
didn't tell us about this?
Diebold, Inc., is one of the country's biggest suppliers of paperless,
touch-screen voting machines. Diebold's CEO, Walter O'Dell, wrote a
letter four months ago soliciting major-league campaign contributions for
Bush, in which he said,
"I
am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president
next year."
Diebold is based in Canton,
Ohio. Coincidence?
Convinced yet? I am.
This election was a foregone conclusion, as some noted beforehand.
Greg Palast, Harper's editor who investigated American vote fraud
on behalf of the BBC, reported on November 1 that upwards of one million
votes, expected to be cast overwhelmingly for Kerry, would not be counted
"because, in important states like
Ohio, Florida and New Mexico, voter names have been systematically
removed from the rolls and absentee ballots have been overlooked -
overwhelmingly in minority
areas..."
up!
•
flashback
November 2, 2004 | 5:51 p.m. ET
John Zogby’s polling was generally
considered the most accurate during the crazed 2000 election, and if he
maintains that measure of reliability, you can go to sleep now.
Zogby’s final tracking poll, state by state, released at 5:30 EST,
suggests the prospect of a Kerry win by a margin of 311 Electoral Votes
to 213, with only Colorado and Nevada too
close to call (and representing just
fourteen votes between them).
Oh and by the way, he has Mr. Bush winning the popular vote, narrowly -
an irony of biblical proportions that one Democratic pollster rated a
one-in-three chance just last week.
It should be noted Zogby is doing a lot of extrapolating. In the
two from Column A (Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania), two from Column B (Iowa,
Minnesota, Wisconsin) states, he gives them all to Kerry. But
Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania are listed as
“trending
Kerry” based on exit polling. The
smaller three states show Kerry up by 5-6%.
up!
by Steve Bhaerman aka
SwamiBeyondananda
NO! It’s
still not funny.
Even though Swami Beyondananda
told us right away the election results could be blamed on
“voting
irregularities” (constipated
people went for the current regime at a rate of 2-1), and even though he
has proposed an official change in the Democrats’ theme song from
“It’s My Party, and I’ll Cry
If I Want To” to
“I Concede Clearly
Now,”
it’s still not
funny. Even though
we hear from reputable reporters like Greg Palast and Thom Hartmann that
there was likely some funny business around voting machines and vote
counting, it’s still not funny.
When my friend Rita Abrams sent me an email about a sad song she was
writing, “I’m In a Blue
State,” I smiled, but only
briefly. The best way to sum up my state of heart this past week is
the way I felt the day Martin Luther King was assassinated. I was
in my first year as a teacher in Washington, D.C. at the time, and I came
home to hear the tragic and disheartening news. That night I went
out with two older teacher friends who had been part of Freedom Summer in
1964 and got good and drunk.
This time I did nothing to alter the sobering state I - and the country -
was in. Those folks who went to Ohio and all of the other swing
states this season to try register Democrats and swing the swing vote,
they were the Freedom
Riders 40 years later.
Those folks in ‘64 didn’t fail, they succeeded. And we will
too. But the death of Martin Luther King was a serious setback, as
is Bush’s self-declared
“mandate”
(hey, I thought he opposed homosexual liaisons). But as the Swami
tells us, now is not the time for despair. We’ve got 4 years to
look forward to, so let’s save some of our despair for when we really
need it.
up!
>> The evidence is clear,
but those who will attend to it will be few, as the implications are too
much for most people to contemplate.
Yes this is very intense. The rigged voting
machines from 2000 ... interesting ... there was no question of their
validity in mainstream media that i saw.
Basically the election coverage i saw was of how it was a close call, the
various tactics of the election campaigns, and interviews with concerned
international leaders and 'real' americans.
OH GOD. it was all a farce. talky talk about this and that, be concerned
about that, go for it girls and
boys, we own the paperless voting machines!
WOW. if only the entire world had demonstrated against those paperless
voting machines. if nothing else, and indeed to focus on getting
rid of those paperless voting machines, seriously. cos it certainly looks
like those machines ensure power to whoever own them. or at least a 5%
swing.
Hey Fraser, thanks man.
Jasper Vader, Boston
up!
•
flashback
November 2, 2004 | 6:46 p.m. ET
The tone of Norah
O’Donnell’s first report from the White House suggested that whatever the
Re-Election Campaign is reading in the way of exit polls, they must be
similar to the 5:30 ET final Zogby tracking numbers
which forecast a Kerry
landslide by as many as 100 Electoral
Votes (while giving Mr. Bush
an absolutely useless popular majority of 3/10ths of one percent).
Norah reported the President and his supporters putting on positive but
somewhat forced faces.
And if they heard the first set of nationwide exit polling released by
NBC a little after 6 PM, the White House can’t be very hopeful:
54% thought the economy was
“not
good”; only 45%
“good.”
46% thought they were worse off today than they were in 2000; only 21%
said they were better off;
Only 52% said they thought we were safer from the threat of terrorism now
than before; 43% thought we were less safe.
And while 53% said they were somewhat worried about another terrorist
attack, just 22% described themselves as
“very”
worried”, a comparatively
small percentage.
All of which brings us to what
might be a very unpleasant Election Night party in the Ronald Reagan
Building in Washington - the President’s soiree.
up!
A professor at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, notes that in Florida the vote to raise the
minimum wage was approved by 72%, but Kerry got 48%. "The
correlation between voting for the minimum wage increase and voting for
Kerry isn't likely to be perfect," he noted, "but one
would normally expect that the gap - of 1.5 million votes - would be far
smaller than it was."
up!
My plan now is to compose an explicit
summary of what went down and to visit as many news/current
affairs/politics sites, but especially american, and paste the facts into
whatever 'leave a message/contribute to discussions' they have.
There's a lot ignorant of all this and the message needs to appear as
much as possible [critical mass?] so they can educated about what just
happened. Michael Moore might have some ideas so I'll go visit
there first.
The new UP!
is good, you manage your apology with style. What can I say?
I also suspended doubts I should have nurtured from last time [you helped
make it all seem hopeful!], but it did seem like the other way.
Lesson, we must never give in to optimism ;-) but keep it in a pocket for
when it really can be got out.
Love and peace
Pete Password, Hereford, UK
up!
Election night, just after midnight, during
the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to
hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush
down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were
clear: Kerry was winning in a
landslide. "Bush took the news
stoically," noted the AP report.
But then the computers reported something different. In several
pivotal states.
Conservatives see a conspiracy here: They think the exit polls were
rigged.
Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton
campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular,
wrote an article for The Hill, the publication read by every
political junkie in Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of
brilliant points.
"Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote.
"They eliminate the two
major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating
actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do
and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the
relative turnout of different parts of the
state."
He added: "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example,
Kerry was slated to carry
Florida, Ohio, New Mexico,
Colorado, Nevada, and
Iowa,
all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had
going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10
points."
A few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as
the computerised vote numbers began to come in from the various states,
the election was called for Bush.
How could this
happen?
up!
It Was All Predicted
Months Ago Live On
TV!
Several months ago, on the CNBC TV show
"Topic A With Tina Brown," Howard Dean had filled in for
Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle
grandmother who started
www.blackboxvoting.org
from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes
were tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like
small towns in Vermont), the real
"counting"
is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which
read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the
scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a
touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a
"central
tabulator" machine.
That central tabulator
computer is a Windows-based PC.
"In
a voting system," Harris explained to
Dean on national television,
"you have all the
different voting machines at all the different polling places. All those
machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes.
So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a
voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000
machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at
once?"
Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued.
"What surprises people
is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I
use. It's just a regular
computer."
"So,"
Dean said, "anybody who
can hack into a PC can hack into a central
tabulator?"
Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program
called
GEMS,
which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into the
central tabulator system.
"This is the official
program that the County Supervisor
sees," she said, pointing to a PC that
was sitting between them loaded with Diebold's software.
Bev then had Dean open the
GEMS
program to see the results of a test election. They went to the
screen titled "Election
Summary Report" and waited a moment while
the PC "adds up all the
votes from all the various precincts,"
and then saw that in this sample election Howard Dean had 1000 votes, Lex
Luthor had 500, and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was
winning.
"Of course, you can't
tamper with this software," Harris
noted. Diebold wrote a pretty good program.
But, it's running on a Windows PC!
So Harris had Dean close the Diebold
GEMS
software, go back to the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the
"My Computer" icon,
choose "Local Disk C:," open the
folder titled
GEMS,
and open the sub-folder
"LocalDB"
which, Harris noted,
"stands for local
database, that's where they keep the
votes." Harris then had Dean
double-click on a file in that folder titled
"Central Tabulator
Votes," which caused the PC to open the
vote count in a database program like Excel.
In the "Sum of the
Candidates" row of numbers, she found that
in one precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor 400.
"Let's just flip
those," Harris said, as Dean cut and
pasted the numbers from one cell into the other.
"And,"
she added magnanimously,
"let's give Tiger 100
votes."
They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software
"the legitimate way,
you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the progress of your
election."
As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said,
"And you can see now
that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger Woods
has 100." Dean, the winner, was
now the loser.
Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said,
"We just edited an
election, and it took us 90
seconds."
On live national television. (clip on
www.votergate.tv.) And they’d left
no tracks whatsoever, Harris said, noting that it would be nearly
impossible for the election software - or a County election
official - to know that the vote database had been altered.
up!
•
flashback
November 2, 2004 | 9:01 p.m. ET
Exit numbers meaning a Bush
exit?
Secaucus The exit polling is sometimes easy enough to read that
even I can figure it out.
The NBC information released at 8:23 indicates numbers crushing for the
president’s hopes of gaining significant votes based on the war in
Iraq.
Only 12% of voters nationally agreed that things were
“going well” in
Iraq, and only another 32% said things were going
“somewhat well”
there. 55% were clearly negative, saying things were going
“badly.”
More significantly perhaps, the President’s argument that the war in Iraq
is a component of the war on terror, was only partially successful with
voters - 52%. 45% said the two elements were separate.
Overall, the exit polls show voters evenly split about the wisdom to go
into Iraq in the first place, 48-48.
And most strikingly, when asked if the action in Iraq improved our
security or harmed it, only 43% said it had improved it 54% felt
otherwise.
No wonder Norah O’Donnell’s latest report refers to more grim faces
inside the White House strategy and war rooms - what we liked to call the
“interior
numbers” would suggest that the
fundaments of the President’s re-election strategy haven’t succeeded, and
the Zogby forecast of a Kerry 100+ Electoral College vote looks
ever-increasingly plausible.
And those “interior
numbers” in Ohio fascinate. The
NBC exit polling there suggests the state saw 800,000 new voters
13% of the entire electorate there - and they went 56-44 Kerry (58-41
Kerry among those under 30), with the only demographic group going for
the President in Ohio being those 60 and over.
But Ohio still shows the closeness of the votes-in-hand.
As of 8:15 EST, out of the 40,367 absentee ballots cast in Franklin
County that’s Columbus, the President led Senator Kerry by exactly
267 of them. That’s not the case in Cuyahoga (Cleveland), where
Kerry got nearly two out of every three absentees (49,816 to
27,770).
up!
Fox's Dick Morris, wrapping up his story for The Hill,
wrote in his final paragraph, "This
was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as
they were on election night. I
suspect foul play."
up!
When the majority of Americans
realise they’ve been conned (again) surely there has to be some massive
civil disobedience. The majority of Americans who voted for Kerry should
do something, like refusing to pay
their taxes that are used to fight an illegal
war in order to bolster
Halliburton’s already ill-gotten profits.
And why not? This would be more effective than complaining about
the result. Or - how about everyone begs OPEC to switch oil trading
currency to the Euro, that would create a "run" on the US
dollar (kinda like what happened to Argentina) - thus bringing the war
machine to a grinding halt. . . . just a thought, and admittedly it is
quite extreme, but so is another four years of Bush madness!!!
marc deeley, glasgow.
up!
Ehhh Frrrazer,
A bit of a half drunk night mail, my semi forbidden semi Pitbull dog
invaded my armchair and I am typing on the floor. I am sitting
here, shifting some of my meagre remainders of past Internet investments
to Solar Energy Stocks. Why I do this? Because Oil Peak will
hit soon... IT WILL! And the UP! brought my attention back to this
long known and rather unavoidable FACT!
The thing that annoys me is that the re- enthroned Government of the
u-dot-s-dot and their cronies profit most from the crisis - a crisis that
is not a coming one but one that already is in full bloom.
The oil price will rise, rise and ever rise from now on (well - it will
wax and wane and go up and down to create this and that illusion to fool
those who are unable to extend their memories and their foresight beyond
3 months) but otherwise REALITY will take over and the oil price will go
up and up and up and up.
And those who have oil - as little as that may be - will profit from that
rise. If I were a Texas Oil well owner, I'd put my pumps all on
halt and WAIT. WAIT, WAIT, WAIT. The best investment I could
make! Because it will not be long before people will sell their
souls for the rotten remainder of oily sludge that rests in my
hypothetical ground.... Let us not forget that
Oil Peak
means a major shift of...
EVERYTHING.
Well - not really of everything. The astronomer in me tells
me that the universe at large will remain rather unimpressed. But
for us little Earth dwellers everything will be at stake. And this
shift is happening. Right now. Right here on the one and only
planet Earth, and not somewhere in some anti utopian novel fantasy.
I am wondering if there is any credibility to the stories related to
the voting
machines. Although I am a Geographer
and Astro Physicist who sank down (after the shadowy bankruptcy of a long
forgotten world company named Commodore International) to the levels of
being a mere writer, I did once in the early ‘90s own a company
specialising in Systems Security. And therefore, yes -
I assume this ballot betrayal is well
within the realm of the possible. But
to quote one of my heroes, the great Richard Feynman:
"The question is not whether
something is possible. The Question is whether it actually is going
on..." What would be worse:
if George Bush were re-elected by manipulation, or if despite his records
he were re-elected by an actual popular vote of the people of the United
States of America?
Now it is time to throw my dog out of the armchair and go to sleep.
Like most of the rest of the PLANET.
Stefan Thiesen, Westphalia at night, Germany, EU
www.mindquest.de
up!
•
flashback
November 2, 2004 | 10:35 p.m. ET
It's 10 p.m., do you know where your
spin is?
Secaucus How right have we been tonight about the distress in the
White House? The re-election campaign admitted a pool camera and
still photographers to the residence to videotape images of Mr. Bush and
his family sitting around stiffly on a couch, he in a white shirt and a
tie, smiling towards the media and saying “I believe I will win. It’s
going to be an exciting evening.”
Well, the night Titanic sank was an exciting evening.
The President’s men had begun whining about the exit polling and its
interpretation since shortly after 7 PM tonight. Norah O’Donnell’s
9:50 EST report had referred to
“anxiety” from
Republicans out in the field, and perhaps the odd photo-op was designed
as much to reassure them as to counter-effect the exit polling with which
the White House so fervently disagreed.
Brian Williams offered the astute observation that the White House did
need to influence photo and videotape selection. Mr. Bush had been
captured with stern and/or exhausted looks on his face at yesterday’s
pre-election events, and today’s voting - and that’s the last thing the
campaign wanted to project. Hence, in Norah’s phrase, the decision
to “put the President
out.”
As I write here Mr. Bush is up by around 80 Electoral Votes, and just
about that many from the promised land. But the Zogby forecast from
5:30 EST tonight - which ends with Senator Kerry getting at least 311 and
the President no more than 227 - has performed flawlessly through the
first 32 NBC state projections.
up!
On Friday I received a phone call from a good friend who
works at CBS. I've known her for years and she is a producer for
some of the news programs, one well known one in particular.
She tipped me off that the news media is in a
"lock-down" and that there
is to be no TV coverage of the real problems with voting on Nov.
2nd. She said similar "lock-down
orders" had come up last year after the Iraq invasion,
but this is far worse - far
scarier. She said the majority of their journalists at
CBS and elsewhere in NYC are pretty horrified - every one is worried
about their jobs and retribution Dan Rather
style or worse.
My source said they've also been forbidden to talk about it even on their
own time but she was pissed and her journalistic and moral integrity as a
gov't watchdog requires her to speak out, albeit covertly, and she asked
me to "spread" the word...She said journalism and truth are at
stake.
She said another friend of hers, a producer at MSNBC, told her an anchor
by the name of Keith Olbermann [see
several entries from him in this UP!] had raised it on his
show on Friday eve and the axe came down. At least he’s fighting
back and talking about it on his "Blog", but she said people
there are worried he's going to be fired.
She said the only way the "real
news" was going to get out at this point is if the people
start talking and made a big enough stink about it to our elected
officials, the FEC, and
"noise" to the
international media, that our own media won't have any choice but to
cover it. (Yes, this is really happening in the good ole' supposed
"democratic" free press of the US of A). The only place
you'll see this talked about right now is on the internet and on
AirAmericaRadio.
Everyone - this is serious....I can't
emphasize it any more than saying if there was ever a time to speak up
and take action it is NOW. If you are feeling sick to your stomach
(like me) about the possibility of 4 more years under Bush and the future
of our country, and yet you feel
helpless, here's your opportunity to
take action. Imagine if you saw a loved one drowning - what do you
do? Well, our country's democracy is drowning and she needs
us.
[MMOB Yahoo group]
up!
EMAIL FROM DC LAWYER CYNTHIA BUTLER
I am angry, and getting emails and recrimination from people
wondering why KERRY just caved and is not fighting this before the final
count in Ohio, before any of the fraud was challenged, before New Mexico
and Iowa even came in.
There is widespread feeling that he did not lose the election and that it
was taken from him. There is enough here to warrant investigation and
enough to challenge the results. It's
coming from all corners.
I understand that he has until the official count certification in
Ohio to Un Concede which is several days from
now.
Anyone who thinks that he should unconcede should give reasons why
- whatever they noticed, particularly in Red Republican Governed States
using electronic machines - and send them directly to Cameron KERRY, John
Kerry's brother at his law firm at the address
CKerry@Mintz.com, informing us if
they were not allowed to vote provisionally (for whatever reason- they
lost forms, ran out of forms, etc.) I personally witnessed a number
of things as I reported in Texas with the DCCC. (Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee)
If you know anyone, in particular in Ohio,
who tried to vote and was turned away at the polls please get their info
and notify the campaign.
They should be notified if they experienced lines longer than 4 hours -
particularly elderly or infirm people. They
should be notified if people were told, as has been reported, that
due to too many people showing up in African American precincts,
particularly in Ohio where there were too few booths (some only had 2 or
3 for the entire precinct) and told because of heavy turn out they could
vote on Wednesday. If the numbers of these sorts of incidents
creates a percentage margin that exceeds the margin of victory -
Un Concession has to be made to challenge
the count.
If people wanted to and tried to vote and were prevented or actively
discouraged from doing so, that is a Civil Rights matter and must be
dealt with in terms of the ultimate count.
Please pass along this to your listservs so that we may make Democracy
Work in America. We are not a country where he who cheats best
wins.
Cynthia L. Butler
BUTLER LAW FIRM, P.C.
1717 K St. NW, Suite 600
Washington, DC 20036
http://www.johnkerry.com/index.html
up!
Electronic Voting
Angst
by Keith Olbermann
Bev Harris, the Blackbox lady, was apparently quoted in a number of
venues during the day Monday as having written
“I was tipped off by a person very high up in TV
that the news has been locked down tight, and there will be no TV
coverage of the real problems with voting on Nov. 2… My source said
they’ve also been forbidden to talk about it even on their own
time.”
I didn’t get the memo.
We were able to put together a reasonably solid 15 minutes or so on the
voting irregularities in Florida and Ohio on Monday’s Countdown.
There was some You-Are-There insight from the Cincinnati Enquirer
reporter who had personally encountered the ‘lockdown’ during the vote
count in Warren County, Ohio, a week ago, and a good deal of fairly
contained comment from Representative John Conyers of Michigan, who now
leads a small but growing group of Democratic congressmen who’ve written
the General Accountability Office demanding an investigation of what we
should gently call the Electronic Voting
Angst. Conyers insisted he wasn’t trying to re-cast the
election, but seemed mystified that in the 21st Century we could have
advanced to a technological state in which voting - fine, flawed, or
felonious - should leave no paper trail.
But the show should not have been confused with Edward R. Murrow
flattening Joe McCarthy. I mean that both in terms of editorial
content and controversy. I swear, and I have never been known to
cover-up for any management anywhere, that I got nothing but support from
MSNBC both for the Web-work and the television time. We were asked
if perhaps we shouldn’t begin the program with the Fallujah offensive and
do the voting story later, but nobody flinched when we argued that the
Countdown format pretty much allows us to start wherever we please.
It may be different elsewhere, but there was no struggle to get this
story on the air, and evidently I should be washing the feet of my bosses
this morning in thanks. Because your reaction was a little
different than mine. By actual rough count, between the 8 p.m. ET
start of the program and 10:30 p.m. ET last night, we received 1,570
e-mails (none of them duplicates or forms, as near as I can tell).
1,508 were positive, 62 negative.
Well, the volume is startling to begin
with. I know some of the overtly liberal sites encouraged
readers to write, but that’s still a hunk of mail, and a decisive margin
(hell, 150 to 62 is considered a decisive margin). Writing this, I know
I’m inviting negative comment, but so be it. I read a large number
of the missives, skimmed all others, appreciate all - and all since -
deeply.
Even the negative ones, because in between the repeated
“you lost” nonsense, there was a
solid point raised about some of the incongruous voting noted on the
website of Florida’s Secretary of State. There, 52 counties tallied
their votes using paper ballots that were then optically scanned by
machines produced by Diebold, Sequoia, or Election Systems and
Software. 29 of those Florida counties had large Democratic
majorities among registered voters (as high a ratio as Liberty County -
Bristol, Florida and environs - where it’s 88% Democrats, 8% Republicans)
but produced landslides for President Bush. On Countdown, we cited
the five biggest surprises (Liberty ended Bush: 1,927; Kerry: 1,070), but
did not mention the other 24.
Those protesting e-mailers pointed out that 4 of the 5 counties we
mentioned also went for Bush in 2000, and were in Florida’s panhandle or
near the Georgia border. Many of them have long “Dixiecrat”
histories and the swing to Bush, while remarkably large, isn’t of itself
suggestive of voting fraud.
That the other 24 counties were scattered across the state, and had
nothing in common except the optical scanning method, I didn’t
mention. My bad. I used the most eye-popping numbers, and
should have used a better regional mix instead.
Interestingly, none of the complaining emailers took issue with the
remarkable results out of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In 29 precincts there,
the County’s website shows, we had the most unexpected results in years:
more votes than voters.
I’ll repeat that: more votes than voters. 93,000 more votes than
voters.
Oops.
Talk about successful get-out-the-vote campaigns! What a triumph
for democracy in Fairview Park, twelve miles west of downtown
Cleveland. Only 13,342 registered voters there, but they cast
18,472 votes.
Vote early! Vote often!
And in the continuing saga of the secret vote count in Warren County,
Ohio (outside Cincinnati), no protestor offered an explanation or even a
reference, excepting one sympathetic writer who noted that there was a
“beautiful Mosque” in or near Warren County, and that a warning from
Homeland Security might have been predicated on that fact.
To her credit, Pat South, President of the Warren County Commissioners
who chose to keep the media from watching the actual vote count, was
willing to come on the program - but only by phone. Instead, we
asked her to compose a statement about the bizarre events at her County
Administration building a week ago, which I can quote at greater length
here than I did on the air.
“About three weeks prior to
elections,” Ms. South stated, “our
emergency services department had been receiving quite a few pieces of
correspondence from the office of Homeland
Security on the upcoming elections. These
memos were sent out statewide, not just to Warren County and they
included a lot of planning tools and resources to use for election day
security.
“In a face to face meeting between the FBI
and our director of Emergency Services, we were informed that on a scale
from 1 to 10, the tri-state area of Southwest Ohio was ranked at a high 8
to a low 9 in terms of security risk. Warren County in particular,
was rated at 10 (with 10 being the highest risk). Pursuant to the
Ohio revised code, we followed the law to the letter that basically says
that no one is allowed within a hundred feet of a polling place except
for voters and that after the polls close the only people allowed in the
board of elections area where votes are being counted are the board of
election members, judges, clerks, poll challengers, police, and that no
one other than those people can be there while tabulation is taking
place.”
Ms. South said she admitted the media to the building’s lobby, and that
they were provided with updates on the ballot-counting every half
hour. Of course, the ballot-counting was being conducted on the
third floor, and the idea that it would have probably looked better if
Warren had done what Ohio’s other 87 counties did - at least let
reporters look through windows as the tabulations proceeded - apparently
didn’t occur to anybody.
Back to those emails, especially the 1,508 positive ones. Apart
from the supportive words (my favorites:
“Although I did not vote for Kerry, as a former
government teacher, I am encouraged by your ‘covering’ the voting issue
which is the basis of our government. Thank you.”), the main
topics were questions about why ours was apparently the first television
or mainstream print coverage of any of the issues in Florida or
Ohio. I have a couple of theories.
Firstly, John Kerry conceded. As I pointed out here Sunday, no
candidate’s statement is legally binding - what matters is the state
election commissions’ reports, and the Electoral College vote next
month. But in terms of reportorial momentum,
the concession took the wind out of a lot of
journalists’ aggressiveness towards the entire issue. Many
were prepared for Election Night premature jocularity, and a post-vote
stampede to the courts - especially after John Edwards’ late night
proclamation from Boston. When Kerry brought that to a halt, a lot
of the media saw something of which they had not dared dream:
a long weekend off.
Don’t discount this. This has been our longest presidential
campaign ever, to say nothing of the one in which the truth was most
artfully hidden or manufactured. To consider this mess over was
enough to get 54% of the respondents to an Associated Press poll released
yesterday to say that the “conclusiveness”
of last week’s vote had given them renewed confidence in our electoral
system (of course, 39% said it had given them less confidence). Up
for the battle for truth or not, a lot of fulltime political reporters
were ready for a rest. Not me - I get to do “Oddball” and
“Newsmakers” every night and they always serve to refresh my spirit, and
my conviction that man is the silliest of the creator’s
creations.
There’s a third element to the reluctance to address all this, I
think. It comes from the mainstream’s love-hate relationship with
this very thing you’re reading now: The
Blog. This medium is so new that print, radio, and
television don’t know what to do with it, especially given that a system
of internet checks and balances has yet to develop. A good reporter
may encounter a tip, or two, or five, in a day’s time. He has to
check them all out before publishing or reporting.
What happens when you get 1,000 tips, all at
once?
Thanks for your support.
Keep them coming... Email me at
KOlbermann@msnbc.com
up!
An interesting little sidebar of our system of
government confirmed recently by the crack
Countdown
research staff: no Presidential
candidate’s concession speech is legally binding. The only determinants
of the outcome of election are the reports of the state returns boards
and the vote of the Electoral College.
up!
Stories like these have filled the web since the tide turned
against John Kerry late Tuesday night. But not until Friday did
they begin to spill into the more conventional news media. That’s
when the Cincinnati Enquirer reported
that officials in Warren County, Ohio, had
“locked down” its administration
building to prevent anybody from observing the vote count
there.
Suspicious enough on the face of it, the decision got more dubious still
when County Commissioners confirmed that they were acting on the advice
of their Emergency Services Director, Frank Young. Mr. Young had
explained that he had been advised by the federal government to implement
the measures for the sake of Homeland
Security.
Gotcha. Tom Ridge thought Osama Bin
Laden was planning to hit Caesar Creek State Park in
Waynesville. During the vote count in Lebanon. Or maybe it
was Kings Island Amusement Park that had gone Code-Orange without telling
anybody. Al-Qaeda had selected Turtlecreek Township for its first
foray into a Red State.
The State of Ohio confirms that of all of its 88 Counties, Warren alone
decided such Homeland Security measures were necessary. Even in
Butler County, reports the Enquirer, the media and others were permitted
to watch through a window as ballot-checkers performed their
duties. In Warren, the media was finally admitted to the lobby of
the administration building, which may have been slightly less
incommodious for the reporters, but which still managed to keep them two
floors away from the venue of the actual count.
Nobody in Warren County seems to think they’ve done anything wrong.
The newspaper quotes County Prosecutor Rachel Hurtzel as saying the
Commissioners “were within their
rights” to lock the building down, because having
photographers or reporters present could have interfered with the
count.
You bet, Rachel.
The majority of the media has yet to touch the other stories of Ohio (the
amazing Bush Times Ten voting machine in Gahanna) or the sagas of Ohio
South: huge margins for Bush in Florida counties in which registered
Democrats outnumber registered Republicans 2-1, places where the optical
scanning of precinct totals seems to have turned results from perfect
matches for the pro-Kerry exit poll data, to Bush sweeps.
In the interim, Senator Kerry, kindly don’t leave
the country.
KOlbermann@msnbc.com
up!
OF INDEPENDENCE
In the light of your failure to elect a competent President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective today.
Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths and other territories. Except Utah, which she does not fancy. Your new prime minister (that’s the Right Honourable Tony Blair, MP for the 92% of you who have until now been unaware that there is a world outside there) will appoint a Minister for America without the need for further elections.
Congress and the Senate will be disbanded, and a questionnaire will be circulated next year to determine whether any of you noticed. To aid in the transition to a British Crown Dependency, the following rules are introduced with immediate effect:
1. Look up "revocation" in the Oxford English Dictionary. Then look up "aluminium". Check the pronunciation guide. You will be amazed how wrongly you have been pronouncing it.
The letter 'U' will be reinstated in words such as ‘neighbour' and ‘labour’, skipping the letter 'U' is nothing more than laziness on your part, or else it is caused by a panic that you are not making money fast enough. Likewise, you will learn to spell 'doughnut' without skipping half the letters.
You will end your love affair with the letter 'Z' (pronounced 'zed' not 'zee') and the suffix ‘ize’ will be replaced by the suffix ‘ise’. You will learn that the suffix 'burgh is pronounced 'burra' e.g. Edinburgh. You are welcome to re-spell Pittsburgh as 'Pittsburg' if you can't cope with correct pronunciation. Generally, you should raise your vocabulary to acceptable levels. Look up "vocabulary". Also look inside a dictionary you will be amazed how many words are available for y0ur FREE use!
Using the same 27 words interspersed with filler noises such as "like" and "you know" is an unacceptable and inefficient form of communication. Look up "interspersed". There will be no more 'bleeps' in the Jerry Springer show. If you're not old enough to cope with bad language then you shouldn't have chat shows. When you learn to develop your vocabulary then you won't have to use bad language as often.
2. There is no such thing as "US English". We will inform Microsoft on your behalf. The Microsoft spell-checker will be adjusted to take account of the reinstated letter 'u' and the elimination of ‘-ize’.
3. You should learn to distinguish the English and Australian accents. It really isn't that hard. English accents are not limited to cockney, upper-class twit or Mancunian (Daphne in Frasier). You will also have to learn how to understand regional accents Scottish dramas such as "Taggart" will no longer be broadcast with subtitles. While we're talking about regions, you must learn that there is no such place as Devonshire in England. The name of the county is "Devon". If you persist in calling it Devonshire, all American States will become "shires" e.g. Texasshire, Floridashire where the vote count’s for hire!.
4. Hollywood will be required occasionally to cast English actors as the good guys. It will be required to cast English actors to play English characters. British sit-coms such as "Men Behaving Badly" or "Red Dwarf" will not be re-cast and watered down for a wishy-washy American audience who can't cope with the humour of occasional political incorrectness.
5. You should re-learn your original national anthem, "God Save The Queen", but only after fully carrying out task 1. We would not want you to get confused and give up half way through.
6. You must stop playing American "football". There is only one kind of football. What you refer to as American "football" is not a very good game. The 8% of you who are aware there’s is a world outside your borders may have noticed that no one else plays "American" football. You will no longer be allowed to play it, and should instead play proper football. Initially, it would be best if you played with the girls as it is a difficult game. Those of you brave enough will, in time, be allowed to play rugby (which is similar to American "football", but does not involve stopping for a rest every 20 seconds or wearing full body armour like nancies. We are hoping to get together at least a US Rugby sevens side by 2005. You should stop playing baseball. It is not acceptable to host an event called the 'World Series' for a game which is not played outside of America. Instead of baseball, you will be allowed to play a girls' game called "rounders" which is baseball without fancy team strip, oversized gloves, collector cards or hotdogs.
7. You will no longer be allowed to own or more dangerous in public than a vegetable peeler. Because we don't believe you are sensible enough to handle potentially dangerous items, you will require a permit if you wish to carry a vegetable peeler in public.
8. July 4th is no longer a public holiday. November 2nd will be a new national holiday, but only in England. It will be called "Indecisive Day".
9. All American cars are hereby banned. They’re crap, and it’s for your own good. When we show you German cars, you will understand what we mean. All road intersections will be replaced with roundabouts. You will start driving on the left with immediate effect. At the same time, you will go metric with immediate effect and without the benefit of conversion tables. Roundabouts and metrication will help you understand the British sense of humour.
10. You will learn to make real chips. Those things you call French fries are not real chips. Fries aren't even French, they’re Belgian though 97.85% of you (including the guy who discovered fries while in Europe) are not aware of a country called Belgium. Those things you insist on calling potato chips are properly called "crisps". Real chips are thick cut and fried in animal fat. The traditional accompaniment to chips is beer which should be served warm and flat. Waitresses will be trained to be more aggressive with customers.
11. As a sign of penance 5 grams of sea salt per cup will be added to all tea made within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, this quantity to be doubled for tea made within the city of Boston itself.
12. The cold tasteless stuff you insist on calling beer is not actually beer at all, it’s lager. From November 1st only proper British Bitter will be referred to as "beer", and European brews of known and accepted provenance will be referred to as "Lager". The substances formerly known as "American Beer" will henceforth be referred to as "Near-Frozen Gnat's Urine", with the exception of the product of the American Budweiser company whose product will be referred to as "Weak Near-Frozen Gnat's Urine". This will allow true Budweiser (as manufactured for the last 1000 years in Pilsen, Czech Republic) to be sold without risk of confusion. Look up Czech Republic.
13. From November 10th the UK will harmonise petrol (or "Gasoline" as you will be permitted to keep calling it until April 1st 2005) prices with the former USA. The UK will harmonise its prices to those of the former USA and the Former USA will, in return, adopt UK petrol prices (roughly $6/US gallon - get used to it).
14. You will learn to resolve personal issues without using guns, lawyers or therapists. The fact that you need so many lawyers and therapists shows that you're not adult enough to be independent. Guns should only be handled by adults. If you're not adult enough to sort things out without suing someone or speaking to a therapist then you're not grown up enough to handle a gun.
15. Please tell us who killed JFK. It's been driving us crazy. Tax collectors from Her Majesty's Government will be with you shortly to ensure the acquisition of all revenues due (backdated to 1776).
Thank you for your co-operation
Tim Easton for her Satanic Majesty Elizabeth, U.K..
up!
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." :
John Kenneth Galbraith
UP!
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Since recipients forward it widely to their own lists and sites,
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DETAINEE WAS DENIED DUE PROCESS
PENTAGON TRIBUNALS ARE INVALID
By John Hendren, Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON The first military commission trial at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was halted Monday after a federal judge ruled the proceedings invalid under U.S. and international law dealing a blow to the legal process set up by the Bush administration to handle accused terrorists.
The case against Salim Ahmed Hamdan was suspended after U.S. District Judge James Robertson ruled that the Yemeni man had been denied due process.
The ruling affects all of the nearly 500 detainees from Afghanistan at Guantanamo.
"The practical outcome of this is that the government is not going to be able to maintain this system," said Eric M. Freedman, a Hofstra University law school professor who has challenged the military commissions in court on behalf of two detainees.
The judge ruled that
1. The Bush administration had not followed a lawful procedure in declaring Hamdan an "enemy combatant" who was not entitled to protections and privileges under the Geneva Convention.
2. The "Combatant Status Review Tribunals" used by the Pentagon to decide whether to hold detainees are not a "competent" court to make such a determination.
3. The military commission process, which prosecutes detainees using secret evidence and unnamed witnesses, "could not be countenanced in any American court.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gitmo9nov09,0,3986662,print.story?coll=la-home-headlines
up!
Falluja's Defiance Of A New Empire
It’s Bush and Blair, not the Iraqi resistance, who fear free elections
by Sami Ramadani, The Guardian
George Bush and Tony Blair have apparently concluded they can crush the Iraqi people's will to resist occupation and legitimise a puppet regime next January by occupying Falluja. Maybe they imagine they can emulate the British forces that terrorised Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1920s by obliterating recalcitrant villages.
The US generals will no doubt deliver Falluja to Bush and Blair after bombarding its neighbourhoods. But they are doomed to deliver neither the Fallujans nor the people of Iraq. Perhaps they are unaware that Fallujans defied Saddam's rule during his last years in power. Falluja - known as the city of a thousand mosques - attracted Saddam's wrath in 1998 when its imams refused to hail the tyrant in their Friday sermons. Many were imprisoned, and the city punished as a result.
But the generals certainly do know how resistance began in Falluja. On April 28 2003 US soldiers opened fire on parents and children demonstrating against the continued military occupation of their primary school - killing 18 of them in cold blood and injuring about 60 others. Until the killing of those demonstrators, not a single bullet had been fired at US soldiers in Falluja or any of the cities north of Baghdad. But, remorselessly, little-known Falluja became a world-renowned centre of defiance, where a poor and poorly armed people has courageously faced the military wing of the new empire.
The way Falluja's 300,000 people reacted to the April 28 massacre has made them a prime target for savage bombardment and conquest. Najaf was bombed into a ceasefire in August. Samarra was conquered in September. Sadr City in Baghdad was bombarded and negotiated into temporary silence in October. Now they want to crush the symbol of Falluja, to teach the rest of Iraq a bloody lesson. Another pyrrhic victory is likely to be added to an already long list.
Blair once again misled parliament this week by branding the resistance in Falluja as Zarqawi-style terrorists out to destroy the prospects for democracy. It was he and Bush who last year rejected the calls for early free and fair elections from those who rejected the occupation, including Ayatollah Sistani, Moqtada al-Sadr, the resistance and the widely supported Iraqi National Foundation Congress. Bush and Blair are terrified of the Iraqi people voting for anti-occupation leaders. They will accept nothing short of the legitimisation, through sham elections supervised by the occupation authorities, of an Allawi-style puppet regime.
up!
Peaceful Resistance To US Terrorism In Iraq
Award-winning Indian author Arundhati Roy has called on people to join the resistance against the US-led coalition forces in Iraq.
The author of God of Small Things, who was presented with the Sydney Peace Prize in Sydney, however, said, "one wasn't urging them to join the Mehdi army but to become the resistance, to become part of what ought to be a non-violent resistance against a very violent occupation. We can't just assume that resistance means terrorism because that would be playing right into the hands of the occupation.”
Activists "need to understand that Iraq is engaging in the front lines of empire and we have to... throw our weight behind the Iraqi resistance.”
Roy said it was difficult to see why the war was not a major issue.
"The sense that that kind of brutality is good, or at the very least acceptable and in the interest of people here is, I suppose, one of the biggest dilemmas that the world faces today," she said.
© HT Media Ltd. 2004
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1087663,00110004.htm
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how to end terrorism at a single stroke
// PLEASE CIRCULATE TO ALL CONCERNED PLANETARY CITIZENS //
by a citizen of the west
WE WHO CALL FOR PEACE MUST OFFER MORE THAN JUST THE HOPE THAT THE PROBLEM WILL GO AWAY. PEACE IS A RESULT, NOT A SOLUTION! IT IS THE RESULT OF ACTIONS TAKEN TO RESOLVE A PROBLEM.
TO END DEFENSIVE JIHAD TERRORISM WE MUST IDENTIFY THE PROBLEM, THEN DEAL WITH THE CAUSES.
”The killers are those who kill - and that includes our pilots as well as their bombers. We don't want to kill civilians, but we know that our wars will do that, and death does not come more pleasantly or less painfully because the victims are killed by the supposedly benevolent West rather than the supposedly cruel East. Now we are beginning to pay the price.” Robert Fisk
2. al-queda leaders have made very clear all along that they are fighting a defensive jihad, the only one permitted by islam - the kind saladin fought successfully against the christian crusades. indeed, as I read mohamed’s words, such action is obligatory on all muslims when the Faith / Faithful are under attack. once a defensive jihad has been declared, aggressive attacks on the Enemy become permitted, even required.
(if your response is THEYRE ATTACKING US!, then ask yourself how many arab soldiers are positioned in your country. and if u say, after all this, that our military were invited in by some MEGA FAT QUISLING SHEIKH, then I say u r a baboon :)) such ignorance is a geometrically accelerating danger to me and to all people on this planet.
3. we ALREADY KNOW against what those thousands of terrorists and hundreds of thousands of supporters are defending. and their demands are eminently reasonable:
A. REMOVAL OF ALL FOREIGN TROOPS FROM ARAB LANDS (except UN)
B. IMPOSITION OF A UN AGREED PEACE SETTLEMENT AROUND ISRAEL’S BORDERS. (militarily if necessarily, and for as long as required - like yugoslavia).
these are an absolute minimum, are eminently reasonable, would already stop the massive spread of terrorism in its tracks, and would save hundreds (possibly hundreds of thousands?) of western lives over the next decade. meanwhile the withdrawn personnel and equipment should be put to protecting our own