Wednesday, November 17, 2004
Exit Democrat, Enter Green?
Did Kerry take a dive? Do you smell sell-out? It is very likely that many of us who voted for Kerry because he seemed to be the most likely way to get Bush out, will now migrate to the Green Party and work for genuine reform. Today the Green Party is actively working on the recounts. You can watch their progress, read "Mainstream" press articles ('xcuse me) about recount efforts and volunteer your support at http://www.votecobb.org/ There is still time but it is limited.
It's in your Face
Just Say No to Fascism.
Unlike these radicons, WE do not LIE, CHEAT, STEAL or KILL in the name of God. Not in the name of Jesus. Not in our name.
Just Say No to Fascism.
The way out of this mess is the way we got into it: through the Market. AirAmericaRadio.com is proof of this. DemocracyNow.org is proof of this. Michael Moore is proof of this. There is now a super high demand for, and a low supply of, Truth. The past election is proof of this. The Market will, in natural migration, seek out new outlets and avenues, exposing the lies of the entrenched, established propaganda machine, at a profit. More and more Americans are beginning to realize that ANYONE who uses "MAINSTREAM media" as a yardstick for validity on ANY issue is living in a DREAM WORLD of DENIAL. This differential of supply versus demand represents an awesome opportunity for true American innovators and persons of integrity.
The result is going to be increasing rewards for witnesses, truth-detectives, journalistic bounty hunters and investigative reporters. Groups will begin to pool funds to support and reward people who produce and broadcast accurate information leading to the arrest and conviction of the criminal Tories who have hijacked our nation and are endangering our species; and recognition with support for those who work to restore the validity of our democracy. This is why a Free Press is a key element in the foundation of America. This is where a Free Press rescues a country from tyranny. The Free Press is a safeguard against exactly what is developing today.
This is why the Press must be wrenched from the clutches of monopolists. There must be broad anti-trust initiatives regarding our means of attaining information, before the American Dream is consumed in despair and destruction borne of ignorance.
Just say NO to Fascism dot Com. Seek out the Truth. They are LYING to you.
Then when enough of us begin to realize how simply it can be done, we will standardize and make voter-verifiable our elections nationwide. The process will become as accurate and traceable as all the other transactions we routinely make. To preserve domestic tranquility, we will effectively eliminate and prevent future doubt as to the validity of our elections.
Then we will return power over the elections, from dumb capital, to The People; by outlawing any and all campaign contributions. By anyone. By any entity. From or in Any location. We will enforce equitable press-time for all popularly nominated candidates, and prohibit the purchase of campaign advertisements, as a condition of continued licensure of news-outlets. This will ensure that our government is returned to control of true representatives of the people and not of dumb capital.
This is America, Remember? Of, By and For the People. Not dumb capital.
Just Say NO to Fascism.
Corporatist radicals are dividing us using stereotypes of yokels versus elitists. They are using socio-economic groups as scapegoats. This is the same scam these people's grandparents pulled with Germany in the 1930's: Control the press, Divide and then subdue the people. A Yale Bush acting like a Texas bubba is an echo of Sinclair Lewis's "It Can't happen Here". Huey Long once said that "If Fascism ever comes to America, it will come wrapped in an American flag".
Or a cowboy hat.
It's in your face.
Just Say NO to Fascism. Dot Com. Tell Somebody.
In this past election and for a generation leading up to it, the Corporatists used class-resentment in a giant bait-and-switch. They took the suspicion that we all hold: that the super-rich are running the country; and they effectively re-directed that suspicion against civil liberties groups, unions, anti-war demonstrators, educated and informed people in general: EVERY SYSTEM THAT WE CREATED IN ORDER TO PRESERVE AND PROTECT OURSELVES. For YEARS. They flim-flammed the country enough to convince people to vote against their own interests, to get that 3-percent margin (the lowest for a standing president since Truman): close enough to steal their second election while permitting less access to observers than do Venezuela or Kazakhstan.
Without even giving us a receipt.
Now they're doing purges of anyone who doesn't toe the party line, thus further stamping out any chance of productive discourse in our government.
Beware. Talk to someone.
You'd think we would have learned by now. Two anesthetized coups on our own soil. A bloody coup in Haiti. Watch Venezuela. But, we are the "United States of Amnesia", to quote Gore Vidal. Ask a twenty-something why we fought World War II.
Feel scammed?
Just Say No To Fascism dot Com.
Tell Somebody.
Boycott the Propaganda Machine. Support real journalists. Tell others that you do.
Just Say No to Fascism. We have the moral high ground. We don't Lie, Cheat, Steal or Kill in the name of God.
Take action for media and elections reform.
And join the ACLU.
-- Mark Frankenberg, www.JustSayNoToFascism.com
P.S. It's not the doctors. It's not the Lawyers. It's the Insurance Corporatists.
Unlike these radicons, WE do not LIE, CHEAT, STEAL or KILL in the name of God. Not in the name of Jesus. Not in our name.
Just Say No to Fascism.
The way out of this mess is the way we got into it: through the Market. AirAmericaRadio.com is proof of this. DemocracyNow.org is proof of this. Michael Moore is proof of this. There is now a super high demand for, and a low supply of, Truth. The past election is proof of this. The Market will, in natural migration, seek out new outlets and avenues, exposing the lies of the entrenched, established propaganda machine, at a profit. More and more Americans are beginning to realize that ANYONE who uses "MAINSTREAM media" as a yardstick for validity on ANY issue is living in a DREAM WORLD of DENIAL. This differential of supply versus demand represents an awesome opportunity for true American innovators and persons of integrity.
The result is going to be increasing rewards for witnesses, truth-detectives, journalistic bounty hunters and investigative reporters. Groups will begin to pool funds to support and reward people who produce and broadcast accurate information leading to the arrest and conviction of the criminal Tories who have hijacked our nation and are endangering our species; and recognition with support for those who work to restore the validity of our democracy. This is why a Free Press is a key element in the foundation of America. This is where a Free Press rescues a country from tyranny. The Free Press is a safeguard against exactly what is developing today.
This is why the Press must be wrenched from the clutches of monopolists. There must be broad anti-trust initiatives regarding our means of attaining information, before the American Dream is consumed in despair and destruction borne of ignorance.
Just say NO to Fascism dot Com. Seek out the Truth. They are LYING to you.
Then when enough of us begin to realize how simply it can be done, we will standardize and make voter-verifiable our elections nationwide. The process will become as accurate and traceable as all the other transactions we routinely make. To preserve domestic tranquility, we will effectively eliminate and prevent future doubt as to the validity of our elections.
Then we will return power over the elections, from dumb capital, to The People; by outlawing any and all campaign contributions. By anyone. By any entity. From or in Any location. We will enforce equitable press-time for all popularly nominated candidates, and prohibit the purchase of campaign advertisements, as a condition of continued licensure of news-outlets. This will ensure that our government is returned to control of true representatives of the people and not of dumb capital.
This is America, Remember? Of, By and For the People. Not dumb capital.
Just Say NO to Fascism.
Corporatist radicals are dividing us using stereotypes of yokels versus elitists. They are using socio-economic groups as scapegoats. This is the same scam these people's grandparents pulled with Germany in the 1930's: Control the press, Divide and then subdue the people. A Yale Bush acting like a Texas bubba is an echo of Sinclair Lewis's "It Can't happen Here". Huey Long once said that "If Fascism ever comes to America, it will come wrapped in an American flag".
Or a cowboy hat.
It's in your face.
Just Say NO to Fascism. Dot Com. Tell Somebody.
In this past election and for a generation leading up to it, the Corporatists used class-resentment in a giant bait-and-switch. They took the suspicion that we all hold: that the super-rich are running the country; and they effectively re-directed that suspicion against civil liberties groups, unions, anti-war demonstrators, educated and informed people in general: EVERY SYSTEM THAT WE CREATED IN ORDER TO PRESERVE AND PROTECT OURSELVES. For YEARS. They flim-flammed the country enough to convince people to vote against their own interests, to get that 3-percent margin (the lowest for a standing president since Truman): close enough to steal their second election while permitting less access to observers than do Venezuela or Kazakhstan.
Without even giving us a receipt.
Now they're doing purges of anyone who doesn't toe the party line, thus further stamping out any chance of productive discourse in our government.
Beware. Talk to someone.
You'd think we would have learned by now. Two anesthetized coups on our own soil. A bloody coup in Haiti. Watch Venezuela. But, we are the "United States of Amnesia", to quote Gore Vidal. Ask a twenty-something why we fought World War II.
Feel scammed?
Just Say No To Fascism dot Com.
Tell Somebody.
Boycott the Propaganda Machine. Support real journalists. Tell others that you do.
Just Say No to Fascism. We have the moral high ground. We don't Lie, Cheat, Steal or Kill in the name of God.
Take action for media and elections reform.
And join the ACLU.
-- Mark Frankenberg, www.JustSayNoToFascism.com
P.S. It's not the doctors. It's not the Lawyers. It's the Insurance Corporatists.
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
blackboxvoting.org contacts
Blackboxvoting.org website keeps going down. To help them out:
Donate. Mailing address is Black Box Voting, PO Box 25552, Seattle WA 98165.
E-mail crew@blackboxvoting.org
Media calls: 206-335-7747
Donate. Mailing address is Black Box Voting, PO Box 25552, Seattle WA 98165.
E-mail crew@blackboxvoting.org
Media calls: 206-335-7747
Tuesday, November 09, 2004
Recount! Subpoena! Kerry and Democrats Won!
Look. It's really very simple. You can pay your taxes through your computer or over the phone. You can buy anything through your computer or over the phone. You do the transaction and get a reciept or a confirmation number. There are countless ways to ensure anonymity.
Why shouldn't our elections be any different? We could reconcile our ballot online. And recount ourselves, if we wanted.
What do they take us for?
You know.. Fraudulent elections are a characteristic of Fascism. So is Militarism. Iraq is our Poland.
Remember, Stupidity Kills. It has and it will again. This is NOT the time to sit by quietly.
Why shouldn't our elections be any different? We could reconcile our ballot online. And recount ourselves, if we wanted.
What do they take us for?
You know.. Fraudulent elections are a characteristic of Fascism. So is Militarism. Iraq is our Poland.
Remember, Stupidity Kills. It has and it will again. This is NOT the time to sit by quietly.
Sign Safety
Some of us are putting "www.justsaynotofascism.com" on our cars and trucks. I believe that it is an excellent way for all of us to excercise our First Amendment right to Free Speech.
If you do begin "Signing" like I do, I urge you do be extra vigilant while driving. The range of responses from other drivers is unlimited. It is a good idea to never make eye-contact with other drivers, to "always leave yourself an out" by avoiding having other vehicles directly beside you, and to only use a nod and a smile, or nothing at all, in response to one thumb (or finger) salutes. Use increased following distance because people may drive closely behind you to read your message.
There is hope. We've survived for 228 years.
If you do begin "Signing" like I do, I urge you do be extra vigilant while driving. The range of responses from other drivers is unlimited. It is a good idea to never make eye-contact with other drivers, to "always leave yourself an out" by avoiding having other vehicles directly beside you, and to only use a nod and a smile, or nothing at all, in response to one thumb (or finger) salutes. Use increased following distance because people may drive closely behind you to read your message.
There is hope. We've survived for 228 years.
"None dare call it voter suppression and fraud"
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/983
"
Bob Fitrakis
None dare call it voter suppression and fraud
November 7, 2004
Evidence is mounting that the 2004 presidential election was stolen in Ohio. Emerging revelations of voting irregularities coupled with well-documented Republican efforts at voter suppression prior to the election suggests that in a fair election Kerry would have won Ohio.
Democratic hopeful Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts conceded on November 3, based on preliminary postings by the highly partisan Republican Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. These unofficial results showed Bush with 136,483 more votes than Kerry, although 155,428 provisional ballots, 92,672 “spoiled” ballots, additional overseas ballots, and some remaining absentee ballots remained uncounted.
The day after his concession, Kerry drew 3,893 votes closer to Bush when a computerized voting machine “glitch” was discovered in an Ohio precinct. A machine in ward 1B in the predominantly Republican Gahanna, Ohio, recorded 4,258 votes for George W. Bush when only 638 people cast votes at the New Life Church polling site. Buried on page A6 of the Columbus Dispatch, the story also reported that the voting machine recorded 0 votes in a race between Franklin County Commissioners Arlene Shoemaker and Paula Brooks. Franklin County Board of Elections Director Matt Damschroder told the Dispatch that the voting machine glitches were “why the results on election night are unofficial.”
The right-wing New Life Church voting glitch is interesting. Free Press reporter Marley Greiner has been tracking Blackwell’s relationship with far right-wing religious forces like Biblical America and Christian dominionist groups that want to establish theocratic religious rule in America. Blackwell was campaigning around the state with the Reverend Rod Parsley as part of a “Silent No More” tour in support of amending the Ohio Constitution to outlaw gay marriage, on the ballot as Issue One. Many mainstream commentators claim it was the widely popular Issue One amendment campaign that brought out Bush voters in record numbers in rural Ohio. Gay marriage was already outlawed by state statute, and six of the seven Ohio Supreme Court justices are Republicans.
The nonpartisan Citizen’s Alliance for Secure Elections (CASE) is investigating various other voting irregularities in Ohio, among them:
# In Auglaize County, a letter dated October 21 under the signature of Ken Nuss, the county’s former deputy director, alleges that Joe McGinnis, a former employee of Election Systems & Software (ES&S), violated election protocol with his unauthorized use of the county’s central tabulating computer that creates ballots and compiles election results. Nuss, who resigned on October 21, alleges that McGinnis was improperly granted access to the computer the weekend of October 16.
# In Miami County, with 100% of the precincts reporting at 9am EST Wednesday, Nov. 3, Bush had 20,807 votes (65.80%) and Kerry had 10,724 (33.92%). Miami reported 31,620 voters. Inexplicably, nearly 19,000 new ballots were added after all precincts reported, boosting Bush’s vote to 33,039 (65.77%) to Kerry’s 17,039 (33.92%). CASE is investigating why the percentage of the vote stayed exactly the same to three one-hundredths of a percentage point after nearly 19,000 new ballots were added. CASE members speculate that it’s either a long-shot coincidence with the last three digits remaining the same, or that someone had pre-set a database and programmed a voting machine to cough up a pre-set percentage of votes. Miami County uses an easily hackable optical scanner with the central counter provided by the Republican-linked vendor ES&S.
# In Warren County, administrators and election officials locked down the county administrative building and prohibited all independent election observers from watching the vote count. County officials cited “homeland security,” according to the Cincinnati Enquirer. WCPO-TV Channel 9 News Director Bob Morford told the Enquirer that he had “never seen anything like it.” Morford asserted that throwing the media and independent observers out of the centralized counting area under the guise of “homeland security” was a “red herring.” He said, “That’s something to put up when you don’t know what else to put up to keep us out.” In Warren County, Bush picked up an additional 12,000 votes over his 2000 election total.
# In Franklin County, where Franklin County Board of Elections Director Matt Damschroder is also the former Executive Director of the county’s Republican Party, the county Board of Elections building looked like a bunker. Scores of city buses blocked parking spaces on the street outside, numerous concrete barricades surrounded the parking lot, and a metal detector was stationed at the only entrance. A phalanx of armed deputy sheriffs swarmed the only site where provisional voters could cast a guaranteed ballot. The Columbus Dispatch confirmed an Election Day Free Press story that far fewer voting machines were present in predominantly black Democratic inner-city voting wards than in the recent primary election and the 2000 presidential election, with their lighter turnouts. The reduced number of machines caused voters to wait up to seven hours and wait an average of approximately three hours. One Republican Central Committee member told the Free Press that Damschroder held back as many as 2000 machines and dispersed many of the other machines to affluent suburbs in Franklin County.
# In rural Drake County, Kerry received 78 less votes than Al Gore in 2000, but Bush received 3000 more votes. Drake is the only county in Miami Valley where Kerry’s votes was less than Gore’s and where Bush’s vote rose dramatically.
Prior to the discovery of these irregularities, investigative reporter Greg Palast, who exposed the systematic disenfranchisement of Democratic voters in Florida in 2004, wrote an article entitled, “Kerry won.” Palast and numerous other observers point to the fact that the exit polls showed Kerry winning. Palast concludes that the exit polls were correct, but Kerry votes were far more likely to remain uncounted on election night.
Unofficial Ohio presidential results provided by the Secretary of State’s Office show 155,428 provisional ballots cast. Blackwell was all over the national news telling everyone who would listen that these ballots were randomly distributed and not disproportionately for Kerry. As former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani raved on national TV demanding Kerry’s concession, a basic analysis of the provisional ballots suggested that they were disproportionately for Kerry.
Historically, provisional ballots are far more likely to be cast by poor and minority voters, who live in the urban centers and move more often. Ohio has 88 counties, the vast majority of them rural. Kerry won 15 counties in Ohio, virtually all large urban centers. In those counties, 85,096 provisional ballots remain uncounted. Past elections point to the fact that these provisional ballots are hardly ever cast in the affluent, primarily Republican municipalities, but are overwhelmingly from the central city. Also, an additional 17,038 provisional ballots are from Hamilton County and Wood County. Bush won Hamilton with 53% of the vote and Wood County with 53.5%. Traditionally, the provisional ballots in Hamilton County come from Cincinnati and its poor central city areas. These are areas where John Kerry won handily on Election Day.
Thus, 102,134 of the provisional ballots, nearly two-thirds (65.7%) in all probability come from solidly pro-Kerry areas and are most likely cast by pro-Kerry supporters such as African Americans and the poor. These fit the same socio-economic demographics and racial profiles of voters targeted by the GOP for challenges in Ohio.
Palast also points to the 92,672 so-called “spoiled” ballots in Ohio that have yet to be counted, and may never be tallied. The most famous spoiled ballots were the 2004 Florida punch cards that could not be machine read, but when looked at manually the voter’s intent could be determined. Expert statisticians who investigated spoilage in the 2000 election in Florida found that 54% of these discarded ballots were cast by blacks. In Ohio, most of the spoiled votes were lost through punch card ballots in 2004.
By Blackwell directing county Boards of Elections not to count the provisional ballots for 11 days, it benefited the Bush campaign since an immediate counting would have no doubt made the race tigher between Kerry and Bush, and perhaps prompted Kerry to request a recount. This would have the 92,672 discarded "spoiled" ballots that were also likely to favor Kerry.
Daniel Tokaji, Professor of Law at the Ohio State University College of Law commented: "One other point. Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell has reportedly said that provisional ballots won't be counted for 11 days. I'm not sure where he's getting this, but he may be relying on ORC 3505.32. This statute provides that the boards of election are to begin canvassing election returns between 11 and 15 days after the election and ‘continue the canvass daily until it is completed.’ Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't see how this precludes provisional votes from being counted earlier than that, even if the canvass doesn't begin until the 11th day."
Spoiled ballots will only be counted if someone with standing, such as five Kerry electors or the Ohio Democratic Party, demands and legally qualifies for a recount. Thus, the exit polls may have been correct. A majority of people voted for Kerry in Ohio; but 250,000 votes were not counted, most favoring Kerry over Bush. If Kerry had won by even one vote in Ohio, he would be the next President of the United States.
Irregularities in other key battleground states have prompted three U.S. representatives to urgently request that the Comptroller General of the United States David Walker and the General Accounting Office “immediately undertake an investigation of the efficiency of voting machines and new technologies used in the 2004 election.” Tom Hartmann, in his post election article on CommonDreams.org (“Evidence mounts that the vote was hacked”), reminds readers that Bev Harris, who started blackboxvoting.org, showed Howard Dean how to hack a county “central tabulator” computer in 90 seconds live on CNBC.
The Diebold Corporation, which helped count the Ohio vote with e-voting machines and optical scan machines, is run by a notoriously pro-Republican CEO, Wally O’Dell. Last year O’Dell wrote a letter to Ohio Republican donors telling them that he is “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year.” O’Dell is a proud member of Bush’s Pioneer and Ranger team of major donors who visit the Crawford ranch. The other major election vote counting firm is ES&S, which is being investigated for allegedly having a machine that subtracted votes when the totals surpassed 32,000.
On Election Day, the Election Protection Coalition observers who covered 58 polling places in central Ohio, documented thousands of voter complaints over long lines and recorded numerous people leaving the polls for work or because they were elderly or handicapped and physically unable to wait for hours to vote. Professor James K. Galbraith, of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin, wrote the following summary of Election Day in Ohio: “. . . I drove a young African-American voter, a charming business student, seven months pregnant, to her polling place at Finland Elementary School in south Columbus. We arrived in a squalling rain to find voters lined up outside for about a hundred yards. . . . The real problem was a grotesque shortage of voting machines.”
Ohio State University Law Professor Edward B. Foley told the New York Times, “When your lines get to two or three hours, it’s system failure.”
Other bizarre tactics emerged in the run-up to the election:
# Under an archaic Ohio law, both the Republican and Democratic Parties, or any slate of five candidates, may embed official election challengers inside polling places. The New York Times reported on Oct. 23 that the Republican Party intended to place thousands of lawyers and other GOP faithfuls inside the polls to challenge voters. Republican insiders confide here that the key goal was to jam lines and frustrate new voters. After two federal judges rejected the GOP challengers, Republicans got a favorable ruling from the Sixth Circuit, which allowed them to place challengers in Ohio polling places. Michael Beaver, Deputy State Commander with the Election Protection Coalition says, “We now believe that the challengers were a smokescreen to hide the real plan to orchestrate a machine shortage in Democratic wards.”
# The Republican Party sent letters challenging thousands of Franklin County registered voters who requested absentee ballots. Franklin County is home to Columbus, the state's largest city and its capitol. Though it is also home to Ohio State University, thousands of local students go to schools outside the county or state. The GOP targeted young voters for challenges. The GOP pre-challenged an estimated 35,000 voters and rented arenas in Cleveland and Columbus to conduct the challenges. The GOP sent registered letters to registered voters’ addresses and when they failed to pick up a letter from the Republican Party in primarily Democratic areas, they were challenged for fraud. A federal judge disallowed the challenges less than a week before the election.
# The Franklin County Board of Elections has called or written an undetermined number of voters who obtained absentee ballots, challenging their addresses. In at least one case, after a series of angry phone calls, the Board admitted there was nothing wrong with the address in question and re-instated voting rights. The voter in question was a registered Democrat. His wife, an independent at the same address, was not challenged. It is unclear how many others have been wrongly knocked out.
# Even if they are counted, Franklin County's absentee ballot forms are designed in ways strikingly reminiscent of those notorious butterfly ballots in the Florida 2000 presidential election. On Franklin County absentee ballot forms, Kerry is the third name on the list of presidential candidates on the left side of the ballot. But, the punch card is designed to fit in the middle, so the actual number you punch for Kerry is hole "4." If you mistakenly punch hole "3" you've just voted for Bush.
# Damschroder, Franklin County's right-wing Elections Director is insisting on e-voting machines that have malfunctioned in at least two Congressional elections. The machines have no paper trail and one subtracted 3% from former Rep. John Kasich’s and added 3% to Ed Brown, a six-point shift. The November issues of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics Magazines ran the following headlines on their covers, respectively: "E-vote emergency: And you thought dimpled chads were bad'" and "Could hackers tilt the election?" Vigorous protests against the paperless machines have been staged here, but many will be used, rendering a meaningful recount impossible.
# Twenty GOP-dominated Ohio counties have given wrong information to former felons about their voter eligibility. In Hamilton County, home of Cincinnati and the Republican Taft family, officials told numerous former felons that a judge had to sign off before they could vote, which is blatantly false.
# Franklin County, which normally cancels 2-300 registered voters a year for felony convictions, has sent at least 3,500 cancellation letters to both current felons and ex-felons whose convictions date back to 1998. The list includes numerous citizens who were charged with felonies but convicted only of misdemeanors.
# Republican Secretary of State Blackwell reversed a long-standing Ohio practice and is barring voters from casting provisional ballots within their county if they are registered to vote but there's been a mistake about where they are expected to cast their ballot. In this year's spring primaries, Blackwell allowed voters to cast provisional ballots by county, even if they were in the wrong precinct. But this fall, voters had to leave if they were in the wrong precinct and find their way to the right one even though they had waited in line two to three hours. Blackwell hopes to succeed Republican Bob Taft as governor, and has labored hard to install Diebold e-voting machines with no paper trail throughout Ohio. Blackwell is being widely compared to the infamous Katherine Harris, who handed Florida to George W. Bush in 2000 and was rewarded with a safe Congressional seat. Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones accused Blackwell of seeking “to disenfranchise the people of the state of Ohio.” Tubbs Jones pointed out that the 2000 census had caused massive redistricting, particularly within inner city precincts, which would lead to many people ending up at the wrong voting site.
# The October 22 Columbus Dispatch, which endorsed Bush, and WVKO Radio have both documented phone calls from people impersonating Franklin County Board of Elections workers and directing registered voters to different and incorrect polling sites. One individual was falsely told not to vote at the polling station across the street from his house, but at a "new" site, four miles away. Under Blackwell's new rules, such a vote would not be counted. Nor do the precinct locations make much sense in the inner city. Someone living on the northwest corner of Bryden and Wilson, instead of walking half a block to the polling site at Franklin Alternative School, must vote seven blocks northeast at the Model Neighborhood facility polling site. The previous polling site for the precinct was two blocks west before the Republicans consolidated several inner city polling places in the 1990s.
# In Cincinnati, some 105,000 voters were moved from active to inactive status within the last four years for not voting in the last two federal elections. This is not required under Ohio law, but is an option allowed and exercised by the Republican-dominated Hamilton County Board of Elections.
# Secretary of State Blackwell ruled that any voter registration form on other than 80-pound weight bond paper would not be accepted. This is an old law left over from pre-scanning days. Many voters who had registered on lighter paper, had their registration returned, even though the forms had been officially sanctioned by local election boards.
# On Election Day, fliers littered the inner city telling voters that Republicans were to vote on Tuesday and Democrats on Wednesday.
No Republican has ever won the presidency without carrying Ohio. The voting irregularities suggest that Bush is the first Republican President to win the presidency without winning the actual Ohio vote. Kerry won the vote in Ohio. The exit polls are correct. The mainstream media, instead of investigating the massive irregularities, are busy concocting theories as to how all the exit polls, the safeguards for fair elections, were all wrong on election night in the Buckeye State. None dare suggest voter suppression and fraud.
--
Bob Fitrakis is a Professor in the Social and Behavioral Sciences Department at Columbus State Community College. He has a Ph.D in Political Science and a J.D. from The Ohio State University Law School. He is the author of seven books, an investigative reporter, and Editor of the Columbus Free Press (freepress.org). He has won ten major investigative journalism awards including Best Coverage of Politics in Ohio from the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists. He served as an international election observer in the 1994 presidential elections in El Salvador and was the co-author and editor of the report to the United Nations. He served as legal advisor for eight polling locations on Columbus' Near East Side for the Election Protection Coalition.
"
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/983
"
Bob Fitrakis
None dare call it voter suppression and fraud
November 7, 2004
Evidence is mounting that the 2004 presidential election was stolen in Ohio. Emerging revelations of voting irregularities coupled with well-documented Republican efforts at voter suppression prior to the election suggests that in a fair election Kerry would have won Ohio.
Democratic hopeful Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts conceded on November 3, based on preliminary postings by the highly partisan Republican Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. These unofficial results showed Bush with 136,483 more votes than Kerry, although 155,428 provisional ballots, 92,672 “spoiled” ballots, additional overseas ballots, and some remaining absentee ballots remained uncounted.
The day after his concession, Kerry drew 3,893 votes closer to Bush when a computerized voting machine “glitch” was discovered in an Ohio precinct. A machine in ward 1B in the predominantly Republican Gahanna, Ohio, recorded 4,258 votes for George W. Bush when only 638 people cast votes at the New Life Church polling site. Buried on page A6 of the Columbus Dispatch, the story also reported that the voting machine recorded 0 votes in a race between Franklin County Commissioners Arlene Shoemaker and Paula Brooks. Franklin County Board of Elections Director Matt Damschroder told the Dispatch that the voting machine glitches were “why the results on election night are unofficial.”
The right-wing New Life Church voting glitch is interesting. Free Press reporter Marley Greiner has been tracking Blackwell’s relationship with far right-wing religious forces like Biblical America and Christian dominionist groups that want to establish theocratic religious rule in America. Blackwell was campaigning around the state with the Reverend Rod Parsley as part of a “Silent No More” tour in support of amending the Ohio Constitution to outlaw gay marriage, on the ballot as Issue One. Many mainstream commentators claim it was the widely popular Issue One amendment campaign that brought out Bush voters in record numbers in rural Ohio. Gay marriage was already outlawed by state statute, and six of the seven Ohio Supreme Court justices are Republicans.
The nonpartisan Citizen’s Alliance for Secure Elections (CASE) is investigating various other voting irregularities in Ohio, among them:
# In Auglaize County, a letter dated October 21 under the signature of Ken Nuss, the county’s former deputy director, alleges that Joe McGinnis, a former employee of Election Systems & Software (ES&S), violated election protocol with his unauthorized use of the county’s central tabulating computer that creates ballots and compiles election results. Nuss, who resigned on October 21, alleges that McGinnis was improperly granted access to the computer the weekend of October 16.
# In Miami County, with 100% of the precincts reporting at 9am EST Wednesday, Nov. 3, Bush had 20,807 votes (65.80%) and Kerry had 10,724 (33.92%). Miami reported 31,620 voters. Inexplicably, nearly 19,000 new ballots were added after all precincts reported, boosting Bush’s vote to 33,039 (65.77%) to Kerry’s 17,039 (33.92%). CASE is investigating why the percentage of the vote stayed exactly the same to three one-hundredths of a percentage point after nearly 19,000 new ballots were added. CASE members speculate that it’s either a long-shot coincidence with the last three digits remaining the same, or that someone had pre-set a database and programmed a voting machine to cough up a pre-set percentage of votes. Miami County uses an easily hackable optical scanner with the central counter provided by the Republican-linked vendor ES&S.
# In Warren County, administrators and election officials locked down the county administrative building and prohibited all independent election observers from watching the vote count. County officials cited “homeland security,” according to the Cincinnati Enquirer. WCPO-TV Channel 9 News Director Bob Morford told the Enquirer that he had “never seen anything like it.” Morford asserted that throwing the media and independent observers out of the centralized counting area under the guise of “homeland security” was a “red herring.” He said, “That’s something to put up when you don’t know what else to put up to keep us out.” In Warren County, Bush picked up an additional 12,000 votes over his 2000 election total.
# In Franklin County, where Franklin County Board of Elections Director Matt Damschroder is also the former Executive Director of the county’s Republican Party, the county Board of Elections building looked like a bunker. Scores of city buses blocked parking spaces on the street outside, numerous concrete barricades surrounded the parking lot, and a metal detector was stationed at the only entrance. A phalanx of armed deputy sheriffs swarmed the only site where provisional voters could cast a guaranteed ballot. The Columbus Dispatch confirmed an Election Day Free Press story that far fewer voting machines were present in predominantly black Democratic inner-city voting wards than in the recent primary election and the 2000 presidential election, with their lighter turnouts. The reduced number of machines caused voters to wait up to seven hours and wait an average of approximately three hours. One Republican Central Committee member told the Free Press that Damschroder held back as many as 2000 machines and dispersed many of the other machines to affluent suburbs in Franklin County.
# In rural Drake County, Kerry received 78 less votes than Al Gore in 2000, but Bush received 3000 more votes. Drake is the only county in Miami Valley where Kerry’s votes was less than Gore’s and where Bush’s vote rose dramatically.
Prior to the discovery of these irregularities, investigative reporter Greg Palast, who exposed the systematic disenfranchisement of Democratic voters in Florida in 2004, wrote an article entitled, “Kerry won.” Palast and numerous other observers point to the fact that the exit polls showed Kerry winning. Palast concludes that the exit polls were correct, but Kerry votes were far more likely to remain uncounted on election night.
Unofficial Ohio presidential results provided by the Secretary of State’s Office show 155,428 provisional ballots cast. Blackwell was all over the national news telling everyone who would listen that these ballots were randomly distributed and not disproportionately for Kerry. As former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani raved on national TV demanding Kerry’s concession, a basic analysis of the provisional ballots suggested that they were disproportionately for Kerry.
Historically, provisional ballots are far more likely to be cast by poor and minority voters, who live in the urban centers and move more often. Ohio has 88 counties, the vast majority of them rural. Kerry won 15 counties in Ohio, virtually all large urban centers. In those counties, 85,096 provisional ballots remain uncounted. Past elections point to the fact that these provisional ballots are hardly ever cast in the affluent, primarily Republican municipalities, but are overwhelmingly from the central city. Also, an additional 17,038 provisional ballots are from Hamilton County and Wood County. Bush won Hamilton with 53% of the vote and Wood County with 53.5%. Traditionally, the provisional ballots in Hamilton County come from Cincinnati and its poor central city areas. These are areas where John Kerry won handily on Election Day.
Thus, 102,134 of the provisional ballots, nearly two-thirds (65.7%) in all probability come from solidly pro-Kerry areas and are most likely cast by pro-Kerry supporters such as African Americans and the poor. These fit the same socio-economic demographics and racial profiles of voters targeted by the GOP for challenges in Ohio.
Palast also points to the 92,672 so-called “spoiled” ballots in Ohio that have yet to be counted, and may never be tallied. The most famous spoiled ballots were the 2004 Florida punch cards that could not be machine read, but when looked at manually the voter’s intent could be determined. Expert statisticians who investigated spoilage in the 2000 election in Florida found that 54% of these discarded ballots were cast by blacks. In Ohio, most of the spoiled votes were lost through punch card ballots in 2004.
By Blackwell directing county Boards of Elections not to count the provisional ballots for 11 days, it benefited the Bush campaign since an immediate counting would have no doubt made the race tigher between Kerry and Bush, and perhaps prompted Kerry to request a recount. This would have the 92,672 discarded "spoiled" ballots that were also likely to favor Kerry.
Daniel Tokaji, Professor of Law at the Ohio State University College of Law commented: "One other point. Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell has reportedly said that provisional ballots won't be counted for 11 days. I'm not sure where he's getting this, but he may be relying on ORC 3505.32. This statute provides that the boards of election are to begin canvassing election returns between 11 and 15 days after the election and ‘continue the canvass daily until it is completed.’ Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't see how this precludes provisional votes from being counted earlier than that, even if the canvass doesn't begin until the 11th day."
Spoiled ballots will only be counted if someone with standing, such as five Kerry electors or the Ohio Democratic Party, demands and legally qualifies for a recount. Thus, the exit polls may have been correct. A majority of people voted for Kerry in Ohio; but 250,000 votes were not counted, most favoring Kerry over Bush. If Kerry had won by even one vote in Ohio, he would be the next President of the United States.
Irregularities in other key battleground states have prompted three U.S. representatives to urgently request that the Comptroller General of the United States David Walker and the General Accounting Office “immediately undertake an investigation of the efficiency of voting machines and new technologies used in the 2004 election.” Tom Hartmann, in his post election article on CommonDreams.org (“Evidence mounts that the vote was hacked”), reminds readers that Bev Harris, who started blackboxvoting.org, showed Howard Dean how to hack a county “central tabulator” computer in 90 seconds live on CNBC.
The Diebold Corporation, which helped count the Ohio vote with e-voting machines and optical scan machines, is run by a notoriously pro-Republican CEO, Wally O’Dell. Last year O’Dell wrote a letter to Ohio Republican donors telling them that he is “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year.” O’Dell is a proud member of Bush’s Pioneer and Ranger team of major donors who visit the Crawford ranch. The other major election vote counting firm is ES&S, which is being investigated for allegedly having a machine that subtracted votes when the totals surpassed 32,000.
On Election Day, the Election Protection Coalition observers who covered 58 polling places in central Ohio, documented thousands of voter complaints over long lines and recorded numerous people leaving the polls for work or because they were elderly or handicapped and physically unable to wait for hours to vote. Professor James K. Galbraith, of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin, wrote the following summary of Election Day in Ohio: “. . . I drove a young African-American voter, a charming business student, seven months pregnant, to her polling place at Finland Elementary School in south Columbus. We arrived in a squalling rain to find voters lined up outside for about a hundred yards. . . . The real problem was a grotesque shortage of voting machines.”
Ohio State University Law Professor Edward B. Foley told the New York Times, “When your lines get to two or three hours, it’s system failure.”
Other bizarre tactics emerged in the run-up to the election:
# Under an archaic Ohio law, both the Republican and Democratic Parties, or any slate of five candidates, may embed official election challengers inside polling places. The New York Times reported on Oct. 23 that the Republican Party intended to place thousands of lawyers and other GOP faithfuls inside the polls to challenge voters. Republican insiders confide here that the key goal was to jam lines and frustrate new voters. After two federal judges rejected the GOP challengers, Republicans got a favorable ruling from the Sixth Circuit, which allowed them to place challengers in Ohio polling places. Michael Beaver, Deputy State Commander with the Election Protection Coalition says, “We now believe that the challengers were a smokescreen to hide the real plan to orchestrate a machine shortage in Democratic wards.”
# The Republican Party sent letters challenging thousands of Franklin County registered voters who requested absentee ballots. Franklin County is home to Columbus, the state's largest city and its capitol. Though it is also home to Ohio State University, thousands of local students go to schools outside the county or state. The GOP targeted young voters for challenges. The GOP pre-challenged an estimated 35,000 voters and rented arenas in Cleveland and Columbus to conduct the challenges. The GOP sent registered letters to registered voters’ addresses and when they failed to pick up a letter from the Republican Party in primarily Democratic areas, they were challenged for fraud. A federal judge disallowed the challenges less than a week before the election.
# The Franklin County Board of Elections has called or written an undetermined number of voters who obtained absentee ballots, challenging their addresses. In at least one case, after a series of angry phone calls, the Board admitted there was nothing wrong with the address in question and re-instated voting rights. The voter in question was a registered Democrat. His wife, an independent at the same address, was not challenged. It is unclear how many others have been wrongly knocked out.
# Even if they are counted, Franklin County's absentee ballot forms are designed in ways strikingly reminiscent of those notorious butterfly ballots in the Florida 2000 presidential election. On Franklin County absentee ballot forms, Kerry is the third name on the list of presidential candidates on the left side of the ballot. But, the punch card is designed to fit in the middle, so the actual number you punch for Kerry is hole "4." If you mistakenly punch hole "3" you've just voted for Bush.
# Damschroder, Franklin County's right-wing Elections Director is insisting on e-voting machines that have malfunctioned in at least two Congressional elections. The machines have no paper trail and one subtracted 3% from former Rep. John Kasich’s and added 3% to Ed Brown, a six-point shift. The November issues of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics Magazines ran the following headlines on their covers, respectively: "E-vote emergency: And you thought dimpled chads were bad'" and "Could hackers tilt the election?" Vigorous protests against the paperless machines have been staged here, but many will be used, rendering a meaningful recount impossible.
# Twenty GOP-dominated Ohio counties have given wrong information to former felons about their voter eligibility. In Hamilton County, home of Cincinnati and the Republican Taft family, officials told numerous former felons that a judge had to sign off before they could vote, which is blatantly false.
# Franklin County, which normally cancels 2-300 registered voters a year for felony convictions, has sent at least 3,500 cancellation letters to both current felons and ex-felons whose convictions date back to 1998. The list includes numerous citizens who were charged with felonies but convicted only of misdemeanors.
# Republican Secretary of State Blackwell reversed a long-standing Ohio practice and is barring voters from casting provisional ballots within their county if they are registered to vote but there's been a mistake about where they are expected to cast their ballot. In this year's spring primaries, Blackwell allowed voters to cast provisional ballots by county, even if they were in the wrong precinct. But this fall, voters had to leave if they were in the wrong precinct and find their way to the right one even though they had waited in line two to three hours. Blackwell hopes to succeed Republican Bob Taft as governor, and has labored hard to install Diebold e-voting machines with no paper trail throughout Ohio. Blackwell is being widely compared to the infamous Katherine Harris, who handed Florida to George W. Bush in 2000 and was rewarded with a safe Congressional seat. Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones accused Blackwell of seeking “to disenfranchise the people of the state of Ohio.” Tubbs Jones pointed out that the 2000 census had caused massive redistricting, particularly within inner city precincts, which would lead to many people ending up at the wrong voting site.
# The October 22 Columbus Dispatch, which endorsed Bush, and WVKO Radio have both documented phone calls from people impersonating Franklin County Board of Elections workers and directing registered voters to different and incorrect polling sites. One individual was falsely told not to vote at the polling station across the street from his house, but at a "new" site, four miles away. Under Blackwell's new rules, such a vote would not be counted. Nor do the precinct locations make much sense in the inner city. Someone living on the northwest corner of Bryden and Wilson, instead of walking half a block to the polling site at Franklin Alternative School, must vote seven blocks northeast at the Model Neighborhood facility polling site. The previous polling site for the precinct was two blocks west before the Republicans consolidated several inner city polling places in the 1990s.
# In Cincinnati, some 105,000 voters were moved from active to inactive status within the last four years for not voting in the last two federal elections. This is not required under Ohio law, but is an option allowed and exercised by the Republican-dominated Hamilton County Board of Elections.
# Secretary of State Blackwell ruled that any voter registration form on other than 80-pound weight bond paper would not be accepted. This is an old law left over from pre-scanning days. Many voters who had registered on lighter paper, had their registration returned, even though the forms had been officially sanctioned by local election boards.
# On Election Day, fliers littered the inner city telling voters that Republicans were to vote on Tuesday and Democrats on Wednesday.
No Republican has ever won the presidency without carrying Ohio. The voting irregularities suggest that Bush is the first Republican President to win the presidency without winning the actual Ohio vote. Kerry won the vote in Ohio. The exit polls are correct. The mainstream media, instead of investigating the massive irregularities, are busy concocting theories as to how all the exit polls, the safeguards for fair elections, were all wrong on election night in the Buckeye State. None dare suggest voter suppression and fraud.
--
Bob Fitrakis is a Professor in the Social and Behavioral Sciences Department at Columbus State Community College. He has a Ph.D in Political Science and a J.D. from The Ohio State University Law School. He is the author of seven books, an investigative reporter, and Editor of the Columbus Free Press (freepress.org). He has won ten major investigative journalism awards including Best Coverage of Politics in Ohio from the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists. He served as an international election observer in the 1994 presidential elections in El Salvador and was the co-author and editor of the report to the United Nations. He served as legal advisor for eight polling locations on Columbus' Near East Side for the Election Protection Coalition.
"
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/983
"Why do they Hate Us?"
On Election Day, I listened to Rush Limbaugh (Holding my nose) for a couple minutes. I can't listen for more than a couple minutes at a time because blatant lies generally anger me. He imitated a caller wondering "Why do they Hate Us", to which he replied "I don't CARE why they hate us", in his Fred Flinstone, wannabe dictator tone.
If you wonder "why do they hate us" there are some explanations in this book:
Available at
http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?isbn=1576753018
If you wonder "why do they hate us" there are some explanations in this book:
Available at
http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?isbn=1576753018
Sunday, November 07, 2004
Was the Election a Scam?
Let's find out!
On Election Day, Greg Palast (who wrote "The Best Democracy Money Can buy", which details the Florida felon-purge fiasco in the 2000 election) said that if this time the vote came within 3 percentage points, "Call the Cops". It's time.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
This organization was instrumental in exposing offshore ownership of some of our voting technology, the vulnerability of much of it, and the blatant conflict of interest concerning Diebold, Inc. and Ohio. Before the election.
As we speak, Black Box Voting is conducting the "most massive Freedom of Information action in history".
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
Remember Watergate? I would volunteer that the stakes are somewhat higher today.
On Election Day, Greg Palast (who wrote "The Best Democracy Money Can buy", which details the Florida felon-purge fiasco in the 2000 election) said that if this time the vote came within 3 percentage points, "Call the Cops". It's time.
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
This organization was instrumental in exposing offshore ownership of some of our voting technology, the vulnerability of much of it, and the blatant conflict of interest concerning Diebold, Inc. and Ohio. Before the election.
As we speak, Black Box Voting is conducting the "most massive Freedom of Information action in history".
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
Remember Watergate? I would volunteer that the stakes are somewhat higher today.
Bush, Rove, Schwarzenneger Nazi association
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1006-08.htm
"
George W. Bush's grandfather helped finance the Nazi Party. Karl Rove's grandfather allegedly helped run the Nazi Party, and helped build the Birkenau Death Camp. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Austrian father volunteered for the infamous Nazi SA and became a ranking officer.
"
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1006-08.htm
"
George W. Bush's grandfather helped finance the Nazi Party. Karl Rove's grandfather allegedly helped run the Nazi Party, and helped build the Birkenau Death Camp. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Austrian father volunteered for the infamous Nazi SA and became a ranking officer.
"
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1006-08.htm
Friday, November 05, 2004
These folks helped during the McCarthy era Too:
"The re-election of George W. Bush, whose administration has shown a profound
disregard for fundamental rights, means our work is now more essential than ever.
The fact is, without a vigorous, spirited movement for freedom, their
unrelenting assault on civil liberties could change the face of our democracy."
I strongly urge you to join the ACLU.
disregard for fundamental rights, means our work is now more essential than ever.
The fact is, without a vigorous, spirited movement for freedom, their
unrelenting assault on civil liberties could change the face of our democracy."
I strongly urge you to join the ACLU.
Wednesday, November 03, 2004
You Get what They Paid For
The republic is sick. It has devolved into empire, and now theocracy, just like Rome did.
We expected Ohio to go wrong since the CEO of Diebold, inc. said he'd hand the Ohio vote to Bush.
We expected things like the computer-bug in Florida electronic voting machines yesterday, that made it necessary for some voters to select Kerry repeatedly to override an apparently erroneous resulting Bush vote (then walk away without a reciept). We suspect that many Bush votes likely resulted from that alone, thus in part explaining huge differences in official election results,from the exit polls.
We sensed a faint odor when such progressives as Ralph Nader, Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton were effectively neutralized and silenced.
So now, You get the manufactured consent that the moneyed interests paid for.
My God, help us.
In the future, My God willing, there will be a standardized, voter-reconcilable elections system.
In the future, My God willing, there will be a de-corporatization of all political parties through the complete prohibition of private campaign finance.
In the future, My God willing, our Press will be returned to the service of the public good, as determined by an effective FCC, monitored and controlled by a legislative branch once again truly representative of the people of the United States.
In the future, My God willing, there will be myriads of investigative journalists like Greg Palast, Michael Moore, Seymour Hersh and Amy Goodman, to shine the light of truth and scatter or destroy the vermin of corruption and injustice.
In the future, My God willing, no longer will lying, cheating and stealing be the accepted means for securing power and influence over others; and that benevolence will prevail.
We respectfully ask our President and Commander in Chief, our senators and representatives, and our judges, to honor their oaths of office and thus preserve justice, liberty, and the Constitution of the United States.
We expected Ohio to go wrong since the CEO of Diebold, inc. said he'd hand the Ohio vote to Bush.
We expected things like the computer-bug in Florida electronic voting machines yesterday, that made it necessary for some voters to select Kerry repeatedly to override an apparently erroneous resulting Bush vote (then walk away without a reciept). We suspect that many Bush votes likely resulted from that alone, thus in part explaining huge differences in official election results,from the exit polls.
We sensed a faint odor when such progressives as Ralph Nader, Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton were effectively neutralized and silenced.
So now, You get the manufactured consent that the moneyed interests paid for.
My God, help us.
In the future, My God willing, there will be a standardized, voter-reconcilable elections system.
In the future, My God willing, there will be a de-corporatization of all political parties through the complete prohibition of private campaign finance.
In the future, My God willing, our Press will be returned to the service of the public good, as determined by an effective FCC, monitored and controlled by a legislative branch once again truly representative of the people of the United States.
In the future, My God willing, there will be myriads of investigative journalists like Greg Palast, Michael Moore, Seymour Hersh and Amy Goodman, to shine the light of truth and scatter or destroy the vermin of corruption and injustice.
In the future, My God willing, no longer will lying, cheating and stealing be the accepted means for securing power and influence over others; and that benevolence will prevail.
We respectfully ask our President and Commander in Chief, our senators and representatives, and our judges, to honor their oaths of office and thus preserve justice, liberty, and the Constitution of the United States.
Thursday, October 21, 2004
America is Liberal
"As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality."
-- George Washington
-- George Washington
Wednesday, October 20, 2004
"Fascism is again rising in America, this time calling itself "compassionate conservatism."
from http://boards.historychannel.com/threadedout.jsp?forum=30048&thread=300021037
"
The Ghost of Vice President Wallace Warns: "It Can Happen Here"
by Thom Hartmann
The Republican National Committee has recently removed from the top-level pages of their website an advertisement interspersing Hitler's face with those of John Kerry and other prominent Democrats. This little-heralded step has freed former Enron lobbyist and current RNC chairman Ed Gillespie to resume his attacks on Americans who believe some provisions of Bush's PATRIOT Act, his detention of American citizens without charges, his willingness to let corporations write legislation, and the so-called "Free Speech Zones" around his public appearances are all steps on the road to American fascism.
The RNC's feeble attempt to equate Hitler and Democrats was short-lived, but it brings to mind the first American Vice President to point out the "American fascists" among us.
Although most Americans remember that Harry Truman was Franklin D. Roosevelt's Vice President when Roosevelt died in 1945 (making Truman President), Roosevelt had two previous Vice Presidents - John N. Garner (1933-1941) and Henry A. Wallace (1941-1945). In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, "write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?"
Vice President Wallace's answer to those questions was published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan.
"The really dangerous American fascists," Wallace wrote, "are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."
In this, Wallace was using the classic definition of the word "fascist" - the definition Mussolini had in mind when he claimed to have invented the word. (It was actually Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile who wrote the entry in the Encyclopedia Italiana that said: "Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." Mussolini, however, affixed his name to the entry, and claimed credit for it.)
As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is: "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."
Mussolini was quite straightforward about all this. In a 1923 pamphlet titled "The Doctrine of Fascism" he wrote, "If classical liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells government." But not a government of, by, and for We The People - instead, it would be a government of, by, and for the most powerful corporate interests in the nation.
In 1938, Mussolini brought his vision of fascism into full reality when he dissolved Parliament and replaced it with the "Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni" - the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations. Corporations were still privately owned, but now instead of having to sneak their money to folks like Tom DeLay and covertly write legislation, they were openly in charge of the government.
Vice President Wallace bluntly laid out in his 1944 Times article his concern about the same happening here in America:
" If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. ... They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead."
Nonetheless, at that time there were few corporate heads who had run for political office, and, in Wallace's view, most politicians still felt it was their obligation to represent We The People instead of corporate cartels. "American fascism will not be really dangerous," he added in the next paragraph, "until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information..."
Noting that, "Fascism is a worldwide disease," Wallace further suggest that fascism's "greatest threat to the United States will come after the war" and will manifest "within the United States itself."
In Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here," a conservative southern politician is helped to the presidency by a nationally syndicated radio talk show host. The politician - Buzz Windrip - runs his campaign on family values, the flag, and patriotism. Windrip and the talk show host portray advocates of traditional American democracy as anti-American. When Windrip becomes President, he opens a Guantanamo-style detention center, and the viewpoint character of the book, Vermont newspaper editor Doremus Jessup, flees to Canada to avoid prosecution under new "patriotic" laws that make it illegal to criticize the President.
As Lewis noted in his novel, "the President, with something of his former good-humor [said]: 'There are two [political] parties, the Corporate and those who don't belong to any party at all, and so, to use a common phrase, are just out of luck!' The idea of the Corporate or Corporative State, Secretary [of State] Sarason had more or less taken from Italy." And, President "Windrip's partisans called themselves the Corporatists, or, familiarly, the 'Corpos,' which nickname was generally used."
Lewis, the first American writer to win a Nobel Prize, was world famous by 1944, as was his book "It Can't Happen Here." And several well-known and powerful Americans, including Prescott Bush, had lost businesses in the early 1940s because of charges by Roosevelt that they were doing business with Hitler. These events all, no doubt, colored Vice President Wallace's thinking when he wrote:
" Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after 'the present unpleasantness' ceases."
Fascists have an agenda that is primarily economic. As the Free Dictionary (www.thefreedictionary.com) notes, fascism/corporatism is "an attempt to create a 'modern' version of feudalism by merging the 'corporate' interests with those of the state."
Feudalism, of course, is one of the most stable of the three historic tyrannies (kingdoms, theocracies, feudalism) that ruled nations prior to the rise of American republican democracy, and can be roughly defined as "rule by the rich."
Thus, the neo-feudal/fascistic rich get richer (and more powerful) on the backs of the poor and the middle class, an irony not lost on author Thomas Frank, who notes in his new book "What's The Matter With Kansas" that, "You can see the paradox first-hand on nearly any Main Street in middle America - 'going out of business' signs side by side with placards supporting George W. Bush."
The businesses "going out of business" are, in fascist administrations, usually those of locally owned small and medium-sized companies. As Wallace wrote, some in big business "are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage." He added, "Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise [companies]. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself."
But American fascists who would want former CEOs as President, Vice President, House Majority Whip, and Senate Majority Leader, and write legislation with corporate interests in mind, don't generally talk to We The People about their real agenda, or the harm it does to small businesses and working people. Instead, as Hitler did with the trade union leaders and the Jews, they point to a "them" to pin with blame and distract people from the harms of their economic policies.
In a comment prescient of George W. Bush's recent suggestion that civilization itself is at risk because of gays, Wallace continued:
" The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination..."
But even at this, Wallace noted, American fascists would have to lie to the people in order to gain power. And, because they were in bed with the nation's largest corporations - who could gain control of newspapers and broadcast media - they could promote their lies with ease.
"The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact," Wallace wrote. "Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy."
In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism the Vice President of the United States saw rising in America, he added, "They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."
Finally, Wallace said, "The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people. ... Democracy, to crush fascism internally, must...develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels."
This liberal vision of an egalitarian America in which very large businesses and media monopolies are broken up under the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act (which Reagan stopped enforcing, leading to the mergers & acquisitions frenzy that continues to this day) was the driving vision of the New Deal (and of "Trust Buster" Teddy Roosevelt a generation earlier).
As Wallace's President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said when he accepted his party's renomination in 1936 in Philadelphia, "...out of this modern civilization, economic royalists [have] carved new dynasties.... It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction.... And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man...."
Speaking indirectly of the fascists that Wallace would directly name almost a decade later, Roosevelt brought the issue to its core: "These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power."
But, he thundered in that speech, "Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!"
In 2004, we again stand at the same crossroad Roosevelt and Wallace confronted during the Great Depression and World War II. Fascism is again rising in America, this time calling itself "compassionate conservatism." The RNC's behavior today eerily parallels the day in 1936 when Roosevelt said, "In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for."
It's particularly ironic that the CEOs and lobbyists who run the Republican National Committee would have chosen to put Hitler's fascist face into one of their campaign commercials, just before they launched a national campaign against gays and while they continue to arrest people who wear anti-Bush T-shirts in public places.
President Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace's warnings have come full circle. Which is why it's so critical that this November we join together at the ballot box to stop this most recent incarnation of feudal fascism from seizing complete control of our nation.
"
from http://boards.historychannel.com/threadedout.jsp?forum=30048&thread=300021037
"
The Ghost of Vice President Wallace Warns: "It Can Happen Here"
by Thom Hartmann
The Republican National Committee has recently removed from the top-level pages of their website an advertisement interspersing Hitler's face with those of John Kerry and other prominent Democrats. This little-heralded step has freed former Enron lobbyist and current RNC chairman Ed Gillespie to resume his attacks on Americans who believe some provisions of Bush's PATRIOT Act, his detention of American citizens without charges, his willingness to let corporations write legislation, and the so-called "Free Speech Zones" around his public appearances are all steps on the road to American fascism.
The RNC's feeble attempt to equate Hitler and Democrats was short-lived, but it brings to mind the first American Vice President to point out the "American fascists" among us.
Although most Americans remember that Harry Truman was Franklin D. Roosevelt's Vice President when Roosevelt died in 1945 (making Truman President), Roosevelt had two previous Vice Presidents - John N. Garner (1933-1941) and Henry A. Wallace (1941-1945). In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, "write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?"
Vice President Wallace's answer to those questions was published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan.
"The really dangerous American fascists," Wallace wrote, "are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."
In this, Wallace was using the classic definition of the word "fascist" - the definition Mussolini had in mind when he claimed to have invented the word. (It was actually Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile who wrote the entry in the Encyclopedia Italiana that said: "Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." Mussolini, however, affixed his name to the entry, and claimed credit for it.)
As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is: "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."
Mussolini was quite straightforward about all this. In a 1923 pamphlet titled "The Doctrine of Fascism" he wrote, "If classical liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells government." But not a government of, by, and for We The People - instead, it would be a government of, by, and for the most powerful corporate interests in the nation.
In 1938, Mussolini brought his vision of fascism into full reality when he dissolved Parliament and replaced it with the "Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni" - the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations. Corporations were still privately owned, but now instead of having to sneak their money to folks like Tom DeLay and covertly write legislation, they were openly in charge of the government.
Vice President Wallace bluntly laid out in his 1944 Times article his concern about the same happening here in America:
" If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. ... They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead."
Nonetheless, at that time there were few corporate heads who had run for political office, and, in Wallace's view, most politicians still felt it was their obligation to represent We The People instead of corporate cartels. "American fascism will not be really dangerous," he added in the next paragraph, "until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information..."
Noting that, "Fascism is a worldwide disease," Wallace further suggest that fascism's "greatest threat to the United States will come after the war" and will manifest "within the United States itself."
In Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here," a conservative southern politician is helped to the presidency by a nationally syndicated radio talk show host. The politician - Buzz Windrip - runs his campaign on family values, the flag, and patriotism. Windrip and the talk show host portray advocates of traditional American democracy as anti-American. When Windrip becomes President, he opens a Guantanamo-style detention center, and the viewpoint character of the book, Vermont newspaper editor Doremus Jessup, flees to Canada to avoid prosecution under new "patriotic" laws that make it illegal to criticize the President.
As Lewis noted in his novel, "the President, with something of his former good-humor [said]: 'There are two [political] parties, the Corporate and those who don't belong to any party at all, and so, to use a common phrase, are just out of luck!' The idea of the Corporate or Corporative State, Secretary [of State] Sarason had more or less taken from Italy." And, President "Windrip's partisans called themselves the Corporatists, or, familiarly, the 'Corpos,' which nickname was generally used."
Lewis, the first American writer to win a Nobel Prize, was world famous by 1944, as was his book "It Can't Happen Here." And several well-known and powerful Americans, including Prescott Bush, had lost businesses in the early 1940s because of charges by Roosevelt that they were doing business with Hitler. These events all, no doubt, colored Vice President Wallace's thinking when he wrote:
" Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after 'the present unpleasantness' ceases."
Fascists have an agenda that is primarily economic. As the Free Dictionary (www.thefreedictionary.com) notes, fascism/corporatism is "an attempt to create a 'modern' version of feudalism by merging the 'corporate' interests with those of the state."
Feudalism, of course, is one of the most stable of the three historic tyrannies (kingdoms, theocracies, feudalism) that ruled nations prior to the rise of American republican democracy, and can be roughly defined as "rule by the rich."
Thus, the neo-feudal/fascistic rich get richer (and more powerful) on the backs of the poor and the middle class, an irony not lost on author Thomas Frank, who notes in his new book "What's The Matter With Kansas" that, "You can see the paradox first-hand on nearly any Main Street in middle America - 'going out of business' signs side by side with placards supporting George W. Bush."
The businesses "going out of business" are, in fascist administrations, usually those of locally owned small and medium-sized companies. As Wallace wrote, some in big business "are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage." He added, "Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise [companies]. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself."
But American fascists who would want former CEOs as President, Vice President, House Majority Whip, and Senate Majority Leader, and write legislation with corporate interests in mind, don't generally talk to We The People about their real agenda, or the harm it does to small businesses and working people. Instead, as Hitler did with the trade union leaders and the Jews, they point to a "them" to pin with blame and distract people from the harms of their economic policies.
In a comment prescient of George W. Bush's recent suggestion that civilization itself is at risk because of gays, Wallace continued:
" The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination..."
But even at this, Wallace noted, American fascists would have to lie to the people in order to gain power. And, because they were in bed with the nation's largest corporations - who could gain control of newspapers and broadcast media - they could promote their lies with ease.
"The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact," Wallace wrote. "Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy."
In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism the Vice President of the United States saw rising in America, he added, "They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."
Finally, Wallace said, "The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people. ... Democracy, to crush fascism internally, must...develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels."
This liberal vision of an egalitarian America in which very large businesses and media monopolies are broken up under the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act (which Reagan stopped enforcing, leading to the mergers & acquisitions frenzy that continues to this day) was the driving vision of the New Deal (and of "Trust Buster" Teddy Roosevelt a generation earlier).
As Wallace's President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said when he accepted his party's renomination in 1936 in Philadelphia, "...out of this modern civilization, economic royalists [have] carved new dynasties.... It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction.... And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man...."
Speaking indirectly of the fascists that Wallace would directly name almost a decade later, Roosevelt brought the issue to its core: "These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power."
But, he thundered in that speech, "Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power!"
In 2004, we again stand at the same crossroad Roosevelt and Wallace confronted during the Great Depression and World War II. Fascism is again rising in America, this time calling itself "compassionate conservatism." The RNC's behavior today eerily parallels the day in 1936 when Roosevelt said, "In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for."
It's particularly ironic that the CEOs and lobbyists who run the Republican National Committee would have chosen to put Hitler's fascist face into one of their campaign commercials, just before they launched a national campaign against gays and while they continue to arrest people who wear anti-Bush T-shirts in public places.
President Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace's warnings have come full circle. Which is why it's so critical that this November we join together at the ballot box to stop this most recent incarnation of feudal fascism from seizing complete control of our nation.
"
from http://boards.historychannel.com/threadedout.jsp?forum=30048&thread=300021037
Thursday, October 14, 2004
Kerry 4, Bush 0
John Kerry looks like our next president. We need a man of integrity and ability. He is that man.
It was easy to see that George Bush had been heavily schooled prior to this last debate. No more rants, no more scowls (although I caught him winking and silently clowning with someone in the audience a couple of times. Boys will be boys, I guess).
I think that it was revealing when Bush blamed the failings of our healthcare system on litigation. He and his supporters want to limit our ability to achieve justice in court. This is a continuation of the Bush Administration's attack on our judicial system.
When Bush again addressed Kerry's various plans with the old "How do you intend to pay for it" attack, I couldn't help thinking of the gargantuan defecit and debt this administration has racked up, and I again noticed that feeling as though we've been robbed. This is the same feeling he evokes when he winks at some deep-pocketed cohort in the audience. It's the same feeling he evokes when he gets that look on his face that seems to say, "I stole from you and there's nothing you can do about it." Yeah, like Tony Soprano the gangster.
Healthy people will strengthen America. Kerry's "take it or leave it" health strategy is long overdue in this country.
Civil rights, equal opportunity and the preservation of personal liberties are key elements of the freedom we all hold sacred. I was left, again, with the conclusion that under George W. Bush these things are severely threatened; and that under John Kerry these defining American qualities will be better protected. The fact that Bush has not talked with the NAACP is symbolic. Bush would roll back what little progress we've made with regard to civil rights. He's already doing it through his upward redistribution of wealth through tax cuts for the top 1% of incomes in the country, effectively further broadening the gap between rich and poor and weakening the middle class.
Kerry's emphasis on fiscal responsibility is a trait real republicans used to have too.
I don't like Bush's plan to let young people take their social security money and give it to private interests. That would be the end of Social Security. Carving up the government of the people and selling it off doesn't work with money or with public natural resources like parks and wildlife preserves. It is theft.
I think Bush's undoing of the assault weapons ban is a way to get more prisoners in our legal system, a way to justify the further militarization of our police; both of which will accelerate America's decline into police-statehood.
Kerry's plan to achieve a "fair playing field" in business is encouraging. There is a lot we can do to get this, and I am encouraged in what I see that John Kerry can do it. Not subsidizing job-loss (moving them overseas) is an excellent first step. A hiring credit is another excellent idea.
I think that when Bush talks of government being out of line when telling "citizens how to live their lives", he's trying to create a phantom; and he's blowing a smokescreen over the patriot act and his fundamentalist religious agenda, including his interference with stem-cell research, and his attacks on womens' choice and states' marriage rights. I agree with John Kerry that "faith must not be legislated". It's smart to keep churches of any kind out of government, and it's part of what defines America.
When George Bush described a "culture of life", I wondered how this applied to Iraq, Guantonimo Bay and Abu Graib, the increasing hate-crimes against and mass deportations of hispanics and middle-eastern Americans, when he said it.
Bush's further mentions of "Legal Reform" were extended to product liability this evening. Not just healthcare. Corporate neo-conservative special-interests have wanted this for years. Beware.
Kerry was believable again when he stressed that partisan bickering should never interfere with reason. His history of cooperation with republicans such as John McCain is proof of this.
George Bush mentioned McCain-Feingold (campaign finance reform), in answer to Kerry's emphasis on the need for clean elections. What he didn't mention was that he grudgingly signed that bill, almost in secret, and that he virtually disabled it in its application, in his FEC.
I think Kerry could have said more on the elections issue, especially when Bush mentioned the 2000 election debacle. Watch Ohio this time around.
It comes down to integrity and credibility. Regarding these, again, Kerry won the debate hands-down.
When John Kerry prepared to give his closing statement, I caught myself silently prompting him, "My fellow Americans"; and he started with that.
As he should.
It was easy to see that George Bush had been heavily schooled prior to this last debate. No more rants, no more scowls (although I caught him winking and silently clowning with someone in the audience a couple of times. Boys will be boys, I guess).
I think that it was revealing when Bush blamed the failings of our healthcare system on litigation. He and his supporters want to limit our ability to achieve justice in court. This is a continuation of the Bush Administration's attack on our judicial system.
When Bush again addressed Kerry's various plans with the old "How do you intend to pay for it" attack, I couldn't help thinking of the gargantuan defecit and debt this administration has racked up, and I again noticed that feeling as though we've been robbed. This is the same feeling he evokes when he winks at some deep-pocketed cohort in the audience. It's the same feeling he evokes when he gets that look on his face that seems to say, "I stole from you and there's nothing you can do about it." Yeah, like Tony Soprano the gangster.
Healthy people will strengthen America. Kerry's "take it or leave it" health strategy is long overdue in this country.
Civil rights, equal opportunity and the preservation of personal liberties are key elements of the freedom we all hold sacred. I was left, again, with the conclusion that under George W. Bush these things are severely threatened; and that under John Kerry these defining American qualities will be better protected. The fact that Bush has not talked with the NAACP is symbolic. Bush would roll back what little progress we've made with regard to civil rights. He's already doing it through his upward redistribution of wealth through tax cuts for the top 1% of incomes in the country, effectively further broadening the gap between rich and poor and weakening the middle class.
Kerry's emphasis on fiscal responsibility is a trait real republicans used to have too.
I don't like Bush's plan to let young people take their social security money and give it to private interests. That would be the end of Social Security. Carving up the government of the people and selling it off doesn't work with money or with public natural resources like parks and wildlife preserves. It is theft.
I think Bush's undoing of the assault weapons ban is a way to get more prisoners in our legal system, a way to justify the further militarization of our police; both of which will accelerate America's decline into police-statehood.
Kerry's plan to achieve a "fair playing field" in business is encouraging. There is a lot we can do to get this, and I am encouraged in what I see that John Kerry can do it. Not subsidizing job-loss (moving them overseas) is an excellent first step. A hiring credit is another excellent idea.
I think that when Bush talks of government being out of line when telling "citizens how to live their lives", he's trying to create a phantom; and he's blowing a smokescreen over the patriot act and his fundamentalist religious agenda, including his interference with stem-cell research, and his attacks on womens' choice and states' marriage rights. I agree with John Kerry that "faith must not be legislated". It's smart to keep churches of any kind out of government, and it's part of what defines America.
When George Bush described a "culture of life", I wondered how this applied to Iraq, Guantonimo Bay and Abu Graib, the increasing hate-crimes against and mass deportations of hispanics and middle-eastern Americans, when he said it.
Bush's further mentions of "Legal Reform" were extended to product liability this evening. Not just healthcare. Corporate neo-conservative special-interests have wanted this for years. Beware.
Kerry was believable again when he stressed that partisan bickering should never interfere with reason. His history of cooperation with republicans such as John McCain is proof of this.
George Bush mentioned McCain-Feingold (campaign finance reform), in answer to Kerry's emphasis on the need for clean elections. What he didn't mention was that he grudgingly signed that bill, almost in secret, and that he virtually disabled it in its application, in his FEC.
I think Kerry could have said more on the elections issue, especially when Bush mentioned the 2000 election debacle. Watch Ohio this time around.
It comes down to integrity and credibility. Regarding these, again, Kerry won the debate hands-down.
When John Kerry prepared to give his closing statement, I caught myself silently prompting him, "My fellow Americans"; and he started with that.
As he should.
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
New John Kerry Movie
We just saw "Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry" here in Tampa Bay (we get community radio: www.wmnf.org). I highly recommend it. Anyone who sees this will gain a fuller understanding of the humanity, capability and righteousness of John Kerry, and a glimpse of what we could lose if ignorance prevails. A very up-beat, inspiring movie with a positive message. Ebert gives it 3 out of 4 stars (this picture is from Roger Ebert's site): 
Roger Ebert's review can be read here:http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041001/REVIEWS/409300303/1023
Roger Ebert's review can be read here:http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20041001/REVIEWS/409300303/1023
Saturday, October 09, 2004
Kerry 3, Bush 0
I’m a former noncommissioned officer from Tampa Bay. We get community radio. Kerry 3, Bush 0.
John Kerry deftly exposed that Bush is "ceding veto power" to an institution / "article of faith" when Bush says that "to destroy life to save life" is unethical with regard to frozen embryos, but Bush had no problem lying to the country to take us into an un-necessary, preemptive war. This outs Bush's Moral Minority membership. Read about MM's in "It Can't Happen Here" by Sinclair Lewis.
Bush again made divisive remarks about THE PEOPLE: one about blacks being property in the Dred Scott case. This reminded me of the first debate when he mentioned that some people are against Muslims. Some people don't bother to learn what civil rights and the constitution are about. It's easier if you have "Internets". And no, it's the Declaration if Independence, not the Constitution that says, "All men are created equal". But you have to show up for class to learn that kind of stuff.
I suspect that George Bush and his "flock" don't even know what "liberal" means. Look it up. Read what Martin Luther King had to say about liberals. I know the two "flockies" we have at work, out of fifty, don't even own computers. They don't like me to bring it up though. They don't trust "Internets" either. (Beware. This is a credible threat to sanity in this country this time. Ever see "Blue Collar TV"?).
Bush wants a runaway free-market. He wants heavy deregulation. That's how you get pollution, corruption, more poverty, crime and incarceration, and big market-corrections. Fiscal irresponsibility is how you get deficit spending greater in one term than in the rest of the entire history of the country. Oh, the deficit, bigger than 1776 to Reagan, is because a bubble popped? Big Bubble, huh? Deregulation and market fear of an upcoming warmonger radical right president causes corrections / "bubble pops". Need some gum?
Bush typically fell back on his patent strategy of lies, fear and intimidation, demonstrating his incompetence, getting upset when put on the spot. This incompetence is proof that corporate and fundamentalist lobbies with a compliant press have inflicted this current administration on us.
Fear is how corrupt national leaders take away the freedoms of the people. Like in Chili and Guatemala. And over there in Russia with Bush's buddy Putin. Patriot Act sneak and peek double-speak. Did Pinochet wear a military flight-sui-, er, uniform..?..yes, he did. You can run but you can't hide.
He gave a tax cut to his rich buddies instead of using the money on civil defense.
I think George wants to be a general now, even though he shirked his duty as a pilot, losing his flight status in a cushy rich-kid guard slot and wasting the flight training we paid for, in favor of youthful indiscretion when he was young. Meanwhile, John Kerry served honorably and then had the additional courage and righteousness to speak out against an unjust war as a civilian, after learning first hand how wrong it was.
Kerry looked like the next president. Kerry should BE the next president. Bush looked and acted like a kid who had been caught doing something wrong. That's because he is a kid who has been caught doing something wrong, stubborn in the face of reason. Well, he did one thing right. He quit drinking and drugs apparently. I can find you thirty guys in a meeting down the street with more clean time than he has. And they didn't have to join a "flock" to do it.
When an incompetent boss keeps messing up and "owning up to it", I know he's going to get canned soon.
Take somebody to the polls. Don't let up! Think of your kids!
And wash that "tort-reform" out of your mouths, please, both of you.. no oppression, thank you. Good judges and a better court-to-case ratio. Not tort-reform.
John Kerry deftly exposed that Bush is "ceding veto power" to an institution / "article of faith" when Bush says that "to destroy life to save life" is unethical with regard to frozen embryos, but Bush had no problem lying to the country to take us into an un-necessary, preemptive war. This outs Bush's Moral Minority membership. Read about MM's in "It Can't Happen Here" by Sinclair Lewis.
Bush again made divisive remarks about THE PEOPLE: one about blacks being property in the Dred Scott case. This reminded me of the first debate when he mentioned that some people are against Muslims. Some people don't bother to learn what civil rights and the constitution are about. It's easier if you have "Internets". And no, it's the Declaration if Independence, not the Constitution that says, "All men are created equal". But you have to show up for class to learn that kind of stuff.
I suspect that George Bush and his "flock" don't even know what "liberal" means. Look it up. Read what Martin Luther King had to say about liberals. I know the two "flockies" we have at work, out of fifty, don't even own computers. They don't like me to bring it up though. They don't trust "Internets" either. (Beware. This is a credible threat to sanity in this country this time. Ever see "Blue Collar TV"?).
Bush wants a runaway free-market. He wants heavy deregulation. That's how you get pollution, corruption, more poverty, crime and incarceration, and big market-corrections. Fiscal irresponsibility is how you get deficit spending greater in one term than in the rest of the entire history of the country. Oh, the deficit, bigger than 1776 to Reagan, is because a bubble popped? Big Bubble, huh? Deregulation and market fear of an upcoming warmonger radical right president causes corrections / "bubble pops". Need some gum?
Bush typically fell back on his patent strategy of lies, fear and intimidation, demonstrating his incompetence, getting upset when put on the spot. This incompetence is proof that corporate and fundamentalist lobbies with a compliant press have inflicted this current administration on us.
Fear is how corrupt national leaders take away the freedoms of the people. Like in Chili and Guatemala. And over there in Russia with Bush's buddy Putin. Patriot Act sneak and peek double-speak. Did Pinochet wear a military flight-sui-, er, uniform..?..yes, he did. You can run but you can't hide.
He gave a tax cut to his rich buddies instead of using the money on civil defense.
I think George wants to be a general now, even though he shirked his duty as a pilot, losing his flight status in a cushy rich-kid guard slot and wasting the flight training we paid for, in favor of youthful indiscretion when he was young. Meanwhile, John Kerry served honorably and then had the additional courage and righteousness to speak out against an unjust war as a civilian, after learning first hand how wrong it was.
Kerry looked like the next president. Kerry should BE the next president. Bush looked and acted like a kid who had been caught doing something wrong. That's because he is a kid who has been caught doing something wrong, stubborn in the face of reason. Well, he did one thing right. He quit drinking and drugs apparently. I can find you thirty guys in a meeting down the street with more clean time than he has. And they didn't have to join a "flock" to do it.
When an incompetent boss keeps messing up and "owning up to it", I know he's going to get canned soon.
Take somebody to the polls. Don't let up! Think of your kids!
And wash that "tort-reform" out of your mouths, please, both of you.. no oppression, thank you. Good judges and a better court-to-case ratio. Not tort-reform.
Wednesday, October 06, 2004
Kerry 2, Bush 0
Again, I sincerely hope a lot of people saw this vice-presidential debate. www.cspan.org will keep playing it for anyone who missed it.
Edwards was direct, consise and clear.
Cheney was cynical, impatient, negative and in total denial. He acted outraged or insulted whenever he was faced with something he knew he couldn't dispute, like the fact that Americans are carrying 90% of the weight in the "coalition" of occupation in Iraq. He carried all the earmarks of one who is used to managing through intimidation instead of reason. He has contributed in large measure to the ugly face-mask America has been forced to wear, in the name of greed.
Notice how Cheney avoided the Halliburton issue Twice. And the way he dodged the Tora Bora failure, in which we could have gotten Bin Laden had not he, Bush and Rumsfeld been so eager to leave there and go after the oil and "better targets" in Iraq instead. Instead of hardening our domestic defenses and seeking out the real threats overseas, Bush and Cheney have created a new menace altogether in Iraq. And killed over a thousand of our sons and daughters in the process.
And No talk whatsoever about Caspian Oil pipelines or Unocal or THREATS, just before 9/11. He said the halliburton issue was a smokescreen. Where there's smoke there's fire. I encourage everyone to enquire further. Bush and Cheney didn't even WANT a 9/11 commission looking into what happened. We should all wonder, WHY?!
Like Kerry, Edwards is working to bring out the truth. They will bring some desperately needed credibility, humanity and good sense back into our government. In the spirit of the late Paul Wellstone, bless him.
And remember equal rights? Yeah.. Remember that?
Iraq was not the terrorists' home. Bush and Cheney have turned it into one. For Oil; and they won't even say it.
Cheney and Bush are unashamedly lying to you. To me. If we let them get away with this, we are doomed to Cheney's "extraordinary measures" (I almost fell out of my chair when he said that) in the form of military aggression and domestic paramilitary policing that is Un-American. Like a company that makes deals with the enemy. Like Halliburton. Like Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam.
Not in our name. Kerry '04. For your freedom. For America.
If you accept their lies they will enslave you. Do you see now what might ensue if Cheney ever became president?
Talk to others. Change somebody's mind. Take them to the polls. We can fix this. This may well be the most important election in our lifetimes.
Edwards was direct, consise and clear.
Cheney was cynical, impatient, negative and in total denial. He acted outraged or insulted whenever he was faced with something he knew he couldn't dispute, like the fact that Americans are carrying 90% of the weight in the "coalition" of occupation in Iraq. He carried all the earmarks of one who is used to managing through intimidation instead of reason. He has contributed in large measure to the ugly face-mask America has been forced to wear, in the name of greed.
Notice how Cheney avoided the Halliburton issue Twice. And the way he dodged the Tora Bora failure, in which we could have gotten Bin Laden had not he, Bush and Rumsfeld been so eager to leave there and go after the oil and "better targets" in Iraq instead. Instead of hardening our domestic defenses and seeking out the real threats overseas, Bush and Cheney have created a new menace altogether in Iraq. And killed over a thousand of our sons and daughters in the process.
And No talk whatsoever about Caspian Oil pipelines or Unocal or THREATS, just before 9/11. He said the halliburton issue was a smokescreen. Where there's smoke there's fire. I encourage everyone to enquire further. Bush and Cheney didn't even WANT a 9/11 commission looking into what happened. We should all wonder, WHY?!
Like Kerry, Edwards is working to bring out the truth. They will bring some desperately needed credibility, humanity and good sense back into our government. In the spirit of the late Paul Wellstone, bless him.
And remember equal rights? Yeah.. Remember that?
Iraq was not the terrorists' home. Bush and Cheney have turned it into one. For Oil; and they won't even say it.
Cheney and Bush are unashamedly lying to you. To me. If we let them get away with this, we are doomed to Cheney's "extraordinary measures" (I almost fell out of my chair when he said that) in the form of military aggression and domestic paramilitary policing that is Un-American. Like a company that makes deals with the enemy. Like Halliburton. Like Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam.
Not in our name. Kerry '04. For your freedom. For America.
If you accept their lies they will enslave you. Do you see now what might ensue if Cheney ever became president?
Talk to others. Change somebody's mind. Take them to the polls. We can fix this. This may well be the most important election in our lifetimes.
Friday, October 01, 2004
Kerry 1, Bush 0
Kerry won this round. I hope a lot of people saw this. I think it's pretty obvious.
I think Bush's lack of thoughtfulness regarding the questions was an insult to all of us.
Bush did not do his homework.
George Bush is out of touch ... when he talks about using missile defense to protect us from things like suitcase bombs.
And promising no draft? That way the rich kids don't have to go.
He's just plain stubborn. He kicked a hornet's nest in the Middle East.
Now we have hope for a rescue from this campaign of fear, This fundamentalist madness.
Notice how the crowd cheered for John and Teresa at the end. It's gonna be a relief to have a decent leader again. Somebody with some ability.
I think Bush's lack of thoughtfulness regarding the questions was an insult to all of us.
Bush did not do his homework.
George Bush is out of touch ... when he talks about using missile defense to protect us from things like suitcase bombs.
And promising no draft? That way the rich kids don't have to go.
He's just plain stubborn. He kicked a hornet's nest in the Middle East.
Now we have hope for a rescue from this campaign of fear, This fundamentalist madness.
Notice how the crowd cheered for John and Teresa at the end. It's gonna be a relief to have a decent leader again. Somebody with some ability.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)