Rolling Stone: Abramoff, Diebold, Ney, HAVA: how they screwed elections

[Amaryllis]

Rollling Stone

MATT TAIBBI

Posted Mar 24, 2006

Meet Mr. Republican: Jack Abramoff
The secret history of the most corrupt man in Washington

So this is it, finally. By the time this magazine hits the newsstands, Jack Abramoff -- right-wing megalobbyist and great feckless shitwad of our new American century -- will be but a tick of the geological clock away from The End. There will be no rack, no stoning, no scorpion-filled sand pit, no bucket of fire ants. Just a sanitary plea agreement and a single blow of the gavel, and "Casino Jack" Abramoff will disappear for a few years of weightlifting and Talmudic study.

<snip>

All along, Abramoff was buying journalists, creating tax-exempt organizations to fund campaign activities and using charities to fund foreign conflicts. He spent the past twenty years doing business with everyone from James Dobson to the Gambino family, from Ralph Reed to Grover Norquist to Karl Rove to White House procurements chief David Safavian. He is even lurking in the background of the 2004 Ohio voting-irregularities scandal, having worked with the Diebold voting-machine company to defeat requirements for a paper trail in elections.

<snip>

They paid journalists to change their opinions; as it turns out, the right to free speech is worth about $2,000 a column to America's journalists like Doug Bandow of Copley News Service. And now it comes out that Diebold, the notorious voting-machine company, paid some $275,000 to Abramoff's firm, Greenberg Traurig, with the apparent aim of keeping legislation requiring paper trails in the voting process from getting into the Help America Vote Act. Conveniently, Abramoff pal Bob Ney, one of the HAVA architects, blocked every attempt to put paper trails into law, even after the controversial electoral debacles of 2000 and 2004.

They targeted Congress, the courts, the integrity of elections, and the free press, and in every corner they found willing partners who could be had for a few bucks and a package of golf tees. That doesn't mean Jack Abramoff was so very smart. No, what that says is that America is no longer trying very hard. And when Jack Abramoff hears his sentence, ours will certainly be made plain soon after. Jack Abramoff was the Patient Zero of Washington corruption. He's the girl at school that everyone got a piece of, including two janitors in their forties. It strains all credulity to think that he's been talking to the Department of Justice for months and yet prosecutors still have to "encircle" a lone congressman, Bob Ney, as has been reported. If Ney is the big target the government made a deal with Abramoff for, we'll know we've been had again.

Read more:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/9519825/meet_mr_republican_jack_abramoff?rnd=1144952282375&has-player=true

[xxqqqzme]

1. RS has been hitting the political reporting bull's eye

quite often of late. I may have 2 go back 2 subscribing.

[Amaryllis]

18. Yep, but Brad broke this in Jan. and they didn't credit him:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x423506

[bleever]

2. Holy me my moly. I haved dream of such a day.

Election fraud is on the map now.

Kicked and recommended.

:)

[BeFree]

3. Wow.

They must have been reading DU's own ER, eh? 'Cause pretty much that same story crossed these pages long ago.

[Amaryllis]

5. Brad did a story on this awhile back...I think Jan. RS isn't exactly

MSM, but it's closer to MSM than blogs are.

[Helga Scow Stern]

8. I know, bleeve. Pinch us!

Election fraud has come from being a taboo subject to being a slightly-more-than-on-the-fringe topic. At least there are now several groups of organized folks beating the pavement and screaming their heads off about it. And we are making a difference. There is no way it will be ignored in 2008. The majority of politicians will still try to pretend it isn't happening, but the people will not stand for it, or something like that. That doesn't mean the 2008 election will be legitimate.

We have come a long way since that nightmare from which we first awakened in November 2004. Some of us knew the score way before then, but I wasn't exactly one of them.

Yay to becoming aware!

[jwirr]

4. I wonder how much a they paid for SCOTUS Judges in 2002?

[Wilms]

6. Wow!

So what happens to laws that were paid for. :shrug:

[Amaryllis]

7. Good question. Do we get a revote? Can we have an audit, please?

What percent of congress has to be discovered to be on the take before the law is null? Are there laws to cover this?

CAn we get HAVA amended to require paper based on this information? Or better yet, since Ney was one of the primary architects of HAVA, can we get it repealed?

DReam dream dream...

[fooj]

9. Right on!

:toast:

[nicknameless]

10. Thank you for posting this.

Recommended.

[Amaryllis]

11. I was surprised no one found it sooner!

[nicknameless]

12. It's so great when stories like this find their way

into papers with such wide readership.
Rolling Stone did a terrific article on the right's attempts to illegally suppress college voters' rights.

Great find. :thumbsup:

[EFerrari]

13. Great find, Amaryllis. One of my comedian friends said

of the 2000 selection, "For one brief shining moment, we were Guatemala."

And although I love him, I think he was wrong.

We are Guatemala on steriods.

I can't tell you how closely everything that is happening in this country resembles the stuff that passes for democracy in the third world country I'm researching. It's what Mark said - scale, technology, and motivation

[Amaryllis]

17. Guatemala on steriods and meth.

[petgoat]

20. Steroids, meth, and Zoldipem tartrate. Colin Powell said

"everybody here uses it."

http://www.thismodernworld.com/1169

[PDittie]

14. .

[Tarheel_Dem]

15. great read...........

:kick:

[Amaryllis]

16. See Bradblog's take on Rolling Stone article here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x423506

[happydreams]

19. This is choice:

....There is a common thread running through almost all of Abramoff's activities during this tadpole period of his in the Eighties. Suggested in his every action is an utter contempt for legal governmental processes; he behaves as if ordinary regulations are for suckers and the uncommitted. If the government won't step up to the plate and sign off on support for the Contras, you go through channels and do it yourself. If you really want to win an election, you find ways around finance laws and spending limits. And if you want to oppose a national anti-apartheid movement on the country's campuses, don't waste time building from the ground up; go straight to Pretoria and bring home a few million dollars in a bag.

One of the ugliest developments in American culture since Abramoff's obscure Cold Warrior days in the Eighties has been the raging but highly temporary success of various "smart guys" who upon closer examination aren't all that smart. There was BALCO steroid scum Victor Conte ("The smartest son of a bitch I ever met in my life," said one Olympian client), Enron's "smartest guys in the room" Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay, and, finally, "ingenious dealmaker" Jack Abramoff. Somewhere along the line, in the years since the Cold War, Americans as a whole became such craven, bum-licking, self-absorbed fat cats that they were willing to listen to these fifth-rate prophets who pretended that the idea that rules could be broken was some kind of earth-shattering revelation -- as though they had fucking invented fraud and cheating. But to a man, they all turned out to be dumb, incompetent fuckups, destined to bring us all down with them -- not even good at being criminals.


The whole piece is a must read.

[sofa king]

21. And yet the article misses important things..

Like how the 9/11 terrorists showed up on Abramoff's boat a week before the attacks and the subsequent FBI investigation was never made public.

Like how someone managed to get Abramoff's client Saleh Kamel written out of the 9/11 Commission Report. That omission was later used to dismiss a suit by 9/11 victims against Kamel (among many others).

How come nobody wants to touch those items, eh?

[mirandapriestly]

22. What possible innocent explanation could there be

for trying to block a paper trail? None! Can you imagine if a democrat did that?

[BeFree]

23. That's a different angle

Lets ask the DNC to declare that in no way shape or form, will there ever be a paper record of our votes. That even though the computer gurus claim that computers should never be used in elections, that they are idiots and we won't listen to them.

I know it sounds preposterous, but isn't that their policy as it stands?

[Amaryllis]

24. Implied policy, if not stated.