Did the NSA help Bush hack the vote?

[Octafish]

Bob Fitrakis asks a most pertinent question:

Did the NSA help Bush hack the vote?
January 9, 2006
Columns
Bob Fitrakis

What do we make of the President boldly proclaiming that he has “spy powers?” Does he have X-ray vision too?

When he and his cronies crawl up into Cheney’s bunker with the sign on the door “He-man Woman-haters Club. No Girls Allowed (except Condi),” do they synchronize their spy decoder rings and decide what new absurd folly to unleash on the world?

Illegal invasion of Iraq, suspending writs of habeus corpus, secret CIA torture dungeons, or election rigging? Most people outgrow such childish games and fantasies by the time they’re ten years old. And by age twelve, most understand that the President is not a king. Or a dictator. That U.S. citizens have inalienable rights.

That there are such things as search warrants. If the executive branch of government is going to conduct surveillance on the American people, they have to get a warrant from the judicial branch specifying what they’re looking for and the reasons for the search.

The Bush administration’s utter contempt for the U.S. Constitution and the specific information we now know about its use of the National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance network should further call into question Bush’ 2004 presidential “election.” In a recent revelation, we have learned that the NSA shared the fruits of its illegal spying on behalf of Bush with other government agencies.

What are e-voting machines and central tabulators that pass the voting results over electronic networks from the internet to phone lines? No more than data easily spied on and tapped into. The Franklin County Board of Elections, for example, tells us that it was a “transmission error” in Gahanna Ward 1B, where 638 people cast votes and Bush, the Wonder Boy, received 4258 votes. It’s not magic, nor is it an accident or an act of God. If the vote total wasn’t so hugely illogical, no one would have caught it.

CONTINUED...

http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2006/1294

Mehr licht, Herr Doktor.

[MelissaB]

1. That terra threat and lockdown were NEVER explained.

The votes were counted behind closed doors.

[MelissaB]

3. More info for those who don't know what happened.

Warren County, OH Vote Count Tallying Done in Secret
All Media Locked out of Counting due to "Homeland Security" Concerns
Warren County Bush Vote Nearly Highest in State!

Citing "homeland security concerns", Warren County, OH was alone in locking out media from their counting of ballots on Election Night. They were amongst the last to report their tallies...

Citing "homeland security concerns", Warren County, OH was alone in locking out media from their counting of ballots on Election Night. They were amongst the last to report their tallies that night, and according to Ohio's Election Night website Warren County ended up having the highest percentage of Bush votes amongst all of Ohio counties that had a total vote turnout greater than 22,500.



Warren 92,251 votes - Bush: 72.1% Kerry: 27.53%

There were only four counties wiht a higher percentage vote for Bush, and they all had 22,279 voters or less:


Mercer 20,058 votes - Bush: 74.89% Kerry: 24.55%

Putnam 18,631 votes - Bush: 76.20% Kerry: 23.34%

Holmes 10,976 votes - Bush: 75.61% Kerry: 23.89%

Auglaize 22,279 votes - Bush: 73.78% Kerry: 25.71%

So what happened that night in Warren County when all of America was waiting for the counting to finish in Ohio to decide the election? Why was it the only county in all of Ohio where media was not allowed to witness the counting?

The Cincinnati Enquirer explained it this way:

Citing concerns about potential terrorism, Warren County officials locked down the county administration building on election night and blocked anyone from observing the vote count as the nation awaited Ohio's returns.

County officials say they took the action Tuesday night for homeland security, although state elections officials said they didn't know of any other Ohio county that closed off its elections board. Media organizations protested, saying it violated the law and the public's rights. The Warren results, delayed for hours because of long lines that extended voting past the scheduled close of polls, were part of the last tallies that helped clinch President Bush's re-election.

"The media should have been permitted into the area where there was counting," Enquirer attorney Jack Greiner said. "This is a process that should be done in complete transparency and it wasn't."

Warren County Emergency Services Director Frank Young said he had recommended increased security based on information received from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in recent weeks.

Commissioners made the security decisions in a closed-door meeting last week, but didn't publicize the restrictions that were made until after polls closed.
...
Typically, the Warren County commissioners' room is set up as a gathering place for people to watch the votes come in. But that wasn't done this year.
...
A representative of The Associated Press, which had stringers at every Ohio board of elections site, said no such election-night access problems were reported outside of Warren County.

http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00000917.htm

[Octafish]

8. Odd how that works, benefitting Bush all the time. Like a clockwork ghost.

The fact Corporate McPravda won't investigate this issue is proof of their role in this treason.

Ghosts in the Voting Machines

By Joel Bleifuss

Lennard Pearson, 81, casts his vote in the US presidential election using a electronic touchscreen voting machine in monterey Park, Calif. in 2004.
Concerned about reports of election fraud and vote suppression in the 2004 election, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, to examine the allegations. In September, the GAO released a report that found electronic voting systems “have caused local problems in federal elections—resulting in the loss or miscount of votes.” In the 2004 general election, about 64 percent of voters cast ballots on one of two types of electronic voting systems: optical scan systems, which read marked paper ballots, and direct recording electronic systems (DRE), which have a touchscreen that voters use to make their choice.

The GAO highlights one major problem with electronic voting systems: They can be hacked because of woefully inadequate security systems.

The report notes, “Regarding key software components, several evaluations demonstrated that election management systems did not encrypt the data files containing cast votes (to protect them from being viewed or modified). …If exploited, these weaknesses could damage the integrity of ballots, votes and voting system software by allowing unauthorized modifications.”

The report goes on to say that flaws in electronic voting security protections “could allow unauthorized personnel to disrupt operations or modify data and programs that are critical to the accuracy and the integrity of the voting process.”

The report cites these examples:

* In some cases, other computer programs can access voting system files that contain records of cast votes, and alter files without a record of hacking showing up in the system’s audit logs.

* On Diebold’s Accu-Vote-TS, a DRE, it “might be possible” to alter ballot definition files—so votes on the touch screen for one candidate would actually be recorded and counted for another.

* Computer security experts working with a Florida local elections supervisor demonstrated that someone with physical access to an optical scan system can use altered memory cards, falsifying election results without any record of the deed.

* In one DRE model, the same personal identification number was programmed into all election supervisor cards nationwide—meaning the number was widely known.

* Several reviews reported smart cards (which activate touch screens on DRE’s) and memory cards (which program an optical scan system’s terminals) were not secured by some voting systems. Reviewers exploited this weakness by altering such cards to improperly access administrator functions, vote multiple times, change vote totals, and produce false election reports in a test environment.

CONTINUED...

http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/ghosts_in_the_voting_machines/

We're on to you Bush!



Thanks for the info, MelissaB.

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

60. Folks stood in line to *ahem* re-elect Chimp!

:rofl:

[Imagevision]

55. terra threat and lockdown were NEVER explained - also Blackwells'

failure to provide a legitimate recount for Ohio as he now runs for Govenor in November

[EFerrari]

2. Motive and opportunity are hard to ignore.

Remember Junior grinning like an idiot mid-evening?

[glitch]

10. And means. If it's one thing this lot has, it's means. Trifecta to me. nt

[Octafish]

13. Frozen in my mind.

?mii=1

Here's something good on the subject from "In These Times," a real news journal:

A Corrupted Election

Despite what you may have heard, the exit polls were right

By Steve Freeman and Josh Mitteldorf
In These Times
Features > February 15, 2005

Recall the Election Day exit polls that suggested John Kerry had won a convincing victory? The media readily dismissed those polls and little has been heard about them since.

Many Americans, however, were suspicious. Although President Bush prevailed by 3 million votes in the official, tallied vote count, exit polls had projected a margin of victory of 5 million votes for Kerry. This unexplained 8 million vote discrepancy between the election night exit polls and the official count should raise a Chinese May Day of red flags.

The U.S. voting system is more vulnerable to manipulation than most Americans realize. Technologies such as electronic voting machines provide no confirmation that votes are counted as cast, and highly partisan election officials have the power to suppress votes and otherwise distort the count.

Exit polls are highly accurate. They remove most of the sources of potential polling error by identifying actual voters and asking them immediately afterward who they had voted for.

The reliability of exit polls is so generally accepted that the Bush administration helped pay for them during recent elections in Georgia, Belarus and Ukraine. Testifying before the House Committee on International Relations Dec. 7, John Tefft, deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, explained that the Bush administration funded exit polls because they were one of the “ways that would help to expose large-scale fraud.” Tefft pointed to the discrepancy between exit polls and the official vote count to argue that the Nov. 22 Ukraine election was stolen.

CONTINUED...

http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/a_corrupted_election/

Gee. Something wrong with the election machines.



Who'd a thought it?

[Old and In the Way]

4. Could this be why the Republican Syndicate won't investigate

Bush's breaking the law? And why Republicans are proposing laws to make it illegal to blow the whistle on NSA abuses? Absolutely.

[Octafish]

19. New crime to report Bush violating FISA

That's it. ''New NSA law criminalizes reporting Pretzeldent breaking law.''

New crime to report Bush violating FISA

Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, Daily kos
March 12, 2006

While a draft of the GOP proposed legislation sponsored by DeWine, Snowe, Graham and Hagel is not yet publicly available, some reporters have written about the substantive provisions after receiving a copy of the draft legislation. Not only does this legislation codify the existing illegal NSA program, but it creates new crimes to prevent the press from reporting on any FISA surveillance programs and Bush is the person who writes a list of the terrorists to be subjected to surveillance.

Some of the provisions of this new legislation include:

(1) The law will make it a crime for reporters and newspapers to publish stories that Bush violated the law or to simply report on the existence of the various FISA surveillance programs to the public. This handy provision protects Bush from any future leaks that he is violating the law governing surveillance of Americans. Criminal penalties would be applied to anyone who "intentionally discloses information identifying or describing" Bush's NSA program or any other surveillance of Americans under FISA. In addition, the scope of activities covered by criminal penalties is expanded by not including a requirement that the "information has to be harmful to national security or classified." Increased penalties of $1 million fines and/or 15 years in jail should be plenty deterrence for the media to not report on such surveillance in the future.

(2) The legislation codifies the primary components of Bush's existing illegal NSA surveillance of Americans. In other words, Bush may continue the surveillance program which violated American's rights, but now he may continue with the cover that Congress is making the program legal. The problem with Bush's NSA program was not just that it was illegal because it violated wiretapping laws and Congressional oversight laws, but also because it violated and lowered American civil right standards by permitting political appointees to make decisions that our system has wisely reserved to judges. These problems remain:

CONTINUED...

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m21467&l=i&size=1&hd=0

Not-So-Agnostic: Why is this -- a subject that maybe a Pulizter Prize winning newspaper should cover -- found on a "blog"?

[donkeyotay]

67. It will be a crime to report Bush's crimes

"The law will make it a crime for reporters and newspapers to publish stories that Bush violated the law..."

Life's about to get so much simpler.

[Botany]

5. In Columbus, OH @ Kerry's HQ ....

.... computers w/ 5 and 6 firewalls were hacked into. "They" whom ever they were really liked voter
data files. Also phone lines were hacked into ..... I heard that myself. The hack I heard was on a vote
fraud hotline .... it disappeared after Kerry conceded.

But w/ the repugs closing ranks around Commandeer Bunny Pants will we ever know what happened.

[Octafish]

26. Thanks, Botany. Fitrakis, also, has noticed what these crooks are up to.

From November 2004:

How the Ohio election was rigged for Bush

November 22, 2004

Following four community public hearings in Ohio about election irregularities and voter suppression – two in the capitol, Columbus, and one each in Cincinnati and Cleveland – a clear pattern and practice of voter disenfranchisement is emerging.

In order to understand the extent of the voter suppression in the inner city of Columbus and Franklin County, overwhelmingly Democratic wards, start with the phrase: “Machines Placed By Close Of Polls” on the last page of the county’s 17-page voting machine allocation report.

This phrase at the end of the spreadsheet may be the key in unraveling a deliberate and unprecedented plan to repress African American and poor central city voters. In statistics, when you see a bizarre definition or measurement, it sends up red flags. Why doesn’t the Franklin County Board of Elections have a number for “Machines Placed By Opening Of Polls”?

It now appears that the Franklin County BOE placed scores of machines too late in the day to alleviate the long lines of voters who gathered to vote before work and at lunchtime.

To better understand what the BOE did on Election Day, consider the following analogy. The near east side of Columbus needs four buses to move the population to the downtown business district. Each bus will move 100 people. At the start of the business day at 6:30am, there are only two buses running and another one with a dead battery. After a few hours, the third bus is put into use. Finally, towards the close of the work day at 6pm, a fourth bus is deployed. The Central Ohio Transit Authority then reports it had four buses operating by the end of the business day. What matters is not how many buses, or voting machines, were operating at the end of the day, but rather how many were there to service the people during the morning and noon rush hours.

SNIP...

Pacifica reporter Evan Davis reported that a county purchasing official who was on the line with Ward Moving and Storage Company, documented only 2,741 voting machines delivered through the November 2 election day. The county’s own documents reveal that they had 2,866 “Machines Available” on Election Day. This would mean that amid the two to seven hour waits in the inner city of Columbus, at least 125 machines remained unused on Election Day. Ward holds the exclusive three-year contract to deliver voting machines in Franklin County.


CONTINUED...

http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/995

The only way to stop a repeat is to get the word out now.

Thanks for being a witness who steps forward, Botany.

[EFerrari]

31. I joined DU the day this article came out. Bob was the only

one writing about this in the press. Donna Brazille et al were blathering about "values" as if Ohioans hadn't stormed their statehouse in protest of their stolen franchise.

What a terrible month that was.

[Botany]

33. Just a little of what I saw and heard in Ohio

Written 1/5/05

http://www.thousandreasons.org/get_article.php?article_id=13

I didn't write about the poor white couple that came by Kerry's HQ with a
a letter rejecting their mother from getting an absentee ballot. She had
had a stroke and sent a letter to the Franklin County BOE asking for an
absentee ballot .... she got a rejection letter but it was not from the BOE.

However it was designed to look as if it was from the BOE. So either the post office
or somebody @ the Franklin County BOE had taken this lady's letter and turned it
over to political operatives of Rove/Blackwell/bush Cheney 04.

To this day i want to stop people on the streets and beg them to get their heads out of their
butts and notice that the election was stolen.
********************************************************************************
This is worth seeing too

"Robert J. Bennett, the Republican chair of the Cuyahoga Board of Elections, and the Chair of the Ohio Republican Party, has confirmed that prior to the 2004 election, his BOE eliminated---with no public notice---a staggering 175,414 voters from the Cleveland-area registration rolls. He has not explained why the revelation of this massive registration purge has been kept secret for so long. Virtually no Ohio or national media has bothered to report on this story."


http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2006/18...

[EFerrari]

37. Sing it, Botany. This will NOT STAND.

They can get away with it in the short run, sure. But we're the Memories. We get the word out. And in the long haul, they will NOT get away with this.

I for one will NEVER forget the images of turned away voters, of lines around the block, of alternate lines for students, of all the dirty, filthy tricks. Never.

Sing it and don't stop.

:toast:

[Trevelyan]

63. You are right. We must continue to talk about the theft of our votes to

everyone. The Russians had a song "We Shall Not Forget, We Shall Never Forgive" about the horrors they were put through by the "elite".

[Generic Other]

6. What legos set is that one -part of??? The Abu Graib lego set?

Very scary!

[Octafish]

16. Zbigniew Libera is a genius.

Everybody in Europe knows the guy, I hear.



Work by Polish artist Zbigniew Libera:



The guy got imprisoned by the commies for drawing cartoons about them.



That was in the late 1980s.



Appears to me that the same mindset is coming to America today.



That is, unless more people wake the heck up.



Maybe someone should ask Halliburton to explain why the Bushiz gave them contracts to build all those camps in the USA.



There was a big show of his work at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Thanks for asking, Generic Other.

[Generic Other]

27. Oh my, those are amazing!!

Wow! Stunning. Appropriating iconography of a consumer society as a political statement in this fashion is the way to mess with their heads big time. It works on so many levels.

Thanks for posting these. I will be looking for more by this artist!

[EFerrari]

39. He is a genius. His work is dazzling.

Thanks again, Octafish, for yet another eye opener.

[Peace Patriot]

7. Catch 22: Can't do anything about the NSA until we have restored election

transparency and begin electing true representatives of the American people to Congress and the White House. Nor can we do anything about illegal war, torture, massive thievery by the rich, loss of our civil rights (in so many ways, for instance, by corporate war profiteers monopolizing our public airwaves), loss of fiscal responsibility, and so many other ills of the Bush junta.

There is one hope. The power over election systems still resides with the states, as per the Constitution. For how long I don't know. The junta is already attacking state power over elections (in Pennsylvania). We have a window of opportunity NOW to pressure state/local election officials and to demand transparent elections.

Some resources:

www.votersunite.org (MythBreakers - easy primer on electronic voting--one of the myths is that HAVA requires electronic voting; it does not.)
www.verfiedvoting.org (great activist site)
www.UScountvotes.org (monitoring of '06 and '08 elections)
www.solarbus.org/election/index.shtml (fab compendium of all election info)
www.freepress.org (devoted to election reform)
www.TruthIsAll.net (analysis of the 2004 election)
Sign the petition (Russ Holt, HR 550, great bill-has 169 sponsors). http://www.rushholt.com/petition.html
www.debrabowen.com (Calif Senator running for Sec of State to reform election system)
www.votepa.us (well-organized local group of citizen activists in Pennsylvania, where important legal issues are at stake, including state's rights over election systems)

Also of interest:

Bob Koehler (-- four recent election reform initiatives in Ohio, predicted to win by 60/40 votes, flipped over, on election day, into 60/40 LOSSES!--the biggest flipover we've seen yet; the election theft machines and their masters are now dictating election policy!)
www.tmsfeatures.com/tmsfeatures/subcategory.jsp?file=20051124ctnbk-a.txt&catid=1824&code=ctnbk

Amaryllis (Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia lavish lobbying of election officials - Beverly Hilton, Aug. '05)
www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x380340

------------

Throw Diebold, ES&S and all election theft machines into 'Boston Harbor' NOW!

:think: :patriot: :woohoo: :patriot: :think:

[EFerrari]

17. Great list of resources!

:applause:
:applause:
:applause:

[Octafish]

35. Yes, indeed. A most fine list. Thanks!

From a friend in Deutschland:

Politics - U.S. Presidential Election 2004

ELECTION FRAUD in 2004

http://www.betterworldlinks.org/book109h.htm

[bobthedrummer]

9. "No sense makes sense." a quote from a 1969 MH CHAOS

operative.

The use of neuro linguinstic programming, semiotics and all kinds of "high-tech" has failed NSA and other agencies within the BFEE imho.

Too many people have spoken/are speaking out now about these "criminals". "My government...", not by a long shot.

:hi:

[Octafish]

36. Operation CHAOS

Here's what bobthedrummer's talking about:

G. Collection, Indexing, and Filing of
Information by Operation CHAOS

http://www.cia-on-campus.org/surveil/chaos.html

CIA Censors Books
Bush Perfects the Cover-up
excerpted from the book
Secrets
The CIA's War at Home
by Angus Mackenzie

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/CensorsBooks_SecretsCIA.html


From Monterey Pop to Altamont
OPERATION CHAOS
The CIA's War Against the Sixties Counter-Culture
by Mae Brussell, November 1976

http://www.maebrussell.com/Mae%20Brussell%20Articles/Operation%20Chaos.html

BTW: Something for the "Small World" file -- Lyman "Operation NORTHWOODS" Lemnitzer was on the Rockefeller Commission.

[bobthedrummer]

40. It's blended into the BFEE, that's for sure. eom

[Trevelyan]

64. Very Good Resources Peace Patriot, Octafish and BobThe Drummer

Had not seen many of those sites before and will return. Wealth of information. Thank you.

[bobthedrummer]

70. "No sense makes sense."

"No one will ever believe you."

Those are real statements Trevelyan, a MH CHAOS operative's quotes from the fall of 1969 in Milwaukee.

This operative worked in simultaneous domestic missions (modeled after the Charles Manson family)as "crazy" as that sounds.

Today it is growing more obvious that these long range domestic programs have gone awry-perhaps by design.

[Emit]

11. Remember this?

By the time election night came around, Mr Rove was in the White House, where, unusually for a political adviser, he has an office.

He set up computers in the Old Family Dining Room and started tabulating results. He had set up a massive network of contacts, not just in state capitals, but individual districts and precincts to monitor turnout and support.


Mr Rove may spin the news, but the media still wants to hear him
Early exit polls quoted by media seemed to give Mr Kerry the edge, but colleagues said Mr Rove indicated right away that they did not tally with his information.

He used his own data to put Ohio and Florida in the Bush column - bringing cheers from the president and his family when he went into the Roosevelt Room and told them.

And when the TV networks gave either Ohio or Nevada to Mr Bush but not both - which would have led him to be declared as the winner - Mr Rove was one of the president's aides who got on the phone to news chiefs to try to pressure them to change their minds.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3987237.stm

And there was a picture, too, of this somewhere -- can't find it now -- think it was published in Time magazine -- Rove with Sue Ralston, set up on election night with their 'puters, crunching numbers. Does make some wonder...

[EFerrari]

12. Do we wonder with this bunch?

When did they ever, EVER restrain themselves?

[MelissaB]

15. Is this it?

[Emit]

18. YES! Thank you.

Do you have a link to that? I always have a hard time finding that pic and story. Thanks again.

[MelissaB]

20. I found it on google images.

I'll try to find the link again. I'm not sure this is the one I was thinking of and I can't find the article that went with it. Anybody have it bookmarked?

[MelissaB]

21. google link

for clues to article: http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=&imgrefurl=http://www.contactpressimages.com/portfolios/ommanney/omm_portfolio2.html&h=300&w=459&sz=47&tbnid=ZNHhp-82KuxDrM:&tbnh=81&tbnw=125&hl=en&start=51&prev=/images%3Fq%3Drove%2Bnovember%26start%3D40%26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26rls%3DGGLD,GGLD:2004-32,GGLD:en%26sa%3DN

[Emit]

22. Thanks again. It's a Newsweek article/pics. n/t

[MelissaB]

23. Yeah, but I still can't find the article online

and have got to make lunch for the kids. I hope somebody has this bookmarked.

[Emit]

28. Still looking. I'll check Lexis- Nexis, too.

I do recall reading the text of that pic online (it's too small to make our any of the wording in the pic you found). Anyway, thanks again!

[Emit]

44. I think it's from a series of articles from Newsweek

HOW BUSH DID IT

NEWSWEEK's exclusive, behind-the-scenes account of the presidential campaign
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Primaries
• Chapter Two: Bush's Inner Circle
• Chapter Three: Kerry Gets Cranky
• Chapter Four: The Prison Scandal
• Chapter Five: The Bush Daughters
• Chapter Six: Swift Boats
• Chapter Seven: The Debates
• Chapter Eight: The Endgame




One is Down to the Wire, written shortly after the selection in November 2004, that has an accompanying photo gallery entitled Long Night's Journey into Day that has the photo that you posted. It does not, however, have any of the text next to the photo.

The photo gallery is located to the right on the first page of the article, with the pic of the old guy in khaki uniform and it reads: "Long Night's Journey Into Day • After the wee hours: A too-close-to-call race becomes a narrow victory for the President"
Click there to see the photos.

Here's an excerpt from this article:

Down to the Wire
The Endgame: In the last weeks, Rove felt 'emotional stress' about getting out the vote for Bush. And where was the 'Comeback Kerry' of campaign legend?

~snip~

Volunteers or no (and lately, Rove had been hiring some get-out-the-vote professionals, as well as squadrons of lawyers), he wanted to maintain absolute control. He was obsessed with "metrics," with precise measurements of how the Bush-Cheney campaign was doing at any given moment. "Give me a date," Rove demanded of a NEWSWEEK reporter in mid-October. "Sept. 30?" He tapped into his computer to examine one of his "metric mileposts." "In Ohio we were supposed to register 1,119 voters that day. We registered 3,604!" he declared triumphantly.

Rove was feeling a little cranky about press reports that the Democrats were registering vastly more voters in swing states like Ohio and Florida. He blamed shoddy reporting by The New York Times (Rove considered the Times to be Pravda for liberals; he had just personally chewed out the Times's executive editor Bill Keller and Washington bureau chief Phil Taubman). The Times had measured only recent registration numbers, overlooking the fact, Rove protested, that the GOP had been working away at voter registration since the 2000 election. "Nationally, it's a wash," claimed Rove. Besides, the key to victory was not registration, but turnout—actually getting people to the polls. Rove scorned a story in that morning's Washington Post reporting that Rove had given up a more ambitious effort to reach out to swing voters in order to concentrate on mobilizing the Republican base. "Ridiculous," he said. "We need 51 percent, and the base is only the high 30s." Rove, who studies population-migration tracts the way baseball fans study box scores, said he was particularly focused on finding and securing the "exurban vote," city dwellers and suburbanites who had just arrived in new towns and had been too busy getting settled to register to vote. These were the real "persuadables," the key to the election. ("Carver County, Minn. Fifty percent population increase. We got 62 percent there last time," said Rove, spouting factoids while he thumbed his BlackBerry.)

~snip~

But McKinnon's own mood darkened when he arrived at the Bush-Cheney campaign headquarters in Arlington shortly after 5 p.m. In Pit Row, strategy boss Dowd was in his office with the door shut. McKinnon tucked his head in. Dowd looked serious, even a little exasperated. His phone was ringing constantly and e-mails were stacking up on his computer screen. Dowd was puzzled by the network exit polls. They were grim: Bush was getting crushed in Pennsylvania and losing in Ohio and Florida. But something was odd. The polls were based on a turnout of 59 percent women and 41 percent men. Maybe that was the actual turnout, but Dowd doubted it. Also, Bush seemed to be doing surprisingly well with Hispanics, winning 42 percent of their votes. But if that number was true, then Bush should be cleaning up overall. The numbers didn't seem to make sense.


~snip~

At the White House, Karl Rove had set up quarters in the family dining room. (He had joked to reporters that he would be working in the "bat cave.") National-security adviser Condoleezza Rice wandered in and out and joked that Rove was looking at way too many numbers. Rove was studying comparisons of results in Florida and Ohio with the poll data in the 2000 election. At about 10:30, he called over to the senior staff, nervously hovering around the Roosevelt Room, and told them that the president would win both Florida and Ohio. The cheers were so loud that they could be heard down the hall in the press briefing room. Then ABC News called Florida for Bush; another eruption. Only now did Karen Hughes finally admit that the White House had drafted two speeches—one for a concession. It no longer looked that the second speech would be necessary.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6420969/site/newsweek/

And, from enlarging the picture you posted to see the author, Howard Fineman, I get this article, Page 3: A Sweet Victory ... And a Tough Loss, with the same online photo gallery next to it at the link. Here's an excerpt:

The economy, which had ruined Bush's father's chances for re-election in 1992, cooperated just enough to give the requisite breathing room to his son. The recession, shorter and shallower than many that had preceded it, ended last year, and growth this year had by some measures been robust, despite soaring oil prices and worries over Iraq. Rove carefully targeted small-business owners, framing tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks as a gift to entrepreneurs, not Halliburton. In states such as Iowa--far gone from the days of rust-belt industry, without visible symbols of distress--the strategy worked. "In those states the key to growth is small business, especially among businesswomen," said GOP polltaker Frank Luntz. "The Bush campaign was very good at targeting those people."

Rove fed messages and demographics into what, for the Republicans, was an unprecedented turnout machine--modeled on the one the Democrats (and their union allies) had assembled back in 2000. Using their own organizational model--Amway--BC04 and the Republican National Committee top hands set strict, constantly updated turnout targets for every one of the nation's 193,000 precincts. As he traveled the country with Bush, Rove received detailed briefings from field lieutenant/sales reps. BlackBerry in hand, Rove rarely left Bush's side--and then only to spin a skeptical (but still listening) press corps on tarmacs at campaign stops.

In the end, the focus was where Rove had planned it to be all along--in Ohio. As the lengthy campaign neared a close, BC04 staged a huge rally in a hockey arena in Columbus. The roar was deafening--23,000 screaming fans/voters--but what rallied the president, his advisers said later, was the look in the eyes of the faithful: an intensity he didn't see in 2000, when he won the presidency in the Supreme Court. Only hours from Election Day, he was in Columbus with Arnold Schwarzenegger. A tape of Osama bin Laden had just been shown on American television. In response, Schwarzenegger and Bush posed as a two-man legion of superheroes. There can be no reasoning with a "people that are blinded by hate," said Arnold. "They are no match for the leadership of George W. Bush." Then it was the president's turn. In somber tones he recalled the day Al Qaeda struck. "On that day of tragedy," he declared, "I made a decision. America will no longer respond to terrorist murder with half measures and empty threats. We will no longer look away from gathering dangers and simply hope for the best."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6400934/site/newsweek/


And, from that series of articles, Inner Circle, The President: Bush's team was upbeat:

Karl Rove called the group "the Breakfast Club." They met at Rove's unadorned house in northwest Washington on Saturday, Dec. 13, 2003, the day Saddam Hussein was captured in Iraq.

~snip~

Rove was the unquestioned boss of the campaign to re-elect the president. Everyone reported to him; even local GOP bosses checked with him before making a move. The group he gathered around his dining-room table this December morning was the tight little inner circle—Dowd, campaign manager Ken Mehlman, White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett, campaign Communications Director Nicolle Devenish. The group was secret at first; other top staffers only gradually learned of its existence. As winter turned to spring, Rove would occasionally add other guests. For a Republican, there was no greater call to duty than an invitation from Rove to join the Breakfast Club.

King Karl, ruler of a vast domain, was held in awe by all (except Bush, who from time to time referred to his chief political adviser as Turd Blossom). Rove had never stopped campaigning since the 2000 squeaker. From the moment he walked into the White House in 2001, he had been building the Republican base, the vast Red State army of evangelicals; flag-waving small-town and rural American Dreamers; '60s-hating, pro-death-penalty, anti-gay-marriage social conservatives; Big Donors—the new Republican majority, or so Rove hoped. A steady wave of e-mails (appropriately studded with Rove-isms), notes, photos, anniversary cards and White House Christmas-party invitations stroked the faithful. But discipline was the key: Rove set up a reporting system designed to hold accountable party bosses and volunteers alike. He created the mystique of an all-seeing, all-knowing boss of bosses; if the emperor had no clothes, no one particularly wanted to find out.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6406880/site/newsweek/

[helderheid]

58. I have been looking everywhere for that picture!!

:yourock:

[Old and In the Way]

24. "He used his own data to put Ohio and Florida in the Bush column "

I have no doubts that he did.

[Octafish]

42. They're crooks, all right. Remember ATHAN GIBBS?

Thanks for the timely reminder, Emit.
Members of The Bush Crime Family are all-time, world-class something.
By their actions, shall Ye know Them.

Mr. Athan Gibbs appears to have been their opposite. He was working on quality, affordable, verified voting when he died in a horrible truck-car crash.

Death of a patriot: No more

By Bob Fitrakis
March 17, 2004

The subject line on yesterday’s email read: “Another mysterious accident solves a Bush problem. Athan Gibbs dead, Diebold lives.” The attached news story briefly described the untimely Friday, March 12th death of perhaps America’s most influential advocate of a verified voting paper trail in the era of touch screen computer voting. Gibbs, an accountant for more than 30 years and the inventor of the TruVote system, died when his vehicle collided with an 18-wheeled truck which rolled his Chevy Blazer several times and forced it over the highway retaining wall where it came to rest on its roof.

Coincidence theorists will simply dismiss the death of Gibbs as a tragic accident – the same conclusion these coincidence theorists came to when anti-nuclear activist Karen Silkwood died in November 1974 when her car struck a concrete embankment en route to a meeting with New York Times reporter David Burnham. Prominent independent investigators concluded that Silkwood’s car was hit from behind and forced off the road. Silkwood was reportedly carrying documents that would expose illegal activities at the Kerr-McGee nuclear fuel plant. The FBI report found that she fell asleep at the wheel after overdosing on Quaaludes and that there never were any such files. A journalist secretly employed by the FBI, and a veteran of the Bureau’s COINTELPRO operation against political activists, provided testimony for the FBI report.

Gibbs’ death bears heightened scrutiny because of the way he lived his life after the 2000 Florida election debacle. I interviewed Athan Gibbs in January of this year. “I’ve been an accountant, an auditor, for more than thirty years. Electronic voting machines that don’t supply a paper trail go against every principle of accounting and auditing that’s being taught in American business schools,” he insisted.

SNIP...

Gibbs’ TruVote machine is a marvel. After voters touch the screen, a paper ballot prints out under plexiglass and once the voter compares it to his actual vote and approves it, the ballot drops into a lockbox and is issued a numbered receipt. The voter’s receipt allows the track his particular vote to make sure that it was transferred from the polling place to the election tabulation center.

My encounter with Gibbs led to a cover story in the Columbus Free Press March-April issue, entitled, “Diebold, electronic voting and the vast right-wing conspiracy.” The thesis I advanced in the Free Press article (www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/834) is that some of the same right-wing individuals who backed the CIA’s covert actions and overthrowing of democratic elections in the Third World in the 1980s are now involved in privatized touch screen voting. Additionally I co-wrote an article with Harvey Wasserman that was posted at MotherJones.com (www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2004/03/03_200.html) on March 5, 2004. Both articles outlined ties between far right elements of the Republican Party and Diebold and ES&S, which count the majority of the nation’s electronic votes.

CONTINUED...

http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/853

Almost feel bad, quoting so many of Bob Fitrakis articles.

Then again, the guy is worth quoting.

That makes him the opposite of Karl Rove.

[BeFree]

48. Hey, Octafish

It may be you have been working on this before now, but its the first I've seen. Glad to see your talents working on election fraud. To me, the fraud is the crux of the problem. We solve it and most of our worries are over.

Peace.

[Octafish]

71. BFEE's good at "fixing" election process. Remember OCTOBER SURPRISE.

The October Surprise describes the pukes' efforts to sabotage President Jimmy Carter's work to get the U.S. hostages released from Iran. Doing all he could to hurt Carter's chances for re-election in 1980 was the "former" spook, George Herbert Walker King Chicken Bush.

Along with Barbara Honegger, Gary Sick and Abolhassan Bani Sadr, the great Robert Parry's done a bang-up of job of bringing this particularly sordid chapter in the BFEE's treason to light.

October Surprise: Finally, Time for the Truth

By Robert Parry

Jamshid Hashemi looked wearier than he did seven years earlier, his complexion was waxier, befitting a man with a serious heart condition. The U.S.-Iranian arms merchant/businessman also was in more legal hot water from his work with an American company which collapsed in an allegedly fraudulent stock scheme.

But Jamshid Hashemi's account of the political intrigue that surrounded the 1980 Iranian hostage crisis -- plotting that allegedly undercut President Carter's negotiations to free 52 Americans and ensured Ronald Reagan's election -- has changed little over the years. In that way, Jamshid Hashemi remains potentially one of the most important witnesses to the unsavory acts that may have launched the Reagan-Bush era.

Jamshid Hashemi still claims that in the summer of 1980, he and his brother, Cyrus, participated in secret meetings involving William J. Casey and Iranian intermediaries representing Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In a recent interview with The Consortium, Jamshid Hashemi repeated his account that meetings in Madrid, Spain, in late July and then in August, 1980, resulted in an agreement to release the 52 American hostages only after Reagan took office. In exchange, the radical Iranian government got commitments for secret shipments of U.S. military supplies.

"I thought it was my duty that the people in the United States should know," Hashemi told me during an afternoon-long interview at a hotel near Heathrow Airport outside of London. "They should know, they should be the judge of it."

Though Hashemi sat through the lengthy interview with the same gentlemanly style that I encountered when I first met him in 1990, he did flash with anger when he discussed the House inquiry that examined the October Surprise controversy in 1992 and issued a report in January 1993 clearing the Republicans.

CONTINUED...
http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/xfile9.html

There's a reason Bartcop calls Consortiumnews.com "The Most Important Site on the World Wide Web." It's true.

Consider the BFEE turd Lawrence Silverman, the neocon schmuck went from negotiatiang with the Iranians as a private citizen to being a a federal judge bigshot helping cover Poppy's pimply and treasonous arse. Nice work if you can stomach it.

Archive

The October Surprise Mystery

http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/xfile.html

PS: Hi, BeFree! Spot-on analysis: We MUST fix the fixed voting machines. And thanks for caring.

While I've tossed in my 2-cents, I've been pretty much AWOL on the election discussions. This is, in part, because of the issue's complexity, and the time needed to really contribute. I like to post what I know about most: The history of treason that is the Bush Transnational Criminal Enterprise.

EDIT: some words.

[Octafish]

51. Ralston used to work as Abramoff's ''secretary.''

She's a regular turd, too.

Skybox Keeper
"On April 20th, 2000, Jack Abramoff's personal assistant Susan Ralston wrote a memo (http://talkingpointsmemo.com/docs/ralston.memo.4202000.html) outlining guidelines for doling out skybox seats to clients, politicians and Capitol Hill staffers," Josh Marshall wrote.

Gatekeeper
"As presidential adviser Karl Rove set up shop in the West Wing in 2001, he was looking for an assistant to serve as the trusted gatekeeper of his new fiefdom. Superlobbyist and Republican fundraiser Jack Abramoff was happy to lend a hand. Abramoff knew just the right person for the job: his own assistant, Susan Ralston. She interviewed with Rove and got the position," Peter H. Stone wrote (http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2004/0327nj1.htm) in the March 27, 2004, National Journal. "For a staunch conservative and smooth GOP operative like Abramoff, losing a valuable aide was well worth the opportunity to ingratiate himself with the president's senior political adviser."

Ralston "was of course one of many Team Abramoff players who got seconded into the administration. Given the close relationship between Abramoff and Grover Norquist, it's probably not surprising that she also had an arrangement with Norquist in which he gave her direction on who to let through to Rove," Josh Marshall wrote (http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_09_18.php#006598) in his Talking Points Memo September 21, 2005.

Marshall, being "a little unclear on whether Ralston still works for Rove," called (http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_09_18.php#006598) the White House September 21, 2005, and "was told that she's no longer his 'executive assistant'. When asked what her title was was told only that she now worked for him 'in a different capacity.'"

"When the Plame affair went before a Federal grand jury, Ralston was compelled to testify, and had to leave the job with Rove," Anton Chaitkin wrote (http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2005/3233abramoff_indict.html) in the August 26, 2005, issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Plamegate
Along with former Rove aide Israel Hernandez, Susan B. Ralston testified before a separate federal grand jury "about grand jury testimony given on July 13 by Matthew Cooper, a reporter for Time magazine," David Johnston reported (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/03/politics/03leak.html?ex=1280721600&en=eae6478f4d3415f9&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss) in the August 3, 2005, Washington Post. "Cooper has said that he testified about a July 11, 2003, conversation with Mr. Rove" in which the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame "was discussed."

"The reason Ralston, 37, was asked to testify remains unclear, but it has heightened suspicions that the locus of the investigation still centers on Rove," Johnston wrote (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/12/AR2005091201630.html), although he did say that "At one point, the aides were asked why Mr. Cooper's call to Mr. Rove was not entered in Mr. Rove's office telephone logs. There was no record of the call, the person who has been briefed said, because Mr. Cooper did not call Mr. Rove directly, but was transferred to his office from a White House switchboard."

Bush-Cheney '04
Ralston told (http://www.asianfortune.com/aug04/Articles/PROFILE%20Susan%20RALSTON.htm) Jennie L. Ilustre in a pre-presidential election 2004 interview for Asian Fortune that she was then "the White House Liaison to the Bush-Cheney ’04 (BC’04) campaign. As such, she has been very much involved in the reelection campaign. 'I work on the coordination of all activities between the campaign and the White House, including the Republican National Convention,... I spend 95 per cent of my physical time at the White House, but do go over to the campaign headquarters for meetings.'"

Abramoff-Reed Indian Gambling Scandal
Ralston, "who worked for Jack Abramoff, the K Street super lobbyist that allegedly swindled Indian tribes out of millions of dollars with the assistance of Ralph Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition, is a trusted Rove aide. The buzz is, Ralston is the tie that binds Rove to the Indian casino swindle as tightly as U.S. Rep. Tom Delay (R-TX)," Blogger "Amy" wrote (http://derrick.dx266.com/cgi-bin/mb5/789.html) August 4, 2005.

CONTINUED...

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Susan_B._Ralston

Abramoff's spy knows how to work more than the phones.

I wonder if she's friends with Imelda?

[NYC]

14. Recommended.

[Octafish]

52. Thanks, NYC! Here's everything you need to know about stealing elections.

When it comes to the pitches thrown by the nation's gangster class, Vankin hits many a home run:

Everything you need to know about stealing elections

By Jonathan Vankin
Sept. 28, 1989.

NOTE: This article was written more than 11 years ago, yet it couldn't be more relevant today. In fact, while the article covers such now-familiar (then-obscure) issues as "hanging chad," it also examines a potentially more important issue that isn't being discussed during the current electoral confusion: the possibility that vote-tabulation software could be easily altered and that, even absent deliberate fraud, the software code itself is such a mess that chances for error and malfunction are dangerously high.


The next president of the United States may not be chosen by the voters of the United States. Instead, he or she may be the choice of whomever controls or manipulates the computer systems that tally the votes. A single, Berkeley- based firm manufactures the software used in the machines that compile more than two-thirds of the nation's electronically-counted votes. Analysts describe the software as "spaghetti code," tangled strands of instructions indecipherable to outsiders. The experts say the code could be manipulated without detection. In fact, that may have happened already.

Vote fraud by computer is an even greater threat to local elections, the experts fear. With the entire system shrouded in mystery and absent of assurances that the voting process is tamper-proof, voters these days have more reason than ever to ask, "Does my vote count?"

"The whole damn thing is mind-boggling," says Ronnie Dugger, a Texas-based writer who investigates computerized elections. "They could steal the presidency." "Any use of computer technology is subvertable," Peter Neumann of the Menlo Park research firm SRI confirms. "The consensus is that elections can be rigged easily locally, but nationally takes a lot more work." However, Neumann says, the task of fixing a presidential election is "doable."

Election-rigging is a time-honored tradition in the US, from the days of New York's Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall to Chicago's legendary Mayor Richard Daley, who, historians believe, engineered President Kennedy's narrow margin of victory over Richard Nixon in the 1960 general election by stealing a key bloc of Illinois votes. And Lyndon Johnson's 1948 Senate victory, according to a biographer, was the result of vote-rigging in Southern Texas, where ballots were burned before a recount could take place.

As recently as 1988, a US Senate race in Florida, in which Republican Connie Mack defeated incumbent Buddy MacKay by just 35,000 out of four million votes, stirred deep suspicion though no fraud was ever proved. The question, however, is whether a well-executed computer vote fraud ever would yield enough evidence to constitute "proof."

CONTINUED...

http://www.govsux.com/steal_an_election.htm

Vankin does more than put 2 + 2 together for his readers. By the time they're done with an article or book, they understand what 4 means -- in this case, the manipulation of the electorate.

[NYC]

66. 1989. Can't say we weren't warned.

Just didn't pay attention.

Thanks for this article. I'll have to read it later.

[Kansas Wyatt]

25. I tried suggesting this back when the Idiot's NSA scandal was blowing up

It's not a question of "if" Bush used the NSA illegally against America, it's question of what Bush didn't illegally use the NSA against America on.

Karl Rove had a computer bank in the White House devoted to the election, and the results that only he had, could determine how the final outcome would fall. Nobody in the press, exit pollsters, or pundits received the credibility that Karl Rove received, which came from his "special" computer bank in the White House.

Now, the NSA certainly would have access to the White House out of everyone's sight and Karl Rove's computer bank in the White House. On election day, the country was still under an alleged threat from a sudden Bin Laden tape appearance, alleged terrorist threats against the U.S. election, and sheeple citizens running around with fear & terror on their minds, just knowing those "evildoers" wanted to tamper with our elections. So, would anyone be concerned about any government agents or NSA members hanging around and asking for discreet access to the 2004 Election, with the fear factor pegged on red alert?

Why no, sheeple would think, 'thank god our boys are on top of this, and I understand why they want me to keep my mouth shut about it, loose lips sink ships.' Even if some questioned it later, perhaps they were reminded that they were part of an illegal activity at the time and would fall as well. And, that is only dealing with the election process, where actual people would come into contact with them. The NSA would have access to all kinds of communication and data lines, to complete a mission being directed from a White House computer bank under the National Security cover. After all, America 'would get hit again' if Kerry was elected, and the sheeple feared the 'Terrist' Boogieman tampering with our elections, so the government had to use all it's assets to 'protect' the election. Bush was suppose to stay in Texas, but ended up going to Ohio and then back to the White House.

The illegal NSA tampering had been hidden in plain sight all along, and maybe Bush needed to be at the information center (computer bank) to determine which specific Presidential Order he needed to issue to 'protect' the election from alleged "evildoers" (classified, so nobody can ever know or talk). Bush was never worried about losing, because he was 'protecting' the 2004 Election.

Edit: grammer error

[EFerrari]

29. What I still don't understand is how they managed to

sell the idea that Bin Laden backed Kerry?

:wtf:

Of course, in the end it doesn't matter because they would have stolen it anyway. But they prefer to have the semblance of agreement from the public.

You're right -- it's hidden in plain sight.

[BeFree]

46. Damn fine piece, Kansas

I had this idea myself one day, but you've done a far better job of laying it out. Lets hope someone in a leadership position reads your work.

[Octafish]

54. Great job there, Kansas Wyatt. Friskie Frist got right on the case.

Here's Cat Killer's letter to "Harry," bemoaning all the "partisanship" surrounding the illegal NSA spying issues.

http://frist.senate.gov/_files/030306.pdf

Gee. I'd rhetorically ask since when is breaking the law something to be ignored?

I think I really know the answer: Since 22 November, 1963.

[earth mom]

30. K & R!

:kick:

[Octafish]

53. Remember HARRY T. MOORE?

Harry T. Moore and his wife died bringing African Americans their franchise.

Florida's legacy of voter disenfranchisement

By Jerry White
9 April 2001

EXCERPT...

Harry T. Moore

A pioneer and martyr in the struggle for black voting rights during the 1930s and 1940s was Harry T. Moore, a Florida school teacher who became state leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1944 Moore co-founded the Progressive Voters League, which registered 100,000 new black voters over the subsequent six years. By 1951, due in large part to his efforts, 31 percent of all eligible blacks in Florida were registered to vote, a rate that was 50 percent higher than any other Southern state.

On Christmas night, December 25, 1951, Moore and his wife Harriette were killed when a bomb planted under their bedroom exploded at their home in Mims, Florida, near Cape Canaveral. Moore's life and murder were the subject of a recent Public Broadcasting System television documentary, Freedom Never Dies: The Story of Harry T. Moore.

Moore joined the NAACP in 1933 and began teaching elementary school students about the vote, even though the state's $3 poll tax and “white-only” primaries all but excluded African Americans from voting. Moore saw the franchise as a weapon to remove officials who supported or were indifferent to the lynchings, mob violence and police brutality victimizing African Americans. He also saw the vote as a means of winning equal pay for black school teachers, equal funding for “colored” schools, and other social and civil rights.

Moore helped defeat efforts to reinstate a literacy test and maintain “white only” primaries on the county level, after the Florida Supreme Court struck down the practice. In May 1945, for the first time ever, over 30,000 blacks voted in the state's Democratic primary, in what Moore described as the “greatest political activity among Florida Negroes since Reconstruction.” For his efforts, state and local officials branded him a “troublemaker” and “Negro organizer” and in 1946 the Brevard County School Board fired Moore after 20 years of service as a teacher.

In 1948, during the Truman administration, the Southern “Dixiecrat” wing of the Democrats rebelled against the national party's plan to adopt a moderate civil rights plank. The Dixiecrats temporarily left the Democratic Party and formed the States' Rights Party, running South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond for president.

CONTINUED...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/apr2001/flor-a09.shtml

The article's from 2001. Why the heck we haven't learned anything since then is beyond me.

Thanks for the K&R, TheGoldenRule! Very much appreciated.

[ClayZ]

32. The crumbs....

always lead back to the cookie jar!

[Octafish]

57. Why won't NSA officials ANSWER the DEM's questions?

It's like the Pukes are hiding something.

Officials Refuse to Answer Critical Questions On Warrantless Domestic Spying

Yesterday, the nation’s top intelligence officials appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee for an annual hearing on national security threats. On at least three occassions, the officials refused to answer critical questions about the administration’s domestic surveillance programs in an open session. In each case, their non-answers spoke volumes.

The first question involved the existence of other domestic intelligence collection programs that have not been disclosed to the full intelligence committee (a CRS report this month found this practice illegal):

SEN. RUSS FEINGOLD (D-WI): Mr. Ambassador, without getting into what the specific programs might be, can you assure us today that there are not other intelligence collection — and I emphasize collection — programs that you are aware of and that you are keeping from the full intelligence committee?

NEGROPONTE: Um… Senator, I … I don’t know if I can comment on that in an open session.

In the second exchange, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) asked officials to provide estimates of the number of communications, and the number of individuals affiliated with terrorist organizations, monitored by the NSA’s warrantless domestic spying program.

As Levin noted, both President Bush and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff have openly discussed these issues: Bush described the program as “one that listens to a few numbers,” and Chertoff hypothesized about “culling through literally thousands of phone numbers.” Yet the officials refused to answer Levin’s questions:

SEN. CARL LEVIN: Can you give us an estimate as to the number of such communications which were tracked by NSA last year? …

HAYDEN: I’d be very uncomfortable doing it in open session, and I don’t actually know that number. …

LEVIN: Secretary Chertoff says if you’re “culling through literally thousands of phone numbers” you wind up with a huge problem managing the amount of paper. Why is it alright for Secretary Chertoff to talk about “thousands of phone numbers,” but you can’t give us or won’t give us in open session an estimate of the number of those communications?

HAYDEN: Senator, as I said, I’d be uncomfortable doing it in open session, and I don’t know the precise numbers.

LEVIN: I’m not saying precise numbers, I asked for an estimate.

HAYDEN: I cannot give you an estimate of the number of communications intercepted.

LEVIN: Is it a few or is it thousands?

HAYDEN: Sir, I’d be very uncomfortable talking about in open session.

…

CONTINUED...

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/02/03/intel-stonewalling/

[fearnobush]

34. NSA has been freedom's enemy from it's inception.

Get the word out, the NSA is criminally political. They created the propaganda Joe McCarthy used the imprison suspected commies in NSA 68. They now create the Bush War on Terra and Gays are evil campaigns.

[Swamp Rat]

38. The Enemy Within

:kick:

[Clara T]

41. The Election Was Rigged

Evidence of Fraud in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election: A Reader

by Michael Keefer
www.globalresearch.ca 5 December 2004

The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE412A.html

This Reading List, a substantially expanded version of previous lists published on 11 and 15 November, has been prepared with the aim of making a wide range of readings on the subject of the integrity—or the lack of integrity—of the recent U.S. presidential election readily available. It is being published as a companion-piece to my article "The Stolen U.S. Presidential Election: A Comparative Analysis."
Found Here:http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE411A.html


Section 3 shows how insistently computer scientists, investigative journalists and activists warned during the past two years about the dangers to democracy posed by electronic voting machines which remove the possibility of electoral recounts and audits—and how, despite their warnings, the U.S. entered the 2004 presidential elections equipped with voting-machine systems most of which were demonstrably open both to back-door manipulation and to hacking at the voting tabulator level.

Section 4 lists a wide variety of different texts. These include, most obviously, reports and analyses focusing on specific aspects of the voting and its aftermath, and studies that allege (and in my opinion cumulatively demonstrate) the theft of the presidential election by the Bush-Cheney Republicans and their corporate allies. But I have made a point also of listing writings by scholars who find no compelling grounds for suspecting large-scale or systematic electoral fraud. (See, with respect to the Florida vote tallies, Mebane <8 and 12 Nov. 2004>, Sekhon <14 Nov. 2004>, Wand, and Strashny—and, on the other side of the debate, Dodge, Dopp, Liddle, Mitteldorf, and Hout.) I have also listed articles by journalists, often writing in mainstream outlets, who have dismissed allegations of electoral fraud as the result of over-hasty or ill-informed analysis, as an expression of conspiracy-theory paranoia, or as mere sour grapes. (See, for example, Corn, A. Freeman, Klein, Manjoo, Morano, Reid, Roig-Franzia & Keating, and Zeller. Critics of the mainstream media coverage include Friedberg, R. Parry <13 Nov. 2004>, S. Parry <12 Nov. 2004>, Smith and Wade.)

Section 5 seeks to facilitate comparisons between the U.S. election and recent presidential elections in Venezuela and Ukraine in which, as in the U.S., divergences between exit poll results and official vote tallies prompted charges of election-rigging.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/KEE412A.html

[Neil Lisst]

43. They stole 2000, they stole 2004, and they'll steal 06 and 08 if allowed

we have to get the counting problem addressed

[Clara T]

45. So who won the 2004 election?

The real winners November 2 are the military industrial complex, who will continue to feed at the 500 billion-dollar military trough and the corporate media, whose coffers were filled with billions of dollars for campaign ads.

And can we be sure we actually had a fair election among those who did vote? Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Diebold, and Sequoia are the companies primarily involved in implementing the new voting stations throughout the country. All three have strong ties to the Bush Administration. The largest investors in ES&S, Sequoia, and Diebold are government defense contractors Northrup-Grumman, Lockheed-Martin, Electronic Data Systems (EDS) and Accenture. Diebold hired Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC) of San Diego to develop the software security in their voting machines. A majority of officials on SAIC's board are former members of either the Pentagon or the CIA including:

• Army Gen. Wayne Downing, formerly on the National Security Council

• Bobby Ray Inman; former CIA Director

• Retired Adm. William Owens, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

• Robert Gates, another former director of the CIA.

So we have a CIA/military private firm that programmed the security in the voting machines for companies owned by some of the largest military contracts in the country. No wonder the Co-founder of the Citizens Alliance for Secure Elections, Susan Truitt said November 3: "Seven counties in Ohio have electronic voting machines and none of them have paper trails. That alone raises issues of accuracy and integrity as to how we can verify the count. A recount without a paper trail is meaningless; you just get a regurgitation of the data. Last year, Blackwell tried to get the entire state to buy new machines without a paper trail. The exit polls, virtually the only check we have against tampering with a vote without a paper trail, had shown Kerry with a lead. ... A poll worker told me this morning that there were no tapes of the results posted on some machines; on other machines the posted count was zero, which obviously shouldn't be the case."

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1104-27.htm

[in_cog_ni_to]

47. YES! That's why we can NEVER know what they've been doing! Roberts

KNOWS they stole 3 elections with the help of NSA. That's why he's covering it up. I wonder if Rockefeller knows? If he does, I'm sure they've wiretapped him to get enough blackmail ammo that he will never spill the beans.

I would bet ANYTHING they have wiretapped everyone in Congress and THEY know they were wiretapped and will NEVER come forward with the truth for fear of being exposed for WHATEVER.

[tom_paine]

49. Almost certainly. Whether NSA helped or not is irrelevant.

It was done, and the old United States of America died a little more on that day.

[farmbo]

50. The new Bush Perpetual Motion Machine: NSA secretly steals elections...

...and the new Dewine (R Ohio) law makes it a felony for anyone to talk or report about the crime.

"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy."- Abraham Lincoln

[Imagevision]

56. Our boy Kerry says he believes OBL video did him in the 04 election

and Bush only 5 days ago releases a statement agreeing with Kerry!! - What's the creedo again for "Bonesmen"??

[bobthedrummer]

59. kick

[Just Me]

61. Regrettably, they will do it, again, and tyranny will continue to evolve.

;( This will continue until they either get caught red-handed or are investigated and prosecuted. But, there still exists the weirdest form of denial, even by democratic representatives.

:shrug:

I shudder when imagining this country under neocon rule for another 8 or 10 or 12 years. :scared:

[Imagevision]

62. We mstn't forget the efforts made by Kenneth Blackwell!!!

[donkeyotay]

68. For which he will be richly rewarded. nt

[bobthedrummer]

65. kick

[bobthedrummer]

69. kick

[Imagevision]

72. Hack the vote? - the question the world wants answered!!!!!!!!