"Venezuelan owners bought Sequoia last year" WTF???

[WhiteTara]

http://www.suntimes.com/output/sneed/cst-nws-sneed02.html

BY MICHAEL SNEED SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

It's muscleman time.

Sneed has learned that Ald. Ed Burke (14th) and three other aldermen fighting to halt $16 million in payments to the Venezuela-owned voting machine company that was at the center of the recent ballot-counting debacle plan to ante up their threat.
snip
*The scattershot: "We plan to request the appearance of appropriate officers of Sequoia and put the head of the company under oath to respond to questions about the true ownership of the company and possible links to anti-American Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez," said Burke.

*The sideshot: "It's clear this company is hiding its true ownership in a maze of offshore trusts and proxies that traces its way through the Netherlands to the Curacao islands and Venezuela," said Burke, citing a recent article about the company in the Miami Herald.

*The parting shot: According to the Miami Herald, a company called Smartmatic International and its Venezuelan owners bought Sequoia last year "without the deal receiving any scrutiny by federal regulators -- including the Treasury Department's Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States , which is tasked with determining whether foreign takeovers pose security risks."

[jsamuel]

1. yeah, FR is in a frenzy, NOW

[Richard Steele]

3. My question to all Freepers who worshipped the mighty FREE MARKET:

[aquart]

4. So is everyone now admitting these clunkers can be programmed

to favor one candidate over the others?

[me b zola]

6. LOL

Does this mean that we can now convince the morans join us in demanding verifiable elections??????

[RagingInMiami]

2. Is there anything that's American-owned anymore?

[Land Shark]

5. Extra credit points if you can name the "minority" owner

[WhiteTara]

12. I was going to forfeit the points

and let you answer. Who is the minority owner?

[flyarm]

7. and who here remembers this FR phrase...

"get over it.............."


The scattershot: "We plan to request the appearance of appropriate officers of Sequoia and put the head of the company under oath to respond to questions about the true ownership of the company and possible links to anti-American Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez," said Burke.

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh but they don't care about proprietary ownership of our votes i thought?..isn't that what we have been told by the rethugs and freepers??????????

funny how the tables are turning..Libby must be right..the "ASPENS ARE TURNING"

fly

[The Backlash Cometh]

8. God, I LOVE it! You can't make this shit up.

This would never sell as fiction. Nobody would believe that we have a system in place, the capitalist system, where this kind of shit happens all the time.

[annabanana]

9. This is GOOD news for election reform...

If the bushbots suddenly realize that who owns the machines owns America, maybe we can make some real progress in cleaning up the mess..

If India can vote on paper so can we...

[magellan]

10. Gee, doesn't THIS sound familiar?

When the (Venezuelan) vote finally came, exit polls by New York's Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates showed Chávez had been defeated 59 to 41 percent; however, when official tallies were announced, the numbers flipped to 58-42 in favor of Chávez. Venezuela's electoral council briefly posted machine-by-machine tallies on the Internet but removed them as mathematicians from MIT, Harvard and other universities began questioning suspicious patterns in the results.

Isn't it interesting how concerned some Americans get over alleged flipped exit poll results, but only when a dreaded leftist is behind the scenes?

Shoe's on the other foot now. Drink deeply, Repukes.

[GreenPartyVoter]

13. *g*

[fed-up]

11. Kicking for the morning crew nt

[Judi Lynn]

14. Here's a Sequoia thread from earlier this month you might want to check:

Original post:
Humor_In_Cuneiform (1000+ posts) Sat Apr-01-06 08:30 PM
Brad Blog: Wingnuts Concerned Re E-Voting- Hugo Chavez May Own Sequoia
This is kind of hilarious in a dark humor kinda way. :rofl:

Wingnuts Finally Concerned About E-Voting Since Discovering Hugo Chavez May Own Sequoia Voting Systems!But They Still Have Trouble With That Whole 'Fact Thing'...
Blogged by Brad on 3/31/2006 @ 1:36pm PT...

Meanwhile meanwhile... The Wingnuts have discovered they too should be concerned about hackable Electronic Voting Machines, as we find in this article posted yesterday over at RedState blog -- the site co-founded by serial plagiarist and disgraced former Washington Post blogger (for three days anyway) Ben Domenech -- concerning new ownership of Sequoia by Venezuelan firm Smartmatic.

Apparently, the writer is concerned about Electronic Voting Machines only now that he's realized Smartmatic may be owned or controlled or unduly influenced by one Hugo Chavez. He goes so far as to quote these words by another blogger in his article:

"It is extremely worrying indeed that a company with connections to the Hugo Chavez regime has been selected to run elections in a county of Chicago and given carte blanche to operate in the USA and other countries.


While we're glad to see the Wingnuts suddenly giving a damn about Electronic Voting -- now that they're concerned about their own ox being gored by a company which may have left-leaning ownership -- we're hardly surprised that the anonymous blogger who calls him or herself "AcademicElephant" (we'll presume it's a "he") didn't seem to have such concerns about another Voting Machine Company with "connections to the George W. Bush regime selected to run elections" all over our country in 2004 during one of the most contentious elections in our country's history.

But of more concern for the moment, now that Mr. Elephant has suddenly decided to be worried about such important matters as a transparent and accountable democracy, he sadly exhibits the all-too-familiar Wingnut tendency of having a problem with that whole pesky "fact thing"...."

http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00002632.htm

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x420354