MAXIM; The Mysterious Death of Bush's Cyber-Guru

[upi402]

http://www.maxim.com/humor/stupid-fun/86265/mysterious-death-bushs-cyber-guru.html

"The plane, it was said, had been sabotaged and the pilot murdered to cover up the GOP’s alleged theft of the Ohio vote in the 2004 presidential election. At the center of this plot was the Saratoga’s pilot, a prodigiously gifted IT expert named Michael Connell, whose altar boy charm and technical brilliance had made him the computer whiz of choice for the Republican Party. Left-wing Web sites openly referred to Connell as “Bush’s vote rigger” and claimed that his fingerprints were on all the most controversial elections in recent history. There were dark whispers of electronic pulses or sniper fire being used to bring down the plane—a black ops attack designed to keep him from testifying against his former cronies. Right-wing bloggers and talk show hosts derided such claims as the twisted delusions of liberal nut jobs and tinfoil hatters. The mainstream press sat on its hands."

This isn't late breaking news, but I'd like to see some coverage.

[liberal N proud]

1. Using an airplane as a murder weapon is a favorite of Republicans

It is hard to prove who the murderer is and many times the crash is written off as accidental.

[upi402]

2. Looks like a cover-up of an investigation

The crash scene was handle questionably, it seems. Hopefully Dylan Ratigan, KO, Ed, or Rachel will check this story out and follow up.

[Vinnie From Indy]

3. I find it funny that folks would deny the possibility that people would kill to steal

BILLIONS of dollars. That is exactly what happened with Bush's two stolen elections. This Connell kid was an IT genius and a complete ignorant fool about with whom he was dealing with. It is seems quite likely that Connell was duped into crafting a vote hack by playing on his extreme anti-abortion sentiments. This dumbass genius got himself killed because he had no conception early on that he would go from being a prized asset before the election to dangerous liability the day after the election. BushCo played this kid like a fiddle and then they played the aftermath perfectly. It would have been far too suspicious to kill him immediately after the election so they watched him and waited a few years to whack him.

[upi402]

6. Brilliant people aften have blind spots

He could recall every branch on every tree, but couldn't see the forest - let alone conceptualize there was an ecosystem at work. The organs of power-grabbing elites consumed this guy.

Whack him when it's clear he might testify against them. Casey's brain bubbling was adjacent to his testimony. Those guys must have been panicked over that one. Conservatives love to suspend disbelief.

"... “Mike was known as the GOP’s Mister Fix-It,” says Stephen Spoonamore, an IT security expert and friend of Connell’s. “He built really intelligent tools that allowed people who wanted to win elections do a better job organizing their data.” But aside from his more legitimate business, Connell was no stranger to the darker side of American politics. He was forced to resign from Senator Coats’ campaign for his involvement in ethical violations. Connell’s was also the hand behind the Web site for the notorious Swift Boat Veterans’ for Truth smear campaign against John Kerry and GWB43.com, the secret e-mail account used by Rove and dozens of other White House staffers...."

[happy_liberal]

13. +10000

nt

[drm604]

4. K&R

In my humble opinion, he may have been involved in the rigging of more than one election.

[Echo In Light]

5. "RW bloggers & talk show hosts derided such claims as the twisted delusions of liberal nutjobs and..

... tinfoil hatters."

Sounds like the sort of thing one hears around DU, also

[Cetacea]

12. Funny, that.

And almost always delivered with snark and insults.

[jpljr77]

7. Is it weird that the story is filed under the Stupid Fun feature in the humor folder?

I don't know much about Maxim's Web site, but check out the taxonomy on the URL to the story.

Also, when you get there, you can check out all of the other pieces in Maxim's Stupid Fun bucket: http://www.maxim.com/humor/stupid-fun. It's really, really dumb stuff. So why is this article filed there?

[upi402]

8. The reason why

I resisted posting this for days. But I want to see if it's been refuted, so I posted to learn of any debunking I couldn't find. Lots of convenient plane crashes for conservatism.

[jpljr77]

9. It's all the more strange considering how lengthy the article is.

I mean, it's a 3,700 word story. I wonder if the writer just really got into the story and the editors knew they couldn't just kill it. But since it's Maxim, they really had no other place to put it.

[upi402]

10. I'd like to see the masthead

Maybe I'll buy a copy just to support this kind of investigative journalism. In modern "journalism" we're left with sources like tabloids, Rolling Stone, and quasi-salacious men's magazines. Harpers and some others aside, there is no New York Times of old to regularly look to.


And PBS is hit and miss now, mostly miss. :shrug: Evenings on MSNBC is my only hope to see if this is a valid story.

[cutlassmama]

15. for both sides actually. Seems to a favorite past time for those in power.

[happy_liberal]

11. It is obvious to most thinking people that this was a hit

but I had no idea how close they are to proving election fraud...

"Ohio’s secretary of state in 2004 was a fiercely partisan Christian named Ken Blackwell. Blackwell had hired a company called GDC Limited to run the IT systems, which had subcontracted the job to Michael Connell’s company, GovTech. Connell had in turn sub-contracted SMARTech, an IT firm based in Chattanooga, to act, it was claimed, as a backup server.

“By looking at the URLs on the Web site, we discovered that there were three points on election night when SMARTech’s computers took over from the secretary of state,” says Arnebeck. “It is during that period that we believe votes were manipulated.”"


and I hadn't read about this either...

"A year later, at an IT conference in London, Spoonamore confronted the pro-life Connell about the Ohio election: “He said, ‘I’m afraid that in my zeal to save the babies, the system I built may have been abused.’ ”

Three days later, in the back of a cab heading toward the airport, Spoonamore asked Connell if he would be willing to talk to a Congressional judiciary committee about what he knew. “I actually took Mike’s hand and said, ‘If I can arrange for a private meeting for you to sit down with the committee and explain what you think may have happened in 2004 and how your systems may have been abused, will you do it?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ ”...

We may never know the truth about Connell’s last flight, but contracts between Connell’s company, GovTech, and Ken Blackwell’s administration establish a credible scenario for electoral fraud and place Connell at the scene of the alleged crime.

Among other things, the contracts contradict Connell’s sworn testimony that SMARTech, in Chattanooga, merely acted as a backup site for election data.

The contracts, signed in March 2004, show that SMARTech was specifically tasked with creating a “mirror site” to manage election night results.“What this means is that Connell’s company was on both sides of the mirror,” explains Stephen Spoonamore. “And that the votes of the people of Ohio were in the control of a fiercely partisan IT company (SMARTech) and operating out of another state.”

Clouding matters further is the persistent specter of paranoid conspiracy that has enveloped the case from the beginning. In September 2009, an anonymous letter was sent to the FBI in Ohio and five other addressees, including Heather Connell. “Enclosed is a document that is not meant to exist,” begins the anonymous writer. Included is what purports to be an “after action report” by a black ops agent. All names have been redacted, but the report provides a detailed time log of actions taken to install an AMD (microprocessor) in the engine of Connell’s plane at College Park Airfield in D.C. the night before he made his fatal last flight. Connell himself is not mentioned by name. Just the registration number of his plane, NP299N, which the agent confirms he had been sent to “neutralize.” The letter accompanying the report is headed MICHAEL CONNELL, HOMICIDE. It ends with the words: “Connell was not NST (national security threat).”

[upi402]

14. Maxim printed it, but in the 'Stupid Fun' section

And why is there no media investigation? Has MSNBC touched this? I haven't seen it.

Maxim must have paid Worrall's travel and per-dium, so may have felt the need to go ahead and print it. Could the placement in the 'Stupid Fun' section been an editorial CYA move that ended up opening the eyes of an audience that never would have thought about this sort of thing otherwise?

[happy_liberal]

16. kick

:kick:

[Apollo11]

17. Europeans don't trust electronic voting machines

This article was published last year in Newsweek magazine: We Do Not Trust Machines

It mentions a number of countries that have abandoned plans to use voting machines. For example - in The Netherlands they have gone back to using pencil and paper since 2006, when activists and journalists revealed just how vulnerable to fraud electronic voting machines could be.

[WhiteTara]

18. kick

kicking for the sunlight to disinfect this swamp called Karl Rove
:kick: