(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Copyright © 1998–2004 Online Journal™. All rights reserved.

Reprinted with permission from ONLINE JOURNAL™
www.onlinejournal.com

The stolen election of 2004: welcome back to hell

By
Larry Chin
Online Journal Associate Editor

November 5, 2004-Using a variety of criminal methods that they have perfected over the past four years, the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney-Karl Rove syndicate stole another election, and extended their illegal occupation of the White House. Experienced, informed and unblinking observers were not fooled by any aspect of this utterly predictable goose-step towards full dictatorship.

But to those who are "shocked" as they watched the election night numbers mysteriously slip away amidst controversy; those who are struggling to understand "what happened", let this cold realization serve as bracing edification.

Welcome to hell. Welcome to the horrifying reality that whistleblowers have suffered and fought through every day, over lifetimes. No more illusions. This is reality.

It Is a Rigged Game

The US political and economic system, exemplified by Bush-Cheney, is deeply criminalized. It is designed to profit by killing things. It thrives on war and oppression. It is sustained by collusion, fraud, lies, cover-up, and the indoctrination and manipulation of minds. It does not, and never has, represented its people. Its operatives heed no laws. They "make" law. These facts must be burned into the consciousness of every decent human being.

As Mike Ruppert writes in Crossing The Rubicon: "That profits of crime and war, which are destructive of human life, of labor, of happy, healthy neighborhoods (whether in the US or in Afghanistan, Africa and Iraq) are in effect a keystone of the global economy and a determinant of the success in a ruthless competition, is a compass needle for human civilization. One cannot expect to follow the recipe for roadkill stew and produce a crème brulee."

Criminals do not obey laws. Criminals do not believe in "democracy".

Criminals do not "permit" elections.

It is foolish, then, to expend one's energies in "clean" election activities, and expect good results. To quote one of George W. Bush many recent Freudian non-slips, "we make elections." The 2004 presidential election was just one more "manufacture".

How John Kerry Unwon the Presidency

How Bush-Cheney stole the 2000 election was a matter of obvious historical fact, confirmed by post-facto mainstream media reports of a Gore win, and detailed by numerous investigators such as Greg Palast in his book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Voters complained about old machines and paper ballots.

Then came the "black box voting" machines. (For detailed analysis of black box voting, read the work of Bev Harris.)

In the 2002 mid-term elections, the Republicans "shocked" Democrats by solidifying their power in Congress, using the same fraudulent methods, along with new and improved black box technology.

"The technology had a trial run in the 2002 mid-term elections. In Georgia, serviced by new Diebold systems, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called 'amazing' upsets, with results showing vote swings of up to 16 percent from the last pre-ballot polls. In computerized Minnesota, former Vice President Walter Mondale-a replacement for popular incumbent Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash days before the vote-was also defeated in a large last-second vote swing. Convenient 'glitches' in Florida saw an untold number of votes intended for the Democratic candidate registering instead for Governor Jeb "L'il Brother" Bush. A Florida Democrat who lost a similarly 'glitched' local election went to court to have the computers examined-but the case was thrown out by a judge who ruled that the innards of America's voting machines are the 'trade secrets' of the private companies who make them."

In 2003, black box voting also helped oust Governor Gray Davis and installed Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Democratic stronghold of California.

The probability of a fix was obvious throughout the 2004 presidential campaign. Corporate media polls continued to predominantly favor Bush, never dipping his rating below 48 percent, despite his trouncing in three straight debates with Kerry, and despite mushrooming war scandals. This was in stark contrast to independent surveys that showed Kerry with commanding leads. Kerry momentum, and massive Kerry/anti-Bush voter turnout, was evident on election day, and confirmed by exit polls with dominant Kerry numbers.

Then what?

Greg Palast reveals in exhaustive detail that John Kerry won the 2004 election and had it stolen through such methods as "spoilage", intimidation, polling place chicanery, ethnic cleansing of polls. (See Kerry Won. And here.)

Once again, criminals do not "permit" elections. They make them. This time, the Bush forces had years of unencumbered time to orchestrate it, from Ohio (where its notorious secretary of state is the head of the Bush re-election campaign), and, of course, Jeb Bush's Florida.

The Triumph of the Bush Machines

But there is one overriding fact that has been left out most of the ridiculous post-election punditry that renders all other analyses completely irrelevant. It is also the reason why the smiles on the faces of Bush crime family members are so bright, as they watched the returns on election night.

Air America Radio's Mike Malloy gave the most succinct and passionate explanation in his Wednesday, November 3, 2004, program [my links included-LC]:

"The American vote count is controlled by three major corporate players, Diebold, ESS, Sequoia, and a fourth, SAIC, Science Applications International. All four are hard-wired into the Bush power structure, the Bush crime family.

"They have been given millions of dollars by the Bush regime to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines that were just used in the 2004 election. The technology involved had a trial run during the 2002 mid-term elections. Georgia had Diebold machines in every precinct. As a result, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called an "amazing" 16 percent swing.

"Diebold's Walden O'Dell, a top Bush fundraiser, publicly committed himself to delivering his home state Ohio's votes to Bush. At Diebold, the election division is run by Bob Urosevich. Bob's brother, Todd, is a top executive at "rival" ES&S. The brothers were originally staked by Howard Ahmanson, a member of the Council For National Policy, a right-wing steering group stacked with Bush true believers. Ahmanson is also one of the bagmen behind the extremist Christian Reconstruction Movement, which advocates the theocratic takeover of American democracy.

"The four companies are interconnected; they are not four "competitors". Ahmanson has large stakes in ES&S, whose former CEO was Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. When Hagel ran for office, his own company counted the votes, and his victory was considered "an amazing upset". Hagel still has a million dollar stake in ES&S.

"Sequoia is the corporate parent of a private equity firm, Madison Dearborn, which is partner in the Carlyle Group. (Also see here.)

"Meanwhile, SAIC is referred to a "shadowy defense contractor". They have gotten into the vote count game both directly and through spinoffs by its top brass, including Admiral Bill Owens, former military aide to Dick Cheney, and Carlyle Group honcho Frank Carlucci and ex-CIA chief Robert Gates. SAIC's history of fraud charges and security "lapses" haven't prevented it from becoming one of the largest Pentagon and CIA contractors, and will doubtless encounter few obstacles in its entrance into the vote counting business.

"The mad rush to install these unverifiable computers is driven by the Help America Vote Act, signed by …Bush! The chief lobbying group pushing for the act (while we dumb asses sat out here and thought, 'That sounds like a good idea!') was a consortium of arms dealers including Northrup Grumman and Lockheed Martin.

"When you hear people saying, 'take a deep breath, we will pull through this', 'we need to work harder', 'we need to organize'-no. We will not. It's over.

"Unless electronic vote tabulation is history, and these companies are driven out of business, it's their country. Not ours.

"Nobody knows, and no one will ever know, what the actual vote count was.

"There are no checks and balances left. The US Senate now has 55 of these Republicans. When they hit 60, which is what will happen in 2006 mid-term elections-trust me-that means that no matter what Bush and the crime family want to do, they can do it. The House (of Representatives) is gone for the next two to five generations. It's gone.

"The last thing rational people in this country need right now is this whistling-past-the-graveyard horse hockey. Nothing is going to happen; it's going to get worse. There will never again be a legitimate election in this county.

"Until we get rid of the machines.

The people who put the software together-do you think that they are in this business to promote democracy? To promote representative government? Then you are a fool, and you don't deserve anything other than the lash.

Kerry did not lose the election. The vote was stolen. Get that through your head."

The Bush syndicate owns and runs the machines that make the votes. They control all branches of the federal government.

There is nothing more painful than witnessing the Kerry voters, liberals and progressives as they agonize over "what went wrong," second guessing their Herculean efforts, grasping for solutions in outdated ideas, and vowing how "next time, we'll work harder, and we'll really get out the vote!", and that "we'll nominate even better candidates!"

Still others are asking reasonable questions. Why aren't Walden O'Dell, Jeb Bush, and J. Kenneth Blackwell under arrest, or in jail? Exactly how did Associated Press pull it off on election night? Will any of the Bush administration criminals ever be punished for their war crimes? Then one must ask, who is going to prosecute? Who is going to hear the cases? The Bush Justice Department? The Bush FBI? The Supreme Court?

When you play fair in a rigged game, it doesn't matter how hard you work, or even what you do. Insanity is repeating the same mistake, expecting a different result.

Kerry Welcomes Fascism with Open Arms

John Kerry's pitiful and immediate capitulation, surrendering with even less of a fight than Al Gore in 2000, despite clear, overt and gross vote fraud across the country, including Ohio-Diebold's home state-was sickening.

Bush's Skull & Bones fraternity brother then spoke of "healing" and uniting behind Bush, a speech grotesquely reminiscent of Al Gore's sickening 2000 declaration that Bush was "mah president."

Twice now, with Gore and Kerry, Democrats have won the White House, and then refused to speak the truth about the crime, and fight for the people who bled for them. Twice, America has been sold out.

Could it be that this time, Kerry played the American people in just another game of bait-and-switch?

Will those who supported Kerry actually heed his command, and obediently march in step, "without anger or rancor," and follow George W. Bush, the strutting tyrant, and the most dangerous and irrational collection of mass-murdering war criminals in modern history?

In a cynical view, and one that is likely accurate, the election of 2004 may have been nothing more than an elaborate trial balloon, a "good cop-bad cop" theater that is mandated every few years to uphold the appearance of legitimacy. Our candidates lie, all the while gauging the effectiveness of long-term manipulation programs. They think, are the people still gullible and uninformed? What slogans and illusions can we fool them with? Is the "war on terrorism" mindset still unwavering? How far can we push them? Will they accept the baseball bat in the face, or the velvet glove to the nose?

How many beatings will this republic take, before its people wake up? When will the people realize what is really happening, and "chase us down the street and lynch us" (as George H.W. Bush said to reporter Sarah McClendon)?

To hell with Bush. To hell with Kerry. Wait, We're All Already Here.

As sadistic Bush slurred in his "acceptance" speech, "a new term is a new opportunity". Then the most chilling words yet: "I earned political capital. I intend to spend it." If the last four years brought the world to its knees, imagine what is to come as Bush-Cheney giddily pry open a new set of larger Pandora's Boxes.

Webster Tarpley, author of the Unauthorized Biography of George Bush writes: "If Bush retains control of the White House, we can expect a neocon fascist dictatorship or martial law emergency regime in 2005 or 2006, possibly as the result of synthetic terrorism. The neocons are in a desperate flight forward mentality which seeks to avoid the penal consequences of what they have already done with Valerie Plame, the Niger yellowcake forgeries, the Israeli mole scandal, and the Chalabi betrayal of state secrets. The neocon preference is for early war with Iran. War with Russia and China cannot be excluded somewhat further down the road."

Add to that the relentless horror that will be inflicted when the effects of Peak Oil (also see From The Wilderness and Richard Heinberg) crash home in earnest, the body bags pile higher with new wars, and the lives of Americans (including Bush drones) and people all over the world continue to be destroyed.

Some members of the current Bush crime organization may leave or retire, and the possibilities include Donald Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft (possibly replaced with Marc Racicot, a long-time friend of George W. Bush, and W's first choice for attorney general in 2000). Expect their replacements to be less well known criminals who, if anything, may be more toxic.

Robert Lederman wrote of Racicot: "Numerous members of the Bush family, including his father and brothers and at least one of GW's prospective cabinet appointees-potential GW Bush Attorney General Marc Racicot-have a history of alleged involvement in drug running at the highest levels. We're not talking about buying drugs for personal use here but massive importations of heroin and cocaine with the full involvement of foreign dictators like George Bush pal Manuel Noriega and the Mafia." (See Murder and Drug Running in Montana)

In Robert Payne's biography The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, he writes of Hitler (whose Third Reich was, in fact, financed by the Bush family): "For all the foreseeable future, he will remain to haunt us, more alive than ever although he is dead. He hides in shadowy places and at the pinnacle of power, always urging men to commit the ultimate crime, the perfect atrocity, the most ferocious massacres. Into the ears of generals and politicians he whispers: "Be merciless. It is very easy now because I have lived. I have reduced the value of man to a fraction of what it was before. You will find, if you continue along the path I have opened for you, the value of man will decline still further. Remember, mankind is always valueless and its only use is to serve our interests. We alone are transmitters of civilization, and the people are nothing but cattle. Napalm is good for them."

Hitler himself wrote: "The victor will not be asked, later on, whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war, it is not right that matters, but victory. Have no pity."

Hitler had nothing on the George W. Bush administration.

What, if any, silver lining can be found in the wake of this new goose-step in the abyss? Perhaps only that the same bellicose, predictable and clumsy villains remain right where they have been for the last four years: right in front of us. Better that than a crafty and likeable neoliberal John Kerry administration that lulls the world to sleep before poison is administered.

We cannot be fooled.


Larry Chin is a freelance journalist and an Online Journal Associate Editor.

Copyright © 1998-2004 Online Journal™. All rights reserved.

http://www.copvcia.com/free/ww3/110804_stolen_election.shtml

www.truthout.org

Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked
By Thom Hartmann
CommonDreams.org

Saturday 06 November 2004

When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.

"It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.

And some believe evidence is accumulating that the national effort happened on November 2, 2004.

The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something startling.

While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking - the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.

In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.

In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.

The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.

Yet in the touch-screen counties, where investigators may have been more vigorously looking for such anomalies, high percentages of registered Democrats generally equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry. (I had earlier reported that county size was a variable - this turns out not to be the case. Just the use of touch-screens versus optical scanners.)

More visual analysis of the results can be seen at http://us together.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm. Note the trend line - the only variable that determines a swing toward Bush was the use of optical scan machines.

One possible explanation for this is the "Dixiecrat" theory, that in Florida white voters (particularly the rural ones) have been registered as Democrats for years, but voting Republican since Reagan. Looking at the 2000 statistics, also available on Dopp's site, there are similar anomalies, although the trends are not as strong as in 2004. But some suggest the 2000 election may have been questionable in Florida, too.

One of the people involved in Dopp's analysis noted that it may be possible to determine the validity of the "rural Democrat" theory by comparing Florida's white rural counties to those of Pennsylvania, another swing state but one that went for Kerry, as the exit polls there predicted. Interestingly, the Pennsylvania analysis, available at http://ustogether.org/election04/PA_vote_patt.htm, doesn't show the same kind of swings as does Florida, lending credence to the possibility of problems in Florida.

Even more significantly, Dopp had first run the analysis while filtering out smaller (rural) counties, and still found that the only variable that accounted for a swing toward Republican voting was the use of optical-scan machines, whereas counties with touch-screen machines generally didn't swing - regardless of size.

Others offer similar insights, based on other data. A professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, noted that in Florida the vote to raise the minimum wage was approved by 72%, although Kerry got 48%. "The correlation between voting for the minimum wage increase and voting for Kerry isn't likely to be perfect," he noted, "but one would normally expect that the gap - of 1.5 million votes - to be far smaller than it was."

While all of this may or may not be evidence of vote tampering, it again brings the nation back to the question of why several states using electronic voting machines or scanners programmed by private, for-profit corporations and often connected to modems produced votes inconsistent with exit poll numbers.

Those exit poll results have been a problem for reporters ever since Election Day.

Election night, I'd been doing live election coverage for WDEV, one of the radio stations that carries my syndicated show, and, just after midnight, during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted the AP report.

But then the computers reported something different. In several pivotal states.

Conservatives see a conspiracy here: They think the exit polls were rigged.

Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, wrote an article for The Hill, the publication read by every political junkie in Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of brilliant points.

"Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state."

He added: "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points."

Yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as the computerized vote numbers began to come in from the various states the election was called for Bush.

How could this happen?

On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real "counting" is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.

That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.

"In a voting system," Harris explained to Dean on national television, "you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once?"

Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. "What surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's just a regular computer."

"So," Dean said, "anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator?"

Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into the central tabulator system. "This is the official program that the County Supervisor sees," she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting between them loaded with Diebold's software.

Bev then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the results of a test election. They went to the screen titled "Election Summary Report" and waited a moment while the PC "adds up all the votes from all the various precincts," and then saw that in this faux election Howard Dean had 1000 votes, Lex Luthor had 500, and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was winning.

"Of course, you can't tamper with this software," Harris noted. Diebold wrote a pretty good program.

But, it's running on a Windows PC.

So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB" which, Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep the votes." Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled "Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like Excel.

In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.

"Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let's give 100 votes to Tiger."

They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software "the legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the progress of your election."

As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said, "And you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.

Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds."

On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv.) And they had left no tracks whatsoever, Harris said, noting that it would be nearly impossible for the election software - or a County election official - to know that the vote database had been altered.

Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that had Karen Hughes telling George W. Bush that he'd lost the election in a landslide.

Morris's conspiracy theory is that the exit polls "were sabotage" to cause people in the western states to not bother voting for Bush, since the networks would call the election based on the exit polls for Kerry. But the networks didn't do that, and had never intended to.

According to congressional candidate Fisher, it makes far more sense that the exit polls were right - they weren't done on Diebold PCs - and that the vote itself was hacked.

And not only for the presidential candidate - Jeff Fisher thinks this hit him and pretty much every other Democratic candidate for national office in the most-hacked swing states.

So far, the only national "mainstream" media to come close to this story was Keith Olbermann on his show Friday night, November 5th, when he noted that it was curious that all the voting machine irregularities so far uncovered seem to favor Bush. In the meantime, the Washington Post and other media are now going through single-bullet-theory-like contortions to explain how the exit polls had failed.

But I agree with Fox's Dick Morris on this one, at least in large part. Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in his final paragraph, "This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play."

-------

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann.com. His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."



-------

Jump to TO Features for Monday November 8, 2004
Today's TO Features -------------- William Rivers Pitt | Worse Than 2000: Tuesday's Electoral Disaster Iraqi Resistance Kill 50, Mostly Police U.S. Ready to Put Weapons in Space French Foreign Minister: Arafat Alive, But in Complex State Neo-Con Agenda: Iran, China, Russia, Latin America ... Los Angeles Times | Democrats and the God Gap Bush, Oil Batter Clean Energy Stocks Eric Leser | The Big Companies Will Be Repaid Christian Right Moves on "Moral Issues" European Catholics Join Battle on Gays and God Republicans in Congress Warned Not to Gloat Guantanamo Bay Justice: 3 Hours Behind Closed Doors BREAKING: Invasion of Fallujah Begins The Costs of War - Letters from the Home Front Pelosi Says Democrats Will Protect Social Security Iraq Declares Martial Law, 23 Police Killed Thom Hartmann | Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked t r u t h o u t Home

© Copyright 2004 by TruthOut.org






> ehécatl ha escrito:
> (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
>
> Copyright © 1998–2004 Online Journal™. All rights reserved.
>
> Reprinted with permission from ONLINE JOURNAL™
> www.onlinejournal.com
>
> The stolen election of 2004: welcome back to hell
>
> By
> Larry Chin
> Online Journal Associate Editor
>
> November 5, 2004-Using a variety of criminal methods that they have perfected over the past four years, the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney-Karl Rove syndicate stole another election, and extended their illegal occupation of the White House. Experienced, informed and unblinking observers were not fooled by any aspect of this utterly predictable goose-step towards full dictatorship.
>
> But to those who are "shocked" as they watched the election night numbers mysteriously slip away amidst controversy; those who are struggling to understand "what happened", let this cold realization serve as bracing edification.
>
> Welcome to hell. Welcome to the horrifying reality that whistleblowers have suffered and fought through every day, over lifetimes. No more illusions. This is reality.
>
> It Is a Rigged Game
>
> The US political and economic system, exemplified by Bush-Cheney, is deeply criminalized. It is designed to profit by killing things. It thrives on war and oppression. It is sustained by collusion, fraud, lies, cover-up, and the indoctrination and manipulation of minds. It does not, and never has, represented its people. Its operatives heed no laws. They "make" law. These facts must be burned into the consciousness of every decent human being.
>
> As Mike Ruppert writes in Crossing The Rubicon: "That profits of crime and war, which are destructive of human life, of labor, of happy, healthy neighborhoods (whether in the US or in Afghanistan, Africa and Iraq) are in effect a keystone of the global economy and a determinant of the success in a ruthless competition, is a compass needle for human civilization. One cannot expect to follow the recipe for roadkill stew and produce a crème brulee."
>
> Criminals do not obey laws. Criminals do not believe in "democracy".
>
> Criminals do not "permit" elections.
>
> It is foolish, then, to expend one's energies in "clean" election activities, and expect good results. To quote one of George W. Bush many recent Freudian non-slips, "we make elections." The 2004 presidential election was just one more "manufacture".
>
> How John Kerry Unwon the Presidency
>
> How Bush-Cheney stole the 2000 election was a matter of obvious historical fact, confirmed by post-facto mainstream media reports of a Gore win, and detailed by numerous investigators such as Greg Palast in his book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Voters complained about old machines and paper ballots.
>
> Then came the "black box voting" machines. (For detailed analysis of black box voting, read the work of Bev Harris.)
>
> In the 2002 mid-term elections, the Republicans "shocked" Democrats by solidifying their power in Congress, using the same fraudulent methods, along with new and improved black box technology.
>
> "The technology had a trial run in the 2002 mid-term elections. In Georgia, serviced by new Diebold systems, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called 'amazing' upsets, with results showing vote swings of up to 16 percent from the last pre-ballot polls. In computerized Minnesota, former Vice President Walter Mondale-a replacement for popular incumbent Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash days before the vote-was also defeated in a large last-second vote swing. Convenient 'glitches' in Florida saw an untold number of votes intended for the Democratic candidate registering instead for Governor Jeb "L'il Brother" Bush. A Florida Democrat who lost a similarly 'glitched' local election went to court to have the computers examined-but the case was thrown out by a judge who ruled that the innards of America's voting machines are the 'trade secrets' of the private companies who make them."
>
> In 2003, black box voting also helped oust Governor Gray Davis and installed Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Democratic stronghold of California.
>
> The probability of a fix was obvious throughout the 2004 presidential campaign. Corporate media polls continued to predominantly favor Bush, never dipping his rating below 48 percent, despite his trouncing in three straight debates with Kerry, and despite mushrooming war scandals. This was in stark contrast to independent surveys that showed Kerry with commanding leads. Kerry momentum, and massive Kerry/anti-Bush voter turnout, was evident on election day, and confirmed by exit polls with dominant Kerry numbers.
>
> Then what?
>
> Greg Palast reveals in exhaustive detail that John Kerry won the 2004 election and had it stolen through such methods as "spoilage", intimidation, polling place chicanery, ethnic cleansing of polls. (See Kerry Won. And here.)
>
> Once again, criminals do not "permit" elections. They make them. This time, the Bush forces had years of unencumbered time to orchestrate it, from Ohio (where its notorious secretary of state is the head of the Bush re-election campaign), and, of course, Jeb Bush's Florida.
>
> The Triumph of the Bush Machines
>
> But there is one overriding fact that has been left out most of the ridiculous post-election punditry that renders all other analyses completely irrelevant. It is also the reason why the smiles on the faces of Bush crime family members are so bright, as they watched the returns on election night.
>
> Air America Radio's Mike Malloy gave the most succinct and passionate explanation in his Wednesday, November 3, 2004, program [my links included-LC]:
>
> "The American vote count is controlled by three major corporate players, Diebold, ESS, Sequoia, and a fourth, SAIC, Science Applications International. All four are hard-wired into the Bush power structure, the Bush crime family.
>
> "They have been given millions of dollars by the Bush regime to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines that were just used in the 2004 election. The technology involved had a trial run during the 2002 mid-term elections. Georgia had Diebold machines in every precinct. As a result, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called an "amazing" 16 percent swing.
>
> "Diebold's Walden O'Dell, a top Bush fundraiser, publicly committed himself to delivering his home state Ohio's votes to Bush. At Diebold, the election division is run by Bob Urosevich. Bob's brother, Todd, is a top executive at "rival" ES&S. The brothers were originally staked by Howard Ahmanson, a member of the Council For National Policy, a right-wing steering group stacked with Bush true believers. Ahmanson is also one of the bagmen behind the extremist Christian Reconstruction Movement, which advocates the theocratic takeover of American democracy.
>
> "The four companies are interconnected; they are not four "competitors". Ahmanson has large stakes in ES&S, whose former CEO was Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. When Hagel ran for office, his own company counted the votes, and his victory was considered "an amazing upset". Hagel still has a million dollar stake in ES&S.
>
> "Sequoia is the corporate parent of a private equity firm, Madison Dearborn, which is partner in the Carlyle Group. (Also see here.)
>
> "Meanwhile, SAIC is referred to a "shadowy defense contractor". They have gotten into the vote count game both directly and through spinoffs by its top brass, including Admiral Bill Owens, former military aide to Dick Cheney, and Carlyle Group honcho Frank Carlucci and ex-CIA chief Robert Gates. SAIC's history of fraud charges and security "lapses" haven't prevented it from becoming one of the largest Pentagon and CIA contractors, and will doubtless encounter few obstacles in its entrance into the vote counting business.
>
> "The mad rush to install these unverifiable computers is driven by the Help America Vote Act, signed by …Bush! The chief lobbying group pushing for the act (while we dumb asses sat out here and thought, 'That sounds like a good idea!') was a consortium of arms dealers including Northrup Grumman and Lockheed Martin.
>
> "When you hear people saying, 'take a deep breath, we will pull through this', 'we need to work harder', 'we need to organize'-no. We will not. It's over.
>
> "Unless electronic vote tabulation is history, and these companies are driven out of business, it's their country. Not ours.
>
> "Nobody knows, and no one will ever know, what the actual vote count was.
>
> "There are no checks and balances left. The US Senate now has 55 of these Republicans. When they hit 60, which is what will happen in 2006 mid-term elections-trust me-that means that no matter what Bush and the crime family want to do, they can do it. The House (of Representatives) is gone for the next two to five generations. It's gone.
>
> "The last thing rational people in this country need right now is this whistling-past-the-graveyard horse hockey. Nothing is going to happen; it's going to get worse. There will never again be a legitimate election in this county.
>
> "Until we get rid of the machines.
>
> The people who put the software together-do you think that they are in this business to promote democracy? To promote representative government? Then you are a fool, and you don't deserve anything other than the lash.
>
> Kerry did not lose the election. The vote was stolen. Get that through your head."
>
> The Bush syndicate owns and runs the machines that make the votes. They control all branches of the federal government.
>
> There is nothing more painful than witnessing the Kerry voters, liberals and progressives as they agonize over "what went wrong," second guessing their Herculean efforts, grasping for solutions in outdated ideas, and vowing how "next time, we'll work harder, and we'll really get out the vote!", and that "we'll nominate even better candidates!"
>
> Still others are asking reasonable questions. Why aren't Walden O'Dell, Jeb Bush, and J. Kenneth Blackwell under arrest, or in jail? Exactly how did Associated Press pull it off on election night? Will any of the Bush administration criminals ever be punished for their war crimes? Then one must ask, who is going to prosecute? Who is going to hear the cases? The Bush Justice Department? The Bush FBI? The Supreme Court?
>
> When you play fair in a rigged game, it doesn't matter how hard you work, or even what you do. Insanity is repeating the same mistake, expecting a different result.
>
> Kerry Welcomes Fascism with Open Arms
>
> John Kerry's pitiful and immediate capitulation, surrendering with even less of a fight than Al Gore in 2000, despite clear, overt and gross vote fraud across the country, including Ohio-Diebold's home state-was sickening.
>
> Bush's Skull & Bones fraternity brother then spoke of "healing" and uniting behind Bush, a speech grotesquely reminiscent of Al Gore's sickening 2000 declaration that Bush was "mah president."
>
> Twice now, with Gore and Kerry, Democrats have won the White House, and then refused to speak the truth about the crime, and fight for the people who bled for them. Twice, America has been sold out.
>
> Could it be that this time, Kerry played the American people in just another game of bait-and-switch?
>
> Will those who supported Kerry actually heed his command, and obediently march in step, "without anger or rancor," and follow George W. Bush, the strutting tyrant, and the most dangerous and irrational collection of mass-murdering war criminals in modern history?
>
> In a cynical view, and one that is likely accurate, the election of 2004 may have been nothing more than an elaborate trial balloon, a "good cop-bad cop" theater that is mandated every few years to uphold the appearance of legitimacy. Our candidates lie, all the while gauging the effectiveness of long-term manipulation programs. They think, are the people still gullible and uninformed? What slogans and illusions can we fool them with? Is the "war on terrorism" mindset still unwavering? How far can we push them? Will they accept the baseball bat in the face, or the velvet glove to the nose?
>
> How many beatings will this republic take, before its people wake up? When will the people realize what is really happening, and "chase us down the street and lynch us" (as George H.W. Bush said to reporter Sarah McClendon)?
>
> To hell with Bush. To hell with Kerry. Wait, We're All Already Here.
>
> As sadistic Bush slurred in his "acceptance" speech, "a new term is a new opportunity". Then the most chilling words yet: "I earned political capital. I intend to spend it." If the last four years brought the world to its knees, imagine what is to come as Bush-Cheney giddily pry open a new set of larger Pandora's Boxes.
>
> Webster Tarpley, author of the Unauthorized Biography of George Bush writes: "If Bush retains control of the White House, we can expect a neocon fascist dictatorship or martial law emergency regime in 2005 or 2006, possibly as the result of synthetic terrorism. The neocons are in a desperate flight forward mentality which seeks to avoid the penal consequences of what they have already done with Valerie Plame, the Niger yellowcake forgeries, the Israeli mole scandal, and the Chalabi betrayal of state secrets. The neocon preference is for early war with Iran. War with Russia and China cannot be excluded somewhat further down the road."
>
> Add to that the relentless horror that will be inflicted when the effects of Peak Oil (also see From The Wilderness and Richard Heinberg) crash home in earnest, the body bags pile higher with new wars, and the lives of Americans (including Bush drones) and people all over the world continue to be destroyed.
>
> Some members of the current Bush crime organization may leave or retire, and the possibilities include Donald Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft (possibly replaced with Marc Racicot, a long-time friend of George W. Bush, and W's first choice for attorney general in 2000). Expect their replacements to be less well known criminals who, if anything, may be more toxic.
>
> Robert Lederman wrote of Racicot: "Numerous members of the Bush family, including his father and brothers and at least one of GW's prospective cabinet appointees-potential GW Bush Attorney General Marc Racicot-have a history of alleged involvement in drug running at the highest levels. We're not talking about buying drugs for personal use here but massive importations of heroin and cocaine with the full involvement of foreign dictators like George Bush pal Manuel Noriega and the Mafia." (See Murder and Drug Running in Montana)
>
> In Robert Payne's biography The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, he writes of Hitler (whose Third Reich was, in fact, financed by the Bush family): "For all the foreseeable future, he will remain to haunt us, more alive than ever although he is dead. He hides in shadowy places and at the pinnacle of power, always urging men to commit the ultimate crime, the perfect atrocity, the most ferocious massacres. Into the ears of generals and politicians he whispers: "Be merciless. It is very easy now because I have lived. I have reduced the value of man to a fraction of what it was before. You will find, if you continue along the path I have opened for you, the value of man will decline still further. Remember, mankind is always valueless and its only use is to serve our interests. We alone are transmitters of civilization, and the people are nothing but cattle. Napalm is good for them."
>
> Hitler himself wrote: "The victor will not be asked, later on, whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war, it is not right that matters, but victory. Have no pity."
>
> Hitler had nothing on the George W. Bush administration.
>
> What, if any, silver lining can be found in the wake of this new goose-step in the abyss? Perhaps only that the same bellicose, predictable and clumsy villains remain right where they have been for the last four years: right in front of us. Better that than a crafty and likeable neoliberal John Kerry administration that lulls the world to sleep before poison is administered.
>
> We cannot be fooled.
>
>
> Larry Chin is a freelance journalist and an Online Journal Associate Editor.
>
> Copyright © 1998-2004 Online Journal™. All rights reserved.
>
> http://www.copvcia.com/free/ww3/110804_stolen_election.shtml
>

Dear All,

If you are not following Keith Oblermann's story about voter fraud in Ohio and Florida, please go immediately to:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/

The numbers are revolting. Ex: 95,000 more people voted for Bush in one Ohio county than were registered. It is clear that the election was intentionally stolen and this can be documented.

Only one "mainstream" news organization is covering this and they will only keep it alive if we are paying attention.

Here's the deal:
The concession is not legally binding.
The vote in Ohio has not yet been certified.
The electoral vote has not yet been cast.
If you found it hard to believe that Bush won, maybe it's because he didn't.
We still have time to address these issues, but you are going to have to make some noise now.

You can follow this story and see links to elected officials at http://www.changeforamerica.com/community/node/view/1785

For those of us who worked to inspire a new generation of voters, we must not neglect to protect that vote when it has been stolen.



"It behooves our citizens to be on their guard, to be firm in their principles, and full of confidence in themselves. We are able to preserve our self-government if we will but think so." --Thomas Jefferson
Voting Is Beautiful,

Teresa Van Deusen
Austin, TX



> ehécatl ha escrito:
> www.truthout.org
>
> Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked
> By Thom Hartmann
> CommonDreams.org
>
> Saturday 06 November 2004
>
> When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.
>
> "It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.
>
> And some believe evidence is accumulating that the national effort happened on November 2, 2004.
>
> The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something startling.
>
> While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking - the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.
>
> In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.
>
> In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.
>
> The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.
>
> Yet in the touch-screen counties, where investigators may have been more vigorously looking for such anomalies, high percentages of registered Democrats generally equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry. (I had earlier reported that county size was a variable - this turns out not to be the case. Just the use of touch-screens versus optical scanners.)
>
> More visual analysis of the results can be seen at http://us together.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm. Note the trend line - the only variable that determines a swing toward Bush was the use of optical scan machines.
>
> One possible explanation for this is the "Dixiecrat" theory, that in Florida white voters (particularly the rural ones) have been registered as Democrats for years, but voting Republican since Reagan. Looking at the 2000 statistics, also available on Dopp's site, there are similar anomalies, although the trends are not as strong as in 2004. But some suggest the 2000 election may have been questionable in Florida, too.
>
> One of the people involved in Dopp's analysis noted that it may be possible to determine the validity of the "rural Democrat" theory by comparing Florida's white rural counties to those of Pennsylvania, another swing state but one that went for Kerry, as the exit polls there predicted. Interestingly, the Pennsylvania analysis, available at http://ustogether.org/election04/PA_vote_patt.htm, doesn't show the same kind of swings as does Florida, lending credence to the possibility of problems in Florida.
>
> Even more significantly, Dopp had first run the analysis while filtering out smaller (rural) counties, and still found that the only variable that accounted for a swing toward Republican voting was the use of optical-scan machines, whereas counties with touch-screen machines generally didn't swing - regardless of size.
>
> Others offer similar insights, based on other data. A professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, noted that in Florida the vote to raise the minimum wage was approved by 72%, although Kerry got 48%. "The correlation between voting for the minimum wage increase and voting for Kerry isn't likely to be perfect," he noted, "but one would normally expect that the gap - of 1.5 million votes - to be far smaller than it was."
>
> While all of this may or may not be evidence of vote tampering, it again brings the nation back to the question of why several states using electronic voting machines or scanners programmed by private, for-profit corporations and often connected to modems produced votes inconsistent with exit poll numbers.
>
> Those exit poll results have been a problem for reporters ever since Election Day.
>
> Election night, I'd been doing live election coverage for WDEV, one of the radio stations that carries my syndicated show, and, just after midnight, during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted the AP report.
>
> But then the computers reported something different. In several pivotal states.
>
> Conservatives see a conspiracy here: They think the exit polls were rigged.
>
> Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, wrote an article for The Hill, the publication read by every political junkie in Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of brilliant points.
>
> "Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state."
>
> He added: "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points."
>
> Yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as the computerized vote numbers began to come in from the various states the election was called for Bush.
>
> How could this happen?
>
> On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real "counting" is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.
>
> That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.
>
> "In a voting system," Harris explained to Dean on national television, "you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once?"
>
> Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. "What surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's just a regular computer."
>
> "So," Dean said, "anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator?"
>
> Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into the central tabulator system. "This is the official program that the County Supervisor sees," she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting between them loaded with Diebold's software.
>
> Bev then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the results of a test election. They went to the screen titled "Election Summary Report" and waited a moment while the PC "adds up all the votes from all the various precincts," and then saw that in this faux election Howard Dean had 1000 votes, Lex Luthor had 500, and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was winning.
>
> "Of course, you can't tamper with this software," Harris noted. Diebold wrote a pretty good program.
>
> But, it's running on a Windows PC.
>
> So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB" which, Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep the votes." Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled "Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like Excel.
>
> In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.
>
> "Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let's give 100 votes to Tiger."
>
> They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software "the legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the progress of your election."
>
> As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said, "And you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.
>
> Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds."
>
> On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv.) And they had left no tracks whatsoever, Harris said, noting that it would be nearly impossible for the election software - or a County election official - to know that the vote database had been altered.
>
> Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that had Karen Hughes telling George W. Bush that he'd lost the election in a landslide.
>
> Morris's conspiracy theory is that the exit polls "were sabotage" to cause people in the western states to not bother voting for Bush, since the networks would call the election based on the exit polls for Kerry. But the networks didn't do that, and had never intended to.
>
> According to congressional candidate Fisher, it makes far more sense that the exit polls were right - they weren't done on Diebold PCs - and that the vote itself was hacked.
>
> And not only for the presidential candidate - Jeff Fisher thinks this hit him and pretty much every other Democratic candidate for national office in the most-hacked swing states.
>
> So far, the only national "mainstream" media to come close to this story was Keith Olbermann on his show Friday night, November 5th, when he noted that it was curious that all the voting machine irregularities so far uncovered seem to favor Bush. In the meantime, the Washington Post and other media are now going through single-bullet-theory-like contortions to explain how the exit polls had failed.
>
> But I agree with Fox's Dick Morris on this one, at least in large part. Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in his final paragraph, "This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play."
>
> -------
>
> Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann.com. His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."
>
>
>
> -------
>
> Jump to TO Features for Monday November 8, 2004
> Today's TO Features -------------- William Rivers Pitt | Worse Than 2000: Tuesday's Electoral Disaster Iraqi Resistance Kill 50, Mostly Police U.S. Ready to Put Weapons in Space French Foreign Minister: Arafat Alive, But in Complex State Neo-Con Agenda: Iran, China, Russia, Latin America ... Los Angeles Times | Democrats and the God Gap Bush, Oil Batter Clean Energy Stocks Eric Leser | The Big Companies Will Be Repaid Christian Right Moves on "Moral Issues" European Catholics Join Battle on Gays and God Republicans in Congress Warned Not to Gloat Guantanamo Bay Justice: 3 Hours Behind Closed Doors BREAKING: Invasion of Fallujah Begins The Costs of War - Letters from the Home Front Pelosi Says Democrats Will Protect Social Security Iraq Declares Martial Law, 23 Police Killed Thom Hartmann | Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked t r u t h o u t Home
>
> © Copyright 2004 by TruthOut.org
>
>
>
>
>
>
>> ehécatl ha escrito:
>> (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
>>
>> Copyright © 1998–2004 Online Journal™. All rights reserved.
>>
>> Reprinted with permission from ONLINE JOURNAL™
>> www.onlinejournal.com
>>
>> The stolen election of 2004: welcome back to hell
>>
>> By
>> Larry Chin
>> Online Journal Associate Editor
>>
>> November 5, 2004-Using a variety of criminal methods that they have perfected over the past four years, the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney-Karl Rove syndicate stole another election, and extended their illegal occupation of the White House. Experienced, informed and unblinking observers were not fooled by any aspect of this utterly predictable goose-step towards full dictatorship.
>>
>> But to those who are "shocked" as they watched the election night numbers mysteriously slip away amidst controversy; those who are struggling to understand "what happened", let this cold realization serve as bracing edification.
>>
>> Welcome to hell. Welcome to the horrifying reality that whistleblowers have suffered and fought through every day, over lifetimes. No more illusions. This is reality.
>>
>> It Is a Rigged Game
>>
>> The US political and economic system, exemplified by Bush-Cheney, is deeply criminalized. It is designed to profit by killing things. It thrives on war and oppression. It is sustained by collusion, fraud, lies, cover-up, and the indoctrination and manipulation of minds. It does not, and never has, represented its people. Its operatives heed no laws. They "make" law. These facts must be burned into the consciousness of every decent human being.
>>
>> As Mike Ruppert writes in Crossing The Rubicon: "That profits of crime and war, which are destructive of human life, of labor, of happy, healthy neighborhoods (whether in the US or in Afghanistan, Africa and Iraq) are in effect a keystone of the global economy and a determinant of the success in a ruthless competition, is a compass needle for human civilization. One cannot expect to follow the recipe for roadkill stew and produce a crème brulee."
>>
>> Criminals do not obey laws. Criminals do not believe in "democracy".
>>
>> Criminals do not "permit" elections.
>>
>> It is foolish, then, to expend one's energies in "clean" election activities, and expect good results. To quote one of George W. Bush many recent Freudian non-slips, "we make elections." The 2004 presidential election was just one more "manufacture".
>>
>> How John Kerry Unwon the Presidency
>>
>> How Bush-Cheney stole the 2000 election was a matter of obvious historical fact, confirmed by post-facto mainstream media reports of a Gore win, and detailed by numerous investigators such as Greg Palast in his book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Voters complained about old machines and paper ballots.
>>
>> Then came the "black box voting" machines. (For detailed analysis of black box voting, read the work of Bev Harris.)
>>
>> In the 2002 mid-term elections, the Republicans "shocked" Democrats by solidifying their power in Congress, using the same fraudulent methods, along with new and improved black box technology.
>>
>> "The technology had a trial run in the 2002 mid-term elections. In Georgia, serviced by new Diebold systems, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called 'amazing' upsets, with results showing vote swings of up to 16 percent from the last pre-ballot polls. In computerized Minnesota, former Vice President Walter Mondale-a replacement for popular incumbent Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash days before the vote-was also defeated in a large last-second vote swing. Convenient 'glitches' in Florida saw an untold number of votes intended for the Democratic candidate registering instead for Governor Jeb "L'il Brother" Bush. A Florida Democrat who lost a similarly 'glitched' local election went to court to have the computers examined-but the case was thrown out by a judge who ruled that the innards of America's voting machines are the 'trade secrets' of the private companies who make them."
>>
>> In 2003, black box voting also helped oust Governor Gray Davis and installed Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Democratic stronghold of California.
>>
>> The probability of a fix was obvious throughout the 2004 presidential campaign. Corporate media polls continued to predominantly favor Bush, never dipping his rating below 48 percent, despite his trouncing in three straight debates with Kerry, and despite mushrooming war scandals. This was in stark contrast to independent surveys that showed Kerry with commanding leads. Kerry momentum, and massive Kerry/anti-Bush voter turnout, was evident on election day, and confirmed by exit polls with dominant Kerry numbers.
>>
>> Then what?
>>
>> Greg Palast reveals in exhaustive detail that John Kerry won the 2004 election and had it stolen through such methods as "spoilage", intimidation, polling place chicanery, ethnic cleansing of polls. (See Kerry Won. And here.)
>>
>> Once again, criminals do not "permit" elections. They make them. This time, the Bush forces had years of unencumbered time to orchestrate it, from Ohio (where its notorious secretary of state is the head of the Bush re-election campaign), and, of course, Jeb Bush's Florida.
>>
>> The Triumph of the Bush Machines
>>
>> But there is one overriding fact that has been left out most of the ridiculous post-election punditry that renders all other analyses completely irrelevant. It is also the reason why the smiles on the faces of Bush crime family members are so bright, as they watched the returns on election night.
>>
>> Air America Radio's Mike Malloy gave the most succinct and passionate explanation in his Wednesday, November 3, 2004, program [my links included-LC]:
>>
>> "The American vote count is controlled by three major corporate players, Diebold, ESS, Sequoia, and a fourth, SAIC, Science Applications International. All four are hard-wired into the Bush power structure, the Bush crime family.
>>
>> "They have been given millions of dollars by the Bush regime to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines that were just used in the 2004 election. The technology involved had a trial run during the 2002 mid-term elections. Georgia had Diebold machines in every precinct. As a result, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called an "amazing" 16 percent swing.
>>
>> "Diebold's Walden O'Dell, a top Bush fundraiser, publicly committed himself to delivering his home state Ohio's votes to Bush. At Diebold, the election division is run by Bob Urosevich. Bob's brother, Todd, is a top executive at "rival" ES&S. The brothers were originally staked by Howard Ahmanson, a member of the Council For National Policy, a right-wing steering group stacked with Bush true believers. Ahmanson is also one of the bagmen behind the extremist Christian Reconstruction Movement, which advocates the theocratic takeover of American democracy.
>>
>> "The four companies are interconnected; they are not four "competitors". Ahmanson has large stakes in ES&S, whose former CEO was Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. When Hagel ran for office, his own company counted the votes, and his victory was considered "an amazing upset". Hagel still has a million dollar stake in ES&S.
>>
>> "Sequoia is the corporate parent of a private equity firm, Madison Dearborn, which is partner in the Carlyle Group. (Also see here.)
>>
>> "Meanwhile, SAIC is referred to a "shadowy defense contractor". They have gotten into the vote count game both directly and through spinoffs by its top brass, including Admiral Bill Owens, former military aide to Dick Cheney, and Carlyle Group honcho Frank Carlucci and ex-CIA chief Robert Gates. SAIC's history of fraud charges and security "lapses" haven't prevented it from becoming one of the largest Pentagon and CIA contractors, and will doubtless encounter few obstacles in its entrance into the vote counting business.
>>
>> "The mad rush to install these unverifiable computers is driven by the Help America Vote Act, signed by …Bush! The chief lobbying group pushing for the act (while we dumb asses sat out here and thought, 'That sounds like a good idea!') was a consortium of arms dealers including Northrup Grumman and Lockheed Martin.
>>
>> "When you hear people saying, 'take a deep breath, we will pull through this', 'we need to work harder', 'we need to organize'-no. We will not. It's over.
>>
>> "Unless electronic vote tabulation is history, and these companies are driven out of business, it's their country. Not ours.
>>
>> "Nobody knows, and no one will ever know, what the actual vote count was.
>>
>> "There are no checks and balances left. The US Senate now has 55 of these Republicans. When they hit 60, which is what will happen in 2006 mid-term elections-trust me-that means that no matter what Bush and the crime family want to do, they can do it. The House (of Representatives) is gone for the next two to five generations. It's gone.
>>
>> "The last thing rational people in this country need right now is this whistling-past-the-graveyard horse hockey. Nothing is going to happen; it's going to get worse. There will never again be a legitimate election in this county.
>>
>> "Until we get rid of the machines.
>>
>> The people who put the software together-do you think that they are in this business to promote democracy? To promote representative government? Then you are a fool, and you don't deserve anything other than the lash.
>>
>> Kerry did not lose the election. The vote was stolen. Get that through your head."
>>
>> The Bush syndicate owns and runs the machines that make the votes. They control all branches of the federal government.
>>
>> There is nothing more painful than witnessing the Kerry voters, liberals and progressives as they agonize over "what went wrong," second guessing their Herculean efforts, grasping for solutions in outdated ideas, and vowing how "next time, we'll work harder, and we'll really get out the vote!", and that "we'll nominate even better candidates!"
>>
>> Still others are asking reasonable questions. Why aren't Walden O'Dell, Jeb Bush, and J. Kenneth Blackwell under arrest, or in jail? Exactly how did Associated Press pull it off on election night? Will any of the Bush administration criminals ever be punished for their war crimes? Then one must ask, who is going to prosecute? Who is going to hear the cases? The Bush Justice Department? The Bush FBI? The Supreme Court?
>>
>> When you play fair in a rigged game, it doesn't matter how hard you work, or even what you do. Insanity is repeating the same mistake, expecting a different result.
>>
>> Kerry Welcomes Fascism with Open Arms
>>
>> John Kerry's pitiful and immediate capitulation, surrendering with even less of a fight than Al Gore in 2000, despite clear, overt and gross vote fraud across the country, including Ohio-Diebold's home state-was sickening.
>>
>> Bush's Skull & Bones fraternity brother then spoke of "healing" and uniting behind Bush, a speech grotesquely reminiscent of Al Gore's sickening 2000 declaration that Bush was "mah president."
>>
>> Twice now, with Gore and Kerry, Democrats have won the White House, and then refused to speak the truth about the crime, and fight for the people who bled for them. Twice, America has been sold out.
>>
>> Could it be that this time, Kerry played the American people in just another game of bait-and-switch?
>>
>> Will those who supported Kerry actually heed his command, and obediently march in step, "without anger or rancor," and follow George W. Bush, the strutting tyrant, and the most dangerous and irrational collection of mass-murdering war criminals in modern history?
>>
>> In a cynical view, and one that is likely accurate, the election of 2004 may have been nothing more than an elaborate trial balloon, a "good cop-bad cop" theater that is mandated every few years to uphold the appearance of legitimacy. Our candidates lie, all the while gauging the effectiveness of long-term manipulation programs. They think, are the people still gullible and uninformed? What slogans and illusions can we fool them with? Is the "war on terrorism" mindset still unwavering? How far can we push them? Will they accept the baseball bat in the face, or the velvet glove to the nose?
>>
>> How many beatings will this republic take, before its people wake up? When will the people realize what is really happening, and "chase us down the street and lynch us" (as George H.W. Bush said to reporter Sarah McClendon)?
>>
>> To hell with Bush. To hell with Kerry. Wait, We're All Already Here.
>>
>> As sadistic Bush slurred in his "acceptance" speech, "a new term is a new opportunity". Then the most chilling words yet: "I earned political capital. I intend to spend it." If the last four years brought the world to its knees, imagine what is to come as Bush-Cheney giddily pry open a new set of larger Pandora's Boxes.
>>
>> Webster Tarpley, author of the Unauthorized Biography of George Bush writes: "If Bush retains control of the White House, we can expect a neocon fascist dictatorship or martial law emergency regime in 2005 or 2006, possibly as the result of synthetic terrorism. The neocons are in a desperate flight forward mentality which seeks to avoid the penal consequences of what they have already done with Valerie Plame, the Niger yellowcake forgeries, the Israeli mole scandal, and the Chalabi betrayal of state secrets. The neocon preference is for early war with Iran. War with Russia and China cannot be excluded somewhat further down the road."
>>
>> Add to that the relentless horror that will be inflicted when the effects of Peak Oil (also see From The Wilderness and Richard Heinberg) crash home in earnest, the body bags pile higher with new wars, and the lives of Americans (including Bush drones) and people all over the world continue to be destroyed.
>>
>> Some members of the current Bush crime organization may leave or retire, and the possibilities include Donald Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft (possibly replaced with Marc Racicot, a long-time friend of George W. Bush, and W's first choice for attorney general in 2000). Expect their replacements to be less well known criminals who, if anything, may be more toxic.
>>
>> Robert Lederman wrote of Racicot: "Numerous members of the Bush family, including his father and brothers and at least one of GW's prospective cabinet appointees-potential GW Bush Attorney General Marc Racicot-have a history of alleged involvement in drug running at the highest levels. We're not talking about buying drugs for personal use here but massive importations of heroin and cocaine with the full involvement of foreign dictators like George Bush pal Manuel Noriega and the Mafia." (See Murder and Drug Running in Montana)
>>
>> In Robert Payne's biography The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, he writes of Hitler (whose Third Reich was, in fact, financed by the Bush family): "For all the foreseeable future, he will remain to haunt us, more alive than ever although he is dead. He hides in shadowy places and at the pinnacle of power, always urging men to commit the ultimate crime, the perfect atrocity, the most ferocious massacres. Into the ears of generals and politicians he whispers: "Be merciless. It is very easy now because I have lived. I have reduced the value of man to a fraction of what it was before. You will find, if you continue along the path I have opened for you, the value of man will decline still further. Remember, mankind is always valueless and its only use is to serve our interests. We alone are transmitters of civilization, and the people are nothing but cattle. Napalm is good for them."
>>
>> Hitler himself wrote: "The victor will not be asked, later on, whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war, it is not right that matters, but victory. Have no pity."
>>
>> Hitler had nothing on the George W. Bush administration.
>>
>> What, if any, silver lining can be found in the wake of this new goose-step in the abyss? Perhaps only that the same bellicose, predictable and clumsy villains remain right where they have been for the last four years: right in front of us. Better that than a crafty and likeable neoliberal John Kerry administration that lulls the world to sleep before poison is administered.
>>
>> We cannot be fooled.
>>
>>
>> Larry Chin is a freelance journalist and an Online Journal Associate Editor.
>>
>> Copyright © 1998-2004 Online Journal™. All rights reserved.
>>
>> http://www.copvcia.com/free/ww3/110804_stolen_election.shtml
>>

Bush's 'Incredible' Vote Tallies
By Sam Parry
Consortium News

Tuesday 09 November 2004

George W. Bush's vote tallies, especially in the key state of Florida, are so statistically stunning that they border on the unbelievable.

While it's extraordinary for a candidate to get a vote total that exceeds his party's registration in any voting jurisdiction - because of non-voters - Bush racked up more votes than registered Republicans in 47 out of 67 counties in Florida. In 15 of those counties, his vote total more than doubled the number of registered Republicans and in four counties, Bush more than tripled the number.

Statewide, Bush earned about 20,000 more votes than registered Republicans.

By comparison, in 2000, Bush's Florida total represented about 85 percent of the total number of registered Republicans, about 2.9 million votes compared with 3.4 million registered Republicans.

Bush achieved these totals although exit polls showed him winning only about 14 percent of the Democratic vote statewide - statistically the same as in 2000 when he won 13 percent of the Democratic vote - and losing Florida's independent voters to Kerry by a 57 percent to 41 percent margin. In 2000, Gore won the independent vote by a much narrower margin of 47 to 46 percent.

[For details on the Florida turnout in 2000, see http://www.msnbc.com/m/d2k/g/polls.asp?office=P&state=FL. For details on the 2004 Florida turnout, see http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/FL/P/00/index.html].

Exit Poll Discrepancies

Similar surprising jumps in Bush's vote tallies across the country - especially when matched against national exits polls showing Kerry winning by 51 percent to 48 percent - have fed suspicion among rank-and-file Democrats that the Bush campaign rigged the vote, possibly through systematic computer hacking.

Republican pollster Dick Morris said the Election Night pattern of mistaken exit polls favoring Kerry in six battleground states - Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Iowa - was virtually inconceivable.

"Exit polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries. … To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible. It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here."

But instead of following his logic that the discrepancy suggested vote tampering - as it would in Latin America, Africa or Eastern Europe - Morris postulated a bizarre conspiracy theory that the exit polls were part of a scheme to have the networks call the election for Kerry and thus discourage Bush voters on the West Coast. Of course, none of the networks did call any of the six states for Kerry, making Morris's conspiracy theory nonsensical. Nevertheless, some Democrats have agreed with Morris's bottom-line recommendation that the whole matter deserves "more scrutiny and investigation." [The Hill, Nov. 8, 2004]

Erroneous Votes

Democratic doubts about the Nov. 2 election have deepened with anecdotal evidence of voters reporting that they tried to cast votes for Kerry but touch-screen voting machines came up registering their votes for Bush.

In Ohio, election officials said an error with an electronic voting system in Franklin County gave Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, more than 1,000 percent more than he actually got.

Yet, without a nationwide investigation, it's impossible to know whether those cases were isolated glitches or part of a more troubling pattern.

If Bush's totals weren't artificially enhanced, they would represent one of the most remarkable electoral achievements in U.S. history.

In the two presidential elections since Sen. Bob Dole lost to Bill Clinton in 1996, Bush would have increased Republican voter turnout nationwide by a whopping 52 percent from just under 40 million votes for Dole to just under 60 million votes for the GOP ticket in 2004.

Such an increase in voter turnout over two consecutive election cycles is not unprecedented, but has historically flowed from landslide victories that see shifting voting patterns, with millions of crossover voters straying from one party to the other.

For example, in 1972, Richard Nixon increased Republican turnout by 73.5 percent over Barry Goldwater's performance two elections earlier. But this turnout was amplified by the fact that Goldwater lost in 1964 to Lyndon Johnson by about 23 percentage points and Nixon trounced George McGovern by 23 percentage points.

What's remarkable about Bush's increase over the last two elections is that Democrats have done an impressive job boosting their own voter turnout from 1996 to 2004. Over this period, candidates Al Gore and John Kerry increased Democratic turnout by about 18 percent, from roughly 47.5 million votes in 1996 to nearly 56 million in 2004.

What this suggests is that Bush is not so much winning his new votes from Democrats crossing over, but rather by going deeper than many observers thought possible into new pockets of dormant Republican voters.

Bush's Gains

But where did these new voters come from, and how did Bush manage to accelerate his turnout gains at a time when the Democratic ticket was also substantially increasing its turnout?

While the statistical analysis of these new voters is only just beginning, Bush's ability to find nearly 9 million new voters in an election year when his Democratic opponent also saw gains of about 5 million new voters is the story of the 2004 election.

Exit polls also suggest that voters identifying themselves as Republicans voted as a greater proportion of the electorate than in 2000 and that Bush won a slightly greater percent of the Republican vote.

The party breakdown in 2000 was 39 percent Democrats, 35 percent Republicans, and 27 percent independents. In 2000, Bush won the Republican vote by 91 percent to 8 percent; narrowly won the independent vote by 47 percent to 45 percent and picked up 11 percent of the Democratic vote compared with Gore's Democratic turnout of 86 percent. [See http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2000/epolls/US/P000.html for details.]

According to exit polls this year, the turnout broke evenly among Democrats and Republicans, with about 37 percent each. Independents represented about 26 percent of the electorate. Kerry actually did better among independents, winning that group of voters by a narrow 49 percent to 48 percent margin.

However, Bush did slightly better among the larger number of Republican voters, winning 93 percent of their vote, while matching his 2000 performance by taking about 11 percent of the Democratic vote.

Registration Up

While this turnout might strike many observers as unusual in an election year that witnessed huge voter registration and mobilization efforts by Democrats and groups aligned with Democrats, the increased GOP turnout does seem to fit with the campaign strategy deployed by the Bush team to run to the base.

From the start of the 2004 campaign, political strategist Karl Rove and the Bush team made its goals clear - maximize Bush's support among social and economic conservatives - including Evangelicals and Club for Growth/anti-government conservatives - and turn them out by driving up Kerry's negatives with harsh attacks questioning Kerry's leadership credentials.

This strategy emerged from Rove's estimate after the 2000 election that 4 million Evangelical voters stayed home that year. The Bush/Rove strategy in 2004 rested primarily on turning out that base of support.

But, even if one were to estimate that 100 percent of these Evangelical voters turned out for Bush in 2004 and that 100 percent of Bush's 2000 supporters turned out again for him, this still leaves about 5 million new Bush voters unaccounted for.

Altogether, Bush's new 9 million votes came mainly from the largest states in the country. But nowhere was Bush's performance more incredible than in Florida, where Bush found roughly 1 million new voters, about 11 percent all new Bush voters nationwide and more than twice the number of new voters than in any other state other than Texas.

-------

Jump to TO Features for Wednesday November 10, 2004
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> ehécatl ha escrito:
> www.truthout.org
>
> Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked
> By Thom Hartmann
> CommonDreams.org
>
> Saturday 06 November 2004
>
> When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.
>
> "It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.
>
> And some believe evidence is accumulating that the national effort happened on November 2, 2004.
>
> The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something startling.
>
> While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking - the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.
>
> In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.
>
> In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.
>
> The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.
>
> Yet in the touch-screen counties, where investigators may have been more vigorously looking for such anomalies, high percentages of registered Democrats generally equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry. (I had earlier reported that county size was a variable - this turns out not to be the case. Just the use of touch-screens versus optical scanners.)
>
> More visual analysis of the results can be seen at http://us together.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm. Note the trend line - the only variable that determines a swing toward Bush was the use of optical scan machines.
>
> One possible explanation for this is the "Dixiecrat" theory, that in Florida white voters (particularly the rural ones) have been registered as Democrats for years, but voting Republican since Reagan. Looking at the 2000 statistics, also available on Dopp's site, there are similar anomalies, although the trends are not as strong as in 2004. But some suggest the 2000 election may have been questionable in Florida, too.
>
> One of the people involved in Dopp's analysis noted that it may be possible to determine the validity of the "rural Democrat" theory by comparing Florida's white rural counties to those of Pennsylvania, another swing state but one that went for Kerry, as the exit polls there predicted. Interestingly, the Pennsylvania analysis, available at http://ustogether.org/election04/PA_vote_patt.htm, doesn't show the same kind of swings as does Florida, lending credence to the possibility of problems in Florida.
>
> Even more significantly, Dopp had first run the analysis while filtering out smaller (rural) counties, and still found that the only variable that accounted for a swing toward Republican voting was the use of optical-scan machines, whereas counties with touch-screen machines generally didn't swing - regardless of size.
>
> Others offer similar insights, based on other data. A professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, noted that in Florida the vote to raise the minimum wage was approved by 72%, although Kerry got 48%. "The correlation between voting for the minimum wage increase and voting for Kerry isn't likely to be perfect," he noted, "but one would normally expect that the gap - of 1.5 million votes - to be far smaller than it was."
>
> While all of this may or may not be evidence of vote tampering, it again brings the nation back to the question of why several states using electronic voting machines or scanners programmed by private, for-profit corporations and often connected to modems produced votes inconsistent with exit poll numbers.
>
> Those exit poll results have been a problem for reporters ever since Election Day.
>
> Election night, I'd been doing live election coverage for WDEV, one of the radio stations that carries my syndicated show, and, just after midnight, during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted the AP report.
>
> But then the computers reported something different. In several pivotal states.
>
> Conservatives see a conspiracy here: They think the exit polls were rigged.
>
> Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, wrote an article for The Hill, the publication read by every political junkie in Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of brilliant points.
>
> "Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state."
>
> He added: "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points."
>
> Yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as the computerized vote numbers began to come in from the various states the election was called for Bush.
>
> How could this happen?
>
> On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real "counting" is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.
>
> That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.
>
> "In a voting system," Harris explained to Dean on national television, "you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once?"
>
> Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. "What surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's just a regular computer."
>
> "So," Dean said, "anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator?"
>
> Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into the central tabulator system. "This is the official program that the County Supervisor sees," she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting between them loaded with Diebold's software.
>
> Bev then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the results of a test election. They went to the screen titled "Election Summary Report" and waited a moment while the PC "adds up all the votes from all the various precincts," and then saw that in this faux election Howard Dean had 1000 votes, Lex Luthor had 500, and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was winning.
>
> "Of course, you can't tamper with this software," Harris noted. Diebold wrote a pretty good program.
>
> But, it's running on a Windows PC.
>
> So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB" which, Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep the votes." Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled "Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like Excel.
>
> In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.
>
> "Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let's give 100 votes to Tiger."
>
> They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software "the legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the progress of your election."
>
> As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said, "And you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.
>
> Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds."
>
> On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv.) And they had left no tracks whatsoever, Harris said, noting that it would be nearly impossible for the election software - or a County election official - to know that the vote database had been altered.
>
> Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that had Karen Hughes telling George W. Bush that he'd lost the election in a landslide.
>
> Morris's conspiracy theory is that the exit polls "were sabotage" to cause people in the western states to not bother voting for Bush, since the networks would call the election based on the exit polls for Kerry. But the networks didn't do that, and had never intended to.
>
> According to congressional candidate Fisher, it makes far more sense that the exit polls were right - they weren't done on Diebold PCs - and that the vote itself was hacked.
>
> And not only for the presidential candidate - Jeff Fisher thinks this hit him and pretty much every other Democratic candidate for national office in the most-hacked swing states.
>
> So far, the only national "mainstream" media to come close to this story was Keith Olbermann on his show Friday night, November 5th, when he noted that it was curious that all the voting machine irregularities so far uncovered seem to favor Bush. In the meantime, the Washington Post and other media are now going through single-bullet-theory-like contortions to explain how the exit polls had failed.
>
> But I agree with Fox's Dick Morris on this one, at least in large part. Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in his final paragraph, "This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play."
>
> -------
>
> Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann.com. His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."
>
>
>
> -------
>
> Jump to TO Features for Monday November 8, 2004
> Today's TO Features -------------- William Rivers Pitt | Worse Than 2000: Tuesday's Electoral Disaster Iraqi Resistance Kill 50, Mostly Police U.S. Ready to Put Weapons in Space French Foreign Minister: Arafat Alive, But in Complex State Neo-Con Agenda: Iran, China, Russia, Latin America ... Los Angeles Times | Democrats and the God Gap Bush, Oil Batter Clean Energy Stocks Eric Leser | The Big Companies Will Be Repaid Christian Right Moves on "Moral Issues" European Catholics Join Battle on Gays and God Republicans in Congress Warned Not to Gloat Guantanamo Bay Justice: 3 Hours Behind Closed Doors BREAKING: Invasion of Fallujah Begins The Costs of War - Letters from the Home Front Pelosi Says Democrats Will Protect Social Security Iraq Declares Martial Law, 23 Police Killed Thom Hartmann | Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked t r u t h o u t Home
>
> © Copyright 2004 by TruthOut.org
>
>
>
>
>
>
>> ehécatl ha escrito:
>> (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
>>
>> Copyright © 1998–2004 Online Journal™. All rights reserved.
>>
>> Reprinted with permission from ONLINE JOURNAL™
>> www.onlinejournal.com
>>
>> The stolen election of 2004: welcome back to hell
>>
>> By
>> Larry Chin
>> Online Journal Associate Editor
>>
>> November 5, 2004-Using a variety of criminal methods that they have perfected over the past four years, the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney-Karl Rove syndicate stole another election, and extended their illegal occupation of the White House. Experienced, informed and unblinking observers were not fooled by any aspect of this utterly predictable goose-step towards full dictatorship.
>>
>> But to those who are "shocked" as they watched the election night numbers mysteriously slip away amidst controversy; those who are struggling to understand "what happened", let this cold realization serve as bracing edification.
>>
>> Welcome to hell. Welcome to the horrifying reality that whistleblowers have suffered and fought through every day, over lifetimes. No more illusions. This is reality.
>>
>> It Is a Rigged Game
>>
>> The US political and economic system, exemplified by Bush-Cheney, is deeply criminalized. It is designed to profit by killing things. It thrives on war and oppression. It is sustained by collusion, fraud, lies, cover-up, and the indoctrination and manipulation of minds. It does not, and never has, represented its people. Its operatives heed no laws. They "make" law. These facts must be burned into the consciousness of every decent human being.
>>
>> As Mike Ruppert writes in Crossing The Rubicon: "That profits of crime and war, which are destructive of human life, of labor, of happy, healthy neighborhoods (whether in the US or in Afghanistan, Africa and Iraq) are in effect a keystone of the global economy and a determinant of the success in a ruthless competition, is a compass needle for human civilization. One cannot expect to follow the recipe for roadkill stew and produce a crème brulee."
>>
>> Criminals do not obey laws. Criminals do not believe in "democracy".
>>
>> Criminals do not "permit" elections.
>>
>> It is foolish, then, to expend one's energies in "clean" election activities, and expect good results. To quote one of George W. Bush many recent Freudian non-slips, "we make elections." The 2004 presidential election was just one more "manufacture".
>>
>> How John Kerry Unwon the Presidency
>>
>> How Bush-Cheney stole the 2000 election was a matter of obvious historical fact, confirmed by post-facto mainstream media reports of a Gore win, and detailed by numerous investigators such as Greg Palast in his book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Voters complained about old machines and paper ballots.
>>
>> Then came the "black box voting" machines. (For detailed analysis of black box voting, read the work of Bev Harris.)
>>
>> In the 2002 mid-term elections, the Republicans "shocked" Democrats by solidifying their power in Congress, using the same fraudulent methods, along with new and improved black box technology.
>>
>> "The technology had a trial run in the 2002 mid-term elections. In Georgia, serviced by new Diebold systems, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called 'amazing' upsets, with results showing vote swings of up to 16 percent from the last pre-ballot polls. In computerized Minnesota, former Vice President Walter Mondale-a replacement for popular incumbent Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash days before the vote-was also defeated in a large last-second vote swing. Convenient 'glitches' in Florida saw an untold number of votes intended for the Democratic candidate registering instead for Governor Jeb "L'il Brother" Bush. A Florida Democrat who lost a similarly 'glitched' local election went to court to have the computers examined-but the case was thrown out by a judge who ruled that the innards of America's voting machines are the 'trade secrets' of the private companies who make them."
>>
>> In 2003, black box voting also helped oust Governor Gray Davis and installed Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Democratic stronghold of California.
>>
>> The probability of a fix was obvious throughout the 2004 presidential campaign. Corporate media polls continued to predominantly favor Bush, never dipping his rating below 48 percent, despite his trouncing in three straight debates with Kerry, and despite mushrooming war scandals. This was in stark contrast to independent surveys that showed Kerry with commanding leads. Kerry momentum, and massive Kerry/anti-Bush voter turnout, was evident on election day, and confirmed by exit polls with dominant Kerry numbers.
>>
>> Then what?
>>
>> Greg Palast reveals in exhaustive detail that John Kerry won the 2004 election and had it stolen through such methods as "spoilage", intimidation, polling place chicanery, ethnic cleansing of polls. (See Kerry Won. And here.)
>>
>> Once again, criminals do not "permit" elections. They make them. This time, the Bush forces had years of unencumbered time to orchestrate it, from Ohio (where its notorious secretary of state is the head of the Bush re-election campaign), and, of course, Jeb Bush's Florida.
>>
>> The Triumph of the Bush Machines
>>
>> But there is one overriding fact that has been left out most of the ridiculous post-election punditry that renders all other analyses completely irrelevant. It is also the reason why the smiles on the faces of Bush crime family members are so bright, as they watched the returns on election night.
>>
>> Air America Radio's Mike Malloy gave the most succinct and passionate explanation in his Wednesday, November 3, 2004, program [my links included-LC]:
>>
>> "The American vote count is controlled by three major corporate players, Diebold, ESS, Sequoia, and a fourth, SAIC, Science Applications International. All four are hard-wired into the Bush power structure, the Bush crime family.
>>
>> "They have been given millions of dollars by the Bush regime to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines that were just used in the 2004 election. The technology involved had a trial run during the 2002 mid-term elections. Georgia had Diebold machines in every precinct. As a result, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called an "amazing" 16 percent swing.
>>
>> "Diebold's Walden O'Dell, a top Bush fundraiser, publicly committed himself to delivering his home state Ohio's votes to Bush. At Diebold, the election division is run by Bob Urosevich. Bob's brother, Todd, is a top executive at "rival" ES&S. The brothers were originally staked by Howard Ahmanson, a member of the Council For National Policy, a right-wing steering group stacked with Bush true believers. Ahmanson is also one of the bagmen behind the extremist Christian Reconstruction Movement, which advocates the theocratic takeover of American democracy.
>>
>> "The four companies are interconnected; they are not four "competitors". Ahmanson has large stakes in ES&S, whose former CEO was Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. When Hagel ran for office, his own company counted the votes, and his victory was considered "an amazing upset". Hagel still has a million dollar stake in ES&S.
>>
>> "Sequoia is the corporate parent of a private equity firm, Madison Dearborn, which is partner in the Carlyle Group. (Also see here.)
>>
>> "Meanwhile, SAIC is referred to a "shadowy defense contractor". They have gotten into the vote count game both directly and through spinoffs by its top brass, including Admiral Bill Owens, former military aide to Dick Cheney, and Carlyle Group honcho Frank Carlucci and ex-CIA chief Robert Gates. SAIC's history of fraud charges and security "lapses" haven't prevented it from becoming one of the largest Pentagon and CIA contractors, and will doubtless encounter few obstacles in its entrance into the vote counting business.
>>
>> "The mad rush to install these unverifiable computers is driven by the Help America Vote Act, signed by …Bush! The chief lobbying group pushing for the act (while we dumb asses sat out here and thought, 'That sounds like a good idea!') was a consortium of arms dealers including Northrup Grumman and Lockheed Martin.
>>
>> "When you hear people saying, 'take a deep breath, we will pull through this', 'we need to work harder', 'we need to organize'-no. We will not. It's over.
>>
>> "Unless electronic vote tabulation is history, and these companies are driven out of business, it's their country. Not ours.
>>
>> "Nobody knows, and no one will ever know, what the actual vote count was.
>>
>> "There are no checks and balances left. The US Senate now has 55 of these Republicans. When they hit 60, which is what will happen in 2006 mid-term elections-trust me-that means that no matter what Bush and the crime family want to do, they can do it. The House (of Representatives) is gone for the next two to five generations. It's gone.
>>
>> "The last thing rational people in this country need right now is this whistling-past-the-graveyard horse hockey. Nothing is going to happen; it's going to get worse. There will never again be a legitimate election in this county.
>>
>> "Until we get rid of the machines.
>>
>> The people who put the software together-do you think that they are in this business to promote democracy? To promote representative government? Then you are a fool, and you don't deserve anything other than the lash.
>>
>> Kerry did not lose the election. The vote was stolen. Get that through your head."
>>
>> The Bush syndicate owns and runs the machines that make the votes. They control all branches of the federal government.
>>
>> There is nothing more painful than witnessing the Kerry voters, liberals and progressives as they agonize over "what went wrong," second guessing their Herculean efforts, grasping for solutions in outdated ideas, and vowing how "next time, we'll work harder, and we'll really get out the vote!", and that "we'll nominate even better candidates!"
>>
>> Still others are asking reasonable questions. Why aren't Walden O'Dell, Jeb Bush, and J. Kenneth Blackwell under arrest, or in jail? Exactly how did Associated Press pull it off on election night? Will any of the Bush administration criminals ever be punished for their war crimes? Then one must ask, who is going to prosecute? Who is going to hear the cases? The Bush Justice Department? The Bush FBI? The Supreme Court?
>>
>> When you play fair in a rigged game, it doesn't matter how hard you work, or even what you do. Insanity is repeating the same mistake, expecting a different result.
>>
>> Kerry Welcomes Fascism with Open Arms
>>
>> John Kerry's pitiful and immediate capitulation, surrendering with even less of a fight than Al Gore in 2000, despite clear, overt and gross vote fraud across the country, including Ohio-Diebold's home state-was sickening.
>>
>> Bush's Skull & Bones fraternity brother then spoke of "healing" and uniting behind Bush, a speech grotesquely reminiscent of Al Gore's sickening 2000 declaration that Bush was "mah president."
>>
>> Twice now, with Gore and Kerry, Democrats have won the White House, and then refused to speak the truth about the crime, and fight for the people who bled for them. Twice, America has been sold out.
>>
>> Could it be that this time, Kerry played the American people in just another game of bait-and-switch?
>>
>> Will those who supported Kerry actually heed his command, and obediently march in step, "without anger or rancor," and follow George W. Bush, the strutting tyrant, and the most dangerous and irrational collection of mass-murdering war criminals in modern history?
>>
>> In a cynical view, and one that is likely accurate, the election of 2004 may have been nothing more than an elaborate trial balloon, a "good cop-bad cop" theater that is mandated every few years to uphold the appearance of legitimacy. Our candidates lie, all the while gauging the effectiveness of long-term manipulation programs. They think, are the people still gullible and uninformed? What slogans and illusions can we fool them with? Is the "war on terrorism" mindset still unwavering? How far can we push them? Will they accept the baseball bat in the face, or the velvet glove to the nose?
>>
>> How many beatings will this republic take, before its people wake up? When will the people realize what is really happening, and "chase us down the street and lynch us" (as George H.W. Bush said to reporter Sarah McClendon)?
>>
>> To hell with Bush. To hell with Kerry. Wait, We're All Already Here.
>>
>> As sadistic Bush slurred in his "acceptance" speech, "a new term is a new opportunity". Then the most chilling words yet: "I earned political capital. I intend to spend it." If the last four years brought the world to its knees, imagine what is to come as Bush-Cheney giddily pry open a new set of larger Pandora's Boxes.
>>
>> Webster Tarpley, author of the Unauthorized Biography of George Bush writes: "If Bush retains control of the White House, we can expect a neocon fascist dictatorship or martial law emergency regime in 2005 or 2006, possibly as the result of synthetic terrorism. The neocons are in a desperate flight forward mentality which seeks to avoid the penal consequences of what they have already done with Valerie Plame, the Niger yellowcake forgeries, the Israeli mole scandal, and the Chalabi betrayal of state secrets. The neocon preference is for early war with Iran. War with Russia and China cannot be excluded somewhat further down the road."
>>
>> Add to that the relentless horror that will be inflicted when the effects of Peak Oil (also see From The Wilderness and Richard Heinberg) crash home in earnest, the body bags pile higher with new wars, and the lives of Americans (including Bush drones) and people all over the world continue to be destroyed.
>>
>> Some members of the current Bush crime organization may leave or retire, and the possibilities include Donald Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft (possibly replaced with Marc Racicot, a long-time friend of George W. Bush, and W's first choice for attorney general in 2000). Expect their replacements to be less well known criminals who, if anything, may be more toxic.
>>
>> Robert Lederman wrote of Racicot: "Numerous members of the Bush family, including his father and brothers and at least one of GW's prospective cabinet appointees-potential GW Bush Attorney General Marc Racicot-have a history of alleged involvement in drug running at the highest levels. We're not talking about buying drugs for personal use here but massive importations of heroin and cocaine with the full involvement of foreign dictators like George Bush pal Manuel Noriega and the Mafia." (See Murder and Drug Running in Montana)
>>
>> In Robert Payne's biography The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, he writes of Hitler (whose Third Reich was, in fact, financed by the Bush family): "For all the foreseeable future, he will remain to haunt us, more alive than ever although he is dead. He hides in shadowy places and at the pinnacle of power, always urging men to commit the ultimate crime, the perfect atrocity, the most ferocious massacres. Into the ears of generals and politicians he whispers: "Be merciless. It is very easy now because I have lived. I have reduced the value of man to a fraction of what it was before. You will find, if you continue along the path I have opened for you, the value of man will decline still further. Remember, mankind is always valueless and its only use is to serve our interests. We alone are transmitters of civilization, and the people are nothing but cattle. Napalm is good for them."
>>
>> Hitler himself wrote: "The victor will not be asked, later on, whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war, it is not right that matters, but victory. Have no pity."
>>
>> Hitler had nothing on the George W. Bush administration.
>>
>> What, if any, silver lining can be found in the wake of this new goose-step in the abyss? Perhaps only that the same bellicose, predictable and clumsy villains remain right where they have been for the last four years: right in front of us. Better that than a crafty and likeable neoliberal John Kerry administration that lulls the world to sleep before poison is administered.
>>
>> We cannot be fooled.
>>
>>
>> Larry Chin is a freelance journalist and an Online Journal Associate Editor.
>>
>> Copyright © 1998-2004 Online Journal™. All rights reserved.
>>
>> http://www.copvcia.com/free/ww3/110804_stolen_election.shtml
>>

Dear MoveOn member,

Questions are swirling around whether the election was conducted honestly or not. We need to know -- was it or wasn't it?

If people were wrongly prevented from voting, or if legitimate votes were mis-counted or not counted at all, we need to know so the wrongdoers can be held accountable, and so we can prevent this from happening again.

Members of Congress are demanding an investigation to answer this question. The decision on whether or not there will be an investigation could come as soon as Monday. Join us in supporting the call for one now, at:

http://www.moveon.org/investigatethevote/

Then please invite your friends and colleagues to sign, as well. We need to show Congress that hundreds of thousands of Americans are serious about protecting the integrity of the vote.

We're all hearing the stories and wondering what's true and what isn't. But at least two cases of serious problems are accepted beyond doubt:

* In Broward County, Florida, electronic voting machines counted
backwards: as more people voted, the official vote count went down. [1]

* In one Columbus, Ohio suburb, election officials have acknowledged
that electronic voting machines credited Bush with winning 4,258
votes, even though only 638 people voted there. [2]

These are just cases where we know something went wrong. There were also lots of reports of people being denied ballots on Election Day. So far, these reports remain anecdotal, but they must be compiled and examined. And the Internet is abuzz with theories about why the official counts were so different from the exit polls.

Do you have a story? Were you prevented from voting? Tell us, at:

http://www.moveon.org/investigatethevote/

Six prominent members of Congress have called for an investigation. Representatives Conyers (D-MI), Holt (D-NJ), Nadler (D-NY), Scott (D-VA), Watt (D-NC) and Wexler (D-FL), have demanded that the U.S. General Accounting Office:

immediately undertake an investigation of the efficacy of voting
machines and new technologies used in the 2004 election, how
election officials responded to difficulties they encountered,
and what we can do in the future to improve our election systems
and administration. [3]

We've got to support their call by asking our own Representatives and Senators to join them.

If you have a personal story of disenfranchisement, tell us. These members of Congress have agreed to include our stories and comments in their call for an investigation. Please sign now -- we'll deliver our compiled statements to them on Friday.

Even if you don't have a personal story, your signature on our petition will still help build support for an investigation.

To keep our faith in democracy, we need to know the facts. Your signing this petition, and sharing your story if you have one, will help.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

--Carrie, Joan, Lee, Marika, Noah, Peter, Rosalyn, and Wes
The MoveOn.org Team
November 11, 2004

Footnotes:

1. Broward Machines Count Backward, Palm Beach Post, November 5, 2004

2. Glitch Gave Bush Extra Votes in Ohio, AP carried on CNN, November 5, 2004

3. Letters from members of Congress to David Walker, Comptroller General of the United States, demanding an investigation of the election: November 5th, 2004 & November 8th, 2004
________________

This is a message from MoveOn.org.
http://www.moveon.org


> ehécatl ha escrito:
> www.truthout.org
>
> Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked
> By Thom Hartmann
> CommonDreams.org
>
> Saturday 06 November 2004
>
> When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.
>
> "It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.
>
> And some believe evidence is accumulating that the national effort happened on November 2, 2004.
>
> The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something startling.
>
> While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking - the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.
>
> In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.
>
> In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.
>
> The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.
>
> Yet in the touch-screen counties, where investigators may have been more vigorously looking for such anomalies, high percentages of registered Democrats generally equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry. (I had earlier reported that county size was a variable - this turns out not to be the case. Just the use of touch-screens versus optical scanners.)
>
> More visual analysis of the results can be seen at http://us together.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm. Note the trend line - the only variable that determines a swing toward Bush was the use of optical scan machines.
>
> One possible explanation for this is the "Dixiecrat" theory, that in Florida white voters (particularly the rural ones) have been registered as Democrats for years, but voting Republican since Reagan. Looking at the 2000 statistics, also available on Dopp's site, there are similar anomalies, although the trends are not as strong as in 2004. But some suggest the 2000 election may have been questionable in Florida, too.
>
> One of the people involved in Dopp's analysis noted that it may be possible to determine the validity of the "rural Democrat" theory by comparing Florida's white rural counties to those of Pennsylvania, another swing state but one that went for Kerry, as the exit polls there predicted. Interestingly, the Pennsylvania analysis, available at http://ustogether.org/election04/PA_vote_patt.htm, doesn't show the same kind of swings as does Florida, lending credence to the possibility of problems in Florida.
>
> Even more significantly, Dopp had first run the analysis while filtering out smaller (rural) counties, and still found that the only variable that accounted for a swing toward Republican voting was the use of optical-scan machines, whereas counties with touch-screen machines generally didn't swing - regardless of size.
>
> Others offer similar insights, based on other data. A professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, noted that in Florida the vote to raise the minimum wage was approved by 72%, although Kerry got 48%. "The correlation between voting for the minimum wage increase and voting for Kerry isn't likely to be perfect," he noted, "but one would normally expect that the gap - of 1.5 million votes - to be far smaller than it was."
>
> While all of this may or may not be evidence of vote tampering, it again brings the nation back to the question of why several states using electronic voting machines or scanners programmed by private, for-profit corporations and often connected to modems produced votes inconsistent with exit poll numbers.
>
> Those exit poll results have been a problem for reporters ever since Election Day.
>
> Election night, I'd been doing live election coverage for WDEV, one of the radio stations that carries my syndicated show, and, just after midnight, during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted the AP report.
>
> But then the computers reported something different. In several pivotal states.
>
> Conservatives see a conspiracy here: They think the exit polls were rigged.
>
> Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, wrote an article for The Hill, the publication read by every political junkie in Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of brilliant points.
>
> "Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state."
>
> He added: "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points."
>
> Yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as the computerized vote numbers began to come in from the various states the election was called for Bush.
>
> How could this happen?
>
> On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real "counting" is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.
>
> That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.
>
> "In a voting system," Harris explained to Dean on national television, "you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once?"
>
> Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. "What surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's just a regular computer."
>
> "So," Dean said, "anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator?"
>
> Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into the central tabulator system. "This is the official program that the County Supervisor sees," she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting between them loaded with Diebold's software.
>
> Bev then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the results of a test election. They went to the screen titled "Election Summary Report" and waited a moment while the PC "adds up all the votes from all the various precincts," and then saw that in this faux election Howard Dean had 1000 votes, Lex Luthor had 500, and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was winning.
>
> "Of course, you can't tamper with this software," Harris noted. Diebold wrote a pretty good program.
>
> But, it's running on a Windows PC.
>
> So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB" which, Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep the votes." Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled "Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like Excel.
>
> In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.
>
> "Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let's give 100 votes to Tiger."
>
> They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software "the legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the progress of your election."
>
> As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said, "And you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.
>
> Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds."
>
> On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv.) And they had left no tracks whatsoever, Harris said, noting that it would be nearly impossible for the election software - or a County election official - to know that the vote database had been altered.
>
> Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that had Karen Hughes telling George W. Bush that he'd lost the election in a landslide.
>
> Morris's conspiracy theory is that the exit polls "were sabotage" to cause people in the western states to not bother voting for Bush, since the networks would call the election based on the exit polls for Kerry. But the networks didn't do that, and had never intended to.
>
> According to congressional candidate Fisher, it makes far more sense that the exit polls were right - they weren't done on Diebold PCs - and that the vote itself was hacked.
>
> And not only for the presidential candidate - Jeff Fisher thinks this hit him and pretty much every other Democratic candidate for national office in the most-hacked swing states.
>
> So far, the only national "mainstream" media to come close to this story was Keith Olbermann on his show Friday night, November 5th, when he noted that it was curious that all the voting machine irregularities so far uncovered seem to favor Bush. In the meantime, the Washington Post and other media are now going through single-bullet-theory-like contortions to explain how the exit polls had failed.
>
> But I agree with Fox's Dick Morris on this one, at least in large part. Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in his final paragraph, "This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play."
>
> -------
>
> Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann.com. His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."
>
>
>
> -------
>
> Jump to TO Features for Monday November 8, 2004
> Today's TO Features -------------- William Rivers Pitt | Worse Than 2000: Tuesday's Electoral Disaster Iraqi Resistance Kill 50, Mostly Police U.S. Ready to Put Weapons in Space French Foreign Minister: Arafat Alive, But in Complex State Neo-Con Agenda: Iran, China, Russia, Latin America ... Los Angeles Times | Democrats and the God Gap Bush, Oil Batter Clean Energy Stocks Eric Leser | The Big Companies Will Be Repaid Christian Right Moves on "Moral Issues" European Catholics Join Battle on Gays and God Republicans in Congress Warned Not to Gloat Guantanamo Bay Justice: 3 Hours Behind Closed Doors BREAKING: Invasion of Fallujah Begins The Costs of War - Letters from the Home Front Pelosi Says Democrats Will Protect Social Security Iraq Declares Martial Law, 23 Police Killed Thom Hartmann | Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked t r u t h o u t Home
>
> © Copyright 2004 by TruthOut.org
>
>
>
>
>
>
>> ehécatl ha escrito:
>> (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
>>
>> Copyright © 1998–2004 Online Journal™. All rights reserved.
>>
>> Reprinted with permission from ONLINE JOURNAL™
>> www.onlinejournal.com
>>
>> The stolen election of 2004: welcome back to hell
>>
>> By
>> Larry Chin
>> Online Journal Associate Editor
>>
>> November 5, 2004-Using a variety of criminal methods that they have perfected over the past four years, the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney-Karl Rove syndicate stole another election, and extended their illegal occupation of the White House. Experienced, informed and unblinking observers were not fooled by any aspect of this utterly predictable goose-step towards full dictatorship.
>>
>> But to those who are "shocked" as they watched the election night numbers mysteriously slip away amidst controversy; those who are struggling to understand "what happened", let this cold realization serve as bracing edification.
>>
>> Welcome to hell. Welcome to the horrifying reality that whistleblowers have suffered and fought through every day, over lifetimes. No more illusions. This is reality.
>>
>> It Is a Rigged Game
>>
>> The US political and economic system, exemplified by Bush-Cheney, is deeply criminalized. It is designed to profit by killing things. It thrives on war and oppression. It is sustained by collusion, fraud, lies, cover-up, and the indoctrination and manipulation of minds. It does not, and never has, represented its people. Its operatives heed no laws. They "make" law. These facts must be burned into the consciousness of every decent human being.
>>
>> As Mike Ruppert writes in Crossing The Rubicon: "That profits of crime and war, which are destructive of human life, of labor, of happy, healthy neighborhoods (whether in the US or in Afghanistan, Africa and Iraq) are in effect a keystone of the global economy and a determinant of the success in a ruthless competition, is a compass needle for human civilization. One cannot expect to follow the recipe for roadkill stew and produce a crème brulee."
>>
>> Criminals do not obey laws. Criminals do not believe in "democracy".
>>
>> Criminals do not "permit" elections.
>>
>> It is foolish, then, to expend one's energies in "clean" election activities, and expect good results. To quote one of George W. Bush many recent Freudian non-slips, "we make elections." The 2004 presidential election was just one more "manufacture".
>>
>> How John Kerry Unwon the Presidency
>>
>> How Bush-Cheney stole the 2000 election was a matter of obvious historical fact, confirmed by post-facto mainstream media reports of a Gore win, and detailed by numerous investigators such as Greg Palast in his book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Voters complained about old machines and paper ballots.
>>
>> Then came the "black box voting" machines. (For detailed analysis of black box voting, read the work of Bev Harris.)
>>
>> In the 2002 mid-term elections, the Republicans "shocked" Democrats by solidifying their power in Congress, using the same fraudulent methods, along with new and improved black box technology.
>>
>> "The technology had a trial run in the 2002 mid-term elections. In Georgia, serviced by new Diebold systems, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called 'amazing' upsets, with results showing vote swings of up to 16 percent from the last pre-ballot polls. In computerized Minnesota, former Vice President Walter Mondale-a replacement for popular incumbent Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash days before the vote-was also defeated in a large last-second vote swing. Convenient 'glitches' in Florida saw an untold number of votes intended for the Democratic candidate registering instead for Governor Jeb "L'il Brother" Bush. A Florida Democrat who lost a similarly 'glitched' local election went to court to have the computers examined-but the case was thrown out by a judge who ruled that the innards of America's voting machines are the 'trade secrets' of the private companies who make them."
>>
>> In 2003, black box voting also helped oust Governor Gray Davis and installed Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Democratic stronghold of California.
>>
>> The probability of a fix was obvious throughout the 2004 presidential campaign. Corporate media polls continued to predominantly favor Bush, never dipping his rating below 48 percent, despite his trouncing in three straight debates with Kerry, and despite mushrooming war scandals. This was in stark contrast to independent surveys that showed Kerry with commanding leads. Kerry momentum, and massive Kerry/anti-Bush voter turnout, was evident on election day, and confirmed by exit polls with dominant Kerry numbers.
>>
>> Then what?
>>
>> Greg Palast reveals in exhaustive detail that John Kerry won the 2004 election and had it stolen through such methods as "spoilage", intimidation, polling place chicanery, ethnic cleansing of polls. (See Kerry Won. And here.)
>>
>> Once again, criminals do not "permit" elections. They make them. This time, the Bush forces had years of unencumbered time to orchestrate it, from Ohio (where its notorious secretary of state is the head of the Bush re-election campaign), and, of course, Jeb Bush's Florida.
>>
>> The Triumph of the Bush Machines
>>
>> But there is one overriding fact that has been left out most of the ridiculous post-election punditry that renders all other analyses completely irrelevant. It is also the reason why the smiles on the faces of Bush crime family members are so bright, as they watched the returns on election night.
>>
>> Air America Radio's Mike Malloy gave the most succinct and passionate explanation in his Wednesday, November 3, 2004, program [my links included-LC]:
>>
>> "The American vote count is controlled by three major corporate players, Diebold, ESS, Sequoia, and a fourth, SAIC, Science Applications International. All four are hard-wired into the Bush power structure, the Bush crime family.
>>
>> "They have been given millions of dollars by the Bush regime to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines that were just used in the 2004 election. The technology involved had a trial run during the 2002 mid-term elections. Georgia had Diebold machines in every precinct. As a result, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called an "amazing" 16 percent swing.
>>
>> "Diebold's Walden O'Dell, a top Bush fundraiser, publicly committed himself to delivering his home state Ohio's votes to Bush. At Diebold, the election division is run by Bob Urosevich. Bob's brother, Todd, is a top executive at "rival" ES&S. The brothers were originally staked by Howard Ahmanson, a member of the Council For National Policy, a right-wing steering group stacked with Bush true believers. Ahmanson is also one of the bagmen behind the extremist Christian Reconstruction Movement, which advocates the theocratic takeover of American democracy.
>>
>> "The four companies are interconnected; they are not four "competitors". Ahmanson has large stakes in ES&S, whose former CEO was Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. When Hagel ran for office, his own company counted the votes, and his victory was considered "an amazing upset". Hagel still has a million dollar stake in ES&S.
>>
>> "Sequoia is the corporate parent of a private equity firm, Madison Dearborn, which is partner in the Carlyle Group. (Also see here.)
>>
>> "Meanwhile, SAIC is referred to a "shadowy defense contractor". They have gotten into the vote count game both directly and through spinoffs by its top brass, including Admiral Bill Owens, former military aide to Dick Cheney, and Carlyle Group honcho Frank Carlucci and ex-CIA chief Robert Gates. SAIC's history of fraud charges and security "lapses" haven't prevented it from becoming one of the largest Pentagon and CIA contractors, and will doubtless encounter few obstacles in its entrance into the vote counting business.
>>
>> "The mad rush to install these unverifiable computers is driven by the Help America Vote Act, signed by …Bush! The chief lobbying group pushing for the act (while we dumb asses sat out here and thought, 'That sounds like a good idea!') was a consortium of arms dealers including Northrup Grumman and Lockheed Martin.
>>
>> "When you hear people saying, 'take a deep breath, we will pull through this', 'we need to work harder', 'we need to organize'-no. We will not. It's over.
>>
>> "Unless electronic vote tabulation is history, and these companies are driven out of business, it's their country. Not ours.
>>
>> "Nobody knows, and no one will ever know, what the actual vote count was.
>>
>> "There are no checks and balances left. The US Senate now has 55 of these Republicans. When they hit 60, which is what will happen in 2006 mid-term elections-trust me-that means that no matter what Bush and the crime family want to do, they can do it. The House (of Representatives) is gone for the next two to five generations. It's gone.
>>
>> "The last thing rational people in this country need right now is this whistling-past-the-graveyard horse hockey. Nothing is going to happen; it's going to get worse. There will never again be a legitimate election in this county.
>>
>> "Until we get rid of the machines.
>>
>> The people who put the software together-do you think that they are in this business to promote democracy? To promote representative government? Then you are a fool, and you don't deserve anything other than the lash.
>>
>> Kerry did not lose the election. The vote was stolen. Get that through your head."
>>
>> The Bush syndicate owns and runs the machines that make the votes. They control all branches of the federal government.
>>
>> There is nothing more painful than witnessing the Kerry voters, liberals and progressives as they agonize over "what went wrong," second guessing their Herculean efforts, grasping for solutions in outdated ideas, and vowing how "next time, we'll work harder, and we'll really get out the vote!", and that "we'll nominate even better candidates!"
>>
>> Still others are asking reasonable questions. Why aren't Walden O'Dell, Jeb Bush, and J. Kenneth Blackwell under arrest, or in jail? Exactly how did Associated Press pull it off on election night? Will any of the Bush administration criminals ever be punished for their war crimes? Then one must ask, who is going to prosecute? Who is going to hear the cases? The Bush Justice Department? The Bush FBI? The Supreme Court?
>>
>> When you play fair in a rigged game, it doesn't matter how hard you work, or even what you do. Insanity is repeating the same mistake, expecting a different result.
>>
>> Kerry Welcomes Fascism with Open Arms
>>
>> John Kerry's pitiful and immediate capitulation, surrendering with even less of a fight than Al Gore in 2000, despite clear, overt and gross vote fraud across the country, including Ohio-Diebold's home state-was sickening.
>>
>> Bush's Skull & Bones fraternity brother then spoke of "healing" and uniting behind Bush, a speech grotesquely reminiscent of Al Gore's sickening 2000 declaration that Bush was "mah president."
>>
>> Twice now, with Gore and Kerry, Democrats have won the White House, and then refused to speak the truth about the crime, and fight for the people who bled for them. Twice, America has been sold out.
>>
>> Could it be that this time, Kerry played the American people in just another game of bait-and-switch?
>>
>> Will those who supported Kerry actually heed his command, and obediently march in step, "without anger or rancor," and follow George W. Bush, the strutting tyrant, and the most dangerous and irrational collection of mass-murdering war criminals in modern history?
>>
>> In a cynical view, and one that is likely accurate, the election of 2004 may have been nothing more than an elaborate trial balloon, a "good cop-bad cop" theater that is mandated every few years to uphold the appearance of legitimacy. Our candidates lie, all the while gauging the effectiveness of long-term manipulation programs. They think, are the people still gullible and uninformed? What slogans and illusions can we fool them with? Is the "war on terrorism" mindset still unwavering? How far can we push them? Will they accept the baseball bat in the face, or the velvet glove to the nose?
>>
>> How many beatings will this republic take, before its people wake up? When will the people realize what is really happening, and "chase us down the street and lynch us" (as George H.W. Bush said to reporter Sarah McClendon)?
>>
>> To hell with Bush. To hell with Kerry. Wait, We're All Already Here.
>>
>> As sadistic Bush slurred in his "acceptance" speech, "a new term is a new opportunity". Then the most chilling words yet: "I earned political capital. I intend to spend it." If the last four years brought the world to its knees, imagine what is to come as Bush-Cheney giddily pry open a new set of larger Pandora's Boxes.
>>
>> Webster Tarpley, author of the Unauthorized Biography of George Bush writes: "If Bush retains control of the White House, we can expect a neocon fascist dictatorship or martial law emergency regime in 2005 or 2006, possibly as the result of synthetic terrorism. The neocons are in a desperate flight forward mentality which seeks to avoid the penal consequences of what they have already done with Valerie Plame, the Niger yellowcake forgeries, the Israeli mole scandal, and the Chalabi betrayal of state secrets. The neocon preference is for early war with Iran. War with Russia and China cannot be excluded somewhat further down the road."
>>
>> Add to that the relentless horror that will be inflicted when the effects of Peak Oil (also see From The Wilderness and Richard Heinberg) crash home in earnest, the body bags pile higher with new wars, and the lives of Americans (including Bush drones) and people all over the world continue to be destroyed.
>>
>> Some members of the current Bush crime organization may leave or retire, and the possibilities include Donald Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft (possibly replaced with Marc Racicot, a long-time friend of George W. Bush, and W's first choice for attorney general in 2000). Expect their replacements to be less well known criminals who, if anything, may be more toxic.
>>
>> Robert Lederman wrote of Racicot: "Numerous members of the Bush family, including his father and brothers and at least one of GW's prospective cabinet appointees-potential GW Bush Attorney General Marc Racicot-have a history of alleged involvement in drug running at the highest levels. We're not talking about buying drugs for personal use here but massive importations of heroin and cocaine with the full involvement of foreign dictators like George Bush pal Manuel Noriega and the Mafia." (See Murder and Drug Running in Montana)
>>
>> In Robert Payne's biography The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, he writes of Hitler (whose Third Reich was, in fact, financed by the Bush family): "For all the foreseeable future, he will remain to haunt us, more alive than ever although he is dead. He hides in shadowy places and at the pinnacle of power, always urging men to commit the ultimate crime, the perfect atrocity, the most ferocious massacres. Into the ears of generals and politicians he whispers: "Be merciless. It is very easy now because I have lived. I have reduced the value of man to a fraction of what it was before. You will find, if you continue along the path I have opened for you, the value of man will decline still further. Remember, mankind is always valueless and its only use is to serve our interests. We alone are transmitters of civilization, and the people are nothing but cattle. Napalm is good for them."
>>
>> Hitler himself wrote: "The victor will not be asked, later on, whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war, it is not right that matters, but victory. Have no pity."
>>
>> Hitler had nothing on the George W. Bush administration.
>>
>> What, if any, silver lining can be found in the wake of this new goose-step in the abyss? Perhaps only that the same bellicose, predictable and clumsy villains remain right where they have been for the last four years: right in front of us. Better that than a crafty and likeable neoliberal John Kerry administration that lulls the world to sleep before poison is administered.
>>
>> We cannot be fooled.
>>
>>
>> Larry Chin is a freelance journalist and an Online Journal Associate Editor.
>>
>> Copyright © 1998-2004 Online Journal™. All rights reserved.
>>
>> http://www.copvcia.com/free/ww3/110804_stolen_election.shtml
>>

FOCUS: MSNBC Vote Fraud Video (Must See):
http://www.truthout.org/multimedia.htm





> ehécatl ha escrito:
> www.truthout.org
>
> Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked
> By Thom Hartmann
> CommonDreams.org
>
> Saturday 06 November 2004
>
> When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.
>
> "It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.
>
> And some believe evidence is accumulating that the national effort happened on November 2, 2004.
>
> The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something startling.
>
> While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking - the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.
>
> In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.
>
> In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.
>
> The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.
>
> Yet in the touch-screen counties, where investigators may have been more vigorously looking for such anomalies, high percentages of registered Democrats generally equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry. (I had earlier reported that county size was a variable - this turns out not to be the case. Just the use of touch-screens versus optical scanners.)
>
> More visual analysis of the results can be seen at http://us together.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm. Note the trend line - the only variable that determines a swing toward Bush was the use of optical scan machines.
>
> One possible explanation for this is the "Dixiecrat" theory, that in Florida white voters (particularly the rural ones) have been registered as Democrats for years, but voting Republican since Reagan. Looking at the 2000 statistics, also available on Dopp's site, there are similar anomalies, although the trends are not as strong as in 2004. But some suggest the 2000 election may have been questionable in Florida, too.
>
> One of the people involved in Dopp's analysis noted that it may be possible to determine the validity of the "rural Democrat" theory by comparing Florida's white rural counties to those of Pennsylvania, another swing state but one that went for Kerry, as the exit polls there predicted. Interestingly, the Pennsylvania analysis, available at http://ustogether.org/election04/PA_vote_patt.htm, doesn't show the same kind of swings as does Florida, lending credence to the possibility of problems in Florida.
>
> Even more significantly, Dopp had first run the analysis while filtering out smaller (rural) counties, and still found that the only variable that accounted for a swing toward Republican voting was the use of optical-scan machines, whereas counties with touch-screen machines generally didn't swing - regardless of size.
>
> Others offer similar insights, based on other data. A professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, noted that in Florida the vote to raise the minimum wage was approved by 72%, although Kerry got 48%. "The correlation between voting for the minimum wage increase and voting for Kerry isn't likely to be perfect," he noted, "but one would normally expect that the gap - of 1.5 million votes - to be far smaller than it was."
>
> While all of this may or may not be evidence of vote tampering, it again brings the nation back to the question of why several states using electronic voting machines or scanners programmed by private, for-profit corporations and often connected to modems produced votes inconsistent with exit poll numbers.
>
> Those exit poll results have been a problem for reporters ever since Election Day.
>
> Election night, I'd been doing live election coverage for WDEV, one of the radio stations that carries my syndicated show, and, just after midnight, during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted the AP report.
>
> But then the computers reported something different. In several pivotal states.
>
> Conservatives see a conspiracy here: They think the exit polls were rigged.
>
> Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, wrote an article for The Hill, the publication read by every political junkie in Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of brilliant points.
>
> "Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state."
>
> He added: "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points."
>
> Yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as the computerized vote numbers began to come in from the various states the election was called for Bush.
>
> How could this happen?
>
> On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real "counting" is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.
>
> That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.
>
> "In a voting system," Harris explained to Dean on national television, "you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once?"
>
> Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. "What surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's just a regular computer."
>
> "So," Dean said, "anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator?"
>
> Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into the central tabulator system. "This is the official program that the County Supervisor sees," she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting between them loaded with Diebold's software.
>
> Bev then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the results of a test election. They went to the screen titled "Election Summary Report" and waited a moment while the PC "adds up all the votes from all the various precincts," and then saw that in this faux election Howard Dean had 1000 votes, Lex Luthor had 500, and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was winning.
>
> "Of course, you can't tamper with this software," Harris noted. Diebold wrote a pretty good program.
>
> But, it's running on a Windows PC.
>
> So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB" which, Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep the votes." Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled "Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like Excel.
>
> In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.
>
> "Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let's give 100 votes to Tiger."
>
> They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software "the legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the progress of your election."
>
> As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said, "And you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.
>
> Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds."
>
> On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv.) And they had left no tracks whatsoever, Harris said, noting that it would be nearly impossible for the election software - or a County election official - to know that the vote database had been altered.
>
> Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that had Karen Hughes telling George W. Bush that he'd lost the election in a landslide.
>
> Morris's conspiracy theory is that the exit polls "were sabotage" to cause people in the western states to not bother voting for Bush, since the networks would call the election based on the exit polls for Kerry. But the networks didn't do that, and had never intended to.
>
> According to congressional candidate Fisher, it makes far more sense that the exit polls were right - they weren't done on Diebold PCs - and that the vote itself was hacked.
>
> And not only for the presidential candidate - Jeff Fisher thinks this hit him and pretty much every other Democratic candidate for national office in the most-hacked swing states.
>
> So far, the only national "mainstream" media to come close to this story was Keith Olbermann on his show Friday night, November 5th, when he noted that it was curious that all the voting machine irregularities so far uncovered seem to favor Bush. In the meantime, the Washington Post and other media are now going through single-bullet-theory-like contortions to explain how the exit polls had failed.
>
> But I agree with Fox's Dick Morris on this one, at least in large part. Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in his final paragraph, "This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play."
>
> -------
>
> Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann.com. His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."
>
>
>
> -------
>
> Jump to TO Features for Monday November 8, 2004
> Today's TO Features -------------- William Rivers Pitt | Worse Than 2000: Tuesday's Electoral Disaster Iraqi Resistance Kill 50, Mostly Police U.S. Ready to Put Weapons in Space French Foreign Minister: Arafat Alive, But in Complex State Neo-Con Agenda: Iran, China, Russia, Latin America ... Los Angeles Times | Democrats and the God Gap Bush, Oil Batter Clean Energy Stocks Eric Leser | The Big Companies Will Be Repaid Christian Right Moves on "Moral Issues" European Catholics Join Battle on Gays and God Republicans in Congress Warned Not to Gloat Guantanamo Bay Justice: 3 Hours Behind Closed Doors BREAKING: Invasion of Fallujah Begins The Costs of War - Letters from the Home Front Pelosi Says Democrats Will Protect Social Security Iraq Declares Martial Law, 23 Police Killed Thom Hartmann | Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked t r u t h o u t Home
>
> © Copyright 2004 by TruthOut.org
>
>
>
>
>
>
>> ehécatl ha escrito:
>> (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
>>
>> Copyright © 1998–2004 Online Journal™. All rights reserved.
>>
>> Reprinted with permission from ONLINE JOURNAL™
>> www.onlinejournal.com
>>
>> The stolen election of 2004: welcome back to hell
>>
>> By
>> Larry Chin
>> Online Journal Associate Editor
>>
>> November 5, 2004-Using a variety of criminal methods that they have perfected over the past four years, the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney-Karl Rove syndicate stole another election, and extended their illegal occupation of the White House. Experienced, informed and unblinking observers were not fooled by any aspect of this utterly predictable goose-step towards full dictatorship.
>>
>> But to those who are "shocked" as they watched the election night numbers mysteriously slip away amidst controversy; those who are struggling to understand "what happened", let this cold realization serve as bracing edification.
>>
>> Welcome to hell. Welcome to the horrifying reality that whistleblowers have suffered and fought through every day, over lifetimes. No more illusions. This is reality.
>>
>> It Is a Rigged Game
>>
>> The US political and economic system, exemplified by Bush-Cheney, is deeply criminalized. It is designed to profit by killing things. It thrives on war and oppression. It is sustained by collusion, fraud, lies, cover-up, and the indoctrination and manipulation of minds. It does not, and never has, represented its people. Its operatives heed no laws. They "make" law. These facts must be burned into the consciousness of every decent human being.
>>
>> As Mike Ruppert writes in Crossing The Rubicon: "That profits of crime and war, which are destructive of human life, of labor, of happy, healthy neighborhoods (whether in the US or in Afghanistan, Africa and Iraq) are in effect a keystone of the global economy and a determinant of the success in a ruthless competition, is a compass needle for human civilization. One cannot expect to follow the recipe for roadkill stew and produce a crème brulee."
>>
>> Criminals do not obey laws. Criminals do not believe in "democracy".
>>
>> Criminals do not "permit" elections.
>>
>> It is foolish, then, to expend one's energies in "clean" election activities, and expect good results. To quote one of George W. Bush many recent Freudian non-slips, "we make elections." The 2004 presidential election was just one more "manufacture".
>>
>> How John Kerry Unwon the Presidency
>>
>> How Bush-Cheney stole the 2000 election was a matter of obvious historical fact, confirmed by post-facto mainstream media reports of a Gore win, and detailed by numerous investigators such as Greg Palast in his book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Voters complained about old machines and paper ballots.
>>
>> Then came the "black box voting" machines. (For detailed analysis of black box voting, read the work of Bev Harris.)
>>
>> In the 2002 mid-term elections, the Republicans "shocked" Democrats by solidifying their power in Congress, using the same fraudulent methods, along with new and improved black box technology.
>>
>> "The technology had a trial run in the 2002 mid-term elections. In Georgia, serviced by new Diebold systems, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called 'amazing' upsets, with results showing vote swings of up to 16 percent from the last pre-ballot polls. In computerized Minnesota, former Vice President Walter Mondale-a replacement for popular incumbent Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash days before the vote-was also defeated in a large last-second vote swing. Convenient 'glitches' in Florida saw an untold number of votes intended for the Democratic candidate registering instead for Governor Jeb "L'il Brother" Bush. A Florida Democrat who lost a similarly 'glitched' local election went to court to have the computers examined-but the case was thrown out by a judge who ruled that the innards of America's voting machines are the 'trade secrets' of the private companies who make them."
>>
>> In 2003, black box voting also helped oust Governor Gray Davis and installed Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Democratic stronghold of California.
>>
>> The probability of a fix was obvious throughout the 2004 presidential campaign. Corporate media polls continued to predominantly favor Bush, never dipping his rating below 48 percent, despite his trouncing in three straight debates with Kerry, and despite mushrooming war scandals. This was in stark contrast to independent surveys that showed Kerry with commanding leads. Kerry momentum, and massive Kerry/anti-Bush voter turnout, was evident on election day, and confirmed by exit polls with dominant Kerry numbers.
>>
>> Then what?
>>
>> Greg Palast reveals in exhaustive detail that John Kerry won the 2004 election and had it stolen through such methods as "spoilage", intimidation, polling place chicanery, ethnic cleansing of polls. (See Kerry Won. And here.)
>>
>> Once again, criminals do not "permit" elections. They make them. This time, the Bush forces had years of unencumbered time to orchestrate it, from Ohio (where its notorious secretary of state is the head of the Bush re-election campaign), and, of course, Jeb Bush's Florida.
>>
>> The Triumph of the Bush Machines
>>
>> But there is one overriding fact that has been left out most of the ridiculous post-election punditry that renders all other analyses completely irrelevant. It is also the reason why the smiles on the faces of Bush crime family members are so bright, as they watched the returns on election night.
>>
>> Air America Radio's Mike Malloy gave the most succinct and passionate explanation in his Wednesday, November 3, 2004, program [my links included-LC]:
>>
>> "The American vote count is controlled by three major corporate players, Diebold, ESS, Sequoia, and a fourth, SAIC, Science Applications International. All four are hard-wired into the Bush power structure, the Bush crime family.
>>
>> "They have been given millions of dollars by the Bush regime to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines that were just used in the 2004 election. The technology involved had a trial run during the 2002 mid-term elections. Georgia had Diebold machines in every precinct. As a result, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called an "amazing" 16 percent swing.
>>
>> "Diebold's Walden O'Dell, a top Bush fundraiser, publicly committed himself to delivering his home state Ohio's votes to Bush. At Diebold, the election division is run by Bob Urosevich. Bob's brother, Todd, is a top executive at "rival" ES&S. The brothers were originally staked by Howard Ahmanson, a member of the Council For National Policy, a right-wing steering group stacked with Bush true believers. Ahmanson is also one of the bagmen behind the extremist Christian Reconstruction Movement, which advocates the theocratic takeover of American democracy.
>>
>> "The four companies are interconnected; they are not four "competitors". Ahmanson has large stakes in ES&S, whose former CEO was Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. When Hagel ran for office, his own company counted the votes, and his victory was considered "an amazing upset". Hagel still has a million dollar stake in ES&S.
>>
>> "Sequoia is the corporate parent of a private equity firm, Madison Dearborn, which is partner in the Carlyle Group. (Also see here.)
>>
>> "Meanwhile, SAIC is referred to a "shadowy defense contractor". They have gotten into the vote count game both directly and through spinoffs by its top brass, including Admiral Bill Owens, former military aide to Dick Cheney, and Carlyle Group honcho Frank Carlucci and ex-CIA chief Robert Gates. SAIC's history of fraud charges and security "lapses" haven't prevented it from becoming one of the largest Pentagon and CIA contractors, and will doubtless encounter few obstacles in its entrance into the vote counting business.
>>
>> "The mad rush to install these unverifiable computers is driven by the Help America Vote Act, signed by …Bush! The chief lobbying group pushing for the act (while we dumb asses sat out here and thought, 'That sounds like a good idea!') was a consortium of arms dealers including Northrup Grumman and Lockheed Martin.
>>
>> "When you hear people saying, 'take a deep breath, we will pull through this', 'we need to work harder', 'we need to organize'-no. We will not. It's over.
>>
>> "Unless electronic vote tabulation is history, and these companies are driven out of business, it's their country. Not ours.
>>
>> "Nobody knows, and no one will ever know, what the actual vote count was.
>>
>> "There are no checks and balances left. The US Senate now has 55 of these Republicans. When they hit 60, which is what will happen in 2006 mid-term elections-trust me-that means that no matter what Bush and the crime family want to do, they can do it. The House (of Representatives) is gone for the next two to five generations. It's gone.
>>
>> "The last thing rational people in this country need right now is this whistling-past-the-graveyard horse hockey. Nothing is going to happen; it's going to get worse. There will never again be a legitimate election in this county.
>>
>> "Until we get rid of the machines.
>>
>> The people who put the software together-do you think that they are in this business to promote democracy? To promote representative government? Then you are a fool, and you don't deserve anything other than the lash.
>>
>> Kerry did not lose the election. The vote was stolen. Get that through your head."
>>
>> The Bush syndicate owns and runs the machines that make the votes. They control all branches of the federal government.
>>
>> There is nothing more painful than witnessing the Kerry voters, liberals and progressives as they agonize over "what went wrong," second guessing their Herculean efforts, grasping for solutions in outdated ideas, and vowing how "next time, we'll work harder, and we'll really get out the vote!", and that "we'll nominate even better candidates!"
>>
>> Still others are asking reasonable questions. Why aren't Walden O'Dell, Jeb Bush, and J. Kenneth Blackwell under arrest, or in jail? Exactly how did Associated Press pull it off on election night? Will any of the Bush administration criminals ever be punished for their war crimes? Then one must ask, who is going to prosecute? Who is going to hear the cases? The Bush Justice Department? The Bush FBI? The Supreme Court?
>>
>> When you play fair in a rigged game, it doesn't matter how hard you work, or even what you do. Insanity is repeating the same mistake, expecting a different result.
>>
>> Kerry Welcomes Fascism with Open Arms
>>
>> John Kerry's pitiful and immediate capitulation, surrendering with even less of a fight than Al Gore in 2000, despite clear, overt and gross vote fraud across the country, including Ohio-Diebold's home state-was sickening.
>>
>> Bush's Skull & Bones fraternity brother then spoke of "healing" and uniting behind Bush, a speech grotesquely reminiscent of Al Gore's sickening 2000 declaration that Bush was "mah president."
>>
>> Twice now, with Gore and Kerry, Democrats have won the White House, and then refused to speak the truth about the crime, and fight for the people who bled for them. Twice, America has been sold out.
>>
>> Could it be that this time, Kerry played the American people in just another game of bait-and-switch?
>>
>> Will those who supported Kerry actually heed his command, and obediently march in step, "without anger or rancor," and follow George W. Bush, the strutting tyrant, and the most dangerous and irrational collection of mass-murdering war criminals in modern history?
>>
>> In a cynical view, and one that is likely accurate, the election of 2004 may have been nothing more than an elaborate trial balloon, a "good cop-bad cop" theater that is mandated every few years to uphold the appearance of legitimacy. Our candidates lie, all the while gauging the effectiveness of long-term manipulation programs. They think, are the people still gullible and uninformed? What slogans and illusions can we fool them with? Is the "war on terrorism" mindset still unwavering? How far can we push them? Will they accept the baseball bat in the face, or the velvet glove to the nose?
>>
>> How many beatings will this republic take, before its people wake up? When will the people realize what is really happening, and "chase us down the street and lynch us" (as George H.W. Bush said to reporter Sarah McClendon)?
>>
>> To hell with Bush. To hell with Kerry. Wait, We're All Already Here.
>>
>> As sadistic Bush slurred in his "acceptance" speech, "a new term is a new opportunity". Then the most chilling words yet: "I earned political capital. I intend to spend it." If the last four years brought the world to its knees, imagine what is to come as Bush-Cheney giddily pry open a new set of larger Pandora's Boxes.
>>
>> Webster Tarpley, author of the Unauthorized Biography of George Bush writes: "If Bush retains control of the White House, we can expect a neocon fascist dictatorship or martial law emergency regime in 2005 or 2006, possibly as the result of synthetic terrorism. The neocons are in a desperate flight forward mentality which seeks to avoid the penal consequences of what they have already done with Valerie Plame, the Niger yellowcake forgeries, the Israeli mole scandal, and the Chalabi betrayal of state secrets. The neocon preference is for early war with Iran. War with Russia and China cannot be excluded somewhat further down the road."
>>
>> Add to that the relentless horror that will be inflicted when the effects of Peak Oil (also see From The Wilderness and Richard Heinberg) crash home in earnest, the body bags pile higher with new wars, and the lives of Americans (including Bush drones) and people all over the world continue to be destroyed.
>>
>> Some members of the current Bush crime organization may leave or retire, and the possibilities include Donald Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft (possibly replaced with Marc Racicot, a long-time friend of George W. Bush, and W's first choice for attorney general in 2000). Expect their replacements to be less well known criminals who, if anything, may be more toxic.
>>
>> Robert Lederman wrote of Racicot: "Numerous members of the Bush family, including his father and brothers and at least one of GW's prospective cabinet appointees-potential GW Bush Attorney General Marc Racicot-have a history of alleged involvement in drug running at the highest levels. We're not talking about buying drugs for personal use here but massive importations of heroin and cocaine with the full involvement of foreign dictators like George Bush pal Manuel Noriega and the Mafia." (See Murder and Drug Running in Montana)
>>
>> In Robert Payne's biography The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, he writes of Hitler (whose Third Reich was, in fact, financed by the Bush family): "For all the foreseeable future, he will remain to haunt us, more alive than ever although he is dead. He hides in shadowy places and at the pinnacle of power, always urging men to commit the ultimate crime, the perfect atrocity, the most ferocious massacres. Into the ears of generals and politicians he whispers: "Be merciless. It is very easy now because I have lived. I have reduced the value of man to a fraction of what it was before. You will find, if you continue along the path I have opened for you, the value of man will decline still further. Remember, mankind is always valueless and its only use is to serve our interests. We alone are transmitters of civilization, and the people are nothing but cattle. Napalm is good for them."
>>
>> Hitler himself wrote: "The victor will not be asked, later on, whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war, it is not right that matters, but victory. Have no pity."
>>
>> Hitler had nothing on the George W. Bush administration.
>>
>> What, if any, silver lining can be found in the wake of this new goose-step in the abyss? Perhaps only that the same bellicose, predictable and clumsy villains remain right where they have been for the last four years: right in front of us. Better that than a crafty and likeable neoliberal John Kerry administration that lulls the world to sleep before poison is administered.
>>
>> We cannot be fooled.
>>
>>
>> Larry Chin is a freelance journalist and an Online Journal Associate Editor.
>>
>> Copyright © 1998-2004 Online Journal™. All rights reserved.
>>
>> http://www.copvcia.com/free/ww3/110804_stolen_election.shtml
>>

State Average IQs:

http://www.noblecustom.co.uk/bush.htm




> ehécatl ha escrito:
> (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
>
> Copyright © 1998–2004 Online Journal™. All rights reserved.
>
> Reprinted with permission from ONLINE JOURNAL™
> www.onlinejournal.com
>
> The stolen election of 2004: welcome back to hell
>
> By
> Larry Chin
> Online Journal Associate Editor
>
> November 5, 2004-Using a variety of criminal methods that they have perfected over the past four years, the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney-Karl Rove syndicate stole another election, and extended their illegal occupation of the White House. Experienced, informed and unblinking observers were not fooled by any aspect of this utterly predictable goose-step towards full dictatorship.
>
> But to those who are "shocked" as they watched the election night numbers mysteriously slip away amidst controversy; those who are struggling to understand "what happened", let this cold realization serve as bracing edification.
>
> Welcome to hell. Welcome to the horrifying reality that whistleblowers have suffered and fought through every day, over lifetimes. No more illusions. This is reality.
>
> It Is a Rigged Game
>
> The US political and economic system, exemplified by Bush-Cheney, is deeply criminalized. It is designed to profit by killing things. It thrives on war and oppression. It is sustained by collusion, fraud, lies, cover-up, and the indoctrination and manipulation of minds. It does not, and never has, represented its people. Its operatives heed no laws. They "make" law. These facts must be burned into the consciousness of every decent human being.
>
> As Mike Ruppert writes in Crossing The Rubicon: "That profits of crime and war, which are destructive of human life, of labor, of happy, healthy neighborhoods (whether in the US or in Afghanistan, Africa and Iraq) are in effect a keystone of the global economy and a determinant of the success in a ruthless competition, is a compass needle for human civilization. One cannot expect to follow the recipe for roadkill stew and produce a crème brulee."
>
> Criminals do not obey laws. Criminals do not believe in "democracy".
>
> Criminals do not "permit" elections.
>
> It is foolish, then, to expend one's energies in "clean" election activities, and expect good results. To quote one of George W. Bush many recent Freudian non-slips, "we make elections." The 2004 presidential election was just one more "manufacture".
>
> How John Kerry Unwon the Presidency
>
> How Bush-Cheney stole the 2000 election was a matter of obvious historical fact, confirmed by post-facto mainstream media reports of a Gore win, and detailed by numerous investigators such as Greg Palast in his book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Voters complained about old machines and paper ballots.
>
> Then came the "black box voting" machines. (For detailed analysis of black box voting, read the work of Bev Harris.)
>
> In the 2002 mid-term elections, the Republicans "shocked" Democrats by solidifying their power in Congress, using the same fraudulent methods, along with new and improved black box technology.
>
> "The technology had a trial run in the 2002 mid-term elections. In Georgia, serviced by new Diebold systems, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called 'amazing' upsets, with results showing vote swings of up to 16 percent from the last pre-ballot polls. In computerized Minnesota, former Vice President Walter Mondale-a replacement for popular incumbent Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash days before the vote-was also defeated in a large last-second vote swing. Convenient 'glitches' in Florida saw an untold number of votes intended for the Democratic candidate registering instead for Governor Jeb "L'il Brother" Bush. A Florida Democrat who lost a similarly 'glitched' local election went to court to have the computers examined-but the case was thrown out by a judge who ruled that the innards of America's voting machines are the 'trade secrets' of the private companies who make them."
>
> In 2003, black box voting also helped oust Governor Gray Davis and installed Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Democratic stronghold of California.
>
> The probability of a fix was obvious throughout the 2004 presidential campaign. Corporate media polls continued to predominantly favor Bush, never dipping his rating below 48 percent, despite his trouncing in three straight debates with Kerry, and despite mushrooming war scandals. This was in stark contrast to independent surveys that showed Kerry with commanding leads. Kerry momentum, and massive Kerry/anti-Bush voter turnout, was evident on election day, and confirmed by exit polls with dominant Kerry numbers.
>
> Then what?
>
> Greg Palast reveals in exhaustive detail that John Kerry won the 2004 election and had it stolen through such methods as "spoilage", intimidation, polling place chicanery, ethnic cleansing of polls. (See Kerry Won. And here.)
>
> Once again, criminals do not "permit" elections. They make them. This time, the Bush forces had years of unencumbered time to orchestrate it, from Ohio (where its notorious secretary of state is the head of the Bush re-election campaign), and, of course, Jeb Bush's Florida.
>
> The Triumph of the Bush Machines
>
> But there is one overriding fact that has been left out most of the ridiculous post-election punditry that renders all other analyses completely irrelevant. It is also the reason why the smiles on the faces of Bush crime family members are so bright, as they watched the returns on election night.
>
> Air America Radio's Mike Malloy gave the most succinct and passionate explanation in his Wednesday, November 3, 2004, program [my links included-LC]:
>
> "The American vote count is controlled by three major corporate players, Diebold, ESS, Sequoia, and a fourth, SAIC, Science Applications International. All four are hard-wired into the Bush power structure, the Bush crime family.
>
> "They have been given millions of dollars by the Bush regime to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines that were just used in the 2004 election. The technology involved had a trial run during the 2002 mid-term elections. Georgia had Diebold machines in every precinct. As a result, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called an "amazing" 16 percent swing.
>
> "Diebold's Walden O'Dell, a top Bush fundraiser, publicly committed himself to delivering his home state Ohio's votes to Bush. At Diebold, the election division is run by Bob Urosevich. Bob's brother, Todd, is a top executive at "rival" ES&S. The brothers were originally staked by Howard Ahmanson, a member of the Council For National Policy, a right-wing steering group stacked with Bush true believers. Ahmanson is also one of the bagmen behind the extremist Christian Reconstruction Movement, which advocates the theocratic takeover of American democracy.
>
> "The four companies are interconnected; they are not four "competitors". Ahmanson has large stakes in ES&S, whose former CEO was Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. When Hagel ran for office, his own company counted the votes, and his victory was considered "an amazing upset". Hagel still has a million dollar stake in ES&S.
>
> "Sequoia is the corporate parent of a private equity firm, Madison Dearborn, which is partner in the Carlyle Group. (Also see here.)
>
> "Meanwhile, SAIC is referred to a "shadowy defense contractor". They have gotten into the vote count game both directly and through spinoffs by its top brass, including Admiral Bill Owens, former military aide to Dick Cheney, and Carlyle Group honcho Frank Carlucci and ex-CIA chief Robert Gates. SAIC's history of fraud charges and security "lapses" haven't prevented it from becoming one of the largest Pentagon and CIA contractors, and will doubtless encounter few obstacles in its entrance into the vote counting business.
>
> "The mad rush to install these unverifiable computers is driven by the Help America Vote Act, signed by …Bush! The chief lobbying group pushing for the act (while we dumb asses sat out here and thought, 'That sounds like a good idea!') was a consortium of arms dealers including Northrup Grumman and Lockheed Martin.
>
> "When you hear people saying, 'take a deep breath, we will pull through this', 'we need to work harder', 'we need to organize'-no. We will not. It's over.
>
> "Unless electronic vote tabulation is history, and these companies are driven out of business, it's their country. Not ours.
>
> "Nobody knows, and no one will ever know, what the actual vote count was.
>
> "There are no checks and balances left. The US Senate now has 55 of these Republicans. When they hit 60, which is what will happen in 2006 mid-term elections-trust me-that means that no matter what Bush and the crime family want to do, they can do it. The House (of Representatives) is gone for the next two to five generations. It's gone.
>
> "The last thing rational people in this country need right now is this whistling-past-the-graveyard horse hockey. Nothing is going to happen; it's going to get worse. There will never again be a legitimate election in this county.
>
> "Until we get rid of the machines.
>
> The people who put the software together-do you think that they are in this business to promote democracy? To promote representative government? Then you are a fool, and you don't deserve anything other than the lash.
>
> Kerry did not lose the election. The vote was stolen. Get that through your head."
>
> The Bush syndicate owns and runs the machines that make the votes. They control all branches of the federal government.
>
> There is nothing more painful than witnessing the Kerry voters, liberals and progressives as they agonize over "what went wrong," second guessing their Herculean efforts, grasping for solutions in outdated ideas, and vowing how "next time, we'll work harder, and we'll really get out the vote!", and that "we'll nominate even better candidates!"
>
> Still others are asking reasonable questions. Why aren't Walden O'Dell, Jeb Bush, and J. Kenneth Blackwell under arrest, or in jail? Exactly how did Associated Press pull it off on election night? Will any of the Bush administration criminals ever be punished for their war crimes? Then one must ask, who is going to prosecute? Who is going to hear the cases? The Bush Justice Department? The Bush FBI? The Supreme Court?
>
> When you play fair in a rigged game, it doesn't matter how hard you work, or even what you do. Insanity is repeating the same mistake, expecting a different result.
>
> Kerry Welcomes Fascism with Open Arms
>
> John Kerry's pitiful and immediate capitulation, surrendering with even less of a fight than Al Gore in 2000, despite clear, overt and gross vote fraud across the country, including Ohio-Diebold's home state-was sickening.
>
> Bush's Skull & Bones fraternity brother then spoke of "healing" and uniting behind Bush, a speech grotesquely reminiscent of Al Gore's sickening 2000 declaration that Bush was "mah president."
>
> Twice now, with Gore and Kerry, Democrats have won the White House, and then refused to speak the truth about the crime, and fight for the people who bled for them. Twice, America has been sold out.
>
> Could it be that this time, Kerry played the American people in just another game of bait-and-switch?
>
> Will those who supported Kerry actually heed his command, and obediently march in step, "without anger or rancor," and follow George W. Bush, the strutting tyrant, and the most dangerous and irrational collection of mass-murdering war criminals in modern history?
>
> In a cynical view, and one that is likely accurate, the election of 2004 may have been nothing more than an elaborate trial balloon, a "good cop-bad cop" theater that is mandated every few years to uphold the appearance of legitimacy. Our candidates lie, all the while gauging the effectiveness of long-term manipulation programs. They think, are the people still gullible and uninformed? What slogans and illusions can we fool them with? Is the "war on terrorism" mindset still unwavering? How far can we push them? Will they accept the baseball bat in the face, or the velvet glove to the nose?
>
> How many beatings will this republic take, before its people wake up? When will the people realize what is really happening, and "chase us down the street and lynch us" (as George H.W. Bush said to reporter Sarah McClendon)?
>
> To hell with Bush. To hell with Kerry. Wait, We're All Already Here.
>
> As sadistic Bush slurred in his "acceptance" speech, "a new term is a new opportunity". Then the most chilling words yet: "I earned political capital. I intend to spend it." If the last four years brought the world to its knees, imagine what is to come as Bush-Cheney giddily pry open a new set of larger Pandora's Boxes.
>
> Webster Tarpley, author of the Unauthorized Biography of George Bush writes: "If Bush retains control of the White House, we can expect a neocon fascist dictatorship or martial law emergency regime in 2005 or 2006, possibly as the result of synthetic terrorism. The neocons are in a desperate flight forward mentality which seeks to avoid the penal consequences of what they have already done with Valerie Plame, the Niger yellowcake forgeries, the Israeli mole scandal, and the Chalabi betrayal of state secrets. The neocon preference is for early war with Iran. War with Russia and China cannot be excluded somewhat further down the road."
>
> Add to that the relentless horror that will be inflicted when the effects of Peak Oil (also see From The Wilderness and Richard Heinberg) crash home in earnest, the body bags pile higher with new wars, and the lives of Americans (including Bush drones) and people all over the world continue to be destroyed.
>
> Some members of the current Bush crime organization may leave or retire, and the possibilities include Donald Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft (possibly replaced with Marc Racicot, a long-time friend of George W. Bush, and W's first choice for attorney general in 2000). Expect their replacements to be less well known criminals who, if anything, may be more toxic.
>
> Robert Lederman wrote of Racicot: "Numerous members of the Bush family, including his father and brothers and at least one of GW's prospective cabinet appointees-potential GW Bush Attorney General Marc Racicot-have a history of alleged involvement in drug running at the highest levels. We're not talking about buying drugs for personal use here but massive importations of heroin and cocaine with the full involvement of foreign dictators like George Bush pal Manuel Noriega and the Mafia." (See Murder and Drug Running in Montana)
>
> In Robert Payne's biography The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, he writes of Hitler (whose Third Reich was, in fact, financed by the Bush family): "For all the foreseeable future, he will remain to haunt us, more alive than ever although he is dead. He hides in shadowy places and at the pinnacle of power, always urging men to commit the ultimate crime, the perfect atrocity, the most ferocious massacres. Into the ears of generals and politicians he whispers: "Be merciless. It is very easy now because I have lived. I have reduced the value of man to a fraction of what it was before. You will find, if you continue along the path I have opened for you, the value of man will decline still further. Remember, mankind is always valueless and its only use is to serve our interests. We alone are transmitters of civilization, and the people are nothing but cattle. Napalm is good for them."
>
> Hitler himself wrote: "The victor will not be asked, later on, whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war, it is not right that matters, but victory. Have no pity."
>
> Hitler had nothing on the George W. Bush administration.
>
> What, if any, silver lining can be found in the wake of this new goose-step in the abyss? Perhaps only that the same bellicose, predictable and clumsy villains remain right where they have been for the last four years: right in front of us. Better that than a crafty and likeable neoliberal John Kerry administration that lulls the world to sleep before poison is administered.
>
> We cannot be fooled.
>
>
> Larry Chin is a freelance journalist and an Online Journal Associate Editor.
>
> Copyright © 1998-2004 Online Journal™. All rights reserved.
>
> http://www.copvcia.com/free/ww3/110804_stolen_election.shtml
>

Who Counts in Ohio?
By Steve Weissman
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Thursday 11 November 2004

Is Team Bush stealing the presidential election in Ohio? And, if it is, can the rest of us do anything to save our embattled democracy?

For those watching American TV or reading the dailies, and nothing more, my questions probably sound loopy, straight from the conspiracy theorists I so often criticize. For those surfing the Internet or scanning this week's flood of round-robin emails, the questions point to one of history's great crimes. The truth, as far as I can see it, falls betwixt, between, and beyond.

Nearly three months ago, I predicted that the Bush campaigners would, in fact, try to steal the election. They would, I argued, do it the old-fashioned American way - with "a massive effort to keep as many as three million pro-Democratic Afro-Americans, Native Americans, and non-Cuban Hispanics from voting."

Nowhere did the GOP try harder to keep minorities from voting - or having their votes counted - than in Ohio, as I'll show in a moment. Just hold in mind that, barring unexpected defections, Ohio's 20 electoral votes will prove decisive on December 13 when the Electoral College meets in the various state capitols to cast their ballots. If the present tally holds, Kerry and Edwards will get 252 votes against 286 for Bush and Cheney. Were the Buckeye State to switch from red to blue, Kerry-Edwards would win 272 to 266. As Ohio goes, so goes the nation.

Could Ohio still change its vote?

Yes, it could, but don't bet on it. The Kerry-Edwards campaign, the White House, and the major media have already awarded victory to Bush and Cheney, taking the public spotlight off Ohio election officials. But, as with so much else in our Rube Goldberg version of democracy, wiggle room remains. Concession speeches, no matter how moving, can be retracted, which - to quote a colleague - would be the mother of all flip-flops. Nor, unless I missed something, do claims of victory from Karl Rove or Peter Jennings have the force of law.

The news, then, is that Ohio is still counting. According to Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the chief election official, Bush presently leads Kerry by 136,483 votes. This includes domestic absentee ballots and those from civilians abroad, but not from overseas military, which will keep coming in until Friday, November 12.

Bush's lead will likely become smaller as Secretary Blackwell and bi-partisan County Election Boards sort out errors in the election night result. Most famously, Franklin County - which includes Columbus, the state capital - has reported a malfunction on a touch-screen voting system in one precinct. According to officials, the precinct gave Mr. Bush nearly 4,000 more votes than he actually received. All of Ohio's 88 counties have reportedly been asked to look for similar cock-ups.

Against Bush's 136,483-vote lead, officials have in hand nearly 250,000 uncounted ballots. Some 155,428 are provisional ballots, where voters were initially challenged or other problems came up. Another 93,000 are "spoiled ballots," which - according to officials - showed either no vote for president or votes for more than one candidate. These are paper punch cards like the ones with the hanging, dimpled, and pregnant chads that in Election 2000 made my home state of Florida a national laughing stock.

Most pundits agree that Ohio's spoiled and provisional ballots came overwhelmingly from Democratic, heavily African-American precincts, while the far smaller number of overseas military ballots will likely break toward Bush.

The election boards are currently verifying the eligibility of voters throughout the state who cast provisional ballots. This Saturday, November 13, the boards should begin to count those from voters they deem legitimately registered. In past elections, officials have disqualified some 10% of provisional ballots, which would reduce the number to just under 140,000.

We should know by Saturday how many provisional ballots officials have accepted and how many overseas military ballots they have received.

To trigger an automatic recount, which would reconsider the "spoiled ballots," Kerry needs to reduce Bush's lead to some 19,000 votes, according to Democratic Party officials. Given the current tally, this would require winning over 90% of 140,000 qualified provisional ballots, and half of the overseas military absentees, or a comparable mix. Not likely, even to a Red Sox fan.

Otherwise, the Kerry camp would have to request a recount, which they will not do unless the provisional votes reduce Bush's lead sufficiently to make the "spoiled ballots" look irresistible.

To make Kerry's odds even tougher, the man running the game - Secretary of State Ken Blackwell -also co-chairs the Ohio committee to re-elect George Bush. A former mayor of Cincinnati, Undersecretary of HUD, and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, Blackwell is one of the national GOP's most prominent African-American officials and a leading candidate to replace Bob Taft as Governor of Ohio. More to the point, he publicly spearheaded Republican efforts in the state to reduce the number of his fellow African-Americans whose votes would go to the Democrats

In some cases, the courts over-ruled him, and - much to their credit - most black voters stood up to his harassing tactics. But Blackwell never stopped trying.

As chief election officer, he decreed that voters, if challenged, could cast provisional ballots only at their correct precinct. Previously, they could vote anywhere in the county in which they were registered. When a lower court over-ruled him, he appealed the decision and got his restriction reinstated. This might, in part, explain why Ohio now has some 100,000 fewer provisional ballots than many Democrats expected.

Less successfully, Blackwell tried to enforce an outdated rule that polling stations could recognize voter registrations only if printed on heavy bond paper, even though local election boards had officially approved lighter-weigh forms. Had the courts not stopped him, this would have kept thousands of newly registered Democrats from voting.

Similarly, Blackwell refused a request from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to inform former felons that, according to Ohio law, they had every right to vote.

He presided over efforts to send massive numbers of poll-watchers into predominantly African-American precincts to challenge prospective voters. Again a Federal Court curtailed the effort, which looked calculated to slow down the process so much that prospective voters would turn away in frustration.

He failed to provide African-American precincts with sufficient voting machines, which added to the incredibly long lines waiting to voting. Many people stood for hours, and no one knows how many walked away.

Finally, he made the decision to keep the punch card voting, which everyone in America knew deprived people - most often minorities - of their right to vote.

Now the fox guarding the hen house, Ken Blackwell presides over his own sordid success.



-------

Jump to TO Features for Thursday November 11, 2004
Today's TO Features -------------- Steve Weissman | Who Counts in Ohio? Iraqi Rebels Seize Ramadi, Al-Zarqawi Likely Escaped Fallujah Go Kick Some Butt and Make History, Vietnam-Style Confusion and Ambushes As Marines Take Fallujah Mosque Bush Wants Line-Item Veto Ashcroft Wants Oregon Suicide Law Blocked Mike Davis | Apocalypse Denial in America Le Monde | Electoral Archaism Kerry Refuses to Go Quietly The Media Gives Bush a Mandate Jonathan Freedland | Death Will be His Witness Liberal Christians Challenge 'Values Vote' FOCUS: Oil Drilling in Alaska (ANWR) Could Pass in New Congress Michael Feingold | Our Vanished Values Gonzales to Succeed Ashcroft Gunmen Kidnap Allawi Family Members, Fallujah Battle Rages On t r u t h o u t Home

© Copyright 2004 by TruthOut.org





> ehécatl ha escrito:
> www.truthout.org
>
> Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked
> By Thom Hartmann
> CommonDreams.org
>
> Saturday 06 November 2004
>
> When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.
>
> "It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.
>
> And some believe evidence is accumulating that the national effort happened on November 2, 2004.
>
> The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something startling.
>
> While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking - the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.
>
> In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.
>
> In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.
>
> The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.
>
> Yet in the touch-screen counties, where investigators may have been more vigorously looking for such anomalies, high percentages of registered Democrats generally equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry. (I had earlier reported that county size was a variable - this turns out not to be the case. Just the use of touch-screens versus optical scanners.)
>
> More visual analysis of the results can be seen at http://us together.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm. Note the trend line - the only variable that determines a swing toward Bush was the use of optical scan machines.
>
> One possible explanation for this is the "Dixiecrat" theory, that in Florida white voters (particularly the rural ones) have been registered as Democrats for years, but voting Republican since Reagan. Looking at the 2000 statistics, also available on Dopp's site, there are similar anomalies, although the trends are not as strong as in 2004. But some suggest the 2000 election may have been questionable in Florida, too.
>
> One of the people involved in Dopp's analysis noted that it may be possible to determine the validity of the "rural Democrat" theory by comparing Florida's white rural counties to those of Pennsylvania, another swing state but one that went for Kerry, as the exit polls there predicted. Interestingly, the Pennsylvania analysis, available at http://ustogether.org/election04/PA_vote_patt.htm, doesn't show the same kind of swings as does Florida, lending credence to the possibility of problems in Florida.
>
> Even more significantly, Dopp had first run the analysis while filtering out smaller (rural) counties, and still found that the only variable that accounted for a swing toward Republican voting was the use of optical-scan machines, whereas counties with touch-screen machines generally didn't swing - regardless of size.
>
> Others offer similar insights, based on other data. A professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, noted that in Florida the vote to raise the minimum wage was approved by 72%, although Kerry got 48%. "The correlation between voting for the minimum wage increase and voting for Kerry isn't likely to be perfect," he noted, "but one would normally expect that the gap - of 1.5 million votes - to be far smaller than it was."
>
> While all of this may or may not be evidence of vote tampering, it again brings the nation back to the question of why several states using electronic voting machines or scanners programmed by private, for-profit corporations and often connected to modems produced votes inconsistent with exit poll numbers.
>
> Those exit poll results have been a problem for reporters ever since Election Day.
>
> Election night, I'd been doing live election coverage for WDEV, one of the radio stations that carries my syndicated show, and, just after midnight, during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted the AP report.
>
> But then the computers reported something different. In several pivotal states.
>
> Conservatives see a conspiracy here: They think the exit polls were rigged.
>
> Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, wrote an article for The Hill, the publication read by every political junkie in Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of brilliant points.
>
> "Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state."
>
> He added: "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points."
>
> Yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as the computerized vote numbers began to come in from the various states the election was called for Bush.
>
> How could this happen?
>
> On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real "counting" is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.
>
> That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.
>
> "In a voting system," Harris explained to Dean on national television, "you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once?"
>
> Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. "What surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's just a regular computer."
>
> "So," Dean said, "anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator?"
>
> Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into the central tabulator system. "This is the official program that the County Supervisor sees," she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting between them loaded with Diebold's software.
>
> Bev then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the results of a test election. They went to the screen titled "Election Summary Report" and waited a moment while the PC "adds up all the votes from all the various precincts," and then saw that in this faux election Howard Dean had 1000 votes, Lex Luthor had 500, and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was winning.
>
> "Of course, you can't tamper with this software," Harris noted. Diebold wrote a pretty good program.
>
> But, it's running on a Windows PC.
>
> So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB" which, Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep the votes." Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled "Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like Excel.
>
> In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.
>
> "Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let's give 100 votes to Tiger."
>
> They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software "the legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the progress of your election."
>
> As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said, "And you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.
>
> Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds."
>
> On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv.) And they had left no tracks whatsoever, Harris said, noting that it would be nearly impossible for the election software - or a County election official - to know that the vote database had been altered.
>
> Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that had Karen Hughes telling George W. Bush that he'd lost the election in a landslide.
>
> Morris's conspiracy theory is that the exit polls "were sabotage" to cause people in the western states to not bother voting for Bush, since the networks would call the election based on the exit polls for Kerry. But the networks didn't do that, and had never intended to.
>
> According to congressional candidate Fisher, it makes far more sense that the exit polls were right - they weren't done on Diebold PCs - and that the vote itself was hacked.
>
> And not only for the presidential candidate - Jeff Fisher thinks this hit him and pretty much every other Democratic candidate for national office in the most-hacked swing states.
>
> So far, the only national "mainstream" media to come close to this story was Keith Olbermann on his show Friday night, November 5th, when he noted that it was curious that all the voting machine irregularities so far uncovered seem to favor Bush. In the meantime, the Washington Post and other media are now going through single-bullet-theory-like contortions to explain how the exit polls had failed.
>
> But I agree with Fox's Dick Morris on this one, at least in large part. Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in his final paragraph, "This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play."
>
> -------
>
> Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann.com. His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."
>
>
>
> -------
>
> Jump to TO Features for Monday November 8, 2004
> Today's TO Features -------------- William Rivers Pitt | Worse Than 2000: Tuesday's Electoral Disaster Iraqi Resistance Kill 50, Mostly Police U.S. Ready to Put Weapons in Space French Foreign Minister: Arafat Alive, But in Complex State Neo-Con Agenda: Iran, China, Russia, Latin America ... Los Angeles Times | Democrats and the God Gap Bush, Oil Batter Clean Energy Stocks Eric Leser | The Big Companies Will Be Repaid Christian Right Moves on "Moral Issues" European Catholics Join Battle on Gays and God Republicans in Congress Warned Not to Gloat Guantanamo Bay Justice: 3 Hours Behind Closed Doors BREAKING: Invasion of Fallujah Begins The Costs of War - Letters from the Home Front Pelosi Says Democrats Will Protect Social Security Iraq Declares Martial Law, 23 Police Killed Thom Hartmann | Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked t r u t h o u t Home
>
> © Copyright 2004 by TruthOut.org
>
>
>
>
>
>
>> ehécatl ha escrito:
>> (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
>>
>> Copyright © 1998–2004 Online Journal™. All rights reserved.
>>
>> Reprinted with permission from ONLINE JOURNAL™
>> www.onlinejournal.com
>>
>> The stolen election of 2004: welcome back to hell
>>
>> By
>> Larry Chin
>> Online Journal Associate Editor
>>
>> November 5, 2004-Using a variety of criminal methods that they have perfected over the past four years, the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney-Karl Rove syndicate stole another election, and extended their illegal occupation of the White House. Experienced, informed and unblinking observers were not fooled by any aspect of this utterly predictable goose-step towards full dictatorship.
>>
>> But to those who are "shocked" as they watched the election night numbers mysteriously slip away amidst controversy; those who are struggling to understand "what happened", let this cold realization serve as bracing edification.
>>
>> Welcome to hell. Welcome to the horrifying reality that whistleblowers have suffered and fought through every day, over lifetimes. No more illusions. This is reality.
>>
>> It Is a Rigged Game
>>
>> The US political and economic system, exemplified by Bush-Cheney, is deeply criminalized. It is designed to profit by killing things. It thrives on war and oppression. It is sustained by collusion, fraud, lies, cover-up, and the indoctrination and manipulation of minds. It does not, and never has, represented its people. Its operatives heed no laws. They "make" law. These facts must be burned into the consciousness of every decent human being.
>>
>> As Mike Ruppert writes in Crossing The Rubicon: "That profits of crime and war, which are destructive of human life, of labor, of happy, healthy neighborhoods (whether in the US or in Afghanistan, Africa and Iraq) are in effect a keystone of the global economy and a determinant of the success in a ruthless competition, is a compass needle for human civilization. One cannot expect to follow the recipe for roadkill stew and produce a crème brulee."
>>
>> Criminals do not obey laws. Criminals do not believe in "democracy".
>>
>> Criminals do not "permit" elections.
>>
>> It is foolish, then, to expend one's energies in "clean" election activities, and expect good results. To quote one of George W. Bush many recent Freudian non-slips, "we make elections." The 2004 presidential election was just one more "manufacture".
>>
>> How John Kerry Unwon the Presidency
>>
>> How Bush-Cheney stole the 2000 election was a matter of obvious historical fact, confirmed by post-facto mainstream media reports of a Gore win, and detailed by numerous investigators such as Greg Palast in his book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Voters complained about old machines and paper ballots.
>>
>> Then came the "black box voting" machines. (For detailed analysis of black box voting, read the work of Bev Harris.)
>>
>> In the 2002 mid-term elections, the Republicans "shocked" Democrats by solidifying their power in Congress, using the same fraudulent methods, along with new and improved black box technology.
>>
>> "The technology had a trial run in the 2002 mid-term elections. In Georgia, serviced by new Diebold systems, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called 'amazing' upsets, with results showing vote swings of up to 16 percent from the last pre-ballot polls. In computerized Minnesota, former Vice President Walter Mondale-a replacement for popular incumbent Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash days before the vote-was also defeated in a large last-second vote swing. Convenient 'glitches' in Florida saw an untold number of votes intended for the Democratic candidate registering instead for Governor Jeb "L'il Brother" Bush. A Florida Democrat who lost a similarly 'glitched' local election went to court to have the computers examined-but the case was thrown out by a judge who ruled that the innards of America's voting machines are the 'trade secrets' of the private companies who make them."
>>
>> In 2003, black box voting also helped oust Governor Gray Davis and installed Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Democratic stronghold of California.
>>
>> The probability of a fix was obvious throughout the 2004 presidential campaign. Corporate media polls continued to predominantly favor Bush, never dipping his rating below 48 percent, despite his trouncing in three straight debates with Kerry, and despite mushrooming war scandals. This was in stark contrast to independent surveys that showed Kerry with commanding leads. Kerry momentum, and massive Kerry/anti-Bush voter turnout, was evident on election day, and confirmed by exit polls with dominant Kerry numbers.
>>
>> Then what?
>>
>> Greg Palast reveals in exhaustive detail that John Kerry won the 2004 election and had it stolen through such methods as "spoilage", intimidation, polling place chicanery, ethnic cleansing of polls. (See Kerry Won. And here.)
>>
>> Once again, criminals do not "permit" elections. They make them. This time, the Bush forces had years of unencumbered time to orchestrate it, from Ohio (where its notorious secretary of state is the head of the Bush re-election campaign), and, of course, Jeb Bush's Florida.
>>
>> The Triumph of the Bush Machines
>>
>> But there is one overriding fact that has been left out most of the ridiculous post-election punditry that renders all other analyses completely irrelevant. It is also the reason why the smiles on the faces of Bush crime family members are so bright, as they watched the returns on election night.
>>
>> Air America Radio's Mike Malloy gave the most succinct and passionate explanation in his Wednesday, November 3, 2004, program [my links included-LC]:
>>
>> "The American vote count is controlled by three major corporate players, Diebold, ESS, Sequoia, and a fourth, SAIC, Science Applications International. All four are hard-wired into the Bush power structure, the Bush crime family.
>>
>> "They have been given millions of dollars by the Bush regime to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines that were just used in the 2004 election. The technology involved had a trial run during the 2002 mid-term elections. Georgia had Diebold machines in every precinct. As a result, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called an "amazing" 16 percent swing.
>>
>> "Diebold's Walden O'Dell, a top Bush fundraiser, publicly committed himself to delivering his home state Ohio's votes to Bush. At Diebold, the election division is run by Bob Urosevich. Bob's brother, Todd, is a top executive at "rival" ES&S. The brothers were originally staked by Howard Ahmanson, a member of the Council For National Policy, a right-wing steering group stacked with Bush true believers. Ahmanson is also one of the bagmen behind the extremist Christian Reconstruction Movement, which advocates the theocratic takeover of American democracy.
>>
>> "The four companies are interconnected; they are not four "competitors". Ahmanson has large stakes in ES&S, whose former CEO was Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. When Hagel ran for office, his own company counted the votes, and his victory was considered "an amazing upset". Hagel still has a million dollar stake in ES&S.
>>
>> "Sequoia is the corporate parent of a private equity firm, Madison Dearborn, which is partner in the Carlyle Group. (Also see here.)
>>
>> "Meanwhile, SAIC is referred to a "shadowy defense contractor". They have gotten into the vote count game both directly and through spinoffs by its top brass, including Admiral Bill Owens, former military aide to Dick Cheney, and Carlyle Group honcho Frank Carlucci and ex-CIA chief Robert Gates. SAIC's history of fraud charges and security "lapses" haven't prevented it from becoming one of the largest Pentagon and CIA contractors, and will doubtless encounter few obstacles in its entrance into the vote counting business.
>>
>> "The mad rush to install these unverifiable computers is driven by the Help America Vote Act, signed by …Bush! The chief lobbying group pushing for the act (while we dumb asses sat out here and thought, 'That sounds like a good idea!') was a consortium of arms dealers including Northrup Grumman and Lockheed Martin.
>>
>> "When you hear people saying, 'take a deep breath, we will pull through this', 'we need to work harder', 'we need to organize'-no. We will not. It's over.
>>
>> "Unless electronic vote tabulation is history, and these companies are driven out of business, it's their country. Not ours.
>>
>> "Nobody knows, and no one will ever know, what the actual vote count was.
>>
>> "There are no checks and balances left. The US Senate now has 55 of these Republicans. When they hit 60, which is what will happen in 2006 mid-term elections-trust me-that means that no matter what Bush and the crime family want to do, they can do it. The House (of Representatives) is gone for the next two to five generations. It's gone.
>>
>> "The last thing rational people in this country need right now is this whistling-past-the-graveyard horse hockey. Nothing is going to happen; it's going to get worse. There will never again be a legitimate election in this county.
>>
>> "Until we get rid of the machines.
>>
>> The people who put the software together-do you think that they are in this business to promote democracy? To promote representative government? Then you are a fool, and you don't deserve anything other than the lash.
>>
>> Kerry did not lose the election. The vote was stolen. Get that through your head."
>>
>> The Bush syndicate owns and runs the machines that make the votes. They control all branches of the federal government.
>>
>> There is nothing more painful than witnessing the Kerry voters, liberals and progressives as they agonize over "what went wrong," second guessing their Herculean efforts, grasping for solutions in outdated ideas, and vowing how "next time, we'll work harder, and we'll really get out the vote!", and that "we'll nominate even better candidates!"
>>
>> Still others are asking reasonable questions. Why aren't Walden O'Dell, Jeb Bush, and J. Kenneth Blackwell under arrest, or in jail? Exactly how did Associated Press pull it off on election night? Will any of the Bush administration criminals ever be punished for their war crimes? Then one must ask, who is going to prosecute? Who is going to hear the cases? The Bush Justice Department? The Bush FBI? The Supreme Court?
>>
>> When you play fair in a rigged game, it doesn't matter how hard you work, or even what you do. Insanity is repeating the same mistake, expecting a different result.
>>
>> Kerry Welcomes Fascism with Open Arms
>>
>> John Kerry's pitiful and immediate capitulation, surrendering with even less of a fight than Al Gore in 2000, despite clear, overt and gross vote fraud across the country, including Ohio-Diebold's home state-was sickening.
>>
>> Bush's Skull & Bones fraternity brother then spoke of "healing" and uniting behind Bush, a speech grotesquely reminiscent of Al Gore's sickening 2000 declaration that Bush was "mah president."
>>
>> Twice now, with Gore and Kerry, Democrats have won the White House, and then refused to speak the truth about the crime, and fight for the people who bled for them. Twice, America has been sold out.
>>
>> Could it be that this time, Kerry played the American people in just another game of bait-and-switch?
>>
>> Will those who supported Kerry actually heed his command, and obediently march in step, "without anger or rancor," and follow George W. Bush, the strutting tyrant, and the most dangerous and irrational collection of mass-murdering war criminals in modern history?
>>
>> In a cynical view, and one that is likely accurate, the election of 2004 may have been nothing more than an elaborate trial balloon, a "good cop-bad cop" theater that is mandated every few years to uphold the appearance of legitimacy. Our candidates lie, all the while gauging the effectiveness of long-term manipulation programs. They think, are the people still gullible and uninformed? What slogans and illusions can we fool them with? Is the "war on terrorism" mindset still unwavering? How far can we push them? Will they accept the baseball bat in the face, or the velvet glove to the nose?
>>
>> How many beatings will this republic take, before its people wake up? When will the people realize what is really happening, and "chase us down the street and lynch us" (as George H.W. Bush said to reporter Sarah McClendon)?
>>
>> To hell with Bush. To hell with Kerry. Wait, We're All Already Here.
>>
>> As sadistic Bush slurred in his "acceptance" speech, "a new term is a new opportunity". Then the most chilling words yet: "I earned political capital. I intend to spend it." If the last four years brought the world to its knees, imagine what is to come as Bush-Cheney giddily pry open a new set of larger Pandora's Boxes.
>>
>> Webster Tarpley, author of the Unauthorized Biography of George Bush writes: "If Bush retains control of the White House, we can expect a neocon fascist dictatorship or martial law emergency regime in 2005 or 2006, possibly as the result of synthetic terrorism. The neocons are in a desperate flight forward mentality which seeks to avoid the penal consequences of what they have already done with Valerie Plame, the Niger yellowcake forgeries, the Israeli mole scandal, and the Chalabi betrayal of state secrets. The neocon preference is for early war with Iran. War with Russia and China cannot be excluded somewhat further down the road."
>>
>> Add to that the relentless horror that will be inflicted when the effects of Peak Oil (also see From The Wilderness and Richard Heinberg) crash home in earnest, the body bags pile higher with new wars, and the lives of Americans (including Bush drones) and people all over the world continue to be destroyed.
>>
>> Some members of the current Bush crime organization may leave or retire, and the possibilities include Donald Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft (possibly replaced with Marc Racicot, a long-time friend of George W. Bush, and W's first choice for attorney general in 2000). Expect their replacements to be less well known criminals who, if anything, may be more toxic.
>>
>> Robert Lederman wrote of Racicot: "Numerous members of the Bush family, including his father and brothers and at least one of GW's prospective cabinet appointees-potential GW Bush Attorney General Marc Racicot-have a history of alleged involvement in drug running at the highest levels. We're not talking about buying drugs for personal use here but massive importations of heroin and cocaine with the full involvement of foreign dictators like George Bush pal Manuel Noriega and the Mafia." (See Murder and Drug Running in Montana)
>>
>> In Robert Payne's biography The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, he writes of Hitler (whose Third Reich was, in fact, financed by the Bush family): "For all the foreseeable future, he will remain to haunt us, more alive than ever although he is dead. He hides in shadowy places and at the pinnacle of power, always urging men to commit the ultimate crime, the perfect atrocity, the most ferocious massacres. Into the ears of generals and politicians he whispers: "Be merciless. It is very easy now because I have lived. I have reduced the value of man to a fraction of what it was before. You will find, if you continue along the path I have opened for you, the value of man will decline still further. Remember, mankind is always valueless and its only use is to serve our interests. We alone are transmitters of civilization, and the people are nothing but cattle. Napalm is good for them."
>>
>> Hitler himself wrote: "The victor will not be asked, later on, whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war, it is not right that matters, but victory. Have no pity."
>>
>> Hitler had nothing on the George W. Bush administration.
>>
>> What, if any, silver lining can be found in the wake of this new goose-step in the abyss? Perhaps only that the same bellicose, predictable and clumsy villains remain right where they have been for the last four years: right in front of us. Better that than a crafty and likeable neoliberal John Kerry administration that lulls the world to sleep before poison is administered.
>>
>> We cannot be fooled.
>>
>>
>> Larry Chin is a freelance journalist and an Online Journal Associate Editor.
>>
>> Copyright © 1998-2004 Online Journal™. All rights reserved.
>>
>> http://www.copvcia.com/free/ww3/110804_stolen_election.shtml
>>

?o to Original

´´Kerry Won Ohio
´´By Greg Palast
´´In These Times

´´Friday 12 November 2004

Just count the ballots at the back of the bus.


´´MOST VOTERS IN OHIO CHOSE KERRY. HERE'S HOW THE VOTES VANISHED.

´´This February, Ken Blackwell, Ohio's Secretary of State, told his State Senate President, "The possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state? primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity." Blackwell, co-chair of Bush-Cheney reelection campaign, wasn't warning his fellow Republican of disaster, but boasting of an opportunity to bring in Ohio for Team Bush no matter what the voters wanted. And most voters in Ohio wanted JFK, not GWB. But their choice won't count because their votes won't be counted.

´´The ballots that add up to a majority for John Kerry in Ohio -- and in New Mexico -- are locked up in two Republican hidey-holes: "spoiled" ballots and "provisional" ballots.

´´Ohio spoiled rotten

´´American democracy has a dark little secret. In a typical presidential election, two million ballots are simply chucked in the garbage, marked "spoiled" and not counted. A dive into the electoral dumpster reveals something special about these votes left to rot. In a careful county-by-county, precinct-by-precinct analysis of the Florida 2000 race, the US Civil Rights Commission discovered that 54% of the votes in the spoilage bin were cast by African-Americans. And Florida, Heaven help us, is typical. Nationwide, the number of Black votes "disappeared" into the spoiled pile is approximately one million. The other million in the no-count pit come mainly from Hispanic, Native-American and poor white precincts, a decidedly Democratic demographic.

´´Ohio Republicans, simultaneously in charge of both the Bush-Cheney get-out-the-vote drive and the state's vote-counting rules, doggedly and systematically insured the spoilage pile would be as high as the White House.

´´Vote spoilage comes in two flavors. There are "overvotes" -- too many punches in the cards, and "undervotes." Here we find the hanging, dimpled and "pregnant" chads created by old, dysfunctional punch card machines, in which the bit of paper covering the hole doesn't fall out, but hangs on. Machines can't read these, but we humans, who know a hole when we see one, have no problem reading these cards ?if allowed to. This is how Katherine Harris defeated Al Gore, by halting the hand count of the spoiled punch cards not, as is generally believed, by halting a "recount."

´´Whose chads are left hanging? In Florida in 2000 federal investigators determined that Black voters' ballots spoiled 900% more often than white voters, mainly due to punch card error. Ohio Republicans found those racial odds quite attractive. The state was the only one of fifty to refuse to eliminate or fix these vote-eating machines, even in the face of a lawsuit by the ACLU.

´´Apparently, the Ohio Republicans like what the ACLU found. The civil rights group's expert testimony concluded that Ohio's cussed insistence on forcing 73% of its electorate to use punch card machines had an "overwhelming" racial bias, voiding votes mostly in Black precincts. Blackwell doesn't disagree; and he hopes to fix the machinery ?sometime after George Bush's next inauguration. In the meantime, the state's Attorney General Jim Petro, a Republican, strategically postponed the trial date of the ACLU case until after the election.

´´Fixing a punch card machine is cheap and easy. If Ohio simply placed a card-reading machine in each polling station, as Michigan did this year, voters could have checked to ensure their vote would tally. If not, they would have gotten another card.

´´Blackwell knows that. He also knows that if those reading machines had been installed, almost all the 93,000 spoiled votes, overwhelmingly Democratic, would have closed the gap on George Bush's lead of 136,000 votes.

´´Jim Crow's provisional ballot

´´Add to the spoiled ballots a second group of uncounted votes, the 'provisional' ballots, and -- voila! -- the White House would have turned Democrat blue.

´´But that won't happen because of the peculiar way provisional ballots are counted or, more often, not counted. Introduced by federal law in 2002, the provisional ballot was designed especially for voters of color. Proposed by the Congressional Black Caucus to save the rights of those wrongly scrubbed from voter rolls, it was, in Republican-controlled swing states, twisted into a back-of-the-bus ballot unlikely to be tallied.

´´Unlike the real thing, these ballots are counted only by the whimsy and rules of a state's top elections official; and in Ohio, that gives a virtually ballot veto to Bush-Cheney campaign co-chair, Blackwell.

´´Mr. Blackwell has a few rules to make sure a large proportion of provisional ballots won't be counted. For the first time in memory, the Secretary of State has banned counting ballots cast in the "wrong" precinct, though all neighborhoods share the same President.

´´Over 155,000 Ohio voters were shunted to these second-class ballots. The election-shifting bulge in provisional ballots (more than 3% of the electorate) was the direct result of the national Republican strategy that targeted African-American precincts for mass challenges on election day.

´´This is the first time in four decades that a political party has systematically barred -- in this case successfully -- hundreds of thousands of Black voters from access to the voting booth. While investigating for BBC Television, we obtained three dozen of the Republican Party's confidential "caging" lists, their title for spreadsheets listing names and addresses of voters they intended to block on any pretext.

´´We found that every single address of the thousands on these Republican hit lists was located in Black-majority precincts. You might find that nasty and racist. It may also be a crime.

´´Before 1965, Jim Crow laws in the Deep South did not bar Blacks from voting. Rather, the segregationist game was played by applying minor technical voting requirements only to African-Americans. That year, Congress voted to make profiling and impeding minority voters, even with a legal pretext, a criminal offence under the Voting Rights Act.

´´But that didn't stop the Republicans of '04. Their legally questionable mass challenge to Black voters is not some low-level dirty tricks operation of local party hacks. Emails we obtained show the lists were copied directly to the Republican National Committee's chief of research and to the director of a state campaign.

´´Many challenges center on changes of address. On one Republican caging list, 50 addresses changed from Jacksonville to overseas, African-American soldiers shipped Over There.

´´You don't have to guess the preferences registered on the provisional ballots. Republicans went on a challenging rampage, while Democrats pledged to hold to the tradition of letting voters vote.

´´Blackwell has said he will count all the "valid" provisional ballots. However, his rigid regulations, like the new guess-your-precinct rule, are rigged to knock out enough voters to keep Bush's skinny lead alive. Other pre-election maneuvers by Republican officials -- late and improbably large purges of voter rolls, rejection of registrations -- maximized the use of provisional ballots which will never be counted. For example, a voter wrongly tagged an ineligible "felon" voter (and there's plenty in that category, mostly African-Americans), will lose their ballot even though they are wrongly identified.

´´Kerry blacks out

´´It was heartening that, during his campaign, John Kerry broke the political omerta that seems to prohibit public mention of the color of votes not counted in America. "Don't tell us that in the strongest democracy on earth a million disenfranchised African Americans is the best we can do." The Senator promised the NAACP convention, "This November, we're going to make sure that every single vote is counted."

´´But this week, Kerry became the first presidential candidate in history to break a campaign promise after losing an election. The Senator waited less than 24 hours to abandon more than a quarter million Ohio voters still waiting for their provisional and chad-spoiled ballots to be counted.

´´While disappointing, I can understand the cold calculus against taking the fight to the end. To count the ballots, Kerry's lawyers would, first, have to demand a hand reading of the punch cards. Blackwell, armed with the Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore diktat, would undoubtedly pull a "Kate Harris" by halting or restricting a hand count. Most daunting, Kerry's team would also, as one state attorney general pointed out to me, have to litigate each and every rejected provisional ballot in court. This would entail locating up to a hundred thousand voters to testify to their right to the vote, with Blackwell challenging each with a holster full of regulations from the old Jim Crow handbook.

´´Given the odds and the cost to his political career, Kerry bent, not to the will of the people, but to the will to power of the Ohio Republican machine.

´´We have yet to total here the votes lost in missing absentee ballots, in eyebrow-raising touch screen tallies, in purges of legal voters from registries and other games played in swing states. But why dwell on these things? Our betters in the political and media elite have told us to get over it, move on.

´´To the victors go the spoils of electoral class war. As Ohio's politically ambitious Secretary of State brags on his own website, "Last time I checked, Katherine Harris wasn't in a soup line, she's in Congress."

´´New Mexico goes Kerry - But who's counting?

´´Why single out Ohio? So it also went in New Mexico where ballots of Hispanic voters (two-to-one Kerry supporters) spoil at a rate five times that of white voters. Add in the astounding 13,000 provisional ballots in the Enchanted State -- handed out "like candy" to Hispanic, not white, voters according to a director of the Catholic Church's get-out-the-vote drive -- and Kerry wins New Mexico. Just count up the votes ?but that won't happen.

´´-----------

´´Investigative reporter Greg Palast is author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Penguin 2004).

´´Oliver Shykles and Matthew Pascarella of GregPalast.com contributed to this article.

´´View Greg Palast's BBC Television film, "Bush Family Fortunes," now available on DVD, at http://www.gregpalast.com/bff-dvd.htm.

´´To receive Greg? investigative reports click here: http://www.gregpalast.com/contact.cfm.

?
´-------

´Jump to TO Features for Sunday November 14, 2004 ´




© Copyright 2004 by TruthOut.org




> eh?catl ha escrito:
> www.truthout.org
>
> Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked
> By Thom Hartmann
> CommonDreams.org
>
> Saturday 06 November 2004
>
> When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.
>
> "It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.
>
> And some believe evidence is accumulating that the national effort happened on November 2, 2004.
>
> The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something startling.
>
> While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking - the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.
>
> In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.
>
> In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.
>
> The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.
>
> Yet in the touch-screen counties, where investigators may have been more vigorously looking for such anomalies, high percentages of registered Democrats generally equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry. (I had earlier reported that county size was a variable - this turns out not to be the case. Just the use of touch-screens versus optical scanners.)
>
> More visual analysis of the results can be seen at http://us together.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm. Note the trend line - the only variable that determines a swing toward Bush was the use of optical scan machines.
>
> One possible explanation for this is the "Dixiecrat" theory, that in Florida white voters (particularly the rural ones) have been registered as Democrats for years, but voting Republican since Reagan. Looking at the 2000 statistics, also available on Dopp's site, there are similar anomalies, although the trends are not as strong as in 2004. But some suggest the 2000 election may have been questionable in Florida, too.
>
> One of the people involved in Dopp's analysis noted that it may be possible to determine the validity of the "rural Democrat" theory by comparing Florida's white rural counties to those of Pennsylvania, another swing state but one that went for Kerry, as the exit polls there predicted. Interestingly, the Pennsylvania analysis, available at http://ustogether.org/election04/PA_vote_patt.htm, doesn't show the same kind of swings as does Florida, lending credence to the possibility of problems in Florida.
>
> Even more significantly, Dopp had first run the analysis while filtering out smaller (rural) counties, and still found that the only variable that accounted for a swing toward Republican voting was the use of optical-scan machines, whereas counties with touch-screen machines generally didn't swing - regardless of size.
>
> Others offer similar insights, based on other data. A professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, noted that in Florida the vote to raise the minimum wage was approved by 72%, although Kerry got 48%. "The correlation between voting for the minimum wage increase and voting for Kerry isn't likely to be perfect," he noted, "but one would normally expect that the gap - of 1.5 million votes - to be far smaller than it was."
>
> While all of this may or may not be evidence of vote tampering, it again brings the nation back to the question of why several states using electronic voting machines or scanners programmed by private, for-profit corporations and often connected to modems produced votes inconsistent with exit poll numbers.
>
> Those exit poll results have been a problem for reporters ever since Election Day.
>
> Election night, I'd been doing live election coverage for WDEV, one of the radio stations that carries my syndicated show, and, just after midnight, during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted the AP report.
>
> But then the computers reported something different. In several pivotal states.
>
> Conservatives see a conspiracy here: They think the exit polls were rigged.
>
> Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, wrote an article for The Hill, the publication read by every political junkie in Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of brilliant points.
>
> "Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state."
>
> He added: "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points."
>
> Yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as the computerized vote numbers began to come in from the various states the election was called for Bush.
>
> How could this happen?
>
> On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real "counting" is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.
>
> That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.
>
> "In a voting system," Harris explained to Dean on national television, "you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once?"
>
> Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. "What surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's just a regular computer."
>
> "So," Dean said, "anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator?"
>
> Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into the central tabulator system. "This is the official program that the County Supervisor sees," she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting between them loaded with Diebold's software.
>
> Bev then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the results of a test election. They went to the screen titled "Election Summary Report" and waited a moment while the PC "adds up all the votes from all the various precincts," and then saw that in this faux election Howard Dean had 1000 votes, Lex Luthor had 500, and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was winning.
>
> "Of course, you can't tamper with this software," Harris noted. Diebold wrote a pretty good program.
>
> But, it's running on a Windows PC.
>
> So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB" which, Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep the votes." Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled "Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like Excel.
>
> In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.
>
> "Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let's give 100 votes to Tiger."
>
> They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software "the legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the progress of your election."
>
> As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said, "And you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.
>
> Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds."
>
> On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv.) And they had left no tracks whatsoever, Harris said, noting that it would be nearly impossible for the election software - or a County election official - to know that the vote database had been altered.
>
> Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that had Karen Hughes telling George W. Bush that he'd lost the election in a landslide.
>
> Morris's conspiracy theory is that the exit polls "were sabotage" to cause people in the western states to not bother voting for Bush, since the networks would call the election based on the exit polls for Kerry. But the networks didn't do that, and had never intended to.
>
> According to congressional candidate Fisher, it makes far more sense that the exit polls were right - they weren't done on Diebold PCs - and that the vote itself was hacked.
>
> And not only for the presidential candidate - Jeff Fisher thinks this hit him and pretty much every other Democratic candidate for national office in the most-hacked swing states.
>
> So far, the only national "mainstream" media to come close to this story was Keith Olbermann on his show Friday night, November 5th, when he noted that it was curious that all the voting machine irregularities so far uncovered seem to favor Bush. In the meantime, the Washington Post and other media are now going through single-bullet-theory-like contortions to explain how the exit polls had failed.
>
> But I agree with Fox's Dick Morris on this one, at least in large part. Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in his final paragraph, "This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play."
>
> -------
>
> Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann.com. His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."
>
>
>
> -------
>
> Jump to TO Features for Monday November 8, 2004
> Today's TO Features -------------- William Rivers Pitt | Worse Than 2000: Tuesday's Electoral Disaster Iraqi Resistance Kill 50, Mostly Police U.S. Ready to Put Weapons in Space French Foreign Minister: Arafat Alive, But in Complex State Neo-Con Agenda: Iran, China, Russia, Latin America ... Los Angeles Times | Democrats and the God Gap Bush, Oil Batter Clean Energy Stocks Eric Leser | The Big Companies Will Be Repaid Christian Right Moves on "Moral Issues" European Catholics Join Battle on Gays and God Republicans in Congress Warned Not to Gloat Guantanamo Bay Justice: 3 Hours Behind Closed Doors BREAKING: Invasion of Fallujah Begins The Costs of War - Letters from the Home Front Pelosi Says Democrats Will Protect Social Security Iraq Declares Martial Law, 23 Police Killed Thom Hartmann | Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked t r u t h o u t Home
>
> © Copyright 2004 by TruthOut.org
>
>
>
>
>
>
>> eh?catl ha escrito:
>> (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
>>
>> Copyright © 1998?004 Online Journalª. All rights reserved.
>>
>> Reprinted with permission from ONLINE JOURNALª
>> www.onlinejournal.com
>>
>> The stolen election of 2004: welcome back to hell
>>
>> By
>> Larry Chin
>> Online Journal Associate Editor
>>
>> November 5, 2004-Using a variety of criminal methods that they have perfected over the past four years, the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney-Karl Rove syndicate stole another election, and extended their illegal occupation of the White House. Experienced, informed and unblinking observers were not fooled by any aspect of this utterly predictable goose-step towards full dictatorship.
>>
>> But to those who are "shocked" as they watched the election night numbers mysteriously slip away amidst controversy; those who are struggling to understand "what happened", let this cold realization serve as bracing edification.
>>
>> Welcome to hell. Welcome to the horrifying reality that whistleblowers have suffered and fought through every day, over lifetimes. No more illusions. This is reality.
>>
>> It Is a Rigged Game
>>
>> The US political and economic system, exemplified by Bush-Cheney, is deeply criminalized. It is designed to profit by killing things. It thrives on war and oppression. It is sustained by collusion, fraud, lies, cover-up, and the indoctrination and manipulation of minds. It does not, and never has, represented its people. Its operatives heed no laws. They "make" law. These facts must be burned into the consciousness of every decent human being.
>>
>> As Mike Ruppert writes in Crossing The Rubicon: "That profits of crime and war, which are destructive of human life, of labor, of happy, healthy neighborhoods (whether in the US or in Afghanistan, Africa and Iraq) are in effect a keystone of the global economy and a determinant of the success in a ruthless competition, is a compass needle for human civilization. One cannot expect to follow the recipe for roadkill stew and produce a cr?me brulee."
>>
>> Criminals do not obey laws. Criminals do not believe in "democracy".
>>
>> Criminals do not "permit" elections.
>>
>> It is foolish, then, to expend one's energies in "clean" election activities, and expect good results. To quote one of George W. Bush many recent Freudian non-slips, "we make elections." The 2004 presidential election was just one more "manufacture".
>>
>> How John Kerry Unwon the Presidency
>>
>> How Bush-Cheney stole the 2000 election was a matter of obvious historical fact, confirmed by post-facto mainstream media reports of a Gore win, and detailed by numerous investigators such as Greg Palast in his book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Voters complained about old machines and paper ballots.
>>
>> Then came the "black box voting" machines. (For detailed analysis of black box voting, read the work of Bev Harris.)
>>
>> In the 2002 mid-term elections, the Republicans "shocked" Democrats by solidifying their power in Congress, using the same fraudulent methods, along with new and improved black box technology.
>>
>> "The technology had a trial run in the 2002 mid-term elections. In Georgia, serviced by new Diebold systems, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called 'amazing' upsets, with results showing vote swings of up to 16 percent from the last pre-ballot polls. In computerized Minnesota, former Vice President Walter Mondale-a replacement for popular incumbent Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash days before the vote-was also defeated in a large last-second vote swing. Convenient 'glitches' in Florida saw an untold number of votes intended for the Democratic candidate registering instead for Governor Jeb "L'il Brother" Bush. A Florida Democrat who lost a similarly 'glitched' local election went to court to have the computers examined-but the case was thrown out by a judge who ruled that the innards of America's voting machines are the 'trade secrets' of the private companies who make them."
>>
>> In 2003, black box voting also helped oust Governor Gray Davis and installed Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Democratic stronghold of California.
>>
>> The probability of a fix was obvious throughout the 2004 presidential campaign. Corporate media polls continued to predominantly favor Bush, never dipping his rating below 48 percent, despite his trouncing in three straight debates with Kerry, and despite mushrooming war scandals. This was in stark contrast to independent surveys that showed Kerry with commanding leads. Kerry momentum, and massive Kerry/anti-Bush voter turnout, was evident on election day, and confirmed by exit polls with dominant Kerry numbers.
>>
>> Then what?
>>
>> Greg Palast reveals in exhaustive detail that John Kerry won the 2004 election and had it stolen through such methods as "spoilage", intimidation, polling place chicanery, ethnic cleansing of polls. (See Kerry Won. And here.)
>>
>> Once again, criminals do not "permit" elections. They make them. This time, the Bush forces had years of unencumbered time to orchestrate it, from Ohio (where its notorious secretary of state is the head of the Bush re-election campaign), and, of course, Jeb Bush's Florida.
>>
>> The Triumph of the Bush Machines
>>
>> But there is one overriding fact that has been left out most of the ridiculous post-election punditry that renders all other analyses completely irrelevant. It is also the reason why the smiles on the faces of Bush crime family members are so bright, as they watched the returns on election night.
>>
>> Air America Radio's Mike Malloy gave the most succinct and passionate explanation in his Wednesday, November 3, 2004, program [my links included-LC]:
>>
>> "The American vote count is controlled by three major corporate players, Diebold, ESS, Sequoia, and a fourth, SAIC, Science Applications International. All four are hard-wired into the Bush power structure, the Bush crime family.
>>
>> "They have been given millions of dollars by the Bush regime to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines that were just used in the 2004 election. The technology involved had a trial run during the 2002 mid-term elections. Georgia had Diebold machines in every precinct. As a result, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called an "amazing" 16 percent swing.
>>
>> "Diebold's Walden O'Dell, a top Bush fundraiser, publicly committed himself to delivering his home state Ohio's votes to Bush. At Diebold, the election division is run by Bob Urosevich. Bob's brother, Todd, is a top executive at "rival" ES&S. The brothers were originally staked by Howard Ahmanson, a member of the Council For National Policy, a right-wing steering group stacked with Bush true believers. Ahmanson is also one of the bagmen behind the extremist Christian Reconstruction Movement, which advocates the theocratic takeover of American democracy.
>>
>> "The four companies are interconnected; they are not four "competitors". Ahmanson has large stakes in ES&S, whose former CEO was Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. When Hagel ran for office, his own company counted the votes, and his victory was considered "an amazing upset". Hagel still has a million dollar stake in ES&S.
>>
>> "Sequoia is the corporate parent of a private equity firm, Madison Dearborn, which is partner in the Carlyle Group. (Also see here.)
>>
>> "Meanwhile, SAIC is referred to a "shadowy defense contractor". They have gotten into the vote count game both directly and through spinoffs by its top brass, including Admiral Bill Owens, former military aide to Dick Cheney, and Carlyle Group honcho Frank Carlucci and ex-CIA chief Robert Gates. SAIC's history of fraud charges and security "lapses" haven't prevented it from becoming one of the largest Pentagon and CIA contractors, and will doubtless encounter few obstacles in its entrance into the vote counting business.
>>
>> "The mad rush to install these unverifiable computers is driven by the Help America Vote Act, signed by ?ush! The chief lobbying group pushing for the act (while we dumb asses sat out here and thought, 'That sounds like a good idea!') was a consortium of arms dealers including Northrup Grumman and Lockheed Martin.
>>
>> "When you hear people saying, 'take a deep breath, we will pull through this', 'we need to work harder', 'we need to organize'-no. We will not. It's over.
>>
>> "Unless electronic vote tabulation is history, and these companies are driven out of business, it's their country. Not ours.
>>
>> "Nobody knows, and no one will ever know, what the actual vote count was.
>>
>> "There are no checks and balances left. The US Senate now has 55 of these Republicans. When they hit 60, which is what will happen in 2006 mid-term elections-trust me-that means that no matter what Bush and the crime family want to do, they can do it. The House (of Representatives) is gone for the next two to five generations. It's gone.
>>
>> "The last thing rational people in this country need right now is this whistling-past-the-graveyard horse hockey. Nothing is going to happen; it's going to get worse. There will never again be a legitimate election in this county.
>>
>> "Until we get rid of the machines.
>>
>> The people who put the software together-do you think that they are in this business to promote democracy? To promote representative government? Then you are a fool, and you don't deserve anything other than the lash.
>>
>> Kerry did not lose the election. The vote was stolen. Get that through your head."
>>
>> The Bush syndicate owns and runs the machines that make the votes. They control all branches of the federal government.
>>
>> There is nothing more painful than witnessing the Kerry voters, liberals and progressives as they agonize over "what went wrong," second guessing their Herculean efforts, grasping for solutions in outdated ideas, and vowing how "next time, we'll work harder, and we'll really get out the vote!", and that "we'll nominate even better candidates!"
>>
>> Still others are asking reasonable questions. Why aren't Walden O'Dell, Jeb Bush, and J. Kenneth Blackwell under arrest, or in jail? Exactly how did Associated Press pull it off on election night? Will any of the Bush administration criminals ever be punished for their war crimes? Then one must ask, who is going to prosecute? Who is going to hear the cases? The Bush Justice Department? The Bush FBI? The Supreme Court?
>>
>> When you play fair in a rigged game, it doesn't matter how hard you work, or even what you do. Insanity is repeating the same mistake, expecting a different result.
>>
>> Kerry Welcomes Fascism with Open Arms
>>
>> John Kerry's pitiful and immediate capitulation, surrendering with even less of a fight than Al Gore in 2000, despite clear, overt and gross vote fraud across the country, including Ohio-Diebold's home state-was sickening.
>>
>> Bush's Skull & Bones fraternity brother then spoke of "healing" and uniting behind Bush, a speech grotesquely reminiscent of Al Gore's sickening 2000 declaration that Bush was "mah president."
>>
>> Twice now, with Gore and Kerry, Democrats have won the White House, and then refused to speak the truth about the crime, and fight for the people who bled for them. Twice, America has been sold out.
>>
>> Could it be that this time, Kerry played the American people in just another game of bait-and-switch?
>>
>> Will those who supported Kerry actually heed his command, and obediently march in step, "without anger or rancor," and follow George W. Bush, the strutting tyrant, and the most dangerous and irrational collection of mass-murdering war criminals in modern history?
>>
>> In a cynical view, and one that is likely accurate, the election of 2004 may have been nothing more than an elaborate trial balloon, a "good cop-bad cop" theater that is mandated every few years to uphold the appearance of legitimacy. Our candidates lie, all the while gauging the effectiveness of long-term manipulation programs. They think, are the people still gullible and uninformed? What slogans and illusions can we fool them with? Is the "war on terrorism" mindset still unwavering? How far can we push them? Will they accept the baseball bat in the face, or the velvet glove to the nose?
>>
>> How many beatings will this republic take, before its people wake up? When will the people realize what is really happening, and "chase us down the street and lynch us" (as George H.W. Bush said to reporter Sarah McClendon)?
>>
>> To hell with Bush. To hell with Kerry. Wait, We're All Already Here.
>>
>> As sadistic Bush slurred in his "acceptance" speech, "a new term is a new opportunity". Then the most chilling words yet: "I earned political capital. I intend to spend it." If the last four years brought the world to its knees, imagine what is to come as Bush-Cheney giddily pry open a new set of larger Pandora's Boxes.
>>
>> Webster Tarpley, author of the Unauthorized Biography of George Bush writes: "If Bush retains control of the White House, we can expect a neocon fascist dictatorship or martial law emergency regime in 2005 or 2006, possibly as the result of synthetic terrorism. The neocons are in a desperate flight forward mentality which seeks to avoid the penal consequences of what they have already done with Valerie Plame, the Niger yellowcake forgeries, the Israeli mole scandal, and the Chalabi betrayal of state secrets. The neocon preference is for early war with Iran. War with Russia and China cannot be excluded somewhat further down the road."
>>
>> Add to that the relentless horror that will be inflicted when the effects of Peak Oil (also see From The Wilderness and Richard Heinberg) crash home in earnest, the body bags pile higher with new wars, and the lives of Americans (including Bush drones) and people all over the world continue to be destroyed.
>>
>> Some members of the current Bush crime organization may leave or retire, and the possibilities include Donald Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft (possibly replaced with Marc Racicot, a long-time friend of George W. Bush, and W's first choice for attorney general in 2000). Expect their replacements to be less well known criminals who, if anything, may be more toxic.
>>
>> Robert Lederman wrote of Racicot: "Numerous members of the Bush family, including his father and brothers and at least one of GW's prospective cabinet appointees-potential GW Bush Attorney General Marc Racicot-have a history of alleged involvement in drug running at the highest levels. We're not talking about buying drugs for personal use here but massive importations of heroin and cocaine with the full involvement of foreign dictators like George Bush pal Manuel Noriega and the Mafia." (See Murder and Drug Running in Montana)
>>
>> In Robert Payne's biography The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, he writes of Hitler (whose Third Reich was, in fact, financed by the Bush family): "For all the foreseeable future, he will remain to haunt us, more alive than ever although he is dead. He hides in shadowy places and at the pinnacle of power, always urging men to commit the ultimate crime, the perfect atrocity, the most ferocious massacres. Into the ears of generals and politicians he whispers: "Be merciless. It is very easy now because I have lived. I have reduced the value of man to a fraction of what it was before. You will find, if you continue along the path I have opened for you, the value of man will decline still further. Remember, mankind is always valueless and its only use is to serve our interests. We alone are transmitters of civilization, and the people are nothing but cattle. Napalm is good for them."
>>
>> Hitler himself wrote: "The victor will not be asked, later on, whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war, it is not right that matters, but victory. Have no pity."
>>
>> Hitler had nothing on the George W. Bush administration.
>>
>> What, if any, silver lining can be found in the wake of this new goose-step in the abyss? Perhaps only that the same bellicose, predictable and clumsy villains remain right where they have been for the last four years: right in front of us. Better that than a crafty and likeable neoliberal John Kerry administration that lulls the world to sleep before poison is administered.
>>
>> We cannot be fooled.
>>
>>
>> Larry Chin is a freelance journalist and an Online Journal Associate Editor.
>>
>> Copyright © 1998-2004 Online Journalª. All rights reserved.
>>
>> http://www.copvcia.com/free/ww3/110804_stolen_election.shtml
>>

www.globalresearch.ca
Centre for Research on Globalisation
Centre de recherche sur la mondialisation




Humor

"How I Stole Your Election" by George W. Bush
www.globalresearch.ca 10 November 2004
The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/GWB411A.html


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

Author unknown (as it should be)
From: George W. Bush <GWB@whitehouse.gov >

Reply-To: GWB@whitehouse.gov

Subject: How I stole your election (ha ha ha ha!!!)

Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2004 14:32:14 -0800


"How I Stole Your Election" by George W. Bush
The first thing I did to steal your election was to make friends with ALL the manufacturers and code-verifyers of the Electronic Voting Machines. They were really nice, especially Diebold who gave me $600,000 for my campaign. Wow, thanks dude!

http://nuclearfree.lynx.co.nz/stealing.htm

Next, I had my attack dog, Karl Rove, convince these companies to either alter the vote totals on the central tabulator machines (simple PCs running windows using Remote Access Server -- RAS), or reprogram (via a downloadable software patch) the voting machines themselves so that they would give the advantage to ME! Isn't America great?!? A little money and some religious zealotry goes a looooong, loooong way. Oh, the religious zealotry thing? That's just a cover. I'm not really a Christian -- or at least I don't act like one. Anyway, I digress.

http://www.ejfi.org/Voting/Voting-25.htm#rig

Did you ever hear the media complaining about how inaccurate the exit polls were in prior elections? No. That's because they basically ARE accurate. But this election, the exit polls showed Kerry WAY ahead. No problem. My buddies rigged the machines (and all they needed to do was rig it in one state, Ohio, but they took care of at least Florida for me too) not only to make me squeak by in the important battleground states, like Florida and Ohio, but they also made sure that when I did get a state that I was expected to win, the margin was HUGE so that my "popular" vote would make it look like I had a mandate.

So let's recap how the popular vote thing worked again. Let's say we didn't want it to look suspicious by taking states that Kerry really would have won (except for Ohio and Florida, gotta take those! heh heh). So we let him win there, but in order once again to boost the "popular" vote (I put that in quotes because as you know, I'm not REALLY popular), we bring my vote tallies RIGHT UP NEXT to Kerry's, to jack up the "popular" vote as much as possible, even if I didn't win the state.

Then, with states like North Carolina, we know we're going to steal the state anyway (at least according to what the exit polls were telling everyone.... and according to the long, long lines of new voters were telling everyone ... because we all know most of those people were voting for Kerry, not the status quo), so we just jack the crap out of the vote total to REALLY stuff a crapload of "popular" votes in my pocket. You see, this way I can get on the TV and declare that I have a "mandate" and that I'm going to "cash in" on my political "capital" (which I don't really have of course, but we made it look that way).

Here's a nice chart to show you what I mean. Take special note of how the electronic voting machine totals compare to the paper ballot totals. And see what I mean about North Carolina? http://www.bandsagainstbush.org/cgi-bin/archives/exit_poll.gif

Look folks, if you really want me out of office, first you're going to have to impeach me. But you know what, if you don't have verifiable paper trails at the polls like these folks recommend ( http://openvotingconsortium.org ), and if you don't take these voting machines out of the hands of private companies that are aligned with one end of the political spectrum, then I'm gonna just continue to hose you (and then my brother Jeb will be president too cause we're into this dynasty thing, kind of like my buddies the Saudis... ain't it cool?!?). Also, in 2006, we're going to steal about five more senate seats, and then we'll have the "super-majority". That means the Democrats can't do that confounded fillerbs... fillas.... fillbusters.... CRAP, well, they can't get in the darn way any more and we can pass ANY laws we want about ANYTHING and put whoever we want on the Supreme court. Ha ha, then you're REALLY screwed. So if you don't fix this mess (I mean great system) in two years and have a verifiable voting system nationwide, America is MINE!!!!! (and Jeb's and my daddy's and Cheney's and Rove's... hey, we could even pass a law saying I could be president for FOUR MORE YEARS after 2008! That would be SOOO cool!) Anyway, I digress once again.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHI411B.html

And that pesky Bev Harris. Man I wish she would go away. If too many of you contribute to her cause, I might just get in trouble so KNOCK IT OFF!!

http://www.blackboxvoting.org

I've said it before and I'll say it again, "Fool me once.....", oh CRAP, I forgot again. Well how about this? "This would be a heck of lot easier if this was [grammar incorrect] a dictatorship.... just so long as I'm the dictator. Heh, heh." Well, sorry to say folks, but I got my way. What are you gonna do about it, huh? Bring it on!!!

http://votergate.tv/votergate/votergatethemovie_64kb.mov

"Sincerely" Yours, "President" George W. Bush

P.S. Pass it on! I dare ya.




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> ehécatl ha escrito:
> (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
>
> Copyright © 1998–2004 Online Journal™. All rights reserved.
>
> Reprinted with permission from ONLINE JOURNAL™
> www.onlinejournal.com
>
> The stolen election of 2004: welcome back to hell
>
> By
> Larry Chin
> Online Journal Associate Editor
>
> November 5, 2004-Using a variety of criminal methods that they have perfected over the past four years, the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney-Karl Rove syndicate stole another election, and extended their illegal occupation of the White House. Experienced, informed and unblinking observers were not fooled by any aspect of this utterly predictable goose-step towards full dictatorship.
>
> But to those who are "shocked" as they watched the election night numbers mysteriously slip away amidst controversy; those who are struggling to understand "what happened", let this cold realization serve as bracing edification.
>
> Welcome to hell. Welcome to the horrifying reality that whistleblowers have suffered and fought through every day, over lifetimes. No more illusions. This is reality.
>
> It Is a Rigged Game
>
> The US political and economic system, exemplified by Bush-Cheney, is deeply criminalized. It is designed to profit by killing things. It thrives on war and oppression. It is sustained by collusion, fraud, lies, cover-up, and the indoctrination and manipulation of minds. It does not, and never has, represented its people. Its operatives heed no laws. They "make" law. These facts must be burned into the consciousness of every decent human being.
>
> As Mike Ruppert writes in Crossing The Rubicon: "That profits of crime and war, which are destructive of human life, of labor, of happy, healthy neighborhoods (whether in the US or in Afghanistan, Africa and Iraq) are in effect a keystone of the global economy and a determinant of the success in a ruthless competition, is a compass needle for human civilization. One cannot expect to follow the recipe for roadkill stew and produce a crème brulee."
>
> Criminals do not obey laws. Criminals do not believe in "democracy".
>
> Criminals do not "permit" elections.
>
> It is foolish, then, to expend one's energies in "clean" election activities, and expect good results. To quote one of George W. Bush many recent Freudian non-slips, "we make elections." The 2004 presidential election was just one more "manufacture".
>
> How John Kerry Unwon the Presidency
>
> How Bush-Cheney stole the 2000 election was a matter of obvious historical fact, confirmed by post-facto mainstream media reports of a Gore win, and detailed by numerous investigators such as Greg Palast in his book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Voters complained about old machines and paper ballots.
>
> Then came the "black box voting" machines. (For detailed analysis of black box voting, read the work of Bev Harris.)
>
> In the 2002 mid-term elections, the Republicans "shocked" Democrats by solidifying their power in Congress, using the same fraudulent methods, along with new and improved black box technology.
>
> "The technology had a trial run in the 2002 mid-term elections. In Georgia, serviced by new Diebold systems, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called 'amazing' upsets, with results showing vote swings of up to 16 percent from the last pre-ballot polls. In computerized Minnesota, former Vice President Walter Mondale-a replacement for popular incumbent Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash days before the vote-was also defeated in a large last-second vote swing. Convenient 'glitches' in Florida saw an untold number of votes intended for the Democratic candidate registering instead for Governor Jeb "L'il Brother" Bush. A Florida Democrat who lost a similarly 'glitched' local election went to court to have the computers examined-but the case was thrown out by a judge who ruled that the innards of America's voting machines are the 'trade secrets' of the private companies who make them."
>
> In 2003, black box voting also helped oust Governor Gray Davis and installed Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Democratic stronghold of California.
>
> The probability of a fix was obvious throughout the 2004 presidential campaign. Corporate media polls continued to predominantly favor Bush, never dipping his rating below 48 percent, despite his trouncing in three straight debates with Kerry, and despite mushrooming war scandals. This was in stark contrast to independent surveys that showed Kerry with commanding leads. Kerry momentum, and massive Kerry/anti-Bush voter turnout, was evident on election day, and confirmed by exit polls with dominant Kerry numbers.
>
> Then what?
>
> Greg Palast reveals in exhaustive detail that John Kerry won the 2004 election and had it stolen through such methods as "spoilage", intimidation, polling place chicanery, ethnic cleansing of polls. (See Kerry Won. And here.)
>
> Once again, criminals do not "permit" elections. They make them. This time, the Bush forces had years of unencumbered time to orchestrate it, from Ohio (where its notorious secretary of state is the head of the Bush re-election campaign), and, of course, Jeb Bush's Florida.
>
> The Triumph of the Bush Machines
>
> But there is one overriding fact that has been left out most of the ridiculous post-election punditry that renders all other analyses completely irrelevant. It is also the reason why the smiles on the faces of Bush crime family members are so bright, as they watched the returns on election night.
>
> Air America Radio's Mike Malloy gave the most succinct and passionate explanation in his Wednesday, November 3, 2004, program [my links included-LC]:
>
> "The American vote count is controlled by three major corporate players, Diebold, ESS, Sequoia, and a fourth, SAIC, Science Applications International. All four are hard-wired into the Bush power structure, the Bush crime family.
>
> "They have been given millions of dollars by the Bush regime to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines that were just used in the 2004 election. The technology involved had a trial run during the 2002 mid-term elections. Georgia had Diebold machines in every precinct. As a result, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called an "amazing" 16 percent swing.
>
> "Diebold's Walden O'Dell, a top Bush fundraiser, publicly committed himself to delivering his home state Ohio's votes to Bush. At Diebold, the election division is run by Bob Urosevich. Bob's brother, Todd, is a top executive at "rival" ES&S. The brothers were originally staked by Howard Ahmanson, a member of the Council For National Policy, a right-wing steering group stacked with Bush true believers. Ahmanson is also one of the bagmen behind the extremist Christian Reconstruction Movement, which advocates the theocratic takeover of American democracy.
>
> "The four companies are interconnected; they are not four "competitors". Ahmanson has large stakes in ES&S, whose former CEO was Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. When Hagel ran for office, his own company counted the votes, and his victory was considered "an amazing upset". Hagel still has a million dollar stake in ES&S.
>
> "Sequoia is the corporate parent of a private equity firm, Madison Dearborn, which is partner in the Carlyle Group. (Also see here.)
>
> "Meanwhile, SAIC is referred to a "shadowy defense contractor". They have gotten into the vote count game both directly and through spinoffs by its top brass, including Admiral Bill Owens, former military aide to Dick Cheney, and Carlyle Group honcho Frank Carlucci and ex-CIA chief Robert Gates. SAIC's history of fraud charges and security "lapses" haven't prevented it from becoming one of the largest Pentagon and CIA contractors, and will doubtless encounter few obstacles in its entrance into the vote counting business.
>
> "The mad rush to install these unverifiable computers is driven by the Help America Vote Act, signed by …Bush! The chief lobbying group pushing for the act (while we dumb asses sat out here and thought, 'That sounds like a good idea!') was a consortium of arms dealers including Northrup Grumman and Lockheed Martin.
>
> "When you hear people saying, 'take a deep breath, we will pull through this', 'we need to work harder', 'we need to organize'-no. We will not. It's over.
>
> "Unless electronic vote tabulation is history, and these companies are driven out of business, it's their country. Not ours.
>
> "Nobody knows, and no one will ever know, what the actual vote count was.
>
> "There are no checks and balances left. The US Senate now has 55 of these Republicans. When they hit 60, which is what will happen in 2006 mid-term elections-trust me-that means that no matter what Bush and the crime family want to do, they can do it. The House (of Representatives) is gone for the next two to five generations. It's gone.
>
> "The last thing rational people in this country need right now is this whistling-past-the-graveyard horse hockey. Nothing is going to happen; it's going to get worse. There will never again be a legitimate election in this county.
>
> "Until we get rid of the machines.
>
> The people who put the software together-do you think that they are in this business to promote democracy? To promote representative government? Then you are a fool, and you don't deserve anything other than the lash.
>
> Kerry did not lose the election. The vote was stolen. Get that through your head."
>
> The Bush syndicate owns and runs the machines that make the votes. They control all branches of the federal government.
>
> There is nothing more painful than witnessing the Kerry voters, liberals and progressives as they agonize over "what went wrong," second guessing their Herculean efforts, grasping for solutions in outdated ideas, and vowing how "next time, we'll work harder, and we'll really get out the vote!", and that "we'll nominate even better candidates!"
>
> Still others are asking reasonable questions. Why aren't Walden O'Dell, Jeb Bush, and J. Kenneth Blackwell under arrest, or in jail? Exactly how did Associated Press pull it off on election night? Will any of the Bush administration criminals ever be punished for their war crimes? Then one must ask, who is going to prosecute? Who is going to hear the cases? The Bush Justice Department? The Bush FBI? The Supreme Court?
>
> When you play fair in a rigged game, it doesn't matter how hard you work, or even what you do. Insanity is repeating the same mistake, expecting a different result.
>
> Kerry Welcomes Fascism with Open Arms
>
> John Kerry's pitiful and immediate capitulation, surrendering with even less of a fight than Al Gore in 2000, despite clear, overt and gross vote fraud across the country, including Ohio-Diebold's home state-was sickening.
>
> Bush's Skull & Bones fraternity brother then spoke of "healing" and uniting behind Bush, a speech grotesquely reminiscent of Al Gore's sickening 2000 declaration that Bush was "mah president."
>
> Twice now, with Gore and Kerry, Democrats have won the White House, and then refused to speak the truth about the crime, and fight for the people who bled for them. Twice, America has been sold out.
>
> Could it be that this time, Kerry played the American people in just another game of bait-and-switch?
>
> Will those who supported Kerry actually heed his command, and obediently march in step, "without anger or rancor," and follow George W. Bush, the strutting tyrant, and the most dangerous and irrational collection of mass-murdering war criminals in modern history?
>
> In a cynical view, and one that is likely accurate, the election of 2004 may have been nothing more than an elaborate trial balloon, a "good cop-bad cop" theater that is mandated every few years to uphold the appearance of legitimacy. Our candidates lie, all the while gauging the effectiveness of long-term manipulation programs. They think, are the people still gullible and uninformed? What slogans and illusions can we fool them with? Is the "war on terrorism" mindset still unwavering? How far can we push them? Will they accept the baseball bat in the face, or the velvet glove to the nose?
>
> How many beatings will this republic take, before its people wake up? When will the people realize what is really happening, and "chase us down the street and lynch us" (as George H.W. Bush said to reporter Sarah McClendon)?
>
> To hell with Bush. To hell with Kerry. Wait, We're All Already Here.
>
> As sadistic Bush slurred in his "acceptance" speech, "a new term is a new opportunity". Then the most chilling words yet: "I earned political capital. I intend to spend it." If the last four years brought the world to its knees, imagine what is to come as Bush-Cheney giddily pry open a new set of larger Pandora's Boxes.
>
> Webster Tarpley, author of the Unauthorized Biography of George Bush writes: "If Bush retains control of the White House, we can expect a neocon fascist dictatorship or martial law emergency regime in 2005 or 2006, possibly as the result of synthetic terrorism. The neocons are in a desperate flight forward mentality which seeks to avoid the penal consequences of what they have already done with Valerie Plame, the Niger yellowcake forgeries, the Israeli mole scandal, and the Chalabi betrayal of state secrets. The neocon preference is for early war with Iran. War with Russia and China cannot be excluded somewhat further down the road."
>
> Add to that the relentless horror that will be inflicted when the effects of Peak Oil (also see From The Wilderness and Richard Heinberg) crash home in earnest, the body bags pile higher with new wars, and the lives of Americans (including Bush drones) and people all over the world continue to be destroyed.
>
> Some members of the current Bush crime organization may leave or retire, and the possibilities include Donald Rumsfeld, and John Ashcroft (possibly replaced with Marc Racicot, a long-time friend of George W. Bush, and W's first choice for attorney general in 2000). Expect their replacements to be less well known criminals who, if anything, may be more toxic.
>
> Robert Lederman wrote of Racicot: "Numerous members of the Bush family, including his father and brothers and at least one of GW's prospective cabinet appointees-potential GW Bush Attorney General Marc Racicot-have a history of alleged involvement in drug running at the highest levels. We're not talking about buying drugs for personal use here but massive importations of heroin and cocaine with the full involvement of foreign dictators like George Bush pal Manuel Noriega and the Mafia." (See Murder and Drug Running in Montana)
>
> In Robert Payne's biography The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, he writes of Hitler (whose Third Reich was, in fact, financed by the Bush family): "For all the foreseeable future, he will remain to haunt us, more alive than ever although he is dead. He hides in shadowy places and at the pinnacle of power, always urging men to commit the ultimate crime, the perfect atrocity, the most ferocious massacres. Into the ears of generals and politicians he whispers: "Be merciless. It is very easy now because I have lived. I have reduced the value of man to a fraction of what it was before. You will find, if you continue along the path I have opened for you, the value of man will decline still further. Remember, mankind is always valueless and its only use is to serve our interests. We alone are transmitters of civilization, and the people are nothing but cattle. Napalm is good for them."
>
> Hitler himself wrote: "The victor will not be asked, later on, whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war, it is not right that matters, but victory. Have no pity."
>
> Hitler had nothing on the George W. Bush administration.
>
> What, if any, silver lining can be found in the wake of this new goose-step in the abyss? Perhaps only that the same bellicose, predictable and clumsy villains remain right where they have been for the last four years: right in front of us. Better that than a crafty and likeable neoliberal John Kerry administration that lulls the world to sleep before poison is administered.
>
> We cannot be fooled.
>
>
> Larry Chin is a freelance journalist and an Online Journal Associate Editor.
>
> Copyright © 1998-2004 Online Journal™. All rights reserved.
>
> http://www.copvcia.com/free/ww3/110804_stolen_election.shtml
>