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Monday, November 29
Who Wants to be a Governor?
by
Trish Nelson
on Mon 29 Nov 2004 07:19 AM CST
 Who Wants to be a Governor?
by Thomas Beaumont, Des Moines Register
Nussle says Republicans have failed to galvanize the faithful
NOV 28, 2004
Republicans lost
the last two [gubernatorial] elections because the nominees' resumes
failed to inspire Iowans, [Bob] Vander Plaats of Sioux City, said.
Vander Plaats, who ran two years ago, has said he will
run in 2006. And Des Moines lawyer Doug Gross has traveled the state to
gauge a reprise of his role as the 2002 nominee.
Vander
Plaats is alone as a declared candidate. Gross and Nussle have courted
support without formal announcements. Both expect to decide by
mid-2005. Iowa Senate President Jeff Lamberti of Ankeny and state Rep.
Danny Carroll of Grinnell will also consider runs.
Whoever
emerges won't have to take on Vilsack, the first Democrat re-elected
governor since 1966. "I know I'm not running for a third term," he said
earlier this month.
(click here to read the entire story)
Friday, November 26
Attempt to Stop Mandatory Mental Screening Fails
by
Linda Thieman
on Fri 26 Nov 2004 04:34 AM CST
 Attempt to Stop Mandatory Mental Screening Fails
WorldNetDaily.com
An
attempt by Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, to add language to the omnibus
spending bill in Congress to require parental consent for any
mental-health screening done to children with federal money has failed.
...Critics
of the mental-health screening plan say it is a thinly veiled attempt
by drug companies to provide a wider market for high-priced
antidepressants and antipsychotic medication, and puts government in
areas of Americans' lives where it does not belong.
(Click here to read the complete article.)
*For further information, click here.
Wednesday, November 17
Caught on Tape: Florida Election Officials Trash Vote Records
by
Linda Thieman
on Wed 17 Nov 2004 02:43 PM CST
 Caught on Tape: Florida Election Officials Trash Vote Records
Blackboxvoting.org
NOV 16 2004: Volusia County on Lockdown
County election records put on lockdown
Dueling lawyers, election officials gnashing teeth, Votergate.tv film crew catching it all.
Here's what happened so far:
Friday, Black Box Voting investigators Andy Stephenson and Kathleen Wynne popped in to ask for some records. They were rebuffed by an elections official named Denise. Bev Harris called on the cell phone from investigations in downstate Florida, and told Volusia County Elections Supervisor Deanie Lowe that Black Box Voting would be in to pick up the Nov. 2 Freedom of Information request, or would file for a hand recount. "No, Bev, please don't do that!" Lowe exclaimed. But this is the way it has to be, folks. Black Box Voting didn't back down.
Monday Bev, Andy and Kathleen came in with a film crew and asked for the FOIA request. Deanie Lowe gave it over with a smile, but Harris noticed that one item, the polling place tapes, were not copies of the real ones, but instead were new printouts, done on Nov. 15, and not signed by anyone.
Harris asked to see the real ones, and they said for "privacy" reasons they can't make copies of the signed ones. She insisted on at least viewing them (although refusing to give copies of the signatures is not legally defensible, according to Berkeley elections attorney, Lowell Finley). They said the real ones were in the County Elections warehouse. It was quittin' time and an arrangment was made to come back this morning to review them.
Lana Hires, a Volusia County employee who gained some notoriety in an election 2000 Diebold memo, where she asked for an explanation of minus 16,022 votes for Gore, so she wouldn't have to stand there "looking dumb" when the auditor came in, was particularly unhappy about seeing the Black Box Voting investigators in the office. She vigorously shook her head when Deanie Lowe suggested going to the warehouse.
more »
Sunday, November 14
Blue America Winning Culture War by a Landslide
by
Trish Nelson
on Sun 14 Nov 2004 11:17 AM CST
 Blue America Winning Culture War by a Landslide
The New York Times
There's only one problem with the storyline proclaiming that
the country swung to the right on cultural issues in 2004. Like so many other
narratives that immediately calcify into our 24/7 media's conventional wisdom,
it is fiction. Everything about the election results - and about American
culture itself - confirms an inescapable reality: John Kerry's defeat
notwithstanding, it's blue America,
not red, that is inexorably winning the culture war, and by a landslide. Kerry
voters who have been flagellating themselves since Election Day with a
vengeance worthy of "The Passion of the Christ" should wake up and
smell the Chardonnay.
The blue ascendancy is nearly as strong among Republicans as
it is among Democrats. Those whose "moral values" are invested in cultural
heroes like the accused loofah fetishist Bill O'Reilly and the self-gratifying
drug consumer Rush Limbaugh are surely joking when they turn apoplectic over
MTV….
When Robert Novak writes after the election that "the anti-abortion,
anti-gay marriage, socially conservative agenda is ascendant, and the G.O.P.
will not abandon it anytime soon," you have to wonder what drug he is on.
The abandonment began at the convention…. Prime time was bestowed upon the three
biggest stars in post-Bush Republican politics: Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and
Arnold Schwarzenegger. All are supporters of gay rights and opponents of the
same-sex marriage constitutional amendment. Only Mr. McCain calls himself
pro-life, and he's never made abortion a cause. None of the three support the
Bush administration position on stem-cell research. When the No. 1 "moral
values" movie star, Mel Gibson, condemned the Schwarzenegger-endorsed California
ballot initiative expanding and financing stem-cell research, the governor and
voters crushed him like a girlie-man. The measure carried by 59 percent, which
is consistent with national polling on the issue.
Their mandate is clear: The same poll that clocked
"moral values" partisans at 22 percent of the electorate found that
nearly three times as many Americans approve of some form of legal status for
gay couples, whether civil unions (35 percent) or marriage (27 percent).
(click here to read entire story)
Saturday, November 13
GOP Calls for End to Exit Polls
by
Trish Nelson
on Sat 13 Nov 2004 07:18 AM CST
GOP Calls for End to Exit Polls
Buzzflash
It really would be so much EASIER to rig the election if the truth weren't known in advance.
RNC
Chairman Ed Gillespie wants to eliminate exit polls because he says
they're not accurate, implying that the final vote was unquestionably
correct.
Sheldon
Drobny [CPA and Venture Capitalist and co-founder of Air America
Radio]: "There's a huge difference between polling what WILL happen and
polling something that has already happened. The reliability of polling
something that has already happened is highly reliable vs. predictive
polls, like Gallup or Zogby, which is very risky. The reliability can
be, not plus or minus 4 percent as we see with predictive polls, but
rather a much more reliable plus or minus one half or one tenth of one
percent with exit polls, because those are based on asking people who
already voted. I would even say that if the exit polling were done in
the key precincts of Florida and Ohio, which it was, then these results
should be practically "bullet proof.'"
Why
would the GOP want to eliminate exit polls? Because it's the last
semi-independent check of an election's accuracy and the only way to
quickly determine if the votes cast for a candidate match those counted
by the machines.
If
the GOP eliminates exit polls before true verifiable voting is in
place, there will be nothing left to warn us when our vote is stolen.
(click here to read the entire story)
Saturday, November 6
Greg Palast: An Election Spoiled Rotten
by
Linda Thieman
on Sat 06 Nov 2004 04:29 AM CST
An Election Spoiled Rotten
by Greg Palast
45% of Americans
believe the presidential election of 2000 was stolen. According to CNN Headline News, a
smaller number, 13%, believe the junta was successful in stealing
another presidential election this week. You weigh the facts.
Monday, November 1, 2004
- It's not even Election Day yet, and the Kerry-Edwards campaign is
already down by almost a million votes. That's because, in important
states like Ohio, Florida and New Mexico, voter names have been
systematically removed from the rolls and absentee ballots have been
overlooked — overwhelmingly in minority areas, like Rio Arriba County,
New Mexico, where Hispanic voters have a 500 percent greater chance of
their vote being "spoiled." Investigative journalist Greg Palast
reports on the trashing of the election.
Greg
Palast, contributing editor to Harper's magazine, investigated the
manipulation of the vote for BBC Television's Newsnight. The
documentary, "Bush Family Fortunes," based on his New York Times
bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, has been released this
month on DVD.
John
Kerry is down by several thousand votes in New Mexico, though not one
ballot has yet been counted. He's also losing big time in Colorado and
Ohio; and he's way down in Florida, though the votes won't be totaled
until Tuesday night.
Through
a combination of sophisticated vote rustling—ethnic cleansing of voter
rolls, absentee ballots gone AWOL, machines that "spoil" votes—John
Kerry begins with a nationwide deficit that could easily exceed one
million votes.
(Click here to read the complete article.)
Also see:
Sour Grapes, or Electoral Fraud?
None of
the facts related to the presidential election add up. Voter
registration went up from 105 million to 120 million. In Ohio alone it
went up a whopping 17%. Whenever registration has surged like this in
the past, it has always favored the challenger and precipitated a
change in government.
Not so,
this time, and Republican pollsters are eager to convince us that the
reason for this is a renewed interest among the American public for
"moral values". Is that it or are the results simply an indication of
massive (but well calculated) voter fraud?
The exit
polling was equally skewed, showing a clear victory for Kerry. Exit
polling has traditionally been a reliable way of determining the
outcome of elections. Not so in Bush-world, where vote totals are
invariably higher for Bush in the contentious areas that ultimately
decide the election.
Give
strategist Karl Rove his due; he knew what had to be done and did it.
The rest, of course, has been papered over by the pollsters, pimps and
pundits in American press corps.
CITIZENS FOR LEGITIMATE GOVERNMENT Launches Investigation Into Discrepancies of 2004 'Election'
Pittsburgh, PA: November 4, 2004
CLG
Founder and Chair, Michael D. Rectenwald, Ph.D., calls for a thorough
investigation into the discrepancies of the 2004 election. At the
conclusion of its investigation, CLG may call for specified action(s)
against the system that has provided for the theft of the 2000 and 2004
elections. CLG may demand prosecution of those that have laid the
groundwork for the 2004 election, if such an investigation points to
the conclusion that a second coup d'etat took place on November 2,
2004.
Click the above link for a long list of detailed discrepencies.
Exit Polls Right, Tallies Wrong?
Alternet
The hot story in the blogosphere is that the "erroneous" exit polls
that showed Kerry carrying Florida and Ohio (among other states)
weren't erroneous at all – it was the numbers produced by paperless
voting machines that were wrong, and Kerry actually won. As more and
more analysis is done of what may (or may not) be the most massive
election fraud in the history of the world, however, it's critical that
we keep the largest issue at the forefront at all time: Why are We The
People allowing private, for-profit corporations, answerable only to
their officers and boards of directors, and loyal only to agendas and
politicians that will enhance their profitability, to handle our votes?
Kerry Won. . .
Greg Palast
November 04, 2004
Bush won
Ohio by 136,483 votes. In the United States, about 3 percent of votes
cast are voided — known as “spoilage” in election jargon — because the
ballots cast are inconclusive. Drawing on what happened in Florida and
studies of elections past, Palast argues that if Ohio’s discarded
ballots were counted, Kerry would have won the state. Today, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports
there are a total of 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the
92,672 discarded votes plus the 155,000 provisional ballots. So far
there's no indication that Palast's hypothesis will be tested because
only the provisional ballots are being counted.
Kerry won. Here are the facts.
I know
you don't want to hear it. You can't face one more hung chad. But
I don't have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage
called American democracy, it's my job to tell you who got the most
votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was
John Kerry.
Most
voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. At 1:05 a.m.
Wednesday morning, CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio
women by 53 percent to 47 percent. The exit polls were later
combined with—and therefore contaminated by—the tabulated results,
ultimately becoming a mirror of the apparent actual vote. [To read
about the skewing of exit polls to conform to official results, click here.]
Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49
percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.
Thursday, November 4
The Day the Enlightenment Went Out
by
Cliff Day
on Thu 04 Nov 2004 11:28 PM CST
New York Times
Op-Ed Contributor: The Day the Enlightenment Went Out
November 4, 2004
By GARRY WILLS
Evanston, Ill.
This election confirms the brilliance of Karl Rove as a political
strategist. He calculated that the religious conservatives, if they
could be turned out, would be the deciding factor. The success of the
plan was registered not only in the presidential results but also in
all 11 of the state votes to ban same-sex marriage. Mr. Rove
understands what surveys have shown, that many more Americans believe
in the Virgin Birth than in Darwin's theory of evolution.
This might be called Bryan's revenge for the Scopes trial of 1925,
in which William Jennings Bryan's fundamentalist assault on the concept
of evolution was discredited. Disillusionment with that decision led
many evangelicals to withdraw from direct engagement in politics. But
they came roaring back into the arena out of anger at other court
decisions - on prayer in school, abortion, protection of the flag and,
now, gay marriage. Mr. Rove felt that the appeal to this large bloc was
worth getting Bush to endorse a constitutional amendment banning
gay marriage (though he had opposed it earlier).
Click here to read the rest of this article.
Possible Evidence of Voter Fraud in Ohio
by
Linda Thieman
on Thu 04 Nov 2004 11:19 AM CST
Possible Evidence of Voter Fraud in Ohio
by John in DC, AMERICAblog
11/3/2004 02:56:47 AM
I just
received a photo a Cincinnati poll manager took this evening, and it
seems to be proof of some fishy actions with ballots in Ohio. Bottom line:
Note the already-voted-with ballots in the back of the truck with the
Bush-Cheney sticker in the back window. Does this prove fraud? Well, it
certainly doesn't look good in a state that's already had lots of
problems this election.
In a
nutshell, Stefan Skirtz is a poll manager for the Kerry campaign in
Cincinnati. His precinct is heavily made up of minorities and students
(i.e., leans Kerry). One of the duties of the poll managers, Stefan
told me in a phone call minutes ago, is to follow the poll workers to
election headquarters as they drop off the ballots and ballot boxes.
Stefan followed the poll workers who didn't go directly to the election
headquarters. Instead, they went to a local public school where workers
put the ballot machines into a semi trailer, and then the poll workers
handed off the sealed bags containing the ballots to someone Stefan
assumed was with the county board of elections.
The
first problem he noticed was that there was no sign off of the transfer
of the ballots. Nothing was written down and given to the poll worker
as proof that the ballots were passed off to the county employee.
What's
worse, Stefan noticed the pick-up truck of the supposed county board of
elections - the truck the ballots for 40 precincts were loaded into -
had a big Bush-Cheney 2004 sticker in the back window. Stefan did say
that he followed the truck to the election headquarters, though he
didn't see what transpired after the truck pulled into the election HQ
parking lot.
As
Stefan explains it, the poll managers had such an extensive list of
voters rights and regulations that they had to follow, including it
being illegal to have any partisan buttons, etc., in the polling place,
yet the ballots for voters in over 40 precincts were put in the hands
of Bush-Cheney partisans.
I don't
know whether the Bush partisans did or didn't play any games with the
ballots they received, but it sure doesn't look good, and I wonder
whether it's even legal. And let's not forget, this is a state that was
already well on its way to becoming the new Florida of GOP election
fraud.
Stefan
says he has 6 or 7 witnesses who also saw the sticker on the truck. I
have Stefan's contact info for members of the media.
 Thanks
to Ellen Ballas of Rapid Response - Iowa for putting me onto this
post. Ellen and Trish Nelson, the Co-coordinators of Iowa Rapid
Response have done a stellar job, and deserve a great big THANK YOU!
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