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Wednesday, May 25
The Death of Democracy: End-game Ohio
by
Caroline Vernon
on Wed 25 May 2005 04:39 PM CDT
 The Death of Democracy: End-game Ohio
by Caroline Vernon
US Democracy would appear to be a fiction, not only because of the war,
but because of the mounting evidence of the election theft in Ohio, and
other parts of the nation.
Here are excerpts from a long and detailed article on the subject.
Interesting that we have to go to Canada to get this article. If you listen to US news only, you might just end up accepting the fiction that Bush was democratically elected President.
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The Strange Death of American Democracy: Endgame in Ohio
by Michael Keefer
University of Guelph (Ontario, Canada) Associate Professor of English
Michael Keefer writes: So who ever thought the 2004 US presidential
election had the remotest chance of being honest and democratic?
. . . . Ohio was the swing state of swing states on November 2nd, 2004,
the one whose twenty Electoral College votes decided the outcome of the
US presidential election. It is therefore a matter of some significance
that the testimonial evidence of corruption in the Ohio election is
corroborated by statistical evidence which shows the election in this
state - and nationwide - to have been not just corrupt, but stolen.
The evidence in both categories is massively complex. But thanks to the
no less massive analytical labors over the past two months of citizen
pro-democracy activists, of social scientists, of mathematicians and
statisticians, of computer programmers, and of alternative-media
investigative journalists, it can nonetheless be conveniently
summarized.
You want smoking guns? Here they are, starting with the evidence that
John F. Kerry, and not George W. Bush, won the state of Ohio.
1. Uncounted punch-card and provisional ballots.
Well over 13,000 Ohio provisional ballots were never counted, and
92,672 regular punch-card ballots were set aside by vote-counting
machines as indicating no choice for president. Thus, even after Ohio's
supposed recount, a total of over 106,000 ballots remained
uncounted--though there was no legal reason for not inspecting
and counting each of these ballots. But there seems to have been
a very good political reason for not doing so: the uncounted ballots
came disproportionately from places like the cities of Cincinnati,
Cleveland and Akron, all of which voted overwhelmingly for the
Democrats.
2. Fraud through default settings on touch-screen voting machines.
Some 15 percent of Ohio's votes were cast using the new touch-screen
voting machines. In the city of Youngstown, in Mahoning County, there
were repeated complaints about what election observers referred to
as vote-flipping by the ES&S Ivotronic touch-screen
machines used there. This flipping phenomenon, also widely
observed in other states, typically appeared to poll watchers
like a mere computer glitch, no different than a super market checkout
machine that records an incorrect price for lettuce.
But what was happening, in the vast majority of cases, was no
glitch. As Dom Stasi notes, The laws of probability demand
that multiple random errors trend toward even distribution, but only if
they are truly errors. Yet in all of the published accounts of
vote flipping, the errors consistently favored Bush: voters
who were trying to vote for Kerry found their votes being given to
Bush, transferred to third-party candidates, or simply erased. The
Chairman of the Mahoning County Board of Elections is reported to have
stated that 20 to 30 machines [...] needed to be re-calibrated
during the voting process. He is not quoted as saying that any
action was taken, or could be taken, to compensate for the machines'
one-way errors - and there is evidence that many other machines were
left uncorrected.
To read the entire article: Click Here
Local Control Off The Radar
by
Chad Thompson
on Wed 25 May 2005 12:57 PM CDT
 Local Control Off The Radar
One of the bits of unfinished business from this legislative session -
and every legislative session of the past ten years - has been to
address the issue of local control of siting livestock operations.
A particularly tough situation came up this month in Cerro Gordo county, when the Board of Supervisors approved a variance for the Weaver family to build a 4,500 head livestock confinement operation.
Cerro Gordo county approved a moritorium on the building of new
livestock confinements in 2002, looking to protect both public health
and the quality of life of rural residents - mainly from the predatory
operations like those owned by DeCoster Farms.
I will agree with Chris Petersen, Iowa Farmers Union president here:
"Everyone needs to get along. We need
to strike a balance in the city and the countryside between health,
quality of life and economic," Clear Lake farmer Chris Petersen said.
"We need to be good neighbors and the Weavers are good actors. Give
them a variance. But I still believe local government should have some
form of filtering, something to protect health."
The problem as it exists is that local governments have no
power to act as a regulatory body when it comes to the siting or
monitoring of livestock operations. The law at the moment makes
no distinction between family farmers like the Weavers and the
corporate predators. That's something that needs to be fixed.
Hello, Big Government; Goodbye, Patient Privacy
by
Linda Thieman
on Wed 25 May 2005 05:04 AM CDT
 Hello, Big Government; Goodbye, Patient Privacy
Citizens' Council on Health Care
National Physician ID Card Threatens Patient Privacy
(St. Paul, Minnesota) - A new national health care identification system threatens the privacy of patients, and their access to health care, says Citizens' Council on Health Care (CCHC).
"May 23rd marked the opening day of 'The Enumerator,'"
says Twila Brase, president of CCHC. "This is not the name of a
new sci-fi movie. It's the name of the latest initiative to advance Big
Government health care."
Yesterday,
the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services began accepting
applications for national identification numbers for physicians,
dentists, pharmacists, and health care organizations, such as
hospitals, nursing homes, pharmacies and group practices. These health
care providers must apply to "the Enumerator" for a National Provider
ID (NPI) if they transmit health information electronically. All health plans, except the smallest, must use the NPI by May 23, 2007.
"In the
age of computers and health care cost containment, a single
identification number allows all sorts of bureaucratic mischief," says
Brase. "The NPI will enable
broad application of coercive strategies now starting to be used by
health plans and government agencies: physician profiling,
pay-for-performance programs, report cards on physician compliance with
HMO-developed and government-endorsed treatment protocols, and
financial penalties for non-compliance."
"In other words, the NPI will facilitate off-site control of medical decisions," she says.
In 1996,
Congress mandated the implementation of several national health care
identification systems, including the NPI, as part of the Health
Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. The mandate is part of
the Administrative Simplification section of the law. Other
requirements include national transaction and code sets, the federal
privacy rule, national security standards, a national employer ID
number, a national payer ID, and a national patient identification
number.
"The
so-called federal 'privacy rule' allows widespread sharing of medical
record information without patient consent. Once the identification
numbers are in place, profiling will become prolific, and patient
privacy will be gone," Brase warns.
"A
national treatment surveillance system is in the works. Enumeration has
been sold as administrative simplification, but its primary purpose
will be ongoing disruption of the confidential patient-doctor
relationship," she charges.
Citizens'
Council on Health Care is an independent, non-profit, free-market
health care policy organization located in St. Paul, Minnesota.
http://www.cchc-mn.org/
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