Hillary's High Negatives and High Poll Numbers, Nationally

Adds up to something no one really wants to admit? Maybe. As the primaries unfold, we will have to face it, if it's true

Zogby’s recent poll asking “Whom would you NEVER vote for president?” was kind of mischievous, wasn’t it? But if I were a member of the Democratic National Committee, not to mention a congressional Democrat, I’d be sweating bullets over it.

A neat 50% claim they would never, even under pain of waterboarding (kidding), cast their presidential vote for Hillary Clinton.

“Never say never,” Howard Dean or the Democratic Leadership Council’s Harold Ford might say. That may have been right seven months ago when 46, not 50%, claimed they would never vote for Hillary. But now, at a time, when other polls show her pulling ahead of Senator Obama in the Democratic race, it’s looking more like “Always say never.”

Worse, her campaign is beginning to emit the stench of Bob Dole’s 1996 Republican presidential run. You know — hand her the nomination because it’s owed her. In his case, likely payback for key votes he swung the way of congressional colleagues. In hers, out of appreciation to the Clintons for their magic touch raking in money.

Dole never had a chance because of poor funding, his caustic personality and, of course, because he was running against a popular president, Hillary’s husband. Meanwhile, she’s been polling well against leading Republican candidate Giuliani. But, as one commentator explained, it just may be because voters are becoming resigned to her.

The cynicism of such a strategy notwithstanding, Democratic leadership forgets there’s little margin of error because of the likelihood that Republicans will engineer widespread voter fraud again.

Can anyone BE so stupid? That would make the Clintonites and/or the Democratic leadership dumber than a box of Bushites.

I can't figure this one out either.

Chairmen of a number of House and Senate committees have made it very hard for the most IQ challenged among us aware that the Republicans know, deep in their rotten little souls that they cannot win with smart or even acceptable policy; foreign or domestic, especially if they tell the truth about it. They know that in order to ever obtain one party rule in America, after the hellish years of Junior and Dick, they have to steal election and election.

If nothing else, the Dems have made it crystal clear that the GOP is being watched by huge bevies of hawks (not war hawks), both in and out of government and to that I can testify.. Their world is going to fall on them in 2008. If they try to steal one more election, the whole damn galaxy will squash them like the despicable cockroaches that they are. There can be nothing more despicable that election theft in a Democracy, with the obvious exception of assassination.

Why is it that we hear so little about election theft in the MSM, including the press. There has been a bit of a fire storm about the attempt by the GOP to change the way California counts its electoral votes, no longer giving all to the winner, obviously splitting up the vote, giving the GOP a very good chance of winning that heavily populated state. California is not as tru-blue as some commentators would have us believe. Southern California is heavily Republican, though far more moderate that those who are representing them in Washington now, with the exception of the immigration and border security issues; more fear/hate issues, the GOP can always count on those two lovely character traits, it seems.

So why are the Democrats committing suicide, dragging our nation right along with them, if that is, indeed, what they are doing? Is it possible that the Clintons own the touch-tones this time. There are quite a few GOP movers and shakers who seem to have suddenly developed the wildest crushes on Hillary. Bill has spent more than the required amount of time with America's Number One Crime Family. WTF is going on with that any how?

I would be willing to bet that if Hillary wins, even by a landslide, not likely in today's politics, all investigations of the Bush administration will go away, just as Iran/Contra did, even when the investigators knew that Poppy was the one who was really responsible for most of that horrible skulduggery. Bush I was also the first president to pardon members of his predecessor, Reagan's, and his own administrations that could put the finger on him and everyone knew it.

With the exception of Brad Blog, there just isn't much coverage between elections, even in the blogosphere, though there has been more since 2005 when it became clear to most of us who were following ElectionTheft 2004 that Kerry had been had, along with John Edwards and every American who voted for Kerry or against Bush.

It's hard to figure out what Democrats are thinking these days. Maybe they are hoping that the GOP will self-destruct. That is a very dangerous strategy...putting politics and party above country and constitution, because if it becomes evident that that is what they are doing, the Donkey will implode as well. Even worse, if it becomes obvious that there is collusion between the Bushites, NeoCons and the Clintonite/DLCers, they will all be lucky to get out of the country.

Hillary’s campaign seems to have developed a mind of its own. Is there any way to stop it before it leads the Democratic party over a cliff only to be dashed to pieces on the rocks below?

Sadly, I doubt it.

For more like this: sandrogues.wordpress.com/2007/10/26/following-hillary-over-a-cliff/#more-1038

(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. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Throw Election Thieves In Prison, no statute of limitations

Screw Impeachment!

Prove illegitimacy of the entire Bushite Regime and then throw their butts in prison where they belong

Editor's Note: A full examination of this issue will be the topic for this week's program, "Voter Caging" on "NOW" airing Friday, July 27 on PBS (Check local listings at http://www.pbs.org/now/sched.html.). TO/vh

Also see:
Truthout's interview with former US attorney for New Mexico David Iglesias •

View exhibit three here.
View exhibit sixteen here.
View RNC emails here.

Exclusive | Emails Detail RNC Voter Suppression in Five States
By Jason Leopold and Matt Renner
t r u t h o u t | Report

Thursday 26 July 2007

Truthout has obtained previously undisclosed GOP campaign emails from the 2004 presidential race that reveal and detail strategies to disenfranchise voters in crucial swing states. (Photo: Truthout)

Previously undisclosed documents detail how Republican operatives, with the knowledge of several White House officials, engaged in an illegal, racially-motivated effort to suppress tens of thousands of votes during the 2004 presidential campaign in a state where George W. Bush was trailing his Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry.

The documents also contain details describing how Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign officials, and at least one individual who worked for White House political adviser Karl Rove, planned to stop minorities residing in Cuyahoga County from voting on election day.

The efforts to purge voters from registration rolls was spearheaded by Tim Griffin, a former Republican National Committee opposition researcher. Griffin recently resigned from his post as interim US attorney for Little Rock Arkansas. His predecessor, Bud Cummins, was forced out to make way for Griffin.

Another set of documents, 43 pages of emails, provided to Truthout by the PBS news program "NOW," contains blueprints for a massive effort undertaken by RNC operatives in 2004, to challenge the eligibility of voters expected to support Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in states such as Nevada, New Mexico, Florida and Pennsylvania.

One email, dated September 30, 2004, and sent to a dozen or so staffers on the Bush-Cheney campaign and the RNC, under the subject line "voter reg fraud strategy conference call," describes how campaign staffers planned to challenge the veracity of votes in a handful of battleground states in the event of a Democratic victory.

Furthermore, the emails show the Bush-Cheney campaign and RNC staffers compiled voter-challenge lists that targeted probable Democratic voters in at least five states: New Mexico, Ohio, Florida, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Voting rights lawyers have made allegations of so called "vote caging," against Republicans previously. These emails provide more evidence. One Republican operative involved in the planning wrote "we can do this in NV, FL, PA and NM because we have a list to run against the Absentee Ballot requests, and should."

Vote caging is an illegal tactic to suppress minorities from voting by having their names purged from voter rolls when they fail to respond to registered mail sent to their homes. The Republican National Committee signed a consent decree in 1986 stating they would not engage in the practice after they were caught suppressing votes in 1981 and 1986.

In a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) and Edward Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) said "[c]aging is a reprehensible voter suppression tactic, and it may also violate federal law and the terms of applicable judicially enforceable consent decrees." Senators Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) and Whitehouse have called for a Justice Department probe into the practice.

One of the individuals connected to the White House who was the recipient of dozens of emails discussing the strategy to suppress votes was Coddy Johnson, the national field director of Bush's 2004 campaign and former associate director of political affairs, working under Karl Rove. Johnson's father was Bush's college roommate at Yale. Another person who was asked to participate in the so-called "voter reg fraud strategy" conference call was Jennifer Millerwise, a former deputy communications director for the Bush-Cheney 2004 re-election campaign and a former spokesperson for Vice President Cheney. Millerwise was interviewed by Patrick Fitzgerald during the federal investigation into the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson.

Other participants for the conference call included Mark "Thor" Hearne. Hearne is closely aligned with Karl Rove and the RNC and has been accused of pushing for the firings of some US attorneys by at least one of the fired attorneys. Some of the attorneys believe they were fired based on their refusal to prosecute alleged cases of voter fraud.

Emails among Ohio Republican Party official Michael Magan, Coddy Johnson, then national field director of the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign, and Timothy Griffin, reveal the men were given documents that could be used as evidence to justify widespread voter challenges if the Bush campaign needed to contest the election results. Johnson referred to the documents as a "goldmine".

The valuable documents were lists of registered voters who did not return address confirmation forms to the Ohio Board of Elections. The Republican operatives compared this list with lists of voters who requested absentee ballots. In the opinion of one of the strategists, the fact that many names appeared on both lists was evidence of voter fraud. "A bad registration card can be an accident or fraud. A bad card AND an Absentee Ballot request is a clear case of fraud," according to former Bush-Cheney campaign staffer Robert Paduchik.

Another Republican operative saw the value of the Ohio list from a media strategy perspective. According to the emails, Christopher McInerney, a RNC researcher said "... I have already tasked our IT [information technology] person with creating a match list between the Board of Elections return mail list and the Absentee Ballot request list. Jack [Christopher] thought this would be a good idea to have - to reference as part of the larger DenHerder press strategy." It is not known what the "DenHerder press strategy" refers to, but Dave DenHerder served as regional political director for the 2004 Bush campaign.

McInerney's email continues, "I can't speak to other states, but if they don't have flagged voter rolls, we run the risk of having GOP fingerprints."

Strategist Christopher Guith responded by saying "I would think we are less worried about "fingerprints" if we have decent evidence that fraudulent ballots are being cast. I think the intent is to take the Board of Elections' list and challenge absentee ballots? At that point, isn't it more important to stop absentee ballots that we have a high certainty of fraud than avoid the hit?"

McInerney's and Guith's emails have been previously disclosed.

Griffin responded, "I guess we have to make sure we have bodies. It seems like it always comes down to bodies. Why don't you ask your peeps in each state at issue if they have the resources to do this. Then, I might/can put some resources in the states that are lacking."

The emails seem to show the Republican operatives were preparing for a confrontation reminiscent of the Florida recount affair that followed the 2000 Presidential election. This exchange took place less than one month prior to the November 2004 election.

The list of questionable voters that was compiled by the Ohio Board of Elections was quite similar to the vote caging lists used by the Republican campaigners. The Board of Elections sent out voter confirmation letters to targeted registered voters. The letters required the voter to return a confirmation request or have their name removed from the voter rolls. Because the confirmation letter gave the voter 60 days to respond, a voter who failed to respond to the confirmation request would still be on the voter rolls for the primary election, but would be purged prior to the general election.

The list was apparently checked by two people identified only as "Ted" and "Evan who" made handwritten notes in one of the columns. According to their notes, they described certain parts of Cleveland where low-income and minority voters were targeted as containing "mixed use buildings" and "single family apartments." Another section said, "looks like a parking lot ... doesn't look residential."

In an interview with Truthout in May, David Iglesias, the former US attorney for New Mexico, said Pat Rogers, one of Hearne's colleagues, alleged there was widespread voter fraud in New Mexico and pressured Iglesias to bring criminal charges against some individuals. Iglesias said he had investigated those allegations tirelessly and found zero evidence to back it up. He added that, based on evidence that had surfaced thus far and "Karl Rove's obsession with voter fraud issues throughout the country," he now believes GOP operatives had wanted him to go after Democratic-funded organizations in an attempt to swing the 2006 midterm elections to Republicans.

---

Jason Leopold is a former Los Angeles bureau chief for Dow Jones Newswire. He has written over 2,000 stories on the California energy crisis and received the Dow Jones Journalist of the Year Award in 2001 for his coverage on the issue as well as a Project Censored award in 2004. Leopold also reported extensively on Enron's downfall and was the first journalist to land an interview with former Enron president Jeffrey Skilling following Enron's bankruptcy filing in December 2001. Leopold has appeared on CNBC and National Public Radio as an expert on energy policy and has also been the keynote speaker at more than two dozen energy industry conferences around the country.

(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. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Election Theft: ZERO-Tolerance!

Maybe part of the solution to election tampering is the seriousness of the penalty, if a party or individuals get caught.

I would suggest prison terms that measure years instead of months for individuals and huge fines for the parties to which they are connected.

Furthermore, if the conspiracy to manipulate an election can be proven to be on a national scale, prison sentences should also be handed out to offficials of the party, like the chairman, for example.

The voting public has to declare a zero-tolerance policy for election tampering, today. Nevermind every election since the 18th century.

It's time it stoppped!

Will Electronic Voting Reform Create New Ways to Steal Elections?

By Steven Rosenfeld
June 4, 200
http://www.alternet.org/story/52956/


This week, the House is expected to pass the first-ever bill regulating electronic voting. But will the legislation unleash new election treachery in American elections?

If history is a guide, political machinations will outsmart the latest efforts to bring accountability to America's newest voting machines. Recent books on how American elections have been stolen -- from the founding of the country to 2004 -- suggest voting machinery may change over time, but sleazy partisan tactics do not: they adapt to the newest way of counting votes. And when grassroots election integrity activists add their experience of wrestling with new electronic voting to this continuum, it seems doubtful that American elections will be cleaned up.

"It is the same game," said Rebecca Mercuri, one of the country's top electronic voting experts and an opponent of the House bill. "They will just now do it electronically. The bill makes it seem like something will be done. It will cause the public to be complacent. That is very scary. People will not be watching. They will not be looking at elections."

"It is not just the electronic machines. It is a pandemic in our political culture," said Tracy Campbell, a University of Kentucky historian and author of Deliver the Vote: A History of Election Fraud, an American Political Tradition 1742-2004. "I am not sure why we are so surprised by it. We cheat in baseball. We cheat on our wives. Why not cheat in elections?"

This week soon after Congress reconvenes, the House is expected to approve H.R. 811, The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007. The bill is intended to bring accountability to the newest election technology, the paperless electronic voting machines that were ushered into American elections after Florida's punch-card ballot debacle in 2000. After hanging chads became the most high-profile feature of that presidential vote count, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, and appropriated $3.9 billion for states to buy a new generation of voting machines. By November 2006, one-third of the country was voting on paperless touch-screen voting machines.

Once introduced, the problems with these machines became well-known. Most notably there was no way of knowing if the data put into the machines -- votes -- would be accurately reported at the end of the day. Moreover, academics and others discovered that the machines were poorly designed, but the software and performance problems were all-but ignored by the independent testing labs that were supposed to certify their accuracy. In numerous elections in 2002 and 2004, voters saw their choices jump between candidates; votes were lost as totals were compiled, and election officials often spent more time tallying results than they had with the voting systems they replaced. By last fall's election, the machines' performance had improved somewhat, but there were notable exceptions, such as in Sarasota, FL, where 18,000 votes vanished in a close U.S. House race. While that was publicized, grassroots activists later discovered numerous other lost votes, or undercounts, such as in Miami and Dade Counties, where one in 10 ballots did not record a vote for Florida attorney general: 70,000 votes went missing.

While some of these problems have become well known, it is important to note that it wasn't flawed technology in Florida that kept Democrat Al Gore from the White House. More pivotal to the vote count were partisan decisions by then Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, a Republican, who allowed overseas ballots -- allegedly from the military -- to be counted, even though many lacked postmarks and those were suspected to be fraudulent. Amid that controversy the Supreme Court intervened, stopping the recount and declared George W. Bush the winner.

"Florida was a great case of our eyes being off the target," Campbell said. "We were looking at butterfly ballots (punch cards). But it was the absentee ballots that came in after the election that Katherine Harris certified that gave the election to George W. Bush. I bet plenty of grieving military families don't realize it was absentee ballots that brought us the war in Iraq."

In short, political manipulation of the process -- on top of flawed election machinery -- was the determining factor in Florida's presidential election in 2000, and for that matter in Ohio in 2004, in Illinois in 1960, and in other earlier presidential elections.

Congress's response to the latest crisis in flawed election machinery has been led by Rep. Rush Holt, a New Jersey Democrat who taught physics at Princeton University before entering politics. His bill, H.R. 811, seeks to fix the problems with the latest electronic voting machines by requiring manufacturers add a paper print out so individuals can verify their vote. The bill also creates new audit and recount procedures based on that paper trail. It also allows people who sign confidentiality agreements to view still-secret vote counting software. And it imposes new conflict-of-interest rules for voting machine makers and the testing labs that certify their product's accuracy. Finally, it provides money to counties to make these changes.

Proponents, such as People for the American Way, say the bill may not solve every problem, but makes significant progress. But the solution that many grassroots election integrity activists want -- dumping the touch screen machines -- is not in the bill. And the opponents have other worries. They say a paper receipt legally is not the same as a ballot marked by a voter, which will complicate recounts. They don't trust this paper trail will mirror the count in the voting machine's computer's memory. They don't want any secret software. And they worry new audit procedures could allow election insiders to tamper with reported results, which would be a return to counting votes in smoke-filled rooms.

"It's not better than nothing," Mercuri said. "It force feeds a bill onto the states. The states have to follow certain things for federal elections, but not for local elections. The technology is still a problem. H.R 811 doesn't solve many of the problems, but it creates a new invitation to insider election fraud."

Mercuri, who has been a poll worker for two decades and whose engineering Ph.D. is on electronic voting technology said H.R. 811 fails to address both the technical problems of electronic machines and the political problems of partisan tampering with vote counts. She points to numerous examples from last fall's election to show how the bill's reforms would play out in the real political world -- and it is not pretty.

First, Mercuri said the 2006 election showed the new voting machines are not always accurate, despite their modern high-tech appearance. She cited litigation following a judicial race in Columbus, Ohio, where the county election board's director testified that in 86 percent of the precincts the county's new electronic machines did not give accurate vote count totals. The number of voters who signed precinct signature books -- the people who showed up, signed in and voted -- equaled the electronic count in only 14 percent of Franklin County's precincts. "In some precincts the numbers were off by single digits, in others they were off by dozens," she said. "Usually, it's a single voter here or there." The county's election director told the judge the discrepancies were "typical," Mercuri said.

Then Mercuri pointed to New Jersey, where new state-issued rules say voter will only get three attempts to vote on a new electronic machine, even if the voting machine does not accurately register their choice in any of those tries. Problems of electronic votes hopping between candidates dates back to at least 2002, when it was reported by some journalists across the country. The burden of proof should be on the machines and local officials to run smooth elections, Mercuri said, not on a confused voter. And she cited a 2006 municipal election in California that ended up in court, where a local judge simply rejected using the electronic voting machine's paper trail in a recount despite state law -- the same paper record that is the backbone of H.R. 811.

But the biggest problem Mercuri saw involves the bill's audit procedures, where local election officials will compare the newly required paper trail to electronically produced vote totals -- to ensure an accurate vote count. It took many decades in the early 20th century to get past the era where ballot boxes were routinely stuffed by local political bosses who manufactured the results they wanted -- regardless of the actual vote. That problem eventually was solved when ballot boxes, once sealed, could only be opened in court before a judge. But H.R. 811's new audit provisions will allow local officials to open the ballot boxes to verify the count -- which Mercuri said was an open invitation to tinkering with paper records and the vote count.

"The audits require the breaking of the seals on the ballot boxes," she said. "It allows the opening of the ballot boxes. It is not done in front of judges. It is done in the back room again. Handful of ballots will be taken out and handfuls will be put in. God only knows what will go on."

What is notable about Mercuri's litany of concerns is these same problems -- from inaccurate machines, to manipulating vote totals, to mediocre or possibly fraudulent election administration -- have plagued American elections for decades.

"That is the point of my book," Campbell said. "This is not just something that popped up in November 2000."

Deleting or swapping votes between candidates was a political fact of life when America used mechanical lever voting machines in the mid-20th century. Miscounting votes did not start with today's electronic voting machines, but with punch-card voting machines that arrived in the 1960s when some election officials discovered how to tinker with the cards that programmed county tabulators. Manufacturers of the older mechanical lever voting machines even testified in Congress how this was done, to try to stop the spread of the newer punch-card machines. Padding the count by voting for people who did not show up at the polls or by stuffing ballot boxes goes back to George Washington's day and even elected John F. Kennedy to the presidency in 1960.

Under H.R. 811, voters may soon get a paper receipt of their vote, but it might not match the precinct total at the end of the night. There might be some access to proprietary vote-counting software, but it will be hard to prevent software-savvy partisans from switching or deleting votes. Unscrupulous election workers, feeling justified by political necessity, could cast ballots for people who did not show up at the polls, or conceivably could alter the paper trail -- with new access to the ballot box during the audit phase of the election.

"It's an important symbolic step to say we want to have transparent verified elections," said Andrew Gumbel, author of Steal This Vote: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America, speaking of H.R. 811. "But it's only one small piece of the puzzle. Even in regards to the paper trail, what guarantee do you have that the paper trail is more accurate than the count of the machine?"

In more than two centuries of American elections, Gumbel said politicians and the public have often been swayed by arguments that technical improvements in election machinery would bring clearer and fairer elections. "There has been an illusion that if you fix the technology, the rest will be fine," he said. "In the book, I repeatedly show that when the stakes are high, and one party can do things, things will happen."

As Republican Rep. Peter King, R-NY, famously told filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi a year before George W. Bush defeated John Kerry in 2004, "It's all over but the counting, and we'll take care of the counting."


Steven Rosenfeld is co-author, with Robert Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, of What Happened in Ohio, a Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election, from The New Press (2006).
© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

(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. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Senator Who Said Gonzales Lied to Him Hasn't Heard Back
By Chitra Ragavan
Mon Apr 23, 9:44 PM ET


At the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday, one particular bone of contention that earned Attorney General Alberto Gonzales a bipartisan scolding was the Justice Department's use of a provision in the U.S.A. Patriot Act allowing Gonzales to name interim U.S. attorneys to replace those fired without Senate confirmation.

That issue has greatly angered Sen. Mark Pryor (news, bio, voting record), an Arkansas Democrat in whose state Gonzales replaced the existing U.S. attorney, H. E. "Bud" Cummins, with J. Timothy Griffin, a former prot �g� of Bush political adviser Karl Rove, using this controversial provision.

Pryor has said that he called Gonzales and the White House on December 15 to weigh in on who Cummins's replacement should be. When Pryor heard that the administration was planning to name Griffin as an interim appointee, the senator says, he "asked them to please not do that, and please send someone through the confirmation process. And if it was Tim Griffin, send him through," even though Pryor could not guarantee he would vote for Griffin. Gonzales assured him that he supported the idea of a Senate-confirmed nominee as well.

But just four days later, Gonzales's chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, sent an E-mail to Christopher Oprisem in the White House, regarding circumventing Pryor and his fellow Arkansas senator, Blanche Lincoln (news, bio, voting record), also a Democrat.

"I think we should gum this to death," Sampson wrote. "Ask the senators to give Tim a chance, meet with him, give him some time in office to see how he performs, etc. If they ultimately say, 'no, never,' (and the longer we can forestall that, the better), then we can tell them we'll look for other candidates, ask them for their recommendations, evaluate the recommendations, interview their candidates, and otherwise run out the clock. All of this should be done in 'good faith,' of course."

Sampson also says the administration should "pledge" to desire a Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney but "otherwise hunker down." He concludes by saying he's not "100 percent sure" that Griffin was the "guy on which to test-drive this authority, but know that getting him appointed was important to [then White House counsel] Harriet Miers, Karl [Rove], etc."
Pryor was infuriated by the memo and said last month that in their talk on December 15, Gonzales appeared to be using the same points Sampson listed in his E-mail (which was sent to the White House four days later) as a "playbook" and hit every point, assuring him that Pryor would get a Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney.

"This is why I feel lied to," Pryor said in angry remarks on the Senate floor last month. "And the truth is I was lied to, because I was told that the attorney general...wanted a Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney in every slot. That is absolutely not true in Arkansas, based on this E-mail from the Justice Department." Pryor said he felt particularly betrayed because he was one of six Democratic senators who had backed Gonzales for attorney general. He called on Gonzales to "resign immediately" because he didn't think Gonzales "has the credibility to run that department anymore."

Then Pryor became even more emphatic. Gonzales "not only lied to me as a person, but when he lied to me, he lied to the Senate and he lied to the people I represent," Pryor said. "And for that reason, I'm asking him and demanding that he resign today."

At Thursday's Judiciary Committee hearing, Gonzales was probed by both Sen. Charles Schumer (news, bio, voting record), a New York Democrat, and Sen. Lindsey Graham (news, bio, voting record), a South Carolina Republican, about his discussion with Pryor. Gonzales said he never liked the idea of an interim appointment without Senate confirmation because it dilutes the prosecutor's authority. But Schumer said it "defies credulity" that Sampson could have unilaterally sent the memo to the White House and "after you tell somebody you're going one way goes exactly the opposite way."

Describing Pryor as "one of the most temperate" and "mild-mannered" senators, Schumer said that his colleague's words "were all the more striking" for that reason. Graham had some "personal advice" for Gonzales, saying he needed to make amends to Pryor, who had "said some pretty harsh things, which is out of character." Graham advised Gonzales to "sit down with him and walk through what happened" and asked Gonzales to clean up the mess.

"Senator, I couldn't agree more," said Gonzales. "I have a great deal of admiration for Senator Pryor, and I think that's a good idea."

But as of Friday afternoon, Gonzales had not reached out to Pryor, the senator's communications director, Michael Teague, told U.S. News. Teague said Pryor's "door is always open" and that the senator "doesn't have any reservations" about meeting with Gonzales but is not sure "what good it would do at this point."

"They not only wrote the E-mail, they implemented that E-mail," says Teague. "And Griffin still holds that position." Teague said Pryor still feels lied to and still wants Gonzales to resign.
"We don't buy this story about the attorney general saying he rejected the idea," said Teague. "In Arkansas, we got a word for that--it's 'baloney.' "


(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. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Karl Rove: Enemy of Democracy

If proof of citizenship is required, it should be provided for free and must be easily obtained by anyone who is a U.S. citizen, otherwise it amounts to a poll tax.

Karl Rove's Jim Crow Voter Suppression Machine is Humming Along Just Fine, All Ready for 2008

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Tue, 04/24/2007 - 6:57am. Editorials
A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

It was an April 21st article that could easily escape your notice: "Ruling lets Arizona require proof of citizenship from voters." The first paragraph of the Associated Press story reads, "A federal appeals court on Friday rejected an attempt to halt enforcement of Arizona's first-in-the-nation requirement that all residents prove they are U.S. citizens when they first register to vote."

Not that the one article in itself should set off alarm bells. But when you put together evidence from the Bush Administration in regards to voter suppression tactics, the partisan U.S. prosecutors, and other indicators, it becomes clear -- as Greg Palast has been warning us – that the Bush Republican Party plans to hold onto the White House for the GOP in 2008 through whatever means possible.

The key electoral strategy, beginning with the infamous "felon purge" in Florida in 2000, has been minority voter suppression. And when they can’t suppress enough votes, they just steal the election, as Scalia and the Supreme Court felonious five did to put Bush in office. (Remember that Gore beat Bush in the popular count by more than half a million votes.)

ProsecutorGate has revealed the missing link that tied the Rovian "Jim Crow" game plan together in one neat package.

It goes something like this. First, use every means possible to suppress minority and other Democractic votes. This includes passing "Jim Crow" style voting laws in the states. Secondly, employ tactics like the Florida felon purge to deny voting rights to Democrats. Thirdly, use U.S. prosecutors to magnify minor voting irregularities in Democratic areas and make it appear as if the Dems are engaging in widespread voter fraud. Fourthly, use the legal action brought by partisan GOP U.S. Attorneys to have loyalist Republicans cite them as further justification for "Jim Crow" laws at the state level.

Actually, the U.S. Attorney component is vital to the overall Rove electoral strategy for several reasons.

One, it is most often employed before elections (in relation to voter registration, etc.) to try and influence electoral outcomes in favor of Republicans by muddying up the Democrats.

Two, it helps to cover up widespread and orchestrated Republican voter fraud. (Remember the New Hampshire phone jamming case that was tied directly to the RNC. The RNC paid more than a million dollars in legal fees to defend the perpetrators of the illegal effort to interfere with a Union voter turnout effort. And who was doing political work through the RNC e-mail system?
Karl Rove and other White House staffers, including his "opposition research" protégé who was just appointed U.S. Attorney in Little Rock.)

Three, it gives Republican state legislators "evidence" to "demand" tough voter registration and voter identification requirements.

Of course, Rove’s long-term voter suppression strategy doesn’t include Rove’s long-term vote theft strategy, which is an additional story related to electronic voting and packing the courts with right-wing hacks.

What is clear is that the Bush Administration is not continuing to try to expand totalitarian "Unitary Executive" authority so that the Bush Republicans can hand over a virtually unchallengeable presidency to a Democrat. They are steam rolling a dictatorial presidency forward with the expectation that they will be handing over unprecedented powers to a Republican.

As BuzzFlash has written before, remember that after all of the hullabaloo about the replacement of U.S. Attorneys with GOP hit men and women who will do Rove’s bidding, those loyalists are still in place and gearing up for carrying out the political dirty work that will help defeat a Democrat for president in 2008.

Furthermore, the U.S. Attorneys who weren’t fired and have cooperated with Rove’s grand scheme to deny minorities the right to vote, those U.S. Attorneys who conducted partisan prosecutions, are also still in place.

Gonzales may or may not stay in office. But whether he leaves or not, you can be sure that his replacement -- an Orrin Hatch or Ted Olsen, for example – will make sure that the Department of Justice’s role in voter suppression keeps humming along.

The RNC and Rove e-mails that the White House claims are "lost" no doubt would reveal the grand scheme behind the effort for the Bush Republicans to control the U.S. government for 100 years, as Rove has bragged.

It won’t be because they received the most votes. It will be because they suppressed the most votes.

And Rove is smiling because the machine he built is not being dismantled.

To the contrary, it is just being fine-tuned.

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL
Additional BuzzFlash Note: William Rehnquist, who was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and was one of the felonious five at the time of the theft of the 2000 election, cut his GOP teeth aggressively challenging minority voters at polling places in Arizona. Ain't it ironic?


(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. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

The Real Story is Election Theft; Grand Theft!

Network Hosting Attorney Scandal E-Mails Also Hosted Ohio's 2004 Election Results

By Steven Rosenfeld and Bob Fitrakis, Free PressPosted on April 23, 2007, Printed on April 24, 2007http://www.alternet.org/story/50941/

Did the most powerful Republicans in America have the computer capacity, software skills and electronic infrastructure in place on Election Night 2004 to tamper with the Ohio results to ensure George W. Bush's re-election?

The answer appears to be yes. There is more than ample documentation to show that on Election Night 2004, Ohio's "official" Secretary of State website -- which gave the world the presidential election results -- was redirected from an Ohio government server to a group of servers that contain scores of Republican web sites, including the secret White House e-mail accounts that have emerged in the scandal surrounding Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's firing of eight federal prosecutors.

Recent revelations have documented that the Republican National Committee (RNC) ran a secret White House e-mail system for Karl Rove and dozens of White House staffers. This high-tech system used to count and report the 2004 presidential vote- from server-hosting contracts, to software-writing services, to remote-access capability, to the actual server usage logs themselves -- must be added to the growing congressional investigations.

Numerous tech-savvy bloggers, starting with the online investigative consortium epluribusmedia.org and their November 2006 article cross-posted by contributor luaptifer to Dailykos, and Joseph Cannon's blog at Cannonfire.blogspot.com, outed the RNC tech network. That web-hosting firm is SMARTech Corp. of Chattanooga, TN, operating out of the basement in the old Pioneer Bank building. The firm hosts scores of Republican websites, including georgewbush.com, gop.com and rnc.org.

The software created for the Ohio secretary of state's Election Night 2004 website was created by GovTech Solutions, a firm co-founded by longtime GOP computing guru Mike Connell. He also redesigned the Bush campaign's website in 2000 and told "Inside Business" magazine in 1999, "I wouldn't be where I am today without the Bush campaign and the Bush family because the Bushes truly are about family and I'm loyal to my network."

Ohio's Cedarville University, a Christian school with 3,100 students, issued a press release on January 13, 2005 describing how faculty member Dr. Alan Dillman's computing company Government Consulting Resources, Ltd, worked with these Republican-connected companies to tally the vote on Election Night 2004.

"Dillman personally led the effort from the GCR side, teaming with key members of Blackwell's staff," the release said. "GCR teamed with several other firms -- including key players such as GovTech Solutions, which performed the software development -- to deliver the end result. SMARTech provided the backup and additional system capacity, and Mercury Interactive performed the stress testing."

On Election Night 2004, the Republican Party not only controlled the vote-counting process in Ohio, the final presidential swing state, through a secretary of state who was a co-chair of the Bush campaign, but it also controlled the technology that allowed the tally of the vote in Ohio's 88 counties to be reported to the media and voters.

Privatizing elections and allowing known partisans to run a key presidential vote count is troubling enough. But the reason Congress must investigate these high-tech ties is there is abundant evidence that Republicans could have used this computing network to delay announcing the winner of Ohio's 2004 election while tinkering with the results.

Did Ohio Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell or other GOP operatives inflate the president's vote totals to secure George W. Bush's margin of victory? On Election Night 2004, many of the totals reported by the Secretary of State were based on local precinct results that were impossible. In Clyde, Ohio, a Republican haven, Bush won big after 131 percent voter turnout. In Republican Perry County, two precincts came in at 124 percent and 120 percent respectively. In Gahanna Ward 1, precinct B, Bush received 4,258 votes despite the fact that only 638 people voted for president. In Concord Southwest in Miami County, the certified election results proudly proclaimed at 679 out of 689 registered voters cast ballots, a 98.55 percent turnout. FreePress.org later found that only 547 voters had signed in.

These strange election results were routed by county election officials through Ohio's Secretary of State's office, through partisan IT providers and software, and the final results were hosted out of a computer based in Tennessee announcing the winner. The Cedarville University releases boasted the system "was running like a champ." It said, "The system kept running through the early morning hours as users from around the world looked to Ohio for their election results."

All the facts are not in, but enough is known to warrant a serious congressional inquiry. Beginning with a timeline on Election Night after a national media consortium exit poll predicted Democrat John Kerry would win Ohio, the first Ohio returns were from the state's Democratic urban strongholds, showing Kerry in the lead.

This was the case until shortly after midnight on Wednesday, Nov. 5, when for roughly 90 minutes the Ohio election results reported on the Secretary of State's website were frozen. Shortly before 2am EST election returns came in from a handful of the state's rural Republican enclaves, bumping Bush's numbers over the top.

It was known Bush would carry rural Ohio. But the vote totals from these last-to-report counties, where Karl Rove said there was an unprecedented late-hour evangelical vote giving the White House a moral mandate, were highly improbable and suggested vote count fraud to pad Bush's numbers. Just how flimsy the reported GOP totals were was not known on Election Night and has not been examined by the national media. But an investigation by the House Judiciary Committee Democratic staff begun after Election Day 2004 and completed before the Electoral College met on Jan. 6, 2005, was first to publicly point to vote count fraud in rural Ohio.

That report, "Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio," cited near-impossible vote totals, including 19,000 votes that were mysteriously added at the close of tallying the vote in Miami County. The report cited more than 3,000 apparently fraudulent voter registrations -- all dating back to the same day in 1977 in Perry County. The report noted a homeland security emergency was declared in Warren County, prompting its ballots to be taken to a police-guarded unauthorized warehouse and counted away from public scrutiny, despite local media protests.

In our book, "What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election" (The New Press, 2006), we go beyond the House Judiciary Democratic report to analyze precinct-by-precinct returns and we print copies of the documents upon which we base our findings. We found many vote-count irregularities based on examining the certified results, precinct-level records and the actual ballots.

The most eyebrow-raising example to emerge from parsing precinct results was finding 10,500 people in three Ohio's 'Bible Belt' counties who voted to re-elect Bush and voted in favor of gay marriage, if the official results are true. That was in Warren, Butler and Clermont Counties. The most plausible explanation for this anomaly, which defies logic and was not seen anywhere else in the country, was Kerry votes were flipped to Bush while the rest of the ballot was left alone. While we have some theories about how that might have been done by hand in a police-guarded warehouse, could full Republican control of the vote-counting software and servers also have played a role?

The early returns on the Secretary of State's website suggest Blackwell's vote-tallying and reporting system could manipulate large blocks of votes. Screenshots taken during the early returns in Hamilton County, where Cincinnati is located, gave Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb 39,541 votes, which was clearly incorrect. Similarly, early return screenshots in Lucas County, where Toledo is located, gave Cobb 4,685 votes, another clear error. (The screenshots are in our book). Were these innocent computer glitches or was a GOP vote-counting and reporting system moving and dumping Kerry votes?

There's more evidence the late returns from Ohio's Republican-majority countryside were not accurate. During the spring and summer of 2006, several teams of investigators associated with Freepress.org, notably one team led by Ron Baiman, a Ph.D. statistician and researcher at Chicago's Loyola University, examined the actual election records from precincts in Miami and Clermont Counties. These records -- from poll books where voters sign in, to examining the actual ballots themselves -- were not publicly accessible until last year, under orders from Ohio's former Republican Secretary of State. Baiman compared the number of voters who signed in with the total number of votes attributed to precincts. He found hundreds of "phantom" votes, where the number of voter signatures was less than the reported vote total. That discrepancy also suggests vote count fraud.

There was other evidence in the observable paper trail of padding the vote, including instances in Delaware County where in one precinct, 359 of the final punch-card ballots cast on Election Day contained no Kerry votes, which means the day's last voters all were Bush supporters, which also is improbable. In another Delaware County precinct, Bush allegedly received the last 210 votes of the day. Were partisan local election workers trying to mask what was happening electronically to tilt the vote count?

Ohio's 2004 ballots were to be destroyed last September. However that fate was blocked by a federal judge, who ruled in the early phase of trying a Voting Rights Act lawsuit that accused Ohio officials of suppressing the minority vote in Ohio's cities. The state's new Secretary of State and Attorney General, both Democrats, are now holding settlement talks for that suit, suggesting its claims have merit. However, unlike Florida after the 2000 election, there still has yet to be a full accounting of Ohio's presidential vote.

What's clear, however, is the highest ranks of the Republican Party's political wing, including White House counselor Karl Rove, a handful of the party's most tech-savvy computer gurus and the former Republican Ohio Secretary of State, created, owned and operated the vote-counting system that reported George W. Bush's re-election to the presidency. Moreover, it appears the votes that gave Bush his 118,775-vote margin of victory -- the boost from Ohio's countryside -- have yet to be confirmed as accurate. Instead, the reporting to date suggests that what happened on the ground and across Ohio's rural precincts is at odds with the vote tally released on Election Night.

As numerous congressional committees attempt to retrieve and examine the secret White House e-mails surrounding Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' firing of eight federal prosecutors, those panels must also probe the privatization and partisan manipulation of the 2004 presidential vote count in Ohio. The lessons from 2004 have yet to be fully understood or learned.

Similarly, the House Administration Committee, which is expected to soon mark up H.R. 811, a bill by Rep. Rush Holt, D-NJ, to regulate electronic voting technology, also must take heed. The vote count and outcome of American elections cannot be left in the hands of known partisans, who can control and manipulate how the votes are counted and what is reported to the media and American people.

Public vote counts on private, partisan servers and secret proprietary software have no place in a democracy.

Bob Fitrakis is a political science professor and attorney in the King Lincoln Bronzeville civil rights lawsuit against Ken Blackwell. Fitrakis, Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman are authors of "What Happened in Ohio? A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election," (New Press, 2006).


(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. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.