Liberation News Service

LNS Post-Coup II Supplement (11/27/04)

NOTE: Because of the embarrassing cowardice of the
Democratic Party leadership and the shameless
complicity of the Corporatist News Media, the LNS will
distribute these supplements until someone is sworn in
January 2005.

There are some bitter ironies…In 2000, as an image of
a Bush–Putin pow-wow flashed on the screen, the LNS
editor-in-chief remarked, “there are the leaders of
Russia and the US, only one of them was elected, and
it is the Russian…” In 2004, as a similar image was
flashed on the screen, the LNS editor-in-chief
remarked “there are the leaders of Russia and the US,
only one of them has signed the Kyoto accords, and it
is the Russian…”
Recent news stories about North Korea report that the
cult of personality centered on Kim Jong is being
rolled back. His photos are vanishing all over the
isolated little police state. But, meanwhile, here in
America, Clear Channel is putting up billboards with
an image of a smiling George W. Bush with a caption
that reads” “Our Leader.” Long Live Little Brother!
But perhaps the bitterest irony of all is listening to
Secretary of Stone Calm ‘Em Powell, the WASHPs
Editorial Board and other denizens of Beltwayistan
condemn the theft of a national election – in the
Ukraine, and even have the audacity to cite the exit
polls as evidence…
Here are 17 news and opinion items…seven items on
Corporatist News Media complicity in Coup II, four
items on the citizen’s resistance to Coup II, two
items on the Bush abomination’s #1 failure (National
Security), three items on the Bush Abomination’s #2
failure (Economic Security), two items on the Bush
Abomination’s #3 failure (Environmental Security) and
two items on aspects of the struggle for hearts and
minds in America...remember, this conflict is not just
a Kulchur War, it is a defense of Western Civilization
itself -- the Renaissance, the Age of Reason, all of
it, is at risk…and yes, here is another bitter irony,
it is not multiculturalism that threatens Western
Civilization (as the Lynne Cheneys of the vast
reich-wing conspiracy want you to believe), it is the
White Taliban of the Not-So-Neo-Confederacy that
threaten it…
Reject those who talk about “bringing the country
together.” Reject the defeatism and collaborationism
of the current Democratic Party leadership.
Support www.moveon.org, not the Democratic Party.
Support www.blackboxvoting.org, not the Democratic
Party.
Support the bastions of the Information Rebellion
(i.e.www.buzzflash.com, www.truthout.org,
www.democrats.com, www.mediamatters.org), not the
Democratic Party…
We need a Greater Mississippi Free Democrats movement
to represent those progressive forces in this country
who understand that the Bush abomination’s war in Iraq
is insane and was insane from its inception, that the
Bush abomination’s pre-9/11 negligence and post-9/11
incompetence have botched and bungled the “war on
terrorism,” that the Bush abomination’s fiscal
irresponsibility is bringing us to the brink of
economic collapse, that we have already lost four
years in the struggle to cope with global warming that
we did not have to lose, and that media reform is the
number one priority for us all because it is the US
mainstream news media’s utter complicity that has
enabled the Bush abomination to overcome the will of
the US electorate. Yes, we need a Mississippi Free
Democrats to stand up not only to the Bush abomination
but to those who like Sen. Kerry choose to live in
denial, a Greater Mississippi Free Democrats willing
to expose election fraud and vote suppression, Greater
Mississippi Free Democrats willing to resist the
Fascist take-over…

1. The US Regimestream News Media is a Full Partner in
a Triad of Shared Special Interest (e.g. oil, weapons,
media, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, tobacco, etc.) with
the Bush Cabal and Its
Wholly-Owned-Subsidiary-Formerly-Known-As-The-Republican-Party,
and It Wants to Disinform You About The 2004 Election

Robert Parry, www.consortiumnews.com: The Washington
Post and other leading American newspapers are up in
arms about the legitimacy of a presidential election
where exit polls showed the challenger winning but
where the incumbent party came out on top, amid
complaints about heavy-handed election-day tactics and
possibly rigged vote tallies.
In a lead editorial, the Post cited the divergent exit
polls, along with voter claims about ballot
irregularities, as prime reasons for overturning the
official results. For its part, the New York Times
cited reports of “suspiciously, even fantastically,
high turnouts in regions that supported” the
government candidate. The U.S. news media is making
clear that the truth about these electoral anomalies
must be told.
Of course, the election in question occurred in the
Ukraine.
In the United States – where exit polls showed John
Kerry winning on Nov. 2, where Republican tactics
discouraged African-American voting in Democratic
precincts, and where George W. Bush’s vote totals in
many counties were eyebrow-raising – the Post, the
Times and other top news outlets mocked anyone who
questioned the results.
For instance, when we noted Bush’s surprising
performance in Dade, Broward and other Florida
counties, a Washington Post article termed us
“spreadsheet-wielding conspiracy theorists.” [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “Washington Post’s Sloppy
Analysis.”] Meanwhile, the New York Times accepted
unsupported explanations for why the U.S. exit polls
were so wrong, including the theory that Kerry
supporters were chattier than Bush voters. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “Evidence of a Second Bush
Coup?”]
Hypocrisy? What Hypocrisy?
But why the double standard? Why would Ukrainian exit
polls be deemed reliable evidence of fraud while
American exit polls would simply be inexplicably wrong
nationwide and in six battleground states where Kerry
was shown to be leading but Bush ultimately won?
Logically, it would seem that U.S. exit polls would be
more reliable because of the far greater experience in
refining sampling techniques than in the Ukraine.
Also, given the Ukraine’s authoritarian past, one
might expect that Ukrainian voters would be more
likely to rebuff pollsters or give false answers than
American voters.
Instead, the U.S. news media chucked out or
“corrected” the U.S. exit polls – CNN made them
conform to the official results – while embracing the
Ukrainian exit polls as a true measure of the popular
will.

Sebastian Usher, BBC: Journalists on Ukraine's
state-owned channel - which had previously given
unswerving support to Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych
- have joined the opposition, saying they have had
enough of "telling the government's lies".
Journalists on another strongly pro-government TV
station have also promised an end to the bias in their
reporting. The turnaround in news coverage, after
years of toeing the government line, is a big setback
for Mr Yanukovych.
Journalists in Ukraine seem to have responded to the
call by opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko for them
to reject government censorship.
A correspondent on the state channel, UT1, announced
live on the evening bulletin that the entire news team
was going to join the protests in Independence Square.
She said their message to the protesters was: "We are
not lying anymore".
For the first time in years, the UT1 bulletin aired
opposition views in a balanced way after the station's
management acceded to the journalists' demands.
It was the culmination of a rebellion among
journalists at the state-run channel that had been
brewing for days.
Even the sign-language presenter said that in an
earlier bulletin, she had rejected the pro-government
script and informed her viewers instead of the
allegations of vote-rigging.

John Nichols, The Nation: The best question asked in
the aftermath of the 2004 US election came from a
British newspaper, The Daily Mirror, which inquired
over a picture of George W. Bush, "How can 59,054,087
be so dumb?
Now, another British newspaper has answered the
question. A new marketing campaign for The Weekly
Guardian, one of the most respected publications in
the world, features images of a dancing Bush and notes
that, "Many US citizens think the world backed the war
in Iraq. Maybe it's the papers they're reading."
The weekly compendium of articles and analyses of
global affairs from Britain's liberal Guardian
newspaper has long been regarded as an antidote to
government controlled, spun and inept local media.
Nelson Mandela, when he was held in South Africa's
Pollsmor Prison, referred to the Weekly Guardian as a
"window on the wider world."
But is it really appropriate to compare the United
States in 2004 with a warped media market like South
Africa during apartheid days?
Actually, the comparison may be a bit unfair to South
African media in the apartheid era--when many
courageous journalists struggled to speak truth to
power.
No serious observer of the current circumstance in the
United States would suggest that our major media
serves the cause of democracy. Years of consolidation
and bottom-line pressures have forced even once
responsible media to allow entertainment and
commercial values to supersede civic and democratic
values when making news decisions. And the
determination to color within the lines of official
spin is such that even the supposed pinnacles of the
profession--the New York Times, the Washington Post
and CBS News' 60 Minutes--have been forced to
acknowledge that they got the story of the rush to war
with Iraq wrong.
There can be apologies. But there cannot be excuses
because, of course, media in the rest of the world got
that story right.
And there are consequences when major media blows big
stories. As the Weekly Guardian's new marketing
campaign suggests, a lot of Americans voted for George
W. Bush on November 2 on the basis of wrong
assumptions.

Matt Taibbi, New York Press: The much-hyped prize to
the winner is going to have to be put off, for now,
for a variety of reasons. For one thing, the Press had
felt quite confident that the winner would ultimately
prove to be Newsweek's Howard Fineman, and had staked
much of its prize plans (which failed, hilariously,
anyway) in that direction.
But Fineman never filed an election post-mortem for
Newsweek, and aside from a few cautiously irritating
exchanges with Joe Scarborough in which he
disingenuously defended Maureen Dowd as his "favorite
high-brow hussy," Fineman kept a very low profile
after the election. There was no rationally defensible
way to declare him the winner, except on the basis of
his cumulative record. And that would have been a
cop-out even worse than the already egregious cop-out
this final round is going to represent.
That leaves as the winner Elisabeth Bumiller of the
New York Times, who did file a number of grossly
objectionable pieces after the election, and so wins
the contest, if not yet the prize. And though this
contest fails in its stated objective of delivering a
just reward, we can say with a clear conscience that
Bumiller deserves her hollow victory, for consistently
representing almost everything that made this campaign
the Monumental Bummer it was.

www.mediamatters.org: Following the November 2
presidential election, Media Matters for America
documented the media's largely unquestioning
acceptance of the notion that "moral values"
determined the election. In their acceptance, the
media did not explain or define what voters meant by
"moral values." MMFA found that during the five days
after the election, network and cable news outlets
gave conservative religious leaders a forum in which
to provide that definition; these leaders often
appeared without other guests to counter their claims.
Between November 3 and November 7, conservative
religious figures appeared a total of 15 times on the
major broadcast and cable networks (ABC, NBC, CNN,
MSNBC, CNBC, and FOX News Channel, but not CBS) to
discuss "moral values," while progressive religious
figures appeared a total of only five times. MMFA
excluded Newsday columnists Rabbi Marc Gellman and
Monsignor Thomas Hartman of "The God Squad" from this
tally of figures. Although the two authors and
religious speakers did not openly endorse President
George W. Bush's reelection, they did speak of the
election results as an indicator of a deeply religious
nation, of which the "secular" coastal states are
"unaware."
Reverend Jerry Falwell, national chairman of the Faith
and Values Coalition and Moral Majority founder, and
Reverend Joe Watkins, a Bush-Cheney '04 campaign
adviser and talk radio host, appeared four times each
in the five days following the election. Reverend
Jesse Jackson was the only progressive religious
leader to make multiple appearances (three) in that
time period.
Four conservative religious figures appeared without
opponents on news programs between November 3 and
November 7: Watkins, Christian Coalition of America
founder Reverend Pat Robertson, Peter Sprigg, senior
director of policy studies at the Family Research
Council (which "promotes the Judeo-Christian
worldview"), and Focus on the Family founder James
Dobson. No progressive religious leaders appeared
alone.
Further, when not appearing alone, conservative
religious leaders were more often paired with
Democratic or progressive pundits who are not
religious figures than with progressive religious
leaders. For example, on the November 4 edition of
CNBC's Capital Report, Falwell was paired with
syndicated columnist and MSNBC political analyst Bill
Press. On the November 7 edition of CNN's Inside
Politics with Judy Woodruff, Randy Tate -- former U.S.
Representative and former executive director of the
Christian Coalition (which identifies itself as
"America's Leading Grassroots Organization Defending
our Godly Heritage") -- appeared opposite U.S.
Representative Barney Frank (D-MA)…

John Byrne, Raw Story, www.bluelemur.com: A billboard
recently put up in Orlando bearing a smiling
photograph of President Bush with the words “Our
Leader” is raising eyebrows among progressives who
feel the poster is akin to that of propaganda used by
tyrannical regimes.
RAW STORY confirmed the billboard’s existence Monday
evening. At our behest, a member of an Orlando media
organization drove past the billboard on two occasions
and verified that it was indeed the one pictured.
The billboard pictured, which is on I-4, says that it
is a “political public service message brought to you
by Clear Channel Outdoor.”
The member, who declined to be named out of concern
for their employer, discovered a second billboard
bearing the same image along the same route, paid for
by Charles W. Clayton Jr.
The Clear Channel-sponsored billboard was not lit up
for drivers Monday evening. The Clayton billboard was.

Kali Autumn Lynn, The Denver Voice: To those of us on
the inside of this issue, it seems inconceivable that
our local newspapers would offer a front page story on
election fraud in Ukraine while ignoring stories of
the same right here at home in the United States.
Every day, since November 2nd, 2004, stories have
emerged detailing such things as malfunctioning voting
machines, fraudulent election records in Volusia,
Florida, inconsistent numbers of voter registrations
vs. vote totals in Ohio, credible university studies
showing serious statistical impossibilities in
election results, and much more. Yet, these daily
revelations have been almost completely ignored by our
media. These reports are coming not from persons with
tin foil hats as is often claimed, but from PhD level
citizens, election officials, and voting rights
activists.
But to the rest of America, who get their information
from corporate owned media sources, there is nothing
missing from the daily news. That's because, if they
don't report it, it didn't happen. For most of
America, we trust our local papers to report honestly
and fairly. But what many of us don't realize is that
our local newspapers are not so local after all.

2. Post-Coup II Resistance

Associated Press: The Rev. Jesse Jackson said he plans
a Sunday rally in Columbus with ministers from around
Ohio to call for an investigation of election
irregularities in the state.
Jackson and his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition civil rights
group want to call attention to the fact that votes in
Ohio are still undergoing the official count, he said
Thursday. Jackson also is questioning whether enough
voting machines were provided in inner-city precincts
and whether fraud could have occurred in counties that
use electronic machines without paper records of
ballots…
Lawyers who have been documenting election problems in
Ohio said last week they would challenge the results
of the presidential election as soon as the vote is
official.
They say they will represent voters who cast ballots
Nov. 2 and the challenge will be based on documented
cases of long lines, a shortage of machines and a
pattern of problems in predominantly black
neighborhoods.

Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY): "We are pleased
that the GAO has reviewed the concerns expressed in
our letters and has found them of sufficient merit to
warrant further investigation. On its own authority,
the GAO will examine the security and accuracy of
voting technologies, distribution and allocation of
voting machines, and counting of provisional ballots.
We are hopeful that GAO's non-partisan and expert
analysis will get to the bottom of the flaws uncovered
in the 2004 election. As part of this inquiry, we will
provide copies of specific incident reports received
in our offices, including more than 57,000 such
complaints provided to the House Judiciary Committee.
"The core principle of any democracy is the consent of
the governed. All Americans, no matter how they voted,
need to have confidence that when they cast their
ballot, their voice is heard."

www.blackboxvoting.org: COMPLAINT TO CONTEST ELECTION
Plaintiff, Susan Rose Pynchon, sues the Volusia County
Canvassing Board and Ann McFall, defendants, and
alleges:
1. This is an action brought under section 102,168,
Florida Statutes (2004), to contest the certification
that Ann McFall received more votes in the November 2
General Election in Volusia County, Florida, than did
Patricia Northey.
2. Plaintiff is an elector resident and qualified to
vote in Volusia County, Florida, residing at (redacted
address).
3. Defendant Volusia County Canvassing Board consists
of Joie Alexander, Member of the Volusia County
Council, the Honorable Steven deLarouche, County
Judge, and Deanie Lowe, Supervisor of Elections.
4. Defendant Ann McFall, (redacted address), is the
candidate certified by the defendant Canvassing Board
to have won the November 2, 2004 election for
Supervisor of Elections.
5. Plaintiff has been informed that the Volusia County
Canvassing Board certified the election results on
November 12, 2004. Plaintiff is aware that the
statutory deadline for filing this complaint is ten
days following the date of that certification.
Plaintiff alleges, however, that this complaint should
be deemed timely filed for two reasons:
a. The Supervisor of Elections has unreasonably
delayed providing information on which this complaint
must be based, and still has not provided all of that
information. The Canvassing Board is therefore stopped
from asserting an untimely filing of this complaint.
b. The certification was based on inadequate and
incomplete information regarding the election results,
as will more particularly appear, and is, therefore,
an invalid certification of those results.

Bob Fertik, www.democrats.com: I've been involved in
the progressive movement since 1977, the year the
amazing Fannie Lou Hamer of the Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party died. Fannie Lou's most famous quote
was: "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired."
Are you sick and tired too?
Let's make a decision here today.
As progressives, let's decide not to spend one more
penny on TV or direct mail. From now on, let's put
every penny into a Manhattan Project effort to build
an e-mail list of 100 million Americans who agree with
us on the issues.
Here's the bottom line: E-mail lists are power.
When we can press "send" and reach tens of millions of
voters on an issue we all care about, we will have
clout.
When we can generate millions of letters and phone
calls to Congress, we will win legislative fights.
When we can mobilize thousands of voters in all 435
Congressional Districts, we will hold our
Representatives accountable.
And when we can recruit progressive candidates and
start their campaigns with lists of half of their
constituents who support progressive issues, our
candidates will win.
As Joe Trippi wrote in his great book: The Revolution
Will Not be Televised.
The future of progressive politics is e-mail, not TV.
If we work together, I know we can build a list of 100
million Americans who support us on the issues.

3. The Bush Abomination’s #1 Failure: National
Security

Chalmers Johnson, www.tomdispatch.com: Part of the
background to the Goss memo is a widespread
misunderstanding of why the CIA was created and what
it actually does. For example, Bush apostle David
Brooks writes in the New York Times that the CIA is
engaged "in slow-motion brazen insubordination, which
violate[s] all standards of honorable public service.
. . . It is time to reassert some harsh authority so
CIA employees know they must defer to the people who
win elections. . . . If they [people in the CIA] ever
want their information to be trusted, they can't break
the law with self-serving leaks of classified
data."[4] Brooks seems to think that the CIA is the
President's personal advertising agency and that its
employees owe their livelihoods to him. About Michael
Scheuer, the head of the "bin Laden Unit" in the
agency's Counterterrorism Center from 1996 to 1999 and
the anonymous author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West
is Losing the War on Terror, Brooks fumes, "Here was
an official on the president's payroll publicly
campaigning against his boss."
Leave aside the fact that the President doesn't pay
any government official's salary, at least not
legally, and that Scheuer was more interested in
educating the public about Osama bin Laden and
al-Qaeda, on which he is an authority, than in
covering up the President's mistakes; the point is
that the issue of the CIA's intelligence on the Iraq
war is bringing back into our political life once
again the figure most feared by presidents: the
truth-teller. During a previous period of falsified
intelligence, National Security Adviser Henry
Kissinger said in the Oval Office in front of
President Nixon and his Special Counsel Charles
Colson, "Daniel Ellsberg is the most dangerous man in
America. He must be stopped at all costs."[5]
Kissinger and Nixon subsequently ordered up felonies,
such as a break-in at Ellsberg's psychiatrist's
office, in order to try to smear and discredit the man
who had revealed to the public the systematic lying of
three presidents -- Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson
-- about the war in Vietnam.

Pierre Lacoste, Le Figaro: Several CIA high officials
have resigned from their positions, horrified by the
aggressive behavior demonstrated by members of Porter
Goss' team, who want to overthrow the service's
structures and functioning.
A few Democratic Senators and Representatives, members
of the Congressional committees charged with secret
services' oversight, express the keenest reservations
over this new manifestation of White House
interference, while the President has still not gained
acceptance for creation of the post of supervisor for
the totality of the American intelligence community.
We may hope that in spite of the Republican majority
in the Senate and the House of Representatives,
Congressional checks and balances will oppose a
departure so extremely worrying for American
democracy.
The question is, in fact, an essential problem. It had
been illustrated by the false declarations made by
official representatives of the United States at the
United Nations' podium to justify the 2003 war against
Iraq. Only skillful legal sophistries allowed G. W.
Bush and Tony Blair to make their intelligence
services "take the fall" to cover up their own errors
of judgment with regard to Saddam Hussein's weapons of
mass destruction. One has only to consult the works of
witnesses as unimpugnable as UN Disarmament
Inspectors' Head, Hans Blix, or former White House
official in charge of anti-terrorism operations,
Richard Clarke, to have no doubt about the way
Washington's ultraconservatives deliberately engaged
in diverse manipulations of intelligence. One had only
to refer to the first declarations of the newly
elected president at the beginning of 2000 to know
their intentions. From that moment, the creation of an
intelligence analysis unit at the center of the
Pentagon allowed one to glimpse how Donald Rumsfeld's
team would go about supplying the President with its
own intelligence to influence his decisions, to the
detriment of State Department and CIA viewpoints. The
evolution of the war in Iraq has shown that, since the
Defense Department analyses prevailed, the
consequences of the initial battle were totally
underestimated.

4. The Bush Abomination’s #2 Failure: Economic
Security

Pedro Nicolaci da Costa, Reuters: "This is a group of
people who don't believe that any of the rules really
apply, said Krugman. "They are utterly irresponsible."

Krugman is currently taking some time off from
journalism to write and promote the second installment
of his latest project - economics textbooks aimed at
making the science more accessible to college
students.
In the meantime, however, he worries the Bush
administration's fiscal policies are going to push the
world's largest economy into a rut.
The most immediate worry for Krugman is that Bush
will simultaneously push through more tax cuts and try
to privatize social security, ignoring a chorus of
economic thinkers who caution against such measures.
"If you go back and you look at the sources of the
blow-up of Argentine debt during the 1990s, one
little-appreciated thing is that social security
privatization was a important source of that expansion
of debt," said Krugman.
In 2001, Argentina finally defaulted on an
estimated $100 billion in debt, the largest such event
in modern economic history.
"So if you ask the question do we look like
Argentina, the answer is a whole lot more than anyone
is quite willing to admit at this point. We've become
a banana republic."
Crisis might take many forms, he said, but one key
concern is the prospect that Asian central banks may
lose their appetite for U.S. government debt, which
has so far allowed the United States to finance its
twin deficits.
A deeper plunge in the already battered U.S.
dollar is another possible route to crisis, the
professor said.
The absence of any mention of currencies in a
communique from the Group of 20 rich and emerging
market countries this past weekend only reinforced
investors' perception that the United States, while
saying it promotes a strong dollar, is willing to let
its currency slide further.
"The break can come either from the Reserve Bank
of China deciding it has enough dollars, thank you, or
from private investors saying 'I'm going to take a
speculative bet on a dollar plunge,' which then ends
up being a self-fulfilling prophecy," Krugman opined.
"Both scenarios are pretty unnerving."

Robert Reich, www.tompaine.com: You might as well
spend your cash now because the dollar is dropping
like a stone in international currency markets. It’s
dropped nearly 30 percent since 2001, and is now at a
record low. Even without the recent dour
pronouncements of Alan Greenspan and Treasury
Secretary John Snow, the greenback is likely to fall
further. And the reason is simple: We’re living beyond
our means. American consumers are deep in debt. The
nation is importing more than we’re exporting. Most
importantly, the federal budget deficit is out of
control.
Nearly all of the increase in public debt over the
last four years -- some 1 trillion dollars -- has been
financed by foreigners, lending us the money. But who
wants to lend more and more to a drunken sailor?
Foreigners are bailing out of dollars. Even the
Chinese and Japanese, who have kept lending so we’ll
keep buying their exports, are starting to wise up.
American exporters are cheering because a lower dollar
makes everything they sell abroad cheaper. But it’s
bad for the rest of us because as the dollar drops
everything we buy from abroad -- including oil --
becomes that much more expensive. And these higher
prices will ripple through the economy, threatening
inflation and higher interest rates -- and,
ultimately, reducing our living standards.
It’s one of the oldest of economic laws: When you’re
living too high on the hog, eventually you’re gonna
fall off and find yourself in pig slop.

www.bloomberg.com: U.S. 10-year Treasury notes fell,
heading for a fifth week of declines, on concern
foreign central banks may cut their holdings of the
securities as the dollar slides.
Indonesia may reduce dollars and U.S. notes in its
foreign- exchange reserves should the currency
continue to drop, said Aslim Tadjuddin, deputy
governor for monetary policy at the central bank.
Treasuries also dropped earlier today after China
Business News reported a central bank official said
China had cut its holdings of U.S. debt. The official
later denied the report. ``These rumors are leading to
tremendous movements in the yields,'' said Kornelius
Purps, a fixed-income strategist in Munich at HVB
Group, Germany's second-largest bank by assets.
``Speculation that the dollar is going to weaken
further means Treasuries are going to weaken further.
This takes out all the other fundamental issues of
rate hikes, steady growth

5. The Bush Abomination’s #3 Failure: Environmental
Security

www.abc.net.au: Ministers noted "with concern" a
report by 250 scientists this month warning that the
Arctic is warming twice as fast as the global average,
threatening to wipe out species like polar bears by
2100 and undermining Indigenous hunting cultures.
"We all need to intensify efforts against pollution in
the Arctic," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov
said.
Indigenous peoples, some nations and environmentalists
had wanted the ministers to urge drastic cuts in
greenhouse gas emissions from cars and factories,
which are blamed for a warming that could melt the ice
around the North Pole in summer by 2100.
"In terms of what the planet needs, this is far from
enough," Sheila Watt-Cloutier, chair of the Inuit
Circumpolar Conference, said.

Alister Doyle, Reuters: Foreign ministers from the
eight Arctic countries are due to meet in Reykjavik on
Wednesday but are sharply divided about what to do.
The United States is most opposed to any drastic new
action.
The U.S. is the only country among the eight to reject
the 127-nation Kyoto protocol meant to cap emissions
of greenhouse gases. President Bush says the U.N. pact
would cost too much and unfairly excludes developing
states.
In some more southerly areas of the Arctic, like
Canada's Hudson Bay, receding ice means polar bears
are already struggling. The bears' main trick is to
pounce when seals surface to breathe through holes in
the ice.
The Arctic report says polar bears "are unlikely to
survive as a species if there is a complete loss of
summer-ice cover." Restricted to land, polar bears
would have to compete with better-adapted grizzly or
brown bears.
"The outlook for polar bears is stark. My grandson
will lose the culture I had as a child," said
Watt-Cloutier, referring to Inuit hunting cultures
based on catching seals, bears or whales.

6. Science and Psyche

LA Times: The lure is clear: $300 million a year for
embryonic stem cell research in California for the
next decade, more than 10 times the yearly federal
funding available and free of the Bush
administration's tight restrictions on what research
can be conducted with federal money.
"Everyone I talk to wants to move to California," said
Kevin Wilson, director of public policy for the
American Society of Cell Biologists. Wilson, only half
jokingly, suggested "staking out the airports" to get
a preview of which top researchers outside the state
are thinking of relocating.

Sidney Blumenthal, Guardian: Offstage, beforehand,
Rove and Bush had had their library tours. According
to two eyewitnesses, Rove had shown keen interest in
everything he saw, and asked questions, including
about costs, obviously thinking about a future George
W Bush library and legacy. "You're not such a scary
guy," joked his guide. "Yes, I am," Rove replied.
Walking away, he muttered deliberately and loudly: "I
change constitutions, I put churches in schools ..."
Thus he identified himself as more than the ruthless
campaign tactician; he was also the invisible hand of
power, pervasive and expansive, designing to alter the
fundamental American compact.
Bush appeared distracted, and glanced repeatedly at
his watch. When he stopped to gaze at the river, where
secret service agents were stationed in boats, the
guide said: "Usually, you might see some bass
fishermen out there." Bush replied: "A submarine could
take this place out."
Was the president warning of an al-Qaida submarine,
sneaking undetected up the Mississippi, through the
locks and dams of the Arkansas river, surfacing under
the bridge to the 21st century to dispatch the Clinton
library? Is that where Osama bin Laden is hiding?
Full texts and URLs follow.

Save the US Constitution! Save the Environment!
Restore the Sanctity of the Electoral Process! Break
the Corporatist Stranglehold on the US Mainstream News
Media! Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up & The Iraq War
Lies!

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/112304.html

Big Media's Democracy Double Standards
By Robert Parry
November 23, 2004

The Washington Post and other leading American
newspapers are up in arms about the legitimacy of a
presidential election where exit polls showed the
challenger winning but where the incumbent party came
out on top, amid complaints about heavy-handed
election-day tactics and possibly rigged vote tallies.

In a lead editorial, the Post cited the divergent exit
polls, along with voter claims about ballot
irregularities, as prime reasons for overturning the
official results. For its part, the New York Times
cited reports of “suspiciously, even fantastically,
high turnouts in regions that supported” the
government candidate. The U.S. news media is making
clear that the truth about these electoral anomalies
must be told.

Of course, the election in question occurred in the
Ukraine.

In the United States – where exit polls showed John
Kerry winning on Nov. 2, where Republican tactics
discouraged African-American voting in Democratic
precincts, and where George W. Bush’s vote totals in
many counties were eyebrow-raising – the Post, the
Times and other top news outlets mocked anyone who
questioned the results.

For instance, when we noted Bush’s surprising
performance in Dade, Broward and other Florida
counties, a Washington Post article termed us
“spreadsheet-wielding conspiracy theorists.” [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “Washington Post’s Sloppy
Analysis.”] Meanwhile, the New York Times accepted
unsupported explanations for why the U.S. exit polls
were so wrong, including the theory that Kerry
supporters were chattier than Bush voters. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “Evidence of a Second Bush
Coup?”]

Hypocrisy? What Hypocrisy?

But why the double standard? Why would Ukrainian exit
polls be deemed reliable evidence of fraud while
American exit polls would simply be inexplicably wrong
nationwide and in six battleground states where Kerry
was shown to be leading but Bush ultimately won?

Logically, it would seem that U.S. exit polls would be
more reliable because of the far greater experience in
refining sampling techniques than in the Ukraine.
Also, given the Ukraine’s authoritarian past, one
might expect that Ukrainian voters would be more
likely to rebuff pollsters or give false answers than
American voters.

Instead, the U.S. news media chucked out or
“corrected” the U.S. exit polls – CNN made them
conform to the official results – while embracing the
Ukrainian exit polls as a true measure of the popular
will.

To compound the irony, the Washington Post editorial
is now calling on George W. Bush to defend democratic
principles halfway around the world. In the Nov. 23
editorial entitled “Coup in Kiev,” the Post wrote,
“For the Bush administration, the responsibility
starts with stating the unvarnished truth about what
has happened in an election” – the one in the Ukraine,
of course.

Election 2000

“Unvarnished truth” was far less important to the
Post, the Times and other U.S. news organizations when
they were reporting on the results of Election 2000.

Then, the cherished value was “unity,” as Americans
were urged to ignore the fact that Al Gore got more
votes and instead rally behind George W. Bush, even
though he had dispatched thugs to Florida to disrupt
recounts and then enlisted his political allies on the
U.S. Supreme Court to stop the counting of votes. [For
details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege: Rise
of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.]

In the months that followed Election 2000, the U.S.
news media even put the cause of Bush’s legitimacy
ahead of its duty to accurately inform the public. In
November 2001, after conducting an unofficial recount
of Florida’s ballots, the news outlets discovered that
if all legally cast votes had been counted –
regardless of the standard used for evaluating chads –
Gore won.

That finding meant that Gore was the rightful occupant
of the White House and that Bush was a fraudulent
president. But in those days after the Sept. 11 terror
attacks, the news organizations again opted for
“unity” over “unvarnished truth,” fudging their own
results and burying the lead of Gore’s electoral
victory.

To falsely tout Bush’s “victory,” the Post, the Times,
CNN and other news outlets arbitrarily – and
erroneously – ditched so-called “overvotes,” in which
voters both checked and wrote in a candidate’s name.
Not only were these votes legal under Florida law but
they apparently would have been included in the
statewide recount if the five Republicans on the U.S.
Supreme Court had not intervened at Bush’s behest.
[For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “So Bush Did
Steal the White House.”]

Weak Democrats

In another case of painful irony, the U.S. Democratic
Party is expressing more outrage about electoral
fairness in the Ukraine than in the United States. The
National Democratic Institute for International
Affairs, which is sponsored by the Democratic Party,
put out a statement declaring that “fundamental flaws
in Ukraine’s presidential election process subverted
its legitimacy.” [NYT, Nov. 23, 2004]

However, at home, the Democrats have accepted the Nov.
2 outcome passively, despite widespread fury within
the Democratic base about what many see as the Bush
campaign’s abusive practices. Again, “unity” has
trumped “unvarnished truth.”

It has fallen to several third-party candidates to
seek limited recounts in several states, including
Ohio and New Hampshire, a move at least designed to
give assurance to millions of Americans that the Bush
campaign didn’t get away with stealing a second
election. Meanwhile, the national Democratic Party has
chosen to sit on the sidelines, presumably to avoid
accusations of irresponsibility from the Washington
Post and other parts of the big U.S. news media.

So, as the Ukrainian people take to the streets to
defend the principles of democracy, including the
concept that a just government derives from the
consent of the governed, the United States – once
democracy’s beacon to the world – presents its
commitment to those ideals more through hypocrisy
abroad than action at home.

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

Robert Parry, who broke many of the Iran-Contra
stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and
Newsweek, has written a new book, Secrecy & Privilege:
Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq. It
can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also
available at Amazon.com.

Back to Home Page

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4044791.stm

Ukraine state TV in revolt
By Sebastian Usher
BBC world media correspondent

Journalists on Ukraine's state-owned channel - which
had previously given unswerving support to Prime
Minister Viktor Yanukovych - have joined the
opposition, saying they have had enough of "telling
the government's lies".
Journalists on another strongly pro-government TV
station have also promised an end to the bias in their
reporting. The turnaround in news coverage, after
years of toeing the government line, is a big setback
for Mr Yanukovych.
Journalists in Ukraine seem to have responded to the
call by opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko for them
to reject government censorship.
A correspondent on the state channel, UT1, announced
live on the evening bulletin that the entire news team
was going to join the protests in Independence Square.
She said their message to the protesters was: "We are
not lying anymore".
Rebellion
For the first time in years, the UT1 bulletin aired
opposition views in a balanced way after the station's
management acceded to the journalists' demands.
It was the culmination of a rebellion among
journalists at the state-run channel that had been
brewing for days.
Even the sign-language presenter said that in an
earlier bulletin, she had rejected the pro-government
script and informed her viewers instead of the
allegations of vote-rigging.
The news staff at UT1 were not alone. A couple of
hours earlier, journalists on the pro-government
private channel One Plus One took a similar stand.
The station had announced earlier in the day the
resignation of its news editor, who had been
presenting a fiercely pro-government election special
for the past three days, after journalists refused to
produce news bulletins in protest at censorship of the
opposition.
Impartial
In the reinstated evening bulletin that replaced the
election special, the channel's director Aleksander
Rodnyansky stood in front of a solemn group of his
colleagues to deliver a brief statement.
He began by saying: "The One Plus One TV channel fully
resumes its news and political and social
broadcasting.
"We understand our responsibility for the biased news
that the channel has so far been broadcasting under
pressure and on orders from various political forces."
Mr Rodnyansky went on to say that the station would
now guarantee "full and impartial" news coverage,
allowing all viewpoints to be expressed. The
subsequent bulletin lived up to this promise.
Media role
This new balance in TV coverage on previously
government-controlled channels means that pictures
making plain the huge size of the opposition
demonstrations can now reach the heartland of Mr
Yanukovych's support in the east of the country.
Rolling news coverage of the protests by Channel 5 -
the one station fully backing the opposition - had
earlier been blocked in the region.
The Ukrainian media played a big role in boosting Mr
Yanukovych's election chances by denying the
opposition any airtime to make its case and ridiculing
his challenger, Mr Yushchenko. Reporters say the
government issued lists of what they could and could
not show.
Now that Ukrainian journalists have openly rebelled
against such tight government control, Mr Yanukovych
appears to have lost one of the key pillars of his
support. It is another clear sign that the momentum
behind the opposition is growing ever stronger.
BBC Monitoring, based in Caversham in southern
England, selects and translates information from
radio, television, press, news agencies and the
internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1123-26.htm

Published on Tuesday, November 23, 2004 by The Nation

Stenographers to Power
by John Nichols

The best question asked in the aftermath of the 2004
US election came from a British newspaper, The Daily
Mirror, which inquired over a picture of George W.
Bush, "How can 59,054,087 be so dumb?

Now, another British newspaper has answered the
question. A new marketing campaign for The Weekly
Guardian, one of the most respected publications in
the world, features images of a dancing Bush and notes
that, "Many US citizens think the world backed the war
in Iraq. Maybe it's the papers they're reading."

The weekly compendium of articles and analyses of
global affairs from Britain's liberal Guardian
newspaper has long been regarded as an antidote to
government controlled, spun and inept local media.
Nelson Mandela, when he was held in South Africa's
Pollsmor Prison, referred to the Weekly Guardian as a
"window on the wider world."

But is it really appropriate to compare the United
States in 2004 with a warped media market like South
Africa during apartheid days?

Actually, the comparison may be a bit unfair to South
African media in the apartheid era--when many
courageous journalists struggled to speak truth to
power.

No serious observer of the current circumstance in the
United States would suggest that our major media
serves the cause of democracy. Years of consolidation
and bottom-line pressures have forced even once
responsible media to allow entertainment and
commercial values to supersede civic and democratic
values when making news decisions. And the
determination to color within the lines of official
spin is such that even the supposed pinnacles of the
profession--the New York Times, the Washington Post
and CBS News' 60 Minutes--have been forced to
acknowledge that they got the story of the rush to war
with Iraq wrong.

There can be apologies. But there cannot be excuses
because, of course, media in the rest of the world got
that story right.

And there are consequences when major media blows big
stories. As the Weekly Guardian's new marketing
campaign suggests, a lot of Americans voted for George
W. Bush on November 2 on the basis of wrong
assumptions.

According to a survey conducted during the fall
campaign season by the Program on International Policy
Attitudes--a joint initiative of the Center on Policy
Attitudes and the Center for International and
Security Studies at the University of Maryland School
of Public Affairs--a lot of what Americans know is
wrong.

Despite the fact that surveys by the Gallup
organization and other polling firms have repeatedly
confirmed that the vast majority of citizens of other
countries opposed the war in Iraq, the PIPA survey
found that only 31 percent of Bush supporters
recognized that the majority of people in the world
opposed the Bush administration's decision to invade
Iraq.

Amazingly, according to the PIPA poll, 57 percent of
Bush supporters assumed that the majority of people in
the world would favor Bush's reelection, while only 33
percent assumed that global views regarding Bush were
evenly divided. Only 9 percent of Bush backers
correctly assumed that Kerry was the world's choice.

That wasn't the end of the misperception.

"Even after the final report of Charles Duelfer to
Congress saying that Iraq did not have a significant
WMD program, 72 percent of Bush supporters continue to
believe that Iraq had actual WMD (47 percent) or a
major program for developing them (25 percent),"
explained the summary of PIPA's polling. "Fifty-six
percent assume that most experts believe Iraq had
actual WMD and 57 percent also assume, incorrectly,
that Duelfer concluded Iraq had at least a major WMD
program."

"Similarly," the pollsters found, "75 percent of Bush
supporters continue to believe that Iraq was providing
substantial support to al Qaeda, and 63 percent
believe that clear evidence of this support has been
found. Sixty percent of Bush supporters assume that
this is also the conclusion of most experts, and 55
percent assume, incorrectly, that this was the
conclusion of the 9/11 Commission."

PIPA analysts suggest that the "tendency of Bush
supporters to ignore dissonant information" offers
some explanation for these numbers. And there is
something to that. After all, Kerry backers displayed
a far sounder sense of reality in PIPA surveys.

But unless we want to assume that close to 60 million
Americans look at the world only through Bush-colored
glasses, there has to be some acceptance of the fact
that good citizens who consume American media come
away with dramatic misconceptions about the most vital
issues of the day.

Sure, Fox warps facts intentionally. But what about
CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, USA Today, the New York Times and
the Washington Post, as well as most local media
across the country? They may strive to be more
accurate than Fox or talk-radio personalities such as
Rush Limbaugh. But they still fed the American people
an inaccurate picture when they allowed the Bush team
to peddle lies about Iraq and other issues without
aggressively and consistently challenging those
misstatements of fact.

America has many great journalists. And there are
still good newspapers, magazines and broadcast
programs. But, taken as a whole, US media--with its
obsessive focus on John Kerry's Vietnam record, its
neglect of fundamental economic and environmental
issues and its stenographic repetition of even the
most absurd claims by the president and vice
president--warped the debate in 2004.

Some of those 59,054,087 Bush voters may have been
dumb.

But a far better explanation for the election result
is summed up by the Weekly Guardian's observation
that, "Maybe it's the papers they're reading."

John Nichols, The Nation's Washington correspondent,
has covered progressive politics and activism in the
United States and abroad for more than a decade. He is
currently the editor of the editorial page of Madison,
Wisconsin's Capital Times.

© 2004 The Nation

###

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/20532/

Wimblehack: The Winner

By Matt Taibbi, New York Press. Posted November 19,
2004.

A post-mortem of election post-mortems reveals the
winner of the prize for worst campaign journalist of
2004. Story Tools

The kids still loved him. You were sure that Spot
could live for another year at least. But those clouds
over his eyes just got too big, and he was walking
into the refrigerator and the brick edge of the
fireplace just a little too often.

Then there were those wheezing fits, the ones that
kept waking you and the wife up in the middle of the
night and throwing the both of you into a tiresome
panic. Do you call the vet? Is there even a vet to
call at 3 a.m.? What moral calculus applies, in the
middle of the night, to the adult owners of a dying
Shar-pei with glowing green pus in his eyes?

The time comes when you and the wife have to send the
kids off to school and take an unscheduled trip to
that little one-story clinic downtown. Make that one
last handshake with Dr. Bernstein, and stroke Spot's
head as he cheerfully lies down on the table and waits
for the needle...

Such is the situation with Wimblehack, which comes to
an end this week in highly unsatisfactory fashion. The
much-hyped prize to the winner is going to have to be
put off, for now, for a variety of reasons. For one
thing, the Press had felt quite confident that the
winner would ultimately prove to be Newsweek's Howard
Fineman, and had staked much of its prize plans (which
failed, hilariously, anyway) in that direction.

But Fineman never filed an election post-mortem for
Newsweek, and aside from a few cautiously irritating
exchanges with Joe Scarborough in which he
disingenuously defended Maureen Dowd as his "favorite
high-brow hussy," Fineman kept a very low profile
after the election. There was no rationally defensible
way to declare him the winner, except on the basis of
his cumulative record. And that would have been a
cop-out even worse than the already egregious cop-out
this final round is going to represent.

That leaves as the winner Elisabeth Bumiller of the
New York Times, who did file a number of grossly
objectionable pieces after the election, and so wins
the contest, if not yet the prize. And though this
contest fails in its stated objective of delivering a
just reward, we can say with a clear conscience that
Bumiller deserves her hollow victory, for consistently
representing almost everything that made this campaign
the Monumental Bummer it was.

On November 7, reverting to her pre-campaign state as
a Times White House correspondent, Bumiller filed her
first large post-election article. Entitled "President
Feels Emboldened, Not Accidental, After Victory," the
piece was pleased to draw a number of conclusions
about the sunny state of the reelected executive's
mind. She writes:

One trademark of President Bush's first term was his
aversion to news conferences, which his staff says he
often treated like trips to the dentist. So on the
morning after Mr. Bush's re-election, Dan Bartlett,
the White House communications director, was taken
aback when the president told him he was ready to hold
a news conference that Mr. Bartlett had suggested, win
or lose, the week before.

"I didn't have to convince him or anything," Mr.
Bartlett said. "Without me prompting him, he brought
it up."

It was a small but telling change for a president
whose re-election has already had a powerful effect on
his psyche, his friends and advisers say.

This habit of taking at face value the unconfirmable
assertions about the personal feelings of officials –
assertions hand-delivered to the journalist by a paid
mouthpiece whose very job is to deadpan preposterous
pieces of mythmaking to the media – is nothing new to
most political reporters. But almost no one consumes
this stuff more eagerly than Bumiller.

Take her piece from March 2 of this year, "Gay issue
leaves Bush ill at ease," in which Bumiller gives
off-the-record spokesmen a chance to allow Bush to
split the difference on the gay-marriage issue:

When President George W. Bush announced his support
last week for a constitutional amendment banning gay
marriage, his body language in the Roosevelt Room did
not seem to match his words. Bush may have forcefully
defended the union of a man and a woman as "the most
fundamental institution of civilization," but even
some White House officials said he appeared
uncomfortable.

This kind of thing is standard in the business – it is
how we are delivered such seemingly unknowable facts
as the "remarkably close friendship" we are told
exists between Bush and Vladimir Putin – but what's
striking about Bumiller is that this is apparently her
conscious response to an administration whose
excessive secrecy she has complained about in public.

On December 3 of last year, Bumiller gave a talk at
Yale University nauseatingly entitled "Shock, Awe, and
Battle Fatigue," in which she complained about the
lack of access in the Bush White House.

"The White House has set a troubling standard for
secrecy," she said. "I worry that future
administrations will look at this White House as a
model that has worked fairly well."

Bumiller went on to laud the administration's "genius"
in interpersonal relations, adding: "The White House
is awesomely good at what it does... The political
skills of the president and his handlers are
unparalleled."

This speech came just days after Bumiller had
experienced a very public slap in the face by that
same White House, which took the extraordinary step of
sending Bush on a surprise trip to Baghdad on
Thanksgiving with a handpicked contingent of
reporters. In a move that was widely interpreted as
payback for the paper's insufficiently slavish
reporting on the Iraq war, the Bush people
conspicuously omitted the Times and Bumiller from the
guest list. Characteristically, however, rather than
giving back in kind by ignoring the Bush p.r. stunt or
burying it in an inside page, the Times responded by
having Bumiller write a front-page story about it,
accompanied up top by the famous turkey photo in full
color.

How did she write the story? The same way she always
covered the White House, and went on to cover the
campaign: She took what was given to her, in this case
the pool report of the Washington Post's Mike Allen.

The pool report allowed her, she said, to write about
the trip "vividly, as if I had been [there]." Her
"vivid" descriptions of the dramatic journey she did
not actually go on included inspired passages of
pastoral magnificence like the following:

"Air traffic controllers in Baghdad did not know the
plane heading for the runway was Air Force One, and it
then landed without its lights in darkness, but for a
sliver of moon."

Far from being insulted at not having been invited,
Bumiller told her Yale audience that the Bush trip was
"brilliant politics." She made sure to point out to
the audience that the Times had taken care to insert
in her article a passage explaining that the piece had
been based on the account of another writer. "That was
a good addition, and it is in essence truth in
packaging," she said, adding that it was "inserted
largely because of the changes at the paper since the
catastrophe of Jayson Blair."

This is ironic again because, as noted previously in
this contest, no reporter in the campaign was more
consistently guilty of violating the "Jayson Blair
test" than Bumiller. In this particular
campaign-journalism fixture, reporters file campaign
pieces from remote state locations in which the entire
article could have been written from a burned-out
crackhouse 2000 miles away, using nothing but a
glimpse of a photo from the event and a Rolodex with
which to call friendly campaign aides.

The typical Bumiller campaign piece showed some
version of that same "sliver of moon" imagery and
sandwiched it around a lot of quotes from trail
regulars – who often, again, provided primarily
apocryphal insights into the mindset of the president
that could then be credulously reported to the public
as fact by the Greatest Newspaper In The World.

In one of her last campaign-trail pieces ("Entering
the homestretch with a smile," Nov. 1), Bumiller
followed this formula exactly. Ostensibly the action
takes place in two sites in Pennsylvania and New
Hampshire, but all we see of the locations is some
more (literally) pastoral descriptive stuff in the
lede:

Late last week at a campaign rally in a dark
Pennsylvania pasture, thousands of supporters listened
raptly to President Bush and then watched fireworks
explode overhead. But other pyrotechnics were going
off in a distant corner, where a giant scrum of
reporters ignored the candidate but hung on to every
word of a bombastic, deceptively cherub-faced man
Democrats love to hate.

He was Karl Rove, the president's political adviser...

In this particular, article Bumiller uses a technique
that my research indicates is peculiar to her alone.
In this passage, she actually swallows an apocryphal
story from one aide about another apocryphal story
about a different aide's apocryphal relationship to
the president. This is Bumiller, reporting from the
unseen alien planet New Hampshire, quoting Karen
Hughes telling a story about Karl Rove talking to
George Bush:

Other times Mr. Rove likes to playfully withhold news
of recent polls from the president. "He'll smile and
say, 'I'm not going to tell you about the latest
numbers,' but he'll have a big smile on his face," Ms.
Hughes said.

Bumiller told her Yale audience last year: "What I
write about is really important. Ninety-five percent
of it is interesting, and 30 percent of it is
absolutely riveting." One wonders which percentile
this insight about Rove falls under.

All campaign journalists fall into the habit of
writing long personality pieces about the
"man-behind-the-man" figures they spend so much time
with on the campaign. In the last two years there were
probably 10 times more profiles of Stephanie Cutter
and Ken Mehlman and Karl Rove and Karen Hughes and Joe
Trippi and Chris Lehane and Ralph Reed than there were
of laid-off workers, prisoners, illegal immigrants,
the uninsured or any of the other mysterious
categories of depressing individuals ostensibly
involved in the election.

Obviously, this was a crime in itself of sorts, as the
campaign press focused a lot more on the optimistic,
self-justifying soap opera of the campaign itself than
on the country's actual problems. The campaign press
was consistently far more fascinated with the drama
and the trimmings of power than it was with, say,
nuclear safety, or how people who collect AFDC checks
live. That's why the only time you saw a profile of a
"working-class Catholic girl" was when it was Karen
Tumulty writing about Mary Beth Cahill, the "miracle
worker" who brought back John Kerry's campaign from
the dead.

Now, if you're like me, you probably don't give a shit
about the fact that Mary Beth Cahill honed her
political reflexes at her working-class Boston dinner
table, where she was the bossy older sister in a
family with six children. But if you think that's
irrelevant, try giving a shit about the inner life of
the presidential tailor, Georges de Paris, whom
Bumiller amazingly profiled just a week after the
election, when half of the population was still trying
to talk itself down from the ledge in the wake of the
horrifying result.

Here's Bumiller quoting de Paris on Nov. 8:

"I love all the presidents, but President Bush is
something more special," Mr. de Paris said Friday,
perhaps employing the principle that it is best to
have the sitting president as No. 1. "He makes you
happy."

More insights, just days after Bush's reelection:

Mr. de Paris would not say how many suits he had made
for the president, although he did say that he was
responsible for a dark blue-on-blue stripe that Mr.
Bush wore for his "axis of evil" State of the Union
address in 2002. The president, he added, likes
full-cut trousers and his hand-sewn white Sea Island
cotton and French blue shirts... As Mr. de Paris
spoke, he sewed a lining with rapid, precisely placed
stitches into a new suit for the secretary of
commerce, Donald L. Evans, a close friend of the
president. Hand-sewn suits, Mr. de Paris said, take
three full days to make and are far more supple than
those made by machine. "It's the difference between
filet mignon and hamburger," he said.

Well, I guess if the administration won't tell you
anything about why it invaded Iraq, and if you don't
feel like making a fuss about it, you might as well
find out who made that blue-on-blue-stripe suit Bush
wore during his "Axis of Evil" speech.

Bumiller of course, was not completely immune to
concerns about the lack of substance in the campaign.
She demonstrated that most forcefully when she was one
of the moderators of a live televised debate of
Democratic candidates, held in New York on Feb. 29 of
this year.

You may remember that one: Bumiller was one of three
journalists, along with Dan Rather and Andrew Kirtzman
of WCBS, who moderated the last meaningful Democratic
debate. At the time, there were only four candidates
left: Kerry, Edwards, Sharpton and Kucinich. The
debate was remarkable because of the obviousness with
which the three panelists tried to steer the
discussion away from Sharpton and Kucinich. Early in
the debate, Bumiller cut Sharpton off in the middle of
one of his answers, about Haiti. When she tried it
again later on, Sharpton protested:

SHARPTON: If we're going to have a discussion just
between two – in your arrogance (ph), you can try
that, but that's one of the reasons we're going to
have delegates, so that you can't just limit the
discussion. And I think that your attempt to do this
is blatant, and I'm going to call you out on it,
because I'm not going to sit here and be window
dressing.

BUMILLER: Well, I'm not going to be addressed like
this.

And Bumiller made it clear later on that the press was
not going to be pushed around, when in an exchange
with Kerry she angrily insisted on the right to make
political labels an issue in the campaign:

BUMILLER: Can I just change the topic for a minute,
just ask a plain political question?

The National Journal, a respected, nonideologic
publication covering Congress, as you both know, has
just rated you, Senator Kerry, number one, the most
liberal senator in the Senate...

How can you hope to win with this kind of
characterization, in this climate?

KERRY: Because it's a laughable characterization. It's
absolutely the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen in
my life.

BUMILLER: Are you a liberal?

KERRY: Let me just...

BUMILLER: Are you a liberal?

KERRY: ...to the characterization. I mean, look,
labels are so silly in American politics...

BUMILLER: But, Senator Kerry, the question is...

KERRY: I know. You don't let us finish answering
questions.

BUMILLER: You're in New York.

This question – how can you hope to win if you're so
liberal – was what sank Howard Dean, was what allowed
the press to ignore Sharpton and Kucinich, was what
ultimately made it impossible for opponents of the war
to have a voice in this campaign. In most cases, this
demonization of the word and witch-hunting of anyone
who could be attached to it was a subtle thing whose
effect was cumulative. But Bumiller brought it right
out into the open, wore it like a badge of honor. And
looked like a smug, barking cow doing it.

One of the most pervasive themes of the post-electoral
wrap-ups was the relentless focus on the seeming
geographical intractability of the political
red-and-blue picture. Nearly every newspaper in the
country led with one version or another of the "nation
bitterly divided" theme, which within a day or two
morphed smoothly into the next round of post-mortems
speculating on the prospects for Bush to "unite" this
wounded nation (Bumiller did one of these,
incidentally).

Almost every part of the country woke up the morning
after the election to see a journalist on its local
daily's front page sounding this "divisiveness" theme.

"Now, as Bush, 58, looks forward to a second term, he
leads a nation as bitterly divided as ever over the
bruising presidential election campaign..." wrote
David Greene of the Baltimore Sun.

"The country is still divided, bitterly divided, and
[Bush's] plans controversial and not proven,"
countered Newsday.

"The nation may be as bitterly divided as ever, but
this one is in the books," sighed the Lincoln
(Nebraska) Journal Star, seemingly in relief.

And it must be admitted that some attention was given
to the relationship of the media to this divisive
picture. There was some hand-wringing in the press
about some errors it might have made in covering the
election, although as in the case of the Iraq war, it
was all the wrong kind of hand-wringing.

Much attention, for instance, was given to the
apparent fact, supported by exit polls, that
journalists had underestimated the role "moral values"
had played in determining the election. No less an
authority than Howard Fineman was one of many who
asserted that the media was out of touch with
mainstream America, and even offered his own mea culpa
on that score. Journalists "don't understand red-state
America," he said, adding, "I'm an indicted
co-conspirator."

But the unanswered question in all of this was: If the
nation was so bitterly divided, how come the campaign
press corps wasn't? Why did they all look so charged
up by the whole thing on television? Why did it seem
like, no matter what they might have said as pundits
on-camera, they were all such buddies off-camera? Why
was an avowed Bush-lover like Howard Fineman sticking
up for Maureen Dowd on MSNBC? Jon Stewart aside, was
there anyone out there in the business who took this
election personally enough to risk pissing off a
colleague over it?

The answer is no, not a one. It was all a game to
these people, which is why they covered it like a
game. There were some people I know personally out
there who hated it, who felt guilty about being part
of the whole ugly charade. But there were a lot more
who were really proud of this life of free lunches,
VIP seating and the chance to be the planted audience
for the occasional dick joke in an off-the-record chat
with some of the hired liars on Air Force One. The
maintenance of these privileges for certain people
dwarfed the more abstract matter of which millions
down there on the ground won or, more to the point,
which ones lost.

How does one decide the country's Worst Campaign
Journalist? Well, the one who loves his job the most
is probably a good candidate. Why not the reporter
whose first cheerful thought after the election was
the hand-sewn suit of Don Evans?

New York Press apologizes for not having a prize ready
for Elisabeth Bumiller, but hopes readers will allow
us time to try to make amends. We have four more
years, after all.

Matt Taibbi lives in New York. He covers politics for
Rolling Stone and the New York Press.

http://mediamatters.org/items/printable/200411240001

Media allowed conservative religious leaders to define
"moral values"
In five days following election, conservative
religious figures made 15 media appearances to
progressive religious leaders' five
Following the November 2 presidential election, Media
Matters for America documented the media's largely
unquestioning acceptance of the notion that "moral
values" determined the election. In their acceptance,
the media did not explain or define what voters meant
by "moral values." MMFA found that during the five
days after the election, network and cable news
outlets gave conservative religious leaders a forum in
which to provide that definition; these leaders often
appeared without other guests to counter their claims.
Between November 3 and November 7, conservative
religious figures appeared a total of 15 times on the
major broadcast and cable networks (ABC, NBC, CNN,
MSNBC, CNBC, and FOX News Channel, but not CBS) to
discuss "moral values," while progressive religious
figures appeared a total of only five times. MMFA
excluded Newsday columnists Rabbi Marc Gellman and
Monsignor Thomas Hartman of "The God Squad" from this
tally of figures. Although the two authors and
religious speakers did not openly endorse President
George W. Bush's reelection, they did speak of the
election results as an indicator of a deeply religious
nation, of which the "secular" coastal states are
"unaware."
Reverend Jerry Falwell, national chairman of the Faith
and Values Coalition and Moral Majority founder, and
Reverend Joe Watkins, a Bush-Cheney '04 campaign
adviser and talk radio host, appeared four times each
in the five days following the election. Reverend
Jesse Jackson was the only progressive religious
leader to make multiple appearances (three) in that
time period.
Four conservative religious figures appeared without
opponents on news programs between November 3 and
November 7: Watkins, Christian Coalition of America
founder Reverend Pat Robertson, Peter Sprigg, senior
director of policy studies at the Family Research
Council (which "promotes the Judeo-Christian
worldview"), and Focus on the Family founder James
Dobson. No progressive religious leaders appeared
alone.
Further, when not appearing alone, conservative
religious leaders were more often paired with
Democratic or progressive pundits who are not
religious figures than with progressive religious
leaders. For example, on the November 4 edition of
CNBC's Capital Report, Falwell was paired with
syndicated columnist and MSNBC political analyst Bill
Press. On the November 7 edition of CNN's Inside
Politics with Judy Woodruff, Randy Tate -- former U.S.
Representative and former executive director of the
Christian Coalition (which identifies itself as
"America's Leading Grassroots Organization Defending
our Godly Heritage") -- appeared opposite U.S.
Representative Barney Frank (D-MA). Watkins appeared
three times opposite progressive pundits who are not
religious figures (in his November 3 appearance on
CNN's American Morning, he was not described as a
"reverend" but as a "Republican strategist").
Progressive religious figures appeared only twice
without conservative religious counterparts: Jackson
appeared with conservative author and nationally
syndicated radio host William J. Bennett on the
November 7 edition of NBC's Today, and Reverend Al
Sharpton appeared on a panel (on the November 3
edition of MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews) that
also included NBC News chief foreign affairs
correspondent Andrea Mitchell, Newsweek managing
editor Jon Meacham, and Republican strategist Ed
Rollins.
Many of the conservative religious figures suggested
that Bush's victory shows public support for
Republican positions on issues such as gay marriage
and abortion. As MSNBC host Deborah Norville pointed
out, however, polling shows that Democrats are
actually more aligned with the American public than
Republicans are on those issues.
Here are some examples of conservative religious
figures delineating "moral values":
• Robertson claimed on the November 4 edition of FOX
News Channel's Hannity & Colmes that voters'
overwhelming opposition to gay marriage was the
decisive factor in the election: "President [George
W.] Bush ought to send roses to that bunch up there in
Massachusetts [the Massachusetts Supreme Court]. I
mean, they won him the victory. ... [T]o cater to a
two-percent minority in the United States, to give
them what they want [gay marriage] is insane. And the
American people aren't going to do that."
• Also November 4, Falwell asserted on CNN's American
Morning that "because of the issues of faith and
family, the unborn, the same-sex marriage, and the war
on terrorism ... Mr. Bush had to go back [to the White
House]." The same day, Falwell said on Capital Report
that in addition to those issues, "questioning 'under
God' in the pledge [of allegiance] and 'In God we
trust' on the coinage" and "kicking the Ten
Commandments out of schoolhouses, [and] courthouses"
had also contributed to "awaken[ing] a sleeping
giant."
• In addition to anti-abortion issues, on the November
7 edition of CNN's Inside Politics, Tate included "a
tax system where families can keep more of their own
money to spend on themselves" as a "moral values"
issue that benefited Bush at the polls.
• On CNN Live Saturday on November 6, Sprigg added the
"type of sex education" that students receive to "the
unlimited abortion license and the issues of same-sex
marriage" as crucial "moral issues" that determined
the election.
• Radio host and WorldNetDaily columnist Rabbi Shmuley
Boteach claimed on the November 4 edition of MSNBC's
Scarborough Country that another aspect was "the whole
issue of a moral focus ... in foreign policy. Guys
like me are sick and tired of the Democratic Party
being apologists for tyrants."
• On the November 3 edition of CNN's Paula Zahn Now,
Watkins suggested that black Democrats' religious
values spurred them to vote for Bush over Kerry: "I
had callers calling in [to my radio program] saying,
'I'm an African American, I am a Democrat, and I
normally vote Democrat, but this year because of my
faith, I'm voting for George W. Bush.'" (According to
exit polling, Kerry won 88 percent of the black vote.)

• On ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos on
November 7, Dobson warned that Republicans have a duty
to implement the policies of "morality," or else "I
believe they'll pay a price at the -- in the next
election."
The claim that the election was a rejection of
Democratic views on social issues was exemplified by a
particularly skewed panel on the November 4 edition of
MSNBC's Scarborough Country, which featured Rabbi
Boteach, Catholic League President William Donahue,
right-wing pundit Ann Coulter, former Republican
presidential candidate and MSNBC analyst Pat Buchanan,
Boston Herald columnist Mike Barnicle, and former
Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich. The two
religious leaders on the panel attacked and smeared
the Democratic Party. Donahue declared, "I think that
there's something in the Democratic Party. There's an
absolute animus, a hostility to people who hold
religion seriously. Either that or they were
delirious, in which case, you have got to get the
straitjackets. Put them in the asylum." Aside from his
claim that Democrats are "apologists for tyrants,"
Boteach also claimed that "Robert Reich is being
totally disingenuous when he blames the corporations
rather than the Democrats for the smut in the
culture." Host and former U.S. Representative Joe
Scarborough (R-FL) suggested that his panel provided a
balanced discussion of moral values because Donahue is
Catholic and Boteach is Jewish -- but he failed to
mention that both men hold highly conservative views:
"Rabbi, let me -- we've been talking about evangelical
Christians. Bill Donahue, obviously a Catholic. But
this isn't just about being a Christian, is it? I
mean, it goes beyond that." The "God Squad" appearance
on CNN also featured a Christian and a Jew (Hartman
and Gelllman) who presented a unified message on moral
values and the election.
Boteach and Donahue were not the only conservative
religious leaders to use the topic of moral values as
an opportunity to attack Democrats. On the November 3
edition of CNN's Anderson Cooper 360, Falwell compared
Kerry's unwillingness to oppose gay marriage through
an amendment to the U.S. constitution to the
unwillingness of many to strongly oppose slavery in
the mid-19th century: "the fact that he [Kerry] would
not support a federal marriage amendment, it equates
in our minds as someone 150 years ago saying I'm
personally opposed to slavery, but if my neighbor
wants to own one or two that's OK. We don't buy that."
The chart below summarizes religious leaders' network
and cable appearances between November 3 and November
7:
Conservative Religious Leaders Program Channel Date
Reverend Jerry Falwell Anderson Cooper 360 CNN 11/3
Falwell American Morning CNN 11/4
Falwell Capital Report CNBC 11/4
Falwell Anderson Cooper 360 CNBC 11/5
Reverend Joe Watkins American Morning CNN 11/3
Watkins Paula Zahn Now CNN 11/3
Watkins Good Morning America ABC 11/4
Watkins Paula Zahn Now CNN 11/5
William Donohue Scarborough Country MSNBC 11/4
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach Scarborough Country MSNBC 11/4
Reverend Pat Robertson Hannity & Colmes FNC 11/4
Randy Tate Crossfire CNN 11/5
Tate Inside Politics CNN 11/7
Peter Sprigg CNN Live CNN 11/6
James Dobson This Week ABC 11/7
The "God Squad" Program Channel Date
Rabbi Marc Gellman CNN Saturday Night CNN 11/6
Monsignor Thomas Hartman CNN Saturday Night CNN 11/6
Progressive Religious Leaders Program Channel Date
Reverend Al Sharpton Hardball MSNBC 11/3
Reverend Jesse Jackson Anderson Cooper 360 CNN 11/3
Jackson Crossfire CNN 11/5
Jackson Today NBC 11/7
Nun and author Karol Jackowski
American Morning CNN 11/4

http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=442

11/22/2004
Mysterious ‘George W. Bush: Our leader’ Clear Channel
political public service billboard graces Orlando
freeway
Filed under: General— site admin @ 8:39 pm Email This

By John Byrne | RAW STORY Editor

A billboard recently put up in Orlando bearing a
smiling photograph of President Bush with the words
“Our Leader” is raising eyebrows among progressives
who feel the poster is akin to that of propaganda used
by tyrannical regimes.

RAW STORY confirmed the billboard’s existence Monday
evening. At our behest, a member of an Orlando media
organization drove past the billboard on two occasions
and verified that it was indeed the one pictured.

The billboard pictured, which is on I-4, says that it
is a “political public service message brought to you
by Clear Channel Outdoor.”

The member, who declined to be named out of concern
for their employer, discovered a second billboard
bearing the same image along the same route, paid for
by Charles W. Clayton Jr.

The Clear Channel-sponsored billboard was not lit up
for drivers Monday evening. The Clayton billboard was.

Clear Channel Outdoor Orlando said they could not
respond to requests for comment this week because
their press person was “away.” They referred calls to
their San Antonio corporate parent, which did not
return two messages for comment.

Clayton’s firm, Charles Clayton Construction, said he
was traveling this week and couldn’t be reached for
comment.

The Orlando Associated Press bureau said they had seen
at least one sign but didn’t plan a story. They
suggested that the signs would only become a story
were there a public response to the billboards, and
that the county in which they were situated would
probably meet the signs with “a warm response.”

One Orlando resident penned a concerned letter to the
(registration-restricted) Orlando Sentinel on Saturday
about the billboard. As the site is restricted to
members, the letter appears below.

“The first thing I thought was, when was the last time
I have seen a president on a billboard?” wrote
resident Dianna Lawson. “Didn’t Saddam Hussein have
his picture up everywhere? What next, a statue?”

Orlando Sentinel Letters Editor Dixie Tate said they
wouldn’t have printed the letter were it false. Other
reporters at the Sentinel told RAW STORY they’d also
seen the billboard.

Others said they’d seen a similar sign in Jacksonville
along I-95.

“We don’t do political advertising,” said Jacksonville
Clear Channel sales representative Brad Parsons. He
said the photograph was probably bogus.

A second Jacksonville rep acknowledged the company did
political advertising but only when paid for by a
third party. When asked if he would look at the
picture for verification, he declined to give out his
email address.

Common Cause, the public interest advocacy group, said
the billboard probably wasn’t a violation of campaign
finance regulations, but expressed concern about Clear
Channel’s history and their use of billboard space to
support the Administration.

“I think it sort of exemplifies the fact that big
media companies are going to do all they can to stay
on the good side of the administration because they’re
very concerned about any efforts in Congress to
challenge their ownership,” Common Cause Vice
President for Advocacy Celia Wexler said Tuesday.

“Clear Channel has a history of weighing in in
controversial ways that don’t respect the diversity of
opinion,” she added. “It is in keeping with Clear
Channel’s vision of the world which is to not take
seriously an effort to serve the public interest or be
non-partisan.”

The posted was first noticed by the liberal forum
Democratic Underground.

The letter in the Orlando Sentinel:

Billboard message

On my way to work Wednesday morning, I looked up and
saw a giant billboard with a picture of George W. Bush
and the words “OUR LEADER” under it. The first thing I
thought was, when was the last time I have seen a
president on a billboard? What is going on? Didn’t
Saddam Hussein have his picture up everywhere? What
next, a statue?

I am so concerned with our country and the division. I
still stand by my vote, which was for John Kerry.
George W. Bush has a lot of work to do to change the
way I feel. Putting him up on a billboard does not
make him a better president. His actions speak louder
than words.

I wonder if anyone else finds the president’s picture
on a billboard odd? I’m sorry, but it reminds me of
countries with dictators, and it seems people are
making him out to be the messiah, the savior of our
world.

Fear, fear, fear. I’m tired of being afraid.

Dianna Lawson
Orlando

http://denvervoice.org/features/Nov_2004/who_is_the_denver_post.htm
Media Blackout on Election Fraud by Media News Group
Denver Post and 94+ Newspapers, Radio Stations, TV
Stations
Corporate Profits vs Civil Rights, and the Vote
by Kali Autumn Lynn
The Denver Voice
Denver, Co: November 26, 2004
To those of us on the inside of this issue, it seems
inconceivable that our local newspapers would offer a
front page story on election fraud in Ukraine while
ignoring stories of the same right here at home in the
United States. Every day, since November 2nd, 2004,
stories have emerged detailing such things as
malfunctioning voting machines, fraudulent election
records in Volusia, Florida, inconsistent numbers of
voter registrations vs. vote totals in Ohio, credible
university studies showing serious statistical
impossibilities in election results, and much more.
Yet, these daily revelations have been almost
completely ignored by our media. These reports are
coming not from persons with tin foil hats as is often
claimed, but from PhD level citizens, election
officials, and voting rights activists.
But to the rest of America, who get their information
from corporate owned media sources, there is nothing
missing from the daily news. That's because, if they
don't report it, it didn't happen. For most of
America, we trust our local papers to report honestly
and fairly. But what many of us don't realize is that
our local newspapers are not so local after all.

Protestors: End the Media Blackout on Election Fraud
One Local Protest
This past Wednesday, November 24th in Denver Colorado,
a small group went to the Denver Post headquarters to
protest a media blackout on coverage of the issue of
election fraud. They tried to see someone, anyone at
the Denver Post but where turned away at security
checkpoints consistently. Eventually the settled for a
phone number a vowed to return every Wednesday at noon
in greater numbers. According to one member, they have
not ruled out spreading the protest to other cities.
Aren't You a "News" Paper?
So question number one comes to mind; if the Denver
Post is just a local paper, why where they so
insistent that the public not be able to see them.
After all isn't "news" something timely? Aren't they a
"news" paper? Why the security? Is there something
bigger going on here. Shouldn't a "news" paper want to
know when things are happening in their community?
According to the Denver Post Web Site they are just a
local newspaper. Searching further reveals that they
are in fact owned by William Dean Singleton and Media
News Group, Inc. (the list of properties they hold is
woefully out of date on their web site). Media News
Group is located in the Denver Post Building and is
owner of at least 94 seperate media properties
including newspapers, radio stations, and television
stations in 12 states. See Media Holdings for a
partial list.
But is that all there is?
As early as May of 2000, Media News Group was working
on the purchase of KTVA in Anchorage Alaska, as
reported by the Peninsula Clarion
http://www.peninsulaclarion.com/stories/052300/ala_052300ala0pm060001.shtml.
This was in "In anticipation of changes in the
regulations governing the ownership of newspapers,
radio and television," according to the MediaNewsGroup
Web Site (c)2000. Now, I ask you this, how can the
purchase of a single television station be in
anticipation of a change in FCC law?
In 2002, KTVA, merged with the local fox affiliate
KTBY, which required special FCC approval, and began
selling joint advertising
http://www.medianewsgroup.com/CompanyNews/2002/121002.pdf.
This was only one in a landslide of mergers and
acquisitions that led to the empire you see today. At
some point Media News Group stopped listing all of
their holdings in one place. At least they stopped
listing multiple holdings in the same market in one
place.

The lists of media holdings I've compiled below come
from two web sites. Notice KTBY didn't appear on
either of them. In fact their corporate site is four
years old! In Denver, Colorado, The Denver Post and
The Rocky Mountain news began publishing joint weekend
editions, but are foggy about their actual
relationship..

What could be determined regarding the ownership of
the Rocky Mountain News is this. After the formation
of the Denver Newspaper Agency, all corporate reports
at the Colorado Secretary of States office,
http://www.sos.state.co.us, for both the Rocky
Mountain News' parent company, The Denver Publishing
Company, and the Denver Newspaper Agency are blacked
out... a whole new meaning for media blackout. Before
the merger, The Denver Publishing Company never
blacked out these reports.

It has become very difficult to determine just what
properties Media News Group owns since they stopped
updating their web sites several years ago. Still they
manage to keep an up to date web site for every one of
their daily newspapers.


The DOJ Loves US

Eventually I located the DOJ anti trust case for the
merger between The Rocky Mountain News and The Denver
Post http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f6500/6508.htm.
Apparently, the Rocky Mountain News was in "probable"
financial trouble so they where allowed to merge. No
hearing and a green light to raise advertising rates
even though Westword would be faced with the complete
loss of competitive bids for printing and other
publishers would be affected. A few groups even
contended that the Rocky Mountain News was not in
financial trouble.

Excerpt from DOJ case:

The Division expects that if established, the JOA
agency may raise prices substantially for newspaper
subscriptions and advertising, and it may restrict
output in other ways. However, the NPA was
specifically designed with the clear recognition that
these types of anticompetitiveeffects could very well
flow from the elimination of competition between
certain newspapers, that otherwise would be prevented
from combining by the federal antitrust laws.
For the reasons described below, the Antitrust
Division recommends that the Attorney General find
that the applicants in this matter have made an
adequate showing that the News is in probable danger
of financial failure and that the proposed Denver JOA
effectuates the policy and purpose of the NPA. As a
result, the Antitrust Division recommends that the
Attorney General approve the application without a
hearing, and immunize what appears to be an
anticompetitive agreement to eliminate competition
between these parties, one that would likely be found
illegal under the Clayton Act (15 U.S.C. §18) were it
not for the NPA.
// end of excerpt

The FCC Loves US

But does Media News Group really want to continue
their pattern of mergers and acquisitions in the same
markets?
This is taken Directly from the US Senates Web Site.
It is William Dean Singleton, of Media News Group's
testimony in which he explains why he should be
allowed to merge merge merge........ see the link for
the complete text.
http://commerce.senate.gov/pdf/singleton051303.pdf

TESTIMONY OF WILLIAM DEAN SINGLETON
VICE CHAIRMAN AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER
MEDIANEWS GROUP, INC.
IMMEDIATE PAST CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS
NEWSPAPER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA
Before the
SENATE COMMERCE COMMITTEE
May 13, 2003
1
Good morning. I am Dean Singleton, vice chairman and
chief executive officer of MediaNews
Group Inc., a private company that publishes 50 daily
newspapers—including The Denver Post,
the Los Angeles Daily News and The Salt Lake
Tribune—as well as 121 non-daily newspapers.
I am also the immediate past chairman of the Board of
the Newspaper Association of America. I
am very pleased to have this opportunity to appear
before the Committee today to discuss the
compelling reasons for eliminating the FCC’s long
outdated and counterproductive ban on
newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership.
The newspaper ban is the last vestige of a series of
“one outlet per customer” local media
ownership restrictions adopted by the FCC in the 1960s
and 1970s. Of these limitations, only the
newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership rule has remained
completely unchanged over the past
three decades, with only four permanent waivers of the
rule granted by the FCC over the last 28
years. All of the Commission’s other restrictions on
broadcast ownership have been either
eliminated or significantly relaxed over the years.
Aside from these four situations and the
newspaper/broadcast combinations that were
“grandfathered” when the rule was originally
adopted, newspaper publishers—alone among local media
outlets—have been completely barred
from participating in the broadcast markets of their
local communities.
This inaction on the part of the Commission is not for
a lack of evidence. To the contrary, over
the past few years, the agency has accumulated a
mountain of evidence supporting the repeal of
the newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership ban...........
So, we've established two things. Mr. Singleton wants
something from the government. Permission to merge
holdings in the same major markets. And he doesn't
want us to know what he's doing anymore now that the
company has gotten so big. So far though, he has every
reason to be happy with the republican leadership, and
the DOJ.
In June 2003, the FCC announced sweeping changes in
their cross ownership rules that would have allowed
large media conglomerates to expand drastically. Then,
just when it looked like Media News Group would get
everything they wanted from Republican FCC Chairman
Michael Powell, former Secretary of State Colin
Powell's son, who led the effort to revise the
ownership regulations, democrats and an odd alliance
of organizations managed to put a halt on the process.
See the report by the Associated Press:
http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/24-06242004-321843.html.
But Media News Group still got most of what they
wanted, for now.
In their 2-to-1 decision, federal judges threw out
rules that would have allowed greater ownership of
television and radio stations in the same market.
However, they also found that the FCC was within its
rights to repeal a blanket prohibition on companies
owning both a newspaper and a television station in
the same city. Current polls indicate that as the
public becomes more aware of this issue they are
against loosening of the restrictions on media cross
ownership. See study by the PEW research center
http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=188.
Further relaxation of these rules will depend heavily
on government sponsorship.
So what do we have so far? A strong desire to merge
and acquire, secrecy, and thank you to the son of the
Secretary of State of the Bush Administration. Oh and
a need for the current administration, who is very
friendly to media mergers, to stay put in order to
push through the FCC's agenda. Then along came
Kerry... Kerry was short sighted in this case. What
one thing could he possibly do to make all of our
major media hate him? Even if he was right?
The Democrats Don't Love US
John Kerry, ""I'm against the ongoing push for
reducing restrictions on media concentration," Kerry
said on August 6, 2004, echoing the question by Forbes
senior editor Brett Pulley. "It's contrary to the
greater goals of democracy for the country." see:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/media/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000600685.
Kerry said this right before all of the major media
outlets decided who to support for President.
This in effect said to every major media outlet in the
world, "I will limit your profit potential!"
Corporations exist to make money for their
shareholders and themselves, not to make the world a
better place. Maybe for some of them that is someplace
in the list, but number one is MAKE MONEY. That is why
the stock market works, that is why it is called
capitalism. Kerry made this statement just a few
months before the media corporations made their
endorsements for the presidential race.
Conclusions
So what conclusions can we draw? I've laid out the
facts. Decide for yourself. It seems pretty obvious to
me that:
Media News Group wants to merge and acquire. So much
so that they started buying up properties before the
laws changed because they were so sure they would
change. They buy up multiple properties in the same
market and have shown a growing tendency towards
secrecy in their holdings. Media News Group influences
legislation so that they can continue to merge and
acquire. They have the son of the Bush
Administration's former Secretary of State to thank
for changes in laws that allow them to grow. Continued
mergers and acquisitions give Media News Group control
over advertising rates and public
opinion/dissemination of information in major markets.
Their continued long term growth depends on continued
relaxation of laws regarding cross ownership of media
properties. Media News Group supported George W. Bush
for President.
Media news group has initiated a near total blackout
on coverage of the election fraud issue, an issue that
could potentially remove the republicans from office,
thereby resulting in the election of a government less
friendly to loosening of FCC cross ownership law,
severely hampering their ability to merge, acquire and
thus grow. This could force them to divest themselves
of properties, limit their ability to control
advertising rates and information, destroy their
growth potential. That is, if fraud where proven and
the elections invalidated.
Even if coverage of the fraud issue didn't result in
removal from office of any elected officials, it could
really upset them, and even cast a shadow of doubt
over many in office, lessening the likelihood that
Media News Group would be received favorably when they
ask the FCC for permission to acquire additional
properties or merge with properties in markets in
which they already have a presence. Make no mistake,
the stakes for them are high. According to Media News
Group's latest financial report, their total assets
are $1,334,844,000.00. For reference see
http://www.medianewsgroup.com/financialinformation/2004/10Q09312004.pdf.
This is an issue that is vital to the health of our
democracy yet because we have allowed big media and
politics to become so entwined and media companies to
exert so much control, they now determine the very
information we receive. They in effect have the
ability, for a great number in our society, to say
what is the truth. As a society we have allowed
ourselves to become disenfranchised from the truth,
giving this responsibility over to corporations whose
number one goal is to make money. In this case, the
truth is, corporate profits over democracy, civil
rights, and the vote.
Media Holdings of Media News Group (gathered from 2
Media News Group Web Sites)
California
The Daily Democrat - Woodland, CA
The Daily Review - Hayward, CA
Enterprise Record - Chico, CA
Times Standard - Eureka, CA
Alameda Times-Star - Alameda, CA
Argus - Fremont, CA
Daily Review - Hayward, CA
Daily Democrat - Woodland, CA
Chico Enterprise Record - Chico, CA
Ft. Bragg Advocate-News - Fort Bragg, CA
Lake County Record Bee - Lakeport, CA
Marin Independent Journal - Marin, CA
Mendocino Beacon - Mendocino, CA
Milpitas Post - Milpitas, CA
The Oakland Tribune - Oakland, CA
Pacifica Tribune- Pacifica, CA
Paradise Post - Paradise, CA
Oroville Mercury Registry - Oroville, CA
Red Bluff Daily News - Red Bluff, CA
The Reporter - Vacaville, CA
San Mateo County Times - San Mateo, CA
Times-Herald - Vallejo, CA
Tri-Valley Herald - Pleasanton, CA
Ukiah Daily Journal - Ukiah, CA
Willits News - Willits, CA
Los Angeles Daily News - Los Angeles, CA
LA.com - Los Angeles, CA
LA Daily News - Los Angeles, CA
Inland Valley Daily

LNS Post-Coup II Supplement (11/23/04)

Do the names Ferdinand Nahimana, Jean-Bosco
Barayagwiza and Hassan Ngeze mean anything to you?
They are the three Rwandan media executives convicted
of war crimes for inciting the Hutu to commit genocide
against the Tutsi in 1994. Perhaps someday, when the
truth about Iraq and 9/11 is understood, the
executives of the major network and cable news
organizations will be held accountable…if not at the
Hague for the war crimes in which they are surely
complicit, then at least in the court of US public
opinion for the abdication of their responsibility to
speak truth to power about massive vote fraud and
suppression in 2000 and 2004, as well as the gutting
of the US federal surplus for two reckless, unfair tax
cuts, the prostitution of the EPA, the denial of
science on global warming and stem cell research,
Medifraud, Enron, the phony “California Energy
Crisis,” and most importantly, the utter destruction
of the Middle East peace process, the cover-up of
their pre-9/11 negligence and post-9/11 incompetence,
and the lies they told to justify their foolish and
catastrophic military adventure in Iraq, that Mega
Mogadishu for which they fractured the Western
Alliance, violated the UN Charter, mocked the Geneva
Accords, sanctioned torture from the Office of the
White House Counsel and sacrificed thousands of US
soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis already…

It’s the Media, Stupid…

Please review these 16 news and opinion pieces and
share them with others.

Go to www.moveon.org and sign their petition demanding
a US GAO investigation of the 2004 election. Spread
the Univ. of Pennsylvania and UC Berkeley studies far
and wide. Provide financial support to
www.blackboxvoting.org. Follow the latest news on the
citizens revolts at www.democrats.com.

Bob Fitrakis, Columbus Free Press: Following four
community public hearings in Ohio about election
irregularities and voter suppression – two in the
capitol, Columbus, and one each in Cincinnati and
Cleveland – a clear pattern and practice of voter
disenfranchisement is emerging…
Olmedo translated at precinct 13-O, where 90% of the
votes were for Kerry and only 53 votes were counted.
The turnout of 21% was due to the lack of Spanish
instructions and the misspelling of names: “I noticed
that one named Nieves was misspelled as Nieues and the
pollworkers were not able to find his name, these
people were told to complete a provisional ballot
because their names were not on the list.”
In Cuyahoga County, according to the Secretary of
State’s website there are 24,788 provisional ballots,
most of them from the city of Cleveland, not its
surrounding suburbs. Secretary of State J. Kenneth
Blackwell served as Co-Chair of the Bush/Cheney Ohio
reelection committee.
There also seems to be an abnormally high vote count
for third party candidates who received less than
one-half of one percent of the statewide vote total
combined. For example, in precinct 4-F, the right-wing
Constitutional Law candidate Peroutka received 215
votes to Bush’s 21 and Kerry’s 290. In this precinct,
Kerry received 55% of the vote where Gore received 91%
of the vote in the year 200. These numbers suggest
that Kerry’s votes were inadvertently or intentionally
shifted to Peroutka.
In Cincinnati, sworn testimony was taken on vote
buying, the lack of machines in African American
neighborhoods and the deliberate destruction of new
voter registration cards by a private company hired to
process the forms.
Exit polls on Election Day from both the polling firm
Zogby International and CNN projected John Kerry
winning the state of Ohio. University of Pennsylvania
Professor Steven Freeman calculated the odds that the
exit polls in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania all being
wrong are 250,000,000 to one. Pollster John Zogby,
President of Zogby International, is quoted as telling
the Inter Press Service of Stockholm that “something
is definitely wrong.”
Zogby commented that he was concerned about the
discrepancy between the exit polls and the official
vote tallies stating “We’re talking about the free
world here.”
The Alliance for Democracy-Ohio is preparing a lawsuit
challenging the outcome of Ohio’s election results due
to the massive voting irregularities that have emerged
in sworn testimony and affidavits.

Jeff Cohen, www.commondreams.org: Among the reasons
some of us worked for Bush's defeat was to get a new
Federal Communications Commission. Many of us were
ready to fight for the elevation of commissioner
Michael Copps, a Democratic appointee, to FCC chair,
replacing Michael Powell, Colin's son. Powell is the
best friend of the media conglomerates. We need to
stop Powell from any further media concentration over
the next 4 years, and unions need to be in the
forefront of that resistance.
Thanks to media deregulation started during the Reagan
administration, and unfortunately continued by Bill
Clinton: there are now 8 companies that largely
determine what Americans see, hear and read through
the media -- 8 companies sitting on the windpipe of
the First Amendment.
We can thank Clinton's Telecommunications "Reform" Act
of 1996 for the right-wing Clear Channel's dominance
of radio and for the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast
Group becoming the biggest TV chain in the country.
Clear Channel owned 40 radio stations before the
Telecom bill and 1200 soon after. Sinclair had 11
stations before the bill, and now has 62 TV stations.
TV news is dominated by 5 corporations.
NBC, CNBC, MSNBC are owned by GE. When I worked at
MNSBC, some of the constraints imposed on the
"Donahue" show were the result of GE ownership and a
conservative NBC boss who'd come out of GE Financial
and GE's plastics division.

Steven Rosenfeld, Columbus Free Press: The lawyers
have taken sworn testimony from hundreds of people in
hearings in Columbus and Cincinnati, and will use
excerpts as well as documents obtained from county
election officials and Election Day exit polls to make
a case that thousands of votes were incorrectly
counted or not counted on Election Day… The 'Ohio
Honest Election Campaign' is a coalition of
public-interest groups and citizens interested in free
and fair elections. The three lawyers announcing the
challenge are associated with a variety of established
groups. Arnebeck is the counsel for Common Cause's
Ohio chapter and The Alliance for Democracy. Attorney
Susan Truitt is with Citizens Alliance for Secure
Elections-Ohio, www.caseohio.org. The boards of groups
have not yet formally endorsed the election challenge
but are expected to do so in coming days.
The Honest Election campaign is part of a populist
groundswell to safeguard voting rights. The 2004
campaign saw the most new voters in a generation. Even
though Kerry conceded on Nov. 3, many people were not
satisfied with national media explanations of the Ohio
vote. Scientifically designed nonpartisan exit polls
taken during the day showed a different result from
the result reported that night, when George W. Bush
was declared the victor.
Moreover, on Election Day there were long lines and
widespread accounts of people who did not get to vote
in urban Democratic-leaning precincts across the
state. These factors and other reports of voter
frustration, computerized voting miscounts and
still-changing provisional ballot counting rules left
many doubts about the unofficial vote count and George
W. Bush's 130,000 vote margin…
Others lawsuits may be announced next week, Arnebeck
said, because there is limited time to hold a
meaningful recount and to address election
irregularities before the Electoral College meets in
December.

Marjorie Cohen, www.truthout.org: Without much
fanfare, a number of lawyers are busy mounting court
challenges to the election. Lawsuits have been filed
and other actions are being taken in Ohio and Florida,
the two key electoral states. Members of Congress have
demanded a General Accountability Office investigation
of the election. The largest Freedom of Information
Act request in the nation's history has been launched,
and other efforts are in the works.

Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D., www.democrats.com: There are wholesale shifts of scores of votes from the Kerry column to other candidates, and astonishingly
low turnouts in certain precincts and entire wards.
The Ohio recount will prove these numbers to be fraudulent.
I may have identified only the tip of the iceberg. I
note that there are 17,741 uncounted ballots in
Cuyahoga County. Kerry's margin in Cleveland was
reportedly 108,659 votes with a 49.89% turnout. The
rest of Cuyahoga County had a 71.95% turnout. Such a
turnout in Cleveland would have given Kerry a margin
of 156,705 votes, left Bush with a statewide margin of
85,007 votes, and with 248,100 votes still uncounted,
nobody would be conceding Ohio.
This is a situation that demands rigorous
investigation. I can imagine Michael Moore going door
to door in Ward 4, Precinct F, looking for the 215
Peroutka voters, or in Ward 4, Precinct N, looking for
the 163 Badnarik voters. Or going door to door in Ward
6, Precinct C, to find out why the turnout was only
7.10% - or in Ward 13, Precincts D, F, and O, to find
out why the turnout was only 13.05%, 19.60%, and
21.01%, respectively.

www.mediamatters.org: The mainstream media have mostly
ignored a statistical study conducted by faculty and
students of the University of California at Berkeley
sociology department on voting irregularities in
Florida in the 2004 presidential election that found
major discrepancies in vote counts between counties
that utilized electronic voting machines (e-voting)
and those that used traditional voting methods. The
study, released on November 18, determined that
President George W. Bush may have wrongly been awarded
between 130,000 and 260,000 extra votes in Florida --
130,000 if they were all "ghost votes" created by
machine error, or twice that if votes intended for
Senator John Kerry were misattributed to Bush.
Even though decreasing Bush's margin of victory by as
many as 260,000 votes would not change the winner in
Florida, the findings of the study are still
important. The study, at the very least, highlights
the lack of accountability in counties that rely on
paperless electronic voting machines, and, more
generally, the lack of confidence inspired by a system
of elections that, as a November 18 article on
Salon.com noted, "so easily creaked and groaned under
the pressure."

William Rivers Pitt, www.truthout.org: In Franklin
County, Ohio, voting machines gave Bush 3,893 extra
votes in one precinct alone. "Franklin County's
unofficial results gave Bush 4,258 votes to Democratic
challenger John Kerry's 260 votes in Precinct 1B,"
according to the news story. "Records show only 638
voters cast ballots in that precinct. Matthew
Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of
Elections, said Bush received 365 votes there. The
other 13 voters who cast ballots either voted for
other candidates or did not vote for president."
In Craven County, North Carolina, a software error
on the electronic voting machines awarded Bush 11,283
extra votes. "The Elections Systems and Software
equipment," according to the news story, "had
downloaded voting information from nine of the
county's 26 precincts and as the absentee ballots were
added, the precinct totals were added a second time.
An override, like those occurring when one attempts to
save a computer file that already exists, is supposed
to prevent double counting, but did not function
correctly."
In Carteret County, North Carolina, "More than 4,500
votes may be lost," according to the news story,
"because officials believed a computer that stored
ballots electronically could hold more data than it
did. Local officials said UniLect Corp., the maker of
the county's electronic voting system, told them that
each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the
limit was actually 3,005 votes. Officials said 3,005
early votes were stored, but 4,530 were lost."
In LaPorte County, Indiana, a Democratic stronghold,
the electronic voting machines decided that each
precinct only had 300 voters. "At about 7 p.m.
Tuesday," according to the news story, "it was noticed
that the first two or three printouts from individual
precinct reports all listed an identical number of
voters. Each precinct was listed as having 300
registered voters. That means the total number of
voters for the county would be 22,200, although there
are actually more than 79,000 registered voters."
In Sarpy County, Nebraska, the electronic touch
screen machines got generous. "As many as 10,000 extra
votes," according to the news story, "have been
tallied and candidates are still waiting for corrected
totals. Johnny Boykin lost his bid to be on the
Papillion City Council. The difference between victory
and defeat in the race was 127 votes. Boykin says,
'When I went in to work the next day and saw that
3,342 people had shown up to vote in our ward, I
thought something's not right.' He's right. There are
not even 3,000 people registered to vote in his ward.
For some reason, some votes were counted twice."
Stories like this have been popping up in many of
the states that put these touch-screen voting machines
to use. Bey
ond these reports are the folks who attempted to vote
for one candidate and saw the machine give their vote
to the other candidate. Sometimes, the flawed machines
were taken off-line, and sometimes they were not. As
for the reports I just described, the mistakes were
caught and corrected. How many mistakes made by these
machines were not caught, were not corrected, and have
now become part of the record?

Bob Fitrakis, Columbus Free Press: Bob Fitrakis
One telling piece of evidence was entered into the
record at the Saturday, November 13 public hearing on
election irregularities and voter suppression held by
nonpartisan voter rights organizations. Cliff
Arnebeck, a Common Cause attorney, introduced into the
record the Franklin County Board of Elections
spreadsheet detailing the allocation of e-voting
computer machines for the 2004 election. The Board of
Elections’ own document records that, while voters
waited in lines ranging from 2-7 hours at polling
places, 68 electronic voting machines remained in
storage and were never used on Election Day.
The Board of Elections document details that there are
2886 "Total Machines" in Franklin County. Twenty of
them are "In Vans for Breakdowns." The County record
acknowledges 2886 were available on Election Day,
November 2 and that 2798 of their machines were
"placed by close of polls." The difference between the
machines "available" and those "placed" is 68. The
nonpartisan Election Protection Coalition provided
legal advisors and observed 58 polling places in
primarily African American and poor neighborhoods in
Franklin County.

Ted Rall, www.yahoo.com: Alberto Gonzales, on the
other hand, possesses one of the most twisted minds
the American legal system has ever produced.
If Bush gets his way, the nation's chief law
enforcement official will be a man whose warped
interpretation of presidential power, contempt for due
process and gleeful deconstruction of fundamental
human values puts him at odds with every patriotic
American.
Gonzales is the author of the infamous August 2002
"Standards of Conduct for Interrogation under 18
U.S.C. 2340-2340A," a legal opinion issued while on
his current job as White House Counsel. The 50-page
"torture memo," which provides government
interrogators justification to torture suspects in the
war on terrorism, isn't just another memo. It's a
benchmark position paper, a document that
Administration figures from Bush and Rumsfeld down to
CIA (news - web sites) interrogators at Guantánamo and
Abu Ghraib still rely upon to protect themselves from
possible future prosecution for war crimes.
First and foremost, Gonzales argues for a definition
of "torture" that omits the most commonly used tactics
banned by the Geneva Conventions. (Gonzales calls
Geneva as a "quaint" anachronism.) To qualify as
torture, he writes, the agony "must be equivalent in
intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical
injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily
function, or even death." Abuses previously banned by
the Army--"pain induced by chemicals or bondage,
forcing an individual to stand, sit or kneel in
abnormal positions for prolonged periods of time, food
deprivation, mock executions, sleep deprivation and
chemically induced psychosis," according to The
Washington Post--are now A-OK, according to Gonzales.
As long as Bush orders it.

Greg Palast, Salon: Now, the facts. Most voters in
Ohio cast their ballots for John Kerry, which should,
in accordance with Mrs. Gordon's civics lessons from
sixth grade, have given Kerry the Electoral College
majority and the White House. Trouble is, those votes
won't be counted…
Last Tuesday, in Ohio, Republicans played the
spoilage game for all it was worth. Over 93,000
ballots were chucked on the spoilage pile, almost all
of them generated by those infernal chad-making
punch-card machines.
Whose votes were lost in the chad blizzard?
According to a recent ACLU analysis of Ohio's system,
votes stolen away by punch-card machine error are
"overwhelmingly" found in African-American - read
"Democratic" - precincts.
After the swindle of 2000, who would have the
nerve to keep these machines in operation? Answer: the
co-chair of Ohio's Bush-Cheney reelection campaign, J.
Kenneth Blackwell, who also happens to have the
convenient post of Ohio secretary of state. Blackwell,
who makes Katherine Harris look like Thomas Jefferson,
concedes the racially bent effects of punch-card
voting; but in spite of this - or because of this - he
refused to replace or fix these machines for the 2004
election.
The result: 93,000 votes spoiled, uncounted.
Salon's Manjoo, ignorant of the ACLU's
precinct-by-precinct studies, simply dismisses out of
hand the assertion that most of those were Kerry
votes. But given that Ohio's spoiled ballots are
concentrated in black and poor communities, it is
hardly a wild leap to discern which candidate got
punched out by the punch cards.
Now, on to the second pile of no-count ballots, the
provisionals. And guess who got these second-class,
back-of-the-bus ballots? Once again, Ohio's
African-American voters.
The Republican Party declared the hunting season open
for dark-skinned voters in October, announcing a plan
to challenge "fraudulent" voters on a mass basis, the
first such programmatic attack on the franchise since
the days of the Night Riders.
And the tactic was very much the same as that used by
the allies of the White Citizens Councils and Bull
Conners in the early '60s: targeted and unequal
application of picayune registration and voting
requirements. The Ohio courts were not amused,
slapping down the Republican Party's challenge lists
before Election Day.
However, the party kept secret lists and a secret
program in its back pocket to ambush black voters on
Election Day, a scheme outed by BBC television the
week before the election…
Here's what we discovered at the BBC: several lists of
voters, every one of them in an African-American
precinct. Fletcher's official explanation (her third
variant, by the way) was that these were returned
undeliverable fundraising solicitations. Odd, that:
Many of the addresses were those of homeless men's
shelters, not where I'd expect a lot of Bush-Cheney
donors. And why were the Republicans sending
solicitations only to black voters? Is that their
normal funding group?
More suspicious is that these lists of
"undeliverable addresses" were sent, not to some clerk
at a direct-mail house, but to the chief of research
for the Republican National Committee in Washington as
well as the executive director of the Bush-Cheney
campaign in Florida. I guess they handle the clerical
overflow work.
Or maybe, as every expert told us, these were hit
lists meant to stop, impede, intimidate and slow down
voters in African-American precincts. The Republicans
have more than embarrassment to motivate them to
mislead us about the true purpose of these lists:
Profiling citizens of one race to block their voting,
even if each challenge itself has merit, is a criminal
violation of the Voting Rights Act.
Whatever their ultimate use of these lists,
whatever the Republican game plan, we have the result:
In Ohio, an astonishing 155,000 voters were shunted to
provisional ballots, where their votes would be
vulnerable to the partisan predation of GOP Secretary
of State Blackwell. And once again, the provisionals
were concentrated in the minority - that is,
Democratic - areas…
Add it up and the demographics of the spoiled and
provisional ballots - if they were all counted - would
overtake George Bush's teeny lead…
Kerry did not concede because he did not have the
votes. He conceded because he could not get them
counted. Kerry would have to demand a hand count of
the spoiled punch cards. But the hard fact is that,
just as Katherine Harris stopped the hand count of the
punch cards in Florida, Blackwell would undoubtedly do
the same in Ohio. And face it: In a legal showdown,
Blackwell could count on the help of that pus-hole of
partisanship, the U.S. Supreme Court. Been there, done
that. Add in the ballot-by-ballot litigation required
to force a count of all the provisional ballots under
rules à la Blackwell, and Kerry, realistically, didn't
stand a chance.
Unfortunately, neither did democracy.

Jason Webb, Reuters: Tens of thousands of people
streamed through central Santiago carrying banners and
chanting slogans against the U.S.-led occupation of
Iraq, including "Fascist Bush is a terrorist."

CNN: Plans for a state dinner for President Bush at
Chile's presidential palace were scratched Sunday
after the United States insisted on security measures
that Chile called unacceptable.
The change came a day after Chilean security guards
temporarily blocked one of Bush's Secret Service
agents from entering an official dinner.

M. Asif Ismail, www.publicintegrity.org: The Carlyle
Group, a Washington, D.C.-based private equity firm
that employs numerous former high-ranking government
officials with ties to both political parties, was the
ninth largest Pentagon contractor between 1998 and
2003, an ongoing Center for Public Integrity
investigation into Department of Defense contracts
found.
A dozen companies in which Carlyle had a controlling
interest netted more than $9.3 billion in contracts…
"Carlyle is the biggest single success in Washington
of a venture capital firm," Dr. Loren B. Thompson Jr.,
a national security expert at the libertarian
Lexington Institute, said.
The group cashed out many of its investments when the
stock of defense companies rose dramatically in the
aftermath of September 11 and the buildups to the
Afghanistan and Iraq wars…
Carlyle finally sold its stakes in United after taking
it public in the aftermath of the September 11
attacks. The Washington Post called the hugely
successful public offering "one of the most successful
single venture investments of recent years."
But United did not seem all that lucrative before
September 11.
"They [Carlyle] were really kind of in a pickle with
United Defense," McCutchan said. "They wanted to cash
out on the equity. There wasn't much money to be
made... When 9/11 happened and the defense budget took
off, suddenly they had a winner on their hands."
Even Carlyle, which typically does not disclose its
financial and operational details, crowed over the
sale.
"It was one of Carlyle's best investments," Carlyle's
Ullman told the Center. "We did make more than a
billion dollars on that deal, and we are very pleased
that we served our investors quite well."

Molly Ivins, Boulder Daily Camera: Whilst the punditry
wanders weak and weary in the deep fogs of the "moral
values debate," what say we pay some attention to what
is going on, eh?
According to Newsday, "The White House has ordered the
new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of
officers believed to have been disloyal to President
George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to
the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the
hunt for Osama bin Laden ..."
Bad Nooz. In the first place, the concept of "purge"
has not hitherto played much part in our history, and
now is no time to start. Considerable pains have been
taken to protect the civil service from partisan
pressure.
"Disloyalty to Bush," or any president, is not the
same as disloyalty to the country. In fact, in the
intelligence biz, opposing the White House is
sometimes the highest form of loyalty to country.

Bryan Bender, Boston Globe: A growing number of
national security specialists who supported the
toppling of Saddam Hussein are moving to a position
unthinkable even a few months ago: that the large US
military presence is impeding stability as much as
contributing to it and that the United States should
begin major reductions in troops beginning early next
year.
Their assessments, expressed in reports, think tank
meetings, and interviews, run counter to the Bush
administration's insistence that the troops will
remain indefinitely to establish security. But some
contend that the growing support for an earlier
pullout could alter the administration's thinking.
Those arguing for immediate troop reductions include
key Pentagon advisers, prominent neoconservatives, and
some of the fiercest supporters of the Iraq invasion
among Washington's policy elite.
The core of their arguments is that even as the US-led
coalition goes on the offensive against the
insurgency, the United States, by its very presence,
is stimulating the resistance.
"Our large, direct presence has fueled the Iraqi
insurgency as much as it has suppressed it," said
Michael Vickers, a conservative-leaning Pentagon
consultant and longtime senior CIA official who
supported the war.
Retired Army Major General William Nash, the former
NATO commander in Bosnia, said: "I resigned from the
'we don't have enough troops in Iraq' club four months
ago. We have too many now."

Marwaan Macan-Markar , Inter Press Service: Alarmed by
the pace at which consumer-driven lifestyles are
destroying the planet's resources, a leading
environmental body has set its sights on creating a
green-friendly haven replete with houses, restaurants,
shops and hotels.
Portugal will serve as the launching pad for these
planned ''eco-cities,'' said officials from the World
Wildlife Fund (WWF) as they revealed the blueprint for
the 'One Planet Living' initiative here Wednesday, at
a major conservation conference.
The 4,340 hectares of land south of the Portuguese
capital Lisbon, identified for this first phase in an
ambitious global drive towards alternative living,
will have by its completion 6,000 houses, apartments,
shops and hotels. The estimated cost, according to the
WWF, will be over one billion euros (1.3 billion U.S.
dollars).
''We aim to build a series of flagship communities for
people to live sustainably, and which are affordable
and comfortable,'' Eduardo Goncalves, coordinator of
the 'One Planet Living' initiative, said during a
meeting at the 3rd World Conservation Congress, in the
Thai capital, organized by the World Conservation
Union or IUCN.
''The quality of modern life will not be sacrificed in
these communities,'' added Claude Martin, director
general of WWF. ''They will be family friendly.''
The global congress has brought together 81 states,
114 government agencies, 800 plus non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) and some 10,000 scientists and
experts from 181 countries. It has been billed as the
one of biggest environmental meetings in history.

Restore the Republic!

Full texts and URLs follow.

http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2004/995

Columns
Bob Fitrakis

How the Ohio election was rigged for Bush
November 22, 2004

Following four community public hearings in Ohio about
election irregularities and voter suppression – two in
the capitol, Columbus, and one each in Cincinnati and
Cleveland – a clear pattern and practice of voter
disenfranchisement is emerging.

In order to understand the extent of the voter
suppression in the inner city of Columbus and Franklin
County, overwhelmingly Democratic wards, start with
the phrase: “Machines Placed By Close Of Polls” on the
last page of the county’s 17-page voting machine
allocation report.

This phrase at the end of the spreadsheet may be the
key in unraveling a deliberate and unprecedented plan
to repress African American and poor central city
voters. In statistics, when you see a bizarre
definition or measurement, it sends up red flags. Why
doesn’t the Franklin County Board of Elections have a
number for “Machines Placed By Opening Of Polls”?

It now appears that the Franklin County BOE placed
scores of machines too late in the day to alleviate
the long lines of voters who gathered to vote before
work and at lunchtime.

To better understand what the BOE did on Election Day,
consider the following analogy. The near east side of
Columbus needs four buses to move the population to
the downtown business district. Each bus will move 100
people. At the start of the business day at 6:30am,
there are only two buses running and another one with
a dead battery. After a few hours, the third bus is
put into use. Finally, towards the close of the work
day at 6pm, a fourth bus is deployed. The Central Ohio
Transit Authority then reports it had four buses
operating by the end of the business day. What matters
is not how many buses, or voting machines, were
operating at the end of the day, but rather how many
were there to service the people during the morning
and noon rush hours.

Questions remain as to where these machines were
placed and who had access to them during the day.

Pacifica reporter Evan Davis reported that a county
purchasing official who was on the line with Ward
Moving and Storage Company, documented only 2,741
voting machines delivered through the November 2
election day. The county’s own documents reveal that
they had 2,866 “Machines Available” on Election Day.
This would mean that amid the two to seven hour waits
in the inner city of Columbus, at least 125 machines
remained unused on Election Day. Ward holds the
exclusive three-year contract to deliver voting
machines in Franklin County.

If the BOE only had 2,741 placed initially, this would
explain the long lines in Columbus and voters leaving
the polls during the morning voting rush. According to
the Franklin County Board of Elections (BOE), in the
city of Columbus, where voters waited in the heavily
Democratic wards between 2-7 hours to cast the vast
majority of their votes for John Kerry, voter turnout
was 52.7%. In the affluent white suburbs of Columbus,
with far more voting machines available, the turnout
figure was 76.15%.

By contrast, 66.31% of registered voters went to the
polls in Cincinnati and turnout was 76.82% in the
suburbs. In Cincinnati, where more voting machines
were available, the difference between the city and
suburbs was only 10.5% compared to 23.45% in the
Columbus area. Cincinnati and Columbus have similar
demographics.

The Franklin County Board of Elections reported that
68 voting machines were never placed on Election Day.
In addition, Franklin County BOE Director Matt
Damschroder admitted on Friday, November 19, that 77
machines malfunctioned on Election Day.

Franklin County Commissioner Mary Jo Kilroy criticized
Damschroder for calling the elections “well-funded and
well-planned and that problems could not have been
averted, . . .” according to the Columbus Dispatch.

Damschroder, the former Executive Director of the
Franklin County Republican Party, told the Franklin
County Commissioners, “From our perspective, this
election was a success.”

Despite an increased registration of more than 167,253
new voters, Damschroder admits he ran the election
with a “fixed and exhausted” pool of voting machines,
the Dispatch reported. Kilroy pointed out that
Damschroder and Franklin County election officials
told her “We’re fine, we’re fine” and never requested
additional money over the initial allocation.

The Washington Post reported “Franklin is the only
Ohio county to use Danaher Control’s ELECTronic 1242,
an older-style touchscreen voting system.” Franklin
County’s voting machine allocation report shows that
Damschroder deployed his Danaher (formerly
Shooptronics) voting machines, which have been in use
since 1992, in a formula that favored Bush over Kerry.

In precinct 55-B on Columbus’ near east side, there
were 1,338 registered voters and, according to
Franklin County Board of Elections estimates, 956
active voters who had voted in the last two federal
elections. Despite voter registration being up 17%,
and by the BOE’s own guidelines the polling place
requiring ten machines (one per 100 voters), the
polling site had only three machines, one less than
for the 2000 elections.

The Election Protection Coalition that visited the
voting site between 7:30-8:30 a.m. documented a dozen
people leaving the polls, six to go to work and six
who were either elderly or handicapped. But things
were worse in other areas of Columbus.

In precinct 1-B where there were 1,620 registered
voters, a 27% increase in voter registration, the
precinct had five voting machines in 2000 and only
three in 2004. Where did they go? Out to Republican
enclaves like Canal Winchester, where two machines
were added since 2000, for a total of five to service
1,255 registered voters? Or were they re-routed to
Dublin 2-G where 1,656 registered voters apparently
needed six machines, twice the number of Columbus’
1-B?

Nearby in Dublin precinct 3-C, 910 registered voters
were allocated four voting machines. No doubt machines
were shifted from precincts like Columbus 44-G with
1,620 voters and registration up 25%, which lost one
machine from the 2000 elections to 2004.

In Cleveland, where a public hearing was held on
Saturday, November 20, there was a different pattern
of voting irregularities. These include heavily
Democratic wards with abnormally low reported rates of
voter turnout, three under 20%. In Precinct 6-C where
Kerry beat Bush 45 votes to one, allegedly only 7.1%
of the registered voters cast ballots. In precinct
13-D where Kerry received 83.8% of the vote, only
13.05% reportedly voted. In precinct 13-F where Kerry
received 97.5%, the turnout was reported to be only
19.6%.

One explanation comes from Irma Olmedo, who provided
the Free Press with a written statement of her
activities in the heavily Hispanic ward 13, which
contained the three low voter turnout precincts.

“Ohio does not have bilingual ballots and this
disenfranchises many Latino voters who are not totally
fluent in English . . . there were 13 poll workers at
the school and none knew Spanish. Some could not even
find the names of the people on the list because they
couldn’t understand well when people said their names.
. . . Some people put their punch card ballots in
backwards when they voted and discovered that they
couldn’t punch out the holes. They had not read the
instructions which were in English, that they had to
turn the card around in order to vote,” Olmedo stated.

Olmedo translated at precinct 13-O, where 90% of the
votes were for Kerry and only 53 votes were counted.
The turnout of 21% was due to the lack of Spanish
instructions and the misspelling of names: “I noticed
that one named Nieves was misspelled as Nieues and the
pollworkers were not able to find his name, these
people were told to complete a provisional ballot
because their names were not on the list.”

In Cuyahoga County, according to the Secretary of
State’s website there are 24,788 provisional ballots,
most of them from the city of Cleveland, not its
surrounding suburbs. Secretary of State J. Kenneth
Blackwell served as Co-Chair of the Bush/Cheney Ohio
reelection committee.

There also seems to be an abnormally high vote count
for third party candidates who received less than
one-half of one percent of the statewide vote total
combined. For example, in precinct 4-F, the right-wing
Constitutional Law candidate Peroutka received 215
votes to Bush’s 21 and Kerry’s 290. In this precinct,
Kerry received 55% of the vote where Gore received 91%
of the vote in the year 200. These numbers suggest
that Kerry’s votes were inadvertently or intentionally
shifted to Peroutka.

In Cincinnati, sworn testimony was taken on vote
buying, the lack of machines in African American
neighborhoods and the deliberate destruction of new
voter registration cards by a private company hired to
process the forms.

Exit polls on Election Day from both the polling firm
Zogby International and CNN projected John Kerry
winning the state of Ohio. University of Pennsylvania
Professor Steven Freeman calculated the odds that the
exit polls in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania all being
wrong are 250,000,000 to one. Pollster John Zogby,
President of Zogby International, is quoted as telling
the Inter Press Service of Stockholm that “something
is definitely wrong.”

Zogby commented that he was concerned about the
discrepancy between the exit polls and the official
vote tallies stating “We’re talking about the free
world here.”

The Alliance for Democracy-Ohio is preparing a lawsuit
challenging the outcome of Ohio’s election results due
to the massive voting irregularities that have emerged
in sworn testimony and affidavits.

--
Bob Fitrakis has a Ph.D in Political Science and a
J.D. He is a lawyer working with the Alliance for
Democracy-Ohio and the Editor of the Columbus Free
Press. Reporting in this article also came from
Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D and Joe Knapp
(http://copperas.com/fcelection/wardbubble.jpg). For
additional documentation, visit
http://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/900.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1122-31.htm

Published on Monday, November 22, 2004 by
CommonDreams.org
Media and the Election
by Jeff Cohen

You all know about journalists embedded with the
troops in Iraq. I started out as a media critic at
FAIR and, as if in a slow-motion nightmare, I ended up
embedded inside the mainstream media. I've worked as a
panelist/commentator over the years at all three cable
news channels.

What I've found inside TV news is a drunken exuberance
for stories involving celebrity, lurid crime and sex
scandal -- matched by a grim timidity and fear of
offending the powers that be, especially if they're
conservatives. The biggest fear is of doing anything
that could get you or your network accused of being
liberal.

In 2002, I was an on-air commentator at MSNBC, and
also senior producer on the "Donahue" show, the
most-watched program on the channel. In the last
months of the program, before it was terminated on the
eve of the Iraq war, we were ordered by management
that every time we booked an antiwar guest, we had to
book 2 pro-war guests. If we booked two guests on the
left, we had to book 3 on the right. At one meeting, a
producer suggested booking Michael Moore and was told
that she would need to book 3 right-wingers for
balance. I considered suggesting Noam Chomsky as a
guest, but our studio couldn't accommodate the 86
right-wingers we would have needed for balance.

When we look at the media's role in the 2004 election,
we make a mistake to focus on election coverage per
se. The basis for Bush's victory was in place way
before 2004. At the end of last year, a huge study
done by the University of Maryland's PIPA, the Program
on International Policy Attitudes, found that most of
those who got their news from the commercial TV
networks held at least 1 of 3 fundamental
"misperceptions" about the war in Iraq (and some held
2 or 3 of them):

that Iraq had been directly linked to 9/11

that WMDs had been found in Iraq

that world opinion supported the U.S. invasion of
Iraq.

Viewers of Fox News, where I worked for years, were
the most misled. But strong majorities of CBS, ABC,
NBC and CNN viewers were also confused on at least one
of these points. Among those informed on all 3
questions, only 23 percent supported Bush's war.

How can you have a meaningful election in a country
where, according to polls, half or more of the
American people don't know who attacked us on 9/11?
They think Saddam Hussein was involved.

To help Bush mislead Americans, Fox News Channel
required that the banner "War on Terror" run when Iraq
was discussed.

I was at MSNBC when Tom Ridge was holding a news
conference at Homeland Security in late 2002 about
alleged new terror threats from Al Qaeda -- and MSNBC
ran a lower third: "Showdown with Saddam."

At MSNBC, I was asked to debate Frank Gaffney, the
former Reagan official who seems to live on TV, in a
segment based on Gaffney's claim that not only was
Saddam Hussein behind 9/11, he was also behind Tim
McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing! I'm not
kidding.

Last month, PIPA released a new study that found
majorities of Bush supporters, sometimes huge
majorities, not only had major misunderstandings of
the basic facts about Iraq, but they were misled on
all sorts of other Bush positions. 74 percent of Bush
supporters believed that Bush favors inclusion of
labor and environmental standards in trade agreements.

60 percent of Bush supporters said the US should not
have initiated a war with Iraq unless evidence
established that Iraq had WMDs and was supporting the
Al Qaeda terrrorists. This should have been a bloc of
Kerry voters. But they were unaware the evidence did
not exist.

These are faith-based voters -- not fact-based voters.

Among the reasons some of us worked for Bush's defeat
was to get a new Federal Communications Commission.
Many of us were ready to fight for the elevation of
commissioner Michael Copps, a Democratic appointee, to
FCC chair, replacing Michael Powell, Colin's son.
Powell is the best friend of the media conglomerates.
We need to stop Powell from any further media
concentration over the next 4 years, and unions need
to be in the forefront of that resistance.

Thanks to media deregulation started during the Reagan
administration, and unfortunately continued by Bill
Clinton: there are now 8 companies that largely
determine what Americans see, hear and read through
the media -- 8 companies sitting on the windpipe of
the First Amendment.

We can thank Clinton's Telecommunications "Reform" Act
of 1996 for the right-wing Clear Channel's dominance
of radio and for the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast
Group becoming the biggest TV chain in the country.
Clear Channel owned 40 radio stations before the
Telecom bill and 1200 soon after. Sinclair had 11
stations before the bill, and now has 62 TV stations.

TV news is dominated by 5 corporations.

NBC, CNBC, MSNBC are owned by GE. When I worked at
MNSBC, some of the constraints imposed on the
"Donahue" show were the result of GE ownership and a
conservative NBC boss who'd come out of GE Financial
and GE's plastics division.

Fox News is owned by the right-wing Rupert Murdoch
(and News Corporation), and does Murdoch's ideological
bidding.

ABC is owned by Disney. You'll remember that CEO
Michael Eisner said that Disney wouldn't distribute
"Fahrenheit 911" because Disney "didn't want to be in
the middle of a politically-oriented film during an
election year." Eisner's comment was allowed to pass
only because so few people realize that Disney is one
of the biggest purveyors of political opinion this
election year and every recent election year -- almost
all of it right-wing political opinion. Each day in
major radio markets nationwide, Disney radio stations
serve up hour after hour of Limbaugh, Sean Hannity,
Bill O'Reilly, Laura Ingraham, Matt Drudge, etc. etc.

CBS News, owned by Viacom, got taken in by forged
documents -- and then censored accurate reporting
critical of Bush, apparently at the behest of Viacom's
CEO, Sumner Redstone. Six weeks before the election
Redstone endorsed Bush on behalf of Viacom: "From a
Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican
administration is a better deal. Because the
Republican administration has stood for many things we
believe in, deregulation and so on."

Until broadcasting is demonopolized and removed from
the control of these corporations, and until major
insulated funding goes to genuine public broadcasting,
misinformed voters will be easy prey for political
demagoguery in election after election.

When I lecture about media in culturally conservative
places, as I did this week in West Virginia, what
comes as a shock to people, including the so-called
"values voter," is that what they see as sleaze on TV
and radio is not brought to them by the "liberal
media" but by Republican-endorsing media moguls like
Murdoch and Redstone.

The spectrum of debate in our country keeps getting
pushed further rightward by corporate media. Look at
what passes for left-right debates in the distorting
lens of national TV. Many complain about the Fox News
pairing of forceful, telegenic Sean Hannity on the
right against the less telegenic, often backpedaling
Alan Colmes. But Fox News Channel did not invent the
narrow center-right, GE to GM spectrum. That was
firmly in place thanks to PBS and CNN years before Fox
News Channel was invented. Indeed, FAIR has recruited
thousands of members and subscribers over the years
through full-page magazine ads with pictures of folks
like Michael Kinsley, Mark Shields and others -- with
the headline: "I'm not a leftist, but I play one on
TV."

Almost all those who regularly represent the left on
TV support corporate globalization and NAFTA; a TV
rightist like Pat Buchanan opposes it. TV leftists
tend to defend the immorality of media corporations
while only rightists attack it. On CNN and NBC this
election season, Time magazine's Joe Klein was
presented as the left side of the debate against
various hardcore rightwingers. A few months ago in a
Time column, Klein hailed the corporate sponsored
Democratic Leadership Council for supporting "fiscal
responsibility and free trade" within the Democratic
Party and for "gleefully assaulting the reactionary
left -- the trade unions and bureaucrats."

Every day on TV and radio, you can hear from regular
hosts and pundits who are proud allies of the
anti-abortion movement, proud allies of the NRA
movement, proud allies of the religious right
movement. You don't hear from regulars who are proud
allies of the labor movement.

Moving briefly from punditry to what passes for
"objective reporting," too many reporters have become
easily manipulated by Republican operatives. They
allowed false and defamatory Swift Boat ads to
dominate coverage for weeks; their fact-checking of
campaign and debate claims has often meant that if
they identify 2 huge whoppers from Bush, they have to
inflate or invent 2 Kerry claims in the name of a
false balance that actually distorts the news. FAIR
has written thousands of words this year on "false
balance" in election coverage.

Ending on good news: The movement to challenge media
bias has never been stronger among progressive and
union activists, and the movement to challenge media
concentration has never been stronger. We had a real
victory in 2003 in resisting FCC proposals to allow
even greater media consolidation, with a coalition
that started with groups like Free Press and FAIR and
MoveOn and Common Cause and then attracted groups on
the right to the effort: the NRA and the Parents
Television Council. One easy way to get involved in
these battles is to sign up for activist alerts at
FAIR's website: http://www.fair.org.

Remarks made at ILCA workshop in Washington, D.C.,
Nov. 12, 2004

Jeff Cohen founded FAIR, the New York-based media
watch group. He's been a nationally-syndicated
columnist, TV commentator and communications director
of the Kucinich for President campaign

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/112204Y.shtml

Ohio Presidential Results to be Challenged
By Steven Rosenfeld
FreePress.org

Saturday 20 November 2004

Ohio's 2004 presidential vote will be challenged as
soon as next week in the state Supreme Court, a
coalition of public-interest lawyers announced Friday.

The lawyers have taken sworn testimony from hundreds
of people in hearings in Columbus and Cincinnati, and
will use excerpts as well as documents obtained from
county election officials and Election Day exit polls
to make a case that thousands of votes were
incorrectly counted or not counted on Election Day.

"The objective is to get to the truth," said
Columbus Ohio lawyer Cliff Arnebeck, coordinator of
the Ohio Honest Elections Campaign. "What's critically
important, whether it's President Bush or Sen. Kerry,
whoever's been elected actually elected, is to know
you won by an honest election. So it's in the interest
of both sides as American citizens to know the truth
and have this answered."

The challenge comes as the Green Party has plans to
file for a recount of the state's 2004 presidential
vote. The Green Party and the Ohio Honest Elections
Campaign both believe the unofficial results announced
on Election Day were wrong. Ohio Secretary of State
Ken Blackwell has not yet certified the Nov. 2 vote.
The state's election law says an election challenge
must show the wrong candidate was been declared the
winner, or it can be dismissed without a hearing. The
state Supreme Court's chief justice hears the case.

The Ohio Republican Party dismissed the challenge on
Friday, the Associated Press reported, but the
coalition announcing it said they were ready to
litigate.

"The sworn statements that we've received should
give everyone cause to go forward in terms of this
inquiry," said Robert Fitrakis, a lawyer, political
science professor at Columbus State Community College,
and editor at www.freepress.org, at the announcement.

The 'Ohio Honest Election Campaign' is a coalition
of public-interest groups and citizens interested in
free and fair elections. The three lawyers announcing
the challenge are associated with a variety of
established groups. Arnebeck is the counsel for Common
Cause's Ohio chapter and The Alliance for Democracy.
Attorney Susan Truitt is with Citizens Alliance for
Secure Elections-Ohio, www.caseohio.org. The boards of
groups have not yet formally endorsed the election
challenge but are expected to do so in coming days.

The Honest Election campaign is part of a populist
groundswell to safeguard voting rights. The 2004
campaign saw the most new voters in a generation. Even
though Kerry conceded on Nov. 3, many people were not
satisfied with national media explanations of the Ohio
vote. Scientifically designed nonpartisan exit polls
taken during the day showed a different result from
the result reported that night, when George W. Bush
was declared the victor.

Moreover, on Election Day there were long lines and
widespread accounts of people who did not get to vote
in urban Democratic-leaning precincts across the
state. These factors and other reports of voter
frustration, computerized voting miscounts and
still-changing provisional ballot counting rules left
many doubts about the unofficial vote count and George
W. Bush's 130,000 vote margin.

Those concerns coalesced into a grassroots campaign
for an answer. Within two weeks following Election
Day, Arnebeck had talked to the Green and Libertarian
Parties about filing for a recount - if the funds
could be raised. The Greens and the Honest Election
Campaign started fundraising the same day, and in less
than a week, the Greens had raised $150,000 via their
website to file for the recount. The Ohio Honest
Election Campaign raised about $90,000 via the
Alliance for Democracy site, after two Air America
Radio hosts, Laura Flanders and Randi Rhodes, embraced
the cause and talked up the campaign.

Meanwhile, FreePress.org's Bob Fitrakis inspired Amy
Kaplan and Jonathan Meier, two young members of the
League of Pissed-Off Voters' Ohio chapter
(www.indyvoter.org) to organize public hearings to
gather testimony under oath of the people who saw or
experienced what they thought was voter suppression or
intimidation. Such intentional acts would violate the
federal Voting Rights Act. Two hearings were held in
Columbus and hundreds of people showed up and
testified. Then activists in Cincinnati and Cleveland
organized hearings.

At these hearings, scores of people said too few
voting machines were put in Democratic-leaning
inner-city precincts, creating long lines and
deterring many people from voting. In contrast,
Republican-leaning suburbs had plenty of voting
machines and did not have the long lines. There were
also reports of miscounts by computer voting machines,
as well as errors registering the wrong candidate for
president. Minority voters also spoke of
disproportionately getting provisional ballots,
including long-time residents.

Early in the weeks those hearings were being held,
the Green and Libertarian Parties announced they would
seek a statewide recount. By week's end, the Honest
Election Campaign announced its intention to challenge
presidential election result at the Ohio Supreme
Court.

Others lawsuits may be announced next week, Arnebeck
said, because there is limited time to hold a
meaningful recount and to address election
irregularities before the Electoral College meets in
December.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/112204A.shtml

Litigating the Election
By Marjorie Cohn
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Monday 22 November 2004

Without much fanfare, a number of lawyers are busy
mounting court challenges to the election. Lawsuits
have been filed and other actions are being taken in
Ohio and Florida, the two key electoral states.
Members of Congress have demanded a General
Accountability Office investigation of the election.
The largest Freedom of Information Act request in the
nation's history has been launched, and other efforts
are in the works.

Is there substance to these challenges? On
Thursday, the University of California's Berkeley
Quantitative Methods Research Team released a
statistical study - the sole method available to
monitor the accuracy of e-voting - reporting
irregularities associated with electronic voting
machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more
excess votes to Bush in Florida. The three counties
where the voting anomalies were most prevalent were
also the most heavily Democratic: Broward, Palm Beach
and Miami-Dade, respectively. The official tally in
Florida shows Bush with 380,978 more votes than Kerry.

Recount, Lawsuits, Hearings in Ohio

Green Party candidate David Cobb and Libertarian
Party candidate Michael Badnarik have sought a recount
of the votes in Ohio. A demand for a recount can only
be filed by a presidential candidate who was on the
ballot or a certified write-in candidate. Alleged
improprieties in Ohio include mis-marked and discarded
ballots, problems with electronic voting machines, and
the targeted disenfranchisement of African-American
voters. Although a recount doesn't typically begin
until after the vote has been certified (December 6),
Cobb and Badnarik have asked for the recount to
proceed forthwith for fear there won't be sufficient
time to complete the recount in time for the December
13 date on which the Ohio presidential electors will
meet.

Bush now leads Kerry by about 136,000 votes in
Ohio. A battle is looming over nearly 155,000
provisional ballots, which might decide who really won
the election. The Ohio Democratic Party has joined a
lawsuit by elector Audrey J. Schering, which asks U.S.
District Judge Michael H. Watson to order Ohio
Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell to impose uniform
standards for counting provisional ballots on all 88
counties. The lawsuit cites the U.S. Supreme Court's
opinion in Bush v. Gore, which "held that the failure
to provide specific standards for counting of ballots
that are sufficient to assure a uniform count
statewide violates the Equal Protection Clause of the
United States Constitution." Attorney Donald J.
McTigue, who filed the suit, told me that although
many of the provisional ballots are being counted, his
client is concerned about those that are not being
counted. Blackwell has provided only limited
instruction about which provisional ballots to count.
But many doubts remain about how different election
boards determine whether someone is a registered
voter. Some may type the name in on a computer; others
may look for typographical errors; still others may
look at the hard copy. McTigue worries that there is
no way of knowing what each board is doing. Do they go
back to the purged files? Were they properly purged?

Of the 11 counties that had completed checking
provisional ballots by Wednesday, 81 percent have been
ruled valid. McTigue expects the counting of
provisional ballots to last at least two more weeks.

On Election Day, Sarah White filed a class action
against Blackwell and the Board of Elections of Lucas
County, claiming they violated the Help America Vote
Act, passed in the wake of the 2000 election debacle,
that gives voters in federal elections a right to cast
provisional ballots. White claimed that although she
requested an absentee ballot one month before the
election, she never received one. Blackwell ruled that
persons who had requested, but not received their
absentee ballots, would not be permitted to cast a
provisional ballot. U.S. District Judge David A. Katz,
however, ordered that "the Board of Elections of Lucas
County shall immediately advise all precincts to issue
provisional ballots to those voters who appear at the
voting place and assert their eligibility to vote,
including that the voter is a registered voter in the
precinct in which he or she desires to vote, and that
the voter is eligible to vote in an election for
Federal office."

Last week, the Ohio Election Protection Coalition
held public hearings in Columbus. Extensive sworn and
written testimony of Ohio voters, precinct judges,
poll workers, legal observers, and party challengers
revealed a widespread and concerted effort by
Blackwell to deny primarily African-American and young
voters the right to cast their ballots within a
reasonable time. Precincts were deprived of adequate
numbers of voting machines, so voters waited in lines
from 2-7 hours, even though 68 electronic voting
machines remained in storage and were never used on
Election Day. Blackwell, who oversaw the election in
Ohio, also served as co-chair of the Ohio Bush-Cheney
reelection campaign. Lawyers for the Ohio Election
Protection Coalition plan to use the testimony from
the Columbus hearings to challenge the results of
Ohio's presidential vote in the state Supreme Court
next week.

Lawsuits in Florida

On Election Day, the American Civil Liberties
Union of Florida and Florida Legal Services sued
Miami-Dade County and Broward County election
officials in U.S. District Court for denying voters
sufficient time to mail in absentee ballots. The
Broward County Supervisor of Elections sent 13,300
absentee ballots to voters late. Plaintiffs Fay
Friedman, Adam Meyer, and Daniel Benhaim claimed the
two counties violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and
the First and Fourteenth Amendments because they did
not receive their absentee ballots until Election Day,
and it was therefore impossible to comply with state
law requiring persons who are out-of-state but present
in the U.S. to submit absentee ballots by 7 P.M. on
Election Day. Under Florida state law, a separate rule
gives more time to absentee voters outside the U.S.,
who may postmark their ballots by November 2 as long
as the ballot arrives within 10 days after the
election. JoNel Newman, a Florida Legal Services
attorney, says, "The rules governing absentee ballots
should apply equally to every voter, whether they are
temporarily in other parts of the country or
overseas." On Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Alan
Gold denied plaintiffs' motion for a preliminary
injunction to include the late ballots in the final
vote tally; however, the lawsuit remains alive for
trial on a request to apply the late counting rule
used for foreign absentees to domestic ballots.

Opponents of slot machines at South Florida
pari-mutuels filed a lawsuit seeking an official
recount of about 78,000 absentee ballots cast in
Broward County on Amendment 4. About 94 percent of the
new votes on the amendment were "yes" and only 6
percent were "no," a "statistical anomaly." No hearing
has yet been scheduled on the case.

Recount in New Hampshire

Pursuant to a request by Ralph Nader, votes in
some New Hampshire towns are being recounted. An
analysis showed wide differences in voting trends
between the 2000 and 2004 elections; about three
quarters of precincts with severe changes used Diebold
optical scanning machines. Last week, Diebold agreed
to pay $2.6 million to settle a lawsuit with the state
of California. Diebold officials misled state leaders
about the security and certification of its products
to get payments from the state, according to
California Attorney General Bill Lockyer. Diebold,
which helped to count the Ohio vote with e-voting
machines and optical scan machines, is headed by
Republican CEO Wally O'Dell. Last year, O'Dell wrote
to Ohio Republican donors, saying he was "committed to
helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the
President next year."

Lawsuits Challenge Mayoral Results in San Diego

Election results in San Diego's mayoral race
remain in doubt. The unofficial tally shows Mayor Dick
Murphy the victor. But write-in votes for Donna Frye
have been excluded because voters did not darken the
oval on the left of the line where they wrote in
Frye's name. A lawsuit seeks to force the county
registrar of voters to count the excluded write-in
votes, which many believe will tip the results in her
favor. Two other lawsuits are attempting to have
Frye's candidacy ruled illegal and force a runoff
between Murphy and Supervisor Ron Roberts. Frye ran on
a platform critical of Murphy's financial leadership
and the culture of secrecy at City Hall.

Congressmen Request GAO Investigation

Three members of Congress - John Conyers, Jr.,
Jerrold Nadler, and Robert Wexler - wrote to the
Government Accountability Office on November 5,
requesting an immediate 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. The Congressmen cited an electronic
voting system in Columbus, Ohio, that gave Bush 4,000
extra votes; an electronic tally of a South Florida
gambling ballot initiative that failed to record
thousands of votes; a North Carolina county that lost
more than 4,500 votes due to a mistaken belief by
officials that a computer that stored ballots could
hold more data than it did; a substantial drop off in
Democratic votes in proportion to voter registration
in counties utilizing optical scan machines that was
apparently not present in counties using other
mechanisms; and numerous reports from Youngstown,
Ohio, as well as Palm Beach, Broward and Dade counties
in Florida, that voters who attempted to cast a vote
for John Kerry on electronic voting machines saw their
votes instead recorded as votes for Bush.

Freedom of Information Act Requests

Blackboxvoting.org, a nonpartisan, nonprofit
consumer protection group for elections, has filed the
largest Freedom of Information Act request in history.
It seeks the internal computer logs (which are public
records ) from voting machines from every county that
used electronic voting machines. The organization has
initiated fraud investigations in selected counties.
It needs lawyers to enforce public records laws, as
well as computer security professionals and citizen
volunteers.

Open Records Act Motions

Cindy Cohn, Legal Director of the Electronic
Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, told me that
independent testing of voting machines could shed
light on why so many people who tried to vote for
Kerry saw their votes registered for Bush. Her
organization is moving under the Open Records Act,
which allows people to see government records, to
gather information, including the impoundment of
voting machines, in some counties in Florida, Ohio,
New Mexico and Pennsylvania that had serious problems
with the machines. Local counsel are needed to help
with this effort. Cohn can be contacted at
cindy@eff.org.

Results Not Final Until January

Although John Kerry conceded that George W. Bush
won the election, a candidate's concession is not
legally binding. Electors will be certified on
December 7, which gives a presumption of legitimacy to
the vote; but electors actually vote on December 13.
These votes are not opened by Congress until January
6, so there is still time to challenge the results in
key states such as Ohio and Florida. A challenge
requires a written objection from one House member and
one senator. If that objection is recorded, both
Houses separate again and they vote by majority vote
as to whether to accept the slate of electoral votes
from that state.

Bush is claiming he has a mandate, planning to
spend his "political capital." Curiously, virtually
all of the so-called "anomalies" in the voting results
favor Bush. The electors have not yet voted; the
election results are not yet final. In the words of
Yogi Berra, "It's not over until it's over."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Marjorie Cohn, a contributing editor to t r u t h
o u t, is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of
Law, executive vice president of the National Lawyers
Guild, and the U.S. representative to the executive
committee of the American Association of Jurists.

http://blog.democrats.com/node/812

Widespread Election Fraud in Cleveland?
by Bob Fertik on November 22, 2004 - 1:44am.
I received this fascinating analysis on Friday. I am
publishing it in the hope that readers will examine
the data with as much scrutiny as Dr. Hayes has. The
preliminary results for Cuyahoga County are here.

Bob

From: Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D.
Date: November 19, 2004

Attached is my recently completed precinct by precinct
analysis of the 2004 presidential vote in Cleveland.
There are wholesale shifts of scores of votes from the
Kerry column to other candidates, and astonishingly
low turnouts in certain precincts and entire wards.
The Ohio recount will prove these numbers to be
fraudulent.

I may have identified only the tip of the iceberg. I
note that there are 17,741 uncounted ballots in
Cuyahoga County. Kerry's margin in Cleveland was
reportedly 108,659 votes with a 49.89% turnout. The
rest of Cuyahoga County had a 71.95% turnout. Such a
turnout in Cleveland would have given Kerry a margin
of 156,705 votes, left Bush with a statewide margin of
85,007 votes, and with 248,100 votes still uncounted,
nobody would be conceding Ohio.

This is a situation that demands rigorous
investigation. I can imagine Michael Moore going door
to door in Ward 4, Precinct F, looking for the 215
Peroutka voters, or in Ward 4, Precinct N, looking for
the 163 Badnarik voters. Or going door to door in Ward
6, Precinct C, to find out why the turnout was only
7.10% - or in Ward 13, Precincts D, F, and O, to find
out why the turnout was only 13.05%, 19.60%, and
21.01%, respectively.

CUYAHOGA COUNTY CANVASS SHEET – 2004 PRESIDENTIAL
ELECTION

THE FOLLOWING IS A PRECINCT BY PRECINCT ANALYSIS OF
THE REPORTED VOTE TOTALS FOR THE PRESIDENTIAL
CANDIDATES IN THE CITY OF CLEVELAND, CUYAHOGA COUNTY,
OHIO, IN THE 2004 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION. THESE ARE
DATA READILY AVAILABLE ONLINE AT THE OFFICIAL WEBSITE
OF THE CUYAHOGA COUNTY BOARD OF ELECTIONS. WHAT YOU
SEE IS AN ACTUAL REPRINT OF THE CUYAHOGA COUNTY
CANVASS SHEET.

IN ORDER TO CONDUCT THIS ANALYSIS I SET UP SEPARATE
MICROSOFT WINDOWS FOR: (1) REGISTERED VOTERS, 2004;
(2) VOTER TURNOUT, BY PERCENTAGE, 2004; (3) VOTE
TOTALS FOR PRESIDENT, 2004; AND (4) VOTE TOTALS FOR
PRESIDENT, 2000. BY CLICKING BACK AND FORTH ON THE
WINDOWS I WAS ABLE TO COMPARE THESE DATA EASILY, IF
TEDIOUSLY.

I HAVE DISCOVERED WHOLESALE “IRREGULARITIES” IN THE
REPORTED VOTES, SOME OF THEM HIGHLY SUSPICIOUS, OTHERS
OBVIOUSLY FRAUDULENT. EVERY NUMBER I BELIEVE TO BE
UNTRUE I HAVE HIGHLIGHTED IN RED, AND I HAVE WRITTEN A
BRIEF ONE-LINE EXPLANATION, ALSO HIGHLIGHTED IN RED,
IN THE RIGHT-HAND COLUMN NEXT TO THE HIGHLIGHTED
NUMBER. THE FOLLOWING WRITE-UP IS THE BEST ESTIMATE I
CAN MAKE AS TO HOW MANY VOTES WERE STOLEN FROM JOHN F.
KERRY IN CLEVELAND, OHIO. IN SOME CASES THERE HAVE
BEEN WHOLESALE SHIFTS OF VOTES FROM THE KERRY COLUMN
TO THE BUSH COLUMN OR TO THIRD-PARTY CANDIDATES; TO
ESTIMATE THE NUMBER OF VOTES TAKEN FROM KERRY, I HAVE
ASSUMED THAT THE PROPORTIONS OF THE VOTE ALLOTTED
ELSEWHERE IN THE WARD ARE CORRECT; IN FACT, ANY
UNREPORTED VOTES COULD ALL HAVE COME FROM KERRY. IN
OTHER CASES THE REPORTED VOTER TURNOUT WAS
ASTONISHINGLY LOW FOR A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION. FOR
PURPOSES OF THIS ANALYSIS, I HAVE ADOPTED 50% AS AN
ARBITRARY ESTIMATE OF THE TRUE VOTER TURNOUT FOR THE
UNDERREPORTED PRECINCTS, AND HAVE ASSUMED THAT THE
PROPORTIONS OF THE VOTE ALLOTTED ARE CORRECT FOR THESE
PRECINCTS.

THESE ESTIMATES ARE JUST THAT. FORTUNATELY, OHIO HAS
A PAPER TRAIL AND THERE WILL BE A RECOUNT. HOPEFULLY
THE CORRECT NUMBERS WILL EMERGE. SOME, BUT NOT ALL,
OF THE UNREPORTED VOTES WILL TURN UP AS PROVISIONAL
BALLOTS OR UNCOUNTED PUNCH CARDS. WHERE WHOLESALE
SHIFTING HAS OCCURRED FROM ONE COLUMN TO ANOTHER, I
EXPECT THAT THE OHIO RECOUNT WILL PROVE, ONCE AND FOR
ALL, ELECTION FRAUD.

LINE 1604 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 129 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 25 VOTES.
LINE 1614 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 166 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 38 VOTES.
LINE 1702 41 VOTES APPEAR IN BADNARIK COLUMN, KERRY
LOSES 41 VOTES.
LINE 1709 70 VOTES APPEAR IN PETROUKA COLUMN, KERRY
LOSES 70 VOTES.
LINE 1806 215 VOTES APPEAR IN PETROUKA COLUMN, KERRY
LOSES 213 VOTES.
LINE 1814 163 VOTES APPEAR IN BADNARIK COLUMN, KERRY
LOSES 162 VOTES.
LINE 1902 16 VOTES APPEAR IN PETROUKA COLUMN, KERRY
LOSES 15 VOTES.
LINE 1903 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 390 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 142 VOTES.
LINE 1909 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 362 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 119 VOTES.
LINE 1910 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 228 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 66 VOTES.
LINE 1912 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 324 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 93 VOTES.
LINE 1915 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 157 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 25 VOTES.
LINE 1916 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 49 VOTES, KERRY LOSES
11 VOTES.
LINE 2002 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 197 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 106 VOTES.
LINE 2003 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 324 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 272 VOTES.
LINE 2004 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 229 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 93 VOTES.
LINE 2011 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 283 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 81 VOTES.
LINE 2006 NOT AN IRREGULARITY; BUSH DID WELL IN
CLEVELAND 6F IN 2000.
LINE 2012 81 VOTES APPEAR IN BUSH COLUMN, KERRY
LOSES 36 VOTES.
LINE 2023 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 144 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 20 VOTES.
LINE 2103 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 276 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 74 VOTES.
LINE 2111 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 120 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 35 VOTES.
LINE 2122 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 482 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 177 VOTES.
LINE 2207 51 VOTES APPEAR IN BADNARIK COLUMN, KERRY
LOSES 51 VOTES.
LINE 2208 45 VOTES APPEAR IN BUSH COLUMN, KERRY
LOSES 32 VOTES.
LINE 2209 27 VOTES APPEAR IN PETROUKA COLUMN, KERRY
LOSES 26 VOTES.
LINE 2301 41 VOTES APPEAR IN BUSH COLUMN, KERRY
LOSES 33 VOTES.
LINE 2316 87 VOTES APPEAR IN BUSH COLUMN, KERRY
LOSES 68 VOTES.
LINE 2319 39 VOTES APPEAR IN BUSH COLUMN, KERRY
LOSES 31 VOTES.
LINE 2412 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 433 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 212 VOTES.
LINE 2513 35 VOTES APPEAR IN THIRD PARTY COLUMNS,
KERRY LOSES 33 VOTES.
LINE 2521 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 377 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 104 VOTES.
WARD 12 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 6095 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 475 VOTES.
LINE 2704 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 962 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 586 VOTES.
LINE 2706 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 411 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 242 VOTES.
LINE 2708 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 134 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 41 VOTES.
LINE 2715 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 117 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 61 VOTES.
LINE 2717 17 VOTES APPEAR IN THIRD PARTY COLUMNS,
KERRY LOSES 15 VOTES.
LINE 2723 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 481 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 133 VOTES.
LINE 2724 37 VOTES APPEAR IN BADNARIK COLUMN, KERRY
LOSES 36 VOTES.
LINE 2725 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 28 VOTES, KERRY LOSES
7 VOTES.
WARD 14 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 6878 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 1106 VOTES.
LINE 2902 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 132 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 36 VOTES.
LINE 2908 22 VOTES APPEAR IN THIRD PARTY COLUMNS,
KERRY LOSES 20 VOTES.
LINE 2919 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 138 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 20 VOTES.
WARD 17 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 6394 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 706 VOTES.
LINE 19O 50% TURNOUT WOULD BE 239 VOTES, KERRY
LOSES 44 VOTES.

CLEVELAND KERRY LOSES 6032 VOTES

THUS, A NOT UNREASONABLE CONCLUSION IS THAT TAMPERING
WITH THE NUMBERS HAS COST JOHN KERRY 6,000 VOTES IN
CLEVELAND.

I AM NOT CLAIMING THAT THE FINAL RESULTS, WHEN ALL THE
VOTES HAVE BEEN COUNTED AND RECOUNTED, WILL COME CLOSE
TO MATCHING UP WITH THE ESTIMATES I HAVE GIVEN ABOVE.
I HAVE MADE THESE ESTIMATES ONLY TO GIVE THE READER
SOME IDEA OF THE MAGNITUDE OF THE PROBLEM. NOT ALL OF
THESE IRREGULARITIES WILL TURN OUT TO BE FRAUD. BUT
SOME OF THEM WILL. WHOLESALE SHIFTING OF SCORES OF
VOTES TO THE COLUMNS OF THIRD PARTY CANDIDATES WHO
RECEIVED LESS THAN ONE HALF OF ONE PERCENT OF THE
STATEWIDE VOTE BETWEEN THEM, VOTER TURNOUTS OF 7.10%,
13.05%, 19.60%, 21.01%, 21.80%, 24.72%, 28.83%,
28.97%, 29.25% IN CERTAIN PRECINCTS, AND A VOTER
TURNOUT OF 39.35% FOR AN ENTIRE WARD, ARE SIMPLY NOT
CREDIBLE.

THERE MAY BE SOME CORRELATION BETWEEN THE PRECINCTS
WITH ASTONISHINGLY LOW VOTER TURNOUT, AND THE REPORTS
OF LONG LINES AT THE POLLING PLACES DUE TO A LACK OF
ENOUGH VOTING MACHINES. PEOPLE ON THE GROUND IN OHIO
SHOULD LOOK AT THE PRECINCT MAPS, CHECK THE NEWS
REPORTS, TALK WITH LOCAL RESIDENTS, AND FIGURE THIS
OUT.

I WISH TO EXPRESS MY DEEPEST APPRECIATION FOR THE
GRASSROOTS EFFORT THAT HAS MADE AN OHIO RECOUNT
POSSIBLE. I AWAIT THE RESULTS.

RICHARD HAYES PHILLIPS, Ph.D.
http://www.northnet.org/minstrel

http://mediamatters.org/items/200411220005

Back to this story | Home
http://mediamatters.org/
Media largely ignored Berkeley study on Florida voting
irregularities

The mainstream media have mostly ignored a statistical
study conducted by faculty and students of the
University of California at Berkeley sociology
department on voting irregularities in Florida in the
2004 presidential election that found major
discrepancies in vote counts between counties that
utilized electronic voting machines (e-voting) and
those that used traditional voting methods. The study,
released on November 18, determined that President
George W. Bush may have wrongly been awarded between
130,000 and 260,000 extra votes in Florida -- 130,000
if they were all "ghost votes" created by machine
error, or twice that if votes intended for Senator
John Kerry were misattributed to Bush.

Even though decreasing Bush's margin of victory by as
many as 260,000 votes would not change the winner in
Florida, the findings of the study are still
important. The study, at the very least, highlights
the lack of accountability in counties that rely on
paperless electronic voting machines, and, more
generally, the lack of confidence inspired by a system
of elections that, as a November 18 article on
Salon.com noted, "so easily creaked and groaned under
the pressure."

According to the Berkeley study:

Irregularities associated with electronic voting
machines may have awarded 130,000 excess votes or more
to Bush in Florida.
Compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with
electronic voting machines were significantly more
likely to show increases in support for Bush between
2000 and 2004. This effect cannot be explained by
differences between counties in income, number of
voters, change in voter turnout, or size of
Hispanic/Latino population.
In Broward County alone, Bush appears to have received
approximately 72,000 excess votes.
The Berkeley researchers can be 99.9 percent sure that
these effects are not attributable to chance.
Media Matters for America has documented the
mainstream media's cursory coverage of reports of
election irregularities: They were dismissed as
"conspiracy theories," as The Washington Post did on
November 10, or ignored altogether. The coverage given
to the Berkeley study represented a continuation of
that pattern. A Nexis search revealed that the
Berkeley study has not been covered on any of the
cable or broadcast news networks and has received
little attention in the print media:

A November 19 Associated Press article on academia's
"fixation" on Senator John Kerry mentioned how the
Berkeley study has increased "Internet buzz" about the
possibility of flawed election returns. The article
questioned the study's findings by quoting its critics
who "say Bush's success may simply be due to a better
get-out-the-vote effort, or fears of terrorism driving
many Democrats to choose Bush over party loyalty" and
listing possibly influential factors that were not
included in the study such as "the number of campaign
visits that the Bush campaign made to a county, or the
number of residents who consider themselves
evangelical Christians." The AP article was picked up
by The Miami Herald (November 20), The Indianapolis
Star (November 20), the Los Angeles Times (November
19), and The Boston Globe (November 19), among others.

A November 19 article in the Oakland Tribune on the
Berkeley study noted that a Massachusetts Institute of
Technology political scientist was asked by the
Tribune and the Associated Press to replicate the
analysis of the study. He succeeded in doing so, and
said that an investigation into the discrepancy was
"warranted."
An article on the Berkeley study appeared in the San
Francisco Chronicle on November 19.
The technology news website CNET News.com published a
November 19 article on the study, which also appeared
on The New York Times website. The report quotes a
Princeton University professor of microbiology who
conducted an independent analysis, using different
methods, that produced results similar to those of the
Berkeley study. The Princeton professor also lent
credence to the study, saying: "Their analysis
indicates that even when all these variables [within
the study] are accounted for, a significant difference
remains between counties that used electronic voting
and counties that used optical scanning or paper
ballots."
Keith Olbermann, host of MSNBC's Countdown with Keith
Olbermann, discussed the Berkeley study and the
November 19 Oakland Tribune article in a November 21
entry on his MSNBC.com weblog. Olbermann has received
criticism from conservatives in the media for his
coverage of reports of election irregularities and the
lack of media attention being paid to them, as MMFA
has noted.

— S.S.M.

Posted to the web on Monday November 22, 2004 at 5:11
PM EST

Copyright © 2004 Media Matters for America. All rights
reserved.
Terms and Conditions | Privacy Policy
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http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/112304Z.shtml

Author's Note | I delivered the following remarks on
the evening of November 21 at a Brookline PeaceWorks
forum on the 2004 voting irregularities. Truthout
readers will recognize some of the text to follow, as
it is from my article on this topic from 08 November.

Saving Your Right to Vote
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Monday 22 November 2004

Section two of the 14th Amendment to the United
States Constitution reads, in paraphrase, as follows:
"But when the right to vote at any election for the
choice of electors for President and Vice President of
the United States, Representatives in Congress, the
executive and judicial officers of a state, or the
members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any
of the inhabitants of such state, or in any way
abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or
other crime, the basis of representation therein shall
be reduced in the proportion which the number of such
male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male
citizens twenty-one years of age in such state." In
other words, if a state can't manage to run a fair
election, that state loses Senators or Congresspeople.
I have this dream of sending Senators DeWine and
Voinovich of Ohio, along with Congressman Ralph Regula
of Ohio, out of Washington in a blizzard of shame and
disgrace. It's a dream, but a good one.

You've heard from Jonathan Simon tonight about what
has been happening over the last several weeks since
the election. By now you've also heard the stories:
Nationally, there were more than 1,100 incidents of
electronic voting machine malfunctions. In Broward
County, Florida, election workers were shocked to
discover that their shiny new machines were counting
backwards. "Tallies should go up as more votes are
counted," according to the news story. "That's simple
math. But in some races, the numbers had gone down.
Officials found the software used in Broward can
handle only 32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the
system starts counting backward."

In Franklin County, Ohio, voting machines gave Bush
3,893 extra votes in one precinct alone. "Franklin
County's unofficial results gave Bush 4,258 votes to
Democratic challenger John Kerry's 260 votes in
Precinct 1B," according to the news story. "Records
show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.
Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County
Board of Elections, said Bush received 365 votes
there. The other 13 voters who cast ballots either
voted for other candidates or did not vote for
president."

In Craven County, North Carolina, a software error
on the electronic voting machines awarded Bush 11,283
extra votes. "The Elections Systems and Software
equipment," according to the news story, "had
downloaded voting information from nine of the
county's 26 precincts and as the absentee ballots were
added, the precinct totals were added a second time.
An override, like those occurring when one attempts to
save a computer file that already exists, is supposed
to prevent double counting, but did not function
correctly."

In Carteret County, North Carolina, "More than 4,500
votes may be lost," according to the news story,
"because officials believed a computer that stored
ballots electronically could hold more data than it
did. Local officials said UniLect Corp., the maker of
the county's electronic voting system, told them that
each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the
limit was actually 3,005 votes. Officials said 3,005
early votes were stored, but 4,530 were lost."

In LaPorte County, Indiana, a Democratic stronghold,
the electronic voting machines decided that each
precinct only had 300 voters. "At about 7 p.m.
Tuesday," according to the news story, "it was noticed
that the first two or three printouts from individual
precinct reports all listed an identical number of
voters. Each precinct was listed as having 300
registered voters. That means the total number of
voters for the county would be 22,200, although there
are actually more than 79,000 registered voters."

In Sarpy County, Nebraska, the electronic touch
screen machines got generous. "As many as 10,000 extra
votes," according to the news story, "have been
tallied and candidates are still waiting for corrected
totals. Johnny Boykin lost his bid to be on the
Papillion City Council. The difference between victory
and defeat in the race was 127 votes. Boykin says,
'When I went in to work the next day and saw that
3,342 people had shown up to vote in our ward, I
thought something's not right.' He's right. There are
not even 3,000 people registered to vote in his ward.
For some reason, some votes were counted twice."

Stories like this have been popping up in many of
the states that put these touch-screen voting machines
to use. Beyond these reports are the folks who
attempted to vote for one candidate and saw the
machine give their vote to the other candidate.
Sometimes, the flawed machines were taken off-line,
and sometimes they were not. As for the reports I just
described, the mistakes were caught and corrected. How
many mistakes made by these machines were not caught,
were not corrected, and have now become part of the
record?

The flaws within these machines are well documented.
Professors and researchers from Johns Hopkins
University performed a detailed analysis of these
electronic voting machines in May of 2004. In their
results, the Johns Hopkins researchers stated, "This
voting system is far below even the most minimal
security standards applicable in other contexts. We
identify several problems including unauthorized
privilege escalation, incorrect use of cryptography,
vulnerabilities to network threats, and poor software
development processes. We show that voters, without
any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes
without being detected by any mechanisms within the
voting terminal software."

"Furthermore," they continued, "we show that even
the most serious of our outsider attacks could have
been discovered and executed without access to the
source code. In the face of such attacks, the usual
worries about insider threats are not the only
concerns; outsiders can do the damage. That said, we
demonstrate that the insider threat is also quite
considerable, showing that not only can an insider,
such as a poll worker, modify the votes, but that
insiders can also violate voter privacy and match
votes with the voters who cast them. We conclude that
this voting system is unsuitable for use in a general
election."

Many of these machines do not provide the voter with
a paper ballot that verifies their vote. So if an
error - or purposefully inserted malicious code - in
the untested machine causes their vote to go for the
other guy, they have no way to verify that it
happened. The lack of a paper ballot also means the
end of recounts as we have known them; now, on these
new machines, a recount amounts to pushing a button on
the machine and getting a number in return, but
without those paper ballots to do a comparison, there
is no way to verify the validity of that count. The
paper ballot aspect isn't nearly the worst part. The
paper ballots are only useful in a recount situation.
If the margin of victory or defeat described by these
machines is large enough, there won't be a recount in
most states.

The worst part is the fact that all the votes
collected by these machines are sent via modem to a
central tabulating computer which counts the votes on
Windows software. This means, essentially, that any
gomer with access to the central tabulation machine
who knows how to work a spreadsheet program and can
fiddle around in Explorer can go into this central
computer and make wholesale changes to election totals
without anyone being the wiser.

Bev Harris, who has been working tirelessly since
the passage of the Help America Vote Act to inform
people of the dangers present in this new process, got
a chance to demonstrate how easy it is to steal an
election on that central tabulation computer while a
guest on the CNBC program 'Topic A With Tina Brown.'
Ms. Brown was off that night, and the guest host was
none other than Governor Howard Dean.

Thanks to Governor Dean and Ms. Harris, anyone
watching CNBC that night got to see just how easy it
is to steal an election because of these new machines
and the flawed processes they use.

"In a voting system," Harris said on the show, "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? What surprises people
is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what
you and I use. It's just a regular computer."

Harris then proceeded to open a laptop computer that
had on it the software used to tabulate the votes by
one of the aforementioned central processors. Harris
had Dean close the Diebold GEMS tabulation software,
return to the 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.
"Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and
pasted the numbers from one cell into the other.
Harris sat up and said, "We just edited an election,
and it took us 90 seconds."

It goes without saying, and is the core of the
argument, that any system which makes it this easy to
steal or corrupt an election has no business being
anywhere near the voters on election day. Period.

The counter-argument states that people with
nefarious intent, people with a partisan stake in the
outcome of an election, would have to have access to
the central tabulation computers in order to do harm
to the process. Keep the partisans away from the
process, and everything will work out fine. Surely no
partisan political types were near these machines on
Tuesday night when the votes were counted, right?

One of the main manufacturers of these electronic
touch-screen voting machines is Diebold, Inc. Millions
of voters across the country used their machines to
cast their ballot on November 2nd. According to the
Center for Responsive Politics, Diebold gave $100,000
to the Republican National Committee in 2000, along
with additional contributions between 2001 and 2002
which totaled $95,000. Of the four companies competing
for the contracts to manufacture these voting
machines, only Diebold contributed large sums to any
political party. The CEO of Diebold is a man named
Walden O'Dell. O'Dell was very much on board with the
Bush campaign, having said publicly in 2003 that he
was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral
votes to the president next year."

So much for keeping the partisans at arm's length.

I could go on and on in this vein, but as a former
teacher, I am a big believer in visual aids. I hold in
my hand here a Diebold corporate document from March
of 2003. It lists all the counties in all the states
where their electronic touchscreen voting machines
were put to use. The document is 28 pages long, and
lists counties in 37 states. This is what we are up
against. Thanks to the Help America Vote Act, this
document will get longer and longer with each
successive election.

I'm supposed to stand up here and talk about what we
can do about it. I'll ignore, for the moment, the fact
that we are forced to fight a political war on twenty
fronts right now. I'll ignore the fact that the media
remains an abomination, that we have no empowered
allies in any of the three branches of government,
that our new Attorney General will probably get
confirmed despite the fact that he made a number of
documented legal arguments claiming that the torture,
murder and rape of prisoners at Abu Ghraib wasn't
really torture, that the supreme court will soon be
packed with Scalia clones, and that our illegal war in
Iraq continues to claim life after life after life.
1,221 American soldiers are dead in Iraq as of today,
100 in the month of November.

I'll ignore all of that, and instead stand here and
talk about money. Money money money. If you want to
attack the problems surrounding these electronic
voting machines, you had better be prepared to dig
deep, because no attack will amount to a bucket of
warm spit without money. In today's political world,
nothing happens without money, and money makes all the
difference. I'll give you one example. We've had all
these reports of voting irregularities, but nothing
has seemed to take root in the public or media
consciousness. Is it a conspiracy? No.

As ominous as these reports have been, they have
been brushed off because George W. Bush managed to
nail down a three million vote advantage in the
popular vote. Can these machines, combined with the
kind of vote spoilage/voter intimidation that Greg
Palast has been reporting on, account for all that?
Possibly, but another factor must be brought into the
equation. Bush got that three million vote advantage
because the Kerry campaign and the DNC did not spend
any money in the South and Midwest to boost voter
turnout. Had the campaign spent that money and managed
to get 40-45% of the popular vote in the South and
Midwest, that three million popular vote margin would
have been erased, and the issues surround

LNS Post-Coup II Supplement (11/20/04)

Re-affirm your humanity as barbarism and corporatism
(i.e. fascism) triumphs in America.

Review these 13 news items and share them with others.

In particular, please draw the attention of your
fellow citizens to our lead story, the UC Berkeley
study on Fraudida 2004. This study, together with the
Univ. of Pennsylvania study on exit poll discrepancies
in 2004 (documented in the previous LNS Post-Coup II
Supplement), provides compelling evidence of the
criminal conspiracy that has been perpetrated against
the US Constitution…

For the latest news on the ongoing citizen struggle to
thwart (or at least expose) the theft of a second
consecutive US presidential election, go to
www.blackvoting.org and/or www.democrats.com.

Go to www.moveon.org, to sign their petition demanding
a US GAO investigation of the 2004 “election.”

The Bush Abomination’s nationwide election fraud and
vote suppression operation, its war crimes, its
rewarding of negligence and incompetence in the
struggle against Al Qaeda, its the rewarding of
bold-faced lies told to the American people, its
catastrophic economic and environmental policies, its
destruction of the Western Alliance, its pandering to
the White Taliban of the Not-so-Neo-Confederacy…all of
it, sadly, pales in comparison to the enabling
mechanism, i.e. the naked, shameless and unequivocal
complicity of the US mainstream news media, and yes,
just as sadly, the cowardice and cravenness of
Democratic Party leadership in its failure to respond
to Coup I (2000) or Coup II (2004)…

Remain defiant, and informed….

Read on…

UC Berkeley: Today the University of California's
Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Team released a
statistical study - the sole method available to
monitor the accuracy of e- voting - reporting
irregularities associated with electronic voting
machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more
excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in
the 2004 presidential election. The study shows an
unexplained discrepancy between votes for President
Bush in counties where electronic voting machines were
used versus counties using traditional voting methods
- what the team says can be deemed a "smoke alarm."
Discrepancies this large or larger rarely arise by
chance - the probability is less than 0.1 percent. The
research team formally disclosed results of the study
at a press conference today at the UC Berkeley Survey
Research Center, where they called on Florida voting
officials to investigate.
The three counties where the voting anomalies were
most prevalent were also the most heavily Democratic:
Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade, respectively.
Statistical patterns in counties that did not have
e-touch voting machines predict a 28,000 vote decrease
in President Bush's support in Broward County;
machines tallied an increase of 51,000 votes - a net
gain of 81,000 for the incumbent. President Bush
should have lost 8,900 votes in Palm Beach County, but
instead gained 41,000 - a difference of 49,900. He
should have gained only 18,400 votes in Miami-Dade
County but saw a gain of 37,000 - a difference of
19,300 votes.
"For the sake of all future elections involving
electronic voting - someone must investigate and
explain the statistical anomalies in Florida," says
Professor Michael Hout. "We're calling on voting
officials in Florida to take action."

Bob Fitrakis, www.democrats.com: But the most
important number in Ohio is the number we will never
know - the number of people who didn't cast a vote
because the lines were so long. And as Harvey
Wasserman writes, this was the result of a systematic
effort by Karl Rove and Ken Blackwell to suppress
Democratic votes.
Hour after hour the testimonies are the same: angry
Ohioans telling of vicious Republican manipulation and
de facto intimidation that disenfranchised tens of
thousands and probably cost the Democrats the
election.
At an African-American church on Saturday and then at
the Franklin County Courthouse Monday night, more than
700 people came to testify and witness to tales of the
atrocity that was the November 2 election.
Organized by local ad hoc groups, the hearings had a
court reporter and a team of lawyers along with other
appointed witnesses. At freepress.org we will be
making the testimonies available as they're
transcribed and organized, and we will present a
fuller accounting of the hearings, along with a book
that includes the transcripts.
But one thing was instantly and abundantly clear: the
Republican Party turned Ohio 2004 into an updated
version of the Jim Crow South.
The principle overt method of vote suppression was to
short-change inner city precincts of sufficient voting
machines to allow a timely balloting. In precinct
after precinct, virtually all of them predominantly
black, poor, young and Democratic, the lines stretched
for two, five, eight, even eleven hours. The elderly
and infirm were forced to stand in the rain while city
officials threatened to tow their cars. No chairs or
shelter were provided. Crucial signage was
mysteriously missing. Thousands came to vote, saw the
long lines and left.
How many thousands? Enough to turn the election?
Almost definitely.
None of this was accidental. This was a well-planned
GOP attack on the right to vote, and on Democratic
candidacies. Republican Secretary of State Kenneth
Blackwell was also co-chair of the Ohio campaign for
Bush. A right-wing Republican was in charge of the
Franklin County Board of Elections.

Thom Hartmann, www.commondreams.org: There was
something odd about the poll tapes.
A "poll tape" is the phrase used to describe a
printout from an optical scan voting machine made the
evening of an election, after the machine has read all
the ballots and crunched the numbers on its internal
computer. It shows the total results of the election
in that location. The printout is signed by the
polling officials present in that precinct/location,
and then submitted to the county elections office as
the official record of how the people in that
particular precinct had voted. (Usually each location
has only one single optical scanner/reader, and thus
produces only one poll tape.)
Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.org, the erstwhile
investigator of electronic voting machines, along with
people from Florida Fair Elections, showed up at
Florida's Volusia County Elections Office on the
afternoon of Tuesday, November 16, 2004, and asked to
see, under a public records request, each of the poll
tapes for the 100+ optical scanners in the precincts
in that county. The elections workers - having been
notified in advance of her request - handed her a set
of printouts, oddly dated November 15 and lacking
signatures.
Bev pointed out that the printouts given her were not
the original poll tapes and had no signatures, and
thus were not what she'd requested. Obligingly, they
told her that the originals were held in another
location, the Elections Office's Warehouse, and that
since it was the end of the day they should meet Bev
the following morning to show them to her.
Bev showed up bright and early the morning of
Wednesday the 17th - well before the scheduled meeting
- and discovered three of the elections officials in
the Elections Warehouse standing over a table covered
with what looked like poll tapes. When they saw Bev
and her friends, Bev told me in a telephone interview
less than an hour later, "They immediately shoved us
out and slammed the door."
In a way, that was a blessing, because it led to the
stinking evidence.
"On the porch was a garbage bag," Bev said, "and so I
looked in it and, and lo and behold, there were public
record tapes."
Thrown away. Discarded. Waiting to be hauled off.

Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman, Columbia Free Press:
Highly-charged, jam-packed hearings held here in
Columbus have cast serious doubt on the true outcome
of the presidential election.
On Saturday, November 13, and Monday, November 15, the
Ohio Election Protection Coalition’s public hearings
in Columbus solicited extensive sworn first-person
testimony from 32 of Ohio voters, precinct judges,
poll workers, legal observers, party challengers. An
additional 66 people provided written affidavits of
election irregularities. The unavoidable conclusion is
that this year's election in Ohio was deeply flawed,
that thousands of Ohioans were denied their right to
vote, and that the ultimate vote count is very much in
doubt.
Most importantly, the testimony has revealed a
widespread and concerted effort on the part of
Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell to
deny primarily African-American and young voters the
right to cast their ballots within a reasonable time.
By depriving precincts of adequate numbers of
functioning voting machines, Blackwell created waits
of three to eleven hours, driving tens of thousands of
likely Democratic voters away from the polls and very
likely affecting the outcome of the Ohio vote count,
which in turn decided the national election.
On November 17, Blackwell wrote an op-ed piece for
Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times, stating:
“Every eligible voter who wanted to vote had the
opportunity to vote. There was no widespread fraud,
and there was no disenfranchisement. A half-million
more Ohioans voted than ever before with fewer errors
than four years ago, a sure sign on success by any
measure,” Blackwell wrote. Moon's extreme right wing
Unification Church has long-standing ties to the Bush
Family and the Central Intelligence Agency.
Additional testimony also called into question the
validity of the actual vote counts. There are thus
serious doubts that the final official tally in Ohio,
due December 1 to Blackwell’s office, will have any
validity. Blackwell will certify the vote count on
December 3.

Alastair Thompson, Scoop: Scoop.co.nz is delighted to
be able today to publish a full set of 4pm exit poll
data for the first time on the Internet since the US
election. The data emerged this evening NZT in a post
on the Democratic Underground website under the forum
name TruthIsAll.
The new data confirms what was already widely known
about the swing in favour of George Bush, but
amplifies the extent of that swing.
In the data which is shown below in tabulated form,
and above in graph form, we can see that 42 of the 51
states in the union swung towards George Bush while
only nine swung towards Kerry.
There has to date been no official explanation for the
discrepancy.
Ordinarily in the absence of an obvious mistabulation
error, roughly the same number of states should have
swung towards each candidate.
Moreover many of the states that swung against
Democratic Party hopeful John Kerry swung to an extent
that is well beyond the margin of error in exit polls.
Exit polls by their nature - they ask voters how they
actually voted rather than about their intentions -
are typically considered highly accurate.

www.dailyhowler.com: TWIN TOWERS: Bush wants to put
Condi Rice in for Powell. And what a perfect swap it
is! How better to capture the way the press rolled
over regarding Iraq?
Of course, Powell has long been the press corps’ prime
icon—the man who can do and say anything. Major
scribes all know their Hard Pundit Law—they must
affirm what the genial man says. In July 2003,
Margaret Carlson captured their Stepford-like approach
to Powell when questioned by Charlie Rose (see THE
DAILY HOWLER, 7/4/03):
ROSE (7/3/03): Where were you on the war?
CARLSON: I was, give diplomacy a chance. [Brightening]
I was with Colin Powell the whole way along! Whatever
Colin Powell—
ROSE: Oh, so whatever Colin—you know. OK.
CARLSON: Yeah. Whatever Colin does, I’ll go with.
ROSE: Is that right?
And yes, that was precisely right, as we had seen five
months before. When Powell appeared before the UN on
2/5/03, he made a notably shaky presentation
supporting the plan to wage war in Iraq. But all your
major “liberal” pundits knew what they were required
to do. Starting the day after Powell’s performance,
pundits stampeded into print, swearing fealty to
Colin’s appraisals. But uh-oh! One month later, it was
already clear that Powell’s presentation had been
rather shaky. Result? Here’s the late Mary McGrory in
the Post, explaining why she had rushed into print
swearing that Powell was perfect:
MCGRORY (3/6/03): What impressed me about Powell’s
presentation, besides his magisterial presence and
impeccable prose, were the poisons he showed and the
malice behind them. I did not have the benefit of the
informed criticism that followed.
How worthless is your mainstream “press corps?” One
day after his shaky UN outing, McGrory rushed into
print praising Powell—and now she said that she had
done so because of his “presence” and his “impeccable
prose.” “I did not have the benefit of the informed
criticism that followed,” she haplessly
added—explaining why she’d affirmed a presentation
without knowing if it was boffo or bunkum. But at the
Post, almost all “liberal” pundits had rushed to
praise Powell—Richard Cohen and William Raspberry too
(links below). And even today, every pundit knows to
insist that Powell clearly believed his own
twaddle—even though Bob Woodward’s Bush at War plainly
showed that Powell included material in his UN pitch
that he thought to be “iffy” and “murky” (links
below). Nothing—nothing—changes the way this
pandered-to poobah is reviewed.
But if Powell has been the corps’ Icon I, Rice has
been its Icon II—Darling Condi, the wholly
untouchable. Indeed, Rice’s testimony before the 9/11
Commission provided one of the most instructive recent
cases of press corps pimping and fawning. Must icons
like Condi play by the rules? Must Darling Condi honor
her oath? The press corps answered—no, and no—as it
kept the public from seeing the shape of this icon’s
inexcusable conduct.
Rice appeared before the commission on April 8, 2004.
Special rules had been crafted for her appearance—no
one could question for more than ten minutes. Blessed
by these special restrictions, Rice knew what she had
to do when questioned by Richard Ben-Veniste. She
stalled; she hemmed and hawed; she fudged and evaded;
and yes, eventually, she told a flat lie. And how did
the “press corps” react to all this? How else? They
all pandered to Condi! Rice had baldly broken her
oath—and your pundits all pandered to Condi.

Mark Jurkowitz, Boston Globe: Two weeks after Election
Day, explosive allegations about a media coverup are
percolating.
There's the widely circulated e-mail about a CBS
producer who complained that a news industry
"lock-down" has prevented journalists from
investigating voting problems that cropped up on Nov
2. There's the rumor that MSNBC host Keith Olbermann,
who has devoted serious air time to discussing
Election Day irregularities, was fired for broaching
the topic. There's the assertion by Bev Harris,
executive director of Black Box Voting Inc., that she
had received calls from network employees saying they
had been told to lay off the sensitive subject of
voting fraud.
In the days after Nov. 2, the Internet was abuzz with
charges from partisans that voting irregularities
might have cost John F. Kerry the White House.
With some media outlets moving swiftly to debunk the
notion that the election had been stolen by the
Republicans, the press itself has come under scrutiny,
accused of everything from a conspiracy of silence to
a collective passivity about pursuing voting
irregularities.
"The mainstream media is not treating this as an
important story overall," said Steve Rendall, senior
analyst at the liberal media watchdog group Fairness
and Accuracy in Reporting."The mainstream media has
largely treated the story as some crazy Internet
story." At the same time, Rendall acknowledged: "There
has been excess in the way stuff has flown around the
Internet and e-mail lists."
Tracking down the sources of the rapidly proliferating
online allegations about a media "lock-down" is a
daunting task. But the response to them has been
unequivocal. "Absolutely untrue," a CBS spokeswoman,
Sandy Genelius, said when asked about the report of
the whistle-blowing CBS producer. "Absolutely,
positively, categorically false. Besides that, it's
absurd."
Media Matters for America, a liberal media monitoring
organization, posted an item on its website recently
that cited several stories about faulty voting
equipment in Ohio that did not generate much media
interest. David Brock, the organization's president,
said in an interview: "I haven't seen anything that is
suggesting that further probing of the issue would
change the results of the election." But he added that
"there are some irregularities, and I would imagine
some reader and viewer interest. . . . It seems that
there should have been somewhat more coverage of this.
There was all this pressure and buildup and very
little follow-up."
No one has been more engaged in the issue than
Olbermann, the host of MSNBC's prime-time "Countdown"
program.
"The thing that woke me up was the lock-down in Warren
County," he said, referring to a Cincinnati Enquirer
report that officials in that Ohio county, citing
terrorist threats, barred observers from the vote
count. "I began to investigate then or at least raise
questions. . . . It turns out there are a lot of valid
stories, at least valid stories worth investigating."
Olbermann said there are a number of reasons much of
the media have not been pursuing the story as ardently
as he is, including "a love-hate [relationship] with
the blogs. Whatever new media is appearing, the
established news industry tend to look down on it." At
the same time, Olbermann flatly denies the
blogger-fueled rumor that he was fired for his
interest in voting irregularities, pointing out that
MSNBC has let him pursue the probe.
"It's still largely a game of telephone on the Net,"
he said.

Thomas Walkom, Toronto Star: When U.S. President George W. Bush arrives in Ottawa — probably later this year — should he be welcomed? Or
should he be charged with war crimes?
It's an interesting question. On the face of it, Bush
seems a perfect candidate for prosecution under
Canada's Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes Act.
This act was passed in 2000 to bring Canada's
ineffectual laws in line with the rules of the new
International Criminal Court. While never tested, it
lays out sweeping categories under which a foreign
leader like Bush could face arrest.
In particular, it holds that anyone who commits a war
crime, even outside Canada, may be prosecuted by our
courts. What is a war crime? According to the statute,
it is any conduct defined as such by "customary
international law" or by conventions that Canada has
adopted.
War crimes also specifically include any breach of the
1949 Geneva Conventions, such as torture, degradation,
wilfully depriving prisoners of war of their rights
"to a fair and regular trial," launching attacks "in
the knowledge that such attacks will cause incidental
loss of life or injury to civilians" and deportation
of persons from an area under occupation.
Outside of one well-publicized (and quickly squelched)
attempt in Belgium, no one has tried to formally
indict Bush. But both Oxfam International and the U.S.
group Human Rights Watch have warned that some of the
actions undertaken by the U.S. and its allies,
particularly in Iraq, may fall under the war crime
rubric.

BBC: President Chirac also maintains that any
intervention in Iraq should have been through the
United Nations.
There's no doubt that there has been an increase in
terrorism and one of the origins of that has been the
situation in Iraq
French President Jacques Chirac
"To a certain extent Saddam Hussein's departure was a
positive thing, " Mr Chirac says when asked if the
world is safer now, as US President George W Bush has
repeatedly stated.
"But it also provoked reactions, such as the
mobilisation in a number of countries, of men and
women of Islam, which has made the world more
dangerous," Mr Chirac says.
"There's no doubt that there has been an increase in
terrorism and one of the origins of that has been the
situation in Iraq.
"I'm not at all sure that one can say that the world
is safer," Mr Chirac says.

Justin Rood, Congressional Quarterly: The CIA official
who now runs the unit responsible for analyzing
terrorist intelligence should share blame for mistakes
that opened the door to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks,
says Michael Scheuer, the agency Osama bin Laden
expert who resigned last week.
According to Scheuer, John O. Brennan, the CIA
official in charge of
the new interagency Terrorist Threat Integration
Center (TTIC), played a
key role in the United States’ failure to capture bin
Laden before the 2001
attacks.
In a telephone interview, Scheuer said, “I know for a
fact that the
director of the TTIC was one of the people that
dissuaded [former CIA
Director George J.] Tenet and others from trying to
capture bin Laden
in May 1998.”
In a letter to Congress last fall Scheuer called it
“our best chance to
capture Bin Laden — an operation which showed no U.S.
hand, risked no
U.S. lives, and was endorsed by senior commanders of
the Joint Special
Operations Command at Fort Bragg.” He said it “was
cancelled because
senior officials from the [Central Intelligence]
Agency, the Executive
Branch, and other Intelligence community components
decided to accept
assurances from an Islamic country [Saudi Arabia] that
it could acquire bin Laden from
the Taliban. . . . ”
“The makers of this decision ignored the extensive
documentary record
that showed nothing but uncooperativeness from this
Islamic country,”
Scheuer said in his letter to Congress.
Although he would not expound further because the
details are still
classified, he said, Scheuer insisted that Brennan
“was pivotal in
persuading the government not to go ahead with the
operation.”
Others were also to blame for failing to stop the
attacks, Scheuer said, going beyond a September 2004
letter to the Senate and House Intelligence
committees that cited “failures in leadership and
management,” particularly by “certain senior civil
servants” who exhibited “arrogance, bad judgment,
disdain for expertise, and bureaucratic cowardice” in
making decisions that allowed al Qaeda to prosper and
attack the United States.
But on Nov. 16 Scheuer— who on Nov. 10 resigned his
post as a senior
analyst in the Usama bin Laden unit of the CIA’s
Counterterrorism
Center — singled out Tenet, former FBI Director Louis
J. Freeh, National
Security Agency Director Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden,
former Defense
Secretary William S. Cohen, and current Defense
Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld, among others, saying they failed to take the
actions he felt
were necessary to kill bin Laden and prevent the Sept.
11 attacks…
Perhaps Scheuer’s most urgent criticism of the CIA is
its transfer of
experts out of its Usama bin Laden unit and into TTIC
and elsewhere,
without replacing them or doing enough to develop new
expertise.

Agence France Press: The International Committee of
the Red Cross sharply criticized the "utter contempt"
for humanity shown by all sides in Iraq amid fierce
fighting between US forces and insurgents for control
of the city of Fallujah.
"We are deeply concerned by the devastating impact
that the fighting in Iraq is having on the people of
that country," said Pierre Kraehenbuehl, the ICRC's
director of operations.
"As hostilities continue in Fallujah and elsewhere,
every day seems to bring news of yet another act of
utter contempt for the most basic tenet of humanity:
the obligation to protect human life and dignity," he
added.
"For the parties to this conflict, complying with
international humanitarian law is an obligation, not
an option," Kraehenbuehl said in an unusually tough
statement by the relief agency.

www.mediamatters.org: Since President George W. Bush
nominated national security adviser Condoleezza Rice
to succeed Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, major
news outlets have produced numerous reviews and
assessments of Rice's record during Bush's first term.
But these reports have generally omitted mention of
Rice's numerous apparently false statements, even when
the reviews were conducted by outlets that originally
broke the news of the statements in question.
Iraq's aluminum tubes were "only really suited for
nuclear weapons"
In The New York Times' large-scale investigation of
the intelligence regarding Iraq's purchase of aluminum
tubes, the paper reported on October 3, 2004, that
Rice had misrepresented the state of intelligence on
the tubes. Prior to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the
White House and parts of the intelligence community
had promoted the purchase as crucial evidence that
then-Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had restarted his
nuclear weapons program.
The tubes were "only really suited for nuclear weapons
programs," Condoleezza Rice, the president's national
security adviser, explained on CNN on Sept. 8, 2002.
"We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom
cloud."
But almost a year before, Ms. Rice's staff had been
told that the government's foremost nuclear experts
seriously doubted that the tubes were for nuclear
weapons, according to four officials at the Central
Intelligence Agency and two senior administration
officials, all of whom spoke on condition of
anonymity. The experts, at the Energy Department,
believed the tubes were likely intended for small
artillery rockets.
The Times did not mention this incident when reporting
on Rice's recent nomination; nor did the paper note
other instances in which Rice's truthfulness has been
challenged. A separate analysis of Bush's new Cabinet
appointments did mention that Rice would likely face
questioning in confirmation hearings about "what
appeared to be her failures either to warn Mr. Bush
about flawed prewar intelligence regarding Iraq's
weapons programs or, as Secretary of State Colin L.
Powell did, to make dogged efforts of her own to
ascertain its accuracy."

YOTAM BARKAI, Yale Daily News: Former Vermont Gov.
Howard Dean '71, a former candidate for the Democratic
presidential nomination, spoke Tuesday at Yale about
the shortcomings of today's print media and the
importance of an ethical media in a working democracy.
In the symposium, titled "The Media and the Election:
A Postmortem," Dean stressed corporate ownership of
the media and the increased focus on entertainment as
problems with today's media, and he emphasized the
importance of diversity and regulation in fixing these
problems. Panelists Evan Thomas, an assistant managing
editor for Newsweek, and Martin Nolan, a political
reporter and editor of The Boston Globe's editorial
page, defended the media's integrity and objectivity.
"The media is a failing institution in this country,"
Dean said. "They are not maintaining their
responsibility to maintain democracy."

Todd Gitlin, Mother Jones: All governments lie, the
muckraker I.F. Stone used to say. They fudge and omit.
They bury and muffle inconvenient facts. They do this
repeatedly, relentlessly, shamelessly. That's hardly
surprising. Why shouldn't they seek— as a Marine Corps
public affairs officer, Lt. Colonel Richard Long, told
a conference on journalism and the Iraq war—to
"dominate the information environment"?
But of late, the government has had plenty of help in
its efforts at dominance. To a disgraceful degree, the
organs of news have been grinding out its tune. Many
are the reasons for deference. Reporters and editors
are credulous, fearful, and flatly bamboozled. Timid
about getting out ahead of a public they respect more
when it is "conservative" (read: rightwardly radical)
than when it is liberal, they bend over backward to
accommodate spin doctors. They grant officialdom the
benefit of the doubt. They fear risking independent
judgment, which they have defined as occupational
hubris. They are terrified of missing out on the perks
of access. They fear that detailing the anatomy of
official distortion will turn off readers and viewers.
Their proprietors, seeking favor in high places, cool
their critical engines. So the media yield to
temptation and morph into megaphones, and falsehoods
too often and too loudly repeated take on the ring of
plausibility.
Does that leave citizens clueless? Not quite. In a
digital world, there's easier access to multiple
sources of facts and analysis than ever before. But
even as journalists lose their hold on a distracted
public, they remain indispensable for arousing
democracy and holding liars, bullies, and cheaters
accountable.
If ever there were a time for unbridled journalism,
this would be it: terrorist mayhem, war, corporate
scandal, ecological crisis, economic upheaval. Public
passion and curiosity have been stoked. But the
potential investigators have been, to a considerable
degree, otherwise occupied. Historians will someday
burrow among the musty artifacts of America's
supercharged 24/7 news organizations—TV with its
glammed-up sets, its convention skyboxes and satellite
feeds; the well-fed correspondents on a firstname
basis with second-rate sources; the newsmagazines with
their gloss, gossip, and fluff—and they will rub their
eyes and marvel that a nation possessed of such an
enormous industry ostensibly specializing in the
gathering and distribution of facts could yet remain
so befogged.

Restore the Republic!

Full text and URLs follow below.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111904W.shtml

UC Berkeley Research Team Sounds 'Smoke Alarm' for
Florida E-Vote Count
By UC Berkeley

Thursday 18 November 2004

Research team calls for investigation.
Today the University of California's Berkeley
Quantitative Methods Research Team released a
statistical study - the sole method available to
monitor the accuracy of e- voting - reporting
irregularities associated with electronic voting
machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more
excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in
the 2004 presidential election. The study shows an
unexplained discrepancy between votes for President
Bush in counties where electronic voting machines were
used versus counties using traditional voting methods
- what the team says can be deemed a "smoke alarm."
Discrepancies this large or larger rarely arise by
chance - the probability is less than 0.1 percent. The
research team formally disclosed results of the study
at a press conference today at the UC Berkeley Survey
Research Center, where they called on Florida voting
officials to investigate.

The three counties where the voting anomalies were
most prevalent were also the most heavily Democratic:
Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade, respectively.
Statistical patterns in counties that did not have
e-touch voting machines predict a 28,000 vote decrease
in President Bush's support in Broward County;
machines tallied an increase of 51,000 votes - a net
gain of 81,000 for the incumbent. President Bush
should have lost 8,900 votes in Palm Beach County, but
instead gained 41,000 - a difference of 49,900. He
should have gained only 18,400 votes in Miami-Dade
County but saw a gain of 37,000 - a difference of
19,300 votes.

"For the sake of all future elections involving
electronic voting - someone must investigate and
explain the statistical anomalies in Florida," says
Professor Michael Hout. "We're calling on voting
officials in Florida to take action."

The research team is comprised of doctoral
students and faculty in the UC Berkeley sociology
department, and led by Sociology Professor Michael
Hout, a nationally-known expert on statistical methods
and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and
the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center.

For its research, the team used
multiple-regression analysis, a statistical method
widely used in the social and physical sciences to
distinguish the individual effects of many variables
on quantitative outcomes like vote totals. This
multiple-regression analysis takes into account of the
following variables by county:

number of voters
median income
Hispanic/Latino population
change in voter turnout between 2000 and 2004
support for Senator Dole in the 1996 election
support for President Bush in the 2000 election
use of electronic voting or paper ballots
"No matter how many factors and variables we took
into consideration, the significant correlation in the
votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot
be explained," said Hout. "The study shows, that a
county's use of electronic voting resulted in a
disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush.
There is just a trivial probability of evidence like
this appearing in a population where the true
difference is zero - less than once in a thousand
chances."

The data used in this study came from public
sources including CNN.com, the 2000 US Census, and the
Verified Voting Foundation. For a copy of the working
paper, raw data and other information used in the
study can be found at: http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/.

-------

Jump to TO Features for Friday November 19, 2004

http://blog.democrats.com/node/708

Stolen Election 2004: Thursday Update
by Bob Fertik on November 17, 2004 - 11:46pm.
Democrats.com is co-sponsoring the 2004 Roundtable on
Progressive Politics & Technology Thursday afternoon
in DC, so I'm blogging early. If you happen to attend,
please say hi!

A brand new study by U.C. Berkeley researchers
suggests electronic voting machines may have awarded
130,000 - 260,000 or more in excess votes to Bush in
Florida. As Buzzflash writes,

"The three counties where the voting anomalies were
most prevalent were also the most heavily Democratic
counties, not the [conservative] Dixiecrat counties
you’ve all heard about before, but the more heavily
Democratic counties that used e-vote technology,
including Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade counties
in order of magnitude," said Professor Hout.

The statistical patterns in counties that did not have
e-touch voting machines predicted a 28,000 vote
decrease in President Bush’s share of the 2004 vote in
Broward County, but the machines actually tallied an
increase of 51,000 votes for a net gain of 81,000
votes for the President.

With the research team’s statistical model, it was
expected that President Bush should have lost 8,900
votes in Palm Beach County but instead he gained
41,000, a difference of 49,900 votes.

And President Bush should have gained only 18,000
votes in Miami-Dade County but in fact gained 37,000,
for a difference of 19,300 votes.

"The disparity in favor of the incumbent President
Bush cannot be explained away by other factors. The
study shows that counties that used electronic voting
resulted in disproportionate increases of votes for
the President," said Professor Hout.

Paging Bev Harris - start heading towards South
Florida!

At long last, the Ohio Democratic Party is going to
court to fight for every vote.

The lawsuit asked U.S. District Judge Michael H.
Watson to order Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell
to impose uniform standards for counting provisional
votes on all 88 counties. Democrats want the judge to
take action quickly - before the results of the
election are certified...

Most of Ohio's provisional ballots were cast in urban
areas where Kerry typically fared well. Cuyahoga
County had the most - nearly 25,000. About 13,000 of
those had been verified as of Wednesday, with about
8,600 of that group deemed valid.

Meanwhile, the presidential candidates from the Green
and Libertarian parties have said they will demand a
recount of all the ballots in Ohio - which could
include a review of another group of votes; 92,672
"spoiled" ballots that recorded no vote for president.

But the most important number in Ohio is the number we
will never know - the number of people who didn't cast
a vote because the lines were so long. And as Harvey
Wasserman writes, this was the result of a systematic
effort by Karl Rove and Ken Blackwell to suppress
Democratic votes.

Hour after hour the testimonies are the same: angry
Ohioans telling of vicious Republican manipulation and
de facto intimidation that disenfranchised tens of
thousands and probably cost the Democrats the
election.

At an African-American church on Saturday and then at
the Franklin County Courthouse Monday night, more than
700 people came to testify and witness to tales of the
atrocity that was the November 2 election.

Organized by local ad hoc groups, the hearings had a
court reporter and a team of lawyers along with other
appointed witnesses. At freepress.org we will be
making the testimonies available as they're
transcribed and organized, and we will present a
fuller accounting of the hearings, along with a book
that includes the transcripts.

But one thing was instantly and abundantly clear: the
Republican Party turned Ohio 2004 into an updated
version of the Jim Crow South.

The principle overt method of vote suppression was to
short-change inner city precincts of sufficient voting
machines to allow a timely balloting. In precinct
after precinct, virtually all of them predominantly
black, poor, young and Democratic, the lines stretched
for two, five, eight, even eleven hours. The elderly
and infirm were forced to stand in the rain while city
officials threatened to tow their cars. No chairs or
shelter were provided. Crucial signage was
mysteriously missing. Thousands came to vote, saw the
long lines and left.

How many thousands? Enough to turn the election?
Almost definitely.

None of this was accidental. This was a well-planned
GOP attack on the right to vote, and on Democratic
candidacies. Republican Secretary of State Kenneth
Blackwell was also co-chair of the Ohio campaign for
Bush. A right-wing Republican was in charge of the
Franklin County Board of Elections.

They all said the election went "smoothly." By their
standards they were right. At least 68 voting machines
sat in a warehouse while precinct managers called
desperately for help. Republican precinct judges and
challengers harassed would-be voters. The names of
long-time activists mysteriously disappeared from
registration lists. The arsenal of dirty tricks was
virtually endless.

With it the Bush/Rove team deprived countless Ohioans
of their right to vote just as surely as if they'd
levied a poll tax or invoked the grandfather clause.

In the coming days we'll issue a more complete
accounting of these devastating hearings. No one who
cares about democracy and fears the consequences of
its destruction could come away from them without
being both infuriated and terrified.

Ralph Nader's NH recount is today. Kim Zetter of Wired
explains the anomalies that prompted Nader's recount
request, which were flagged by Ida Briggs of Michigan,
a programmer with 20 years of experience:

Most people would have expected John Kerry's
performance at the polls this year to be similar to Al
Gore's in 2000. And in 229 out of 300 voting
districts, or wards as they're called in New
Hampshire, that was the case. Kerry either matched the
percentage of votes that Gore received in 2000 in
those wards or did better than Gore. But in 71 wards,
Briggs found, Bush did better in 2004 than he did in
2000.

When Briggs broke the 71 wards down by voting
equipment -- separating wards into those that used
traditional paper ballots and those that used
optical-scan machines -- she discovered that 73
percent of the wards used optical-scan equipment,
while only 27 percent used traditional paper ballots.
Even more interesting was the breakdown per brand of
voting equipment. New Hampshire wards used
optical-scan equipment made by Diebold Election
Systems and Election Systems & Software. About 62
percent of the wards with anomalous results used
Diebold machines.

"Which is pretty high," Briggs said. "Especially in
comparison to hand-counted paper ballots, which
accounted for only 27 percent of the out-of-trend
wards."

In one ward in the city of Manchester, the change was
remarkable. In 2000, Gore beat Bush 49 percent to 48
percent. But this year Bush carried the ward with 53
percent of votes. In another Manchester ward where
Gore won 52 percent to Bush's 44 percent in 2000, Bush
won with 50 percent to Kerry's 49 percent this year.

"The numbers could be real," Briggs said. "But to be
this dramatically outside of the trend raises some red
flags."

Some people have explained away the numbers as a
result of affluent Massachusetts voters moving to New
Hampshire to take advantage of its tax system. These
transplants would be more likely to vote for Bush. But
Briggs thinks this is too anecdotal and shouldn't be
used to dismiss the numbers.

"It's also anecdotal that urban voters tend to vote
more liberal than rural voters, but in New Hampshire
we see that trend reversed," she said.

Briggs said the wards with surprising numbers account
for about 235,000 votes, at least 200,000 of which are
in wards that used Diebold machines. This is
significant because earlier this year, activists found
security flaws in the Diebold counting software that
could allow someone with access to the system to alter
votes.

But Briggs stressed that there was nothing to indicate
fraud.

"My take is this could simply be a glitch. And if
someone made a mistake, then it's an easy find," she
said. "Thank God New Hampshire has a paper trail so we
can just sit down and count the paper ballots."

Unlike states and counties using paperless
touch-screen voting machines, New Hampshire passed a
law in 1994 requiring all voting machines to produce a
paper trail, so the paper can easily be used to verify
the vote results.

But this isn't why Briggs chose to examine New
Hampshire's machines. She chose the state because
Kerry won there, with 50 percent of the votes to
Bush's 49 percent, and people would be less likely to
view her examination as a partisan tactic to overturn
Bush's victory.

The recount will consist only of 11 wards, taken from
a list of wards that Briggs supplied to the Nader
campaign. Because state officials are already busy
conducting 15 recounts in close local races, they will
only be able to count five of the wards Thursday and
will do the remaining six wards at a date to be
determined...

[Nader spokesman Zeese] said they looked at data
showing that in Florida counties using optical-scan
machines numerous Democrats had voted for Bush. But he
concluded, as several academics did, that "it's not
unusual," since many Democrats in Florida had been
voting Republican for years.

But if the New Hampshire recount uncovers problems
with the machines, the Nader campaign will consider
seeking a recount in Florida, since the state uses
many of the same Diebold and ES&S optical-scan
machines as those in New Hampshire. The process in
Florida, however, would be more complicated and
expensive.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1118-22.htm

Published on Thursday, November 18, 2004 by
CommonDreams.org
'Stinking Evidence' of Possible Election Fraud Found
in Florida
by Thom Hartmann

There was something odd about the poll tapes.

A "poll tape" is the phrase used to describe a
printout from an optical scan voting machine made the
evening of an election, after the machine has read all
the ballots and crunched the numbers on its internal
computer. It shows the total results of the election
in that location. The printout is signed by the
polling officials present in that precinct/location,
and then submitted to the county elections office as
the official record of how the people in that
particular precinct had voted. (Usually each location
has only one single optical scanner/reader, and thus
produces only one poll tape.)

Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.org, the erstwhile
investigator of electronic voting machines, along with
people from Florida Fair Elections, showed up at
Florida's Volusia County Elections Office on the
afternoon of Tuesday, November 16, 2004, and asked to
see, under a public records request, each of the poll
tapes for the 100+ optical scanners in the precincts
in that county. The elections workers - having been
notified in advance of her request - handed her a set
of printouts, oddly dated November 15 and lacking
signatures.

Bev pointed out that the printouts given her were not
the original poll tapes and had no signatures, and
thus were not what she'd requested. Obligingly, they
told her that the originals were held in another
location, the Elections Office's Warehouse, and that
since it was the end of the day they should meet Bev
the following morning to show them to her.

Bev showed up bright and early the morning of
Wednesday the 17th - well before the scheduled meeting
- and discovered three of the elections officials in
the Elections Warehouse standing over a table covered
with what looked like poll tapes. When they saw Bev
and her friends, Bev told me in a telephone interview
less than an hour later, "They immediately shoved us
out and slammed the door."

In a way, that was a blessing, because it led to the
stinking evidence.

"On the porch was a garbage bag," Bev said, "and so I
looked in it and, and lo and behold, there were public
record tapes."

Thrown away. Discarded. Waiting to be hauled off.

"It was technically stinking, in fact," Bev added,
"because what they had done was to have thrown some of
their polling tapes, which are the official records of
the election, into the garbage. These were the ones
signed by the poll workers. These are something we had
done an official public records request for."

When the elections officials inside realized that the
people outside were going through the trash, they
called the police and one came out to challenge Bev.

Kathleen Wynne, a www.blackboxvoting.org investigator,
was there.

"We caught the whole thing on videotape," she said. "I
don't think you'll ever see anything like this - Bev
Harris having a tug of war with an election worker
over a bag of garbage, and he held onto it and she
pulled on it, and it split right open, spilling out
those poll tapes. They were throwing away our
democracy, and Bev wasn't going to let them do it."

As I was interviewing Bev just moments after the
tussle, she had to get off the phone, because, "Two
police cars just showed up."

She told me later in the day, in an on-air interview,
that when the police arrived, "We all had a vigorous
debate on the merits of my public records request."

The outcome of that debate was that they all went from
the Elections Warehouse back to the Elections Office,
to compare the original, November 2 dated and signed
poll tapes with the November 15 printouts the
Elections Office had submitted to the Secretary of
State. A camera crew from www.votergate.tv met them
there, as well.

And then things got even odder.

"We were sitting there comparing the real [signed,
original] tapes with the [later printout] ones that
were given us," Bev said, "and finding things missing
and finding things not matching, when one of the
elections employees took a bin full of things that
looked like garbage - that looked like polling tapes,
actually - and passed by and disappeared out the back
of the building."

This provoked investigator Ellen Brodsky to walk
outside and check the garbage of the Elections Office
itself. Sure enough - more original, signed poll
tapes, freshly trashed.

"And I must tell you," Bev said, "that whatever they
had taken out [the back door] just came right back in
the front door and we said, 'What are these polling
place tapes doing in your dumpster?'"

A November 18 call to the Volusia County Elections
Office found that Elections Supervisor Deanie Lowe was
unavailable and nobody was willing to speak on the
record with an out-of-state reporter. However, The
Daytona Beach News (in Volusia County), in a November
17th article by staff writer Christine Girardin,
noted, "Harris went to the Department of Elections'
warehouse on State Road 44 in DeLand on Tuesday to
inspect original Nov. 2 polling place tapes, after
being given a set of reprints dated Nov. 15. While
there, Harris saw Nov. 2 polling place tapes in a
garbage bag, heightening her concern about the
integrity of voting records."

The Daytona Beach News further noted that, "[Elections
Supervisor] Lowe confirmed Wednesday some backup
copies of tapes from the Nov. 2 election were destined
for the shredder," but pointed out that, according to
Lowe, that was simply because there were two sets of
tapes produced on election night, each signed. "One
tape is delivered in one car along with the ballots
and a memory card," the News reported. "The backup
tape is delivered to the elections office in a second
car."

Suggesting that duplicates don't need to be kept, Lowe
claims that Harris didn't want to hear an explanation
of why some signed poll tapes would be in the garbage.
"She's not wanting to listen to an explanation," Lowe
told the News of Harris. "She has her own ideas."

But the Ollie North action in two locations on two
days was only half of the surprise that awaited Bev
and her associates. When they compared the discarded,
signed, original tapes with the recent printouts
submitted to the state and used to tabulate the
Florida election winners, Harris says a disturbing
pattern emerged.

"The difference was hundreds of votes in each of the
different places we examined," said Bev, "and most of
those were in minority areas."

When I asked Bev if the errors they were finding in
precinct after precinct were random, as one would
expect from technical, clerical, or computer errors,
she became uncomfortable.

"You have to understand that we are non-partisan," she
said. "We're not trying to change the outcome of an
election, just to find out if there was any voting
fraud."

That said, Bev added: "The pattern was very clear. The
anomalies favored George W. Bush. Every single time."

Of course finding possible voting "anomalies" in one
Florida county doesn't mean they'll show up in all
counties. It's even conceivable there are innocent
explanations for both the mismatched counts and
trashed original records; this story undoubtedly will
continue to play out. And, unless further
investigation demonstrates a pervasive and statewide
trend toward "anomalous" election results in many of
Florida's counties, odds are none of this will change
the outcome of the election (which exit polls showed
John Kerry winning in Florida).

Nonetheless, Bev and her merry band are off to hit
another county.

As she told me on her cell phone while driving toward
their next destination, "We just put Volusia County
and their lawyers on notice that they need to continue
to keep a number of documents under seal, including
all of the memory cards to the ballot boxes, and all
of the signed poll tapes."

Why?

"Simple," she said. "Because we found anomalies
indicative of fraud."

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," "Unequal Protection:
The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human
Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America,"
and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."

###

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1118-30.htm

Published on Thursday, November 18, 2004 by the
Columbus Free Press (Columbus, Ohio)
Hearings on Ohio Voting Put 2004 Election in Doubt
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman

Highly-charged, jam-packed hearings held here in
Columbus have cast serious doubt on the true outcome
of the presidential election.
On Saturday, November 13, and Monday, November 15, the
Ohio Election Protection Coalition’s public hearings
in Columbus solicited extensive sworn first-person
testimony from 32 of Ohio voters, precinct judges,
poll workers, legal observers, party challengers. An
additional 66 people provided written affidavits of
election irregularities. The unavoidable conclusion is
that this year's election in Ohio was deeply flawed,
that thousands of Ohioans were denied their right to
vote, and that the ultimate vote count is very much in
doubt.

Most importantly, the testimony has revealed a
widespread and concerted effort on the part of
Republican Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell to
deny primarily African-American and young voters the
right to cast their ballots within a reasonable time.
By depriving precincts of adequate numbers of
functioning voting machines, Blackwell created waits
of three to eleven hours, driving tens of thousands of
likely Democratic voters away from the polls and very
likely affecting the outcome of the Ohio vote count,
which in turn decided the national election.

On November 17, Blackwell wrote an op-ed piece for
Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times, stating:
“Every eligible voter who wanted to vote had the
opportunity to vote. There was no widespread fraud,
and there was no disenfranchisement. A half-million
more Ohioans voted than ever before with fewer errors
than four years ago, a sure sign on success by any
measure,” Blackwell wrote. Moon's extreme right wing
Unification Church has long-standing ties to the Bush
Family and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Additional testimony also called into question the
validity of the actual vote counts. There are thus
serious doubts that the final official tally in Ohio,
due December 1 to Blackwell’s office, will have any
validity. Blackwell will certify the vote count on
December 3.

While Blackwell supervised the Ohio vote he also
served as co-chair of the Ohio Bush-Cheney re-election
campaign, a clear conflict of interest that casts
further doubt on how the Ohio election and vote counts
have been conducted.

At the Columbus hearings, witness after witness under
oath gave testimony to an election riddled with
discrimination and disarray. Among them:

Werner Lange, a pastor from Youngstown, Ohio, who said
in part:

“In precincts 1 A and 5 G, voting as Hillman
Elementary School, which is a predominantly African
American community, there were woefully insufficient
number of voting machines in three precincts. I was
told that the standard was to have one voting machine
per 100 registered voters. Precinct A had 750
registered voters. Precinct G had 690. There should
have been 14 voting machines at this site. There were
only 6, three per precinct, less than 50 percent of
the standard. This caused an enormous bottleneck among
voters who had to wait a very, very long time to vote,
many of them giving up in frustration and leaving. . .
. I estimate, by the way, that an estimated loss of
over 8,000 votes from the African American community
in the City of Youngstown alone, with its 84
precincts, were lost due to insufficient voting
machines, and that would translate to some 7,000 votes
lost for John Kerry for President in Youngstown alone.
. . .”

“Just yesterday I went to the Trumbull Board of
Elections in northeast Ohio, I wanted to review their
precinct logs so I could continue my investigation.
This was denied. I was told by the Board of Elections
official that I could not see them until after the
official vote was given.”
Marion Brown, Columbus:

“I am here on behalf of a friend. My friend came to my
home very upset while she was away standing four hours
in the voting, her husband passed away. The funeral
was on yesterday, November 13th, at 2:00. Perhaps had
she not stood so long in the line, she may have been
able to save her husband.”
Victoria Parks:

“In Pickaway County, oh, my goodness, in Pickaway
County, I entered there, I was shown a table, 53 poll
books were plunked down in front of my. I noticed
there were no signature on file in any of the poll
books, in any of the poll books, and furthermore, a
minute later the director of the Board of Elections of
Pickaway County came into the room and snatched the
books away from me and said you cannot look at these
books. I said are you aware that what you are doing is
against the law? She said I have been on the phone
with the Secretary of State and he has instructed me
to take these books away and you cannot see them. I
paraphrase very slightly here. She took them away. I
was persona non grata. I did not want to risk arrest,
and I left. . . . There were no signatures, and
furthermore, the writing in the book seemed to have
been written in the same hand, because that is a
requirement.”
Boyd Mitchell, Columbus:

“What I saw was voter intimidation in the form of city
employees that were sent in to stop illegal parking.
Now, in Driving Park Rec Center there are less than 50
legal parking spots, and there were literally hundreds
and hundreds of voters there, and I estimated at least
70 percent of the people were illegally parked in the
grass around the perimeter of the Driving Park Rec
Center, and two city employees drove up in a city
truck and said that they had been sent there to stop
illegal parking, and they went so far as to harass at
least a couple of voters that I saw, and when they
were talking to us, they were kind. But when they
didn't realize we were overhearing them talking to
voters, they were trying to keep people from parking
where they were parking. They went so far as to set up
some cones, trying to block people from getting into a
grassy area...”

“I calculated that I maybe saw about 20 percent of the
people that left Driving Park D and C, I personally
saw and talked to about 20 percent of them as they
left the poll between 12:30 and 8 p.m. And I saw 15
people who left because the line was too long. The
lines inside were anywhere from 2 1/2 to 5 hours. Most
everybody said 4 hours, and I saw at least 15 people
who did not vote, and I heard a gentleman who was
earlier making some mathematical calculations, well,
if this is going on across town, and, you know, in a
precinct where it was going so heavily for Kerry, and
me only seeing 20 percent of the people coming out, I
saw 15. We could just do the math and extrapolate that
out into a huge number of people who might have voted
had they had a chance.”
Joe Popich (entered into the record copies of the
Perry County Board of Election poll book):

“There are a bunch of irregularities in this log book,
but the most blatant irregularity would be the fact
that there are 360 signatures in this book. There are
33 people who voted absentee ballot at this precinct,
for a total of 393 votes that should be attributed to
that precinct. However, the Board of Elections is
attributing 96 more votes to that precinct than what
this log book reflects.”
Derek Winsor, Columbus:

“Out of the six total voting machines that were at 14
C, three of them showed some type of malfunction that
at one point or another during the three our so hours
that we were waiting, and between my wife and me, we
had asked poll workers individually if they could
explain what was going on and what kind of
reassurances they could give us that, for one machine
in particular that the votes had already been posted
on, that machine would be counted, and the response
was just, oh, they will be counted. And how can you be
sure of that? What storage mechanism do they use to
ensure that the votes are stored, and, again, the
response was just, well, they just are. And that was a
bit of a concern here.”
Carol Shelton, presiding judge, precinct 25 B at the
Linden Branch of the Columbus Metropolitan Library:

“The precinct is 95 to 99 percent black. . . . There
were 1,500 persons on the precinct rolls. We received
three machines. In my own precinct in Clintonville,
19E, we always received three machines for 700 to 730
voters. Voter turnout in my own precinct has reached
as high as 70 percent while I worked there. I
interviewed many voters in 25 B and asked how many
machines they had had in the past. Everyone who had a
recollection said five or six. I called to get more
machines and ended up being connected with Matt
Damschroder, the Director of the Board of Elections.
After a real hassle -- and someone here has it on
videotape, he sent me a fourth machine which did not
dent the length of the line. Fewer than 700 voted,
although the turnout at the beginning of the day would
cause anyone to predict a turnout of over 80 percent.
This was a clear case of voter suppression by making
voting an impossibility for anyone who had to go to
work or anyone who was stuck at home caring for
children or the elderly while another family member
voted.”
Allesondra Hernandez, Toledo:

“What I witnessed when I had gotten there about 9 A.M.
was a young African American woman who had come out
nearly in tears. She was a new voter, very first
registered, very excited to vote, and she had said
that she had been bounced around to three different
polling places, and this one had just turned her down
again. People were there to help her out, and I was
concerned. I started asking around to everyone else,
and they had informed me earlier that day that she was
not the only one, but there were at least three others
who had been bounced around. Also earlier that day the
polls had opened an hour late, did not open until
about 7:30 A.M. The polling machines were locked in
the principal's office. Hundreds of people were turned
away, were forced to leave the line because they
needed to be at school, they needed to be at work, or
they needed to take their children to school. The
people there who were assisting did the best they
could to take down numbers and take down names, but I
am assuming that a majority of those people could not
come back because of work and/or because of school,
because they had shown up to vote, and that was the
time that they could vote, and that is why they were
there. Also along the same lines, they ran out of
pencils for those ballots.”
Erin Deignan, Columbus:

“I was an official poll worker judge in precinct
Columbus 25 F, at the East Linden School. We had
between 1100 and 1200 people on the voter registry
there. We had three voting machines. We did the math.
I am sure lots of other people did too. With the
five-minute limit, 13 hours the polls were open, three
machines, that is 468 voters, that is less than half
of the people we had on the registry. We stayed open
three hours past 7:30 and got about 550 people
through, but we had one Board of Elections worker come
in the morning. We asked if he could bring more
machines. He is said more machines had been delivered,
but they didn't have any more. We had another Board of
Elections official come later in the day, and he said
that in Upper Arlington he had seen 12 machines.”
Matthew Segal, Gambier:

“In this past election, Kenyon College students and
the residents of Gambier, Ohio, had to endure some of
the most extenuating voting circumstances in the
entire country. As many of you may already know,
because they had it on national media attention,
Kenyon students and the residents of Gambier had to
stand in line up to 10 to 12 hours in the rain,
through a hot gym, and crowded narrow lines, making it
extremely uncomfortable. As a result of this, voters
were disenfranchised, having class to attend to,
sports commitments, and midterms for the next day,
which they had to study for. Obviously, it is a
disgrace that kids who are being perpetually told the
importance of voting, could not vote because they had
other commitments and had to be put up with a 12-hour
line.”
Blackwell characterized Ohio’s Election Day as
“tremendously successful” in the Washington Times.
Several people at Saturday’s hearing said they’d like
to hear Mr. Blackwell testify under oath, preferably
under a criminal indictment.

Bob Fitrakis, Ph.D, J.D., a legal advisor for the
Election Protection Coalition, convened and moderated
the public hearings. Harvey Wasserman is Senior Editor
of the Columbus Free Press and freepress.org. Audio
from the hearings can be found at:
www.theneighborhoodnetwork.org.

© 2004 Columbus Free Press

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00227.htm

Complete US Exit Poll Data Confirms Net Suspicions
Wednesday, 17 November 2004, 10:45 pm
Article: Alastair Thompson

Complete US Exit Poll Data Confirms Net Suspicions
Full 51 State Early Exit Poll Data Released For The
First Time

By Scoop Co-Editor Alastair Thompson
Scoop.co.nz is delighted to be able today to publish a
full set of 4pm exit poll data for the first time on
the Internet since the US election. The data emerged
this evening NZT in a post on the Democratic
Underground website under the forum name TruthIsAll.

The new data confirms what was already widely known
about the swing in favour of George Bush, but
amplifies the extent of that swing.

Click for big version
Figure 1: Graph showing the "red shift" between 2004
US General Election exit polls & the actual 2004 US
Election results
In the data which is shown below in tabulated form,
and above in graph form, we can see that 42 of the 51
states in the union swung towards George Bush while
only nine swung towards Kerry.

There has to date been no official explanation for the
discrepancy.

Ordinarily in the absence of an obvious mistabulation
error, roughly the same number of states should have
swung towards each candidate.

Moreover many of the states that swung against
Democratic Party hopeful John Kerry swung to an extent
that is well beyond the margin of error in exit polls.
Exit polls by their nature - they ask voters how they
actually voted rather than about their intentions -
are typically considered highly accurate.

Last week in an analysis of a similar, but incomplete
set of data, Dr Stephen F. Freeman from the University
of Pennsylvania calculated that the odds of just three
of the major swing states, Florida, Ohio and
Pennsylvania all swinging as far as they did against
their respective exit polls were 250 milllion to 1.
(See…"The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy" – Dr
Stephen F. Freeman - .pdf format)

Dr Freeman's academic paper contains a thorough
description of why and how exit polls are conducted
(in some countries they use them to prevent against
vote fraud), and considers a number of hypotheses for
why this year's polls could have been so dramatically
wrong. He concludes that the reasons are unknown.

CAUTIONARY NOTE: The data that is released today shows
the 4pm data run from the Edison-Mitofsky polling
company. This run was based on 63% of the full 13660
sample in the poll. However as we also have a set of
data from around midnight with which to compare this
data, we can tell that the final exit poll results
were not that far different than these early results.
This in itself tends to suggest that the polling
system did not have a systemic bias in its early data
as suggested by some commentators in early reports on
this puzzle.

(For a more detailed description of the limitations of
this data and the claimed gender bias in the early
data see.. EXTENDED FOOTNOTE ON THE LIMITATIONS OF
THIS DATA - By Jonathan Simon )

*****************
For more background and the latest news links on this
news subject see also Scoop's A Very American Coup
Special Feature

http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh111604.shtml

TWIN TOWERS! Rice for Powell? Your “press corps” knows
to pander and fawn to Washington’s two favorite icons:
// link // print // previous // next //

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2004

TWIN TOWERS: Bush wants to put Condi Rice in for
Powell. And what a perfect swap it is! How better to
capture the way the press rolled over regarding Iraq?
Of course, Powell has long been the press corps’ prime
icon—the man who can do and say anything. Major
scribes all know their Hard Pundit Law—they must
affirm what the genial man says. In July 2003,
Margaret Carlson captured their Stepford-like approach
to Powell when questioned by Charlie Rose (see THE
DAILY HOWLER, 7/4/03):

ROSE (7/3/03): Where were you on the war?
CARLSON: I was, give diplomacy a chance. [Brightening]
I was with Colin Powell the whole way along! Whatever
Colin Powell—

ROSE: Oh, so whatever Colin—you know. OK.

CARLSON: Yeah. Whatever Colin does, I’ll go with.

ROSE: Is that right?

And yes, that was precisely right, as we had seen five
months before. When Powell appeared before the UN on
2/5/03, he made a notably shaky presentation
supporting the plan to wage war in Iraq. But all your
major “liberal” pundits knew what they were required
to do. Starting the day after Powell’s performance,
pundits stampeded into print, swearing fealty to
Colin’s appraisals. But uh-oh! One month later, it was
already clear that Powell’s presentation had been
rather shaky. Result? Here’s the late Mary McGrory in
the Post, explaining why she had rushed into print
swearing that Powell was perfect:
MCGRORY (3/6/03): What impressed me about Powell’s
presentation, besides his magisterial presence and
impeccable prose, were the poisons he showed and the
malice behind them. I did not have the benefit of the
informed criticism that followed.
How worthless is your mainstream “press corps?” One
day after his shaky UN outing, McGrory rushed into
print praising Powell—and now she said that she had
done so because of his “presence” and his “impeccable
prose.” “I did not have the benefit of the informed
criticism that followed,” she haplessly
added—explaining why she’d affirmed a presentation
without knowing if it was boffo or bunkum. But at the
Post, almost all “liberal” pundits had rushed to
praise Powell—Richard Cohen and William Raspberry too
(links below). And even today, every pundit knows to
insist that Powell clearly believed his own
twaddle—even though Bob Woodward’s Bush at War plainly
showed that Powell included material in his UN pitch
that he thought to be “iffy” and “murky” (links
below). Nothing—nothing—changes the way this
pandered-to poobah is reviewed.
But if Powell has been the corps’ Icon I, Rice has
been its Icon II—Darling Condi, the wholly
untouchable. Indeed, Rice’s testimony before the 9/11
Commission provided one of the most instructive recent
cases of press corps pimping and fawning. Must icons
like Condi play by the rules? Must Darling Condi honor
her oath? The press corps answered—no, and no—as it
kept the public from seeing the shape of this icon’s
inexcusable conduct.

Rice appeared before the commission on April 8, 2004.
Special rules had been crafted for her appearance—no
one could question for more than ten minutes. Blessed
by these special restrictions, Rice knew what she had
to do when questioned by Richard Ben-Veniste. She
stalled; she hemmed and hawed; she fudged and evaded;
and yes, eventually, she told a flat lie. And how did
the “press corps” react to all this? How else? They
all pandered to Condi! Rice had baldly broken her
oath—and your pundits all pandered to Condi.

How did the sequence of questioning go? As he began,
Ben-Veniste asked a bone-simple, yes-or-no question
about a briefing Bush received in the summer before
9/11. Eventually, he was forced to ask his question
three times. But here was its first iteration:

BEN-VENISTE (4/8/04): Isn’t it a fact, Dr. Rice, that
the August 6th PDB [Presidential Daily Briefing]
warned against possible attacks in this country?
After Rice gave an odd reply, Ben-Veniste asked his
question again. This time he used more specific
language—language he had taken straight from the PDB
itself:
BEN-VENISTE (second iteration): As of the August 6th
briefing, you learned that al Qaeda members have
resided or traveled to the United States for years and
maintained a support system in the United States. And
you learned that FBI information since the 1998 Blind
Sheik—warning of hijackings to free the Blind Sheik
indicated a pattern of suspicious activity in the
country, up until August 6th, consistent with
preparation for hijackings. Isn’t that so?
The answer to that question was simple—yes. In fact,
the highlighted language came straight from the PDB in
question (text of PDB below). But Ben-Veniste was at a
disadvantage; the August 6 PDB was still classified,
so while he and Rice knew what it said, the press and
the public had no way to know. And Darling Condi knew
what this meant; it meant that she could dissemble as
much as she pleased, and her fake answers couldn’t be
checked. So the Icon hemmed and hawed again—forcing
Ben-Veniste to ask his question a third, final time:
BEN-VENISTE (third iteration): You have indicated here
that this [PDB] was some historical document. And I am
asking you whether it is not the case that you learned
in the PDB memo of August 6th that the FBI was saying
that it had information suggesting that
preparations—not historically, but ongoing, along with
these numerous full-field investigations against al
Qaeda cells—that preparations were being made
consistent with hijackings within the United States.
Again, the highlighted language came straight from the
PDB (text below). The answer to this question was
bone-simple —yes. But Condi knew the PDB was still
under wraps—so she refused “to tell the whole truth.”
In fact, Rice’s third answer was so far from the truth
that it can best be described as a lie.
But Condi Rice is the press corps’ darling, an icon
who plays by The Condi Rules. Indeed, the aftermath of
this rank exchange tells you all you need to know
about the soul of your modern “press.” Surprise! Two
days after Rice’s exchange with Ben-Veniste, the
August 6 PDB was made public. Result? It became clear
that Ben-Veniste had been quoting straight from its
text—and that Rice had refused, three separate times,
to answer his bone-simple question.

Rice had refused to honor her oath, about a major
life-or-death matter. Given three separate chances to
answer, she had refused to do so each time; the third
time, she’d basically lied to the nation. But
remember—this was Darling Condi, Icon II, the princess
who plays by The Condi Rules. So how did the pandering
press corps react when they discovered what had
happened? Easy! Pundits savaged Ben-Veniste for rudely
asking his question three times! And pundits all knew
that they must never say that Darling Condi had broken
her oath. Ben-Veniste was slammed in the press—and the
press refused to report Rice’s conduct. In this
episode, we see the basic shape of the way your “press
corps” handled 9/11 and Iraq—and we see the way
they’re going to act as Rice comes up for her new
station.

Powell and Condi? Icons both. It’s like the old joke
from the Soviet Union: They pretend to tell you the
truth, and the “press corps” pretends to report on
them.

FOR THE RECORD: For the record, here are paragraphs
6-10 of the 11-paragraph PDB. The reader can see that
Ben-Veniste’s question came straight from paragraph
10:

PRESIDENTIAL DAILY BRIEFING, 8/6/01: (pgh 7) Al Qaeda
members—including some who are U.S. citizens—have
resided in or traveled to the U.S. for years, and the
group apparently maintains a support structure that
could aid attacks….
(8) A clandestine source said in 1998 that a bin Laden
cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth
for attacks.

(9) We have not been able to corroborate some of the
more sensational threat reporting, such as that from a
[REDACTED] service in 1998 saying that bin Laden
wanted to hijack a U.S. aircraft to gain the release
of “Blind Sheik” Omar Abdel Rahman and other U.S.-held
extremists.

(10) Nevertheless, FBI information since that time
indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this
country consistent with preparations for hijackings or
other types of attacks, including recent surveillance
of federal buildings in New York.

The answer to Ben-Veniste’s question was bone-simple:
Yes! But to see Darling Condi lie in your face, review
our four-part series, “Rice Under Oath.” For links to
all four reports, see THE DAILY HOWLER, 4/17/04.
VISIT OUR INCOMPARABLE ARCHIVES: Again: To see Darling
Condi lie in your face, review our four-part series,
“Rice Under Oath.” For links to all four reports, see
THE DAILY HOWLER, 4/17/04.

To see McGrory take it back about Powell, see THE
DAILY HOWLER, 3/6/03, with links to prior reporting.

In Woodward’s book, Powell pimps some iffy scuds. See
THE DAILY HOWLER, 5/24/04.

To see Gwen Ifill give Rice home cookin’, see THE
DAILY HOWLER, 8/11/03, with links to prior reporting.

How does Koppel handle Colin? See THE DAILY HOWLER,
10/19/04, for a study in private press culture.

Finally, why didn’t the “press corps” ask questions
before the war? Jim Lehrer said they were just too
stupid. To revisit this utterly foolish excuse, see
THE DAILY HOWLER, 5/17/04. The actual reason was
perfectly clear when the “press corps” trashed
Ben-Veniste and pimped for its darling, Icon Condi.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1117-01.htm

Published on Wednesday, November 17, 2004 by the
Boston Globe
Media Accused of Ignoring Election Irregularities
by Mark Jurkowitz

Two weeks after Election Day, explosive allegations
about a media coverup are percolating.

There's the widely circulated e-mail about a CBS
producer who complained that a news industry
"lock-down" has prevented journalists from
investigating voting problems that cropped up on Nov
2. There's the rumor that MSNBC host Keith Olbermann,
who has devoted serious air time to discussing
Election Day irregularities, was fired for broaching
the topic. There's the assertion by Bev Harris,
executive director of Black Box Voting Inc., that she
had received calls from network employees saying they
had been told to lay off the sensitive subject of
voting fraud.

In the days after Nov. 2, the Internet was abuzz with
charges from partisans that voting irregularities
might have cost John F. Kerry the White House.

With some media outlets moving swiftly to debunk the
notion that the election had been stolen by the
Republicans, the press itself has come under scrutiny,
accused of everything from a conspiracy of silence to
a collective passivity about pursuing voting
irregularities.

"The mainstream media is not treating this as an
important story overall," said Steve Rendall, senior
analyst at the liberal media watchdog group Fairness
and Accuracy in Reporting."The mainstream media has
largely treated the story as some crazy Internet
story." At the same time, Rendall acknowledged: "There
has been excess in the way stuff has flown around the
Internet and e-mail lists."

Tracking down the sources of the rapidly proliferating
online allegations about a media "lock-down" is a
daunting task. But the response to them has been
unequivocal. "Absolutely untrue," a CBS spokeswoman,
Sandy Genelius, said when asked about the report of
the whistle-blowing CBS producer. "Absolutely,
positively, categorically false. Besides that, it's
absurd."

"There are a lot of nervous people out there," said
Olbermann, whose disappearance from MSNBC was the
result not of being terminated but of taking a
vacation. "I'm both amused and a little terrified that
I became the subject of an Internet rumor."

In an appearance Nov. 8 on the "Democracy Now!"
program, Harris, whose organization is investigating
allegations of voter fraud in Florida and Ohio, told
host Amy Goodman that sources in television news have
told her "there is now a lock-down on this story. It
is officially . . . 'Let's move on' time." In an
interview with The Boston Globe, she reiterated those
potent allegations but declined to reveal her sources.
She also appeared to soft-pedal the idea that the
media was at fault, saying instead that it was too
early in the fraud-investigation process to blame
reporters for not being more aggressive.

"I'm not terribly concerned about . . . the media's
coverage of it yet," she said. "We're still early. . .
. Caution's probably appropriate. [It's] a very
sensitive story."

Not all accusations that journalists have not
vigorously pursued allegations of voting problems
involve speculation that they are being muzzled by
their bosses. But several left-leaning critics
complain that reporters have lost interest in what is
still an important story because the outcome of the
2004 election, unlike in 2000, is not being contested.

Media Matters for America, a liberal media monitoring
organization, posted an item on its website recently
that cited several stories about faulty voting
equipment in Ohio that did not generate much media
interest. David Brock, the organization's president,
said in an interview: "I haven't seen anything that is
suggesting that further probing of the issue would
change the results of the election." But he added that
"there are some irregularities, and I would imagine
some reader and viewer interest. . . . It seems that
there should have been somewhat more coverage of this.
There was all this pressure and buildup and very
little follow-up."

TomPaine.com, a liberal website that collects news and
commentary about public policy issues, has posted
several analyses arguing that Kerry was hurt in Ohio
by a shortage of voting machines, as well as by
discarded votes that came disproportionately from
minority precincts. The website's executive editor,
Alexandra Walker, said her organization leaves the
conspiracy theories surrounding the media's behavior
to "the blogosphere."

But she also argued that, with the election results
not being disputed, "the public interest angle was not
enough to keep [voter irregularities] in the sights of
political reporters. The horse-race coverage of
political campaigns shortchanges readers."

No one has been more engaged in the issue than
Olbermann, the host of MSNBC's prime-time "Countdown"
program.

"The thing that woke me up was the lock-down in Warren
County," he said, referring to a Cincinnati Enquirer
report that officials in that Ohio county, citing
terrorist threats, barred observers from the vote
count. "I began to investigate then or at least raise
questions. . . . It turns out there are a lot of valid
stories, at least valid stories worth investigating."

Olbermann said there are a number of reasons much of
the media have not been pursuing the story as ardently
as he is, including "a love-hate [relationship] with
the blogs. Whatever new media is appearing, the
established news industry tend to look down on it." At
the same time, Olbermann flatly denies the
blogger-fueled rumor that he was fired for his
interest in voting irregularities, pointing out that
MSNBC has let him pursue the probe.

"It's still largely a game of telephone on the Net,"
he said.

© Copyright 2004 Boston Globe

###

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1116-27.htm

Published on Tuesday, November 16, 2004 by the Toronto
Star
Should Canada Indict Bush?
by Thomas Walkom

When U.S. President George W. Bush arrives in Ottawa —
probably later this year — should he be welcomed? Or
should he be charged with war crimes?

It's an interesting question. On the face of it, Bush
seems a perfect candidate for prosecution under
Canada's Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes Act.

This act was passed in 2000 to bring Canada's
ineffectual laws in line with the rules of the new
International Criminal Court. While never tested, it
lays out sweeping categories under which a foreign
leader like Bush could face arrest.

In particular, it holds that anyone who commits a war
crime, even outside Canada, may be prosecuted by our
courts. What is a war crime? According to the statute,
it is any conduct defined as such by "customary
international law" or by conventions that Canada has
adopted.

War crimes also specifically include any breach of the
1949 Geneva Conventions, such as torture, degradation,
wilfully depriving prisoners of war of their rights
"to a fair and regular trial," launching attacks "in
the knowledge that such attacks will cause incidental
loss of life or injury to civilians" and deportation
of persons from an area under occupation.

Outside of one well-publicized (and quickly squelched)
attempt in Belgium, no one has tried to formally
indict Bush. But both Oxfam International and the U.S.
group Human Rights Watch have warned that some of the
actions undertaken by the U.S. and its allies,
particularly in Iraq, may fall under the war crime
rubric.

The case for the prosecution looks quite promising.
First, there is the fact of the Iraq war itself. After
1945, Allied tribunals in Nuremberg and Tokyo — in an
astonishing precedent — ruled that states no longer
had the unfettered right to invade other countries and
that leaders who started such conflicts could be tried
for waging illegal war.

Concurrently, the new United Nations outlawed all
aggressive wars except those authorized by its
Security Council.

Today, a strong case could be made that Bush violated
the Nuremberg principles by invading Iraq. Indeed,
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has already labelled
that war illegal in terms of the U.N. Charter.

Second, there is the manner in which the U.S.
conducted this war.

The mistreatment of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib
prison is a clear contravention of the Geneva Accord.
The U.S. is also deporting selected prisoners to camps
outside of Iraq (another contravention). U.S. press
reports also talk of shadowy prisons in Jordan run by
the CIA, where suspects are routinely tortured. And
the estimated civilian death toll of 100,000 may well
contravene the Geneva Accords prohibition against the
use of excessive force.

Canada's war crimes law specifically permits
prosecution not only of those who carry out such
crimes but of the military and political superiors who
allow them to happen.

What has emerged since Abu Ghraib shows that officials
at the highest levels of the Bush administration
permitted and even encouraged the use of torture.

Given that Bush, as he likes to remind everyone, is
the U.S. military's commander-in-chief, it is hard to
argue he bears no responsibility.

Then there is Guantanamo Bay. The U.S. says detainees
there do not fall under the Geneva accords. That's an
old argument.

In 1946, Japanese defendants explained their
mistreatment of prisoners of war by noting that their
country had never signed any of the Geneva
Conventions. The Japanese were convicted anyway.

Oddly enough, Canada may be one of the few places
where someone like Bush could be brought to justice.
Impeachment in the U.S. is most unlikely. And, at
Bush's insistence, the new international criminal
court has no jurisdiction over any American.

But a Canadian war crimes charge, too, would face many
hurdles. Bush was furious last year when Belgians
launched a war crimes suit in their country against
him — so furious that Belgium not only backed down
under U.S. threats but changed its law to prevent
further recurrences.

As well, according to a foreign affairs spokesperson,
visiting heads of state are immune from prosecution
when in Canada on official business. If Ottawa wanted
to act, it would have to wait until Bush was out of
office — or hope to catch him when he comes up here to
fish.

And, of course, Canada's government would have to want
to act. War crimes prosecutions are political
decisions that must be authorized by the federal
attorney-general.

Still, Prime Minister Paul Martin has staked out his
strong opposition to war crimes. This was his focus in
a September address to the U.N. General Assembly.

There, Martin was talking specifically about war
crimes committed by militiamen in far-off Sudan. But
as my friends on the Star's editorial board noted in
one of their strong defences of concerted
international action against war crimes, the rule must
be, "One law for all."

Thomas Walkom writes every Tuesday for the Toronto
Star Tribune.

© 2004 Toronto Star

###

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4018325.stm

Chirac questions US-led Iraq war
French President Jacques Chirac says he is "not at all
sure" the world has become safer with the removal from
power of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
In a BBC interview Mr Chirac suggests the situation in
Iraq has helped to prompt an increase in terrorism.

The interview, to be aired on BBC Two's Newsnight
programme on Wednesday, comes ahead of his visit to
the UK this week.

President Chirac also maintains that any intervention
in Iraq should have been through the United Nations.

There's no doubt that there has been an increase in
terrorism and one of the origins of that has been the
situation in Iraq
French President Jacques Chirac

"To a certain extent Saddam Hussein's departure was a
positive thing, " Mr Chirac says when asked if the
world is safer now, as US President George W Bush has
repeatedly stated.

"But it also provoked reactions, such as the
mobilisation in a number of countries, of men and
women of Islam, which has made the world more
dangerous," Mr Chirac says.

"There's no doubt that there has been an increase in
terrorism and one of the origins of that has been the
situation in Iraq.

"I'm not at all sure that one can say that the world
is safer," Mr Chirac says.

Return favours

He also signals that he believes Britain's support for
the US-led war has brought few dividends.

In an earlier interview with British journalists, Mr
Chirac said Prime Minister Tony Blair had received
nothing in return for backing the Bush administration.

"I'm not sure it is in the nature of our American
friends at the moment to return favours
systematically," he said.

"I am not sure, with America as it is these days, that
it would be easy for someone, even the British, to be
an honest broker."

Mr Chirac said he had urged Mr Blair last year to
press President Bush to restart the Middle East peace
process in return for British support for the US-led
war in Iraq.

Speaking in Washington on Monday, Mr Blair called for
Europe and the US to bury their differences over Iraq.

"It is not a sensible or intelligent response for us
in Europe to ridicule American arguments and parody
their political leadership," he said.

The signs are that Mr Chirac and Mr Blair will again
at best agree to disagree on the Iraq war when they
meet on Thursday, says BBC World Affairs correspondent
Mike Wooldridge.

You can see the interview with President Chirac on
Newsnight on BBC Two at 2230 GMT on Wednesday 17
November, or watch it on the Newsnight website

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/4018325.stm

Published: 2004/11/17 11:16:12 GMT

© BBC MMIV

Nov. 18, 2004
By Justin Rood, CQ Staff

The CIA official who now runs the unit responsible for
analyzing
terrorist intelligence should share blame for mistakes
that opened the
door to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, says Michael
Scheuer, the agency
Osama bin Laden expert who resigned last week.

According to Scheuer, John O. Brennan, the CIA
official in charge of
the new interagency Terrorist Threat Integration
Center (TTIC), played a
key role in the United States’ failure to capture bin
Laden before the 2001
attacks.

In a telephone interview, Scheuer said, “I know for a
fact that the
director of the TTIC was one of the people that
dissuaded [former CIA
Director George J.] Tenet and others from trying to
capture bin Laden
in May 1998.”

In a letter to Congress last fall Scheuer called it
“our best chance to
capture Bin Laden — an operation which showed no U.S.
hand, risked no
U.S. lives, and was endorsed by senior commanders of
the Joint Special
Operations Command at Fort Bragg.” He said it “was
cancelled because
senior officials from the [Central Intelligence]
Agency, the Executive
Branch, and other Intelligence community components
decided to accept
assurances from an Islamic country that it could
acquire bin Laden from
the Taliban. . . . ”

In the interview Tuesday, Scheuer disclosed that the
unnamed “Islamic
country” was Saudi Arabia. In May 1998, Brennan was
serving as chief of
station in “a major Middle East capital,” according to
a CIA press
release.

“The makers of this decision ignored the extensive
documentary record
that showed nothing but uncooperativeness from this
Islamic country,”
Scheuer said in his letter to Congress.

Although he would not expound further because the
details are still
classified, he said, Scheuer insisted that Brennan
“was pivotal in
persuading the government not to go ahead with the
operation.”

A CIA spokesperson declined to make Brennan available
or comment for
this story.

*Names Other Officials*

Others were also to blame for failing to stop the
attacks, Scheuer said, going beyond a September 2004
letter to the Senate and House Intelligence
committees that cited “failures in leadership and
management,” particularly by “certain senior civil
servants” who exhibited “arrogance, bad judgment,
disdain for expertise, and bureaucratic cowardice” in
making decisions that allowed al Qaeda to prosper and
attack the United States.

But on Nov. 16 Scheuer— who on Nov. 10 resigned his
post as a senior
analyst in the Usama bin Laden unit of the CIA’s
Counterterrorism
Center — singled out Tenet, former FBI Director Louis
J. Freeh, National
Security Agency Director Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden,
former Defense
Secretary William S. Cohen, and current Defense
Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld, among others, saying they failed to take the
actions he felt
were necessary to kill bin Laden and prevent the Sept.
11 attacks.

The 9/11 commission thoroughly investigated the U.S.
government’s
repeated attempts to capture or kill bin Laden before
the 2001 attacks,
but did not affix blame to any specific officials for
the 9/11
intelligence failures.

Scheuer has been critical of some of the commission’s
conclusions in
the past. The 9/11 commission declined to comment on
his allegations
through its current entity, the 9/11 Public Discourse
Project.

Perhaps Scheuer’s most urgent criticism of the CIA is
its transfer of
experts out of its Usama bin Laden unit and into TTIC
and elsewhere,
without replacing them or doing enough to develop new
expertise.

“On 9/11, we had no more than 100 experienced
officers,” said Scheuer
of the unit, which provides support for covert
actions and intelligence
gathering against Osama bin Laden and his network.

“I think Tenet sent 25 [analysts] to the FBI right
after 9/11. And now
they’re sending another bunch over to TTIC. At the end
of the day, what
happens is [that] the group of officers which support
operations ...
against bin Laden has been starved, to send people to
TTIC,” he said.

Offense vs. Defense

TTIC keeps an eye out for terror threats to U.S.
interests by analyzing
and reporting on daily threat information, but it does
not task
collection or run covert operations, leading Scheuer
to dismiss it as
“kind of the voyeur of terrorist threats.”

Instead, Scheuer says, the CIA should be putting
knowledgeable people
in
the bin Laden unit, where they can run offense against
bin Laden,
rather
than at TTIC, where they take a defensive posture
against impending
attacks.

“I think a better investment is to attack the people
who are
thre

Posted by richard at 10:37 AM