Major Florida coke bust conspiracy? Mexican election mess; Underlings misinform Bush; Gaza; Italian intrigues; Army skinheads

Massive 5 ton cocaine bust tied to Bush cronies?: Yummy stuff. This weird company called SkyWay Aircraft, which claimed to sell security products to the Department of Homeland Security, got busted with a huge amount of cocaine from Mexico, and both Mexican and American authorities are being curiously silent about it. The Mexican press, on the other hand, has been speculating that high-ranking members of Vincente Fox's government are involved. Of course, SkyWay is based in Venice, Florida, right by where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained.

MadCowProd.com is offering the goods in this case. They conclude:

DC9’s cost money. But the twin airliners weren’t being used to demonstrate SkyWay’s products, for the simple reason that the company never had a product to demonstrate. The fact is both inescapable and mind-boggling at the same time. Two DC9’s painted to impersonate U.S. Government planes were being used for an as-yet unknown purpose… for almost two years.

Like the FAA, the attitude of the DEA toward a drug trafficking case involving 5.5 tons of cocaine seems remarkably laissez faire. A call to the DEA to inquire whether the Agency had mounted an investigation of an American-owned airliner busted with 5.5 tons of cocaine elicited a terse “no comment.”

The duty officer at the Tampa Office of the Drug Enforcement Administration revealed no indication that the DEA has taken any interest in the case. Two days of phone calls to the Agency’s Public Information Officer in Miami yielded nothing but busy signals.

.........The answer, both here in the U.S. as well as in Mexico, appears to be: Damage Control, for what clearly appears to have been officially-sanctioned drug trafficking. The silence in the U.S. and Mexico is a tell-tale sign of clandestine activity gone horribly awry. The bust was a mistake.

Once again, low-level personnel just hadn't been "clued-in" to the protected nature of the trade. Because of the sensitivity, everything is on a need to know basis. This creates a continuing problem.

You can't tell just anyone.

Cheney seems to be investing in securities that favor a weak dollar: That's pretty fucked up, observed at Attu Sees All and dissected on Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine.

Are they going to gut the Freedom of Information Act under the mask of 'counter-terrorism'? (via The Agonist)

The Mexican election is starting to look pretty ugly. How could there possibly be voting fraud south of the US?? More here.

UK Times: Leftist calls supporters onto streets in Mexican crisis

Mexico's electoral crisis deepened today after a recount separated the two leading candidates by less than 0.5 per cent of the vote and the leftist, Andres Manuel López Obrador, called his supporters onto the streets to protest against the result.

With 99.48 per cent of the vote reviewed by election officials, Felipe Calderon, a pro-business former energy secretary, led Señor López Obrador, a former mayor of Mexico City, by 0.41 per cent, or just 170,000 of the 41 million votes cast on Sunday.

Señor Calderon appeared relaxed at a party in the headquarters of the ruling National Action Party (PAN), saying: "Now is the hour for unity and agreements between Mexicans."

But Señor López Obrador said he would challenge the result in Mexico's highest electoral court, the Federal Electoral Tribunal. He asked his supporters to rally in Mexico City's huge Zócalo square on Saturday afternoon.

"We have taken the decision to challenge the electoral process," he told a press conference. "We cannot recognize or accept these results. There are lots of irregularities."
......
Señor López Obrador, whose Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) was founded by a populist famously cheated of the presidency in a rigged election in 1988, has alleged throughout the week that PAN activists had counted votes twice in some districts and ignored votes in others.

Today he said that a case before the Federal Electoral Tribunal would expose the "lack of transparency, the lack of independence of the electoral body".

"We have triumphed and this is what we will demonstrate to the tribunal," he said.

Aryan Nations & other hate groups infiltrating the US Army: An army desperate for recruits might be handing guns to unsavory criminal lunatics: NY Times:

A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists" to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks racist and right-wing militia groups, estimated that the numbers could run into the thousands, citing interviews with Defense Department investigators and reports and postings on racist Web sites and magazines.

"We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad," the group quoted a Defense Department investigator as saying in a report to be posted today on its Web site, www.splcenter.org. "That's a problem."
.......
The report quotes Scott Barfield, a Defense Department investigator, saying, "Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don't remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members."

Mr. Barfield said Army recruiters struggled last year to meet goals. "They don't want to make a big deal again about neo-Nazis in the military," he said, "because then parents who are already worried about their kids signing up and dying in Iraq are going to be even more reluctant about their kids enlisting if they feel they'll be exposed to gangs and white supremacists."

The 1996 crackdown on extremists came after revelations that Mr. McVeigh had espoused far-right ideas when he was in the Army and recruited two fellow soldiers to aid his bomb plot. Those revelations were followed by a furor that developed when three white paratroopers were convicted of the random slaying of a black couple in order to win tattoos and 19 others were discharged for participating in neo-Nazi activities.
.......
An article in the National Alliance magazine Resistance urged skinheads to join the Army and insist on being assigned to light infantry units. The Southern Poverty Law Center identified the author as Steven Barry, who it said was a former Special Forces officer who was the alliance's "military unit coordinator." "Light infantry is your branch of choice because the coming race war and the ethnic cleansing to follow will be very much an infantryman's war," he wrote. "It will be house-to-house, neighborhood-by-neighborhood until your town or city is cleared and the alien races are driven into the countryside where they can be hunted down and 'cleansed.' "

He concluded: "As a professional soldier, my goal is to fill the ranks of the United States Army with skinheads. As street brawlers, you will be useless in the coming race war. As trained infantrymen, you will join the ranks of the Aryan warrior brotherhood."

Holy shit. And let's not forget about Gulf War vet Timothy McVeigh.

The twisted Internal Disinformation of the Bush Regime:

I thought this was pretty nuts. Ron Suskind's new "One Percent Doctrine" is selling pretty well, and the

review in the NY Times was disturbing, for it paints a portrait of a president protectively misinformed in order to defend the illogical madness of the war. This is madness:

During a November 2001 session with the president, Mr. Suskind recounts, a C.I.A. briefer realized that the Pentagon had not told Mr. Bush of the C.I.A.'s urgent concern that Osama bin Laden might escape from the Tora Bora area of Afghanistan (as he indeed later did) if United States reinforcements were not promptly sent in. And several months later, he says, attendees at a meeting between Mr. Bush and the Saudis discovered after the fact that an important packet laying out the Saudis' views about the Israeli-Palestinian situation had been diverted to the vice president's office and never reached the president.

Keeping information away from the president, Mr. Suskind argues, was a calculated White House strategy that gave Mr. Bush ''plausible deniability'' from Mr. Cheney's point of view, and that perfectly meshed with the commander in chief's own impatience with policy details. Suggesting that Mr. Bush deliberately did not read the full National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which was delivered to the White House in the fall of 2002, Mr. Suskind writes: ''Keeping certain knowledge from Bush -- much of it shrouded, as well, by classification -- meant that the president, whose each word circles the globe, could advance various strategies by saying whatever was needed. He could essentially be 'deniable' about his own statements.''

''Whether Cheney's innovations were tailored to match Bush's inclinations, or vice versa, is almost immaterial,'' Mr. Suskind continues. ''It was a firm fit. Under this strategic model, reading the entire N.I.E. would be problematic for Bush: it could hem in the president's rhetoric, a key weapon in the march to war. He would know too much.''

Plainly nuts.

The situation in Gaza is pretty ugly right now. On the one hand, the Israeli strategy is brutal, but even worse, it's pointless. HAMAS has offered a prisoner swap, like the old days with Hezbollah. Check out "The Ideology of Occupation, Revisited" from Israeli peacenik Ran HaCohen. James Zogby observes the Deadly Silence over the matter. I haven't said much about it, but this piece pretty much sums up the problem.

Captive in Gaza: Israel has several objectives in Gaza -- all mutually exclusive, writes Graham Usher

There are four aims behind operation "Summer Rain", the Israeli army's latest invasion of Gaza, according to ministers, officers and analysts. The first is to free "unconditionally" Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier captured by Palestinian guerrillas just outside the Strip on 25 June. The second is to end Palestinian "rocket fire" that, in the last month, has peppered Sederot and other Israeli areas on the Gaza border, so far without serious injury.

The third aim -- undeclared but acknowledged -- is to force the Palestinian government from office via a rising curve of pre-emptive strikes. So far this has included tightened economic and political blockades, destruction of civilian power plants and bridges, military re-occupation, rocket attacks on the prime and interior ministers' offices and the wholesale arrest of Hamas ministers, members of parliament and local authority officers.

The ouster has little to do with the government's refusal to recognise the legitimacy of the Jewish state -- a rejection that suits Israel since it frees it from having to deal with an elected Palestinian Authority. It has more to do with Hamas's success not only in surviving the siege but in enshrining resistance as a central policy in its and any future National Unity Palestinian government, courtesy of the recently agreed Prisoners' Document.

The fourth aim is to repair the battered status of Israel's "deterrence". It is now clear to most Israelis that the relative quiet they enjoyed for the last year or so was not due to their army's military prowess. It was due to the Palestinian ceasefire, observed above all by Hamas's military arm, Izzeddin El-Qassam (IQ). Since it was renounced, 200 mortars have been fired into Israel, four soldier abductions have been attempted or carried out and two soldiers and one settler have been killed.

Threats Hamas may now take the fight "deep into Israel" reminds most Israelis of the bloodiest days of the Intifada. It destroys the illusion that the Gaza disengagement was somehow a military success. And it casts Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's project to determine unilaterally Israel's eastern border as absolute folly.

Vanity Fair had a lengthy feature on the Duke Cunningham/hookergate scandal and here's a summary.

Italian intrigues: In a small tidbit perhaps related to the Valerie Plame scandal, some of the top-ranking guys in Italy's SISMI intelligence service were arrested, as noted in the Italian media and the AP. This probably has more to do with furious Italian judges going after SISMI and CIA agents who helped get some terror suspect abducted.

.....the Italian military intelligence organization's deputy director and director of the first "foreign" or counterintelligence division Marco Mancini has been arrested in Italy, allegedly for his role in the CIA extraordinary rendition of Egyptian cleric Abu Omar from Milan in 2003. When I was in Rome on a few recent reporting trips, Mancini was the guy who everybody was literally frightened of even saying his name. I mean literally, people just referred to him as Marco. He was highly involved in Sismi's Middle East affairs, as well, apparently, I am hearing from Rome, in several recent cases of illegal wiretapping and illegal domestic spying in Italy. Arrest warrants have apparently been issued in the same Abu Omar case for four more CIA officials as well, including for the former CIA station chief in Rome.

In fact, on Sismi's behalf, Farina and Libero led the bogus charge that France was responsible for the Niger forgeries. Farina was also the beneficiary of illegal wiretaps seemingly conducted by friends of Sismi. Interesting times indeed.

From my brief exposure to politics there, I would say Mancini is far more comparable to a Lewis Libby figure than to his ex-CIA deputy director counterpart John McLaughlin, far more wired into the Byzantine politics of the Berlusconi project than a straight intel professional. Although this arrest would seem to be lapping pretty high on the ankles of the ex-Berlusconi administration itself, a friend in Rome writes that it may not go any further, and Prodi is giving indications he may not wish it to, especially as far as Sismi is concerned.
.......
Update: A reader in Rome writes that Libero's Farina is "under investigation not for his articles but because he has allegedly been identified as a Sismi source code-named 'Betulla.' ... [Sismi's] Mancini and Pignero are suspected of having studied Abu Omar’s habits and having prepared an initial plan for his abduction which would have the airport of Ghedi as the first destination of Abu Omar after his kidnapping. The plan went otherwise, as Aviano was opted for. They are also accused of spying on Repubblica's Giuseppe D’Avanzo as of May 12th..."

If I understand this and other recent Italian news reports correctly, Mancini was allegedly a liaison to several private Italian dirty tricks intelligence operations.

More on this here.

Ann Coulter's plagarism situation seems not that serious, but here's the comprehensive index. Xenu, the Scientology warlord, is involved.

The LA Times tries to claim that anti-Lieberman-ism is a "purge" of the Democratic Party by antiwar fanatics, while in fact it's more of a reaction to the fact that Lieberman is a crappy senator all around.

Around the paranoid side: I was advised to check out "The Resistance" on MySpace. As always PrisonPlanet will fill your daily conspiratoria quotient. Some Montana guy that sold (legal) gun kits was raided by the FBI, ATF and Canadian law enforcement for handing out 'subversive' Alex Jones material, according to... Alex Jones. In a crossposted story from the Sacramento Bee, Homeland Security denies tracking political activity after the state office got word of a peace rally on April 18. There was a new al-Qaeda video released to mark the 7/7 London bombings, and PrisonPlanet asks a bunch of questions about 7/7 anomalies, suggesting as they have from the beginning it was staged by the UK government.

The guy who invented Ren & Stimpy (a particularly raunchy but funny one that never went on TV is here) is in a battle with Warner Bros. because he's been posting their really good but forgotten cartoons on YouTube as Examples of the Art.

Worse than a Star Trek 'red shirt': 10 worst jobs to have in the action film universe.

Well that should tide folks over for a bit of the weekend here...

Al Gore says perhaps he'll speak on FL vote fraud someday; Sibel Edmonds tidbits; new 9/11 conspiracy video; the Teflon pharaoh

I am going up to Hibbing to see my aunt's Dylan documentary until Saturday afternoon and probably won't have time to post until Sunday.

A tantalizing nugget: my friend's dad stumbled across a massive embezzlement scheme in the Chicago branch of the Head Start education program. This is only now coming into public view and I will try to get something real on it later.

So the Administration wants to eat reporters who spill classified information. This lends itself to a new strategy: classify everything embarrassing and evil. Now that's your tax dollars at work!

Wednesday night I was hanging out with some folks soon parting ways with Minnesota, and it was a good time. In exchange for a nice old hat, various objects were offered for barter, including a Krazy Kat book. Krazy Kat was a weird old comic from the 1920s that has reached a kind of Major Art status, while really it's just pretty weird. I noticed that Itchy & Scratchy seems to be kind of based on it, including the cat's androgynous quality. Anyway.

Finally a Democrat in the House is getting busted for a scandal. Poor Jefferson was caught taking major cash in a pretty blunt kind of way and they're saying indictments next month, yet there is a big ruckus from Republicans after the FBI searched his Congressional office and took boxes of documents. Due to the bipartisan uproar, Bush has sealed the docs from the FBI, at least temporarily.

It's an interesting case. I feel that Republicans are a bit terrified that a potential future Democratic president could find evidence of all kinds of illegal stuff in their offices. For the whole history of this country, the executive hasn't been able to storm these places (or had the guts to). I tend to think that this is appropriate, that there ought to be a sphere of immunity of some sort to protect Congress from the executive. On the other hand, I would like to see Hastert, DeLay and all the other homies get nailed for all their Abramoff corruption. Just because you're in Congress doesn't mean you're above the law. Laura Rozen asks, is it panic?

But, what if (and certainly this has happened), member X has lots of evidence proving that Gonzales is a lawbreaker himself, that Rummy is a psychopath who permits war crimes, that Cheney helped channel Halliburton contracts and Porter Goss partied with hookers at the Watergate for a decade? In other words, what if I had Sen. Carl Levin's file cabinet? Well, that file cabinet would serve as a crucial check in the pretty corrupt system we've got now, and it seems clear that the founders intended to privilege stuff like that file cabinet. I also think that it should be impossible to charge Rep. Cynthia McKinney for slapping that Capitol police officer (in particular since it's been said that the Capitol police corps have been taken over by southern GOP good-ol-boy sheriff types).

We should note that the great Joseph McCarthy could not be sued for all the crazy slanderous and libelous garbage he puked onto the floor of the Senate during the 1950s, because, well, it was his constitutional right as a Senator to say plainly false and libelous things there. If the legislative branch gets under that kind of pressure, well, they will be 'chilled' in the legal speech sense, and it's curtains for that supposedly equal branch of the government. Never forget that people with their hands on executive power don't necessarily care about the truth, but they'll try to silence those who get in their way. McKinney has been a pretty vocal anti-imperialist (not to mention 9/11 skeptic), despite her silly style, and that whole thing reeks of an effort to kill the messenger. Movin' on.

Al Gore stares into the distance: From New York magazine, via the Brad Blog:

Does he, like many Democrats, think the election was stolen?

Gore pauses a long time and stares into the middle distance. "There may come a time when I speak on that,” Gore says, "but it’s not now; I need more time to frame it carefully if I do.” Gore sighs. "In our system, there’s no intermediate step between a definitive Supreme Court decision and violent revolution."

Later, I put the question of Gore’s views on the matter to David Boies, his lawyer in the Florida-recount battle. "He thought the court’s ruling was wrong and obviously political," Boies says. So he considers the election stolen? "I think he does—and he’s right."

Brad Blog was a leading place for tracking the election fraud in Ohio, and while I don't read regularly, it's well done.

Check out Wot is it Good 4 by Lukery, which has especially followed the case of former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds - with its bizarre stories of drug money laundering, 9/11 links, FBI corruption, the whole bit. Sibel herself (official site), under many federal gag orders, has said that Lukery has been able to digest the known facts of the case better than anyone else. There's fresh stuff on a daily basis. For example, if you want to get waist-deep in some weird defense contractor shit, connected laterally with Manucher Ghorbanifar, Rep. Curt Weldon (of Able Danger fame), plus Edmonds' belief that Weldon has been kind of duped about some of the fake Iraq intelligence, well this story is what you need, and this one about some kind of corrupt link between neoconservatives, Turkey and military-industrial defense contractors, which Edmonds is also tied up in, another good one. Read this and trip out: Bing Bang Boom Shazam. The Edmonds case is way under the radar, extremely weird, but it seems to connect to the AIPAC scandal, Chalabi and the fake Iraq intelligence, some kind of secret 9/11 financing arrangements, drug money laundering, Turkish spies, and perhaps illegal money in the campaign coffers of people like Rep. Dennis Hastert. Or maybe not (Hastert is getting sucked into the Abramoff scandal, either way). I think at some point, Sibel Edmonds will finally break out into a major scandal and I'd like to say that we got a bit of the early word out here. SourceWatch on Sibel Edmonds too. (tiny side note: Lukery suggests this woman's skillful negotiation sites)

But who are Sibel Edmonds, Curt Weldon, Able Danger and what do these have to do with 9/11?? Fortunately in the expanding field of 9/11 conspiracy videos, a new one introduces these issues in an accessible way. Check out Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime. I thought it was better than Loose Change, in terms of consisting of actual information and loose ends. However it doesn't have as many fun video clips. It has a pretty good introduction to the Able Danger, the pre-9/11 military intelligence project that apparently pinpointed some of the hijackers, and then was abruptly shut down with its terabytes of records vaporized. But ironically the problem perhaps might have been that it was based on illegal data mining?

Chinese spy update: Pretty cool stuff on the next hurrah about Katrina Leung, a pro-Republican Chinese spy who is basically getting let off by the Justice Department. She admitted tipping off the Chinese to the identities of FBI agents investigating nuclear sales to China (which mighta been tied to Iran-contra - whew). Evidently, she fed disinformation to the FBI to go after the unfortunate scientist Wen Ho Lee.

OS X operating system design: Check out this Flash animation if you want to know how OS X is structured internally. This guy's book will kick ass if you are into kernel hacking.

Israel claims Iran gets nukes in "months": My Ass. Antiwar.com's Raimondo, in a column bitching about the Iran badge story, the peripheral Israeli connections to the fake Iraq intelligence, and new and shiny paranoia from Israel about Iran, notes that well, Israel is definitely going to jerk the U.S. down this path.

AIPAC notes: I thought this was a good writeup about the power of the Israel lobby from Stephen Zunes: FPIF Special Report: The Israel Lobby: How Powerful is it Really? He points out an interesting example of a Congressman, who, when challenged about his heavily anti-Palestinian votes, basically says that the Jews made him do it for fear of losing fundraising, but even after he announces he won't run again, he still votes against Palestinians. The Jews are just - wait for it - a scapegoat for his actual anti-Arab bias. And of course there's the basic fact that Bush depends a lot more on the hardcore rightwing (and often apocalyptic) Christian Zionists that Jewish ones.

Misc notes: Watch Lazy Ramadi, a video from some troops with a video camera. You won't regret it.

Sidney Blumenthal notes Iraq is doomed. Of course, it has literally the most corrupt government ever created (although maybe DC actually wins that right now). Duly noted by the brave Patrick Cockburn:
Iraq is disintegrating as ethnic cleansing takes hold:

Across central Iraq, there is an exodus of people fleeing for their lives as sectarian assassins and death squads hunt them down. At ground level, Iraq is disintegrating as ethnic cleansing takes hold on a massive scale.
By Patrick Cockburn in Khanaqin, North-East Iraq (20 May)
The state of Iraq now resembles Bosnia at the height of the fighting in the 1990s when each community fled to places where its members were a majority and were able to defend themselves. "Be gone by evening prayers or we will kill you," warned one of four men who called at the house of Leila Mohammed, a pregnant mother of three children in the city of Baquba, in Diyala province north-east of Baghdad. He offered chocolate to one of her children to try to find out the names of the men in the family.

Mrs Mohammed is a Kurd and a Shia in Baquba, which has a majority of Sunni Arabs. Her husband, Ahmed, who traded fruit in the local market, said: " They threatened the Kurds and the Shia and told them to get out. Later I went back to try to get our furniture but there was too much shooting and I was trapped in our house. I came away with nothing." He and his wife now live with nine other relatives in a three-room hovel in Khanaqin.

The same pattern of intimidation, flight and death is being repeated in mixed provinces all over Iraq. By now Iraqis do not have to be reminded of the consequences of ignoring threats.

I liked this list from Juan Cole:

There are now four distinct wars going on in Iraq simultaneously
1) The Sunni Arab guerrilla war to expel US troops from the Sunni heartland
2) The militant Shiite guerrilla war to expel the British from the south
3) The Sunni-Shiite civil war
4) The Kurdish war against Arabs and Turkmen in Kirkuk province, and the Arab and Turkmen guerrilla struggle against the encroaching Peshmerga (the Kurdish militia).

The struggle of the Turkmen is starting to branch out into Turkey. Note how Turkey is now red on the lovely Reuters map, seems ominous:

Kurds say Turkish shells land in Iraq, Turkey denies: By Sherko Raouf
SULAIMANIYA, Iraq, May 17 (Reuters) - The government of Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region accused Turkish forces of shelling an area inside northern Iraq on Wednesday.
A Turkish government official dismissed the accusation as "total fabrication."
Ankara traditionally launches a spring offensive against Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas in southeastern Turkey, an area which borders Iraq.
Earlier this month, villagers in Iraq's Kurdistan accused neighbouring Iran of hitting targets inside Iraq, a charge Tehran denied.
Khaled Salih, a senior official of the Kurdish regional government in Arbil, said by telephone that no one was hurt when three shells slammed into a mountainous area close to the town of Kani Masi a few km (miles) inside Iraq.
"A village ... has been bombarded from the Turkish side. There were no casualties, but there was material damage," Salih told Reuters. "This is the second time in a week villages have been bombarded in the north."
"We will report this to the government in Baghdad so that they can contact the Turkish government and ask for an explanation," he said.
Salih said there were no PKK fighters in the area where the shells landed. NATO member Turkey has stationed some 1,500 troops stationed inside northern Iraq since the late 1990s when it launched regular raids into the region to hunt PKK fighters.
In Turkey, a government official told Reuters: "This is not true ... All the measures are on our side of the border." Turkey has sent 40,000 troops to its own Kurdish areas to reinforce the 220,000 already there, the biggest build-up in years after an increase in PKK attacks.
The PKK, seeking a Kurdish homeland including southeastern Turkey, accuses Ankara and Tehran of mounting coordinated operations against the group and its Iranian wing, PJAK.

NSA Total My Phone Bill Awareness: Crusty CIA veteran Ray McGovern rails against NSA monitoring of Americans. Sy Hersh with a few bits and pieces on the NSA situation. Congressional Quarterly reports on mysterious data links between Homeland Security and the NSA. TPMM observes how DOJ sends out TONS of subpoenas for data daily, apparently outside of judicial oversight. National Security Letters. Someday, the Letter will come for you (or more likely, me). TPMM also looks at how there is a cottage industry of companies that handle all our phone records, passing them from the telcos to the government, allowing AT&T to claim that they aren't giving Big Brother the records directly. Check this: Fuck NeuStar, the "scapegoat" for hire.

Billmon hung out in Egypt for some conference. Egypt is autocratic, the Teflon pharaoh. I like that phrase.

As always, Prof. Cole is the go-to man for direct analysis of the situation and Arab media. He also follows up further on the fake Iran Jew Badge story. Firedoglake traces back the root of the fake Badge story. The National Post had to retract the story:

Last Friday, the National Post ran a story prominently on the front page alleging that the Iranian parliament had passed a law that, if enacted, would require Jews and other religious minorities in Iran to wear badges that would identify them as such in public. It is now clear the story is not true. Given the seriousness of the error, I felt it necessary to explain to our readers how this happened.

Then, of course, the bastards require you to register to read the rest. Fuck! (this early, erroneous bit on the badge story struck me for its interesting historical content, but also classic pompous ignorati*-style writing)[ * "Ignorati" has been trademarked by Mordred]

We noted earlier a report about 200,000 AK-47s from Bosnia, that were purchased by the US for the Iraqi security forces, but now there are more reports that the AKs basically vanished and are now in the hands of insurgents because of - you guessed it - private defense contractors!! BBC reports on how the guns that ruined Yugoslavia are getting dumped straight into the Iraqi civil war.

Ah, the irony of how shitty neoconservatism worked out to be.

Murray Waas reports that Rove and Novak may have hatched a conspiracy to cover up the Valerie Plame leak (via TPMM):

On September 29, 2003, three days after it became known that the CIA had asked the Justice Department to investigate who leaked the name of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, columnist Robert Novak telephoned White House senior adviser Karl Rove to assure Rove that he would protect him from being harmed by the investigation, according to people with firsthand knowledge of the federal grand jury testimony of both men. . . .
Rove and Novak, investigators suspect, might have devised a cover story to protect Rove because the grand jury testimony of both men appears to support Rove's contentions about how he learned about Plame.

Chinese PCs feared to be bugged: There's always time for Sinophobia.

Blockquotes are plagarism?! Plagarism Today (what a name for a site) talks about how the practice of blockquoting from other sources is really the new plagarism. I think that's a bit retarded since if you're naming your source, it's not plagarism at all. However, there are sites that exclusively skim off content and pass it as their own for spamming purposes. There are actually Hongpong.com fragments on spam sites out there. We blockquote a lot here, but damn, no one can read the whole damn Internet themselves! It seems like a silly argument, but on the other hand, the game ought to be about original content. However, I like to put lots of sources in here, since, well, you gotta at least weigh their credibility apart from mine in order for my arguments to sink in. Anyway, slashdot reacts.

Long ass random post. However more than enough stuff to keep anyone busy for a while. True?

The Equation of Life; the Olive Branch is Quaint; 5% vote fraud rate in Iraq asserted as blogs propagandize?

Some scientists determined that apparently, across the scale from bacteria to whale, the basic unit of life is energy and metabolism -- not time. A Master Equation for All Life Processes? Check out the 10 little-known sweet science stories. A Swedish bio-gas (cow poo) train, pillows are laden with fungi, French scientists figured out how to slow down & speed up light, (!!!) leading the way to future all-optical data routers (!!!!!), a robot with square wheels, and of course they are training honey bees to find land mines! (also 50 greatest robots ever - via GM)

The Eagle faces the olive branch: Dear Leader recently addressed the nation about that war thing, and someone told me that it was interesting how the olive branch on the Great Seal of the United States is hidden.

(Bush has also been pressuring newspaper editors a lot lately, including trying to prevent the CIA European prison stories in the WaPo, and the Times NSA story, by summoning the editors to the Oval Office in a vain effort to intoxicate with the fearful trappings of power)

I found out that on the Presidential Seal, the eagle used to face the arrows until 1945:

This one-time change has given rise to the myth that the eagle's head changes position to indicate wartime or peacetime, but that is obviously not true. The eagle faced right from 1880 to 1945, and has faced left ever since. It is nevertheless true that, when the change was made in 1945, the announcement referred to the symbolism of the eagle facing peace instead of war, and this symbolism has been alluded to many times since, although it was not the motivation for the change.

Make no mistake; when the Duke makes a televised address, every visual detail is carefully managed. The fascinating Brian Springer film "Spin", which was made primarily with intercepted satellite signals — open video feeds from the White House and other political and media operations. There's one funny part when they remove a photo from behind Poppa Bush's seat, because it is thought to resemble a recent photo of when he passed out in Japan.

So make no mistake, the selection of the arrows was 100% intentional, in a White House as image-conscious as this one.

(evil witch Peggy Noonan observed Bush talking about the way the eagle faces pre-9/11)

Windy: Energy issues in MN. Apparently the vast majority of windmills around Buffalo Ridge are not owned locally according to an interesting Strib article. Let's think about the means of production here people!

They don't like the vote: Guardian: Religious parties deal blow to US hopes for Iraq. Apparently an official level of 5% vote fraud in Iraq has been accepted, Juan Cole says:

The Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq admitted on Sunday that voting fraud occurred in approximately 5 percent of the ballots cast, but said that this level of fraud would not affect the over-all outcome. Still, the IECI announcement will certainly fuel Sunni Arab anger and conviction that the election was stolen.

Bizarre. The Sunnis think that Shiites ganked their votes, and there have been mass protests in Fallujah. KR: "Iran now enemy No. 1, Sunnis say". Violence resumes apace as Sunni Arab student leader killed in Mosul after protesting vote -- Shiite militias and Kurds accused of killing him.

AP reports that US airstrikes are escalating, although of course it is hard to tell how many civilian casualties this generates, or whether they are the 'right targets,' or whether it is strategically useful at all. Such urban bombardments have not been seen in years, but due to 'perception management' techniques, the US public is blissfully unaware. A Steel Curtain for their bodies and our eyes, indeed.

RJ Eskow: Voting Confirms: Iraq Is a Red state. We have generated a fundamentalist theocracy, aligned against Israel, towards Iran, while 45% of the country supports attacking US troops. Why was this such a brilliant fucking idea again? Robert Scheer cackles: Iran's victory revealed in Iraq election.

Ethnic/sect structure of iraqi forces is doomed, man: One of the measuring sticks of how propagandizing a perspective on the Iraq war is how the difference between Sunni & Shiite groups is framed. When Sunnis are "rat's nest terrorists" while the Shiites are "Free Iraqis come to Battle for Freedom" in the northwest of the country, you are looking at some obfuscation.

Consider this first: SF Chronicle: Various private armies still exist, threatening Iraq's national security:

Residents of Samarra, the scene of bloody clashes between U.S. soldiers and insurgents, said they feared a Shiite militia being unleashed on the city. Interviewed in their homes this week, they said they were unaware of a Mahdi Army presence, but claimed they had already suffered when commandos affiliated with al-Sadr's militia were dispatched to the city earlier this year.

Ibrahim Farraj, who lives in the Sikek district, said, "The Interior Ministry forces are very strong. The insurgents are afraid of them, but they are corrupt and we cannot trust them. The last time the Interior Ministry was here, they were al-Sadr -- people are scared of them and the Mahdi Army."

U.S. Army Capt. Ryan Wylie, of the 3rd Infantry Division serving in Samarra, said he had heard rumors that the Interior Ministry was conducting a private war, but had seen no evidence.

These bloggers that have been embedded with US troops in the northwest Euphrates river valley are all about exaggerating this difference. In particular, Bill Roggio at Threatswatch (where the map above came from) explains how Rats Nests are obliterated in Steel Curtain Unmasked, and other interesting dehumanizing euphemisms. See if you can find the subtle twist of meaning here:

Throughout the operation, the 1/1/1 of the Iraqi Army and the Desert Protection Force worked in conjunction with the U.S. Forces, and proved to be an instrumental part of the operation. The Iraqi Army battalion participated in combat operations, and they and Desert Protectors were able to identify foreign fighters and local insurgents.

I wonder if Roggio can wrap his head around the concept that 'identifying' is not a neutral act of observation, but a conscious change of political identity (by Shiite militia, no less) leading straight to violence.

Roggio is not happy about a Washington Post article that characterized his role in Iraq as a military-supported Information Operation. He says that all the cash to get him there was raised independently, and that the military has not 'influenced' his writing. But his main sources are military personnel, and his perspective is deeply enmeshed with the same terminology and concepts that Pentagon spokespeople attempt to beat into our heads. Here's his core point:

Equating military information operations with al-Qaeda propaganda efforts is a form of moral equivalence of the worst sort. The U.S. military is conducting an influence campaign to draw attention to the news which is missed by the media on a daily basis. Their belief (and one that I share) is the portrayal of events in Iraq do not reflect the actual situation on the ground. While the articles may be viewed as “favorable” to the Coalition, the question is, are they accurate and factual? The Washington Post does not address this issue, nor does it provide evidence that the military is running a disinformation campaign.

Misrepresenting the source (such as the placed Iraqi newspaper stories) is a form of disinformation because it manipulates the perception of where it's coming from. The military's justification is that there is a metaphysical or ontological gap between (all?) portrayals and reality, according to him. Well isn't there always? How far can this go? Also consider this ironic statement:

al-Qaeda is running a sheer disinformation campaign which uses human beings as props in events such as beheadings and execution styled killings. It manufactures events, such as the faux uprising in Ramadi in the beginning of December. The truth is not relevant to al-Qaeda’s propaganda operations, only results matter.

The administration has 'manufactured' all sorts of symbolic events and concepts, such as the Statue Toppling, the mysteriously Satanic Terrorist Singularity in Fallujah that needed to be nuked after the 2004 Presidential election, etc. There have been plenty of symbolic constructions. Look at how Pat Tillman died -- that event was manufactured beyond the truth (it was a friendly fire fatality) to burnish the war narrative. Oh by the way, here's what Tillman's dad said:

"They purposely interfered with the investigation, they covered it up," Patrick Tillman said. "I think they thought they could control it and they realized that their recruiting efforts were going to hell in a hand basket if the truth about his death got out."

Al Qaeda is not the only force at hand here seeking to 'sharpen the contradictions' through symbolic action. What is Shock and Awe, if not a symbolic gesture? (Roggio also said that lots of Sunnis voted for Allawi in Anbar. That's fucking ridiculous!)

But what can I say about a worldview with ideas like "Samarra, a city once ripe for a Tal Afar styled assault."

By the way, here's a by-the-numbers orthodox propaganda tale about the Terrorists in Mosul. Of course it comes from the American Forces Press Service, part of the 'American Forces Information Service.' Use this to set your propaganda index, I guess.

Sadr City has a good deal of reconstruction, after decades of neglect. A story in the rightwing UK Telegraph claims that Tal Afar is totally ballin' these days:

Their commander, Col H R McMaster, is a counter-insurgency specialist who wrote a book about the Vietnam War, in which he criticised the US military's failure to understand the enemy's culture.

Before deployment, his men were given extensive Arabic classes and intensive lessons on Iraqi history, customs and religion. Proper efforts were made to woo local tribal sheiks with banquets in which goats were slaughtered and concerns listened to.

"The enemy is really good at disinformation and propaganda. We have to win the battleground of perception," he said.

Big Brother & Crying Wolf: People are more willing to believe the right yarn at the right time these days. A student at Dartmouth claimed that Homeland Security questioned him after he got Mao's Little Red Book through inter-library loan. But apparently it was a hoax. This story shows that people are expecting to hear these kinds of things... so stay sharp, we can hit spin real fast here.

Scratch the Checks and/or Balances: How sad is it that Sen. Rockefeller gets to jot secret handwritten notes of concern to the White House like a high school sweetheart, and that is supposed to be his total constitutional role? WTF?

AIPAC says Jump! WaPo: "Pro-Israel Group Criticizes White House Policy on Iran:"

AIPAC, which describes itself as nonpartisan, has criticized nearly every administration's Middle East policies, often speaking out when Israeli government officials express private frustration with U.S. policies.

But the news releases mark the first major criticism of the Bush White House and come as the administration is focused on problems in Iraq and has no clear path on Iran.
[.....]
Ross said the criticisms, though serious, are unlikely to lead to an all-out rift between AIPAC and the administration. "At the end of the day, every administration does what it needs to do, but obviously they will have to pay attention to this," he said.

Which again suggests that AIPAC should be registered as an agent of a foreign power. Well, that, and some of their (former) personnel have been indicted on espionage charges (more info here via the New Yorker).

Biochemical roots of the Munchies: Cannabinoid receptors around the hypothalamus.

In their studies, the researchers concentrated on the lateral hypothalamus (LH) of the brain, known to be a center of control of food intake. Their studies involved detailed electrophysiological measurements of the effects of specific neurons that they had identified in previous studies as being important in endocannabinoid signaling.

Their studies revealed that activation of CB1 receptors, as by endocannabinoid molecules, induced these neurons to be rendered more excitable by a mechanism called "depolarization-induced suppression of inhibition" (DSI).

What's more, they found that leptin inhibits DSI. However, they found that leptin did not interfere with the CB1 receptors themselves. Rather, leptin "short-circuits" the endocannabinoid effects by inhibiting pore-like channels in the neurons that regulate the flow of calcium into the neurons. Such calcium is necessary for the synthesis of endocannabinoids.

Iraqi blogstorm; $100 laptop developed for developing world; Iraqi bloggers vs the 'Iranian horde'; Diebold CEO quits under fire; Horatio Alger was a pedophile

The One Laptop Per Child nonprofit organization is supporting the distribution of a Linux-based $100 laptop, which will soon go out to children in Brazil, Thailand, Egypt and Nigeria. It also has a hand-cranked power generator, which is a brilliant idea.

Forbes: Intel's Barrett Dismisses $100 Laptop As 'Gadget'
LONDON - It's a crank. Intel Chairman Craig Barrett has dismissed a WiFi-enabled, Linux-based, full-color, full-screen laptop aimed at bringing computers to developing economies as a "$100 gadget". The lime-green devices run on electromotive energy from a wind-up mechanism--thus allowing the machines to be used in areas lacking a regular power supply.

Bit of a jackass, then. See also PCWorld.com - Kids' Laptop Hits World Spotlight. Pic source from the oddly negative article carried in Vermont Guardian.

By 2007, five to ten million of these laptops will have been shipped to developing countries. By the year after that, the number is expected to have grown ten-fold. What is not known is whether this project will mark a new phase in the spread of knowledge, or whether hundreds of millions of children will become slaves to their little green boxes instead of playing in the backyard.

The Man was Here: WaPo: "CIA scours blogs for useful intelligence: Some `secrets' can be found in plain view." Well at least I know the CIA has already been here a couple times. So it's not breaking news.

Ten stoner ideas for peace in Iraq: Brilliant. Air conditioners, kind bud, Xbox 360s with extra controllers, Madden 2006, Marshmallows, kegs of Budweiser, acoustic guitars and whores. Shrewd strategy. "I guarantee this much: Give a 16-year-old Sunni the choice between killing himself and spending his life playing videogame football, and he’ll make the right choice every time." BSnews.org also features the "Bush War Plan Clearly Written In Crayon."

DeLay is hurting Republicans in vulnerable districts. Ouch. Sweet.

The blogosphere may be unreasonably carried away with Paul Hackett's chances in the Ohio senate race, given his low name ID. Rep. Sherrod Brown seems to be leading in polls.

Polls in Iraq seem oddly positive. I doubt their scientific value. "'Failure' Most Popular Term Sending Traffic From Google To US White House Site".

Bite the patting hand: Rightwingers are angry when the NY Times Magazine carried a story titled "Conservative Blogs are more Effective." Weird.

Elections in wars may not work: Haaretz/Reuters: Gaza gunmen fire on PA security compound, storm election HQ. "The Wall of Hate" is a film about the West Bank partition wall that Israel is constructing.

Iraq blogstorm and the 'Iranian occupation': Check out Iraq Blog Count for an index. A friend of mine was saying that all these blogs and Internet things complicate the situation, but I strongly disagree because I think we get a real good sense of the mentality and the situation of Iraqis, just by looking through a few of them. Baghdad Burning by Riverbend is of course well-known now, and excellent. The Iranian Occupation bit is interesting:

The agony of the long war with Iran is what makes the current situation in Iraq so difficult to bear- especially this last year. The occupation has ceased to be American. It is American in face, and militarily, but in essence it has metamorphosed slowly but surely into an Iranian one.

It began, of course, with Badir’s Brigade and the several Iran-based political parties which followed behind the American tanks in April 2003. It continues today with a skewed referendum, and a constitution that will guarantee a southern Iraqi state modeled on the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Of course all this talk about the US dropping chemical weapons makes it more 'complicated.' Would the Baghdad Burning book -- now on its way -- seem more credible somehow? Truth-about-iraqis.blogspot.com has a anguished rant whose tone rings very true. And this one too:

This is not Iraq. The only Iraq I can identify with is the Iraq that rages in the hearts of those who defend its honor, who die defending its honor, those who fight the Iranian horde, the US oppressor.

.....In any case, everything is coming tumbling down. The war lies, the GOP, right wing radio, the illusionists, the nazis and their WASP allies, the zionist war machine, and the racist white-hood wearing commentators.

The Iraq lie is simply too heavy a burden.

Sow it buddy, then drink the rotten milk of human waste.

Nefarious is as nefarious will do.

I think it makes a major, positive, difference -- although the terrible experience of Khaled Jarrar when he was captured by the Interior Ministry, and his additional troubles because they found out about his blog, were an example of how it can hurt the writers. But we wouldn't know about what it's really like inside the New Security Organs of Iraq without people like him.

For more, consider Aunt Najma's A Star from Mosul (with many relatives blogging too), Treasure of Baghdad, Free Iraq ("The US's pre-emptive occupation of Iraq will see to it that the Lion of Babylon rises again" sweet) and Iraqi Rebel.

David Ignatius likes the eschatological-conspiracy angle in "Breaking the Assassins." Thanks for obfuscating reality with a bunch of grand gibberish. Can Rummy defeat the Cult of the Assassins? Sure!

Ethnically pure militias: Bloomberg service: Bush's Strategy, Iraq's New Army Challenged by Ethnic Militias

The Defense Department's intelligence agency says there are dozens of loosely organized Shiite armies in southern Iraq, Kurdish militias in the north that function like a regular army, and as many as 20,000 Sunni fighters who are part of the violent insurgency in Iraq's four central provinces.

..... ``The situation continues to deteriorate,'' said Anthony Cordesman of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. ``It's a matter of the militias, new political organizations, Shiite groups'' and Iraqi security forces becoming ``forces for revenge or reprisal.''

....Leslie Gelb, former assistant secretary of state and former president of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, said most of the militias pay first allegiance to their ethnic or tribal group. ``It's not an Iraqi army,'' said Gelb, who visited Iraq for 10 days earlier this year. Kurds are loyal to Kurds, Shiite militias resembling ``mafia operations'' run the south, ``the central region has the insurgency, and Baghdad is all mixed up,'' he said.

Patrick Lang, former chief analyst for the Middle East at the Defense Intelligence Agency, said Iraq's different ethnic groups ``will not serve together'' in national army units. ``They tried it and it didn't work, and now they're going back to ethnically pure units,'' he said, citing Defense Department officials he declined to identify. Lang, a retired colonel in the Army's Green Berets, is now president of Global Resources Group, a Washington-based consulting firm.

"Islamic leaders unveil action plan to rescue a 'nation in crisis'." Baghdad Press Club investigated as a central node of paid military propaganda.

Cheney visits Auschwitz and secret CIA Poland camp on same trip? Oy vey. FT: Allegations of secret US jails in Europe are 'credible'. Guardian: Investigator links Europe's spy agencies to CIA flights. Ireland On-Line 'Signs suggest US illegally held detainees in Europe' especially Poland and Romania. Take it with a grain of salt, but Wayne Madsen's report on Cheney visiting secret camps in Poland (Dec. 13) around his visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi extermination camp last January. Not sure if it's a true report, but if it is true, a very dark irony.

Iran talks a big game: But this Haaretz article makes it all too clear that their economic situation is excellent, and they can count on Russia and China to help them in the UN if things get hairy. Ahmadinejad can continue to smile while the world argues. True.

The Horatio Alger NAMBLA chapter: Larry Beinhart's "Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin" looks interesting. In particular, for example, he establishes that Horatio Alger was a pedophile, and was a pedophilic minister before he got chased out of Brewster, Massachusetts, and admitted to it. That's established, then the spin dissection starts. Weird. And maybe that's more widely known, but I never heard of it. Also claims that the NYC chapter of NAMBLA is the Horatio Alger chapter. Creepy.

Vote Spoofing: The War at Home: Diebold chief executive Wally O'Dell resigns, as more questions about company conduct and illegal trading have come up. There are lawsuits happening as people claim that Diebold failed to get its modified voting machine software correctly certified on some occasions. In North Caroline, the EFF has filed a lawsuit. O'Dell was the guy who claimed he would help 'deliver' Ohio's electoral votes to Bush.

DeLay bit for Texas Gerrymandering; CBS producer defends National Guard memo story; no time for Tookie

1UP for Russ: Russ Feingold is chilling around the Internet while fighting the renewed Patriot Act. Now that's class. Also he speaks in favor of withdrawing from Iraq. So Quadruple Infinity Bonus Points -- he's trying to kill Bowser and save the Princess. The Odds are Slim but entirely worth it.

While Iraq prepares for another round of 'something', (and election irregularities around Mosul are apparently expected) a memo (PDF) from the Department of Justice indicated that career Justice lawyers believed that redistricting Texas would illegally marginalize minorities. Meanwhile a Crips co-founder is going to get injected. And who says minorities are oppressed in this free country?

(fortunately the DOJ's new policy has "barred staff attorneys from offering recommendations in major Voting Rights Act cases, marking a significant change in the procedures meant to insulate such decisions from politics." - thx Marshall.)

Charting sleaze: This big ass Abramoff chart is almost big enough to encompass the mega-scandal. Marshall on this as well. There are quite a few Democrats on there. Where are the House ethics complaints anyway? Polls show that corruption is a leading concern in America nowadays.

Secret laws? The Bush Administration apparently claims that secret regulations require people to present IDs at the airport. Why secret? Secret courts, secret evidence, secret prisons. Laws too? And they call us on the Internet obsessed with conspiracies! :-D (via Kevin Drum)

It's a really big information war: I don't feel like putting a lot more words in. But this NY Times article, "Military's Information War is Vast and Often Secretive," reaches into great detail about psychological operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Although really, I have to think that most of the locals see right through this stuff and scoff at it. Even if it's supposedly hidden through private contractors, I suspect they aren't really taken in that easily.

It also makes me wonder about psy ops dimensions to such things as "Shootout! Battlecry Iraq: Ramadi" coming Dec. 14 to the History Channel.

Meanwhile dead US soldiers apparently back come as commercial freight. So much for honoring the heroes. If it were my kin, I would be crushed.

Juan Cole reflects on Iraq in our Strib. Background on activities of the Badr Corps, now the de facto Inner Militia of the Interior Ministry. Tactics seem to escalate in Afghanistan, no matter how many radio stations we control. Damn. Juan Cole's site will be a good spot to follow the election results, and i think this bit pretty much sums up the evolving problem:

Al-Zaman/ AFP: Muntadhar al-Samarra'i, the former commander of the Iraqi special forces, said Sunday that the Minister of Interior, Bayan Jabr Sulagh, appointed 17,000 fighters from the Badr Militia as police officers in his ministry at a time when they still receive their salaries from Iran. Al-Samarra'i accused the Badr Corps [the paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq] of employing torture on detainees in prison. He showed AFP a film he himself had shot of torture in Iraqi prisons. He said all of the high officials in the Ministry of the Interior are from the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and Dawa (Shiite parties), whereas the detainees are Sunni Arabs. Al-Samarra'i also said that the special police speak Persian with one another (the Badr Corps fighters had been expatriates in Iran). He spoke of several secret prisons, some with as many as 600 inmates, and said there were also jails for women.

An interview with Sy Hersh, if you want more gory details. He puts in this fun bit about rigging the last Iraqi election:

...the three provinces that – according to the actual rules, the three provinces voted against the constitution – you had to have a two-thirds majority against it – it was defeated, and there is no question that in two of them this happened, and the third, Mosul province, the amount of fraud and jiggering of election ballots and manipulation was just outlandish. I do know, at least I have been told that, before the… if you remember the election day, I think it was initially supposed to be August 15th. The election day…
Horton: October 15th, I think, right?
Hersh: Right, right, October 15th. It was extremely quiet, and it's my understanding that the resistance actually had been talking to the UN – the UN had an advisory role in the election process, which it still has – and they had made it quiet not because intimidation of coalition forces and the American government but because they decided, they said, "The UN will do it straight. Because if it's a straight, honorable election, you won't get your constitution through. We'll defeat you in three provinces." There was a great, a great deal of agitation among the Sunni resistance about the fraud that was involved. I don't know what's going to happen. Nobody knows. I think the Sunnis… I think the election will take place. That won't be spoiled by rioting and distress and disturbances, but I think afterwards – I think the Ba'athists are sort of curious, the Sunnis, to see what happens – but afterwards, I think we could even see a significant escalation, already, of the kind of damage we're having.

So Talabani will probably play the Katherine Harris role in the coming production. All right. Hersh also has lots of info about the insanity of the air war ramping up -- as airstrikes replace American soldiers, and no one's around to film all the civilian casualties.

You are looking, if you break it down, to, oh, roughly 100 bombs being dropped an hour. Twenty four hours a day for the last 15, 16 months. That's a hell of a lot of bombs.

Indeed. And that's only estimated from one section of the airborne military forces. And also this: after the election,

we could end up with Iranian operatives helping to guide and direct American bombs against targets that are against our interests. This is all in the realm of possibility. Yes.

Oh yah, also this:

The Israelis are investing in their good partners the Kurds, they support an independent Kurdistan, or at least a strong Kurdistan. And for sure, there are operations going on, Israeli-led operations are going on inside Kurdistan into Iran, Syria, absolutely. The Israelis have a platform there.

Not terribly shocking. But I'm sure it will work itself out. A final bit, on dear Michael Ledeen and the Niger forgeries:

The one thing that makes me a little skeptical is Michael Ledeen is certainly, really smart, I disagree with everything, you know, he and I are on the other ends of the world, but it is such a bad forgery, I mean, it is such a bad forgery.

Well that's true. We ought to expect more finesse from him. Anyhow, lots of quotes, but Hersh is still the Dude on these matters.

Syria talks tough: I missed this one. About a month ago Assad said that Syrians had to stick together and fight, as the US has a plan to crush the Arab nations. It was basically a pretty hard statement from a country that the US has been openly belligerent towards for years now. But it suggests that Assad is not going to fold... With a little luck the neo-cons will fall in Washington before they can generate a Tonkin Gulf incident in the Syrian desert, as Raimondo put it. Syria accuses US of launching lethal raids over its borders.

The National Security Agency reflects on Tonkin Gulf: they put together a nice website with lots of original documents on the incident that got spun up to spark the Vietnam war, in an attempt to provide clarity. Good for them.

Venezuela and USAID operations against Chavez: This bit by Tom Barry from the International Relations Center talks about USAID and its various means of influencing politics in Venezuela. Part of the shadow boxing between Chavez and Washington. Also the ever-altruistic National Endowment for Democracy pops up as supporting 'democratic organizations.' Mysterious.

Former CBS producer stands by Texas National Guard documents: Right wing bloggers rode Dan Rather's battered remains to glory last year, but it might turn out that (surprise!) they're full of it. Mary Mapes, the producer supposedly responsible for acting as a Kerry henchwoman, has returned to tell the tale of the National Guard documents. Lo and behold she found that many Guard docs have the same features that everyone said made Bush's docs forgeries. She wrote a book "Truth and Duty" about it. There was a good interview with her on DailyKos exploring all this stuff. Here's the documents she dug up.

Florida logic: Robert Novak says that Florida Republicans are trying to get Katherine Harris to duck out of the Senate race. Also interesting stuff about how in Florida the Dems are starting over from scratch, all over.

To Live and Die in CA: They say that the man from the Crips, Stanley 'Tookie' Williams, is getting executed about now. I oppose the death penalty for anyone (including hapless Iraqi soldiers), and in this particular case, it strikes me as especially harmful to kill a figure who has managed to find a peaceful political strategy to defuse violent gang conflicts. (Possibilities of rioting. Only a massive LA riot could round out this ridiculous year.)

When steroid-sodden leaders, with quite soft support of their own, need to shore up that sense of solidarity among the Base, well why not get rid of a 'lead gangster'? Perhaps that's not fair because clemency ought to rest on the case itself. But I heard the same tone when a radio talk show host on CNN suggested that even if more than a hundred innocent people have been let off death row, it's still better to kill because they are plotting to kill more people in prison. Why not just shoot everyone? Horrible.

Drunk Trashy White Power, Mate: Elsewhere, in Australia there's been riots after some Lebanese immigrants were accused of assaulting a lifeguard. Naturally the Australian far-right has apparently latched onto the situation as an opportunity to demonize immigrants. Mean right wing lady Lucianne Goldberg said "Finally, a WASP riot as beer soaked beefy Aussies bash Muslims at beach" (via nomoremisterniceblog). Something to be proud of when neo-Nazis are circulating videos about 'the Battle for Cronulla'. Even more horrible. 12thharmonic is following this. Radio host Alan Jones is whipping things along:

The riot was still three days away and Sydney’s highest-rating breakfast radio host had a heap of anonymous emails to whip his 2GB listeners along.
"Alan, it’s not just a few Middle Eastern bastards at the weekend, it’s thousands. Cronulla is a very long beach and it’s been taken over by this scum. It’s not a few causing trouble. It’s all of them."

Froomkin's getting Posted: I think everyone knows how lame the Washington Post usually is these days. Somehow they seem to be getting upset about how all over the Internet people spit at them. Now one of their better writers, Dan Froomkin, is getting a bunch of crap from the WaPo editors because his column, the "White House Briefing", is perceived as too liberal, and by too liberal, they mean it is not always buried in the torrent of spin and propaganda masquerading as 'balance'.

Political Editor John Harris is a jackass here. Marshall and Firedoglake with more on it. Since Froomkin might go down over this, lets give him a couple paragraphs to explain himself:

Regular readers know that my column is first and foremost a daily anthology of works by other journalists and bloggers. When my voice emerges, it is often to provide context for those writings and spot emerging themes. Sometimes I do some original reporting, and sometimes I share my insights. The omnipresent links make it easy for readers to assess my credibility.

There is undeniably a certain irreverence to the column. But I do not advocate policy, liberal or otherwise. My agenda, such as it is, is accountability and transparency. I believe that the president of the United States, no matter what his party, should be subject to the most intense journalistic scrutiny imaginable. And he should be able to easily withstand that scrutiny. I was prepared to take the same approach with John Kerry, had he become president.

This column’s advocacy is in defense of the public’s right to know what its leader is doing and why. To that end, it calls attention to times when reasonable, important questions are ducked; when disingenuous talking points are substituted for honest explanations; and when the president won’t confront his critics -- or their criticisms -- head on.

The journalists who cover Washington and the White House should be holding the president accountable. When they do, I bear witness to their work. And the answer is for more of them to do so -- not for me to be dismissed as highly opinionated and liberal because I do.

Cheers dude, cheers. How the hell did you ever get that column anyway? Perhaps I'm not being totally fair with the Post. They did hook us up with the Abramoff chart and DeLay memo above. But why are they still such punks?

Viveca Novak twist in the Plame scandal: Weird. Digby if you want the ugly details. NextHurrah, E&P, Atrios, needlenose, Talkleft, & the firedoglake again for more. Apparently VandeHei suddenly said that Hadley was Rove's source on Hardball (a slight bombshell) and no one even noticed, probably because they have all gotten aneurisms by now. She tries to explain herself but its shady. Eccch whatever.

Hong Kong activists ask for quiet at WTO: According to the Guardian, the stalwart crew of rebels against the Communist order in those parts distributed notices:

In what passes for Hong Kong's alternative press, a cut-out-and-keep rioters' guide to Hong Kong was hardly a call to arms. Under R for Rioters, it said: "This is a peaceful place and your shenanigans will only make it harder for us once you leave, so leave the rocks at home." G for Globalisation noted: "While we are on the topic, what is your beef anyway?"

Could be some of that neo-Communist Propaganda though.

Wikipedia hoaxer apologises. The guy says it was a workplace prank. Old story about a Mac SE 30 made into a bong. The worst video game art ever. Hilarious.

Clinton messed with Bush at the global warming thing in Montreal. It is actually really good Clinton is wielding his residual 'soft power' to pressure the US on global warming, while saving a tiny bit of dignity for Sane America with the rest of the world.

Wake Up Neo, the screensaver. When you are listening to Massive Attack's Dissolved Girl and your mescaline-toting hipster friends show up for warez, you know you need to follow the white rabbit.

Star and stripe resign: A spoof. Rove's on the case. The little dog is a nice touch.

Al Qaeda Santa Connection - via elf torture: Sam Seder and Bob Knight from Air America's Majority Report point out the value of a war on Christmas (video here):

SEDER: Listen, as far as the war on Christmas goes, I feel like we should be waging a war on Christmas. I mean, I believe that Christmas, it's almost proven that Christmas has nuclear weapons, can be an imminent threat to this country, that they have operative ties with terrorists and I believe that we should sacrifice thousands of American lives in pursuit of this war on Christmas. And hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money.

PHILLIPS: Is it a war on Christmas, a war Christians, a war on over-political correctness or just a lot of people with way too much time on their hands?

SEDER: I would say probably, if I was to be serious about it, too much time on their hands, but I'd like to get back to the operational ties between Santa Claus and al Qaeda.

PHILLIPS: I don't think that exists. Bob? Help me out here.

SEDER: We have intelligence, we have intelligence.

PHILLIPS: You have intel. Where exactly does your intel come from?

SEDER: Well, we have tortured an elf and it's actually how we got the same information from Al Libbi. It's exactly the same way the Bush administration got this info about the operational ties between al Qaeda and Saddam.

... Yes, well, Kyra, I mean, listen, I would like Bob to tell me who is the person who has been offended by someone saying Merry Christmas to them? I've never met that person. I don't celebrate Christmas. But if someone says "Merry Christmas" to me, I either think, well, it's a little bit odd, it's like me saying happy birthday to you on my birthday, but no one cares.

But I will tell you this, as we wage the war on the war on the war on the war on Christmas on our radio show. News Corp., Fox News, those people who have started this entire war on Christmas mean, fake war, they're having a holiday party.

President Bush saying "Happy Holidays." Tokyo Rose, Laura Bush, saying "Happy Holidays" to her dogs in the video, I'm sure you've seen it. I mean, these are the things that we should be talking about when we are waging this war in Iraq, we should be equating it to the war on Christmas.

Scandal breakfast: Speeding up the war; Duke scandal reaches into CIA; Diebold revelations; GOP war-dialing in New Hampshire; More mercenaries

I have plenty of scandals for you today. But I'll try to keep it concise.

Texas gerrymandering: Justice Staff Saw Texas Districting As Illegal.

DIEBOLD insider speaks out on Vote Spoofing: One of my reliable spies sent this in. Diebold insider alleges company plagued by technical woes, Diebold defends 'sterling' record. This talks a lot about how Diebold may have manipulated the Georgia 2002 Senate race, among other things. Basically it indicates that Diebold should not be trusted at all. And they are diabolical.

New probes in the prewar intel, but Those Italians mighta done the forgery! Spicy Meat-aball! So yah, Lewis Libby attacked Wilson because he called out the yellowcake uranium thing, which turned out to be a forgery. The hot rumor -- supported in the Italian media -- is that Michael Ledeen and some other neo-cons channeled the stuff into Washington. And now it seems like they might finally get nailed for it. Congress Opens New Front In Iraq-War Probe. Treasongate: The Niger Forgeries v. the CIA Intel Reports - Preliminary Conclusion: An Italian Job. Consult Raimondo for more. FBI Is Taking Another Look at Forged Prewar Intelligence. Marshall's take on that, check it out.

Marshall adds that Scooter Libby's legal defense fund is being run by Mel Sembler, the US Ambassador to Italy "when all the secret meetings took place and when the forged uranium papers showed up at the US Embassy in October 2002." However he sees no evidence Sembler was involved.

New Hampshire scandal: via Marshall, blogger Betsy Devine is covering the court case of NH Republicans phone hacking -- more like phreaking -- no, wardialing. Yeah, wardialing on election day is illegal.

Bomb Jazeera-Gate: Clemons promises news from London on the Bush Bombing Al Jazeera memo, so check that later.

SAVE XMAS: Oh great, another holiday video from the White House. And holiday cards. Where is our Jesus??! Conservatives are really disappointed that Bush surrendered Christmas -- really!

SAVE BORAT FROM KAZAKHSTAN: Kazakhstan shows the world tyranny is not dead. And not only that, they threatened to sue Sasha Cohen for his fine Borat portrayal on MTV. Borat, for his part, "fully support my government's decision to sue this Jew" immediately, in a response video on his site.

SAVE NIXON: 'I Didn't Like Nixon Until Watergate': The Conservative Movement Now. Interesting reflections on a weird philosophy.

Meth for Iraqi insurgents: When you need to conduct a war, it is a good idea to get your forces sped up with pharmaceuticals, as we learned from the Stim Packs in Starcraft. The UK Mirror reports that methamphetamine has been found in pills around Basra -- and claims that Mahdi Army irregulars have used it fearlessly. However, it is also official US government policy to give speed to pilots sometimes -- which was blamed as a cause for the deaths of several Canadians in Afghanistan. Meth or dextro -- which is the ethical War Stimulant??

IRAQ: Why no army & how to get out: What? Dems dont know a strategy? James Fallows' recent bit on Why Iraq Has No Army from the Atlantic. Interesting column from E&P about White Phosphorus and the media spin that followed. Armando on the Kos suggests that we need to stick with criticizing Bush, since theoretical Democratic plans (a fuzzy mess nowadays) don't really do as much as discrediting Dear Leader (which is something that Lieberman attempted to attack this week. Fuck you, Lieberman!! Why articulate when obscenities express it better?)

"Donald Rumsfeld Is Mad As a Hatter" Funny how that victory strategy was written by some shady professor. US Rep. Adam Smith (D) on the ground in Iraq.

Shrewd people are thinking about getting out. Via the solid Steve Clemons, some good strategies. Politicians square off against each other. Republicans try a bizarre two-handed trick, claiming that the Dems are treasonous for demanding it more quickly, while still claiming that withdrawal is going to happen, sooner rather than later.

The Hard Nosed Realists are worth consulting. Lt. Gen. William Odom is one of these. He was merely director of the National Security Agency and was the Army's senior intelligence officer for a time. I am hardly such a damn fool as to not appreciate the kind of wisdom that only one of these old, battle-tested characters could give you. Odom: Want stability in the Middle East? Get out of Iraq!

On the flip side, journalist Nir Rosen has kicked around Iraq a lot, so he's got a pretty solid view of why the hell we need to get out.

The Insurgencies Are Winning by Dreyfuss, always good. Ten ways to argue about the war. Well at least Sunnis and Shiites are praying together a bit. "Profusion of Rebel Groups Helps Them Survive in Iraq".

Wes Clark, still Big Pimpin with war plans here. Clark-Mentum. Drum is confused. There seems to be a lot of enthusiasm for Clark in the Democratic netroots, but I feel ambivalent.

Death squads instead! Billmon sighs about the execution squads now deemed to be Iraq's Last, Best Hope, characterized as Salvadoran Option, Pt. II. And his bit about the Lincoln Group and its organized efforts to propagandize for the military in Iraq was interesting. More below...

Marketing the Dogs of War: Mercenaries are always interesting. So here is a pile o links. Private Security Guards in Iraq Operate With Little Supervision. American Security Firm Implicated in Iraq Killings. Triple Canopy investigation. This PDF is interesting because it indicates that they kill Iraqis and lie about it. Booman Tribune on the Aegis Security Corporation and Tim Spicer. Also more about Triple Canopy.

A NY Times story about these forces, with some random Nazi thing attached to it.

PERU: Veteran Soldiers, Police Recruited for Iraq by U.S. Contractors.
Mercenaries Guard Baghdad Green Zone. Green zone security switch increases risk.
Sandline mercenaries: from Sierra Leone to Iraq.
CPI: Marketing the Dogs of War: Making a Killing.

As earlier reported, "Trophy Video" of Civilian Shootings By Contractors Emerges and guess what folks, here is the actual video. Creepy. Crooks and Liars has more on Spicer.

I wrote a big paper for Wendy Weber about these private military firms and their role in geopolitical developments. Actually my view is not 100% negative, but I mostly worry that they are used to A) cover up covert foreign policy, like DynCorp spraying herbicide in Colombia, and B) destroy the chain of command -- and in turn our adherence to international treaties, etc. More later.

Pentagon Propaganda Matrix. For some conspiracy stuff, see the PropagandaMatrix. For a real Matrix of Propaganda, look at Iraq these days. In the so-called Serious Media:

Williams: Bush administration has "right" to buy media coverage
Appearing on the December 4 edition of CNN's Reliable Sources, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams told host Howard Kurtz that the Bush administration has "the right" to pay a columnist to tout its views in his column. Williams also condoned the "politiciz[ation]" of programming on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS).

Bastard. Let me just put in these DAMN links.
WaPo: Pentagon Funds Diplomacy Efforts / Military Says It Paid Iraq Papers for News
NYT: U.S. Is Said to Pay to Plant Articles in Iraq Papers
SourceWatch: Burson-Marseller's BKSH Gets Piece of Pentagon Psy-ops Pie
Forbes.com: Military Explains News Propaganda in Iraq
Freepaz: U.S. propaganda effort described
KR Washington Bureau: U.S. military pays Iraqis for positive news stories on war
LA Times: Secret Program May Have Erred, Pentagon Says
GovExec.com: What's Lincoln Group?
LA Times: U.S. Military Covertly Pays to Run Stories in Iraqi Press
Military Says It Paid Iraq Papers for News
DO YOU FEEL SAFER FROM TERROR YET? MUST BE THAT WARM AND FUZZY 'PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATION' FEELING!! (sorry that was tacky. This pisses me off)

Bribery scandal has many tentacles! Rep. Harris to donate contributions linked to Cunningham. Florida schemes? Of course! The Cunningham bribery scandal extends into the area of Pentagon defense spending -- and shadowy contributions leading to classified spending contracts (MZM gives cash to Duke, Duke hooks up open-ended contracts). Josh Marshall recently insinuated that people 'looked the other way' at what Cunningham was doing, while their own machinations around Defense sailed forth. Money quote:

The Pentagon's classified budget for buying goods and services has increased by nearly 48% since 9/11 — from $18.2 billion in fiscal 2002 to $26.9 billion this year — according to figures compiled by the non-partisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

......Harold Relyea, who studies government secrecy at the Congressional Research Service, says even if lawmakers had the time to study classified programs, most are not inclined to question the pet projects of their colleagues. And within the defense industry, "there is a coziness that sometimes builds up. You are familiar with the company and their people, it's easy to go back to them" for more work. "It's a new phase of what we used to call the military-industrial complex."

Neither Congress nor the executive branch regularly produces reports on oversight of classified spending. ... "We don't have the manpower or time to look into this, so we take it on faith that all of the companies working the black world are basically honest."

One of Porter Goss' boys at the CIA is apparently implicated in the Cunningham scandal, and other guys at the CIA are talking to the media about it. (Goss brought in a bunch of nasty national security punks to push people around at the Agency, and perhaps it will backfire since they were somewhat corrupt. Office politics from hell!) Jason Vest reports on this for GovExec.com about the details, including CIA executive director Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, who ought to go down on this.

Josh Marshall's on it too, as well as Laura Rozen. Marshall adds that legislative spending 'earmarks' have been used to provide patronage / funding for favored companies, maintaining the Power Structure.

BIG RED: China: Boom or Boomerang?

CFR: Council of Frickin' IDIOTS: Bush speaks at the CFR yesterday, and they were weak about it. Atrios mocks.

Psychological & economic damage of war: Coping with Combat. "Has 'War' become a leading brand for United States? How Bush's imperial policies are being linked to economic woes and CEO angst in America".

Wiki bad! To spoof Wikipedia's latest problems, consider Uncyclopedia and its fine CNN, Nostradamus and German grammar entries.

Misc file: Dems still polling damn well. Haaretz says, OK Sharon, what about the damn West Bank outposts!? Guess I finally found the vast right wing conspiracy. Pointers from Hunter on how to write massively for the DailyKos. Ah, good stuff. Hunter is always pretty cool.

Spin Charting for Fun! Part of the new liberal institutions' priorities are to track the subtle points of spin. For example, ThinkProgress got Bush Knew 10 Marines Had Died Prior To Rose Garden Remarks, Didn’t Mention It because he wanted to keep the happy spin going.

Alito in trouble. Don't really care.

Torture vs the media: Project Censored presents Hard Evidence of US Torturing Prisoners to Death Ignored by Corporate Media. Even the WaPo says Rice offers a weak defense of torture.

Skyscrapers and carbon sequestration schemes may cause earthquakes. The world's tallest tower in Taipei may have cracked open a fault line. Ouch.

Microsmish: IE flaw lets intruders into Google Desktop. Xbox 360 is lacking in some good features. SO much damn hype.

Persian Atom Smash: Iran Plans to Build Two More Reactors. Look to Khuzestan for the potential "FIRST FRONT IN THE WAR ON IRAN."

Now we've got some mothafuckin' scandals. Have fun kids.

Clocky holds it down; the GOD WARRIOR; shady voting machines in Nov. election

I have to praise Clocky, the clock that randomly rolls away after you hit the snooze button, so you have to chase it down. I also have to praise the BRILLIANT crazy "talking bobblehead nodder Trading Spouses GOD WARRIOR!!" as sold on eBay - a small, talking statue replicating a crazed Christian fundamentalist mom from an episode. This got some major internet and media buzz and got bid up beyond $800!

Many people were shocked and disgusted with Marguerite's behavior on the show. Not me! I thought it was so hilarious and wonderful it inspired me to create a bobblehead in her likeness! She is now my favorite t.v. personality of all time. When judgement day comes, me and Marguerite will be fighting the demons and stabbing the jaws of gargoyles and the demonic "moon creatures"! Everything's unholy!

An interview with the Dude (the basis for the Big Lebowski) on bullz-eye.com. Really enjoyed this. In particular the part where he just keeps running into the Coen brothers at several parties, a coinsidence that inspires them to do the movie.

What happens when you combine Mario and Che for a T shirt? Genius.

In the interests of offending everyone, I'd like to present Al-Jazeerah.info's official list of Jews in the Media. It's quite a list, but they left off one of my new heroes, quasi-fictional Ninja Hollywood Agent Ari Gold! Its posting on the Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK site was headlined, "If Jews Can Be This Successful In The Media, Why The Hell Are Mosque Half Wits Not Teaching it!" There's plenty of room in the media for everyone...

SONY Rootkit followup: Sorry i forgot to mention that a virus - worm, rather - has already been found on the internet that exploits this horrible thing. See also Boston Globe.

The Grand Federalist Society conspiracy: David Cumming pointed out to me once that the Masons mostly just eat pancakes. A valuable insight. Meanwhile the FedSoc, as it should be called, has systematically eaten the government. More or less.

Old tidbit on Tracking Election Irregularities: Voting machines in Virginia were reported to malfunction as touchscreen votes for victorious Democrat Tim Kaine were seemingly diverted to Republican Jerry Kilgore.

Virginia televsion station WDBJ-TV reports voters in at least four different precincts "say their votes for Tim Kaine were not recorded or took several attempts to go through. They contend the electronic touch screens repeatedly indicated they were voting for Republican candidate Jerry Kilgore instead of registering their intended vote for his Democratic opponent Tim Kaine."

There were also voting machine problems in Ohio and California. Schwartzenegger himself was initially denied the vote as the system indicated he'd already voted. Wow.

A sweet old 500KB hard drive getting wheeled across a clean room. All right. Sorry I forgot where this link came from.

Curtains rise on another act; Wurmser (under Bolton) said to be a key channel in Plame case

Amazing Mike Luckovich cartoon illustrates the thousands of dead soldiers. Also as high-rez PDF.

The sun will dawn on a different world in a few hours. Finally the Law has pierced the flesh of that most dangerous of beasts, the Bush Administration, and they cannot keep telling themselves how immaculate they are with an indictment lodged in the corpus... (narcissism in the leadership leading to ego projection in the followers - doesn't lead to good things)

Great diary about Seymour Hersh speech, relating torture, the regular bombing of Turkic people in northern Iraq, etc. Many arguments these days about how the war wasn't a mistake, it was sedition!!!

Basic hypocrisy from the Powerline crew on Clinton scandals vs Bush madness.

To clarify, with the Pat Lang link earlier, evidently Lang has been posting stuff from an experienced journalist using this 'alternate channel.' An interesting approach which will help solve the problem of political pressure from editors. Anyway, the journalist Sale writes (via Lang):

According to the Times account, Cheney told Libby the covert name of the wife of Joseph Wilson, a former U.S. diplomat who had publicly alleged that the administration had mishandled of intelligence relating to Iraq's nuclear weapons programs.

But several former and serving U.S. intelligence officials strongly disputed this. "That is simply not accurate," a very former senior CIA official told this repoter. "Libby's notes on this are misleading and inaccurate or both."

This source, supported by three others, alleged that it was a telephone call from the Department of State that first gave Libby the name of Plame.

The name of the caller? No one is sure. But these sources said that the call defintely came from the State Department office of John Bolton, then the arms control chief of the department.

These same sources alleged that two employees of Bolton, David Wurmser, a virullent pro-war hawk, first told Libby that Valerie Plame had sent Wilson to Niger to attempt to discredit the administration's line on Iraq's nuclear weapons programs.

These same intelligence sources alleged that Wurmser, as Bolton's special assistant, got his knowledge of Plame's classified identity from a colleague in his office, Frederick Fleitz, a CIA officer detailed to Bolton's office from the agency who worked in the CIA's Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center (WINIPAC.)

"We do not know yet which of the two called," the former very senior intelligence official said.

There are conflicting reports about the fate of Rove and the whole investigation (across LA Times, NY Times, the WaPo). So who knows how it adds up? The money question: is it true that Fitzgerald Expands Probe to Prewar Intel?

Nice little scandal index they got at Perrspectives.

Fortunately we have twits like Stephen Hayes at the Weekly Standard to blame the Wilsons for their perpetual mendacity. (Hayes himself has many sins to atone for in the intel disinformation game)

Norm is playing a role in Armed Forces Media. DailyKos: Ed Shultz Isn't Popular Enough: Norm Coleman. Galloway swats back against Norm.

Geekiest arm tattoo ever.

Because Beyonce is too black, they had to retone her skin for a fashion magazine. Thanks.

Teams Fail To Recreate Archimedes' Fabled Death Ray. Go Mythbusters.

Peak Corn? As Wal-Mart Shifts from Petroleum to Corn, Farmers Flee the Crop

What the fuck does this even mean? "Metrosexual man bows to red-blooded übersexuals" Apparently now someone has decided that George Clooney is cooler than Jude Law. Well no shit!

Breathalyzers and Open Source:

Lawyers for 150 Floridians accused of drunk driving have asked a court to order the disclosure of the source code for software running in the breathalyzer machines used by police to analyze their blood alcohol level, according to a Tom Sanders story on vunet.
The defendants say they have the right to examine the machines that accused them, and that a meaningful examination requires access to the machines’ software. Prosecutors say the code is a trade secret.

I respect that. Get the code while you can!!!

Iraq: Quite full of explosions these days, even in the Green Zone.The New York Review of Books: Last Chance for Iraq: the forceful argument to let it break up. Sunnis try to merge it up. Abu Ghraib photo court appeal runs out - new torture photos soon to be released?

Google: Chinese dissident observes: My Experience of Google's Censorship. Also good ol Seth Finkelstein's Google Censorship - How It Works.

The Turkish alphabet: CNN:

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey (Reuters) -- A Turkish court has fined 20 people for using the letters Q and W on placards at a Kurdish new year celebration, under a law that bans use of characters not in the Turkish alphabet, rights campaigners said.

Voter fraud: check out video footage of Clint Curtis saying that Florida Congressman Tom Feeney ordered him to make vote-rigging software. (the actual link - an odd site)

A post that's about a week late!

This was a set of stuff which I should have posted like a week ago. Well, enjoy. :-/

Some Minnesota blogs: I do not usually pay enough attention to blogs around the Twin Cities although it's a rich territory these days. City Pages big index. I think Kennedy vs. the Machine is amusing because, well, it just is. Anything idolizing Mark Kennedy is sort of like praising ketchup for daring to be different than mustard. Freedom Dogs is another right wing local one.

Then there are a couple college guys running MN Publius, which is pretty good. They are watching the upcoming election from afar. MN Lefty Liberal holding it down.

Secret Phone Numbers: escape the Labyrinth. Dial up real humans in corporate voice mail hell! This has the secret customer service numbers for many corps, including Amazon, which I used today.

Example of media manipulation & gullibility. FOX blimp tricks WCCO into covering it.

Scott McClellan Says Helen Thomas Opposes 'War on Terrorism' (featured on CrooksAndLiars). Har har har!!

[Helen Thomas]: What does the President mean by "total victory" -- that we will never leave Iraq until we have "total victory"? What does that mean?
[......]
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, Helen, the President recognizes that we are engaged in a global war on terrorism. And when you're engaged in a war, it's not always pleasant, and it's certainly a last resort. But when you engage in a war, you take the fight to the enemy, you go on the offense. And that's exactly what we are doing. We are fighting them there so that we don't have to fight them here. September 11th taught us --
Q It has nothing to do with -- Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, you have a very different view of the war on terrorism, and I'm sure you're opposed to the broader war on terrorism. The President recognizes this requires a comprehensive strategy, and that this is a broad war, that it is not a law enforcement matter.
Terry.
Q On what basis do you say Helen is opposed to the broader war on terrorism?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, she certainly expressed her concerns about Afghanistan and Iraq and going into those two countries. I think I can go back and pull up her comments over the course of the past couple of years.
Q And speak for her, which is odd.
MR. McCLELLAN: No, I said she may be, because certainly if you look at her comments over the course of the past couple of years, she's expressed her concerns --
Q I'm opposed to preemptive war, unprovoked preemptive war.
MR. McCLELLAN: -- she's expressed her concerns.

Who knew the CIA had a journal? Studies in Intelligence: VOL. 49, NO. 2, 2005 featuring Understanding Terror Networks and The Intelligence Officer's Bookshelf. Nice. Interestingly, the CIA defends itself from charges that they gave bad intelligence by an article published in this declassified journal. Here is an article about Goss crushing CIA analysts under political pressure.

Israel, Iran and nuclear war. Unpleasant thoughts that make me want to play computer games instead. WOPR knows you can't win Global Thermonuclear War anyway. But this article about how the US is prepping for the attack is spooky. US selling Bunker Bombs to Israel. They got some sweet jets too. Bush: "America would back Israel attack on Iran." Good old Cheney:

"Given the fact that Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel, the Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards," Cheney said. In 1981, Israel sent warplanes to destroy Iraq's nuclear reactor.

More on this later. Gotta love Threat Construction in the mideast.

Global: What is China Up to in the Western Hemisphere? Big things!

"Former U.S. ambassador in Bolivia Manuel Rocha recently remarked, 'Your children may have to start learning Mandarin ... if you wish to see them involved in business in the Americas.'"

UNPO: I like the idea of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization, which is set up for the various smaller ethnic groups (From the Lakota Nation to Georgian Abkhazia, the Assyrians of Iraq and the Levant - who do not support the new constitution. Sweet flag too! - and the formerly independent Arabic Ahwaz people of southwestern Iran)

Talk about some pandemic. Personal Pandemic Preparedness Plan. "ASSUME FOOD AND SUPPLIES WILL BE UNAVAILABLE". Here is yr bird flu map over time. Uh oh! Rich people should be saved in disasters first, says yr typical rightwing idiot.

Syria under pressure, ringed by an Iron Wall. More details on this later.

New Service to Coordinate US Overseas Espionage. Oh good, more for Goss, less for Negroponte. Or not. Dammit!

Rebels in Russia! They are getting serious out in those quiet Caucasus areas. Also covered here but these sites may be some rightwing gibberish. Well DEBKA should bring an air of Sanity to the affair. (they say it was mostly locals, shocking). The choice quote:

Most of the province’s inhabitants are ethnic Circassian Muslims. The unrecorded chapter of the Chechen intelligence war of the 1990s relates how the Circassian community of Jordan, which was the security buttress of the Hashemite throne, was used by US, British and French intelligence as a pipeline into the Chechen breakaway movement for close surveillance of its conflict with Russia. Al Qaeda, which tracks and meets every American intelligence move connected with the global war on terror, countered by going into the remote and relatively affluent Kabardino-Balkaria to quietly acquire its own Circassian asset.

Iraq Boom. Bush is really alone. It would be funny if it wasn't such a horrible and devastating problem. 'The worst possible policy for Iraq'. The good news: perhaps Iraq's violence not yet civil war. Journalist Chris Albritton has the latest on the election results and suspicious indicators of electoral fraud in Nineveh province. Here comes sectarian warfare. Ah, Bush's staged Potemkin army.

Great moments in strategy, revisited: Vanquished Iraqi military disbanded; U.S. occupying force to set up new army. What a classic. How did that turn out?

Terror Letters O Love: We got this exciting Zawahiri letter. Jazeera: Al Qaeda claims US faked Zawahiri letter.

Condi still has some fucked up spin:

The fact of the matter is that when we were attacked on September 11, we had a choice to make. We could decide that the proximate cause was al Qaeda and the people who flew those planes into buildings and, therefore, we would go after al Qaeda…or we could take a bolder approach.

Vikings. Ouch. Talk about bumblefucking your way out of a new stadium, and then getting crushed by the Bears. Bitter Reusse:

As to what action Wilf should take in the wake of this aquatic Sodom and Gomorrah, the most popular suggestion has been to fire Tice now, rather than at season's end.
That's an idea worth serious consideration, but until nightfall today, Zygi has a higher priority:
Repenting for using the family fortune to buy this no-class operation.

Plame Flood [week-oldd news - sorry]! Plenty of news on this in the last couple days. I am glad it's become a major scandal again. Judith Miller certainly played things the nasty, dishonest and venal way she's handled them so far. No real admission from her great tell-all in the Times about how Libby mercilessly spun the war against intelligence community - with the Plame scandal as only a branch of the fallout. (AIPAC/WINEP and Chalabi being two other major branches yet to break off the tree)

But the tone of media coverage still doesn't fully link the fake intelligence with the attack that Libby et al. tried against Wilson. Miller's particular role in that fake intelligence, I would say, means that she was probably protecting Chalabi's people, "defending her other sources" ± as she seemed to put it in her article. But lets get to the Main Story, as the "other" Roger Ailes puts:

In today's column, Howie Kurtz illustrates what's wrong with most of the newspaper and television coverage of the New York Times' role in Traitorgate, including Kurtz's:

"Leave aside the criticisms of her WMD reporting."

The newspaper's purported coverage of WMD and Miller's relationship with the White House are inextricably intertwined. Miller's dealings with the White House and her agenda cannot be separated.

Howie can't seem to understand why the Times' reporting on its own reporter is so weak. He mentions the obvious conflict of interest, but doesn't address the equally obvious fact -- that the paper knew how corrupt Miller was and ran her articles anyway.

The paper either knew Miller's unnamed sources in the Administration and the INC, and published her articles anyway, or it published Miller's propaganda without knowing. In either case, the paper knowingly permitted Miller to lie to its readers. And that's why the paper's coverage of Traitorgate is not only weak -- it's non-existent. The paper can't publish the truth about Traitorgate without exposing its own role in the scandal and the parallel scandal of its own reporting on Iraq. It can't report the truth of Traitorgate and simulataneously maintain the fiction -- illustrated in the article quoted below -- that it was misled by the Administration and self-interested Iraqis and therefore can't really be faulted for its faulty reporting.

And that's why you can't "leave aside" Miller's WMD reporting when you consider the Times current coverage of Traitorgate. Howie is smart enough to understand this -- why he doesn't credit his readers with the same intelligence is an interesting question.

Ailes also has a good timeline of the various NY Times stories that Miller spewed forth for the trusting American public.

Ok there are a ton of links. Arianna (again and again). Judy made some obvious mistakes in her notes about Plame's role. The AntiWar blog is jolly these days. E&P are pissed. "The Law is on the Side of Valerie Plame," by pissed off ex-CIA dude Larry Johnson. Johnson also has some pieces about SISMI, the apparent original entry point of the forgeries into western intelligence communities. He alleges a prominent neo-con (Michael Ledeen in all but name) concocted the damn things. Nice! (also, why Fitz gets it) Pat Lang pissed off at that horrible Cohen column (as is Atrios and everyone else).

"My money is on the company, Pt. II". Victoria Plame? A fine reference to the whole case via the Left Coaster. Time for the Frog March? The Times newsroom has been tense. Fire Miller, dammit!

AIPAC still simmers: Raimondo considers the possibility that Israeli ambassador Danny Ayalon is one of the parties of espionage in the AIPAC indictments.

Texas two step: These guys have been making a Ronnie Earle documentary. Interesting.

GOP dissolves? Sure why not?

Some kind of DeLay situation; dipping Uzbekistan; Machiavelli in the 21st century; Hey Arianna, we're #1 for "Bolton fake intelligence"

Yeah, I can't bring myself to write any more about the whole arrest incident. So I won't.

Start with Machiavelli for the Twenty-First Century from New Left Review. I liked this.

It is true that Bush sounds like LBJ in 1967 with staying the course. Tom DeLay got indicted, what fun. They are screaming partisanship but the Democratic Texas prosecutor has hit a lot of Democrats in the past.

In Ohio they are trying to un-gerrymander the legislative districts. Good luck folks.

Robert George, a self described "Catholic, West Indian black Republican" asks himself "Why Am I (Still) A Republican?" Indeed. There is a good deal of gloating on the left-blogosphere these days, as conservatives seem to split in all directions and run for cover. Stygius and Laura Rozen note that such luminaries as Andy Sullivan, Dan Drezner and Robert "the ghoul" Novak are running for cover.

I might have the sniffles. I wonder if it is H5N1 KILLER FLU. Which is spreading rapidly.

Arianna is saying what I said a while ago, that John Bolton is quite likely connected to the Valerie Plame CIA case. (antiwar.com was on it a while ago as Raimondo quickly puts on the comments). For more old bits, consider "They Knew" the intel was spoofed in In These Times, Aug 2004. Oh by the way, HongPong.com has the top Google ranking for "bolton fake intelligence," for the excellent post: "More stories of the fake intelligence and John 'the Moustache' Bolton". Hey, not bad!

The US is really leaving Uzbekistan. I really enjoyed this lengthy New Left Review profile about the history and situation of Chechnya. It very astutely points out that no legitimate Chechen leader has ever agreed with the Russians to be part of Russia or the USSR. Also the article adds that the FSB and Putin were widely suspected of orchestrating the 1999 apartment bombings subsequently blamed on Chechen rebels - terror99.ru is a sweet Russian site elaborating on some "conspiracy theories" about why a beam of shining light like Putin would ever dare do such a thing as bomb some buildings to freak out the Russian public.

Check out Arms Control Wonk. It's just cool. They have good info about North Korea among other things.

Oddly, Arlen Specter accused the Pentagon of blocking an investigation in the pre-9/11 "Able Danger" Pentagon intelligence project that people are now saying somehow identified Mohammed Atta, and other weird stuff. NY Times on it as well as CNN. I will spare you the billions of weird theories that could spring from this. Sorry - use your imagination.

The NY Times Company is cutting out 500 jobs.

An American diplomat characterized the depth of Shiite fundamentalist organizations taking solid control of southern Iraq as "our dirty little secret." If you are looking for a more realistic summary of Islamic militant movements and "the far enemy" check out this review of The Far Enemy on the Agonist. Some are arguing that Iran is not a global threat. Try "Give Iranian Nukes a Chance" by Slavoj Zizek (Aug. 2005), a lot of stuff about how the state projects its threat perceptions onto foreigners, justifying ongoing 'security measures' that are in fact the real threats to Democracy & Freedom. I think the truth lies in between, but it certainly is true that MAD logic may get the Iranians peace in the end - or a large glass parking lot. I hope for peace, and I am not a paranoid racist who thinks that Iranian civilization is totally suicidal and irrational.

Slavoj Zizek also wrote this bit about how the WMDs were MacGuffins in the narrative. Old but funny.

The Afghan heroin kingpins / warlords did quite well in the elections. Juan Cole noted that the British agents captured in Basra were apparently active in trying to intercept arms coming into Iraq from Iran. Basra is wack these days (FT adds to this, and Raimondo remarks that we're on the war road to Damascus and Tehran via Basra). Cole adds:

Among the more powerful Iranian arms merchants is Manucher Ghorbanifar, this one with friends in high places in Washington, who is trying to pull the United States into a war against Iran. War is good for arms merchants.

There is also some info about how much be-Baathification has really happened.

Check out this new film, Occupation Dreamland, about how some US troops handle their situation in Fallujah. There are sweet trailers. It looks amazing. Also check out this story about Turkey and its social conflicts.

Some commentary about Katrina's economic effects. The "Fog of Katrina" is being used to obscure unrelated economic information, they say. MorganStanley economist talking about how and when the global economy will get rebalanced. Richard Cohen at the WaPo says choose, dammit, Guns or Butter.

As always, between Israel and Palestine there is plenty of violence and even more spin. The Israelis got mighty angry when Hamas fired a bunch of rockets from Gaza into southern Israel, which Hamas justified by claiming that Israel blew up a vehicle at a militant rally, killing lots of people. It seems reasonable to me that the vehicle blew up on its own, but it is certainly possible that Israel did it. So Israel attacked Gaza and arrested a bunch of people in the West Bank. The 'militants' supposedly captured in the West Bank were to some extent part of the militant organizations' "political wings" and some of the more moderate elements, including those that favor reconciliation and intend to run in the upcoming Palestinian elections. I found the following on some kind of rightwing Israeli site, unitedjerusalem.org, where the text was loaded into some kind of interactive bias-judging webpage. Weird. But here is the "political" vs "militant wing" bit, which seems to be on Haaretz's print page here but not here or here. Thanks google.

In the largest arrest sweep since Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, the IDF apprehended 207 leaders of Hamas´ political wing, along with a number of Islamic Jihad activists in the West Bank early yesterday. Most of those arrested are not on the list of wanted men from the two organizations´ military wings, but rather their accomplices or activists in the political and civilian wings.

Palestinian sources said that among those arrested were several local leaders considered key figures in the upcoming third round of municipal elections to take place Thursday in 105 local authorities in the West Bank and in the fourth round of elections scheduled to take place in December, which include the major cities.

Among key activists arrested yesterday were several expected to run on Hamas´ ticket for the Palestinian Legislative Council elections on January 25. Prominent among the detainees is Sheikh Hassan Yusuf, along with his two sons. Yusuf, who was released from prison six months ago, and Muhammad Ghazal, a senior Hamas leader in the Nablus area, is considered a leader of the moderate camp espousing Hamas´ involvement in the political process.

But such a move was probably deemed necessary by Sharon for his own sordid domestic political reasons: On the other side, Sharon narrowly won his battle with Netanyahu over the Likud premiership and primaries, managing to retain the later Likud primary date and blunting Netanyahu's ever-intrigiuing conspiracy to take over the state. In a humorous twist, Sharon couldn't give his speech to the Likud Central Committee because his microphone went dead. This sparked a huge controversy between both sides, with the Netties claiming that Sharon did it himself to posture as a victim. Akiva Eldar always has interesting things to say about "Sharon's Cheerleading Squad", that is, the Israeli Left that now finds themselves in a strange political alliance.

I would like to believe that it was Sharon's idea, but Netanyahu actually approved it, to suit their weird personalities.... Anyway, also Likud members accused each other of ballot manipulation and voting fraud (as has happened in the past).

Israel would like a seat on the UN Security Council. The director of the Shin Bet security service says he expects more attacks from the West Bank now, which seems true as far as it goes tactically, but then again I think we can expect the settlers to Amp their Land Grab up now as well. The settlers are on a mission to persuade Likud Central Committee members of how freakin great they are.

I just found informationwar.org, a UK peace project. Nice name. Did you know that Winston Churchill once praised dropping poison gas on the Kurds? Funny story.

Three Voting Rights / tech conferences come to Twin Cities this weekend, Ohio election official caught taking $10,000 from Diebold

Via a good story in the Pulse this week by Burt Berlowe, I heard that there are three different gatherings about the state of Democracy in these United States over in Minneapolis this week. Maybe I should snoop around, see if I can get some of those sweet hackable voting machine memory cards. Pulse:

Forty years later, the right of people of color to cast their ballots freely and equally is still being questioned.

To find evidence of that, look no further back than the last two presidential elections, both of which were fraught with efforts to deny minorities their right to vote. Black names were purged from Florida voting lists; Ohio voters in minority precincts stood in line for up to 10 hours while their white counterparts had virtually no wait at all; and in our own Minnesota, Native-American ID cards were challenged.
In contrast to four decades ago, the culprits in this case have come not primarily from the White House but from the state houses—specifically the office of those in charge of running elections, the secretaries of state. In 2000, it was Florida Secretary of State Kathryn Harris who led efforts to keep blacks away from the polls. In 2004, Ohio’s Kenneth Blackwell drew fire for alleged discriminatory election practices. In Minnesota, secretary of state Mary Kiffmeyer has used various tactics to make voting more difficult for minority populations. All three of these secretaries were Republican Party activists—Harris and Blackwell both were state coordinators of George W. Bush’s presidential campaign.

This weekend the ongoing conflict between the secretaries of state and voters of color will be played out in the Twin Cities. While the two entities will not meet face to face, their agendas will collide in separate but intersecting events.

On Friday, Minneapolis will host one of a series of national public hearings sponsored by the Voting Rights Project, Lawyers Committee on Civil Rights (LCCR) and several other concerned organizations. It will be held all day at the Dorsey and Whitney Law Firm in downtown Minneapolis. 

The object of the event will be to assess the impact of the Voting Rights Act on individuals and communities as a proposed renewal of some its provisions draws near. The event will feature a series of panel discussions by experts in voting rights followed by open public testimony. Citizens are invited to attend and testify about their voting experiences.
[.......]
Beginning that same Friday and continuing through the following Monday, the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) will stage its annual summer convention at the Radisson Riverfront Hotel in downtown St. Paul. Some 300 to 400 secretaries and/or their representatives from 40 states are expected to attend the four-day conference. Voting rights and election reform issues of various kinds are among the items up for discussion. 

Minnesota will also host a third event with some relationship to the electoral process, immediately following those two mentioned here. There will be an international E-Democracy conference July 26 and 27 at the U of M Humphrey Center. Julian Bowery will be a featured speaker, and one session focuses on the use of computer technology in voting and data collection. Go to DoWire.org for more information.
[.......]
Most of the relevant election-related issues, including HAVA, will be discussed during the last day of the conference. The public is invited to attend any of the open sessions for a fee of $250 a day or $475 for the entire event by registering at the NASS web site.

In addition to the conference business, delegates will be treated to cruises, tours and parties during the conference, most of which are paid for by conservative corporate sponsors, including voting machine manufacturers who sell their products to state election officials. Among them is Accenture, a company with a history of questionable electoral practices, including close ties to the Republican Party, a role in the purging of felons from the roles in Florida in 2000, and numerous breakdowns and failures. 

Ellen Theisen of Voters Unite, a national election reform advocacy organization, is critical of this practice. 

“Not only are the voting machine manufacturers directly sponsoring much of this conference, most of them are also corporate affiliates of the National Association of Secretaries of State, paying up to $20,000 a year for the privilege,” she said. “When the Secretaries of State are under this constant influence from the vendors, it’s difficult to see how they can make objective decisions about our voting systems.”

Take a look @ blackboxvoting.org and Velvet Revolution for the latest on the fine field of shady county officials and the voting machine companies that love them.

It's not just secretaries of state getting seduced by the voting machine manufacturers. Brad Blog reports that Franklin County, Ohio Elections Director Matt Damschroder was punished for accepting a nice $10,000 check from a Diebold lobbyist. More about Damschroder in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and RAW STORY. (Damschroder was closely involved with the interesting pattern of keeping voting machines away from non-whites around Columbus last November, instrumental in tilting the outcome of 'democracy')

The Downing Street Dodge, 2004 voting fraud and hacking reports in Florida, Ohio + military anger at Karl Rove

I have so many damn links piled up for days on end, gotta get rid of them!!

The Downing Street Memo continues to exert a certain effect on things... It's interesting how the New York Times has bent over backwards to soften the way they talk about the memo and its contents. NewsClip Autopsy has a bit about their mastery of deception. Sanjoy Maharajan's "Anatomy of a Coverup" at Zmag has all the gory details about how the news copy obfuscates key points about the memos and their contents, although the text layout gives me a headache and I can't help but skim it. An old grumble about the Winds of War by Jim Kirwan has a link to an interesting "Iraqi Resistance Report"... And this page of war headlines has all kinds of leftie stuff.

Tracking Election Irregularities (HongWiki page): Bev Harris and the crew at Black Box Voting soldier on, and determine that Diebold optical scanner machines can be manipulated with programs on the memory cards. Wow.

The Diebold optical scan system uses a dangerous programming methodology, with an executable program living inside the electronic ballot box. This method is the equivalent of having a little man living in the ballot box, holding an eraser and a pencil. With an executable program in the memory card, no Diebold opti-scan ballot box can be considered "empty" at the start of the election.

The Black Box Voting team proved that the Diebold optical scan program, housed on a chip inside the voting machine, places a call to a program living in the removable memory card during the election. The demonstration also showed that the executable program on the memory card (ballot box) can easily be changed, and that checks and balances, required by FEC standards to catch unauthorized changes, were not implemented by Diebold -- yet the system was certified anyway.

The Diebold system in Leon County, Florida succumbed to multiple attacks.

Meanwhile the people at the Free Press in Columbus, Ohio have published "Did George W Bush Steal America's 2004 Election? Essential Documents." From the introduction:

This volume of documents is meant to provide you, the reader, with evidence necessary to make up your own mind.

Few debates have aroused more polarized ire. But too often the argument has proceeded without documentation. This volume of crucial source materials, from Ohio and elsewhere, is meant to correct that problem.

Amidst a bitterly contested vote count that resulted in unprecedented action by the Congress of the United States, here are some news accounts that followed this election, which was among the most bitterly contested in all US history:

• Despite repeated pre-election calls from officials across the nation and the world, Ohio's Republican Secretary of State, who also served as Ohio's co-chair for the Bush-Cheney campaign, refused to allow non-partisan international and United Nations observers the access they requested to monitor the Ohio vote. While such access is routinely demanded by the U.S. government in third world nations, it was banned in the American heartland.

• A post-election headline from the Akron Beacon Journal cites a critical report by twelve prominent social scientists and statisticians, reporting: "Analysis Points to Election ‘Corruption': Group Says Chance of Exit Polls Being So Wrong in '04 Vote is One-in-959,000."

• Citing "Ohio's Odd Numbers," investigative reporter Christopher Hitchens, a Bush supporter, says in Vanity Fair: "Given what happened in that key state on Election Day 2004, both democracy and common sense cry out for a court-ordered inspection of its new voting machines."

• Paul Krugman of the New York Times writes: "It's election night, and early returns suggest trouble for the incumbent. Then, mysteriously, the vote count stops and observers from the challenger's campaign see employees of a voting-machine company, one wearing a badge that identifies him as a county official, typing instructions at computers with access to the vote-tabulating software.

When the count resumes, the incumbent pulls ahead. The challenger demands an investigation. But there are no ballots to recount, and election officials allied with the incumbent refuse to release data that could shed light on whether there was tampering with the electronic records.

This isn't a paranoid fantasy. It's a true account of a recent election in Riverside County, California..."

• Hundreds of Ohio African-American voters give sworn testimony that they were harassed, intimidated, deprived of voting machines, given faulty ballots, confronted with malfunctioning machines and hit with a staggering range of other problems that deprived them of votes that were destined for John Kerry, votes that might have tipped the Ohio outcome.

• A team of high-powered researchers discover results in three southern Ohio counties where an obscure African-American candidate for the state Supreme Court somehow outpolls John Kerry, a virtually impossible outcome indicating massive vote fraud costing Kerry thousands of votes.

• Up until 11pm Eastern time on election night, exit polls show John Kerry comfortably leading George Bush in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Mexico, giving him a clear victory in the Electoral College, and a projected national margin of some 1.5 million votes. These same exit polls had just served as the basis for overturning an election in Ukraine, and are viewed worldwide as a bedrock of reliability. But after midnight the vote count mysteriously turns, and by morning George W. Bush is declared the victor.

There is far far more…enough, indeed, to result in massive court filings, unprecedented Congressional action and a library full of documents leading to bitter controversy over the 2004 election, especially in Ohio.

In this volume, we have attempted to present many of the most crucial of those documents.
Do they prove that George W. Bush stole the U.S. presidential election of 2004?
Should John Kerry rather than Bush have been certified by the Electoral College on January 6, 2005?

Historians will be debating that for centuries. What follows are some of the core documents they will use in that debate:

The most hotly contested evidence comes most importantly from Ohio, whose 20 electoral votes decided the election. But it also comes from other key swing states—-especially Florida and New Mexico—-where exit polls and other evidence raise questions about the officially certified vote tallies in favor of Bush.

Let's not forget that the certification of Ohio's electors was halted by Democratic senators back in January...

Campaign 2008: The Hillary business continues in an effort to discredit before a likely 2008 run. BBC noted this funny sentence:

While Klein says his references to lesbianism in the book illustrate how "Hillary's politics were shaped by the culture of radical feminism and lesbianism at Wellesley College in the 1960s", the woman herself has altered her stance on one of America's key feminist issues: abortion.

I didn't realize that lesbianism was an ideological orthodoxy. Do they have a little red book?? Klein got on Air America and he admits to quite a lot of errors, including the messing up the name of Hillary's chief of staff and various other hack mistakes. Bill Richardson is an interesting possible candidate and he is being annoyingly coy about it. From back on June 8, a Richardson trip to New Hampshire:

MANCHESTER - Wondering if Bill Richardson is running for president? It depends on which language you speak.

"I want to be very clear about this presidential stuff," Richardson, the Democratic governor of New Mexico, said at yesterday's New Hampshire Latino Summit. "No, I will not run for president."

Then, switching to Spanish, he told the heavily Hispanic crowd, "Segura que si, voy a ser candidato!"

Rough translation: You bet I am!

It was a light-hearted response to a question that is bound to follow Richardson for the next few years. But the bilingual answer also underscored a point Richardson made several times yesterday, as he met with members of New Hampshire's Hispanic community and other state business and political leaders.

Leaked government documents: From the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) meetings going on, some dude scanned in internal goodies. (via Boingboing)

The Military, Karl Hate and Recruiting:

Hey, the MinuteMen started a branch in Texas (and they've got a funny movie coming up). And China widely has a more popular global image than the United States. Such are two effects of the present political crisis, and now Karl Rove is attempting to mint some anti-liberal hate currency because they can't figure out real solutions. The military is under pressure and Rove insults all serving liberals. Recruitment is down, which might be a pressure point. Some thoughts about anti-recruitment action on the Left by Michael Neumann on Counterpunch:

Worst of all, the very concept of political action has been attenuated to the vanishing point. By now, many leftists have only the faintest idea of what it is to do something. They see two options, non-violent protest and violent protest, never suspecting that both of these are closer to speech than to action. 'Support' has come to mean equally little: like protest, it has to do with uttering words. ....
...Of course, leftists are quite aware of the recruitment crisis in today's armed forces. But awareness isn't enough - excitement would be more appropriate. This is not just a weakness in the system which sustains the war effort. It is a fatal weakness.
Recruitment is essential: no troops, no war. Recruitment happens, and has to happen, all over the country. All over the country, right where they live, people can do much to make recruitment less effective. Parents of high school kids (and veterans' groups) are already working on this. Every high school, every university, every place where recruiters go, is an ideal battleground, because the anti-war forces, far more than the recruiters, are on home ground.
Recruiters are vulnerable to student protest, to one-on-one confrontations, to anti-war parents and to all those adults who can support them. Anti-recruiters, who make the case against joining up to potential recruits, can circulate on the ground; others can use online services to reach fighting age computer users. Posters can go up all over cities and towns across the country, perhaps with pictures of some of the wounded Bush likes to hide.

On the other hand I sympathize for the guys who have to work as recruiters because it is really quite a horrible job. However, by that very statement we run into a classic fallacy deployed against the left, "Supporting the Troops == Supporting the War", in this case, they will try to imply that "Opposing the War == Opposing recruiting == Opposing the troops". But we can't let them get away with blaming noisy liberals for a lack of recruits. There's a lack of recruits because the war has gone to hell, everyone knows it, and no one wants to go. Bob Herbert is saying this may very well lead to the draft... The normally hilarious 'Jesus General' makes a depressingly serious comment, and cites this little set of pictures. Apparently Rove's nasty recent comments were fully coordinated with the White House, and nasty talking points got released before he even started the rant.

They'd like to blame the failure of the war on the antiwar voices, much as Vietnam got reframed in people's heads over the last year with the silly argument that leftist protesters caused national will to implode. In truth, the worthless political strategy caused the expression of national will via violence to fall apart. And that's

happening again. But the recruiters don't deserve a pass, and they don't deserve to know my brother's grade point average.

Well what do you know, now there's a blog for "Taking the Fight to Karl: American Service Men and Women Mad at Karl Rove". Including the memorable post, "Active Iraq Soldier: Karl, Come over _here_ and say that, Chickenhawk":

I'm writing you from [Location Withheld] Iraq, about 35 miles NW of Baghdad.. And I'm too tired to give Karl the verbal beating he deserves for his insults. I'm too tired because we're jsut a bit shorthanded over here, fighting his war for him. A war taht has made nearly every country in the world fear and distrust America, a war fought for a knowing lie dreamed up by Karl and his buddies, none of whom have ever heard a shot fired in anger, or helped pick up the parts of another human being after an IED blast.

I enlisted after the war beganm and after I'd gotten my degree. I could easily have stayed home and watched the war on TV, and Karl does. I do not support this war in the slightest, but I will not sit at home and lecture others on their insufficient patriotism when the nation is in need. I joined because I believe in giving back some measure of service and devotion to my country.

To hear a man like Karl insinuate that only conservatives are really patriotic is a knife in the back to every man and woman in Iraq who serves here. At least a third of us voted against Bush and pals. The number increases every day that we stay here, forced to make bricks without straw for months on end.

We've been here for 6 months. We're going to be here for at least 6 more. And next week we're moving to a more 'active' sector because the unit there is rotating home and the are is still too hot to entrust to the IA or IP, most of whom are still not fit to guard a traffic light, despite two years of efforts on our part. For some of us, this is our second tour through Iraq. My unit, [Withheld] was the tip of the spear in OIF I. At least half of us are combat veterans of a major battle and liberals. Can any of your gang say that, Karl?

Never insult me and my fellow liberals again, Karl. Watching a fat, hateful thing like you that has never faced any greater danger in your life than a long golf shot denigrate every liberal who has put on a uniform is more demoralizing than ten thousand speeches that uphold America's highest ideals from Sen. Biden or Byrd.

[Name Withheld]

And lots more... On Thursday the Supreme Court is supposedly meeting to look at the Valerie Plame case. Something exciting may happen. There is terrible nastiness happening at PBS now (look at that GOPBS logo!). I saw Moyers on the Daily Show recently. Depressing. Moyers is fighting hard in this.

Tech: Google to launch online video playback on Monday, using my favorite open-source media player VLC. Or so they say. Also check out combining RSS and BitTorrent. Well it's an old story. But worth thinking about. The Onion 2056. Good stuff at amphetameme.org. What is Outfoxed (not the anti-Fox flick)? The Avian Flu blog.

More politics: DemBloggers still has great streaming media including some great Rumsfeld moments (WMV required but it works on the Mac) Hijacking Catastrophe is frickin sweet.

Random culture: via BoingBoing Rare Bollywood LP covers. An amazing act of sarcasm for the Kansas School Board:

We have evidence that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. None of us, of course, were around to see it, but we have written accounts of it. We have several lengthy volumes explaining all details of His power. Also, you may be surprised to hear that there are over 10 million of us, and growing. We tend to be very secretive, as many people claim our beliefs are not substantiated by observable evidence. What these people don’t understand is that He built the world to make us think the earth is older than it really is. ..... But what our scientist does not realize is that every time he makes a measurement, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is there changing the results with His Noodly Appendage. We have numerous texts that describe in detail how this can be possible and the reasons why He does this. He is of course invisible and can pass through normal matter with ease.

The horror of Jared Fogle.

Iran election turnout nearly 63%, really not so bad? Or fraud?

Free Thoughts In Iran reports:

Participation: 61.7%

Rafsanjani: 6,108,029 (21.2%)
Ahmadi Nejad: 5,555,458 (19.3%)
Karrubi: 5,394,031 (18.7%)
Qalibaf: 4,009,620 (13.9%)
Moeen: 3,949,240 (13.7%)
Larijani: 1,715,190 (6.0%)
Mehr Alizade: 1,269,790 (4.4%)

Spoiled Ballots: 847,642 (2.9%)

A day before the election, Bush sharply denounced the vote, saying it was designed to keep power in the hands of the clerics. But some Iranians said they were motivated to vote to retaliate against Bush’s denunciations.

“I picked Ahmadinejad to slap America in the face,” said Mahdi Mirmalek after attending Friday prayers at Tehran University.

And I don't even want to start into what happened in Lebanon. In a move sure to annoy the many regime change enthusiasts in Washington, the Iranian public (including a significant number of expatriates) voted in surprisingly large numbers in the first round of their presidential election--although naturally Michael Ledeen now claims that various people cooked the numbers, provided fake ballots and perhaps bussed in a million Shiites from Pakistan. Now the former president, Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, will face off against a rather hardcore mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the final election this Friday. Snooping around the burgeoning Iranian presence online these days shows that progressive Persians are annoyed as hell that they'll have to vote for Rafsanjani to prevent the even more conservative Ahmadinejad from taking over.

Check an interesting NY Times Q&A with professor William Beeman, who just returned from there. (Rafsanjani, by the way, was involved with Iran-Contra back in the good ol' days, but it doesn't seem to bother people too much, because, hey, they got some missiles out of it, right?) A good summary of the whole thing, including a broader look at how American hawks tried to frame the situation.

And there are claims of voting fraud now coming from Rafsanjani's people, as well as the #3 candidate Mehdi Karroubi, who represented sort of an anti-poverty religious angle that progressives took cynically. A letter about fraud that Karroubi published was printed in two daily newspapers, Eqbal and Aftab Yazd, and they got shut down by the government. Even IRNA reported this was about "some rigging in the elections."

There were polls in Los Angeles, and some people tried to picket them. Apparently the "Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran" quoted in this story is basically a one-man front that people shouldn't take seriously. But he did yell at people.

Human Rights Watch summarized Iran's exclusionary election system, termed as 'pre-cooked elections.' The distribution of votes was fairly close among six candidates, which suggests that if the various progressive movements in the country hadn't tried to boycott it, they might have actually gotten someone more preferable into the final round. Mostafa Moin (spellings vary-"Moeen" as well) was the supposed progressive candidate and he seems to be claiming that he took a nap in the morning and when he awoke a million votes had shifted. But Moin might not really be that progressive. As the Sunnis in the next war zone over learned, boycotting elections in imperfect systems doesn't really solve anything.

There are many pictures of the election process available online. That is pretty nifty to see.

As Prof. Juan Cole described the results,

The Iranian voting public put a hardliner and a conservative pragmatist into a run-off election with their ballots on Friday. With a turnout of 62 percent or more, voters rejected reformist youth calls for a boycott and some said they meant their vote to be a slap in the face of US President George W. Bush. In the lead is Mahmud Ahmadinejad, the former mayor of Tehran and a hardliner close to the Islamist vigilantes ("Basij") of the grass roots Khomeinist movement. Coming in close second is former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a conservative pragmatist who dealt with the Americans during the Reagan-era Iran-Contra scandal. They will face each other in a run-off next Friday. Wire services report,

“I picked Ahmadinejad to slap America in the face,” said Mahdi Mirmalek after attending Friday prayers at Tehran University.
At Tehran University, the leader of Friday prayers, Ayatollah Mohammad Emami Kashani, told worshippers that voting “strengthens the pillars of the ruling Islamic establishment.” Followers then joined in with the common chant of “Death to America!”

The vote is a repudiation of the relatively timid reform movement of outgoing president Mohammad Khatami, which never delivered an improved economy or administration. Its attempts to open up the Khomeinist system to greater personal liberties and greater freedom of speech were relentlessly blocked by the hardline clerics that controlled the judiciary and other oversight bodies. The Right closed dozens of reformist newspapers and cracked down on student demonstrations. The most outspoken reformist on the ballot, Mostafa Moin, did poorly. He had initially been excluded by the hardline clerics that vet Iranian candidates, but was put back on the ballot at the insistence of Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei. A more moderate reformer, Mehdi Karrubi, came in third and charged ballot fraud by the Revolutionary Guards who supported Ahmadinejad.

It is likely that the Iranian electorate's swing to the Right reflects in part a deep unease about being surrounded by the United States, which has troops both in Afghanistan and Iraq. Post-revolutionary Iranians are nationalistic and determined to maintain their national independence, and all the talk by the Bush administration about regime change, aggressive action against Iran over its nuclear research program [which so far appears to have been conducted within the limits set by the Non-Proliferation Treaty], and the illegitimacy of the Iranian elections themselves, appears to have contributed to the greater success of the hardliners.

Ahmadinejad is a very bad character, with a long history of essentially fascist activity in suppressing points of view other than those of the hardline Khomeinists. He is said to have plotted the murder of novelist Salman Rushdie and to have been involved in planning terrorist actions by Iranian agents in the 1980s. Ironically, in Iranian terms he is a "Neoconservative," the opposite number of the Cheneys, Perles and Feiths in the United States.

I did some research on how the domestic scene is put together in Iran, and it is interesting that indeed there is a segment labeled 'neoconservative' that is closely tied to the religious establishment and the bazaaris, more traditionalist merchants of the informal economy that have a great deal of influence over affairs. An Interview with Ahmadinejad on IRNA, the Islamic Republic News Agency. What a great name for an agency. Anyway:

Nuclear energy is the scientific achievement of the Iranian nation. Our youth have crowned themselves with this achievement, via domestic technology and by reliance on their own knowledge. The energy belongs to the Iranian nation. Definitely, the progress of a nation can not be obstructed. Scientific, medical, and technical development of our nation is necessary.

I believe there are certain individuals that create a false mood. They want to portray the situation as critical, while there is no crisis here. The technology is at the disposal of the Iranian nation. Certain powers do not want to believe this. They resist a bit against accepting such a right, such an achievement of the Iranian nation. Their scientists and experts have admitted that the Iranian nation is entitled to this right.

I believe the problem can be solved with prudence and wisdom, by utilizing opportunity and relying on the endless power of the Iranian nation, through our self-confidence. The ongoing artificial mood is political sleight of hand. The mood aims to influence the Islamic Republic's domestic developments.

One can not impede scientific progress. You can see scientific progress everywhere in the world. One can not obstruct this movement. This is not something that can be prevented with an order. No one can deprive the Iranian nation of this right. They are vainly trying to stir conditions worldwide. They want to fan tension, create crisis to meet their transitory objectives.

That's a kind of psychological war; nothing else meets the objectives. That may not be the case. This is as if you want to deprive someone of industrial progress. This is something impossible. Industry is intertwined with the nature of an individual. Technical knowledge has now become an integral aspect of the Iranian psyche. You can not say that the Iranian nation should not use math, should not have physicians, should not build large dams, or should not be able to build a refinery or a plane.

So that is kind of disturbing, but interesting... Really shocking that they feel entitled to use technology, oh how could they ever be so crazy? :-P To put another point on this, Beeman said:

I think there is no question that the public, all the candidates, and the current establishment are completely unified on this point: Iran should be developing its nuclear industry.
Here's one point that utterly escapes us in the United States, and I really wish people in power could understand: The discourse on the nuclear question between the United States and Iran is almost a complete disconnect. The United States, not to put too fine a point on it, thinks Iran is going after nuclear weapons in order to do some damage to the United States and its allies. To put it really crudely, as one adviser connected to the White House told me, "Look, we know Iran wants to develop a nuclear bomb to drop on Tel Aviv." This kind of statement just utterly and completely floors me.
The Iranian side of the discourse is that they want to be known and seen as a modern, developing state with a modern, developing industrial base. The history of relations between Iran and the West for the last hundred years has included Iran's developing various kinds of industrial and technological advances to prove to themselves--and to attempt to prove to the world--that they are, in fact, that kind of country.
The nuclear-power issue is exactly that. When Iranians talk about it, and talk about the United States, they say, "The United States is trying to repress us; they're trying to keep us down and keep us backward, make us a second-class nation. And we have the ability to develop a nuclear industry, and we're being told we're not good enough, or we can't." And this makes people furious--not just the clerical establishment, but this makes the person on the street, even 16- and 17-year-olds, absolutely boil with anger. It is such an emotional issue that absolutely no politician could ever back down on this question. But again, the public, when you ask them about nuclear weapons, they just sort of look at you like you are crazy. Because that's not even close to what it means to them.

Here are some links. Editor:Myself by Hossein Derakhshan, who is based in Toronto. He says that things are getting kind of scary.

Also check out Iranian Truth, IranScan1384, Free Thoughts on Iran, IranMania news service/portal, aptly named Brooding Persian, The Iranian Feminist Tribune, Adventures of Mr. Behi, and a huge friggin' list @ blogsbyiranians.com. And of course Iranians have many sites purely in Farsi.

More articles... bitterness about Iran's double apartheid based on gender and beliefs. I liked the different notes on freethoughts.org.
Finally then, I think this post by an Iranian student in Toronto rounded it out:

History seems to follow no pattern. The lesson is that there is simply no lesson to learn(*). Politics due to <put your favorite reason here> is not a deterministic game.

There is no guarantee of what is going to happen to Iran after this presidential elections and many of the heated debates going on about boycott or supporting a specific candidate are at best superficial.
I know this was a lousy post but I thought the nihilistic nonchalant should have a voice as well.
-----------
(*) Reminds me of "We learn from history that we never learn anything from history," as Hegel said.

America's Internal Pro-Democracy Movement

It has been quite a few months since the election, and the fact that we still live in the Modern Babylon is kind of vexing, but our nation's shitty electoral system makes me angry too.

It's a good thing, then, that Brad Friedman of BradsBlog, along with the support of many miscellaneous groups, has started an organization called "Velvet Revolution" to agitate for better electoral systems here, and accountability from officials who try to obscure how flaky those systems really are.

It is a little unfortunate that the Velvet website has the tacky yellow-caps headline style and whirling police light alert of the BradBlog; it appears they just tweaked Brad's layout a bit. Nonetheless they are trying with good faith to raise noise about some shame National Election Reform Commission, which has all sorts of top Bush apparatchiks all over the place,led by none other than James "Stop Counting you Filthy Swamp Yokels" Baker. Jiminy Carter comes along to provide some feelgood vibes, and the whole thing looks like a farce just ginnin' up... A RawStory feature breaks down the lineup. On April 19 the WaPo reported on the panel's initial hearing, which I suppose at least entered a number of disturbing problems into the record.

John Conyers is getting into the blogging game now at conyersblog.us, and he's pushing reform:

As you may be aware, on March 25 it was announced that former President Jimmy Carter and former Bush-Cheney Campaign lawyer James Baker, III, would co-chair a Commission on election reform. I think bipartisanship is desperately needed in the area of election reform. However, for many of us, Mr. Baker will be forever remembered for his ultimately successful efforts to stop the counting of legally cast votes in the 2000 election. Had these efforts not succeeded and had the true will of the voters been ascertained, Al Gore would have been elected President.

How can an individual who played a critical role in the disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of Floridians now co-chair a Commission which should have as its mission ensuring that every vote counts?

One of the appointees, Wall Street Journal lackey John Fund, was caught on tape talking about tossing out provisional ballots of people who "Don't look like they live in the neighborhood," and Conyer's blog provides the link.

This column below quickly recalled for me the bitter feeling of realizing that thousands of votes were prevented in the last election, and many more recorded on insecure machines. A columnist from Tribune Media penned the following recently:

The silent scream of numbers
The 2004 election was stolen — will someone please tell the media?

As they slowly hack democracy to death, we’re as alone — we citizens — as we’ve ever been, protected only by the dust-covered clichés of the nation’s founding: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

It’s time to blow off the dust and start paying the price.

The media are not on our side. The politicians are not on our side. It’s just us, connecting the dots, fitting the fragments together, crunching the numbers, wanting to know why there were so many irregularities in the last election and why these glitches and dirty tricks and wacko numbers had not just an anti-Kerry but a racist tinge. This is not about partisan politics. It’s more like: “Oh no, this can’t be true.”

I just got back from what was officially called the National Election Reform Conference, in Nashville, Tenn., an extraordinary pulling together of disparate voting-rights activists — 30 states were represented, 15 red and 15 blue — sponsored by a Nashville group called Gathering To Save Our Democracy. It had the feel of 1775: citizen patriots taking matters into their own hands to reclaim the republic. This was the level of its urgency.
...
In contrast to the deathly silence of the media is the silent scream of the numbers. The more you ponder these numbers, and all the accompanying data, the louder that scream grows. Did the people’s choice get thwarted? Were thousands disenfranchised by chaos in the precincts, spurious challenges and uncounted provisional ballots? Were millions disenfranchised by electronic voting fraud on insecure, easily hacked computers? And who is authorized to act if this is so? Who is authorized to care?

No one, apparently, except average Americans, who want to be able to trust the voting process again, and who want their country back.

There will be more to be seen, thank God.

To the sound of ballots dropping

The WMCN benefit at the 400 Bar tonight was excellent, although I only got there in time to see Short Order. Mitch sported sunglasses... I'm real tired now, but I watched the overnight cable broadcasts regarding Iraq, which sounded better than I might have expected. Massive violence over the past 4 hours, almost a dozen suicide bombs, yet the people are apparently turning out in many places. I don't know what it will sound like by the time I wake up in the morning. Of course, the real fireworks might come when they try to move the ballots. Who knows...

For all this lying and violence, well at least they got to have some polls. Some came from Bulgaria to Turkey to vote, according to CNN.

The highlight of the broadcasts was at about 1:59 central time. Two Iraqi dudes were telling FOX News about coming from Utah to vote in California, and they started to describe how another Iraqi at the polling station was wearing black because their relative got killed working in the Iraqi National Guard, and then the anchor suddenly cut them off. Time for the 2 AM commercial break!!!

What product so immediately needed to be offered to us? A collection of cowboy classics. John Wayne. Buy it now and git double the episodes, only nanntenn nannty fiiive plus shippin' and handlin'.

Norm Rosenberg taught us about the John Wayne movie Red River. Wayne rides into the west, gits some land, shoots the representative of the land's owner, and connects the cattle generated to the American economy, represented by a railway. He didn't have time to hear the end of any damn stories, either.

Ironically, there was only one polling station open in the western United States, and we'll see how many stations in western Iraq make it through the day.

Ongoing news coverage:
Al Jazeera - although they got officially kicked out
Agonist.org - online news collectors. top notch folks.
The early report from Dexter Filkins of the Times.
Something will turn up on Metafilter.

My regards to anyone who tries to brave the situation, and my sympathy for those that already know its a slanted game. Hang on folks, this is the part where 2 + 2 just gotta equal 5.

Sen. Boxer boxes Ohio's electoral votes

Right now I am sitting in the BI room in the library watching C-SPAN on streaming video with Braham. Rep. Maxine Waters just wrapped up and she did a damn fine job raising questions about what happened in Ohio. We are fortunate to get the issue out there, although it will probably still get a low level of media attention.

I want to thank Rep. Waters, Senators Boxer and Harkin, and all the others who are standing up to question the fate of thousands of voters in that last farce of a fair election. As Rep. Kilpatrick (D-MI) is saying right now, this is the appropriate venue to speak on beahlf of those disenfranchised on November 2nd. Thanks, Democrats. You should have done this in January 2001.

Zap the system, pleeeaaase!!

Well, the time is upon us to certify last November's election, and there are some hopeful rumors that up to three senators were favorable to objecting to the certification of Ohio's electors. Possibly the certification of other states might be challenged, as well.

I will be back at the Dungeon of the Palace of DeWitt Wallace (ie the library computer lab) on Thursday so I will try to post some more stuff up as things in Washington unfold. Yes, the site has not been getting fresh content like we had going before finals. I would simply say that:

A) I have needed some time off of writing to read more–and actually read pleasant things, not the usual endless stream of insanity

B) the server had outdated versions of important software and it keeps forgetting what time it is. No, it is not 1904. So I've spent a while patching things up, strengthening the operation. This is especially important because

C) when looking through the hongpong.com server logs late last night, I discovered that the Central Intelligence Agency came back, (after their first openly identified visit—the real covert dudes would obviously use computers that didn't have IP numbers tied to CIA.gov) but this time, they downloaded a large section of things. I will say more about this later. Centcom.mil, the Joint Forces Command, and the usual jokers on Air Force and Army bases looking (via Google) for the violent military helicopter kill video keep coming back.

As you might imagine, the CIA has given me one of those weird post-paranoia feelings. I am not wildly alarmed, but it's motivated me to spend a while increasing the security of things, reflecting on what other script kiddies and spammers are trying to do all the time. I don't think the CIA has it 'in for me,' but it motivates me to keep a reasonably close eye on what is going on.

All this stuff has taken my attention away from looking at the election stuff and posting about it. But anyway here goes...

Your reading assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to look at the report by the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee called "Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio." [Full PDF] I will post the whole executive summary below this stuff because it is important.

So bradblog.com is offering some hopeful rumors and tidbits. The great Clint Curtis will probably get some attention as well, as he was making the rounds through Capitol offices. Three senators, says Brad:

We have heard that there was a hard coalition of three Senators in support of challenging the Electors, while a larger number had hoped to simply publish a letter calling for Election Reform instead of taking the more impressive stand as recommended by the Constitution. There is a reason why in a body of hundreds, only two are required to immediately halt all proceedings in order to debate and investigate any Electoral chicanery.

While Election Reform is clearly necessary, that can be done next week, or next month. Tomorrow is the moment for Senators to stand up with the 24 House of Representative members to challenge Electors for being illegally seated.

We're happy to report we've heard that the three Senators in favor of challenge held strong, at least for the day, and did not fold in favor of the "Letter" option.

Well, that makes me feel a little more optimistic that the whole issue of vote integrity will get propelled into the news cycle for a while, but these days I just don't think it will stick. If it weren't for the tsunami disaster, there would have been a lot more oxygen in the media spin chamber for elevating this fight.

I have not been following these things as closely as before break, because I feel that most of the energy of the Vote 2004 story has pretty much been spent. I might be wrong.

For the sake of my country I hope that principled Democrats can raise as much ruckus as possible, and bite off at least the first two hours of the Authenticated BushTwoSquared Presidency. Make the bastard squirm a little, come on folks...

Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio: Executive summary

Representative John Conyers, Jr., the Ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, asked the Democratic staff to conduct an investigation into irregularities reported in the Ohio presidential election and to prepare a Status Report concerning the same prior to the Joint Meeting of Congress scheduled for January 6, 2005, to receive and consider the votes of the electoral college for president. The following Report includes a brief chronology of the events; summarizes the relevant background law; provides detailed findings (including factual findings and legal analysis); and describes various recommendations for acting on this Report going forward.

We have found numerous, serious election irregularities in the Ohio presidential election, which resulted in a significant disenfranchisement of voters. Cumulatively, these irregularities, which affected hundreds of thousand of votes and voters in Ohio, raise grave doubts regarding whether it can be said the Ohio electors selected on December 13, 2004, were chosen in a manner that conforms to Ohio law, let alone federal requirements and constitutional standards.

This report, therefore, makes three recommendations: (1) consistent with the requirements of the United States Constitution concerning the counting of electoral votes by Congress and Federal law implementing these requirements, there are ample grounds for challenging the electors from the State of Ohio; (2) Congress should engage in further hearings into the widespread irregularities reported in Ohio; we believe the problems are serious enough to warrant the appointment of a joint select Committee of the House and Senate to investigate and report back to the Members; and (3) Congress needs to enact election reform to restore our people’s trust in our democracy. These changes should include putting in place more specific federal protections for federal elections, particularly in the areas of audit capability for electronic voting machines and casting and counting of provisional ballots, as well as other needed changes to federal and state election laws.

With regards to our factual finding, in brief, we find that there were massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio. In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio.

First, in the run up to election day, the following actions by Mr. Blackwell, the Republican Party and election officials disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens, predominantly minority and Democratic voters:

• The misallocation of voting machines led to unprecedented long lines that disenfranchised scores, if not hundreds of thousands, of predominantly minority and Democratic voters. This was illustrated by the fact that the Washington Post reported that in Franklin County, “27 of the 30 wards with the most machines per registered voter showed majorities for Bush. At the other end of the spectrum, six of the seven wards with the fewest machines delivered large margins for Kerry.” Among other things, the conscious failure to provide sufficient voting machinery violates the Ohio Revised Code which requires the Boards of Elections to “provide adequate facilities at each polling place for conducting the election.”

• Mr. Blackwell’s decision to restrict provisional ballots resulted in the disenfranchisement of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of voters, again predominantly minority and Democratic voters. Mr. Blackwell’s decision departed from past Ohio law on provisional ballots, and there is no evidence that a broader construction would have led to any significant disruption at the polling places, and did not do so in other states.

• Mr. Blackwell’s widely reviled decision to reject voter registration applications based on paper weight may have resulted in thousands of new voters not being registered in time for the 2004 election.

• The Ohio Republican Party’s decision to engage in preelection “caging” tactics, selectively targeting 35,000 predominantly minority voters for intimidation had a negative impact on voter turnout. The Third Circuit found these activities to be illegal and in direct violation of consent decrees barring the Republican Party from targeting minority voters for poll challenges.

• The Ohio Republican Party’s decision to utilize thousands of partisan challengers concentrated in minority and Democratic areas likely disenfranchised tens of thousands of legal voters, who were not only intimidated, but became discouraged by the long lines. Shockingly, these disruptions were publicly predicted and acknowledged by Republican officials: Mark Weaver, a lawyer for the Ohio Republican Party, admitted the challenges “can’t help but create chaos, longer lines and frustration.”

• Mr. Blackwell’s decision to prevent voters who requested absentee ballots but did not receive them on a timely basis from being able to receive provisional ballots likely disenfranchised thousands, if not tens of thousands, of voters, particularly seniors. A federal court found Mr. Blackwell’s order to be illegal and in violation of HAVA.

Second, on election day, there were numerous unexplained anomalies and irregularities involving hundreds of thousands of votes that have yet to be accounted for:

• There were widespread instances of intimidation and misinformation in violation of the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, Equal Protection, Due Process and the Ohio right to vote. Mr. Blackwell’s apparent failure to institute a single investigation into these many serious allegations represents a violation of his statutory duty under Ohio law to investigate election irregularities.

• We learned of improper purging and other registration errors by election officials that likely disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters statewide. The Greater Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition projects that in Cuyahoga County alone over 10,000 Ohio citizens lost their right to vote as a result of official registration errors.

• There were 93,000 spoiled ballots where no vote was cast for president, the vast majority of which have yet to be inspected. The problem was particularly acute in two precincts in Montgomery County which had an undervote rate of over 25% each – accounting for nearly 6,000 voters who stood in line to vote, but purportedly declined to vote for president.

• There were numerous, significant unexplained irregularities in other counties throughout the state: (i) in Mahoning county at least 25 electronic machines transferred an unknown number of Kerry votes to the Bush column; (ii) Warren County locked out public observers from vote counting citing an FBI warning about a potential terrorist threat, yet the FBI states that it issued no such warning; (iii) the voting records of Perry county show significantly more votes than voters in some precincts, significantly less ballots than voters in other precincts, and voters casting more than one ballot; (iv) in Butler county a down ballot and underfunded Democratic State Supreme Court candidate implausibly received more votes than the best funded Democratic Presidential candidate in history; (v) in Cuyahoga county, poll worker error may have led to little known third-party candidates receiving twenty times more votes than such candidates had ever received in otherwise reliably Democratic leaning areas; (vi) in Miami county, voter turnout was an improbable and highly suspect 98.55 percent, and after 100 percent of the precincts were reported, an additional 19,000 extra votes were recorded for President Bush.

Third, in the post-election period we learned of numerous irregularities in tallying provisional ballots and conducting and completing the recount that disenfanchised thousands of voters and call the entire recount procedure into question (as of this date the recount is still not complete) :

• Mr. Blackwell’s failure to articulate clear and consistent standards for the counting of provisional ballots resulted in the loss of thousands of predominantly minority votes. In Cuyahoga County alone, the lack of guidance and the ultimate narrow and arbitrary review standards significantly contributed to the fact that 8,099 out of 24,472 provisional ballots were ruled invalid, the highest proportion in the state.

• Mr. Blackwell’s failure to issue specific standards for the recount contributed to a lack of uniformity in violation of both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clauses. We found innumerable irregularities in the recount in violation of Ohio law, including (i) counties which did not randomly select the precinct samples; (ii) counties which did not conduct a full hand court after the 3% hand and machine counts did not match; (iii) counties which allowed for irregular marking of ballots and failed to secure and store ballots and machinery; and (iv) counties which prevented witnesses for candidates from observing the various aspects of the recount.

• The voting computer company Triad has essentially admitted that it engaged in a course of behavior during the recount in numerous counties to provide “cheat sheets” to those counting the ballots. The cheat sheets informed election officials how many votes they should find for each candidate, and how many over and under votes they should calculate to match the machine count. In that way, they could avoid doing a full county-wide hand recount mandated by state law.

Gooo Conyers, he's the man!

All in one year

It is finally the end of 2004 and things look set for another strange year ahead of us. I have not had much time or impulse to write on the site for the last few days. I am doing some more web work for Andrew at Computer Zone Consulting. Andrew is himself Sri Lankan, and I saw him for the first time in a few weeks on Monday as the news rolled in from the tsunami disaster zone.

It's a hard thing to figure out the scale of this thing, to put it in a relative view that you can even comprehend. All those videos they've been playing on the cable news constantly—people washing and twirling away—is so incredibly unnerving and weird.

So anyhows, I'm trying not to get down about this whole mess, because the world is a messy place and we all end up muddling along no matter what. Of course, things are going weirdly in other places. By the end of January we'll have a sense of whether or not the situation in Iraq is going to screech off and out of control, or else fizzle down. Meanwhile in Washington they are getting hunkered down for another round of the Amazing Bush Administration and its Circus of Follies.

So it's a season of change for everyone now. I'm looking back at the things I have done and seen this year, and I think overall I did pretty well, but I still don't know what I ought to do when I graduate. It's kind of amazing that it's already time to get out of college. I have enjoyed the experience, but I do regret not studying abroad somewhere, as I think it would have given me a clean slate and fresh approach instead of those pointless months here... specifically the difficult experience of the Dupre Single days.

This year was a good one, though. I learned a lot of things about how the world worked, I talked with a lot of strange people. When I look back, I think that this was very much a breakthrough year in terms of just being willing to go out in the world and see what happens, for an often skittish person like myself.

January 2004 was pointless, so I guess we should skip to February. Back then, I advanced the story of the war, as I see it, in a worthwhile way, when I asked John Kerry during his visit to Macalester if the intelligence distortions (meaning the fake WMD and al Qaeda stories, mainly) should be considered a criminal matter akin to Iran-Contra. Kerry gave me one of those classic two-paragraph answers, but I would say, looking back almost a year on it, that he probably gave me the wrong answer.

My view of the matter is that Ahmed Chalabi and the neo-cons consciously knew they were providing bad information about Iraq, and hence deceived everyone in the government, and in particular our elected representatives in Congress. Kerry said that he had 'no evidence' that it was illegal, but he never really pursued the issue as a campaign matter, I suppose in particular because his campaign acted self-consciously 'tainted' by his position on the war early on.

But that's the key thing about it: Kerry could have weaseled out of responsibility for the war vote by saying that 'we wuz lied to!!' and provided the American public an entertaining tale about Chalabi and the rest of them, which would have drawn more attention to the malevolent incompetents running the Pentagon, forcing the frame of debate back to Bush's systematic deception and the war's managerial disasters. By the end of the campaign, Kerry was alleging that they were 'playing games' with intelligence, but that doesn't really mean anything to Joe Sixpack. They should have given us the spy story. It would have been cool.

Afterwards, in March I went to London for a week and stayed on the floor of Nick Petersen's flat. This came just a couple days after the Madrid bombings, and I thought that security would be escalated all over the place. It was my first trip to Europe and I made the most of it. I didn't obsess with seeing tourist attractions, and instead tried to wander all through town, a project assisted by Nick's encyclopedic knowledge of London architecture. On the first night, Victoria came back from her apparently horrible school in Wales. Vic's mom and siblings had also come to London for break, and they had a fabulous suite at the County Hall (Hotel?). The room had a little balcony high above the river Thames, and from there I could look right across the river at Parliament and the clock tower, as that huge Ferris wheel thing turned overhead. I saw the House of Commons meet, I went to the Prime Meridian and some museums...

Then I hopped the Eurostar (?) train to Paris, and wandered around there for a day, eating a Royale with Cheese on the banks of the Seine, and I even went in and saw the Mona Lisa and other places in the Louvre. Emi showed me all over town, and it was just a damn awesome place to be, like something out of a movie of someone else's life (this sense was helped along when I watched that recent Jack Nicholson movie, which ends in Paris, on the flight back to Chicago).

The summer was an interesting venture. I took an electronic art and journalism law classes at the University of Minnesota. Made some friends, picked up some useful information and put together a sweet DVD of many of my better photographs and videos.

After that stuff ended, I went to the site of the Republican National Convention with Dan Schned and Peter Gartrell. It was at times the most overwhelming experience I've ever had. When the police officer pulled his hat off to show us the photos of his friend who died at the WTC, or when the girl from Iowa showed us a video of anarchists setting the dragon on fire right next to her, or when we stood on a corner as AIPAC delegates to the convention streamed past, happily celebrating the renewal of the Likud-Republican political alliance that I so loathe. Or when we tracked down the bar where Dick Cheney was drinking, or when we chanted in the streets in an unlicensed march....

So, then, was it worth it? Was it worth the hassle, the arrests, the gasoline expended, just to go out there and watch people wave some signs around? You know, I think it was. I think that it helped me to ground some of the symbols that they manipulate in our minds—the WTC site, for one. These things become easier to understand once you see them, stripped of the media frames, the pretexts and moral arguments. Just to stand there and smoke a cigarette, then another cigarette, in the great important Negative Space in south Manhattan, helps to assert some control over the symbols they wield. It helped me settle the issue somehow.

After that we went down into the WTC subway stop. I walked over to one of the support beams and rubbed my finger on a bolt encrusted with sparkling reddish-brown dust. I rubbed the dust between my fingers and smelled it, a certain, dusty, burned smell, the torched synthetic substances from the offices, mixed with window and beam particles, had plunged down, and puffed into the tunnels under the city where no amount of cleaning could ever eradicate the traces.

I saw Bush himself a few days before the trip, as he made a campaign appearance in Hudson, Wisconsin. I saw him get off the bus and shake people's hands, and I could finally see what is so difficult to discern from home: that man is just the front face for a whole vast system of domination and control. It's a much larger problem than just that man. It's the administrative deception, the suppression of agencies like the EPA. We make the mistake of projecting perceived personality traits into understanding the political problems we have, without understanding how much of the issue is organizational.

School went pretty well this semester. I actually did something that I thought might not happen: I had a conversation with a really quite devious neoconservative that came to Macalester. For quite a while I wondered what might happened if I encountered Michael Ledeen at the Roundtable, but when I suddenly did, it was a surprise because he hadn't even given his speech yet. I ended up talking with the odd character over lunch, a bizarre twist. I gamely tried to suggest to him that the Iranians weren't determined to nuke Jerusalem the moment they developed the Bomb, but Ledeen would have none of it. A quixotic sort of notion to try convincing this guy that we shouldn't lose our cool about Iran, but of course he would never change his mind.

I learned a key thing about the people that run things from this encounter: They are very moody people. They are not well-adjusted low-key technocratic sorts of people. They are grim and weird. Ledeen himself admitted a manic depressive condition, and I think that whole kind of thing is what drives them to make their crazy decisions as much as any kind of Evil Agenda we might try to fathom from their actions.

And then the election. In some ways I barely want to hear about it, to hear about how such a vast section of the American public wholeheartedly embraced absurd lies about the situation, and how despite a sense that we were careening out of control, we were still destined to end up with these ridiculous cats for another four years.

I guess a sense of needing to refute that 'destiny' led me to place a shred of hope in the election-challenge folks, although of course it offends my sense of what it means to live in a democracy when I hear of a single vote damaged, lost, vanished or even potentially manipulated by our crappy system. At this point, we are hearing some interesting stuff out of Florida about Congressman Feeney and the usual Florida corruption, but it seems like we will never hear much of an articulation of how evil it was in Ohio when election supervisors implemented a strategy to direct voting machines away from heavily Democratic precincts into the suburbs. Is that really what we can accept as an element of a 'legitimate' election?

To round out this year end ramble, I would say that I am still much the same sort of person as when I began this year, but I think that I managed to advance my view of the world by talking straight to some of the important people, going into hazardous places like New York, and trying to express my own views of the world via this website, the campus paper, and just talking with people. I think I've tried to criss-cross some interesting slices of Americana this year and listen to what people have told me. As time has gone past, it seems more clear to me than ever that I still have a very long ways to go before things make sense to me.

The good thing is that right now I feel less like giving up than before. I don't have a sense that my energy is evaporating, but with the end of school coming around I have to try to pull together a new plan. Not easy for anyone... There is still a world of opportunities out there. I will have to spend a while poking around...

So here's to 2004. A year I got through by taking some chances and going new places. As for 2005, that's the year when things really better start clicking.

Crackin stories and I am tired of this semester

I'm feelin pretty bleary eyed. It's been a pretty weird semester, I think you'd all agree. Nonetheless I am not as angry as I might have expected to be... The feeling I get these days is "Oh, here we go for another round of the nonsense," but for some reason, at times I feel less terrified than usual. There is a large degree of uncertainty, as usual, but things could shake out in a good way, or else catastrophically fall apart.

I am still not done with Macalester this semester, and still have not had as much time as usual to follow things, but I will lay out some things about both the voting irregularity complex and the usual war madness. Then I am going to drink.

Then I will finish things tomorrow and Tuesday. Then it will be done. Don't expect more posts till late Tuesday at the earliest, more likely Wednesday.

It seems clear that the story about the Florida programmer Clint Curtis being asked by Republican Congressman Feeney actually has some legs, although it's hard to say how conspiratorial we should view this. It still sounds like a classic case of wildly unscrupulous bastards in Florida doing horrible things. Once again, Florida didn't let us down.

THE BRAD BLOG following the election mystery has returned to its former web address, now that they have gotten a better server setup. Brad Friedman just posted a whole batch of stuff about this guy Curtis, and the coverage he has gotten. Friedman says that a major news network is snooping around the story, and there was a good story in a local Florida paper (brad's comment) as well. The Raw Story is also all over some stuff in Ohio, including the Kerry campaign, who have filed a lawsuit alleging vote tampering in an Ohio county. Also some Diebold people were recently 'calibrating' a machine before the incremental recounts were to be held in Ohio, a county official testified.

From six days ago, Bob Fitrakis on what the special hearings in Ohio... heard. Brad Blog on candidate David Cobb's Judiciary Committee Testimony which was apparently pretty dramatic. WashingtonPost.com: Several Factors Contributed to 'Lost' Voters in Ohio. Thanks, guys. The Official Kerry-Edwards Position on How to Handle the Ohio Recount, Sent to the Individual Boards of Election in the State.

The NY Times reports on it, hurray: Lawmaker Seeks Inquiry Into Ohio Vote."See also the exciting "Ohio presidential vote challenged" The AP report which first cited "dissident groups" (via MSNBC). Sweet.

So where's the big picture? I don't really know, it seems like the electoral manipulation that could have very well occurred has been legitimized by the media pretty thoroughly now, yet finally we're getting some stories that are cracking the surface.

But then, back to the regularly scheduled program, i.e. the circus of idiocy known as 'the Beltway.' One thing we have working is the purge throughout the government, which might get rid of the more incompetent neo-cons, but also will likely gut the CIA and other pockets of sane people. Either way, people are getting fired, so we will get more dirt about the internal workings of the place, and some of the really bad ones might get fired.

There is a fairly good chance that things might straighten out on the international stage before February or March. If the Iraqi elections get some kind of assembly going, they aren't all killed, and the U.S. gets the hell out of the Sunni areas, then things might simmer down before the emerging civil war cracks all the way open.

Meanwhile the Israelis see an opportunity to lock in their stolen territory right now, but they also seem reluctant to attack militarily until things shake out with Arafat's successor and the Palestinian Authority. I haven't written too much about this because it is damn hard to tell where things are shifting, and everyone is in 'wait and see' mode.

I have noticed there is a major Public Relations offensive gearing up against Syria now via that instrument of doom, the U.S. cable TV network. Besides allegations on CNN about Syrians doing things in a segment about "Inside the Insurgency," we have Dore Gold. Former Israeli ambassador to the UN Mr. Gold was on the Daily Show pimping his book "Tower of Babble," critical of the United Nations. He kept arguing that the organization has a lack of moral standards etc. etc.

Jon Stewart did his best under the circumstances (Of course, Gold's statement is ironic because of the sheer number of times that his country has been singled out by the UN, and all those times that the United States has blocked Security Council resolutions against them).

Anyhow Gold insinuated that Syria was orchestrating the insurgency and Baathists were running stuff from there... He said this retroactively proved they could not be trusted to be on the UN Security Council and uphold world peace etc. His rhetorical strategy was really good here and he managed to reverse the times of cause and effect.

On the one hand, I think it is quite probable that people and arms are going from Syria to Iraq. There are plenty of Sunni tribes that span the Levant region into Syria, and these are the people that the U.S. has decided are Morally Incorrect Terrorists to Wipe Out from the Sunni Triangle.

I think it is worth noting that the Syrians used their time at the Security Council to attempt to prevent the invasion of Iraq, even while they trafficked arms up to the last minute into Iraq. That would qualify them as fairly interested in world peace, at least in this instance. As for terrorism, after 9/11 the Syrians have supplied the CIA with crucial intelligence against Al-Qaeda, which has directly saved us from terrorist attacks. We didn't lose that intel source until the Bush folks, cajoled by the neo-con crew of the Administration (probably on the basis of false intel, as usual) turned against Syria.

I've long expected a big anti-Syria thing to happen, and it seems like the time is probably at hand. The Syrian ruling clique has long opposed political groups like the Muslim Brotherhood that support elements of Al-Qaeda's ideology. If Prez. Assad gets taken out then then the fundamentalist folks will be in a very strong position. If the U.S. keeps blowing away their cousins, then the war will spread.

One tiny thing... an old BradBlog post about the weirdness of Warren County, which had the mysterious Nov. 2 lockdown and a really really high turnout for Bush. Warren County, OH anomalous count. I'll add this to the Wiki, and the other stuff, once I finish my papers.

Where am I

Hey all,

Sorry I have not posted jack in the last few days. AS I said before, it is finals time and I have been a most harried individual lately. Fortunately, the rest of my due dates are after the weekend so I actually have some breathing space now. At the moment, I'm at work but I really need to go to lunch, so I can't really say much.

However I will say that those of us who have qualms about the election process have been labelled 'dissidents' by the Associated Press. I'm down with that...

Apparently a county elections official in Ohio just testified that they saw someone from the "Triad" voting machine company strip down a machine to its parts and "adjust" it just prior to the Ohio recount. There has been a lot of other stuff going on with Rep. Conyers and the Dems snooping around. Cheers to them, I say. Also there were big articles in the Washington Post and NY Times about what the hell happened in Ohio today, which makes me happy.

I don't know but it seems like the story might finally be cracking.... a day after the bastards certified the Electoral College. Blach....

In any case, refer to http://bradblogtoo.blogspot.com for the latest, he's doin a damn fine job.

Murder at Florida motel, an Iran-Contra arms merchant, illegal aliens at NASA, a prototype vote rigging machine and other Exciting Tales

Its the middle of finals time, and I was delayed in putting this post together for the better part of the week. Here it is, hodgepodgy and overgrown with intrigue...

Now, kiddos, it's back to tinfoil hat land for another installment of Tracking Election Irregularities, and we've got some great tales tonight. Sit back and hear of the prototype vote hacking machine that a Florida congressman allegedly ordered built, and hear more about offshore banking—and how the CIA may be so angry about Bush's purges that they're revealing some of the parapolitical financial arrangements used to finance their schemes.

(A quick note: breaking the programmer story caused the BradBlog site to get overwhelmed with internet traffic, so it got bumped over to BradBlogtoo.blogspot.com for now. more below...)

Do not assume these stories are credible. First, take them as examples of the kinds of ways the world might work. Then look at it as audacious journalism. Then, and only then, should you start on the what-ifs. and there are a lot of what-ifs tonight. Smoke the pipe of conspiracy, and get high on its strands of intrigue... Damn it, I'm feeling pretentious tonight.

First item for the hodgepodge: A contributing writer, Larisa Alexandrovna, at a site called RAW STORY (reposted by BlueLemur) found a couple news story references to 21 voting machines in good old Broward County, Florida getting rolled out of polling sites—after several days of voting—and possibly back to some local voting administration center. Apparently these machines may have been recalled because they showed the wrong votes for buttons touched. (story via DailyKos diary)

The RAW STORY writer's catch is that there ought to be some kind of chain of custody for these machines, and we ought to be able to find out what their serial numbers were, if they did exist. How many votes might be recovered from such machines? Were they wildly statistically skewed for Bush, as many other errors have been?

Who knows? Either way, she tried to pester the AP wire journalist that wrote the original story, who said they were "moving on." The Miami Herald doesn't seem to care much either. In the end, she had to post this story, incomplete, another frustrated path on the quest to find out what happened within the Black Boxes.

“Twenty-one touch-screen voting machines in Broward County were replaced because of technical problems, said Gisela Salas, the county’s deputy supervisor of elections. At least one of the machines had shown votes cast for the wrong candidates.”

This striking sentence in the fourteenth paragraph of a Nov. 4 AP wire story was merely the accidental starting point for RAW STORY research into voting irregularities in Broward County, Florida.

I came across Ms. Salas’ statement by sheer accident while researching another story. Twenty-one voting machines being removed and replaced on Election Day would seem to merit more than a four sentence description. I wondered as to the process by which these machines were taken and replaced. Who supervised this process?

This brief mention in the AP was all I could immediately find. Documented in an article entitled “State lauds performance of touch-screen machines; critics uncertain,” other voting irregularities were briefly mentioned with the same terse detail. These references are delivered as a matter of fact, as if most of us should know that large-scale voting glitches occur and are corrected instantaneously.

How then are we to correct these issues for future elections? I wondered.

After some thought, I contacted an Associated Press editor not involved with the Nov. 4 article, who quickly dismissed me as “paranoid,” though I neither discussed the outcome of the election or commented on anything other than the 21 machines allegedly removed in Broward County.

NOW let's throw in some more colorful tales about these very sorts of tech specialists. This story is caroming around the Internet because, well, it's a darn good one. If, hypothetically, you were spoofing an election, you would need to pay off a lot of technical specialists, and for that matter, you would need source code designed to be compiled into voting machines that could manipulate the numbers. (Daily Kos :: Sworn affadavit: vote-rigging prototype developed for FLA congressman)

Fortunately, some programmer dude has surfaced claiming that a Florida Republican congressman paid him to make this code back in 2000, and now he's pissed about it. This story stretches off into all kinds of bizarre directions. The programmer has a website, JustAFlyOnTheWall.com.

Another election held and another election stolen. In 2000 Bush stole the election by restricting the ability to vote by those people most likely to vote against him. The abuses were wide spread and the Democrats and other groups that believe in each individuals right to vote put together an impressive attempt to make sure that every individual that wanted to vote would not be turned away. Everywhere you went there was booths where new voters could register. Celebrities in commercials were urging voters to get out and vote. Poll watchers were placed in polling stations across the country to guarantee that every voter would not be turned away on any technicality.

What these well meaning groups failed to account for was that they were defending the 2000 election fixing plan and not taking into account that this election would be decided not by voters but by the rise of technology. Every one might be allowed to vote but their vote, and your vote made no difference at all. The programmers had already decided who would win and by how much.

Prior to this election I personally sent out information to the media which should have been provided to the electorate. It was not. The biggest turnout in history had no chance to win this election or any other unless the programmers of the voting machine allowed it. I believe they will allow it less and less as the machines control the elections and the Republicans control the machines.

This is not speculation. It is not a rant designed to make the losers feel better. I speak from first hand information and unless people stand up and act, democracy in this country is ended.

While employed at Wong Enterprises, Congressman Feeney had requested if Wong could write a voting program that could alter the vote and be undetectable. As the technology advisor, I explained that as long as the source code was provided and complied under supervision, code which altered the vote and was undetectable could not be built. Another problem would be that no one would trust a program that provided for no paper trail to substantiate its accuracy. When the vote was flipped the paper trail could easily detect the fraud.

This request was early in my exposure to Congressman Feeney, so I was not familiar with what a total piece of crap he truly was. My assumption was that he was worried that the other side (the Democrats) would introduce voting machines which could manipulate the vote. Mrs. Wong volunteered that we (meaning me) could put together a quick prototype that he could view and show others.

I have recreated that prototype and posted it at http://www.justaflyonthewall.com/votefraudprogram.htm. It is essentially the same code that I built for the vote fraud demo for Congressman Feeney. You will notice that by clicking on the correct hidden spots on the screen, the vote will flip so that the Republican candidate will receive fifty one percent of the vote. The hot spots make it possible to flip the vote as often as necessary yet it will never fire accidentally so as to avoid detection. My prototype was actually very simplistic. The actual sequence to flip the vote could be as complex as the programmer wished or even to operate automatically. In cases when the Republican is already leading, the vote is left as is. I built the program to demonstrate that with proper supervision that the election machines would be safe. The code would not be able to be hidden.

The next day I complete the prototype and presented it to Mrs. Wong. I stressed how the tampering could be detected. She quickly set me straight as the to true intention. Her exact words were "If we can’t hide the manipulation, we won’t get the contract the program is needed to control the south Florida vote." Another confirmation of why I needed to get a different job. I would not build something that would defraud every voter in this country. Even better, I knew that as long as the election supervisors used proper computer procedures, no one else would or could either.

What I did not anticipate was that this country would allow the placement of voting machines where the source code was not provided. The programs were pre-compiled (you have no idea what is in them or what hidden triggers exist), and where no paper trail would be required to check their accuracy. Any moron could build a voting program that could flip the vote under those circumstances and no amount of testing could discover the deception.

The plausibility of the idea of this vote hacking software has been basically confirmed.

There are two main branches to the story. BradBlog has a more circumscribed look at it, having interviewed the dude in question a couple times, and offering a PDF version of his sworn affadavit that Congressman Feeley paid him to write the software.

Then, on the other hand, mysterious investigator Wayne Madsen writing on OnlineJournal.com has asserted that this is just an element of a complex scheme involving offshore banks tied to Iran-Contra schemer and Richard Perle's dinner friend (as Sy Hersh reported) Adnan Khashoggi. Madsen's exciting claim is that the CIA is really pissed off that the Bushites are trying to purge their agency, so CIA partisans have deliberately chosen to reveal part of their sketchy shadow finance network in an effort to smoke the Bushes. And they're showing this network to.... taa-daa, Wayne Madsen.

In other words, let me restate. I am not asserting that the above two paragraphs are true. In fact, Madsen's writings, the last round which I posted earlier, seem to fit like puzzle pieces into a classic paranoid conspiracy tale, like an Iran-Contra projected forward into our present context. It all sounds a little too slick to me so far. Nevertheless, I always enjoy a good baroque conspiracy yarn, and this one doesn't disappoint.

The manipulation of computer voting machines in the recent presidential election and the funding of programmers who were involved in the operation are tied to an intricate web of shady off-shore financial trusts and companies, shady espionage operatives, Republican Party politicians close to the Bush family, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) contract vehicles.

An exhaustive investigation has turned up a link between current Florida Republican Representative Tom Feeney, a customized Windows-based program to suppress Democratic votes on touch screen voting machines, a Florida computer services company with whom Feeney worked as a general counsel and registered lobbyist while he was Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, and top level officials of the Bush administration.

According to a notarized affidavit signed by Clint Curtis, while he was employed by the NASA Kennedy Space Center contractor, Yang Enterprises, Inc., during 2000, Feeney solicited him to write a program to "control the vote." At the time, Curtis was of the opinion that the program was to be used for preventing fraud in the in the 2002 election in Palm Beach County, Florida. His mind was changed, however, when the true intentions of Feeney became clear: the computer program was going to be used to suppress the Democratic vote in counties with large Democratic registrations.

According to Curtis, Feeney and other top brass at Yang Enterprises, a company located in a three-story building in Oviedo, Florida, wanted the prototype written in Visual Basic 5 (VB.5) in Microsoft Windows and the end-product designed to be portable across different Unix-based vote tabulation systems and to be "undetectable" to voters and election supervisors.

Yang, an engineering and computer services company subcontracted to NASA prime contractors like Lockheed Martin, was founded in 1986 by Dr. Tyng-Lin (Tim) Yang. Granted minority-owned "Section 8A" and woman-owned preferential status by the U.S. government, Yang's clients also include the Florida Department of Transportation (DOT). Yang's President, Li-Woan (Lee) Yang, is Tim Yang's wife. Feeney was the registered agent for another Yang company, Y & H Greens, Inc., a company that was dissolved in 1988 and operated from the Yangs' residence on Merritt Island. The Yangs also serve as co-trustees for an entity called Yang of Merritt Island, Ltd., founded on January 31, 2000, and also run from their residence.

In the autumn of 1999, Curtis, who served as a sort of technology adviser for Yang, first became aware of Feeney's interest in election rigging. Curtis said at one meeting, Feeney "bragged that he could reduce the minority vote and deliver the election to 'George.'" At the same meeting, according to Curtis, Feeney said he had "implemented a list that would eliminate thousands of voters that would vote for Democratic candidates" and that "a proper placement of police patrols could further reduce the black vote by as much as 25 percent."

CANNONFIRE: Exposed: Funding vote fraud -- a "five star" investigation Digests the Wayne Madsen story. Don't know who Cannonfire is, but they are following along further.

OffshoreBusiness.com has got interesting stuff on the shadow financing.

More from Bob Fitrakis in Ohio. Suppression: STEALING VOTES IN OHIO URBAN AREAS. what happened in Columbus, Ohio?

Minor details for the obsessed Data tables from Ohio precincts, reflecting on the changes in registered voters etc.RICHARD HAYES PHILLIPS : uncounted votes. comment from John Allen paulos. Also we got Warren County registration stuff here as well. Onward....

Special Congressional hearing on Ohio voting irregularities... starting now

The tale of voting irregularities on Nov. 2nd has entered the realm of official record in Washington, as Congressman Conyers has called a hearing this morning, which I am listening to (unreliably) via C-SPAN online.

To watch the hearings unfold right now, check C-SPAN.org. Right now, they are talking about all kinds of things, including overwhelming concentrations of spoiled ballots in Democratic precincts. Jesse Jackson Jr. just came up. This is good stuff and it makes me feel better already! This should get a lot of media attention, thank God!!!

In the wake of a Shameless Plug

Well, today (if luck holds) the Mac Weekly comes out and I have a nice column, "Cracking the Black Box Election," which describes some of the voting irregularities that the mainstream media generally refuses to talk about. In a move that has already sparked widespread rumors that I'm a self-aggrandizing megalomaniac, I have a reference to this site in the piece. For that, all I can say is that I'm a shameless Internet whore living in the age of self-made celebrity.

After press time, I discovered I made a couple mistakes in the column which I should correct here. In both cases, I understated the extent of examples of voting problems. First, I said that Volusia County double-counted hundreds of ballots in the 2000 election. In fact, they counted an extra 4000 votes fot Bush, and a Diebold optical scanner added a negative 16,000 votes for Gore... that is, subtracted about 30 times Bush's margin of victory, before a staffer caught the mistake. Another low-ball mistake on my part was saying that one machine in Broward County started counting a ballot initiative backwards at 32,767. In fact, a whole set of machines started counting backwards. I knew these things before I wrote the piece, but I slipped up and I'm sorry.

I was under a lot of time pressure when writing the piece, and quite hungry as well. My biggest complaint about the Mac Weekly this semester has been the irregular distribution of pizza, and I must call for equality and more grease from week to week as a solution.

Anyhow, I need to give some links. This week, Bev Harris at Black Box Voting stormed a farewell party for a Palm Beach County elections director, serving her with a lawsuit. Provisional ballot counting in Cuyahoga County, Ohio provided Kerry with 9,242 more votes, and there has been some legal wrangling about the qualification of these votes.

There will be hearings starting next Wednesday in Congress about voting irregularities, a source has told Brad Blog. I highly recommend checking out Bob Fitrakis' work in the Columbia Free Press (OH), who has been investigating the strange tales of Nov. 2. A public hearing he held provided the crazy quote about electronic votes jumping from Kerry to Bush that I started my piece with. Read this piece for stunning reports of administrative incompetence and very suspicious poll behavior from Fitrakis.

This PDF file sent as a complaint to Ohio's insanely partisan Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell (via Bradblog) has all kinds of interesting stuff in it, including reports of odd irregularities, conservative judicial candidates awash in money, and the mysterious Warren County lockdown.

Well, sadly that's all I've got time for before lunch & class. Keep on rockin' in the free world.

More voting irregularities and a tale of Saudis and offshore banks cheating the election

I started a new HongPong.com topic, "tracking election irregularities" to hold news about irregularities, news of failures and groundless Rumours Of Foul Play.

I am uncertain, in fact highly doubtful, about all the following links. Nonetheless they provoke further questions that I can't answer right now. And there is some cool bank fraud conspiracy stuff in there. First, a couple DailyKos diary entries:
Daily Kos :: Manipulating the media -- an experiment in cajoling CNN to cover the voting challenge stories more closely by signing up for CNN email alerts. Seems like a wack idea. Ignoring Voter Suppression is Betraying Black Voters.

At least CNN is printing something. CNN.com - Suit seeks new look at rejected Ohio ballots - Nov 26, 2004

I am not sure what the deal is with this guy. Ohio hearings show massive GOP vote manipulation, but where the hell are the Democrats & John Kerry? - Harvey Wasserman

A strange tale from OnlineJournal.com. It reads a little bit too much like the "classic spy caper" inspired by Iran-Contra, complete with offshore bank accounts and the Department of Homeland Security in the mix. Basically this asserts that a bunch of technicians went in and added electronic votes in Ohio under the guise of federal agents.

I have pondered the possibility that the Department of Homeland Security might have some inbuilt tendency to defend the Bush government by prolonging its political existence, much as the CIA is a self-perpetuating bureaucracy accountable to no one. This is really just a fart of a conspiracy theory... nonetheless now the internet has a story where DHS and FBI perpetuate the Bush administration. A fine tale...

I will add that I have my doubts about what the hell OnlineJournal.com is. For example take this cheesy piece about fascism in America.

"More on the [alleged] buying of electoral fraud by the Bush campaign":

November 26, 2004—Additional information on the buying of vote riggers with Saudi and former Enron funds has been obtained. The epicenter for the vote rigging operation is Dallas, Texas, and the operation may involve retired FBI agents who used a well-established "good ole boy" network to arrange for access to polling precincts by electronic voting machine technicians who took advantage of various November 2 security "lockdowns" to illegally alter the tabulation of votes in favor of Bush. Some of the retired agents may have used courtesy credentials issued upon retirement to fool unsuspecting polling place workers.

The cost of the operation was estimated at $29 million with the money sent via a circuitous network of offshore trust companies and shell activities. This reporter has obtained a copy of a bank check for $29,600,000 that was allegedly sent to cover the cost of the Texas-based vote rigging operation. The check is dated October 22, 2004, and was made payable to "Five Star Investment Ltd.," a trust said to have long connections to Saudi-funded operations in Texas and around the world. The payer is identified as "Equity Financial Trust," a Houston-based "brass plate" and post office box entity tied to offshore Cook Islands "folding tent" accounts used to hide away profits amassed by the former Enron as well as Saudi financiers.

On October 6, 2004, some two weeks before Equity Financial Trust transferred the money to Five Star Investment Ltd., the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions for Canada listed Equity Financial Trust, along with Bankers Financial and Security Trust, Falcon Financial and Trust, and Unity Virtual Trust Group as "unauthorized financial institutions." In fact, the check for $29.6 million, which is marked "Not to exceed fifty million dollars," is drawn on the Laurentian Bank of Canada's Toronto branch. Its serial number is 317675450 3 and the bank number is 23-97/1020. The bank instrument is issued by Integrated Payment Systems, Inc. of Englewood, Colorado, and Bank One, NA, Denver, Colorado.

It is noteworthy that a number of companies operated by past Bush campaign contributor Pierre Falcone, under criminal investigation in France for weapons smuggling in Angola, are called "Falcon." Several non-governmental organizations, including Global Witness, have tied Falcone to questionable Halliburton activities when Vice President Dick Cheney headed the firm. Some of the vote riggers who were guaranteed a minimum payment for their services have started talking about the operation because they did not receive the money they were promised.

The same reporter previously published "Saudis, Enron money helped pay for US rigged election." Again, take it with that grain of salt, but there's nothing like a fun banking conspiracy!

November 25, 2004—According to informed sources in Washington and Houston, the Bush campaign spent some $29 million to pay polling place operatives around the country to rig the election for Bush. The operatives were posing as Homeland Security and FBI agents but were actually technicians familiar with Diebold, Sequoia, ES&S, Triad, Unilect, and Danaher Controls voting machines. These technicians reportedly hacked the systems to skew the results in favor of Bush.

The leak about the money and the rigged election apparently came from technicians who were promised to be paid a certain amount for their work but the Bush campaign interlocutors reneged and some of the technicians are revealing the nature of the vote rigging program.

There have been media reports from around the country concerning the locking down of precincts while votes were being tallied. In one unprecedented action in Warren County, Ohio, election officials locked down the facility where votes were being counted. The officials said this was in response to a Level 10 high-threat terrorist warning being issued by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI for Warren County. George Bush won 72 percent of the vote in Warren County, much larger than his percentage of victory statewide.

The money to rig the election in favor of Bush reportedly came from an entity called Five Star Trust, largely based in Houston but a worldwide entity that is directly tied to the Saudi Royal Family. Five Star Trust was termed "a well-protected vehicle" that has been used to support both Bush and Osama bin Laden in the US and around the world.

Other money used to fund the election rigging was from siphoned Enron money stored away in accounts in the Cook Islands, which was once the base of one of the more questionable and Saudi-linked BCCI subsidiaries. Cook Islands banks also handled some of the weapons smuggling financing of the Iran-Contra scandal. A former Justice Department attorney who helped prosecute the BCCI case said the use of the Cook Islands by the Bush reelection team indicates they wanted the bank arrangements to be a "quick folding tent" operation that would cease to exist when the election was over. He said the Cook Islands was notorious for not requiring any documentation for such operations.
[....]
The sale of nuclear material to Iraq was funded through Saudi operations in Houston, including those associated with George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, James R. Bath, and Saudis Abdullah Taha Baksh, and Kamal Adham, as well as Lebanese businessman Ghaith Pharaon (who was also involved in the collapse of Miami's CenTrust S&L, a bank that had ties to Jeb Bush). This gang, along with Salem Bin Laden, the older brother of Osama, funneled over $1 million into failed Bush ventures, including Arbusto, Spectrum 7, and Harken Energy. Some of the Saudi money also financed Enron Oil and Gas Resources (later EOG Resources) in the Belspec Fusselman Field in Midland, Texas, a deal in which George W. Bush had a financial stake. In fact, Saudi planes in the 1980s landed in Houston with mountains of cash used to buy nuclear material for Saddam to possibly use against the Iranians. The money was laundered through Houston's Main Bank, a bank close to the Bush family. Skyway Aircraft of Houston, owned by Bath, was invested in by Abu Dhabi's ruler (the main owner of BCCI) and whose parent company in the Cayman Islands was used by Ollie North to collect foreign money for his Iran-contra enterprise.

Well then, if they say so! :-P

Berkeley analysis finds 100,000+ extra electronic votes for Bush likely

Third parties are swinging into action to get recounts going in Ohio. The Greens & Libertarians have raised a ton of money to do it, and now they're rolling...

Blue Lemur carries a story from the University of California Berkeley, where researchers have found that Bush was likely awarded an extra 130,000 to 260,000 votes via the electronic voting systems there, including an impressive 72,000 in Broward County alone.

The survey, which is the most comprehensive and detailed analysis of Florida’s 2004 election results to date, found that compared to counties with paper ballots, counties with electronic voting machines were significantly more likely to show gains for Bush between 2000 and 2004.
Unlike other analyses, this survey accounted for and ruled out other demographic factors which have clouded the results of other studies, such as the “dixiecrat” phenomenon, where Democratic counties have supported Republican nominees in the past.
“For the sake of all future elections involving electronic voting - someone must investigate and explain the statistical anomalies in Florida,” Professor Hout remarked in a statement to RAW STORY . “We’re calling on voting officials in Florida to take action.”
Among the factors weighted in the study were the Hispanic/Latino population, median income, change in voter turnout between 2000 and 2004 and support for Senator Bob Dole in the 1996 election.
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 predicted a 28,000 vote decrease in President Bush’s support in Broward County, yet machines tallied an increase of 51,000 votes – a net gain of 81,000.
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.
“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,” Hout added. “The study shows that a county’s use of electronic voting resulted in a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush.
The odds of this occurring by chance?
“Less than once in a thousand,” he said.
In the reported results, Bush led Senator John Kerry in Florida by 377,216 votes.

BradBlog is a leading spot to follow reports of election irregularities, Brad's got plenty: Indiana, ES&S and One Ungodly Mess!, plus 2600 ballots were double-counted in Sandusky County, Ohio (lucky hacker number, eh?).

Stunning reports of illegally installed software from April of 2004 add to already-horrific mess!
Still waiting for the "Liberal" Media to Show Up!
A series of investigative stories (here, here, and here) by WISHTV.com in Indianapolis from April of this year, have just come to my attention (sent by several different readers).
They concern yet more troubling reports about the Election Systems & Software (ES&S) company, who's software and tabulating machines, along with Diebold's, are responsible for tabulating about 80% of the votes in America. Both companies were founded by the same man, who just happens, along with the rest of their Boards of Directors to be big donor/supporters of the Republican Party.
The series of reports from WISHTV earlier this year tell of ES&S employees surreptitiously installing illegal, uncertified software, into the voting and tabulating machines in Marion County, Indiana. They then ordered their regional ES&S project manager to lie about it to county officials. She refused. As had her husband in a previous ES&S incident, where he was also a project manager, in a different Indiana county. He was fired for his refusal.
In one of the reports, the Marion County Clerk Doris Anne Sadler is quoted as saying that ES&S "has willfully and purposely deceived me and the Marion County election board...[W]ith complete disregard for business ethics and with intent to deceive, [ES&S] deliberately worked to keep their actions from the Marion County election board and its employees."
The county's election board vice chair added, "Throughout the process, there have been missteps and outright fabrications and mistruths given to us by the vendor implementing the election process."
The assiduous BRAD BLOG readers will note that ES&S has popped up time and time again in so many of these stories of "irregularities" related to electronic voting and tabulating machines. Amongst the many troubling incidents so far reported here:
- ES&S Employee found on Auglaize County, OH Computer! Just weeks before election! County had 4th highest Bush vote percentage in the state!
- 10,000 Extra Votes Added in Nebraska County! Another ES&S computer "failure".
- 50,000 Votes LOST in LaPorte County, IN County! Yet another ES&S computer "failure". This one in a heavily Democratic county.
Additionally, DailyKos reported ... on yet another Indiana county where the U.S. Congressional results are now in doubt and a recount may be coming shortly due to revelations from nearby Franklin County where a recount was already held after it was discovered that the optical-scan tabulating machine was counting straight Democratic ticket votes as Libertarian votes!

Then there is the weird story of Jeff Fisher, a Democratic candidate who claims straight up vote fraud. BradBlog followed up on this guy, who seems like he might be crazy. Thom Hartmann, who wrote a piece that raised Fisher's credibility perhaps more than he deserved, has sort of retracted what he wrote earlier. There is a lot of other interesting info in this one... A couple older pieces claiming voter suppression from Bob Fitrakis, "None dare call it voter suppression and fraud" and "And so the sorting and discarding of Kerry votes begins."

Voting anomalies all over: Indiana 9th district contested; Black Box Voting finds trashed poll tapes in Volusia Cty, FL; 268 absentee ballots found in box

DemocraticUnderground.com: After a day of furious auditing Bev, Andy and Kathleen of Black Box Voting have found discrepant results in Volusia county. At this time we have had an attorny LOCK DOWN all poll tapes, memory cartridges and the GEMS central tabulator. The discrepant results were concentrated in mainly minority areas. We are currently going through trash obtained early this morning by Bev and Kathleen Wynne via a FOIA request. At one point they were threatened with arrest but avoided it narrowly (Bev will do a full report later). Black Box Voting will be issuing a press release later today. This is it folks...the first crack in Florida.

Andy

And they even got VoterGate.tv to record the confrontation. Check out VoterGate's 30 minute pre-election video about Black Box Voting and their fight for the integrity of voting systems. Also you'll see a Diebold PR flack squirming when questioned about their CEO's notorious boast that "We'll deliver Ohio's electoral votes." They even go dumpster diving at Diebold and find a memo where some county refuses to pay for electronic machines that won't upload votes correctly. The crew that made this video is following Bev Harris around Florida now and finding trouble with county election officials all over the place.

More about Bev Harris' & co. sudden discoveries in Volusia County below.

Recounts are getting underway all over the place now, but here's a few stories that should inspire confidence in all believers in Democracy.

We have the final 4 PM exit polls from Nov. 2 now, and they show distinct 'red shifts' in many places. That is, the exit polls showed Kerry quite a few points higher all over the place. North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida all had major shifts. Via DailyKos diary.

Indiana Democrats are demanding a recount in their 9th district. Via DailyKos, a report from Roll Call:

The Indiana Democratic Party on Friday requested a recount of votes cast in the 9th district, where Rep. Baron Hill (D-Ind.) was narrowly defeated by Republican Mike Sodrel on Nov. 2.

The recount request was made after an election-equipment malfunction was discovered in Franklin County, which is not in the 9th district.

On Nov. 3, Hill conceded defeat to Sodrel, a trucking company owner, and the most recent vote tally available from the Indiana secretary of state's office showed Hill trailing by 1,485 votes. As of midday Friday, Sodrel had 142,257 votes to Hill's 140,772.

An emergency meeting of the state's recount commission was held Friday afternoon and the machines, ballots and all other material relating to the election were ordered impounded. The commission will meet again on Tuesday to decide the next course of action and to hear cross petitions from Republicans.

"They want to hear from the other side as well," Kate Shepherd, a spokeswoman for the Indiana secretary of state's office, said Friday.

Last week, Rock Island, Ill.-based election equipment vendor Fidlar Election Co. acknowledged that some of its vote-scanning machines counted straight Democratic ticket votes as Libertarian votes.

There is some really weird stuff happening in Florida. First the smaller story:

The unmarked brown box sat unnoticed in the Pinellas Supervisor of Elections office until Monday, two weeks after the election, when an employee cleaning a desk stumbled upon it (via DKos).

Inside were 268 uncounted absentee ballots.
[.....]
Five days ago, Clark sent the state the county's final results for the Nov. 2 election. But her office had failed to perform a standard check to ensure that all ballots had been accounted for.

Clark assumed her staff had performed the check, but they had not.

Now she will ask the state for permission to change Pinellas' official results. The canvassing board will count the missing ballots Thursday.

Although it is numerically possible, officials say the missing ballots probably won't change any results. Only a few races were decided by less than 268 votes - including the presidential contest.

George W. Bush won the presidential race in Pinellas by just 226 votes. While Bush's margin in Pinellas could change, his statewide victory won't.

A city commission seat in South Pasadena and a referendum in Indian Rocks Beach were also decided by fewer than 268 votes.

"If you found a couple hundred thousand votes in Ohio, that might be exciting," said Paul Bedinghaus, chairman of the Pinellas Republican Party. "I expect that human error will continue to occur as long as human beings are involved."

This is the third time since Clark became election supervisor in 2000 that her office has had problems handling ballots.

In the presidential race in 2000, the office neglected to count 1,400 ballots - and counted more than 900 ballots twice. In 2001, her office misplaced six absentee ballots in a Tarpon Springs city election.

And what was the margin of victory in 2000??!!?!?! Also this story quite accurately makes the point that these voting discrepancies affect other races, not just the presidential. So this one was probably just a little bureaucratic incompetence rather than malicious intent.

There's a sweet writeup, "HackTheVote FAQ" by Republican 'white hat' hacker (i.e. 'legit' tech security professional) Chuck Herrin, who was sickened by all the flaws in Diebold's systems, and he describes why one might go about hacking the central tabulator systems. This guy's motives are a perfect example of why I think following this story is important, not because I think that "Kerry Really Won" but because it shows that all sorts of people care deeply about the integrity of our system, and the flaws profoundly disturb them:

I feel that it is unlikely that these individual touch screen machines would be targeted. At greater risk than the individual touch screens are the Central Voting Tabulation computers, which compile the results from many other systems, such as touch screens and optically scanned cards. From a hacker’s standpoint, there are a couple of reasons why these central computers are better targets:

a. It is extremely labor intensive to compromise a large number of systems, and the chance of failure or being detected increases every time an attack is attempted. Also, the controversy surrounding the touch screen terminals ensures that their results will be closely watched, and this theory has been born out in recent days.

b. If one were to compromise the individual terminals, they would only be able to influence a few hundred to maybe a couple of thousand votes. These factors create a very poor risk/reward ratio, which is a key factor in determining which systems it makes sense to attack.

c. On the other hand, the Central Vote Tabulation systems are a very inviting target – by simply compromising one Windows desktop, you could potentially influence tens or hundreds of thousands of votes, with only one attack to execute and only one attack to erase your tracks after. This makes for an extremely attractive target, particularly when one realizes that by compromising these machines you can affect the votes that people cast not only by the new touch screen systems, but also voters using traditional methods, such as optical scanning systems since the tallies from all of these systems are brought together for Centralized Tabulation. This further helps an attacker stay under the radar and avoid detection, since scrutiny will not be as focused on the older systems, even though the vote data is still very much at risk since it is all brought together at a few critical points. This also has been born out by early investigations, where the touch screen results seem to be fairly in line with expectations, while some very strange results are being reported in precincts still using some of the older methods.

But from Volusia County, Florida, Bev Harris and the ragtag band of misfits known as Black Box Voting and affiliated voter-activists have zeroed in on suspicious county behavior. After hitting Florida counties with FOIA (Freedom of Information Act requests) they found that Volusia County wouldn't give them xeroxed copies of the poll tapes for one precinct in particular, a heavily black precinct that recorded far more votes for Bush than the party registry would predict.

In other words, the vote could have been manipulated here, and Black Box Voting is putting together a concrete investigation to lock down all suspicious county computers and voting machines. Bev Harris is a grandmother on a mission to protect voting integrity and shine light on irregularities. If only we had thousands of people like her...

Kathleen Wynne and Bev Harris showed up at the warehouse at 8:15 Tuesday morning, Nov. 16. There was Lana Hires looking especially gruff, yet surprised. She ordered them out. Well, they couldn't see why because there she was, with a couple other people, handling the original poll tapes. You know, the ones with the signatures on them. Harris and Wynne stepped out and Volusia County officials promptly shut the door.

There was a trash bag on the porch outside the door. Harris looked into it and what do you know, but there were poll tapes in there. They came out and glared at Harris and Wynne, who drove away a small bit, and then videotaped the license plates of the two vehicles marked 'City Council' member. Others came out to glare and soon all doors were slammed.

So, Harris and Wynne went and parked behind a bus to see what they would do next. They pulled out some large pylons, which blocked the door. Harris decided to go look at the garbage some more while Wynne videotaped. A man who identified himself as "Pete" came out and Harris immediately wrote a public records request for the contents of the garbage bag, which also contained ballots -- real ones, but not filled out.

A brief tug of war occurred, tearing the garbage bag open. Harris and Wynne then looked through it, as Pete looked on. He was quite friendly.

Black Box Voting collected various poll tapes and other information and asked if they could copy it, for the public records request. "You won't be going anywhere," said Pete. "The deputy is on his way."

Yes, not one but two police cars came up and then two county elections officials, and everyone stood around discussing the merits of the "black bag" public records request.

The police finally let Harris and Wynne go, about the time the Votergate.tv film crew arrived, and everyone trooped off to the elections office. There, the plot thickened.

Black Box Voting began to compare the special printouts given in the FOIA request with the signed polling tapes from election night. Lo and behold, some were missing. By this time, Black Box Voting investigator Andy Stephenson had joined the group at Volusia County. Some polling place tapes didn't match. In fact, in one location, precinct 215, an African-American precinct, the votes were off by hundreds, in favor of George W. Bush and other Republicans.

Hmm. Which was right? The polling tape Volusia gave to Black Box Voting, specially printed on Nov. 15, without signatures, or the ones with signatures, printed on Nov. 2, with up to 8 signatures per tape?

Well, then it became even more interesting. A Volusia employee boxed up some items from an office containing Lana Hires' desk, which appeared to contain -- you guessed it -- polling place tapes. The employee took them to the back of the building and disappeared.

Then, Ellen B., a voting integrity advocate from Broward County, Florida, and Susan, from Volusia, decided now would be a good time to go through the trash at the elections office. Lo and behold, they found all kinds of memos and some polling place tapes, fresh from Volusia elections office.

So, Black Box Voting compared these with the Nov. 2 signed ones and the "special' ones from Nov. 15 given, unsigned, finding several of the MISSING poll tapes. There they were: In the garbage.

So, Wynne went to the car and got the polling place tapes she had pulled from the warehouse garbage. My my my. There were not only discrepancies, but a polling place tape that was signed by six officials.

This was a bit disturbing, since the employees there had said that bag was destined for the shredder.

By now, a county lawyer had appeared on the scene, suddenly threatening to charge Black Box Voting extra for the time spent looking at the real stuff Volusia had withheld earlier. Other lawyers appeared, phoned, people had meetings, Lana glowered at everyone, and someone shut the door in the office holding the GEMS server.

Black Box Voting investigator Andy Stephenson then went to get the Diebold "GEMS" central server locked down. He also got the memory cards locked down and secured, much to the dismay of Lana. They were scattered around unsecured in any way before that.

Talk about your classic shady Florida government officials... GO BEV GO.... down to the wire!

Tracking election irregularities: what exactly happened on November 2?

I sent an email (and posted) a while ago about a supposed 93,000 votes in Ohio materializing from somewhere, but the morning after I sent the email the story was debunked. It seems that some Ohio county put the wrong number of total voters on their website, which a little bit of the corporate news (and some bloggers) picked up on.

Meanwhile, despite the media impressions that everything went real smoothly, there are still many unresolved stories, and rather shocking stories of voting machines counting backwards (in Florida, of course) and another story about a county in Ohio that suddenly locked down its ballot counting facilities, barring the media and official ballot observers, citing 'homeland security' concerns.

There are a lot of concerns about the integrity of our electoral system out there. This is not the same thing as saying that "Bush didn't win." Rather, many people are concerned that the system at all levels--and races all over the country, including ballot initiatives--may not be 100% accurate. This is really a huge story that has to be dissected, not just out of suspicion of fraud, but simply to understand if the present system even works right or not.

I have put together a web page that has a lot of these election stories. The page also has links to websites like BlackBoxVoting.org, an organization that is conducting Freedom of Information Act requests all over the country to find out exactly what happened on Nov. 2. Some of the websites have political agendas, yet all should provide information that people need to see about our system.

The page is located at http://wiki.hongpong.com/index.php/Tracking_election_irregularities

The page can be edited by the public so if any of you find stories about voting irregularities, weird stuff or investigations of fraud, you could easily add a link onto the page. To explain this a little better, I have added a type of technology called a 'wiki' to my website that allows people to collaborate and interlink easily written webpages. That may not make a lot of sense but go check it out.

If you want to leave any comments about the page or what's on it, go to this link and click the '+' button to type something in.
http://wiki.hongpong.com/index.php/Talk:Tracking_election_irregularities

Thanks for checkin this out and please let me know what you think!

MoveOn.org starts petition to investigate the vote

I will not get into the election irregularities stuff I've found lately at the moment, but I will quote a form email that Dan Schned sent me:

Dear friend,

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

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

Members of Congress are demanding an investigation to answer this question. Join me in supporting their call, at:

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

Thanks.

I wrote the following in the petition comment box:

As a young person who understands the principles of information technology, I am terrified that the legitimacy of our democracy rests on the 'black boxes' of memory cards in electronic voting machines. I know perfectly well (and I suspect the Republicans know, too) that anomalies in how these machines operate cannot scientifically be detected from the outside. Hence, the election becomes a matter of unobserved, unverifiable phenomena, encouraging electoral fabrication similar to so many Iraqi defectors providing fake intelligence to Congress about weapons of mass destruction. Every year, my generation trusts less and less what the adult world tries to pass off as legitimate systems of government. Our patience for these farcical claims of veracity wears thin.

93K vote story in Ohio laid to rest, but Questions Remain

I'm about to get teased, I sense, by one of my afternoon poli. sci. professors for an email I sent out after posting the stuff below last night. Turns out that Olbermann retracted the 93,000 vote claim this morning, much to my chagrin. I got an email from Peter Gartrell suggesting that I not wrap the whole damn campus up in my conspiracy theories. Well, i never said that I was certain of the story, just that its appearance in a corporate news source proved it was more likely to have something behind it.

However, there are plenty of other stories out there that need to be examined, including the Black Box Voting issue, the optical scanner discrepancies in Florida and such things as the Ohio machine that added 4,000 votes for Bush—nearly a twentieth of his victory margin, from just one machine. That one was corrected, but how many of things happened in an unobservable fashion?

I'm feeling a little bit dumb that I jumped the gun on this one, and normally I don't do such things, but for some reason I felt that when the corporate guys broke the story, it became far more worthwhile to email people about. Email your brickbats to Microsoft. (what is a brickbat besides a tired journalist expression for pissed off people anyway?)

I have to jet to lunch in a sec, but here are a few stories to look at about it.

Florida discrepancies from county to county.

"Election 2004: worse than 2000?"

"Presidental votes miscast on e-voting machines across the country"

"Going down the stolen election road?" by David Corn of The Nation.

"The Scourge of PESTS," more fluffy but it talks about people denied the right to vote and missing absentee ballots in Ohio.

Eriposte has some stuff about exit poll irregularities and other stuff.

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann pushes the vote fraud story??? EXTRA 93,000 VOTES IN OHIO!!!

This is really weird. One of the more marginal yet oddly spunky anchors on cable TV, the former sportscaster Keith Olbermann, has suddenly decided to take his show, Countdown, straight into the land of tinfoil hats (welcome, sir!) and is now trying to blow the stories of voting irregularities wide open. Fascinating stuff. I am posting a bit about this voting fraud story (described as 'naked promotional announcement') I got this off a DailyKos diary which has links to some of the MSNBC videos.

There is some serious shit in here, about security lockdowns in Ohio and the apparent discrepancies between optical scanners and electronic machines in Florida. Yeee-haw!!!

This was originally published on MSNBC's website. The nut of the issue: we now have evidence that shows most of the gap in Ohio's election results can be filled with phantom voters (evangelicals or ghosts in the diebold machines, take your pick).

At least, that's what a corporate news desk is now saying. WHAT the HELL? I will not still not assign credulity to the idea that the election WAS stolen. However, now things are, shall we say, amped.

I needed to pull out this quote. I can't believe it myself. And Homeland Security is involved?

Interestingly, none of the complaining emailers took issue with the remarkable results out of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In 29 precincts there, the County's website shows, we had the most unexpected results in years: more votes than voters.

I'll repeat that: more votes than voters. 93,000 more votes than voters.

Oops.

Talk about successful get-out-the-vote campaigns! What a triumph for democracy in Fairview Park, twelve miles west of downtown Cleveland. Only 13,342 registered voters there, but they cast 18,472 votes.

Sorry, here is the full thing:

SECAUCUS -- A quick and haplessly generic answer now to the 6,000 emails and the hundreds of phone calls.

Firstly, thank you.

Secondly, we will indeed be resuming our coverage of the voting irregularities in Ohio and Florida -- and elsewhere -- on this evening's edition of Countdown {8:00 p.m. ET}. The two scheduled guests are Jonathan Turley, an excellent professor of law at George Washington University, and MSNBC analyst and Congressional Quarterly senior columnist Craig Crawford.

For Jonathan, the questions are obvious: the process and implications of voting reviews, especially after a candidate has conceded, even after a President has been re-elected. For Craig, the questions are equally obvious: did John Kerry's concession indeed neuter mainstream media attention to the questions about voting and especially electronic voting, and what is the political state of play on the investigations and the protests.

Phase Two, in which Doris gets her oats...

Keep them coming. Email me at KOlbermann@msnbc.com

* November 9, 2004 | 12:55 a.m. ET

Electronic voting angst (Keith Olbermann)

NEW YORK -- Bev Harris, the Blackbox lady, was apparently quoted in a number of venues during the day Monday as having written "I was tipped off by a person very high up in TV that the news has been locked down tight, and there will be no TV coverage of the real problems with voting on Nov. 2... My source said they've also been forbidden to talk about it even on their own time."

I didn't get the memo.

We were able to put together a reasonably solid 15 minutes or so on the voting irregularities in Florida and Ohio on Monday's Countdown. There was some You-Are-There insight from the Cincinnati Enquirer reporter who had personally encountered the `lockdown' during the vote count in Warren County, Ohio, a week ago, and a good deal of fairly contained comment from Representative John Conyers of Michigan, who now leads a small but growing group of Democratic congressmen who've written the General Accountability Office demanding an investigation of what we should gently call the Electronic Voting Angst. Conyers insisted he wasn't trying to re-cast the election, but seemed mystified that in the 21st Century we could have advanced to a technological state in which voting-- fine, flawed, or felonious-- should leave no paper trail.

But the show should not have been confused with Edward R. Murrow flattening Joe McCarthy. I mean that both in terms of editorial content and controversy. I swear, and I have never been known to cover-up for any management anywhere, that I got nothing but support from MSNBC both for the Web-work and the television time. We were asked if perhaps we shouldn't begin the program with the Fallujah offensive and do the voting story later, but nobody flinched when we argued that the Countdown format pretty much allows us to start wherever we please.

It may be different elsewhere, but there was no struggle to get this story on the air, and evidently I should be washing the feet of my bosses this morning in thanks. Because your reaction was a little different than mine. By actual rough count, between the 8 p.m. ET start of the program and 10:30 p.m. ET last night, we received 1,570 e-mails (none of them duplicates or forms, as near as I can tell). 1,508 were positive, 62 negative.

Well the volume is startling to begin with. I know some of the overtly liberal sites encouraged readers to write, but that's still a hunk of mail, and a decisive margin (hell, 150 to 62 is considered a decisive margin). Writing this, I know I'm inviting negative comment, but so be it. I read a large number of the missives, skimmed all others, appreciate all-- and all since-- deeply.

Even the negative ones, because in between the repeated "you lost" nonsense and one baffling reference to my toupee (seriously, if I wore a rug, wouldn't I get one that was all the same color?), there was a solid point raised about some of the incongruous voting noted on the website of Florida's Secretary of State.

There, 52 counties tallied their votes using paper ballots that were then optically scanned by machines produced by Diebold, Sequoia, or Election Systems and Software. 29 of those Florida counties had large Democratic majorities among registered voters (as high a ratio as Liberty County-- Bristol, Florida and environs-- where it's 88 percent Democrats, 8 percent Republicans) but produced landslides for President Bush. On Countdown, we cited the five biggest surprises (Liberty ended Bush: 1,927; Kerry: 1,070), but did not mention the other 24.

Those protesting e-mailers pointed out that four of the five counties we mentioned also went for Bush in 2000, and were in Florida's panhandle or near the Georgia border. Many of them have long "Dixiecrat" histories and the swing to Bush, while remarkably large, isn't of itself suggestive of voting fraud.

That the other 24 counties were scattered across the state, and that they had nothing in common except the optical scanning method, I didn't mention. My bad. I used the most eye-popping numbers, and should have used a better regional mix instead.

Interestingly, none of the complaining emailers took issue with the remarkable results out of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In 29 precincts there, the County's website shows, we had the most unexpected results in years: more votes than voters.

I'll repeat that: more votes than voters. 93,000 more votes than voters.

Oops.

Talk about successful get-out-the-vote campaigns! What a triumph for democracy in Fairview Park, twelve miles west of downtown Cleveland. Only 13,342 registered voters there, but they cast 18,472 votes.

Vote early! Vote often!

And in the continuing saga of the secret vote count in Warren County, Ohio (outside Cincinnati), no protestor offered an explanation or even a reference, excepting one sympathetic writer who noted that there was a "beautiful Mosque" in or near Warren County, and that a warning from Homeland Security might have been predicated on that fact.

To her credit, Pat South, President of the Warren County Commissioners who chose to keep the media from watching the actual vote count, was willing to come on the program-- but only by phone. Instead, we asked her to compose a statement about the bizarre events at her County Administration building a week ago, which I can quote at greater length here than I did on the air.

"About three weeks prior to elections," Ms. South stated, "our emergency services department had been receiving quite a few pieces of correspondence from the office of Homeland Security on the upcoming elections. These memos were sent out statewide, not just to Warren County and they included a lot of planning tools and resources to use for election day security.

"In a face to face meeting between the FBI and our director of Emergency Services, we were informed that on a scale from 1 to 10, the tri-state area of Southwest Ohio was ranked at a high 8 to a low 9 in terms of security risk. Warren County in particular, was rated at 10 (with 10 being the highest risk). Pursuant to the Ohio revised code, we followed the law to the letter that basically says that no one is allowed within a hundred feet of a polling place except for voters and that after the polls close the only people allowed in the board of elections area where votes are being counted are the board of election members, judges, clerks, poll challengers, police, and that no one other than those people can be there while tabulation is taking place."

Ms. South said she admitted the media to the building's lobby, and that they were provided with updates on the ballot-counting every half hour. Of course, the ballot-counting was being conducted on the third floor, and the idea that it would have probably looked better if Warren had done what Ohio's other 87 counties did-- at least let reporters look through windows as the tabulations proceeded-- apparently didn't occur to anybody.

Back to those emails, especially the 1,508 positive ones. Apart from the supportive words (my favorites: "Although I did not vote for Kerry, as a former government teacher, I am encouraged by your `covering' the voting issue which is the basis of our government. Thank you."), the main topics were questions about why ours was apparently the first television or mainstream print coverage of any of the issues in Florida or Ohio. I have a couple of theories.

Firstly, John Kerry conceded. As I pointed out here Sunday, no candidate's statement is legally binding-- what matters is the state election commissions' reports, and the Electoral College vote next month. But in terms of reportorial momentum, the concession took the wind out of a lot of journalists' aggressiveness towards the entire issue. Many were prepared for Election Night premature jocularity, and a post-vote stampede to the courts-- especially after John Edwards' late night proclamation from Boston. When Kerry brought that to a halt, a lot of the media saw something of which they had not dared dream: a long weekend off.

Don't discount this. This has been our longest presidential campaign ever, to say nothing of the one in which the truth was most artfully hidden or manufactured. To consider this mess over was enough to get 54 percent of the respondents to an Associated Press poll released yesterday to say that the "conclusiveness" of last week's vote had given them renewed confidence in our electoral system (of course, 39 percent said it had given them less confidence). Up for the battle for truth or not, a lot of fulltime political reporters were ready for a rest. Not me-- I get to do "Oddball" and "Newsmakers" every night and they always serve to refresh my spirit, and my conviction that man is the silliest of the creator's creations.

There's a third element to the reluctance to address all this, I think. It comes from the mainstream's love-hate relationship with this very thing you're reading now: The Blog. This medium is so new that print, radio, and television don't know what to do with it, especially given that a system of internet checks and balances has yet to develop. A good reporter may encounter a tip, or two, or five, in a day's time. He has to check them all out before publishing or reporting.

What happens when you get 1,000 tips, all at once?

I'm sounding like an apologist for the silence of television and I don't mean to. Just remember that when radio news arose in the '30s, the response of newspapers and the wire services was to boycott it, then try to limit it to specific hours. There's a measure of competitiveness, a measure of confusion, and the undeniable fact that in searching for clear, non-partisan truth in this most partisan of times, the I'm-Surprised-This-Name-Never-Caught-On "Information Super Highway" becomes a road with direction signs listing 1,000 destinations each.

Having said all that-- for crying out loud, all the data we used tonight on Countdown was on official government websites in Cleveland and Florida. We confirmed all of it-- moved it right out of the Reynolds Wrap Hat zone in about ten minutes.

Which offers one way bloggers can help guide the mainstream at times like this: source your stuff like crazy, and the stuffier the source the better.

Enough from the soapbox. We have heard the message on the Voting Angst and will continue to cover it with all prudent speed.

Thanks for your support.

Keep them coming... Email me at KOlbermann@msnbc.com

To introduce some uncertainty, it's time for electoral spoilage!

What does this election prove? What does it suggest we are destined for? What does it signify about the people of this nation?

I don't think the answers are positive ones. I have some lingering questions about the legitimacy of this one, although we are meant to believe that the results were clear and obvious. Yet I must ask, is it possible that they could have made 11,000 votes for Kerry in New Mexico disappear? A hundred thousand in Ohio?

Adding to the uncertainty, journalist Greg Palast, whose book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy summed up all the electoral fraud in Florida last time, now hypothesizes that Kerry actually won, if the exit polls are to be believed:

Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. At 1:05 a.m. Wednesday morning, CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. The exit polls were later combined with—and therefore contaminated by—the tabulated results, ultimately becoming a mirror of the apparent actual vote. [To read about the skewing of exit polls to conform to official results, click here .] Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.

So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, "Who did you vote for?" Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters don't know.

Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. [See TomPaine.com, "An Election Spoiled Rotten," November 1.]

Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote game are, I'm sorry to report, hanging chads and pregnant chads, plus some other ballot tricks old and new.

The election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something called "spoilage." Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded. When the bobble-head boobs on the tube tell you Ohio or any state was won by 51 percent to 49 percent, don't you believe it ... it has never happened in the United States, because the total never reaches a neat 100 percent. The television totals simply subtract out the spoiled vote.
[.....]
Exactly how many votes were lost to spoilage this time? Blackwell's office, notably, won't say, though the law requires it be reported. Hmm. But we know that last time, the total of Ohio votes discarded reached a democracy-damaging 1.96 percent. The machines produced their typical loss—that's 110,000 votes—overwhelmingly Democratic.

The Impact Of Challenges

First and foremost, Kerry was had by chads. But the Democrat wasn't punched out by punch cards alone. There were also the 'challenges.' That's a polite word for the Republican Party of Ohio's use of an old Ku Klux Klan technique: the attempt to block thousands of voters of color at the polls. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida, the GOP laid plans for poll workers to ambush citizens under arcane laws—almost never used—allowing party-designated poll watchers to finger individual voters and demand they be denied a ballot. The Ohio courts were horrified and federal law prohibits targeting of voters where race is a factor in the challenge. But our Supreme Court was prepared to let Republicans stand in the voting booth door.

In the end, the challenges were not overwhelming, but they were there. Many apparently resulted in voters getting these funky "provisional" ballots—a kind of voting placebo—which may or may not be counted. Blackwell estimates there were 175,000; Democrats say 250,000. Pick your number. But as challenges were aimed at minorities, no one doubts these are, again, overwhelmingly Democratic. Count them up, add in the spoiled punch cards (easy to tally with the human eye in a recount), and the totals begin to match the exit polls; and, golly, you've got yourself a new president. Remember, Bush won by 136,483 votes in Ohio.
[.....]
New Mexico reported in the last race a spoilage rate of 2.68 percent, votes lost almost entirely in Hispanic, Native American and poor precincts—Democratic turf. From Tuesday's vote, assuming the same ballot-loss rate, we can expect to see 18,000 ballots in the spoilage bin.

Spoilage has a very Democratic look in New Mexico. Hispanic voters in the Enchanted State, who voted more than two to one for Kerry, are five times as likely to have their vote spoil as a white voter. Counting these uncounted votes would easily overtake the Bush 'plurality.'

Already, the election-bending effects of spoilage are popping up in the election stats, exactly where we'd expect them: in heavily Hispanic areas controlled by Republican elections officials. Chaves County, in the "Little Texas" area of New Mexico, has a 44 percent Hispanic population, plus African Americans and Native Americans, yet George Bush "won" there 68 percent to 31 percent.

I spoke with Chaves' Republican county clerk before the election, and he told me that this huge spoilage rate among Hispanics simply indicated that such people simply can't make up their minds on the choice of candidate for president. Oddly, these brown people drive across the desert to register their indecision in a voting booth.

Now, let's add in the effect on the New Mexico tally of provisional ballots.

"They were handing them out like candy," Albuquerque journalist Renee Blake reported of provisional ballots. About 20,000 were given out. Who got them?

Santiago Juarez who ran the "Faithful Citizenship" program for the Catholic Archdiocese in New Mexico, told me that "his" voters, poor Hispanics, whom he identified as solid Kerry supporters, were handed the iffy provisional ballots. Hispanics were given provisional ballots, rather than the countable kind "almost religiously," he said, at polling stations when there was the least question about a voter's identification. Some voters, Santiago said, were simply turned away.

This rests rather heavily on the idea that the exit polls will be accurate within just a few points. However, it would help explain why the chattering heads on Fox News couldn't stop their disdain for exit polls. Exit polls are in fact the only real way we have to detect electoral fraud, and I'm alarmed at the idea that they would no longer be used. We find widespread discrepancies between the exit polls and election results in Ohio and Florida, and this ought to be explained, yet probably won't be.

Dan Schwartz wrote the following email that rounds up the various rumors and incongruities.

The Democrats have already conceded the presidential election, magnanimously declaring that victory is impossible and that we should therefore spare the nation the excruciating pain of a full vote count. The major media agrees. Pre-election voter disenfranchisement, though widely reported and thoroughly documented (see http://vote2004.eriposte.com/ for this), has completely dropped out of the spotlight; the possibility of an imperfect election seems to be headed the same way.

There is a growing pile of evidence, though, that clearly points to the possibility of outright fraud on election day. The AP and AFP (Agence France-Presse) are both carrying stories now that detail instances where 'software glitches' resulted in Bush winning more votes in a county than are possible- more than the total number of registered voters. These stories come from Ohio and Florida, obviously the 2 most crucial and contentious states in the entire election.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/11/05/politics1149EST0515.DTL

http://www.newbernsj.com/SiteProcessor.cfm?Template=/GlobalTemplates/Details.cfm&StoryID=18297&Section=Local

This graph shows wild discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote tallies, suggesting the possibility of fraud. The servile mass media relies on these same polls to make their coverage bearable on election night, so you'd better believe they work hard to make sure they're reliable.

Check it out: http://img103.exs.cx/img103/4526/exit_poll.gif

Other counties have made projections based on voter registrations, then found that the election result was massively different. Take Baker County, FL as an example:

Registered Voters
REP: 24.3% DEM: 69.3%

Actual Votes
REP: 7,738 DEM: 2,180

Change from Expected Results REP: 220.4% DEM: -68.4%
(data from http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00000893.htm)

Here's a story from Warren County, Ohio: "Citing concerns about potential terrorism, Warren County officials locked down the county administration building on election night and blocked anyone from observing the vote count as the nation awaited Ohio's returns."

The Miami Herald has reported an instance where officials in Broward County were forced to change a previously announced result on a gambling referendum after discovering a 'computer glitch' that caused the vote tabulation system to begin counting BACKWARDS after hitting a ceiling (chosen by the software programmer) of 32,000 votes. the machine did this for every vote it counted for every race. officials there have apparantly known about the 'bug' for 2 years now but never had it fixed. "Florida's election chief, Secretary of State Glenda Hood, downplayed the significance of a miscount she blamed on 'inadvertent human error' in the Broward elections office. Hood stressed that double-checking procedures had caught what she described as an isolated error. Hood maintained that the incident shows the system worked. 'It's not a problem. . . . They made the correction.'"

Even if you don't think this is conclusive proof of fraud, it is certainly enough to justify demanding a recount. Remember, Kerry's concession is not legally binding in any way. It was a political decision, taken to save face and preserve everyone's perceptions that the system is not corrupt. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE CALL YOUR CONGRESSPEOPLE, CALL EVERYONE YOU KNOW, AND FORWARD THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE YOU HAVE EVER MET.

dan [Schwartz]

So then, do I conclude that the Republicans stole their second presidential election in four years? That's a tall order to fill, and I don't really believe it that much. However, I will say that our election system does not work perfectly, and provides plenty of opportunities for electoral fraud all around.

I even talked with someone (though I forget who, Your Honor) who planned to vote in both a swing state and Minnesota. I also heard about some foreigner getting into the polls here. This stuff happens, and we cannot ignore that. The question is whether the people on top are gaming the system as much as the random folks I've run across.

Campaign 2004 might be over, thank God, but it was not clean nor honest.