The train keeps a’rolling . . . the Clinton choo-choo . . . all aboard and park your principles in the excess baggage car. “You see, you got to vote for Clinton, ’cause of Newt Gingrich. If ya don’t, the Republicans will hurt workin’ people and people on welfare,” or so they explain on the train to Centristville.
Clinton’s visit to Columbus is like an episode of Twilight Zone. He’s created a bizarro world of gutless, soulless, and repentant baby boomers. The most vacuous and unprincipled Democratic president elected this century. President NAFTA, President GATT, destroyer of the New Deal.

Now, let me get this right. In 1992 I reluctantly supported Clinton, because if I didn’t, terrible things would happen. The Republicans would pass a free-trade agreement sending hundreds and thousands of U.S. jobs to sweatshops in the Third World and polluting the global environment. I voted for the Democrat so the Republicans wouldn’t create a police state with 100,000 police added to the streets causing the subsequent erosion of civil liberties based on hypocritical crime hysteria and stereotyping of the poor and minorities. I was supposed to vote for Clinton so the Republicans wouldn’t pass a vicious, mean-spirited Welfare Reform Act. So there would be universal health care, less poverty, etc.

Wait a minute. I voted for Clinton and I got Reagan and Bush’s GATT and NAFTA policies. I got Richard Nixon’s law-and-order agenda. I got Gingrich’s welfare reform act. I got 42 million Americans without health care in 1996 instead of 37 million in 1992. I got 15.1% of Americans living in poverty today instead of 14.2% four years ago. With Democrats like this, who needs Republicans?

Fear of Newt has neutered the Democratic Party. Today’s so-called Clintonesque “New Democrats” are still to the left of Mussolini, but are definitely to the right of the Eisenhower Republicans and, dare I say, Richard Nixon. The Democratic Party has turned itself into the pre-Ronald Reagan Republican Party and it now celebrates its hollow victory in Chicago.

“Oh my party’s bound and gagged and they’ve tied it to a chair. Won’t you please come to Chicago…”

Umberto’s inner-belt blues
Can Umberto Fedeli pick ‘em, or what? Seems S.E. Johnson Company’s having a problem with its paving of Cleveland’s inner belt. According to Saturday’s Plain Dealer, Johnson’s resurfacing of part of Interstate 480 began “to crumble several months after completion.” Hope they’ve got insurance!

As previously noted, S.E. Johnson won $32 million in third-lane construction contracts from the Ohio Turnpike Commission earlier this year. In July, the company switched its liability insurance to the less-than-renowned Fedeli Group. The Fedeli Group is sort of like the Gang of Four, or the Mob of Three, or Horde of Two. The Group’s sole owner is Turnpike Commission Chair Umberto Fedeli.

Hopefully, everyone’s favorite minority front, Banks Carbone, didn’t use S.E. Johnson for the foundation work at the residence of Paul Mifsud, the governor’s former chief of staff. You can count on the fact that Banks didn’t actually do the work. He’s essentially subcontracts. Maybe T.G. can find an actual minority architect or builder to check the pavement and concrete work at Paul’s place.

A whiff of Y-Town
Something’s rotten in Y-town.

The Youngstown City Health Department received an Ohio Infant Mortality Reduction Initiative Grant from the Ohio Health Department. So far, so good, no smell.

But, the mayor of Y-town can’t document or provide proof of service contracts for $40,395 in grant funds. The money was spent and apparently no one was contracted to provide the required Save-the-Babies services. Starting to have a bit of an odd odor.

The Most Honorable Patrick J. Ungaro, mayor of Youngstown, was looking for a little favor from Georgie-boy-perhaps Y-town’s all-time favorite guv. Ungaro wanted the governor to look the other way over Youngstown’s inability to “provide executed personal service contracts for grant personnel,” as referenced in an August 9, 1996 letter to Ungaro from Ohio Department of Health Director Peter Somani. This is the grant equivalent of “no show” or “ghost” employees. Definitely a strong stench, particularly as, in a letter dated June 4, 1996, the guv had agreed that he would “would explore the state’s ability to waive recoupment of $40,395″ of the missing funds. One wonders why our pro-life governor wouldn’t be more vigilant over such funds. But hey, Paul Mifsud-since resigned under a suspicious cloud-was running the show in the governor’s office then and I understand he’s got more than a few friends in Y-town.

Due to heightened scrutiny in the wake of Mifsud’s most untimely departure, the feds are looking very closely at the activities of the Voinovich administration. One federal source suggests that evidence points to the pockets of local Y-town politicals as the best possible recoupment site.

Now sources say a deal has been cut where Mayor Ungaro will look contrite and return the mysteriously missing money.

As the saying goes, “Y-town is mob…I mean, my town.”

A REAL-LIFE DISASTER MOVIE
Filmmakers follow the country and our global warming messengers through an extraordinary three years of transformation,
from 2003-to the eve of 2007, with sometimes funny, sometimes tragic experiences.

EVERYTHING’S COOL is a film about America finally “getting” global warming in the wake of the most dangerous chasm ever to emerge between scientific understanding
and political action. While industry funded nay-sayers sing what just might be their swan song of pseudo-scientific deception, a group of self-appointed global warming messengers
went on a high stakes quest to find the iconic image, the magic language, the points of leverage that will finally create the political will to move the United States from its reliance on fossil fuels
to the new clean energy economy - AND FAST.
Hold on… this is bigger than changing your light bulbs.

Sponsored by the Free Press, Central Ohio Green Education Fund and the Drexel East Theater.
Truth@freepress.org
253-2571

Film Site:

http://everythingscool.org/index.php

Bob Fitrakis, with the Ecological Options Network crew, interviewed Rep.
Tubbs-Jones after the 2004 election debacle and subsequent 2005 challenge
to the Ohio electoral votes. Watch it here:

A REAL-LIFE DISASTER MOVIE
Filmmakers follow the country and our global warming messengers through an extraordinary three years of transformation,
from 2003-to the eve of 2007, with sometimes funny, sometimes tragic experiences.

EVERYTHING’S COOL is a film about America finally “getting” global warming in the wake of the most dangerous chasm ever to emerge between scientific understanding
and political action. While industry funded nay-sayers sing what just might be their swan song of pseudo-scientific deception, a group of self-appointed global warming messengers
went on a high stakes quest to find the iconic image, the magic language, the points of leverage that will finally create the political will to move the United States from its reliance on fossil fuels
to the new clean energy economy - AND FAST.
Hold on… this is bigger than changing your light bulbs.

Sponsored by the Free Press, Central Ohio Green Education Fund and the Drexel East Theater.
Truth@freepress.org
253-2571

Film Site:

http://everythingscool.org/index.php

Monday, August 11 @ 00:00:00 EDT

The American press corps has finally begun to report on illegal activities of the Bush administration. However, the subject of election theft remains largely ignored. In recent years, the Republican Party has used an array of tactics to subtract votes from opposing candidates. These include sending defective voting machines to strongly Democratic precincts and removing low-income and minority voters from electoral rolls.

Reporter Greg Palast has been covering this issue since 2000, when he revealed that Florida officials ensured the election of George W. Bush by illegally suppressing the African-American and Democratic vote. (Learn more about that subject here.) In this interview, I asked Palast about his reports on the GOP’s dirty electoral tricks since 2000 and the possibility that the ’08 election will be stolen. He explained how the Help America Vote Act actually helps crooked Republicans and he previewed his upcoming broadcasts and publications, which will include a free guide with tips for safeguarding your vote.

–Chris Pepus

Chris: Your reports on vote suppression led to a congressional inquiry and the resignation of Tim Griffin, one of President Bush’s U.S. Attorneys.[i] Could you describe how the Bush administration interfered with voting rights in 2004?

Greg: Item one is something that we discovered called caging. There were e-mails written by the Republican National Committee’s chief researcher, a character named Tim Griffin, who was a protégé of Karl Rove.[ii] He was sending out caging lists, which are hit lists of voters to challenge. The way caging works is they send out registered letters to voters and when the voters aren’t around to receive their letters—the envelopes say, “Do Not Forward”—the voters end up being subject to challenge. The particular hit list that we got was substantially filled with voters from the naval air station in Jacksonville ( Florida). There are reasons why someone at a naval air station wouldn’t be at their voting address. That’s because, unlike Bush during Vietnam, they are off in a foreign war. Republicans also sent letters to students at black colleges in August knowing that they wouldn’t be there. They illegally challenged their votes. The Republicans challenged three million voters in 2004, which is absolutely unbelievable and unreported. That fact was right there in the records of the Election Assistance Commission of the federal government. Those voters received provisional ballots and a million of those ballots were thrown in the garbage. That is just one of the tricks. There are several and they are being sharpened for 2008.

Chris: But Griffin claimed that he didn’t know what caging was until he read your report. “I had to look it up,” he said.

Greg: Well, actually, I determined that he is correct. He sent out an e-mail saying, “Here is a caging list.” As he said, you have to be an expert in direct-mail marketing to understand what caging is. Now, that means that someone told him to send out an e-mail with caging lists, someone whose orders were so important that he wouldn’t question them, even if he didn’t know what (the list) was. Now, who would know direct marketing and who could give orders to Tim Griffin? Well, before he worked for George W. Bush, Karl Rove was head of Rove & Company, a direct-mail marketing firm. Rove is an expert on caging. Law professor Bobby Kennedy Jr., my co-investigator, says that this was an illegal act. So who ordered this illegal act? Hm, Mr. Rove?

Chris: How did you obtain these e-mails?

Greg: Griffin is not the sharpest knife in the drawer and he copied these e-mails not to GeorgeWBush.com, which was the campaign’s internal e-mail system, but rather to GeorgeWBush.org, a parody web site. The head of that site, John Wooden, knows me. He immediately passed (the e-mails) on to my team. He didn’t know what they were and, frankly, we didn’t know what they were at first either. It took a lot of work to decode.

Chris: Have there been any new developments in the case, other than Karl Rove’s refusal to testify before the House Judiciary Committee?

Greg: I have just returned from a meeting with David Iglesias, a fired prosecutor from New Mexico. Caging and gimmicks like it were behind his firing and the firings of other U.S. prosecutors.[iii] The U.S. press corps, as usual, got it completely wrong. The firing of U.S. Attorneys is not simply about the politics of the prosecutors or even the operations of their offices. Rather, it is about an attempt to force prosecutors to be involved in a scheme to arrest voters under voter-fraud laws to create hysteria to justify vote suppression. I was constantly asking Republicans, “If there are so many criminal voters, why haven’t you arrested them? Why aren’t there prosecutions?” The Republicans said, “Oh, there will be. Talk to David Iglesias.” I called him and other prosecutors and got all this hemming and hawing. So, I’m being told that Iglesias is about to bring prosecutions and he is saying, “I don’t think so.” It’s very clear to me that Iglesias was resisting phony prosecutions. He ran around the bases looking for fraudulent voters and he didn’t find one. Some were in the military, so they were not at their voting addresses.

I just came back from checking out some of the so-called fraudulent voters that Iglesias refused to prosecute. Republican leaders gave me their names. There was one lady, a waitress, who was signed up twice and there were two different signatures of her name. So I spoke to her—this “criminal”—and I said, “Did you register twice?” She said, “Yes.” She explained that, under the law, if you don’t receive formal acknowledgment of your registration, you can and should register again. They don’t put your name on the roll twice. I asked why there were two signatures: “Was there some fraudulent game going on?” She said: “No. One time, I signed at a table. The other time, I signed it on my hand.” This woman was supposed to be one of the six most obvious cases of a fraudulent voter in New Mexico. Governor Bill Richardson signed laws making it harder for people to register because of these so-called frauds. The laws are so horrible that Richardson, a Hispanic Democrat, is being sued by the Brennan Center for Justice for illegally impeding Hispanic voters.     

Chris: It’s remarkable how many groups are targeted. I recall reading about defective voting machines in (Palast’s 2006 book) Armed Madhouse. You mentioned that, in ’04, the county in New Mexico where the most votes disappeared was a predominantly white, working-class county.

Greg: Yeah, I call vote theft “class war by other means.” Places like Native American precincts, black precincts, and Mexican barrios are often the hardest hit. But, statistically, we find that it is income more than race that determines whether your vote will count. I can tell you the probability that your vote will count if you tell me your income. By the way, the Republican secretary of state[iv] in Colorado (Mike Coffman) just attacked me. I reported that he purged all these voters. He said, “Palast is just trying to raise money for his operation,” but he didn’t say I was wrong. He said he was just following the law. I’d heard all this from Katherine Harris[v] before. I’d said, “Guess the color of the voters purged.” He said, “We don’t keep track of voters’ race on our voter forms.” Yeah, right. They know. It’s by zip code. That’s the other thing: if they don’t know, they should know. Civil rights law does require election officials to take steps to determine that their actions don’t have a racial bias. When he said, “I don’t know,” that’s not true and, also, that’s not a legal answer. He’s supposed to know, especially when he removes a fifth of the voters in Colorado.

Chris: Another state with a history of vote suppression is Florida. In 2000, you reported that Florida Republicans removed tens of thousands of Democratic voters from the rolls. Have you found evidence pointing to a similar result this year?

Greg: Worse than ever. The whole nation’s been Floridated. George Bush signed the Help America Vote Act (in 2002) and, in 2006, they did a Katherine Harris on the whole nation. They told secretaries of state, who are partisan officials in every state, to purge away and remove “suspect voters.” A lot of the things that were illegal, like caging, that’s now in the law. Basically, we now have federal cover for mischief, instead of federal prohibition. In one New Mexico county, half the Democrats who showed up to vote in the (2008) primary/caucus couldn’t vote. You have address purges, I.D. purges. The Brennan Center said that about 85,000 voters in Florida are losing their right to vote, because they signed up in voter drives and couldn’t verify their identity. Overwhelmingly, those voters are black, because many black voters register in voter drives out of their churches. So, Florida’s back in the game. They’re just changing the rules.

Chris: How does the Help America Vote Act enable those tactics?

Greg: For example, Florida, when imposing special identity requirements on voter drives, they cited the Help America Vote Act. They said that it was required. Now, the fact that forty-six states don’t agree with them on that interpretation didn’t stop them. Also, HAVA basically required every state in America to change its laws. Once you open up the howling Pandora’s Box of election law, every reform becomes grounds for new mischief. HAVA creates this new shadow world of law. Florida officials said, “Well, we did this for HAVA.” Then the lawyers at the Brennan Center said, “Where in HAVA? How can you say this is for HAVA?” They said, “Oh, well, that’s our own interpretation.” Is this federal law? Is it state law? No, it’s Bush law; it’s Rove law. The nice thing about elections for vote thieves: there’s a “Fuck you” clause in vote theft. If you win, you control the review. You own the police.

Chris: Which provisions of the act are most often cited as authority for attacks on voting rights?

Greg: I go back to the 2006 codicils. Certain things kicked in in ’06 regarding verification of voter identity. That is the most mischievous thing. The law demanded that, beginning in ’06, each state must have centralized, computerized rolls of voters. Again, the first state to go full-on with computerized, centralized purging of voter rolls was Florida. That’s how we ended up with the phony felon purge (in 2000). With HAVA, they used the Florida fix as an excuse to create a so-called reform and the “reform” was to take Florida’s method and nationalize it. But people say, “Well, why shouldn’t we have verified rolls?” The answer is that this is a new law to prevent a crime that almost never happens. We have five or fewer convictions for vote fraud a year in America. We figure that, under the new system, five million voters a year lose their right to vote. You literally have a million voters losing their right to vote to catch one ne’er-do-well. You don’t arrest a million people to catch one murderer.

Chris: Now, regarding these centralized lists, you’ve written about a firm called Accenture that runs computerized voting lists for various state governments. Could you talk about that?

Greg: Accenture used to be Arthur Andersen, but after they got caught cooking the books for Enron, they tend not to use that name. Arthur Andersen was split into two parts: one was liquidated, put into bankruptcy, and one was renamed Accenture. They haven’t changed their ways. There’s Accenture; there’s ES&S (Election Systems & Software). These characters are some of the greasiest operators out there. They combine bias with incompetence and high fees. ES&S has been involved in New Mexico. It’s a firm founded by Republican Senator Chuck Hagel (of Nebraska). Every time ES&S gets involved in purging voter rolls, they turn astonishingly Republican. Everyone knows that if you use certain methods, it knocks out certain types of voters. That’s why I’m doing this investigation with Bobby Kennedy. We are investigating the theft of the 2008 election before it happens. We’re looking at what’s happening in Colorado, New Mexico, Alabama, Florida. We’re going to be putting out a big national magazine article with our findings. We can’t say where.

Chris: When is that going to come out?

Greg: In September. We will then also have a film out starting with a broadcast on BBC Television and a U.S. national network. For the first time, we’re going to break through the electronic blockade in America.

Chris: I read that you’re raising funds for the broadcast. How are you doing on that?

Greg: Well, that’s the thing. (The network) finally opened the door, but they said, “Of course, we’re not paying for this.” Okay, I’ll tell my cameramen to eat dog food. My staff is pretty good at living on very little. They were here last night ’til 2 a.m. (Research associate) Zach Roberts—I want to give him his due—his last day off was about seven weeks ago. This is a nonstop operation, but I have to raise money to provide the bare minimum. We do want to be able to provide outreach and give stuff out to some activist groups. We’re going to have a voter guide, Steal Back Your Vote, which I’m putting together with Kennedy. A lot of this is going to be in comic-book form, designed by Top Shelf. I had a complaint from one of my fundraisers that we give away too much stuff—my books, DVDs. But that’s our game: to get the word out and build a knowledge base. Now, I’ll give a hint of my age. The protests against the war in Vietnam began with massive teach-ins: “Here’s where Vietnam is.” We need to learn the issues. People are unarmed. That is, people know that they’re getting shafted, but they don’t really know exactly how.

http://www.gregpalast.com/

[ii] Nicknamed “Bush’s brain,” Rove served as chief strategist for Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign. From 2001-2007, Rove held various posts in the Bush administration, including senior advisor and deputy chief of staff.

[iii] In 2006, the Justice Department fired nine U.S. Attorneys, nearly all of whom had received high performance ratings from the department. The subject is being investigated by Congress. Alberto Gonzalez, the attorney general at the time, claims to remember very little about the firings.

[iv] The official in charge of a state’s elections.

[v] In 2000, Harris was the secretary of state in Florida and the co-chair of George W. Bush’s presidential campaign in that state. She presided over the various voter purges in 2000 and was the one who officially certified Bush the winner of the election.

Original Copy Link:

http://tinyurl.com/6cmzfd

Workshops on:

Board of Election Monitors
Election Day Election Protection
Video the Vote

** Free Registration ** Free Parking **

Please RSVP:
614-253-2571
truth@freepress.org
Donation requested for refreshments
Parking in Columbus State lot at Cleveland by 670 or guest parking meters
Keynote speaker: Mark Crispin Miller - Meet Mark on Friday, September 26 for his talk at 9pm
Miller is a professor of media studies at New York University and author of the books: “Loser Take All,” “Fooled Again, How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections” and “The Bush Dyslexicon.” He is known for his writing on American media and for his activism on behalf of democratic media reform.

Featured films:
Free For All
produced by John Ennis
Sept. 26 - 7pm (free)
Columbus State - conference center
John investigates the evidence of the stolen 2004 election with sometimes frustrating and often funny results

Stealing America Vote-by-Vote
produced by Dorothy Fadiman
Sept. 28 - 12:30pm (tentative)
Drexel Gateway Theater, OSU
Experts and witnesses exposing the flaws of electronic voting

Columbus Dispatch articles explaining the 2004 election irregularities
all embrace the same formula: ignore the more than 1000 signed
affidavits and sworn testimonies of disenfranchised voters; rely only
on the word of OSU Law Professor Dan Tokaji who has no background in
statistical analysis and who always tells the Dispatch whatever they
want to hear; and then apologize for former Ohio Secretary of State J.
Kenneth Blackwell and fail to mention what is routinely reported in
every other major newspaper in the state of Ohio.

In the Sunday, August 10 Dispatch front page story, the paper
conveniently avoids reporting on Blackwell’s well-documented
activities. There’s no mention of: Blackwell’s directive that returned
voter registration applications that weren’t on “80-bond paper weight”;
Blackwell’s refusal to count the votes for the first time in modern
Ohio history if voters were at the right polling place but the wrong
precinct table; the fact that Blackwell outsourced Ohio’s official vote
count tabulation to Michael Connell, a Bush family partisan who sent
the vote tally to a Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee
tied to the White House; or of his full-court blitz on TV trying to get
Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry to concede with 250,000
uncounted votes

The Dispatch claims “there’s no direct proof of widespread fraud.” This
may be true. But, in an election where the exit polls showed Kerry
winning by 3 percentage points, all you need is a “little bit of” fraud
to flip the numbers. And that’s exactly what the exit polls showed.
That instead of Kerry winning 52% to 48%, Bush wins 51% to 48.5%.

So biased was the Dispatch reporting that they either engaged in
deliberate propaganda or made errors so simple that they would have
flunked Intro to Politics 101 at any college. Tokaji, who admitted to
having no training in exit polling, told the AP, and hence the world,
that the unexplainable discrepancy between the exit poll numbers and
the actual vote count was not a problem.

For example, they report without embarrassment that the official
response for the highly accurate exit polls being wrong in Ohio – and
so outside the margin of error that it would only happen in one in
959,000 presidential elections – was that “…exit polls are based only
on responses from voters who agree to participate.”

The Dispatch’s own polls, that they brag about as being highly
accurate, are based on only those who agree to participate. Also,
methodology requires only randomization, not that every single voter
exiting the polls agrees to respond. This means that every voter has
equal chance at inclusion. If the pollsters are asking every 10th voter
and one refuses, they go on to the next 10th voter.

In a telephone survey, if a particular person who is randomly called
isn’t home, or refuses to answer the questions, it doesn’t negate the
scientific validity of the survey if it is randomized and
representative. All of this is taken into consideration in the polls’
methodology.

The Dispatch formula invokes the “c” word – conspiracy – whenever
possible. The paper’s fundamental premise is that the statistically
impossible results of the election and the highly improbably nature of
all the irregularities going in Bush’s favor and against John Kerry are
just a coincidence. The Dispatch’s brand of reporting is a monument to
coincidence theory.

From the paper’s perspective: 308,000 voters purged from voting
registration rolls in the urban centers of Cleveland, Cincinnati, and
Toledo, are not deliberate, even though 80% or so would have likely
voted for Kerry; dozens of sworn statements from voters saying that
they touched the computer screen for Kerry and saw their vote flip to
Bush is only an accident; and that Kerry’s votes ran significantly
behind an underfunded retired African American municipal judge from
Cleveland on the ticket – only in 14 Republican counties – is simply
ignored.

On Friday, July 25, the Dispatch ran the headline: “’04 Ohio election
was fair, Blackwell says.” In the course of the story, they quote the
ubiquitous Tokaji who states without facts or political science
qualifications that Bush’s margin “was sufficient to overcome any legal
challenge that might have arisen from provisional ballots that were
uncounted ambiguously marked punch-card ballots and long lines that may
have discouraged many citizens from voting.”

Tokaji’s assessment runs contrary to dozens of social and political
science texts on the subject. He has refused to appear on panels with
political scientists who offer different views. Nor has Tokaji
indicated that he’s actually gone into the boards of elections’
warehouses and looked at hundreds of thousands of actual ballots, as
his critics do in preparing their analyses.

In a previous article, the Dispatch officially reported without
blushing that Franklin County Board of Elections Executive Director
Denny L. White retired last month. Members of the Franklin County
Democratic Party Central Committee are openly telling reporters that
White was forced out for echoing the Dispatch line that there were no
significant problems with the 2004 election. White, the former chair of
the Ohio Democratic Party, announces his retirement in July of a
presidential election year and is replaced by the 28-year-old Michael
Stinziano, and the Dispatch reports as fact the fantasy spun by the
Party’s PR people.

To put things in perspective, they quote Tokaji who states the obvious:
“There are lots of land mines out there, and someone who is not
experienced in running local elections must very quickly educate
themselves as to where those land mines are.” The Dispatch might have
asked some Party insiders why the highly experienced Denny White was
retiring just prior to the election. It’s difficult to avoid this
question when the Dispatch headline read: “New director will face first
ballot in 3 months.”

Four days prior to the Dispatch’s August 10 article that smeared the
election integrity movement, they were forced to report that Ohio
Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner had sued the former Diebold
Election Systems, now Premier Election Solutions, for providing the
state “defective” computerized voting machines.

Brunner told the Dispatch that an investigation by her office
documented that the Diebold machines “dropped” votes in “at least 11
counties.”

Conveniently missing from the Dispatch article is the fact that
Blackwell personally negotiated the unbid contract that brought Diebold
machines into prominence in Ohio. At the same time, Blackwell held
Diebold stock. The article also fails to report that Diebold’s CEO
Walden O’Dell, a major contributor to the Bush-Cheney Re-election
Campaign, sent out a letter pledging to deliver Ohio’s electoral votes
to Bush in 2004.

But the key reason the Dispatch is attacking the election integrity
movement and lead litigator Cliff Arnebeck, of the King Lincoln
Bronzeville case that seeks to protect the civil rights of voters in
the 2008 election, is because of the revelations concerning Bush family
loyalist Michael Connell and the allegations that the vote can easily
be stolen with the flip of a switch in the computerized vote tabulation
process.

The Dispatch avoids dealing with the revelations by highly respected
Republican IT man and McCain supporter Steve Spoonamore at a Columbus
press conference on July 17. With Dispatch reporter Mark Niquette in
attendance, Spoonamore stated in no uncertain terms that he felt the
evidence suggested fraud in the 2004 election. The Dispatch is also not
telling its readers that Spoonamore’s analysis as an expert witness was
offered to the Ohio Attorney General’s office.

Spoonamore, who has worked for the Secret Service and major
corporations on credit card fraud, stated that the IT system designed
by Mike Connell for Blackwell is vulnerable to election rigging. In the
Dispatch version of reality, little-qualified Party appointees and
untrained volunteer election workers stand as a bipartisan impenetrable
fortress against election tampering. The ultimate thesis is always
based on the tenuous fact that there’s a bipartisan system of Democrats
and Republicans at county boards of elections, therefore election
rigging is “impossible.”

Spoonamore’s point is the exact opposite of the Dispatch’s. As long as
all the Ohio election results are compiled at county central tabulators
and fed officially to sites in Ohio and Tennessee, overseen partisan IT
companies using proprietary secret software, then our elections are
vulnerable to manipulation. All the well-intentioned “bipartisan”
grandmothers, grandfathers and political operatives working the polling
places and boards of elections watching the flashy touchscreens and
shiny county central tabulators have no idea what’s really going on
inside the black box and what happens when the
digital vote count heads off into cyberspace.
__________________________

Bob Fitrakis holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and a J.D. from the OSU
Moritz College of Law, is a Political Science Professor at Columbus
State Community College, and is an award-winning investigative
reporter.

And

The Second Saturday Salon - Aug. 9, 6:30pm to 8:30 pm
1000 E. Main St. Columbus Ohio
parking in rear or next door at the Salvation Army
Discussion of grassroots activism and election protection.

Sponsored by Green Pro, the Green Institute, The Free Press, The Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism,
the Central Ohio Green Education Fund
Robert Fitrakis 614-253-2571, truth@freepress.org

When he died, Entertainment Weekly called him the Berry Gordy of Columbus. It was August 2, 2005 when Columbus lost a hero. Bill Moss made his reputation in radio as the “Boss with the Red Hot Sauce.” But he was much more than that: a loving husband and father, good friend, public servant, and Soldier of the Year. He was a man of the highest integrity whose principles couldn’t be bought for thirty pieces of silver, who heard the voice of the Lord say unto him “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” and Bill answered, “Here am I, send me.”

Moss, the Chief Plaintiff in the Moss v. Bush lawsuit that challenged the results of the 2004 election, spoke these words before agreeing to sue the President of the United States: “The only way an investigation is going to happen is if we the people take the responsibility.” He felt the theft of the 2004 Ohio presidential election was deliberate. He believed that the American people had “rolled over” too easy after 2000 Florida debacle. After Bill and his wife Ruth witnessed the hours-long lines at the Franklin Middle School polling site, and noting that it had never taken them over 20 to minutes in the past, they decided that they would lead the charge to expose the corruption and reveal the crimes behind it.

It’s hard to forget how deeply he cared and how hard he fought, and how lucky we were to have worked by his side. He kept the faith and so shall we. We vow to protect the 2008 election in his name.

Green Pro, a tool for green activists created
and managed by the Green Institute
is proud to sponsor

Former Congresswoman
Cynthia McKinney
and
Hip-Hop activist
Rosa Clemente

for a discussion of grass roots activism
and election protection.

At: The Second Saturday Salon

1000 E. Main St. Columbus Ohio
On: Saturday Aug. 9
From: 6:30pm to 8:30 pm
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Parking in rear or next door at the Salvation Army

This event is cosponsored by:
The Free Press, The Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism, the Central Ohio Green Education Fund and The Neighborhood Network

for more information contact:
Anita Rios 419-243-8772 rhannon@toast.net

Robert Fitrakis 614-253-2571, truth@freepress.org

In 2001, Michael L. Connell of GovTech Solutions, L.L.C., a notoriously partisan GOP operative and Bush family confidant, was selected to re-organize the Capitol Hill IT network. Under the guise of selecting a female-owned IT company (Connells wife Heather is listed as the owner), former Congressman and convicted felon Bob Ney reportedly arranged for Connell to be the man behind the firewall for the U.S. House of Representatives. Connells role and activities need to be investigated by putting Connell under oath and examining how arguably one of the countrys most zealously partisan IT specialists managed to land the contract and be allowed access to this electronic communication system.

Initially, Connells forays into partisan politics had very public ups and downs. Connell got his big break in 1987 as a staff member for former CIA Director and Vice President George H.W. Bushs successful campaign for president. He programmed and developed an advanced delegate tracking system for Republican National Convention in 1988. With no presidential campaign in 1990, Connell emerged in partisan politics, this time in a well-publicized scandal. On November 11, 1990, Senator Dan Coats (R-IN) fired Connell for his role in a push polling scheme that Coats denounced as clearly unethical. Next, Connell resurfaced as a congressional staffer and mouthpiece as U.S. Rep. Martin R. Hokes (R-OH) Communication Director in 1993-4.

In 1996 election year, Connells back at partisan campaign IT activity. His newly formed New Media Communications began providing design makeovers and software for Republican candidates and organizations in Ohio and Illinois. Public records reflect that he specifically worked on implementing databases and web services for John Bohners (R-OH) Freedom Project PAC, John Kasichs (R-OH) Pioneer PAC, and Dick Armey’s (R-TX) Majority Leaders Fund. Also during this period he did computer work for right-wing ideologue David Horowitzs Center for the Study of Popular Culture and the website FrontPageMag.com.

Tom Brazatis of the Cleveland Plain Dealer described Connell as an Internet consultant in 1998 for the winning campaigns of governors Bob Taft in Ohio and Jeb Bush in Florida. The article stated that Connell told the Plain Dealer that he had been hired to do special internet projects for George W. Bush. Connell declined to be more specific, noted the Plain Dealers 2000 article.

After Jeb Bush won the governors office, Connell received various Florida IT contracts from the governors office, Florida Department of Education and Community Affairs, and did computer work for the Florida Republican Party. A few months after Bushs 1998 Florida victory, New Media Communications merged with GOP lobbyist and operative Thomas J. Synhorst and formed DCI/New Media L.L.C. in Richfield, Ohio. Synhorst is listed as a co-founder of GovTech. Connell designed Jeb.org, JebWear.com, and GOPWear.com during that election cycle.

Im loyal to my friends and Im loyal to the Bush family read a Connell quote in Inside Business magazine, November 2, 1999.

Crains Cleveland Business reported when Connell created GovTech Solutions in 2001 he told them he had decided to roll out a separate company for its political work because government and corporations are ëtwo animals different enough to have it make sense. Connell told Crains that his GovTech Solutions is the only private-sector company to gain permission from HIR [House Information Resources] to place its servers behind the firewall

One has to wonder about the implications of the premier partisan campaign IT man, steadfastly loyal to the countrys most well-known security-industrial complex and CIA family, serving as the man behind the U.S. Congress firewall.

According to the Federal Election Commission, Connells company New Media Communications received more than $800,000 from the Bush-Cheney Re-Election Campaign between January 2003 and October 2004. During the same period New Media Communications brought in $1.2 million in contracts from Republican congressional candidates, political parties, and the National Rifle Association, according to the Akron Beacon Journal on November 24, 2004.

SourceWatch notes that Connell developed the websites for the House Intelligence, Judiciary, Financial Services, Ways and Means, and Administration Committees. According to SourceWatch, Connell teamed up with R. Rebecca Donatelli, Chair of the D.C.-based Campaign Solutions, to form Connell Donatelli Inc. (CD Inc.) as a specialized online advertising agency in July 2004. One of CD, Inc.s first activities was to become the registrant, administrator and tech organizer for the anti-Kerry group Swiftboat Veterans for Truths website swiftboatvetsfortruth.org.

Connell also handled the IT system work for the Bush-Cheney Re-election Campaign and worked for Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell in designing the system that allowed the real time outsourcing of Ohios presidential vote count to a Chattanooga, Tennessee server site. The blog ePluribus Media deserves great credit for breaking this key story. The Tennessee servers at the old Pioneer Bank building was a massive repository of Republican and conservative websites.

An article about Connells partisan IT activities in George W. Bushs hometown newspaper, the Crawford, Texas Lone Star Iconoclast, invokes the specter of the Watergate scandal. It notes that Theres Ohio in 2004 when his [Connells] company (SmartTech) ran election results through his computers before releasing them to Ken Blackwells Secretary of State office.

The Iconoclast pointed out in that December 18, 2007 article entitled Plumbers 2.0 that top Bush operatives, including Karl Rove, emailed plans for dismissing eight U.S. attorneys using the accounts set up by Connell gwb43.com and georgebush.com. As ePluribus Media put it, In the virtual worlds of computer security, networking and email, the lines separating the inner workings of the current government in Washington D.C. and the outer world of partisan politics exist only in theory.

The IT cyberstructures created by Connell remain in place for the 2008 election. On February 22, 2008, the Akron Beacon Journal reported Connells team helped develop the John McCain for President website, just as it helped create the website for the last two Bush presidential campaigns.

While the Republicans tell us to pay no attention to the man behind the congressional firewall, that hes just another government contractor, Connell is thinking long-term. When asked by Campaign and Elections magazine in June 2004 what he wished to be doing in ten years, he replied that his goal was to be in a senior position in the campaign to elect Rick Santorum president of the United States. He also cited among his political heroes, Saint Paul because he . . . leveraged Roman citizenship to fuel the expansion of the early church and he cited George W. Bush because he had the courage to publicly share his faith.

–
Bob Fitrakis has a Ph.D. in political science and was an election observer in the Ohio 2004 general election and Ohio’s 2008 primary. Originally published by The Free Press at http://freepress.org.

Uh oh, Umberto. This is getting all too predictable. Sunday’s Cleveland Plain Dealer reports that everybody’s favorite suspected minority front company, Banks Carbone Construction, is purchasing liability insurance through the Fedeli Group.

Umberto Fedeli, chair of the Ohio Turnpike Commission, is the sole owner of the Fedeli Group Insurance Company. Now, just ’cause the selling of over-priced insurance as a condition of getting contracts and business is a standard organized crime scheme, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions here. You see, that would be “anti-Italian.” Just ask Governor George Voinovich, who appointed Fedeli to the Turnpike Commission in 1991.

Recall again that the Guv’s original choice, Carmen Parise-a known Mafia associate and loan shark-withdrew from consideration after his shady past was made public. Up stepped Umberto. A former organized crime contract launderer and confidential source previously told Columbus Alive about Fedeli’s alleged ties to Youngstown and Cleveland Mafia families in an attempt to dissuade the paper from further reporting on Fedeli. A sporting sort, the source said, “Let me know if you’re going to keep reporting on this so I can make book on how long you live.”

Anyway, since becoming Turnpike chair in 1992, Fedeli has steadfastly refused to disclose his insurance agency clients who do business with the turnpike, nor will he say how much cash he’s raking in from these accounts. Fedeli failed to reveal on his required 1995 financial disclosure statement that both Banks Carbone and Ralph C. Tyler PEPS Inc., an engineering firm, began purchasing his liability insurance just before they got a piece of the turnpike $650 million project to add a lane each way between Youngstown and Toledo.

As previously reported in this column, another turnpike contractor, S.E. Johnson Companies, received a $32 million turnpike construction contract earlier this year. You can guess who they switched their insurance to in July. You’re in good hands with Umberto!

More on McGreevy

Poor Mr. McGreevy. He just wants to run as Mr. Clean Government-type against dirty ol’ “Mean Gene” Watts and Mary Jo Kilroy. But questions keep popping up about theft charges that Assistant County Prosecutor Dianne Kurilchick dismissed.

Franklin County Court of Common Pleas documents indicate that instead of representing the “people’s interest,” Kurilchick seemed to act more like McGreevy’s personal defense counsel. McGreevy, perhaps believing his own political propaganda, wanted to act as his own counsel. Instead of going in for the easy kill, Kurilchick repeatedly had the trial delayed and then sought “diversion” for McGreevy. The diversion plan is open to first-time felony offenders usually requiring restitution and community service for later expunging of the record.

According to a Common Pleas judge, McGreevy was found “unfit” for the diversion program because of his “attitude.” The fearless county prosecutor’s office dismissed the felony theft indictment against McGreevy on June 18,1996 so that he can conveniently run his ever-so ethical and clean campaign for state senate.

In dismissing the case, Mike Miller’s office cited the following reason: “state believes this is an unauthorized use of property, not theft.” McGreevy was miffed that a subcontractor hadn’t performed the work he was allegedly paid for, thus Mr. Clean lifted the man’s tools from his vehicle at a local eatery. Maybe if McGreevy wins his campaign as an Independent for state senate he can vote to send a public contract to Banks Carbone and they can finish the construction project for him.

Derailing the Mobile Chernobyl

The list of local municipalities passing resolutions in opposition to a multi-state nuclear waste dump in Ohio keeps growing. It’s damn near a full-blown movement. So far resolutions have been passed by Cleveland, Cincinnati, Bedford Heights, Brook Park, Woodmere, Brooklyn, Strongsville, Oakwood, and Painesville Township.

Let’s see. Cleveland. . . Cincinnati. . . what big city starting with a “C” is missing? Maybe the roll-over-and-play-dead lapdogs on the Columbus City Council are waiting for cues from Mr. “All Environmental Laws Are Unfunded Mandates” Mayor. Yep, maybe “Landfill” Lashutka has a cozy little site in mind in Franklin County for the radioactive waste dump. After all, he’s opposed to recycling because there’s LOTS of room left in those landfills. And there’s all those friendly waste haulers who make illegal donations to Ohio politicians who need work! And maybe Banks Carbone could build the nuke dump, too! And Umberto Fedeli could sell the insurance! That’s the ticket.

Oh, I forgot. Nuclear accidents are uninsurable. Sorry, Umberto.

Arnebeck will also “be providing copies of document hold notices to the U.S .Chamber Institute for Legal Reform and the U.S. Justice Department for Karl Rove emails from the White House.”

This case has the potential to put some of the most powerful people in the country in jail, according to Arnebeck, as he was joined by a well-respected, life-long Republican computer security expert who charged that the red flags seen during Ohio’s 2004 Presidential Election would have been cause for “a fraud investigation in a bank, but it doesn’t when it comes to our vote.”

“This entire system is being programmed in secret by programmers who have no oversight by anybody,” the expert charged, as Arnebeck detailed allegations of complicity by a number of powerful GOP operatives and companies who had unique access both to the election results as reported in 2004, as well as to U.S. House and Senate computer networks even today.

The presser was attended by some of the corporate-controlled media, including the head of the Ohio AP bureau, the Columbus Dispatch, and IndyMedia. Listening in by phone were ABC News, our friends from RAW STORY, and me, your humble blogger. I recorded the presser, so I have no links for the quotes in this post, but I transcribed them word-for-word and can vouch for their accuracy.

One of the more delightful and interesting quotes comes from Arnebeck, concerning what he expects to discover as the stay is lifted: “[W]e anticipate Mr. Rove will be identified as having engaged in a corrupt, ongoing pattern of corrupt activities specifically affecting the situation here in Ohio”…

According to Arnebeck, his expert witness, Stephen Spoonamore, “works for credit card companies chasing data thieves, identity thieves around the globe, and also consults with government agencies including the Secret Service, the Pentagon, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in criminal matters. [He's] really one of the top, and in fact the top private cop in the world on the subject of data security.”

First, some background. The King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case was filed on August 31, 2006. At issue was “whether the rights, privileges, and immunities guaranteed to Plaintiffs by the Civil Rights Act, and the First, Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution have been violated by the past and ongoing conduct of Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell in connection with past elections in Ohio.”

A stay was previously entered into on joint motion of the parties, Ohio’s Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner and the plaintiffs, to support settlement discussions in the case. “At one point,” Arnebeck noted this morning, “this was interrupted when the Secretary wanted to bring all the ballots that had been ordered preserved by Judge Marbley, bring them in to one location. When the ballots came in, there was significant omissions and reports of the destruction of some of the ballots.”

The BRAD BLOG reported previously on some of some of the ballots missing from 56 of Ohio’s 88 counties, despite the federal court order.

Arnebeck explained that part of the reason for the stay, at the time, was to allow the Ohio Attorney General to proceed first, as provided in Ohio House Bill 3 which states, in part:

…the attorney general may initiate criminal proceedings for election fraud under section 3599.42 of the Revised Code which results from a violation of any provision of Title XXXV of the Revised Code, other than Chapter 3517. of the Revised Code, involving voting, an initiative or referendum petition process, or the conducting of an election, by presenting evidence of criminal violations in question to the prosecuting attorney of any county in which the violations may be prosecuted. If the prosecuting attorney does not prosecute the violations within a reasonable time or requests the attorney general to do so, the attorney general may proceed with the prosecution of the violations with all of the rights, privileges, and powers conferred by law on a prosecuting attorney, including, but not limited to, the power to appear before a grand jury and to interrogate witnesses before a grand jury.
Arnebeck said that the Attorney General’s office said they were ready to begin the investigation of the 2004 presidential election in Ohio, and Arnebeck said he submitted a great deal of material to them, including “Bob’s [Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman's] book on what happened in Ohio, documentation of the exit poll discrepancy, [and] John Conyers’ report to the Congress which was the factual basis for the challenge to the electoral votes of the Ohio vote in January of 2005.”

About a month later, the Attorney General’s office contacted Arnebeck and asked him, “Who do you want to indict?”

Arnebeck explained that the AG’s “concept of looking at this from a criminal standpoint was not to convene a grand jury and cast the net broadly and use the grand jury process to investigate and narrow the focus into the question of who may have tampered with those votes. But rather they wanted us to come to them with a more focused case.”

Arnebeck then informed the AG that they were going to file the motion to lift the stay so that the plaintiffs “could proceed with the civil case in order to collect discovery to do that” and create a more focused case.

Fitrakis, who was also at today’s presser, said that early on they went to Washington and met with the House Judiciary staff who agreed to come to Ohio in early March of 2007. Fitrakis informed Ohio’s then-Attorney General Mark Dann’s office, but the office never got back to them.

Arnebeck also explained that he met with Conyers within the last two weeks. He made the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee aware of what they have: new resources and information, and the assistance of Spoonamore to help the state of Ohio, the Congress, and the court understand what needs to be done to help secure the 2008 election.

Also, Arnebeck has sent out document “hold” notices. A hold notice is, essentially, a letter sent to the parties of a lawsuit informing them of their legal obligation to hold on to (and not destroy) all relevant documents, including electronic documents such as emails, pending the outcome of the suit.

Hold letters have been sent to the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, asking them to hold documents relating to their activities to use corporate money to influence the Ohio Supreme Court elections. Another hold letter was sent to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey asking that he advise the federal government to hold emails from Karl Rove.

Arnebeck said “We think [Rove] is an individual who has been at the center of both the use of corporate money to attack state Attorneys General and their elections and candidates for the Supreme Court and their elections in the states, and also in the manipulation of the election process.

“We expressed concern about the reports that Mr. Rove destroyed his emails and suggested that we want the duplicates that should exist [be put] under the control of the Secret Service and be sure that those are retained, as well as those on the receiving end in the Justice Department and elsewhere, that those documents are retained for purposes of this litigation, in which we anticipate Mr. Rove will be identified as having engaged in a corrupt, ongoing pattern of corrupt activities specifically affecting the situation here in Ohio.”

Arnebeck said they are prepared “to go after the issues of election integrity in a very targeted way, as opposed to a casting of a fishing net. We’re able to do some ‘rifle shots.’”

Along those lines, Arnebeck plans to subpoena and depose GOP operative Michael (Mike) L. Connell, who as described by SourceWatch, is….

Chief Political Strategist and CEO of New Media Communications, Inc., a Republican website development and internet services firm based in Richfield, OH.

New Media’s GOP clients are a “‘Who’s Who’ of Republican politics”, having provided campaign web services and Internet strategy for Bush-Cheney 2000/2004, as well as Republicans such as Dick Armey, Spencer Abraham for Senate 2000, Heather Wilson for Congress 2000/2002/2004, Rick Santorum for Senate 2000/2006, and John Thune for Senate 2002/2004 to name just a few. New Media also designed GOP.com for the Republican National Committee, RGA.org for the Republican Governors Association, and between two and three dozen state GOP sites.

According to Arnebeck, Connell “[D]esigns websites and he manages the information technology. Interestingly, he’s done this for the Bush campaign of 2000 and the Bush campaign of 2004. Simultaneously, he was doing IT work for the State of Florida in 2000, and for the office of the [Ohio] Secretary of State in 2004.

“And just think of this: here’s a person who is an instrument of a major presidential campaign simultaneously setting up the hosting of the votes in the Ohio election.”

Arnebeck added: “We’re not saying that he [Connell] did anything wrong in the sense of his conduct, but we’re saying that these conflicting roles raise some issues.”

According to Arnebeck, “Mr. Connell also worked with the various front groups for the US Chamber, tobacco industry front groups, and starting in 2000 after the New Hampshire primary, there was an unleashing of a variety of these Washington-based lobbying groups that created these phony grass-roots groups that attack candidates, supposedly independently. We believe there is clear evidence of a coordinated campaign in which Mr. Rove is involved, in which Mr. Connell is an instrument. And this emphasizes his value of a witness in bringing some of this together.”

Indeed, Arnebeck believes that Connell’s role in the suit, at least at first, will be that of a witness. “He, by virtue of his involvement in a variety of these roles that we’re concerned with — as a witness, he can provide a perspective. He’s the one person who can bring a great deal of information together to better inform folks of what happened and what some of the vulnerabilities are and where some of the data security breaches may have occurred.”

One of the more frightening aspects of Connell’s work is that his company, Gov Tech Solutions, was the first private company to be allowed to put servers behind the firewall of the Congressional computer systems. This led to him creating and managing several powerful Committee IT networks, including those for the House Intelligence Committee, the Ways and Means Committee, the Judiciary Committee, the Ethics Committee, and the House Committee on Rules. Of course, it is completely possible that the firewall could have been created with secret security gaps that can be exploited to hack into any congressional computer. If that has happened, every computer in any senate or congressional office is subject to hacking by Bush/Republican operatives.

Currently, Connell is running the IT operations for the McCain campaign. Isn’t that a comforting thought…

Expert advisor Stephen Spoonamore, who among other things designs and runs computer programs to analyze and detect fraudulent financial activity for the world’s leading credit card companies, said, “You cannot secure electronic voting. You set up a bunch of grandmothers to put together a bunch of computers once every two years, basically those machines are architected in such a manner to maximize their capacity [for] fraud.

“In the 2004 election, from my perspective, on any of the programs we run for any of my credit card clients, the results from the 14 counties, those are the sort of results that would instantaneously launch a credit card fraud investigation or a banking settlement investigation.”

Spoonamore’s reference to the “14 counties” refers to the so-called “Connelly Anomaly” in which down-ticket candidates got more votes than John Kerry. The name comes from the candidacy of C. Ellen Connelly, an African-American woman who was running for the Ohio Supreme Court in 2004. She was endorsed by pro-choice and civil rights groups, and was relatively unknown to Ohio voters, in addition to being vastly outspent by her opponent in the campaign. Yet, somehow Connelly got scores of thousands more votes than did John Kerry at the very top of the ticket.

Arnebeck said that “if you adjust for the [Connelly] anomaly or that situation, it’s enough votes to have changed the outcome of the election. So the focus of our efforts, in cooperation with the Secretary of State, would be to find out who is responsible for that.”

He targeted the Rapp family and the Triad Voting Systems company, who ran the tabulators in a number of Ohio counties in 2004, as those who need to be closely investigated.

“If it’s the Rapp family and the programming of the [Triad] tabulators,” Arnebeck stated, “we need to know that so that the Rapp family will be closely monitored, if not put in jail, before the 2008 election.”

Spoonamore continued, “I am extremely confident in [our] analysis of the 2004 election anomalies because of the way the tabulators were programmed, and all were programmed by the Rapp family on Triad systems. So in my opinion, there should be an investigation launched into exactly what happened.

“There was an enormous number of strange activities in which Triad and the Rapp family were running around the state taking hard drives out of computers, putting in new hard drives, and posting poll results. And the reason all this was going on, I’m quite confident, was that the hard drives they were pulling out had fraudulent coding. Simple as that.”

“Certainly if that happened at one of our banks, you could be arrested.”

Spoonamore has told Arnebeck and the plaintiffs that there is a clear pattern of fraud. He said the Ohio 2004 election was “a frighteningly un-auditable system.”

“When, in the Green Party recount, all of the sudden [people are] driving around the state pulling and swapping hard drives, they should have been in handcuffs that day,” argued Spoonamore.

Arnebeck noted that Triad Voting Systems “has never been interrogated under oath in either a civil or a criminal context, to the best of our knowledge. There was an FBI investigation launched at the request of John Conyers, and very shortly a letter coming back from the FBI stating that they had found no problem. But it was very minimal and it appears to have been a politicized investigation, not a normal serious investigation by the FBI.”

Spoonamore said that he knows the key FBI cyber investigation people “quite well, and they were certainly never involved [in the investigation Conyers requested], there was no hardware ever involved. So whatever investigation was launched, it was topical, but they never examined the equipment.”

When the stay on the King Lincoln case is lifted, Arnebeck intends to depose Connell, key members of the Rapp family, and says that he will make Spoonamore available as an expert witness and advisor. After discovery, they will amend their complaint as needed and “focus on corrective actions that are necessary for the protection of the 2008 election.”

More quotes from today’s presser…

Spoonamore on vote counting: “What happens at the end of the day, all those votes are thrown into a magic box with one troll inside, the troll jumps out and says ‘Here are your results! Ta-Da!!’ That’s it. There’s no validation of the code, there’s no authentication.

“With the Connelly Anomaly, if that was in a banking environment, instantaneously — instantaneously! — the entire system inside that box would be frozen. Any programmer who reviewed any of that code would be alerted, all the executives assisting in that process would be alerted, the hard drives would be frozen in place, extracted and immediately placed in forensic analysis. ‘Cause somebody did something major.”

Spoonamore again: “None of us [the American people] really want to confront the fact that there appears to be an extremely coordinated effort by a very small group of people to rig elections and take control of the executive branch.”

“You can spend all day every day looking at this stuff and saying, ‘Well that would certainly launch a fraud investigation in a bank, but it doesn’t when it comes to our vote.’ Why?”

When asked by a reporter to respond to the fact that both Democratic and Republican Secretaries of State and elected officials will say that our elections are run on a bi-partisan system, Spoonamore responded, “No it’s not. It’s not a bi-partisan system. This entire system is being programmed in secret by programmers who have no oversight by anybody. In my opinion, both sides [Democrats and Republicans] have no friggin’ clue what they’re talking about.”

“The person who programs the code inside the machine will decide the results.”

Spoonamore was asked, “Are you a Republican?” And his priceless response was “Yes, I’ve been a life-long member of the Republican party. Sadly.” That prompted a burst of laughter from all assembled.

When a reporter asked Cliff Arnebeck what specifically he alleges Karl Rove did, Arnebeck said, “Karl Rove was involved in the Bush campaign for president in 2000. Our understanding is when they lost the New Hampshire primary, they were quite concerned and they made a decision to take the gloves off. Mr. Rove contact[ed] people with whom he had worked with in the industry, Grover Norquist and others, on behalf of the tobacco industry.

“At the time, the tobacco industry was fighting the Clinton administration $260 billion class action RICO case. That industry alone had a tremendous incentive to do whatever was necessary to kill that lawsuit. And George Bush, on Rove’s recommendation, positioned himself as a reformer with results. Not meaning the McCain reform with campaign finance reform, but the Bush reform in Texas where they changed the composition of the Texas Supreme Court to be business-friendly and to effectively immunize corporations from meaningful tort liability.

“They turned these groups loose in South Carolina, they won South Carolina with a lot of independent expenditures and dirty tricks.

“Rove was the architect of a strategy to, in effect, undo the rule of law, turn business loose, free of government regulation.

“We certainly want to take his [Rove's] deposition. His deposition has never been taken. Mr. Conyers is currently seeking his deposition in regard to what he did…in terms of going after Governor Siegelman in Alabama. And Mr. Rove is currently evading the congressional subpoena for his testimony.”

Cross-posted at Velvet Revolution and at The BRAD BLOG.

http://www.velvetrevolution.us/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/165

Ohio Attorney Files Motion to Lift Stay in Ohio Case of King Lincoln Bronzeville v Blackwell:

“I heartily recommend this documentary. It should be watched by every citizen of the U.S.“
Dale Allen Pfeiffer. Author “Eating Fossil Fuels”

“Oil Smoke & Mirrors” offers a sobering critique of our perceived recent history, of our present global circumstances, and of our shared future in light of imminent, under-reported and mis-represented energy production constraints. Through a series of impressively candid, informed and articulate interviews, this film argues that the bizzare events surrounding the 9/11 attacks, and the equally bizzare prosecution of the so-called “war on terror”, can be more credibly understood in the wider context of an imminent and critical divergence between available global oil aupply and and global oil demand. The picture “Oil, Smoke & Mirrors” paints is one of a tragically hyper-mediated global-political culture, which, for whatever reason, demonstrably disassociates itself from the values it claims to represent. While the ideas presented in this film can at first seem daunting, it’s ultimate assertion is that these challenges can indeed be met and surpassed, if, but only if, we can find the courage to perceive them.

253-2571
truth@freepress.org
http://oilsmokeandmirrors.com/

Socialize and network with progressive friends!
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1000 E. Main Street, firehouse #11
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truth@freepress.org
253-2571
Sponsored by the Free Press and the Central Ohio Green Education Fund

Are we a big ol’ lucky dog of a city, or what? I couldn’t be more excited about Saturday’s Business section front-page story in the Dispatch. The lead told us: “Rickenbacker International Airport will begin receiving cargo shipments from Malaysia as a result of service added by Evergreen International Airlines.”

Thank God we finally got somebody to replace the former Southern Air Transport (SAT) after the company went bankrupt amidst allegations that its pilots and planes were used in CIA drug-running operations.

Evergreen began racing “time-sensitive cargo” from Kuala Lumpur to Rickenbacker on Sunday. They’re aiding some of our best corporate citizens “…such as The Limited and Eddie Bauer,” according to the Dispatch, where no doubt garments are made in state-of-the-art cheery facilities by well-paid Third World employees. I was so excited I took a few minutes to research Evergreen’s history.

Evergreen, originally based in McMinnville, Oregon, expanded from a small helicopter in the 1960s “to a major international airline with secret government contracts” according to the Portland, Oregon Free Press. The Oregonian reported that “Evergreen Airline Company, Evergreen International Airlines, Inc., was built on remnants of two older airlines—one a wholly owned CIA proprietary, or front company, and the other a virtual branch of the U.S. Forest Service that for years secretly had helped the CIA recruit paramilitary personnel.”

In 1975, after a series of embarrassing revelations during Senator Frank Church’s investigation of the CIA, the “company” liquidated Intermountain Aviation Inc. of Marana, Arizona near Tucson. Intermountain’s assets were purchased by two Oregon companies that the CIA selected: Evergreen and Rosenbalm Aviation Inc. But Evergreen was the big winner. One of the CIA’s top aviation officers, the legendary covert ops expert George Doole worked for Evergreen as a director. Prior to this, Doole managed all of the CIA’s proprietary airlines. The CIA selected Evergreen to take over the agency’s airbase at Marana. An investigation by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Oregonian documented that “The CIA offered Intermountain’s substantial Arizona assets only to Evergreen.”

What followed was a decade of privileged treatment and government contracts to the airline. Evergreen purchased the CIA’s Arizona assets at a fraction of their real worth. An Arthur Andersen and Co. financial statement indicates that Evergreen’s assets nearly doubled from $25 million to more than $45 million one year after the deal. Evergreen’s revenues rose from $8-10 million range in 1975 to $77.9 million by 1979, according to U.S. Civil Aeronautics Board documents.

The Washington Post reported on Evergreen’s CIA connection in 1980 after it was chosen to fly the former Shah of Iran from Panama to Cairo.

In 1984, CBS News reported that the CIA was using a “network of private companies” to fly military weapons to Central America to support the Contra rebels trying to overthrow the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. CBS named both Southern Air and Evergreen Air as involved in the arms shipments. The day after the broadcast, the Washington Post reported that “Private airlines, including Evergreen, were owned by the CIA during the Vietnam War, but the agency has said that the airline has since been sold.”

The New York Times jumped in a day later with the following lead: “The Central Intelligence Agency is using small private airlines to fly guns and other military supplies to United States-backed forces in Central America, and false flight plans are sometimes filed to cover up the shipments….” The Times mentioned Evergreen Air by name.

When Doole died on March 9, 1985, the Times reported that Evergreen International Aviation in Marana placed a bronze plaque on the wall acknowledging Doole’s more than 20-year service with the CIA. Like Rickenbacker, the huge airfield formerly operated by the CIA was now owned by the county government (Pinal County, AZ). The plaque noted that Doole was “founder, chief executive officer & board of directors of Air America, Inc., Air Asia Company Ltd., Civil Air Transport Company Ltd.” Air America’s planes were used, according to U.S. Intelligence documents, to facilitate the transportation of opium from Laos to U.S. military bases in the Philippines and Thailand during the Vietnam War. The airline’s nickname was “Opium Air.”

Following the incident when Sandinistas shot down a Southern Air Transport C-123K cargo plane that led to the Iran-Contra arms and drug-running scandal, the Washington Post reported that SAT President William G. Langton had been previously associated with Evergreen International Airlines. The Oregonian investigative report came out in 1988 revealing how well Evergreen Airlines was doing. But by 1994, the airline had defaulted on $125 million in junk bonds, according to the Portland Free Press.

In 1997, Evergreen was caught up in a huge scandal when scores of former military planes were diverted to covert CIA operations under the guise of “firefighting.” The Free Press reported that Evergreen International Airlines was involved in the covert activities. Gary Eitel, a decorated Vietnam combat pilot and law-enforcement officer, found employment at Evergreen and “observed that card-carrying CIA personnel were on Evergreen property acting as Evergreen employees.”

In last Saturday’s paper, the Dispatch’s last sentence stated that: “Still, Rickenbacker officials are hoping for even more cargo activity, and [Jeff] Clark said Evergreen is in the process of determining whether it will operate additional flights from Columbus to South America.”

Columbia may be a good place to start for those “time-sensitive” deliveries, eh?

They’re here. Yes, indeed. New evidence published in this week’s issue of The Nation directly links Columbus’s own Southern Air Transport to the Contra cocaine network reputedly protected by the Central Intelligence Agency.
In December 1985, Robert Perry, now the director of The Nation Institute’s Investigative Unit, co-wrote the first news story about Contra drug trafficking for the Associated Press. After the October 5, 1986 crash in Nicaragua of a Southern Air Transport aircraft that was carrying arms to the U.S.-backed Contras, Perry flew to Nicaragua and copied down the entries in the crashed plane’s flight logs. The entries made by co-pilot Wallace “Buzz” Sawyer, who, along with two others, died in the crash, indicated that Sawyer flew a Southern Air L-382 from Miami to Barranquilla, Colombia on October 2, 4, and 6, 1985.

In 1986, Wanda Palacio broke with Colombia’s Medellin Cartel and became an FBI informant. According to The Nation, Palacio also informed Massachusetts Senator John Kerry that she had witnessed cocaine being loaded onto Southern Air Transport (SAT) planes, an admitted CIA-owned airline from 1960-’73, then under contract to the Pentagon. On September 26, 1986, Senator Kerry hand-delivered an 11-page statement from Palacio to William Weld, then an assistant attorney general at the Justice Department. Palacio asserts that she was with cocaine kingpin Jorge Ochoa at the airport in Barranquilla in ‘83 as a cocaine shipment was loaded onto a SAT plane, according to The Nation. She claims that Ochoa told her it was “a CIA plane and that he was exchanging guns for drugs.”

Palacio claims in early October 1985 she again witnessed Ochoa’s aides loading an SAT plane with cocaine. She also confirmed to Kerry staffers that Sawyer was one of the SAT pilots she saw loading cocaine in Barranquilla in early October. SAT officials admitted that Sawyer flew their planes, but steadfastly deny involvement in cocaine smuggling. Not that we would expect them to admit it. On August 7, 1987 in a Senate deposition, Palacio stated that “the FBI stopped working with me all of the sudden because of this Southern Air Transport deal…Justice doesn’t want to hear me.”

With the CIA-Contra drug connection now national news after the publication of Gary Webb’s series in the San Jose Mercury News, and recently reprinted in the Dispatch, questions need to be asked about the use of taxpayer’s money to bring the infamous Southern Air Transport to Rickenbacker Air Base. Webb documents how the Contra cocaine network spread crack into the inner cities of Cincinnati and Dayton. Evidence suggests that there was clearly a Colombian cocaine connection in Columbus in the late ’80s and early ’90s. In 1990, the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department under Earl Smith made the single largest drug bust in its history when they confiscated 48 pounds of cocaine from Fernando Solar.

Solar, according to Smith, led the Sheriff’s Department to New York and an apartment building where vehicles were being compartmentalized for drug trafficking. They issued a warrant for one Carlos Wagner. Wagner was later detained by U.S. Customs Agents who confiscated half a million dollars from him and allowed him to return to Colombia. He was later arrested in Houston when he re-entered the U.S. Wagner turned out to be a “mule,” Smith says, for Colombian drug dealer Rudolphio Trahiellio in San Francisco.

In 1992, the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department played a vital role in Trahiello’s arrest in cracking one of the largest drug rings in the U.S. Solar, Wagner and Trahiello are reportedly in prison, but Southern Air Transport remains at Rickenbacker Air Base, courtesy of Ohio taxpayer’s dollars. Why?

Buck up In the September 4 Columbus Alive, I wrote a news article entitled “The High Price of Bucking the System” about the firing of Voinovich administration official Joe Gilyard. Gilyard, former director of the Office of Criminal Justice Services, repeatedly claimed that Voinovich Company lobbyist Phil Hamilton continually pressured him to illegally release money for Voinovich Company projects. When I asked him why there was so much pressure, Gilyard claimed that “Pauly Voinovich and [the governor's former chief of staff and former Voinovich Companies vice president] Paul Mifsud were in a hurry to repay money to a savings and loan they had busted out.”

Gilyard offered no substantiation. But, a Cleveland Plain Dealer article dated September 8, 1994 provides additional insight. Seems Pauly defaulted on a $6.8 million construction loan for a housing project in 1990, just before Gilyard was appointed. The lender was Columbus-based Mid-America Federal Savings & Loan, which later failed and was taken over by the Resolution Trust Company. Dale Bissonette, a former chief financial officer of the Voinovich Company, pleaded guilty to bank fraud in connection with the case. Good thing we got Pauly V building the Franklin County jail for $2 million-oops! forgot the overruns-$9 million. Gilyard was fired; Voinovich is at large in Franklin County. Stop him before he builds again.

Channel 4’s investigative series “Trouble on 12th Avenue” aired last week. Producer Joel Chow and investigative reporter Rich Skidmore provided viewers with some of the year’s most provocative video footage. Despite the standard denials, obfuscations and wild tales told by police officials, their own videotapes tell a different story. Still even more damning is the Internal Affairs paper trail left by the officers accused of “excessive use of force” on May 18.

The series’ first segment focused on an incident involving Kevin Lennon. Lieutenant David Wood, who investigated Lennon’s complaint against Officer Robert Coffman, wrote in his June 7, 1996 memo to Chief James Jackson that: “When I first viewed the film it appeared that Officer Coffman’s strike to the subject’s back was improper. After careful review, this investigation [sic] it is obvious that his actions were necessary and proper. I recommend no further action necessary.” No surprise.

The police tapes, obtained by Channel 4, clearly show Officer Coffman coming in and punching Lennon as he’s being carried away by other cops. You can hear the words “Enough, Bob,” from a fellow officer, which brings what appears to be a swipe from Coffman towards the cop advocating professional behavior.

Coffman is not always keen on professionalism. On February 9, 1994, Coffman ran a license tag number for a Sergeant Watkins for “personal use.” He was “counseled.” Perhaps the police should have spoken with Becky West, who on April 17, 1993, was injured in Coffman’s custody. That was ruled an “accidental injury.” Or they could have talked with Tony Delpra who filed a complaint for an incident on May 13, 1991 when he was “struck in jaw” by Coffman. This was, of course, “justified.” Or they could have talked to three different mothers on two different occasions who charged that Coffman pointed his gun at kids during raids on their homes. And the list goes on.

Officer Michael Stalnaker knees Lennon on the tape. Another of Columbus’ finest, he has since 1987 either Maced or had 13 “excessive use of force” complaints. Whether it was an “unfounded” shove against Paul Collier “causing him to hit his head,” or the “justified” use of a “flashlight” against Robert Walker, or the “justified” kicking of Tim Hemmert in the stomach, for some reason citizens seem to unfairly single out Stalnaker. With all the “justified” force being used by the officer, it’s no wonder it slipped his mind to report he kicked Hemmert. His “written reprimand” was, no doubt, unwarranted. So many unruly citizens, so little time.

The second segment shows that there’s always time to take a young lad-in this case, George Sandrock-to “the whipping post.” Different officers; same pattern of behavior. Sandrock suffered contusions on his nose and upper left eye and a laceration over his right eye that required stitches. This, for not dispersing quickly enough while on a private porch behind party fencing per police instructions. According to police reports, Sandrock’s a real ass-kicker. He stood his ground, cussing out cops, despite “two verbal orders” directed at him by Officer Jimmie Barnes. After Macing Sandrock, in Barnes’ version, the youngster attacked his riot shield with his fist and head. Yes, indeed, Sandrock swung his “fist so hard at Officer Barnes that he lost his balance and fell into the riot shield.”

Just ask Officer Eric Moore, who attempted “to restrain Mr. Sandrock’s arms and legs while he was kicking and swinging his fist at the officers.” And Officer Martin Malone also saw Sandrock “resisting.” Now, anyone who saw the video saw the officers push Sandrock over the railing, hold him there, and beat the hell out of him. The Allman Brothers classic Whipping Post would have been appropriate background music. But who’s going to believe a lying punk like Sandrock when you have three officers like Barnes, Moore and Malone.

Since 1990, six citizens have complained after Barnes Maced them; three persons “accidentally injured” themselves in his custody in the last year and a half.

At least Moore “accidentally shot himself in the leg” and was reprimanded on April 1, 1990. Add to that nine Moore Macings- including Macing a man in Florida while Moore was on vacation. A written reprimand resulted from Moore’s Florida adventure. Stir in seven citizen complaints, all very similar, all found to be “unfounded” allegations. These involved “rude and obnoxious behavior,” “alleged theft,” and forcefully pulling police out of their cars. Toss in seven more force complaints, including pulling Joseph Cook from his car and putting a gun to his head, and three-including Sandrock-”accidentally injured” prisoner complaints in the last three years.

There’s still more with Malone: 17 complaints since 1987 for Macing, excessive use of force, and an injured prisoner.

And the third and final segment dealt with Criminal Justice student Shammas Jones who was videotaping the police activity away from the fray and was allegedly attacked by Officer David Dennison. Dennison’s attack on Jones was “justified.” Just like his 10 Macings since March 1993.

But how do they justify the police officer caught on tape shooting “knee-knockers”-rubber bullets designed to be shot into the ground and bounce up-directly at students and yelling, “There you go, eat that!”

Police investigators admit they came to their conclusions on “justified” Macing and use of force on 12th Avenue by only using the least damaging tape. This is unjustifiable.
CORRECTION
Last week Bob Bites Back mistakenly stated that Judge Deborah O’Neill had met with “the late J.F. Wolfe.” The column should have read “the late J.W. Wolfe.”

For three decades Vice President Dick Cheney conducted a secretive, behind-closed-doors campaign to give the president virtually unlimited wartime power. Finally, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Justice Department and the White House made a number of controversial legal decisions. Orchestrated by Cheney and his lawyer David Addington, the department interpreted executive power in an expansive and extraordinary way, granting President George W. Bush the power to detain, interrogate, torture, wiretap and spy — without congressional approval or judicial review.

“The vice president believes that Congress has very few powers to actually constrain the president and the executive branch,” said former Justice Department attorney Marty Lederman. “He believes the president should have the final word — indeed the only word
– on all matters within the executive branch.”

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/cheney/

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