Carole Cadwalladr Kicks Facebook's Ass-- The Petri Dish For Trump

Remember how Trump lied his ass off during the 2016 campaign about the "great healthcare" he would provide if voters elected him? No? You can watch him telling his health care lies here. Look at those morons behind him. Did the campaign rent them from Central Casting? How did he win? How? Yes, Hillary's horrible, and should have never been the nominee-- but not that horrible, not compared to what was then the alternative. I mean, even with the Russians cheating on his behalf-- which the Mueller report has now proven beyond any reasonable doubt-- Trump still got tens of millions of votes. Are there that many people that incredibly stupid? And, by the way, the CBO reported on Thursday that over a million Americans have lost their healthcare insurance since Trump occupied the White House. I wish I could say they're all Trump voters and will be incapacitated and unable to ever vote again. But...

In a Ted Talk this month in the Silicon Valley, U.K. journalist Carole Cadwalladr got into the details of how the Russians managed make sure Britain passed Brexit. As someone who has never looked at a Facebook ad in my life and as someone who thinks Facebook is primarily for pre-teens, it's almost unimaginable that a barrage of misleading Facebook ads targeted at vulnerable Brexit swing voters could have swung an election-- be it for Brexit or in the Trump/Clinton debacle. Cadwalladr called out those who she referred to as the "gods of Silicon Valley"-- the ones at Facebook in particular and by name-- for being on the wrong side of history and asked, ominously, "Are free and fair elections a thing of the past?"

She thinks so. I guess we'll find out next year, won't we? Please don't miss watching the Ted Talk; she's really excellent and enlightening. I mean what do you have better to do? Watch Game of Thrones or something?

Time For Paper Ballots-- So The Kremlin Can’t Steal The Next Election The Way They Stole 2016 For Trump. (Oh, You Didn’t Hear?)

Naive people-- really naive people-- have believed an American establishment desperate to pretend that the Kremlin didn’t steal the election for Trump. I’ve always thought they were fools and that Putin certainly stole the election for Trump, while Obama sat by with his dick in his hand. And then participated in a massive coverup to make Americans think their voting system was just fine and that all Putin did was hack the criminally-minded Debbie Wassermann Schultz-- she desreved it and worse, right?-- and release some silly e-mails and get some Albanian and Macedonian kids to monkey around with Facebook. Yeah, wanna buy a bridge?

A low key article in the NY Times yesterday scratched the surface of how Putin delivered America the devastating, debilitating blow of a Trumpanzee White House. Nicole Perlroth, Michael Wines and Matthew Rosenberg began their report in Durham. North Carolina is a swing state. Hillary was competitive there. Trump won the state’s crucial 15 electoral votes 2,339,603 (50.5%) to 2,162,074 (46.7%). Not that close. How’d that happen? Durham is a blue county. After winning the state in 2008, Obama lost North Carolina in 2012 2,275,853 (51%) to 2,178,388 (48%). But he kicked ass in Durham County-- 109,185 (76%) to 33,326 (23%) for Romney. Running against a sociopathic racist Hillary had every reason too think she would do better than Obama had-- and she did-- 118,783 (78.9%) to 27,879 (18.5%). She should have done even better, but… Durham County, of all counties, was targeted for some trouble.

The problems, wrote Perlroth, Wines and Rosenberg, "involved electronic poll books-- tablets and laptops, loaded with check-in software, that have increasingly replaced the thick binders of paper used to verify voters’ identities and registration status. [Susan Greenhalgh, a troubleshooter at a nonpartisan election monitoring group] knew that the company that provided Durham’s software, VR Systems, had been penetrated by Russian hackers months before. 'It felt like tampering, or some kind of cyberattack,' Ms. Greenhalgh said about the voting troubles in Durham."

[M]onths later, for Ms. Greenhalgh, other election security experts and some state officials, questions still linger about what happened that day in Durham as well as other counties in North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia and Arizona.

After a presidential campaign scarred by Russian meddling, local, state and federal agencies have conducted little of the type of digital forensic investigation required to assess the impact, if any, on voting in at least 21 states whose election systems were targeted by Russian hackers, according to interviews with nearly two dozen national security and state officials and election technology specialists.

The assaults on the vast back-end election apparatus-- voter-registration operations, state and local election databases, e-poll books and other equipment-- have received far less attention than other aspects of the Russian interference, such as the hacking of Democratic emails and spreading of false or damaging information about Mrs. Clinton. Yet the hacking of electoral systems was more extensive than previously disclosed, the New York Times found.

Beyond VR Systems, hackers breached at least two other providers of critical election services well ahead of the 2016 voting, said current and former intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the information is classified. The officials would not disclose the names of the companies.

Intelligence officials in January reassured Americans that there was no indication that Russian hackers had altered the vote count on Election Day, the bottom-line outcome. But the assurances stopped there.

Government officials said that they intentionally did not address the security of the back-end election systems, whose disruption could prevent voters from even casting ballots.

That’s partly because states control elections; they have fewer resources than the federal government but have long been loath to allow even cursory federal intrusions into the voting process.

That, along with legal constraints on intelligence agencies’ involvement in domestic issues, has hobbled any broad examination of Russian efforts to compromise American election systems. Those attempts include combing through voter databases, scanning for vulnerabilities or seeking to alter data, which have been identified in multiple states. Current congressional inquiries and the special counsel’s Russia investigation have not focused on the matter.

“We don’t know if any of the problems were an accident, or the random problems you get with computer systems, or whether it was a local hacker, or actual malfeasance by a sovereign nation-state,” said Michael Daniel, who served as the cybersecurity coordinator in the Obama White House. “If you really want to know what happened, you’d have to do a lot of forensics, a lot of research and investigation, and you may not find out even then.”

In interviews, academic and private election security experts acknowledged the challenges of such diagnostics but argued that the effort is necessary. They warned about what could come, perhaps as soon as next year’s midterm elections, if the existing mix of outdated voting equipment, haphazard election-verification procedures and array of outside vendors is not improved to build an effective defense against Russian or other hackers.

In Durham, a local firm with limited digital forensics or software engineering expertise produced a confidential report, much of it involving interviews with poll workers, on the county’s election problems. The report was obtained by The Times, and election technology specialists who reviewed it at the Times’ request said the firm had not conducted any malware analysis or checked to see if any of the e-poll book software was altered, adding that the report produced more questions than answers.

Neither VR Systems-- which operates in seven states beyond North Carolina-- nor local officials were warned before Election Day that Russian hackers could have compromised their software. After problems arose, Durham County rebuffed help from the Department of Homeland Security and Free & Fair, a team of digital election-forensics experts who volunteered to conduct a free autopsy. The same was true elsewhere across the country.

…While only a fraction of [Durham Co.] voters were turned away because of the e-poll book difficulties-- more than half of the county cast their ballots days earlier-- plenty of others were affected when the state mandated that the entire county revert to paper rolls on Election Day. People steamed as everything slowed. Voters gave up and left polling places in droves-- there’s no way of knowing the numbers, but they include more than a hundred North Carolina Central University students facing four-hour delays.

At a call center operated by the monitoring group Election Protection, Ms. Greenhalgh was fielding technical complaints from voters in Mississippi, Texas and North Carolina. Only a handful came from the first two states.

Her account of the troubles matches complaints logged in the Election Incident Reporting System, a tracking tool created by nonprofit groups. As the problems mounted, The Charlotte Observer reported that Durham’s e-poll book vendor was Florida-based VR Systems, which Ms. Greenhalgh knew from a CNN report had been hacked earlier by Russians. “Chills went through my spine,” she recalled.

The vendor does not make the touch-screen equipment used to cast or tally votes and does not manage county data. But without the information needed to verify voters’ identities and eligibility, which county officials load onto VR’s poll books, voters cannot cast ballots at all.

Details of the breach did not emerge until June, in a classified National Security Agency report leaked to The Intercept, a national security news site. That report found that hackers from Russia’s military intelligence agency, the G.R.U., had penetrated the company’s computer systems as early as August 2016, then sent “spear-phishing” emails from a fake VR Systems account to 122 state and local election jurisdictions. The emails sought to trick election officials into downloading malicious software to take over their computers.

The N.S.A. analysis did not say whether the hackers had sabotaged voter data. “It is unknown,” the agency concluded, whether Russian phishing “successfully compromised the intended victims, and what potential data could have been accessed.”

VR Systems’ chief operating officer, Ben Martin, said he did not believe Russian hackers were successful. He acknowledged that the vendor was a “juicy target,” given that its systems are used in battleground states including North Carolina, Florida and Virginia. But he said that the company blocked access from its systems to local databases, and employs security protocols to bar intruders and digital triggers that sound alerts if its software is manipulated.

On Election Day, as the e-poll book problems continued, Ms. Greenhalgh urged an Election Protection colleague in North Carolina to warn the state Board of Elections of a cyberattack and suggest that it call in the F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security. In an email, she also warned a Homeland Security election specialist of the problems. Later, the specialist told her Durham County had rejected the agency’s help.

When Ms. Greenhalgh, who works at Verified Voting, a nonprofit dedicated to election integrity, followed up with the North Carolina colleague, he reported that state officials said they would not require federal help.

“He said: ‘The state does not view this as a problem. There’s nothing we can do, so we’ve moved on to other things,’” Ms. Greenhalgh recalled. “Meanwhile, I’m thinking, ‘What could be more important to move on to?’”

The idea of subverting the American vote by hacking election systems is not new. In an assessment of Russian cyberattacks released in January, intelligence agencies said Kremlin spy services had been collecting information on election processes, technology and equipment in the United States since early 2014.

The Russians shied away from measures that might alter the “tallying” of votes, the report added, a conclusion drawn from American spying and intercepts of Russian officials’ communications and an analysis by the Department of Homeland Security, according to the current and former government officials.

The most obvious way to rig an election-- controlling hundreds or thousands of decentralized voting machines-- is also the most difficult. During a conference of computer hackers last month in Las Vegas, participants had direct access and quickly took over more than 30 voting machines. But remotely infiltrating machines of different makes and models and then covertly changing the vote count is far more challenging.

Beginning in 2015, the American officials said, Russian hackers focused instead on other internet-accessible targets: computers at the Democratic National Committee, state and local voter databases, election websites, e-poll book vendors and other back-end election services.

Apart from the Russian influence campaign intended to undermine Mrs. Clinton and other Democratic officials, the impact of the quieter Russian hacking efforts at the state and county level has not been widely studied. Federal officials have been so tight-lipped that not even many election officials in the 21 states the hackers assaulted know whether their systems were compromised, in part because they have not been granted security clearances to examine the classified evidence.

The January intelligence assessment implied that the Russian hackers had achieved broader access than has been assumed. Without elaborating, the report said the Russians had “obtained and maintained access to multiple U.S. state and local election boards.”

Two previously acknowledged strikes in June 2016 hint at Russian ambitions. In Arizona, Russian hackers successfully stole a username and password for an election official in Gila County. And in Illinois, Russian hackers inserted a malicious program into the Illinois State Board of Elections’ database. According to Ken Menzel, the board’s general counsel, the program tried unsuccessfully “to alter things other than voter data”-- he declined to be more specific-- and managed to illegally download registration files for 90,000 voters before being detected.

On Election Day last year, a number of counties reported problems similar to those in Durham. In North Carolina, e-poll book incidents occurred in the counties that are home to the state’s largest cities, including Raleigh, Winston-Salem, Fayetteville and Charlotte. Three of Virginia’s most populous counties-- Prince William, Loudoun, and Henrico-- as well as Fulton County, Georgia, which includes Atlanta, and Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes Phoenix, also reported difficulties. All were attributed to software glitches.

Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia and vice chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, argued for more scrutiny of suspicious incidents. “We must harden our cyber defenses, and thoroughly educate the American public about the danger posed” by attacks,” he said in an email. “In other words: we are not making our elections any safer by withholding information about the scope and scale of the threat.”

In Durham County, officials have rejected any notion that an intruder sought to alter the election outcome. “We do not believe, and evidence does not suggest, that hacking occurred on Election Day,” Derek Bowens, the election director, said in a recent email.

But last month, after inquiries from reporters and the North Carolina State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement, Durham county officials voted to turn over laptops and other devices to the board for further analysis. It was not clear which government agency or private forensics firm, would conduct the investigation.

Ms. Greenhalgh will be watching closely. “What people focus on is, ‘Did someone mess with the vote totals?’” she said. “What they don’t realize is that messing with the e-poll books to keep people from voting is just as effective.’”

The Times, the newspaper of record, is easing its readers into the whole concept of Putin having decided the 2016 election slowly. Wait 'til they get to Russian vote theft in carefully-targeted counties in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida and Ohio!

Does anyone doubt that "Slimy Scott" Walker is a crook? Still, don't expect to see him on a chain gang anytime soon

Screen cap from Billionaires for Wealthcare (click to enlarge)

"Shit just got real. 'Scott Walker Involved in Criminal Scheme' is currently the BANNER headline on the front page of 18 Wisconsin newspaper sites. The breath and depth of the coverage is simply devastating. The story is engulfing Walker across the entire state, from cities to suburbia to even rural farm country."

-- from Billionaires for Wealthcare's Daily Kos post
last night, "Wisconsin Firestorm Engulfing Walker"

by Ken

So now at least we have some idea what it is that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is thought to have been up to by the ad hoc bunch of Wisconsin prosecutors who wanted very much to find out what the hell had gone on in the gubernatorial and state Senate recall elections that should have sent all those pests crawling back under whatever slimy rocks they emerged from originally. What it was that those prosecutors were -- incredibly, it seems to me -- forbidden to continue investigating, at least for the time being, by both a state and a federal judge.

AS USA Today's Fredreka Schouten and Aamer Madhani reported this morning:

Prosecutors claim Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was at the center of a plan to illegally coordinate fundraising with an array of outside conservative groups to help him and several Republican senators survive a 2012 recall election, newly released records show.

In the documents unsealed Thursday, prosecutors from five Wisconsin counties allege an effort by Walker and top aides to circumvent state law and raise money and plan spending by a dozen outside groups during the election.

The prosecutors' filings include a quote from an e-mail in which Walker tells Republican strategist Karl Rove that a top campaign aide, R.J. Johnson, was leading the coordination effort and praises Johnson's work.

"Bottom line: R.J. helps keep in place a team that is wildly successful in Wisconsin," prosecutors say Walker wrote in the May 4, 2011, e-mail. "We are running nine recall elections and it will be like running nine congressional markets in every market in the state."

Naturally, however, as far as our Scott, the Slimy One, is concerned:

This is nothing more than a partisan investigation with no basis in state law. It’s time for the prosecutors to acknowledge both judges’ orders to end this investigation.

If this was actually true, as our Scott is saying to every microphone he can get access to, it would mean that those judges were gifted with powers of divination, that they managed to decide that no laws had been broken without allowing the prosecutors who were investigating to actually investigate.

But of course, that's not what happened. Like most everything that comes out of Slimy Scott's maw, it's not true. As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Patrick Harley explained a few days ago (links onsite):

The latest documents set to come out are part of a lawsuit filed in February by the Wisconsin Club for Growth and its treasurer, Eric O'Keefe. They allege the probe violates their civil rights, and U.S. District Judge Rudolph Randa in Milwaukee last month sided with them and ordered a halt to the investigation.

Not exactly the same thing as ruling that no state laws were broken by the Slimy Scott Gang. The judges just seemed to think that Baby O'Keefe's First Amendment rights really may somehow be at jeopardy. (In case you're wondering how the pieces of the case fit together, the R. J. Johnson who, according to the e-mail Slimy Scott is alleged to have written to Karl Rove, was so busy trampling laws right and left, is also closely associated with Baby O'K's Wisconsin Club for Growth, which I gather is thought by the prosecutors to have been heavily involved in Slimy Scott's coup.

Baby O'Keefe whines in his legal pleadings that this is all a plot against conservatives. But I don't believe he's that stupid. He knows perfectly well that that isn't the case. What it is is a plot against criminals and criminal conspiracies -- aka law enforcement. It just happens that nowadays criminal conspiracies are a basic tool of conserative activists.

I think I understand the crazed conservatives' logic, though. Since they are, after all, on a mission from God to take complete control of the legal apparatus -- from law-making to law enforcement -- in every state as well as the federal government, and there's not a damn son of a bitch alive who's gonna stop 'em, it's just a matter of time before they get to decide what the law is anyway, as they already have done in Wisconsin, which is now more or less officially not so much a state as a privileged enclave of Koch Industries.

Since it's just a matter of time before the rich and superrich people who bankroll stooges like Slimy Scott will have full control of the law, why should they be penalized for this teensy time gap? Just consider: If Slimy Scott and his politcal henchscum had been forced to, you know, follow the obsolete old laws like a bunch of girlie-boy schoolchildren, that could have slowed down the changing of state laws enough to interfere with their seizure of full control of the Wisconsin legislature? The rich and superrich masters whom Slimy Scott serves are busy and important people; they can't be expected to cool their heels while a bunch of cockamamie prosecutors in Wisconsin try to make a case that Slimy Scott masterminded a criminal conspiracy.

Sorry, SS, but you weren't cleared of anything. Your henchscum have simply done a deft job of blowing smoke all over the investigation. But then, there probably aren't any legal requirements any longer in Wisconsin that the governor occasionally tell the truth about anything.

At issue now is whether the five Wisconsin prosecutors banded together in this case can persuade the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago to toss Baby O'K's lawsuit. It's that court's Judge Frank Easterbrook who allowed the unsealing of the documents that are the subject of the current furor. A whole bunch of other documents remain under seal.

It's another reminder how unsymmetrical our political system is. Right-wingers have made it a standard operating practice to hurl any sort of lies and distortions at anyone who gets in their way with a view to ruining the poor souls' lives. But Wisconsin's Baby O'Keefe knows how to manipulate the legal system to prevent law-enforcement officials from even finding out what he may have done.

I'd like to believe some of the chickens are finally coming home to roost for Slimy Scott. But while media mavens are pondering whether this fracas will hurt his chances, not so much of being reelected this fall but of entering the presidential sweepstakes for 2016, I'm not optimistic.

#

Gerrymandering-- Both Sides Do It... True But Only One Side Does It Enough To Base Its Entire Future On

Earlier today we took a look at some pretty good news from North Carolina which, admittedly, has been pretty depressing lately for progressives. Though not as depressing as it once was. Sunday, David Frum, in his review of Robert Norrell's biography of Booker T. Washington, Up From History, reminded us how racist sociopath Alfred Waddell became mayor of Wilmington back when the Democrats were the party of bigotry and racism and the Republicans were still vaguely anti-racist.

Alfred Waddell, an out-of-favor politician remaking himself as a white-nationalist leader, became the most vitriolic nativist firebrand. 'You are Anglo-Saxons,' Waddell told a crowd. 'Go to the polls tomorrow, and if you find the negro out voting tell him to leave the polls, and if he refuses, kill him, shoot him down in his tracks.' In early November tens of thousands of black men were too frightened to vote, and the Democrats regained control of North Carolina. Two days after the election, Waddell led a mob in destroying [Wilmington's leading black newspaper]. They gathered the resignation of all Republican city officials at gunpoint, and Waddell was named mayor.

Waddell's mob swelled to 2,000 men, including whites from all classes and vocations. When a shot hit one of them, the mob raged through Wilmington, with whites hunting down blacks in running gun battles through the city streets. The gunfire alerted militias and vigilante groups from outside the city to join the attack. Literally thousands of blacks ran for their lives. As many as 300 African Americans may have been killed. Eyewitnesses later recounted seeing wagon carts piled high with dead black bodies being removed from the city… The riot depopulated Wilmington of its large black majority.

That was in the late 1800s, when the Southern racists were busy undoing the advances African-Americans had made right after the Civil War. As Frum points out, "The 1890s were the decade in which Jim Crow had been formalized; in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court rejected a constitutional challenge to the segregation of public conveyances and inscribed the phrase 'separate but equal' into American law... Since the withdrawal of federal troops in the 1870s, these [former Confederate] states had asserted an increasingly extreme white domination over the former slaves. State governments had deprived freed blacks of the right to vote and sit on juries. They had sliced contributions to black education to pitiful fractions of the small enough investment in the education of white children. They had adopted increasingly formalized rules of racial subordination in public places. This system of domination was enforced by violence and the threat of violence. The violence was usually informal-- 'racial terrorism' as Robert Norrell aptly calls it-- but not always. Local authorities actively connived in it. State governments accepted it. And while the federal government might occasional issue some deploring statement, it seldom if ever did anything to prevent the violence."

Today, the political racism of conservatives is manifest differently-- although with similar results. Despicable and unevolved self-serving rightists still get elected to office by screaming "Nigger" and dividing working people so they'll vote against their own families well-being. No matter how many times you've watched this, you haven't watched it frequently enough:



In Sunday's NY Times, Sam Wang explained how the Republican Party has made racism work for itself politically... and not just in the Old slave states it now completely dominates.

Having the first modern democracy comes with bugs. Normally we would expect more seats in Congress to go to the political party that receives more votes, but the last election confounded expectations. Democrats received 1.4 million more votes for the House of Representatives, yet Republicans won control of the House by a 234 to 201 margin.

...Through artful drawing of district boundaries, it is possible to put large groups of voters on the losing side of every election. The Republican State Leadership Committee, a Washington-based political group dedicated to electing state officeholders, recently issued a progress report on Redmap, its multiyear plan to influence redistricting. The $30 million strategy consists of two steps for tilting the playing field: take over state legislatures before the decennial Census, then redraw state and Congressional districts to lock in partisan advantages. The plan was highly successful.

...In North Carolina, where the two-party House vote was 51 percent Democratic, 49 percent Republican, the average simulated delegation was seven Democrats and six Republicans. The actual outcome? Four Democrats, nine Republicans-- a split that occurred in less than 1 percent of simulations. If districts were drawn fairly, this lopsided discrepancy would hardly ever occur.

Confounding conventional wisdom, partisan redistricting is not symmetrical between the political parties. By my seat-discrepancy criterion, 10 states are out of whack: the five I have mentioned [Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin], plus Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Illinois and Texas. Arizona was redistricted by an independent commission, Texas was a combination of Republican and federal court efforts, and Illinois was controlled by Democrats. Republicans designed the other seven maps. Both sides may do it, but one side does it more often.

...Gerrymandering is a major form of disenfranchisement. In the seven states where Republicans redrew the districts, 16.7 million votes were cast for Republicans and 16.4 million votes were cast for Democrats. This elected 73 Republicans and 34 Democrats. Given the average percentage of the vote it takes to elect representatives elsewhere in the country, that combination would normally require only 14.7 million Democratic votes. Or put another way, 1.7 million votes (16.4 minus 14.7) were effectively packed into Democratic districts and wasted.

...Some legislators have flirted with the idea of gerrymandering the presidency itself under the guise of Electoral College reform. In one short-lived plan, Virginia State Senator Charles Carrico sponsored legislation to allocate electoral votes by Congressional district. In contrast to the current winner-take-all system, which usually elects the popular vote winner, Mr. Carrico’s proposal applied nationwide would have elected Mitt Romney, despite the fact that he won five million fewer votes than Mr. Obama. This is basically an admission of defeat by Republicans in swing states. Mr. Carrico’s constituents might well ask whether these changes serve their interests or those of the Republican National Committee.

To preserve majority rule and minority representation, redistricting must be brought into fairer balance. I propose two plans. First, let’s establish nonpartisan redistricting commissions in all 50 states. In Ohio, one such ballot measure failed in November, in part because of a poorly financed campaign. Maybe those who prodded voters to turn out could support future initiatives.

Second, we need to adopt a statistically robust judicial standard for partisan gerrymandering. In the Supreme Court’s Vieth v. Jubelirer case, in 2004, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy voted against intervention in chicanery in Pennsylvania, but left the door open for future remedies elsewhere if a clear standard could be established.

The great gerrymander of 2012 came 200 years after the first use of this curious word, which comes from the salamander-shaped districts signed into law by Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts. Gov. Gerry’s party engineered its electoral coup using paper maps and ink. But the advent of inexpensive computing and free software has placed the tools for fighting politicians who draw absurd districts into the hands of citizens like you and me.

Politicians, especially Republicans facing demographic and ideological changes in the electorate, use redistricting to cling to power. It’s up to us to take control of the process, slay the gerrymander, and put the people back in charge of what is, after all, our House.

Done Deal For Obama? Don't People Undrestand GOP Election Fraud?

Folks who are poll-obsessed already know that by Sunday, Nate Silver had moved Obama's chance of winning the Electoral College (and reelection) to 85.1%-- pretty tough odds for Romney. And when I woke up Sunday morning I found an odd press release from Paddy Power, Europe's top betting house, that says they had already started paying out to punters who picked Obama to win and had already sent $650,000 worth of checks before a single vote is counted! 75% of the money that's been bet has gone Obama's way over the last two months. A Paddy Power spokesperson said: “Romney gave it a good shot and is doing well in the popular vote, but we suspect he’s had his moment in the sun and is likely to be remembered more for his legendary gaffes than Presidential potential. The overall betting trend has shown one way traffic for Obama and punters seemed to have called it 100% correct. Despite Romney appealing to the large evangelical and senior vote, America‘s sticking with black and cool.” As you can see below, they're still taking bets on how big Obama's win will be and on state races, etc.

Had Katherine Harris, Ken Blackwell, and Kathy Nickolaus been tried and then shot for treason-- which is, after all, exactly what those three were guilty of-- I would feel that there would be less of a propensity for Republican officials in the states they've captured in 2010 to try to steal the election now. We've all seen the attempts to limit voter participation in Wisconsin, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, New Hampshire, Georgia, Texas... all the states they control... but now they're looking for ways to subvert the vote-counting itself. Reince Priebus-- straight out of the Kathy Nickolaus school of election theft in Wisconsin and now the chairman of the RNC-- hired notorious election criminal Nathan Sproul to undermine democracy in Virginia, Florida and Colorado. It's what happens when no one is held seriously accountable for serious crimes. Viper-like Ken doll Jon Husted, Ohio's extremist Secretary of State, seems determined to be this year's Katherine Harris. He's already the 2012 posterboy for voter suppression, even after being slapped down by state and federal courts for his efforts to keep likely Democrats from voting. And now he has a new scheme to invalidate votes. Anyone who though these anti-democracy freaks were just going to accept the inevitable without a dirty fight, just doesn't know the nature of these people. And what do they have to lose? No one ever gets held accountable. So keep his graphic in mind when the GOP tries their coup d'état this week:

It won't always be as gross as the bomb scare at an Orlando area early voting station or serial election fraudster Patrick McHenry trying to subvert democracy at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, which Newsweek ranked the "most liberal college in America." But anyone who isn't expecting nationwide GOP attempts to steal the election, just hasn't been paying attention this year decade.

With electronic voting machines, which leave no paper trail and are programmed with proprietary software, the count can be decided before the vote. Those who control the electronics can simply program voting machines to elect the candidate they want to win. Electronic voting is not transparent. When you vote electronically, you do not know for whom you are voting. Only the machine knows.

According to most polls, the race for the White House is too-close-to-call. History has shown that when an election is close and there’s no expectation for a clear winner, these are the easiest ones to steal. Even more important, the divergence between exit polls, perhaps indicating the real winner, and the stolen result, if not overdone, can be very small. Those who stole the election can easily put on TV enough experts to explain that the divergence between the exit polls and the vote count is not statistically significant or is because women or racial minorities or members of one party were disproportionately questioned in exit polls.

There have been recent reports that, because of costs, exit polls in the 2012 presidential election will no longer be conducted on the usual comprehensive basis in order to save money. If the reports are correct, no check remains on election theft.

...For now Republicans seem to have the technological advantage with their ownership of companies that produce electronic voting machines programmed by proprietary software, but in the future the advantage could shift to Democrats. Early voting aids electronic election theft. Successful and noncontroversial theft depends on knowing how to program the machines. The victory needs to be within the range of plausibility. Too big a victory raises eyebrows, but if the guess is wrong in the other direction theft fails. Early voting helps the voting machine programmers decide how to set the machines.

The absence of transparency is a threat to whatever remains of American democracy. In the Summer 2011 issue of the Trends Journal, Gerald Celente made the point that “if we can bank online, we can vote online.”

Think about it! Across the globe, trillions of dollars of bank transactions are made each day, and rarely are they compromised. If we can accurately count money online, we can certainly count votes accurately online. The only obstacles blocking online voting are entrenched political interests intent upon controlling the ballot box.

The lack of transparency has given rise to election litigation. On October 29, the Washington Post reported that “thousands of attorneys, representing the two major presidential candidates, their parties, unions, civil rights groups and voter-fraud watchdogs, are in place across the country, poised to challenge election results that may be called into question by machine failures, voter suppression or other allegations of illegal activity.”

Voting online, if properly arranged, can provide the transparency that the current system lacks. While the GOP might remain active in voter suppression, the Democrats could no longer vote graveyards, and the count of those who do manage to vote would not be subject to secret proprietary software.

In 2005 the nonpartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform concluded that the integrity of elections was compromised by those who controlled the programming. Proprietary private ownership of voting technology is simply incompatible with transparent elections. A country without a transparent vote is a country without democracy.

Anyone know if Romney's most malevolent little shit of a son, Tagg, invested in a company that owns voting counting machines in Hamilton County, Ohio (Cincinnati)? That could be the best investment the sleazy Romney family ever made.

The Reactionary Mind Can't Help Itself-- It Will Always Try To Steal Democracy

I'm sure you've heard about how the Republicans, spurred on by Koch and other avatars of domestic fascism-- we'll leave the Iranian cash out of this equation for now-- are undermining the infrastructure of democracy itself in the hope of electing more Rick Scotts, more Scott Walkers, more John Kasichs, more Rick Snyders, more Rick Perrys... and a whole Congressful of lackeys and corporate order-takers. Rachel did another great segment on it this week (above) that I recommend everyone watch.

You know when you hear a new book is great from Digby and from Chris Hayes in the same week, you order it-- or at least I do. Did. And I'm reading it. And it's killer and it's in the DownWithTyranny bookstore now. The author is Corey Robin and the book is The Reactionary Mind and I promise you'll be hearing more about it here at DWT. Corey reminds us that the disenfranchisement of "certain" people is nothing new to conservatives and revanchists. It's part of their DNA. He takes us way back to the Jim DeMint of the first half of the 1800s. He's talking about what a conservative is, in essence: "the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win in back." It's kind of like what the big Wall Street firms made 1% Bloomberg do yesterday in trying to shut down OccupyWallStreet.

Every once in a while, however, the subordinates of this world contest their fates. They protest their conditions, join movements, and make demands. Their goals may be minimal and discrete-- better safety guards on factory machines, an end to marital rape-- but in voicing them, they raise the spectre of a more fundamental change in power. They cease to be servants or supplicants and become agents, speaking and acting on their own behalf. More than the reforms themselves, it is this assertion of agency by the subject class-- the appearance of an insistent and independent voice of demand-- that vexes their superiors.

... In his last major address to the Senate, John C. Calhoun, former vice president and chief spokesman of the Southern cause, identified the decision by Congress in the mid-1830s to receive abolitionist petitions as the moment when the nation set itself on an irreversible course of confrontation over slavery. In a four-decade career that had seen such defeats to the slaveholder [conservative] position as the Tarriff of Abominations, the Nullification Crisis, and the Force Bill, the mere appearance of slave speech in the nation's capital stood out for the dying Calhoun as the sign that the revolution had begun. And when, a half-century later, Calhoun's successors sought to put the abolitionist genie back into the bottle, it was this same assertion of black agency that they targeted. Explaining the proliferation across the South in the 1890s and 1900s of constitutional conventions restricting the franchise, a delegate to one such convention declared, "The great underlying principle of this Convention movement... was the elimination of the negro from the politics of this State."

The Scott Walkers and Rick Scotts and Nathan Deals and Rick Perrys won't call them negroes, of course, but who do you think they're trying to keep from voting?

Today's GOP-- At The Very Un-American Intersection of Fascism And Stalinism

You know the old adage almost universally-- if incorrectly-- attributed to Soviet totalitarian Josef Stalin: "It's not the people who vote that count. It's the people who count the votes." Though he never said any such thing, it certainly sums up his view of "democracy." It also sums up the Republican Party's view on democracy.

It was more than a little ironic when Grover Norquist tried comparing President Obama to Stalin yesterday. Norquist, who, like Stalin, was never elected to anything, holds dictatorial power over his authoritarian political party. He may not have the clout of the Koch brothers but he's become the symbol for right-wing intransigence, obstructionism and hatred of American government. And when it comes to discarding any and all rules for the sake of obtaining power, there's no light whatsoever between the Kochs, Norquist, Hitler and Stalin.

In the video above, Rachel Maddow goes into admirable depth in explaining the Republican Party's current Koch-financed, ALEC-dominated jihad against the mortal enemy of right-wing politics: democracy itself. The Republican governors and legislatures in Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, Maine and Georgia are making the ultimate grab for the golden ring in 2012. If it succeeds, American democracy will be altered in a way that goes against the grain of the country's history, a history that has seen the inexorable expansion of voter participation from the day when only white, Christian male property owners were allowed to participate in government-- or even vote. If you think this isn't exactly what the Republican fascists are aiming for, you haven't been paying attention. Watch Rachel's report up top.

RNC PR BS-- DWT Welcomes Reince Priebus, New Chief Clown Of The Republican Party

Yesterday John Boehner pulled out all stops to get a crooked lobbyist crony of his, Maria Cano, elected as the new Chair of the RNC. Although he managed to get rid of the embarrassing clown the RNC saddled itself with 2 years ago-- really a foregone conclusion for weeks-- his candidate came in a distant third. The winner, though, isn't someone Boehner will have any trouble embracing. As a right-wing blogger pointed out this morning, Chairman Reince Priebus doesn't need any lessons in arch-hypocrisy. He's coming to the party fully armed. Take all the vowels out of his name first. You're left with RNC PR BS. How perfect, especially considering that Priebus' campaigning for his new job included a much ballyhooed statement in right-wing circles: "If you’re pro-abortion, pro-stimulus, pro-G.M. bailout, pro-AIG, well you know guess what, you might not be a Republican." Well...

Blatant right wing hypocrisy has become so commonplace that it’s no surprise at all to discover that Priebus himself worked at a law firm that helps clients secure federal stimulus funds.

Priebus is a partner for the law firm Michael Best & Friedrich LLP in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In February 2009, his firm announced the creation of a ‘Stimulus Legislation Team’, of which Priebus was listed as a member.

One of the client alerts co-authored by Priebus describes the team’s role as such:

“…The Michael Best Stimulus and Economic Recovery Team is prepared to assist you in understanding the implications and in developing and implementing a strategy to secure the benefits of this unprecedented legislation. Specifically, we will assist you to identify opportunities, prepare appropriate proposals and make targeted contacts to secure funds.”

A Wisconsin blogger, fills in all the blank spots for the rest of us. Priebus, a close ally of Paul Ryan, who has been tasked by Wall Street to wreck Social Security, "is a partisan, voter obstruction operative from Ryan's district who lost his bids to roll back Wisconsin's historically progressive tradition to open and fair elections."

Priebus is the outgoing chair of Republican Party of Wisconsin and a partner with the GOP-heavy law firm, Michael Best and Friedrich (LLP), recently retained by the new GOP-led Wisconsin state legislature to redraw and gerrymander national and Wisconsin legislative districts. (The GOP legislature is not allowing democrats to have the counsel of tax-financed law firms to redraw districts.)

Priebus is known in Wisconsin political-journalistic circles for his dedicated (and so far unsuccessful) efforts to obstruct Wisconsin voters, suppressing the wrong kind of voters—black
, old, and disabled. The Priebus-led voter obstruction programs are consonant with national GOP efforts to obstruct Democratically leaning voters.

In October 2008, it was reported by Mark Pitsch (Wisconsin State Journal) and WisPolitics that Priebus and Republican Wisconsin Attorney General (and McCain-Palin co-chair) J.B. Van Hollen (and Van Hollen's top aide) met before and at the 2008 National Republican Convention in St. Paul to discuss voter obstruction efforts which would be employed by the Van Hollen-headed Wisconsin Department of Justice during the late stages of 2008 presidential campaign and on election day.

GOP allegations of organized voter fraud has been shown to be a fiction, by the Brennan Center for Justice and by a Wisconsin-federal committee looking into past GOP allegations of voter fraud in the 2004 election.

After contacts with Priebus, Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen filed a lawsuit (Van Hollen v. Government Accountability Board)demanding that the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (GAB) use the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) to obstruct Wisconsin voters.

Van Hollen had denied any contacts with the Republican Party and the McCain campaign about this voting rule lawsuit, a denial that was contradicted by WisPolitics' reporting of an audio recording revealing Van Hollen promising legal action to Priebus on alleged "voter fraud" during an address at the Republican National Convention held in St. Paul.

Several civil rights and public interests groups submitted their amici curiae brief in support of the Wisconsin General Accountability Board's (GAB) successful motion to dismiss the Attorney General's legal petition. The Van Hollen-Priebus suit was subsequently tossed out of court by Dane County (Wisconsn) Judge Maryann Sumi.

In some many words, Priebus and Van Hollen lost their efforts to obstruct voters in Wisconsin in 2008.

Sumi ruled on October 23, 2008, citing precedent and federal and Wisconsin law: "'It is evident that this court has consistently placed a premium on giving effect to the will of the voter.' ... 'the will of the voter in terms of the ability to go to the polls, vested with the franchise' (to vote)." ... "Nothing in state or federal law requires that there be a data match (among bureaucratic listings of names) as a prerequisite for a citizen's right to vote." [Opinion - Order and Hearing Transcript (Case No 08CV4085)]

The GOP searches for other tools to obstruct.

After the GOP retook the Wisconsin legislature in 2010, one of the Party's first bills introduced in 2011 is a photo ID bill that would "mean folks without driver's licenses - disproportionately poor, minority, or elderly, would not be able to vote." (Neil Heinen, WISC TV)

Reince Priebus must be proud.

The mysterious, convenient solo-plane-crash death of "Karl Rove's IT guru" has to turn the soberest soul into a Konspiracy Kook

Thanks to Brad Blog for digging out this lovely photo. Brad recalls that Mike Connell "had reportedly been threatened by Karl Rove over the summer, just prior to being forced to testify by a federal judge in Ohio in a 2004 election fraud lawsuit."

"I'm loyal to my friends and I'm loyal to the Bush family."

-- the late Mike Connell

"I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist."

-- Teresa Nielsen Hayden

by Ken

I didn't pay much attention to this story at first. But it caught Howie's attention in Africa, and I took a closer look. Here is Lisa Derrick's account on FireDogLake's Campaign Silo:

Plane Crash Kills Rove IT Guy, Testified in OH Voter Fraud Case, Key in White House Email Scandal

By Lisa Derrick Saturday December 20, 2008 9:47 am

Mike Connell, Karl Rove's IT guru -- who was compelled six weeks ago to testify in an Ohio vote-tampering case -- was killed late Friday night in a solo plane crash. His plane crashed into the garage of an empty house. Per Cybrinth CEO Stephen Spoonamore, Connell was also considered "vital to uncovering the truth" about the missing White House emails considered a critical link to the Justice Department and White House's involvement in the firings of nine US attorneys.

According to Spoonamore, as reported by Rebecca Abrahams, at an October 11, 2006 meeting between Spoonamore, Connell, and GovTech Solutions President Randy Cole -- who ran and lost for State Representative in Ohio this election --

Connell asked him about ways to "permanently destroy hard drives." Spoonamore said "If this is what I think you're talking about, this meeting is over."

Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board are on site today. Investigations typically take weeks and even months or longer to complete, according to an FAA spokeswoman.

Connell, president of GovTech Solutions and New Media Communications, was a website designer and IT professional who created the website for Ohio's secretary of state Kenneth K. Blackwell that presented the 2004 election results in real time as they were tabulated.

Connell created websites for Blackwell's election runs was well as the one which tabulated and displayed votes in real time. During the 2004 elections, Blackwell was also chairman of Bush-Cheney 2004 reelection effort in Ohio, successfully leading the campaign for the 2004 Ohio Constitution Amendment banning state recognition of same sex marriage or civil unions. Blackwell was unseated in 2006 by Ted Strickland.

Connell refused to testify or to produce documents relating to the system used in the 2004 and 2006 elections until compelled by a judge on on November 1 of this year.

The Ohio RICO lawsuit King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association v. Blackwell, brought by Cliff Arnebeck, alleged alleging that vote-tampering during the 2004 presidential election resulted in civil rights violations. The lawsuit maintains that Karl Rove, with the assistance of Mike Connell, designed, built and directed a strategy to manipulate elections through the use of computers. On November 1, 2008, a judge ordered Connell to testify, though his resulting deposition two days later was disappointing to many. Connell's attorney advised him to not answer many questions including, "Who directed you to set up the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth IT Network?"

In addition to his with his work creating Blackwell's election websites and the anti-Kerry website swiftboatvetsfortruth.org, per reporter Rebecca Abrahams, Connell also developed websites for the House Intelligence, Judiciary, Financial Services, Ways and Means, and Administration Committees. The builder of RNC.org, and head of IT for the McCain campaign, Connell was also

the architect and cyber keymaster of George W. Bush election websites including GeorgeWBush.com and GWB43.com, the site Karl Rove used for 95-percent of his email communication. Connell is also the CEO of Govtech Solutions, the company responsible for building and managing congressional email servers and firewalls.

In 1999, Connell told Inside Business magazine, "I'm loyal to my friends and I'm loyal to the Bush family."

Let's pause here and take a deep breath before venturing into territory where sensible people really shouldn't be venturing. Breathe in, breathe out. Again.

Okay. So in other words:

* Mike Connell knew all of Karl Rove's electronic secrets. All of the systems by which Rove organized and exercised his control over the GOP and executive-branch propaganda operations, which of course were merged into a single operation,
went through Connell.

To the extent that communications were involved in Rove's far-flung machinations to subvert the Constitution and the whole body of federal law in order to perpetuate the totalitarian regime he had played such a large role in establishing, which is to say both his life's work and his every waking hour's occupation, to that extent, everything went through systems devised Connell. This included the creation of parallel e-mail systems devised to circumvent the government record-keeping requirements of federal law, and also to circumvent the requirements for separation of government business and partisan political activity, a separation that ran directly counter to the fundamental operating principle of the Bush regime, which was not only to break down the separation between government business and partisan political activity but to make them exactly the same thing.

* Clearly, e-mail communications were not only central to the political purge of U.S. attorneys who resisted participating in Rove's transformation of the Justice Dept. into an agency of political hatchet folk and partisan enforcers, but were central to the unraveling, documentation, and eventual prosecution of the various conspiracies.tiy, we'll never know.

* What's more, Connell was deeply involved with the Karl Rove of Ohio, former Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, including the period in which Blackwell likely oversaw the theft of the state's 2004 electoral votes for the presidential reelection campaign of George W. Bush, which enabled the never-elected president to steal a second term.

* Six weeks ago, after exhausting all efforts at stonewalling, Connell finally was forced to give a deposition concerning the Ohio electoral matters, though questions seem to have ranged into some of his other Rove-commissioned work.. He lawyered up, but what methods of persuasion might eventually have been brought to bear to persuade him to be more forthcoming, or what legal compulsions might in future have been applied to unearth what he knew about such other Rove secrets as the U.S. attorney firings, regarding which Rove himself is under increasing legal pressure to testy. Everything Connell knew about those activities also died with him in Friday night's plane crash.

* And that crash was of a single-passenger plane. All of a sudden, poof! No more Mike Connell. Oops. Well, accidents happen.

Now, I realize that this sounds like the most hysterical of conspiracy-mongering. It's just that where the activities of Karl Rove is concerned, it seems pretty clear that vast networks of conspiracies were in fact in daily operation, and that a substantial portion of the activity specifically involved bypassing or flouting the law. Where organized crime is concerned, such coincidences become automatically suspect, it seems hard to resist the suspicion that Karl Rove was a sort of operations manager for the most extensive political crime operation in the history of the republic.

Hmmm.


YOU ASK, WHO WAS MIKE CONNELL ANYWAYS?

Brad Blog has a veritable Mike Connell archive. The links are available on-site:

* 7/17/08: Ohio Attorney Files to Lift Stay on '04 Election Case, Cites Allegations, Evidence of Massive Fraud by a Number of GOP Operatives
* 7/22/08: GOP Tech Guru Mike Connell 'High IQ Forrest Gump...At Scene of Every Single Crime' Say Ohio Attorneys
* 7/24/08: Rove Threatened GOP IT Guru If He Does Not 'Take the Fall' for Election Fraud in Ohio, Says Attorney
* 7/25/08: Cliff Arnebeck, OH Attorney, Interviewed Live on Peter B. Collins Show
* 7/26/08: So Who Is Mike Connell? A Clip from 'Free For All' Gives You an Idea...
* 9/29/08: STAY LIFTED IN '04 OHIO ELECTION FRAUD CASE, GOP 'TECH GURU' SUBPOENAED
* 10/31/08: BREAKING: Federal Judge Compels GOP IT Guru Mike Connell To Give Deposition in Ohio '04 Election Case
* 11/24/08: 'Document Hold' Served by OH Attorney to GA SoS in Advance of State's U.S. Senate Run-off Election

LARISA ALEXANDROVNA REPORTS: "HE WAS AFRAID"

Raw Story, whose investigative team headed by Larisa Alexandrovna has been all over the Connell story, naturally is on this story too.

Alexandrovna revealed on her own blog that Connell was a source of hers, adding:

[H]e had information that he was ready to share.

You see, Mike Connell set-up the alternate email and communications system for the White House. He was responsible for creating the system that hosted the infamous GWB43.com accounts that Karl Rove and others used. When asked by Congress to provide these emails, the White House said that they were destroyed. But in reality, what Connell is alleged to have done is move these files to other servers after having allegedly scrubbed the files from all "known" Karl Rove accounts.

In addition, I have reason to believe that the alternate accounts were used to communicate with US Attorneys involved in political prosecutions, like that of Don Siegelman. This is what I have been working on to prove for over a year. In fact, it was through following the Siegelman-Rove trail that I found evidence leading to Connell. That is how I became aware of him. Mike was getting ready to talk. He was frightened. . . .

I am not saying that this was a hit nor am I resigned to this being simply an accident either. I am no expert on aviation and cannot provide an opinion on the matter. What I am saying, however, is that given the context, this event needs to be examined carefully. [emphasis in the original]

#

John McCain Is Distracting People By Yammering About Nailing Jello To The Wall While His Campaign Tries Stealing The Election

McCain's grab for news-- his suggestion that the federal government buy up mortgages and reset them at current values-- was an OK idea, although didn't the bailout already authorize that? Or was he really suggesting we spend another $300 billion? He sent right-wingers into orbit with his proposal. Mark Steyn: "'Nina Easton nailed it by referring to McCain's mortgage buy up plan as a death knell for free market capitalism.  Out in California Reagan  is spinning in his grave.' ... [W]e have a non-conservative making the conservative case in this election."

So why did he do it? He can't think that dispossessed, repossessed homeowners are going to vote for him. They're not and, in fact, the Republican Party has been working assiduously all over the country to make sure that people who have lost their homes won't even be allowed to vote? Northwest Indiana is Obama country and the part of the state that has been making Indiana a battleground. McCain's campaign has been doing everything they could to disenfranchise people of color and people whose homes were foreclosed on. And it's happening wherever McCain's lobbyists are hoping to steal the election-- like Nevada and Michigan.

A few days ago the Marion County Republican Party chairman, Tom John, said "foreclosures open the door to residency challenges and refuses to rule out doing just that. "We might end up challenging on that," he said. "It's entirely possible. I think it would be a solid basis for asking someone to vote provisionally... Anybody whose home is already in foreclosure isn't actually living in the home and might not be a valid voter."

The SEIU has taken a leading role in fighting Republican attempts to disenfranchise voters in Democratic areas and yesterday they won a round in court.

Voters in Indiana earned a victory in their efforts to enjoy equal access to early voting sites today as Judge Lorenzo Arredando of the Lake County Circuit Court blocked Republicans' attempt to bar Gary, East Chicago and Hammond from hosting their own early voting sites--while early voting has already begun in Crown Point.

The lack of early voting sites in Gary/East Chicago/Hammond disproportionately affects African American and Latino voters.  Crown Point, whose population is 95 percent white, is 16, 18 and 25 miles away from the more diverse cities of Gary, Hammond and East Chicago, respectively.

...On September 23, the Lake County Board of Elections voted to establish satellite early voting sites in Gary, East Chicago and Hammond-- but late last week, on the eve of early voting, Republicans went to court to block those satellite locations from going into effect.  The lack of early voting satellite locations in Gary, East Chicago, and Hammond while early voting is presently taking place in Crown Point violates the Indiana Constitution's guarantee of free and equal elections as well as the Voting Rights Act.  

..."Any move that disenfranchises select Lake County residents in Indiana or in any city in America is a disgrace to our democratic system," said Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union. "Our country is at a critical point in history and the stakes could not be higher for working families.  SEIU is committed to justice for all people and we are going to do everything we can to make sure that our members and their communities make their voices heard and their votes count in this election.  We will not let this election turn into Ohio in 2004 and Florida in 2000."

Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. have started an organization, Steal Back Your Vote to help thwart Republican attempts to steal another presidential election.

And don't forget-- McCain's a "bellicose, red-faced, angry guy who constantly explodes:"




UPDATE: REVIEW OF McCAIN'S PERFORMANCE BY ANOTHER WINGNUT-- DISASTER

Right wing extremist Andy McCarthy in GOP tabloid National Review: "I think tonight was a disaster for our side. I'm dumbfounded that no one else seems to think so. Obama did everything he needed to do, McCain did nothing he needed to do."

Can the Fraternal Order of Media Whores for McCranky pull the plug on the monster they created?

Well, for once Young Johnny didn't lie -- when he told us
the economy isn't his strong suit. [Click to enlarge.]

"'I broke my promise to always tell the truth,' McCain said [after the 2000 South Carolina primary]. He has broken that promise so completely that the John McCain of old is unrecognizable. He has become the sort of politician he once despised."

-- Village gasbag Richard Cohen, in his Washington Post column
yesterday, "The Ugly New McCain"

by Ken

You have to figure that the Washington Post's Richard Cohen had some idea of the ridicule he was opening himself to when he acknowledged in his column yesterday trashing his onetime hero, Young Johnny McCranky: "I am one of the journalists accused over the years of being in the tank for McCain. Guilty."

With just the hint of a tear, the Old Gasbag remembers how in 2000 his hero the Old Shithead --

did something extraordinary: He confessed to lying about how he felt about the Confederate battle flag, which he actually abhorred. "I broke my promise to always tell the truth," McCain said. Now he has broken that promise so completely that the John McCain of old is unrecognizable. He has become the sort of politician he once despised.

(Confidential to campaign genius Steve Schmidt at McCranky HQ: Shouldn't Young Johnny be campaigning on this seemingly superhuman ability to keep a secret? To this day, does anybody -- except the Old Gasbag, that is -- know that the Crankyman "actually abhor[s]" the Confederate battle flag? Would anyone in, say, South Carolina care to field this one? Of course it could just be simple forgetfulness that causes the Crankyman to neglect to mention this anytime he's on formerly Confederate soil.)

Now of course, unbeknownst to the Old Gasbag, by 2000 Young Johnny had told so many lies that if he were Pinocchio his nose would have circled the globe. Once again, I refer one and all to Cliff Schecter's indispensable The Real McCain.

DON'T TELL ME THERE'S (GASP!) A MEDIA DOUBLE STANDARD!

Say, isn't it fascinating how little attention the infotainment news media pay to The Real McCain, a work of actual verifiable research by a serious, responsible fact-based journalist, even as they scratch their asses while lending credibility to, even orchestrating media blitzes on behalf of, out-and-out fictional, undisguisedly malicious hatchet jobs published about Barack Obama? Nope, no double standard there! (I'm just saying.)

The Old Gasbag can even pinpoint "the precise moment of McCain's abasement." The moment of truth, as it were, came during Young Johnny's appearance last week on The View, when Joy Behar (God bless her) called the Crankyman on two of his campaign's more preposterous ads, the "lipstick on a pig" debacle and the sex-ed-for-kindergarteners bullshit:

"We know that those two ads are untrue," Behar said. "They are lies."

Freeze. Close in on McCain. This was the moment. He has largely been avoiding the press. The Straight Talk Express is now just a brand, an ad slogan like "Home Cooking" or "We Will Not Be Undersold." Until then, it was possible for McCain to say that he had not really known about the ads, that the formulation "I approve this message" was just boilerplate. But he didn't.

"Actually, they are not lies," he said.

Actually, they are.

McCain has turned ugly. His dishonesty would be unacceptable in any politician, but McCain has always set his own bar higher than most. He has contempt for most of his colleagues for that very reason: They lie. He tells the truth. He internalizes the code of the McCains -- his grandfather, his father: both admirals of the shining sea. He serves his country differently, that's all -- but just as honorably. No more, though.

And that did it for the O.G. He explains, you see, that his "years of being in the tank for McCain" were attributable, not to the famously chummy insider access of the favored media whores riding the Crankyman's Double Talk Express, but to his perception of the Old Shithead's "integrity":

What impressed me most about McCain was the effect he had on his audiences, particularly young people. When he talked about service to a cause greater than oneself, he struck a chord. He expressed his message in words, but he packaged it in the McCain story -- that man, beaten to a pulp, who chose honor over freedom. This had nothing to do with access. It had to do with integrity.

Ack!

Talk about a defective (or more likely absent) bullshit detector! Well, they say when you can fake sincerity, everything else falls into place. And it appears that the O.G. and his fellow Media Whores for McCranky are preternaturally gullible.

And if you can fake integrity . . .

Of course Young Johnny didn't internalize "the code of the McCains." As anyone at all familiar with his biography knows, he spent his early manhood and his military career thumbing his nose at the starchy naval forebears the Admirals McCain. Or is internalizing-the-McCain-code another thing that's supposed to have happened to him during his time as a POW? You know, along with learning to love his country, which apparently he didn't before.

What can be tricky about the McCranky "integrity" is that, at least to an extent, the lying son of a bitch believes in it himself. This appears to be one reason why he manages to live a life of thoroughgoing ethical sleaze even while claiming to be the purest of the pure -- he really thinks everything he does is morally beyond reproach.

Remember that, unlike the other U.S. senators who formed the Keating Five in the heyday of the S&L greed-and-selfishness scandals, Young Johnny had a personal relationship with Charles Keating. The guy did (sleazy) business with the Crankyman's (sleazy) father-in-law, from whom came the lovely Cindy's bulging coffers, which have always bankrolled Young Johnny's political campaigns when he couldn't hornswoggle innocent civilians to pony up enough cash. But in Young Johnny's mind he is so integritatious that he is above any possible suspicion of "pay for play" political

So when his Senate votes reflect uniform fidelity to the corporate interests that bankroll him, how could anyone even suspect "corruption"? Can't we recognize a "conscience at work"? Similarly, why should it occasion as much as a second thought when he turns his entire political operation over to lobbyists, the people whose job it is to buy, or leastwise rent, government officials for their corporate masters? After all, he's Young Johnny McCranky, God's own earthly anointed saint. Makes that Jesus fellow look like a small-timer.

The Legend of the Maverick McCranky

Now while the O.G. may have been clueless about the Real McCranky until Joy Behar unmasked him, for many people -- even people who were taken in by the Crankyman's phony "maverick" persona, the Legend of the McCranky Integrity began unraveling sometime between 2004 and 2008 -- or possibly even during the first term of the Bush regime. It was the moment when the Crankyman realized that he still still had one last shot at the White House, but that it would have to be not just literally but "spiritually" as the successor to the anointed zealot of the Oh-So-Far Right, George W. Bush. While Chimpy the Prez went about his work destroying the country, Young Johnny was frenetically reinventing himself as the New Chimpy, trying to make himself the new darling of the Far Right fanatics and loons whom the "maverick" McCranky had once scorned.

Okay, so the O.G. and the rest of McCranky's Media Minions were kind of slow on the uptake. (Sometimes all it takes is paying attention.) Nevertheless, if you're campaign genius Steve Schmidt (a Karl Rove disciple, of course), you can't be thrilled to read stuff like this:

McCain has soiled all that. His opportunistic and irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin as his political heir -- the person in whose hands he would leave the country -- is a form of personal treason, a betrayal of all he once stood for. Palin, no matter what her other attributes, is shockingly unprepared to become president. McCain knows that. He means to win, which is all right; he means to win at all costs, which is not. . . .

He was going to look the American people in the eyes and say, not me. I will not lie to you. I am John McCain, son and grandson of admirals. I tell the truth.

But Joy Behar knew better. And so McCain lied about his lying and maybe thinks that if he wins the election, he can -- as he did in South Carolina -- renounce who he was and what he did and resume his old persona. It won't work. Karl Marx got one thing right -- what he said about history repeating itself. Once is tragedy, a second time is farce. John McCain is both.

For several months now campaign genius Steve Schmidt, who undoubtedly deserves credit for turning the moribund McCranky campaign around with his whirlwind of anti-Obama whoppers, has been pursuing a parallel strategy that has struck me as dubious, and potentially disastrous for his enterprise. He more or less declared war on the media.

Dr. Frankenstein was here

The conventional wisdom is that you can never go wrong waging war on the media -- at least if you're doing it from the Right. At this point the infotainment news media are safely owned by, or at least safely in thrall to, the Money-Grubbing Right, and can generally be counted on to do their bidding. Still, the myth of the "liberal media" dies hard, and if some media members who didn't get the memo have the temerity to not just report the blithering imbecilities squealed by McCranky's nincompoop running mate, who after all seems largely responsible for the resurgence of the McCranky campaign, but to point out that from the fact-based standpoint just about every word out of her mouth is a demonstrable lie, well, that's media "bias," isn't it?

So why do I describe this bash-the-media strategy, as employed by the McCranky campaign, "dubious"? Well, you can always get away with a certain amount of media bashing -- the voting public almost demands it. But there are limits, especially when your candidate was invented by the media. The Legend of Young Johnny the Truth-Talking Maverick is a media invention.

The people who propagated that myth either know, or are in a position to know, where the bodies are buried. If they turn against Young Johnny, is it possible that the whole miserable mishmosh could fall apart?

Or, then again, it may be too late. Is it possible that the monster, once created, takes on a life of its own, beyond the control of its creator? Isn't that the unfortunate lesson poor Dr. Frankenstein learned?

For example, even as the insane popularity numbers of Governor Who??? plummet, a staggering number of potential voters stand by their original crackpot judgment that "we like Sarah." No matter how unfounded that judgment may have been, people tend to be reluctant to let go of it. Look how long it took the public to discover that maybe Chimpy the Prez wasn't who or what they thought way back when they, you know, voted for him -- twice. And now they seem to be dealing with this uncomfortable discovery by wiping the memory. George W. Who? Nope, name doesn't ring a bell.

Still, I wonder whether campaign genius Steve Schmidt really appreciates the risky course he has charted, snubbing the very media minions who created their candidate. Hell hath no fury like a media whore scorned.


POSTSCRIPT: MARK CRISPIN MILLER SUGGESTS GOVERNOR WHO???
WAS CHOSEN AS A COVER FOR MORE GOP ELECTION-STEALING

NYU media professor Mark Crispin Miller (most recently author of a book on election fraud called Loser Takes All, from stalwart progressive publisher Ig Publishing) is a serious guy, and I take him seriously. Now he's advancing an alternate theory for the selection of Sarah Palin as McCranky running mate.

Realistically, Mark argues, Palin couldn't have been expected to do much more than energize the Republican "base." That's not enough votes to swing the election, but he suggests that it could be enough to provide cover for another Republican presidential-election theft.

In 2004, he argues, there was no late "surge" of support for Chimpy the Prez, notably in Christian-conservative strongholds like southern Ohio, by Christian "values" voters. It's a myth invented by GOP strategists to conceal what really happened: rigging of the election count, ironically (but crucially) dismissed by the media as a myth. And everybody bought it, losers as well as winners. Poor John Kerry was undone by that late surge of "values" surge.

But Mark points out that there is absolutely no evidence that such a thing happened, and even if it did, it couldn't have happened in anything like the numbers necessary to swing the election. However, if you scratch the surface, he argues, there is plenty of evidence, not just of voter suppression but of serious vote miscounting -- enough to steal the election.

The logic for 2008, he suggests, is that another stolen election can once again be covered with a myth of surging "values"-voter support. It's an interesting argument, and not surprisingly from Mark it's persuasively argued.

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