2008: A YEAR ON STEROIDS, Part 2

December 2006: Time's (in)famous "You" Person of

the Year cover. What a difference two years makes!

Random observations, thoughts, and rants on 2008,
Part 2 (of 3)


by Noah


1. PARDONS, PARDONS, WHO'S GETTING PARDONS?

There has been justifiable concern about who so-called President Bush might pardon before he says "My work is done here" and smirks, slithers, and slinks off into the rest of his life of failure. There's even speculation as to whether he might try to pardon himself along with the rest of the sleazoids in his administration. Not much talk about it at all in the MSM, though, and even less talk about the pardons Bush issued for Thanksgiving.

That's right. Although Dubya has been stingier with pardons than any president in memory, he quietly issued several you may not have heard about, among them five issued to people convicted of crimes related to the mid-1980s S&L scandal, including John Smith (if that's his real name), a former Dallas banker; David McCall Jr. from Plano, Texas; Mark Hale of Henderson, Texas, who went for the gold to the tune of $5 million; and one William Hoyle McCright Jr. of Midland, Texas. The last one there just happened to be a McCain donor. Gee, look at all these guys from Texas. What a coincidence!

Of course, the MSM's blanket of secrecy continues to protect the Bush Crime Family. It's like the S&L crimes never happened. No mention of Neil Bush's role, and still no mention of Jeb Bush's default on a $4.5 million "loan" from Broward Federal Savings. Some guys took a fall. Smaller fish, perhaps. Now they get pardons for keeping silent, I suppose. That's the way it works. The Bush Crime Family sure knows how to get its hands on money, especially our money. Still lots of mention about Clinton's seedy pardon of Marc Rich, but these? Not so much.


2. SPEAKING OF MOVING MONEY AROUND: HANK THE GRIFTER

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is pulling off what those bankers who plotted to overthrow FDR back in the '30s wanted to do. Everyone wants a crack at Bernie Madoff for making $50 billion disappear. Why not Hank the Grifter for making who-knows-how-many-times that disappear? (And I mean that as a question. Does anyone have any idea how many billions have vanished down the Grifter's rathole?) He is turning over a major percentage of our GDP to a few cigar-chomping, meth-snorting fat cats. He is the master enabler. It's thievery that any two-bit Middle Eastern or Latin American dictator can only dream about, all being done before our eyes while politicians and media whores call it something else.

I remember when Saddam Hussein was being shocked and awed, he took a couple of trailer trucks to the bank and loaded up the cash and gold. What's the difference? Where'd the "bailout" money go? It was sold to us as money that would go to people looking for loans to purchase homes and cars. In reality, it went to buy up smaller banks, pay bonuses for bankers (over $1.6 billion to date), and pay stockholder dividends. Understand this: They took our tax dollars and redistributed them -- to themselves. Car and home loans? Nope. The new bank mantra is "Just Say NO."

With the S&L scandal, the participants in the scam took out loans from banks which they had no intention of repaying. Investors and depositors be damned. This time they take it from the U.S. Treasury and hand it over to their slimy buddies. Poppy Bush once described the goal as to get more money into the hands of fewer people. Saddam was known to give the contents of his country's treasury and foreign aid to himself, his family, and a small circle of friends. He created a class of the superwealthy. The Bush Crime Family has aimed at the same goal for decades, across generations. Strip away all the "he tried to kill my daddy nonsense," and you're left with this: Saddam was merely a very nasty rival -- they didn't hate Saddam, they envied him. He wasn't an enemy, he was a role model.


3. BUSH'S EXIT INTERVIEWS

When asked what he would miss most about not being (playing) president, El Heinisio replied wistfully that he would most miss riding on Air Force One and having the White House chef at his call. Oh well, maybe missing the opportunity to make the country and the world a better place finishes a close third. With most people on the way out, we'd say, "Don't let the door hit you where the good lord split ya," but in this case it might be nice if the door had some extra snap in its springs. He used to talk about catapulting the propaganda. Maybe there's an idea here.


4. TIME MAGAZINE'S PERSON OF THE YEAR

A few weeks ago, Time's Mark Halperin spoke out from his cuckoo-clock rest home about how some perceived "extreme pro-Obama bias" on the part of the mainstream media had -- shock, horror -- fooled the public into electing Senator "That One." That Halperin witnessed this imaginary bias may, in fact, be the long-sought proof of parallel universes and previously unknown dimensions that top physicists have theorized. However, on this planet, in this dimension, the 2008 election may just be the watershed moment where the public took a lead from the classic '70s movie Network and started to really scream, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore," back at the MSM talking heads, jive-ass spinmeisters, and assorted foaming-at-the-mouth, rotating-head right-wing sideshow attractions.

Halperin must be totally beside himself with sputtering rage and frustration at the naming of President-elect Obama as Person of the Year by his obviously biased employer. His own employer! What a betrayal! Hopefully, someone at Time will film Halperin's near convulsions and upload it to YouTube asap.

Note to Mark Halperin: The tide may be moving the other way. You are obsolete, a caricature of the past. The MSM has always spewed little but the propaganda of the neocon artists, memos from the desk of Karl Rove, and the semicoherent mumblings of religious goons like Pat Robertson, who has become a multigazillionaire off of his "nonprofit" organization. Even when the MSM has a dreaded liberal on one of its political chat shows, they make sure to "balance" the token liberal with two to four screaming ditzbrains who start yelling every time the alleged liberal-commie-terrorist sympathizer tries to get a word in edgewise.

It's time to just turn these loons off. Hell, in my parallel universes I'd make them walk the plank off the lip of an active volcano. Now, that would be a reality show! Kudos to Ed Schultz for actually just getting up and walking off in the middle of one show (the execrable Fox and Friends) this year, leaving the shrieking, hooting, jumping-up-and-down, armpit-scratching righty monkeys to throw their monkey poop at each other in their mass confusion. It was a beautiful thing to behold.


5. GOP ELECTION-STEALING: A TICKING TIME BOMB

In all of the discussion of Barack Obama's victory, something has been ignored. It's a time bomb waiting to blow up in our faces on some future Election Day. It's a voting-machine time bomb. Diebold, a company so heinous, it had to change the name of its voting-machine division to Premier, is still in control of a huge percentage of our election tabulating. Diebold whistle-blower Christopher Hood has provided information as to how the Georgia 2002 Senate election was rigged in favor of Saxby Chambliss; more specifically, how he was ordered by Bob Urosevich, the president of Diebold, to secretly install software "patches" in clear violation of state law on voting machines in Democratic-leaning counties.

Stephen Spoonamore, a talented cyber expert who has done much work for our government (and who is a lifelong Republican) has stated publicly that he believes the 2002 Georgia election was rigged. "If you look at the case of Saxby Chmablis, that's ridiculous. The man was not elected. He lost that election by five points. Max Cleland won. They flipped the votes, clear as day." You can watch him say it on YouTube if you like.

Funny how YouTube provides us with more real information now than the so-called news networks. Was Georgia 2002 just a test for Ohio 2004? You decide. A RICO case is in motion in Ohio. Depositions have been taken, and the Georgia secretary of state was told to save everything -- every hard drive, every memory card, every document relating to Georgia's more recent runoff election. Cliff Arnebeck, lead attorney in the case, has said, "Karl Rove has made a career out of rigging elections. Electronic voting machines like those being used in Georgia are his favorite tool."

Now, just last week, the key Rove IT guy, Mike Connell, who began testifying seven weeks ago in an Ohio vote-tampering case, died in a plane crash on a clear, good-weather night. Spoonamore called him "vital to uncovering the truth" about missing White House e-mails and related things, including the firings of nine U.S. Attorneys who held legal principle above Rovian politics. According to Spoonamore, Connell had asked him about ways to "permanently destroy hard drives." Connell also did IT work for the infamous Ohio secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, designing a program for him that enabled him to see the 2004 election results in real time, as they were counted.

Connell's other dubious accomplishments include being computer guy for the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, RNC.org and numerous House committees and building and managing congressional servers and George W. Bush's election websites and communication networks. This includes the nongovernment e-mail systems that Rove used for virtually all his important e-mail communication, much of which is now -- surprise, surprise! -- mysteriously missing. Connell was an extreme Bush loyalist and also a Christian extremist, an anti-choice zealot who, along with his wife, spoke of electing Bush as a mission from God which no law of man should get in the way of. He was doing God's work, after all!

This guy was the man who knew too much. Talk about knowing where the bodies were buried! But since he was forced to testify, he and his wife have been receiving threats, and now he has gone to his great reward, although it's probably not the one he was expecting. His death is a very convenient one, to say the least.

Remember how confident Rove was going into Election Day 2006? Then remember how completely shocked the White House was by the massive Democratic turnout? Even then, there were dozens of suspicious results, the most famous of which was in Katherine Harris's old congressional district in Florida. I guess the Repugs thought they had it all set up. Things would look close again, but they would prevail again and keep their majorities.

Sigh! There's only so much tampering you can do. Just like in November, the only way to beat machine tampering is with massive turnout. One wonders what the election results would be with no tampering! How one-sided could the Obama and congressional victories have been? There were reports of vote-flipping this time in West Virginia and upstate New York, to name two. What happens the next time there is a tight election, an election where vote-flipping in just one state can change who gets in the White House or who gets to be your Senator?

It's a time bomb, and it needs to be addressed and disarmed, now. It threatens democracy itself. The excuse often given for not acting on this matter runs something like this: "Well, the people might lose faith in their electoral system." Either Washington is the last to know, yet again, or they like things just fine the way they are.


6. TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN

Bush's final looting of the treasury, the Halliburton no-bid deals, the tax cuts for the wealthy, and bailouts to nowhere are all about starving the government while stealing as much as they can. The easiest way to starve out funds for things like education, health care, infrastructure, enforcement of environmental laws, etc. is to just take the money, all under the guise of fiscal conservatism. This is what "conservatism" is about now -- conserving your money for the few at the top, while we buy into media myths like "trickle-down economics."

Your 401(k)? As if an evil worm like Bush even cares. Ten to one he had to ask what a 401(k) was when it came up in September during the market crash. Bush leaves office snickering and smirking, muttering "Let them eat rum cake" under his reeking-of-alcohol breath. The crashing economy is the end result of 30 years of deregulation, destruction of a balanced tax code, and destruction of a balanced tariff mechanism, which built the middle class and led to a prosperity that deprived the upper class of their favorite weapon against the rest of us, fear. To them, prosperity had to go. It was an anathema that stood in the way of greed. Too much was never enough. The needs of the greedy outweighed the needs of the needy.

Dems like former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin shouldn't get off the hook either. He says he didn't know it was coming. He didn't see it. "I saw nothing. I see nothing." Drop the Sergeant Schultz act, bozo.


7. FINALLY, AN OPEN LETTER TO ALAN COLMES

Dear Alan,

I hate to think that you actually enjoyed your last job. The money must have been really good, but you were just a sideshow geek to the rest of the people (and I use the word "people" loosely) on the show. You were, at best, a professional patsy, a punching bag for total jerks. Maybe you could go on Dirty Jobs. I used to hope that just once you would go postal on-air, but you always disappointed me.

Then again, conspiracy buffs might notice the timing of the announcement of your leaving, matching up with word that Ann Coultergeist has a broken jaw. If that's what happened, you have redeemed yourself and taken The Man's money at the same time. Not bad!

Yours,
Noah


YESTERDAY IN PART 1: Sarah P and Joe the P, Gov. Spritzer, Keith and Rachel, the Repugs stuck in mid-20th century, and more

TOMORROW IN PART 3: CNN and the illusion of news, piggies everywhere, the Supremes who gave us Pres. Dubya, and more

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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]

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