2006 GOP Dirty Tricks

By Dave Lindorff

The calls for a reckoning for the criminals of the Bush/Cheney
administration are growing by the day, as the final few days of the
Bush presidency tick down, and as new evidence of their crimes keep
pouring out of the deflating gas bag that was the Bush White House.

For years, the Democrats in Congress, with a few notable
exceptions, have sat on their hands, allowing the ongoing destruction
of the Constitution, of the US military, of the nation’s reputation,
and of the rule of law, as well as of the institution of Congress
itself, by a cabal of Republicans in the White House, led by Vice
President Dick Cheney, who have sought to establish an executive-led government
that answered only to itself.

By Dave Lindorff

With the polls continuing to show Barack Obama holding a steady or
even growing lead heading into Election Day, especially in the key
swing states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Colorado, New Hampshire
and Virginia, and with Democratic challengers looking strong in at
least 10 Senate races and dozens of open-seat or Republican-held House
races, it’s looking like this will be a big win for Democrats, both in
the presidential and the Congressional races.

Hopefully one thing such an across-the-boards win will lead to
would be a withering away of the self-destructive conspiracy-theory
paranoia that has gripped much of the Left over the last eight years.

Tonight from 8 - 9 p.m. ET I'll be interviewing Mark Crispin Miller and he'll be taking your questions at http://www.thepeoplespeakradio.net

Mark Crispin Miller is professor of media studies at New York University and the author of the book: Fooled Again, How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections. He is known for his writing on American media and for his activism on behalf of democratic media reform. His books include Boxed In: The Culture of TV, Seeing Through Movies, and Mad Scientists, a study of war propaganda.

Miller writes in his book, Fooled Again, that the 2000 U.S. Presidential election and 2004 U.S. Presidential election were “stolen”. Miller presents extensive documentation, backed by 56 pages of notes, supporting his contention that the outcome of both elections was altered and controlled by a small minority. He states that the American voting populace can no longer assume that their votes will be accurately assessed, and that the installation of electronic voting machines in state after state is a fundamental flaw in the U.S. electoral system. He appeared in the 2004 documentary Orwell Rolls in His Grave, which focuses on the hidden mechanics of the media, its role as it should be and what it actually is, and how it shapes (to the point of almost controlling) U.S. politics.

Mark’s new book is: Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008.

On Thursday, February 21st, David Earnhardt, the writer, director, and producer of the best film yet released on election fraud, "Uncounted," showed the film and spoke about it in Charlottesville, Va., at an event hosted by the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice (CCPJ). The week of the event, Charlottesville's daily newspaper and its two weekly newspapers wrote about the movie and the issue of election fraud: Daily Progress, The Hook, and C'ville Weekly.

CCPJ recorded a 50-minute video that includes Earnhardt's opening remarks prior to the screening of the film, and his remarks and question-and-answer session at the end. During the Q&A, Earnhardt is joined on stage by CCPJ board member David Swanson.

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Machines can’t be trusted to get elections right
By David Swanson, C'ville Weekly

How can we be sure our votes in the February 12 primaries were properly counted? We can trust and hope, but we cannot be certain. Charlottesville uses DRE voting machines (Directly Recording Electronic voting machines). While the city brags that these are not touch-screen machines, because we turn a dial instead of touching a screen, the problems are the same. The machines we use have produced noticeable errors in some places around the country, such as displaying on the final page for confirmation different selections from those the voter had made. But the major danger lies in the unnoticeable.

By David Swanson

As we muddle our way through primary elections fraught with errors, fraud, and suppression, it's useful to look back at the elections of 2004 and 2006. So, on Wednesday February 20th, from 8 to 9 p.m. ET I'll be interviewing David Earnhardt live online, and you can phone in with your questions.

Humor is a funny thing. Show the same thing to various people, and some will think it's funny, others, not. I can only wonder why, out of the universe of possibilities, Karl Rove, noted as "Bush’s Brain," would choose to say, even "jokingly," that his hobby is "tearing the tops off small animals...headless"

It was only a joke, ya know, made by a man facing the pressures of increasing scrutiny.

But we do know that there's a correlation between cruelty to animals and sociopathic behavior.

"And what is the foundational characteristic of every sociopath? A profound, pervasive, fundamental lack of empathy. The sociopath attends to only his own needs, and feels only his own pain. If the pain of others interferes with his needs, it is casually ignored. And if the pain of others becomes his need, it is relentlessly pursued....empathy isn't administered as an injection; it is learned over time. The young child who throws a rock at a flock of pigeons isn't so much endangering a bird as he is giving us the chance to intervene at the crossroads: We can teach empathy, or we can encourage cruelty....

In the wake of Ann Coulter's meltdown, Steven Crockett, co-host of Democratic Talk Radio wrote about other typical forms of harassment against Democratic activists from his own experience in "Democratic Activists Harassed by Republican Lunatics."

Populist Democratic activists are routinely being harassed by the lunatic fringe of the Republican Right and fanatics from the anti-Democratic Left. Lately, it seems increasingly likely that some of those on the Internet harassing Populist Democratic activists are actually supporters of the Republican Right pretending to be from the anti-Democratic Left.

There are some things that you just don’t want to read about or watch on a full stomach -- this is one of those.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing on Tuesday to consider the nomination of Sam Fox, a wealthy St. Louis businessman, to be the new U.S. Ambassador to Belgium. While it is not unusual for big political donors to be rewarded with ambassadorships -- and Fox is a huge donor to all things Republican -- what made everyone take note of this guy is that Fox gave a whopping $50,000 to help fund the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smear campaign against John Kerry in 2004.

And in being questioned by the Senate panel yesterday, Fox had to face one of the senior members of that committee in… Senator John Kerry.

What followed was riveting theater, with Kerry coldly staring down a clearly-nervous Fox and Bush's nominee withstanding a barrage of questions from Kerry that the Massachusetts Senator nicely referred to as questions of Fox's "judgment" while many of us would have just flat-out called him a scumbag.

Click for video

How to you smear lipstick on the worst presidency in our nation's history? Ask corporate donors and arab governments and businessmen to pony up half a billion dollars to build the largest presidential library in the country.

The most frightening aspect of this is that they're going to use part of the cash to set up a thinktank modelled after the Reagan Legacy Project, which will have as its primary goal, the re-writing of history, portraying Bush Jr. as a misunderstood genius who was only guilty of being a tad before his time.