Going Too Far Continued

Weird just keeps getting weirder, and degradation more degraded.  First there was the spectacle of a story about who would speak at Senator John McCain's funeral, while Senator McCain is still alive.  One person--the antipresident-- reportedly would not be invited, and that led to two more bizarre events and stories.

The first was another Republican Senator instructing the McCains on who they should invite, namelythe antipresident.  He later apologized for this obvious act of presumption.

The latest was the reported comment of a White House staffer, on Senator McCain's announced opposition to confirming the current candidate to be CIA Director, who ran a torture program that the antipresident would love to reinstate.  It doesn't matter, the staffer reportedly said, adding Senator McCain is "dying anyway."

The reaction was swift and strong from media and Democrats but not Republicans. Given multiple opportunities, the White House has not denied the statement nor apologized.  The staffer was not fired, and there is no evidence she was even reprimanded.

Though many today focused on Senator McCain as a war hero, this disrespect towards him as a former candidate of the party for the presidency, a long-serving Senator, or just a terminally ill person worthy of respect, is itself scandalous.

But there's more.  I haven't heard anyone say it (but I haven't heard everyone) but it seems a direct reaction to the antipresident purportedly not being invited to the funeral of a man who is still alive.  That's the world we're in now.

John McCain is on Homegrown Hitler's very long Enemies List.  Because of that, not just a White House staffer feels free to disrespect him. The politics of resentment that unites HH and the far right knows no degrees and has no decency: it's scorched Earth all the time.  So there's a far right story making the rounds that while captive and tortured multiple times in Vietnam, McCain provided information to the enemy damaging to the US.  That's the gleeful ugliness in store for anyone on the Enemies List.

I would feel better about some of the outrage today if it had been voiced when Senator John Kerry's heroism in Vietnam was being lied about for political gain in 2004--but then some of the Bush people rightly defending McCain were among the perpetrators and enablers of that scandal, now with its own political verb of swiftboating.

Once again Homegrown Hitler has degraded almost everyone and the entire political culture and tradition along with himself, and once again the latest outrage has been greeted with searing contempt, and the declaration that, this time he's crossed a line, this time he's gone too far.

How many more times will that happen, I wonder.

The Obama Generation Is Here

Ok, this is the "best of times" part.  Start with the New York Times:

Demonstrators flooded streets across the globe in public protests on Saturday, calling for action against gun violence. Hundreds of thousands of marchers turned out, in the most ambitious show of force yet from a student-driven movement that emerged after the recent massacre at a South Florida high school.

Yolanda Renee King, the 9 year old granddaughter of Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke at the Washington demo:

"My grandfather had a dream that his four little children would not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character," she said, referencing her grandfather's famous speech. "I have a dream that enough is enough. That this should be a gun-free world. Period."

Celebrities, political and otherwise, joined, including Paul McCartney at the New York demo, held near where John Lennon was shot and killed.

President Obama tweeted:

Michelle and I are so inspired by all the young people who made today’s marches happen. Keep at it. You’re leading us forward. Nothing can stand in the way of millions of voices calling for change.

New Yorker report on the Washington march included:

By noon, it was impossible to move easily through the crowd. Teens waved homemade signs (“Hunting Season is Over”; “No, I’m Pretty Sure Guns Kill People”) and huddled together for photos. Poppy Fleming, a nine-year-old student at Hartwood Elementary, in Stafford County, Virginia, stood with Deborah and Michael Fleming, her grandparents. She held up a sign decorated with the names and locations of various mass shootings. In the middle, she’d written, in magic marker, “Am I Next?”

“We can teach her about civil disobedience,” Deborah said. “We can teach her how to vote.”

Boston

A Politico story included details of the Washington march:

The city’s public transportation system was bracing for long lines and crowds. Restaurants offered discounted meals to marchers and the ride-sharing app Lyft offered free rides to the march. Local families have been offering up their homes to students with nowhere to stay.

It goes on:
Many adults took to the streets, too, saying they were inspired by personal experiences with gun violence. Danny Robb, a 64-year-old retired Air Force colonel, traveled from than 7,000 miles from Okinawa, Japan to Washington. On March 24, 1998 — 20 years ago today— two gunmen shot up his daughter’s middle school in Jonesboro, Arkansas, killing five people. She happened to stay home that day, but a friend she sat next to in class was killed.

Now, Robb said he hopes young people will succeed where his generation fell short.  “In the military, you’re taught that to be a good leader you have to be a good follower,” Robb said. “And the kids need to take the lead on this.”

Marches across the world and across the US included an estimated 30,000 in downtown Pittsburgh, one of the largest political gathering there ever.

The Hill: seven memorable moments from the Washington event.

History may see this as the first action of the Obama Generation.  When we marched on Washington in 1963, we changed the country and changed the world. There have been many marches since that have had lesser effect.  Only time will tell about this one.  But it clearly says there is a hopeful element in the coming generations, and their influence may well be felt soon, even if they can't vote yet, through parents and those they persuade with their intelligence and passion.  (They register a ton of voters on Saturday.)

Your Old Road is Rapidly Aging

Some penetrating new political commentaries outline the long term and perhaps the present problem the Grand Old White Peoples Party has. 

In a piece that begins by quoting Romney's harsh position on aid to students (the headline is Pay For Your Own Damn College!), Jonathan Chiat at New York Magazine concludes: "Republicans are defending the shared cultural prerogatives of a certain group of people. That is why I am arguing that the shifting demographic tides will require the GOP to undertake a major reorientation in order to maintain its competitiveness. There’s simply no way to transpose their sense of what is and what is not a legitimate government function onto a progressively younger, browner electorate. (Latino voters overwhelmingly support Obama’s health care reform.) Their conception of us versus them can work for a while – it worked quite well with the anomalously old, white 2010 off-year electorate – but the them is rapidly outnumbering the us."

Specifically with the fastest growing population group, Latinos, GOPers are persistently and even doggedly digging themselves a black hole into which their electoral fortunes are already falling.  When asked which party supports their chance to achieve the American Dream, only 10% chose the GOWP.  President Obama beats any GOWP opponent by a factor of 6 to 1.  Said a GOP strategist  in this Monitor piece that outlines the problem, "If we don’t do better among Latinos, we are not going to be talking about how to get back Florida in the presidential race, we are going to be talking about how not to lose Texas.”

Meanwhile Josh Marshall at TPM offers the most cogent explanation for the mindset of Mitt Romney: as a businessman, his core values are bloodless business values which he freely expresses as let Detroit go bankrupt, let the housing market hit bottom, pay for your own damn college, etc.  But on other issues that don't touch this business mindset, he'll say whatever works on the principle of market testing: there's no sense trying to sell a product that your market testing tells you won't sell to the people you see as your market.  Hence his "flip-flops" on everything else.

Roved Again?

Even Democrats can hardly believe they're going to win, so it's not so surprising that some Republicans can't accept that they will lose... And what if they're right?

Karl Rove is functionally arrogant, but has usually kept from displaying that arrogance too forthrightly--and besides, he's had this oddly unfathomable winning streak. But his arrogance was on full and obvious display in a radio interview with NPR's Robert Seigel. Rove flatly stated that Republicans will retain control of both houses of Congress. When Seigel suggested that "many might consider you on the optimistic end of realism," as of course anybody reading or hearing the news for the last month or so would, Rove shot back, "Not that you would be exhibiting a bias or anything like that. You're just making a comment." A clear and clearly cheap shot at NPR--a Rove trademark, although he usually lets others deliver it--and a ploy at intimidating Seigel into not asking hard questions.

Rove several times insisted that despite the public polls--many of them, contrary to his assertion, polling specific contests--the polls he was seeing showed that Republicans will retain power. Or as Rove modestly put it, "You may end up with a different math, but you're entitled to your math. I'm entitled to THE math."

But perhaps Rove's most arrogant statement was that the public polls showing two-thirds or more of voters saying the Iraq war must end, or the majorities that believe Bush lied them into the war and has kept on lying about it, and all the other national issues that voters are angry at Republicans about--simply don't matter. They "do not impact the outcome."

Specifically he was talking about local issues or other overrriding issues being more important in individual races. But the idea that so many Americans can be so upset about so many important matters, about a war that kills hundreds, even thousands of people a month and is costing this country billions, but can't change the government bungling that war, lying all the way, is profoundly disturbing.

But as many suspect, perhaps Rove has different reasons for his predictions. Stories continue to appear about the likelihood of problems with voting--everything from electronic machines to a dearth of trained poll workers. A new report by Electionline.org, supported by the Pew Charitable Trust, cites ten states as having particular problems this time, including states with crucial races, like Maryland, Ohio, Colorado, and Pennsylvania. Suppression of voters who would most likely vote Democratic is a matter of record and even of law in several states, including Ohio and Florida.

The rollcall of such problems, plus the Rovian district-by-district analysis, prompted election maven Chris Bowers to ask: "How Much Do Democrats Have to Win By to Actually Win?" He quotes at length a study by three political scientists who conclude: If current trends in the congressional generic ballot polling persist (which they have in past election campaigns), the Democrats are near certain to win control of the House. But this assumes a continued Democratic lead of 8 or more points among likely voters in the generic ballot. If the lead dips below this level, the Republicans can rekindle their hope of holding the House.

So in terms of the generic D or R national polls, Dems have to win by 8 points. Bowers concurs with that figure. It may well be that even in individual contests, the Democratic candidate will have to get 8% more votes than the Republican just to come away with a one point victory.

All of which is even more motivation for voters to get out there and vote for Democrats.

UPDATE: Figures just out today show that Democrats have increased their generic national lead to 11 points for the House in one poll, and 18 points overall in another.

2004 Not Dead in Ohio?

Since Robert Kennedy, Jr. published his story in Rolling Stone challenging the results of the 2004 presidential election (and after attempted debunking in Salon and elsewhere, and debunking of the debunking), two pretty noteworthy statements in the trad media.

The latest and loudest appeared in the New York Times, by columnist Bob Herbert (as excerpted here; the rest is behind the pay-per-view wall.):Republicans, and even a surprising number of Democrats, have been anxious to leave the 2004 Ohio election debacle behind. But Kennedy, in his long, heavily footnoted article ("Was the 2004 Election Stolen?"), leaves no doubt that the democratic process was trampled and left for dead in the Buckeye State. Kerry almost certainly would have won Ohio if all of his votes had been counted, and if all of the eligible voters who tried to vote for him had been allowed to cast their ballots.

No one has been able to prove that the election in Ohio was hijacked. But whenever it is closely scrutinized, the range of problems and dirty tricks that come to light is shocking. What's not shocking, of course, is that every glitch and every foul-up in Ohio, every arbitrary new rule and regulation, somehow favored Bush.

This follows an oped in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer by Kenneth F. Bunting, an associate publisher of that newspaper, outing the trad media for its response to the RFK jr. article: the silence in America's establishment media has been deafening. But Bunting concludes: Singling out Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell for much of the blame, Kennedy writes persuasively that enough was awry in that state alone to raise serious questions as to whether Bush really defeated John Kerry in 2004.

Herbert's column especially is likely to intensify debate over this article and its conclusions, but will it be enough to prevent such perversion of the very basis of our government and political rights? Not in Ohio--not if Ken Blackwell has anything to say about it, and guess what, he still does.

Though he is running for governor, he is still Secretary of State, able this time to manipulate the rules governing his own election. According to a New York Times editorial he recently
has put in place "emergency" regulations that could hit voter registration workers with criminal penalties for perfectly legitimate registration practices. The rules are so draconian they could shut down registration drives in Ohio.

Similiar rules have been put in place by Katherine Harris' Republican successor and the Republican legislature in that other bastion of democracy, Florida, resulting (the Times ed says) in a law that is so harsh that the Florida League of Women Voters announced that it was stopping all voter registration efforts for the first time in 67 years.

It's obvious how suppressing votes in black neighborhoods, disenfranchising blacks and Democrats, rigging machines to register votes for Bush when the voter voted for Kerry, etc. could give the election to Bush. But what about suppressing voter registration, which Blackwell and others also did in 2004? Partly it's targeted to likely or actual Democrat registrations. Partly it was in recognition that more people were angry at Bush and registering so they could vote against him. But it's also part of the electoral philosophy of Rove and other Republicans, as expressed by a GOPer operative recently convicted of an illegal phone-jamming scheme in New Hampshire to disrupt Democratic registration efforts.

According to Political Wire, he said the scheme reflects a broader culture in the Republican Party that is focused on dividing voters to win primaries and general elections. He said examples range from some recent efforts to use border-security concerns to foster anger toward immigrants to his own role arranging phone calls designed to polarize primary voters over abortion in a 2002 New Jersey Senate race."Said Raymond: "A lot of people look at politics and see it as the guy who wins is the guy who unifies the most people. I would disagree. I would say the candidate who wins is the candidate who polarizes the right bloc of voters."

Keeping everyone from participating but those you are sure are yours to command is a key part of this strategy. There is no ethic, principle or value that is greater, or is allowed to interfere with domination by the Bushite Republicans and their minions. Until the trad media and the public at large comes to grips with this almost unthinkable situation, they will continue to manipulate "elections" and consolidate their power without compunction or conscience, and certainly without democracy.

It can also be the key to your fortune, on scales both large and small. There is an incredible story unfolding in Florida, involving manipulated elections in support of big ticket development enriching some of the locals, and the arrest of the man trying to expose it all. It's like some Rod Serling deep south story updated to 2006--complete with a city manager who is also the police chief, Jeb Bush appointees and Wal-Mart. Yet for all its absurdities, it's also a portrait in miniature of what may well be going on elsewhere, including Washington DC.

Robert Kennedy, Jr.: Kerry Won in 2004

The evidence has been growing since November 2004, and now the case is made by environmental lawyer and son of one of the great names in American political life: in the new Rolling Stone, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. writes that the Republicans systematically stole the 2004 election for George Bush. In Ohio alone, enough voters were disenfranchised and enough votes not counted or counted wrong to ensure Bush's election. Otherwise John Kerry would now be president of the U.S. And it would not have even been close.

Indeed, the extent of the GOP's effort to rig the vote shocked even the most experienced observers of American elections. ''Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,'' Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me.

The indictment of the Republicans and the media establishment that allowed them to get away with stealing this election (after stealing the one before) is relentless and extensive.

Are You Scared Yet? This Should Do It

Free Press

From "Powerful Government Accounting Office report confirms key 2004 stolen election findings" by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman [excerpts; emphasis added]

As a legal noose appears to be tightening around the Bush/Cheney/Rove inner circle, a shocking government report shows the floor under the legitimacy of their alleged election to the White House is crumbling.

The latest critical confirmation of key indicators that the election of 2004 was stolen comes in an extremely powerful, penetrating report from the General Accounting Office that has gotten virtually no mainstream media coverage.

The government's lead investigative agency is known for its general incorruptibility and its through, in-depth analyses. Its concurrence with assertions widely dismissed as "conspiracy theories" adds crucial new weight to the case that Team Bush has no legitimate business being in the White House.

Among other things, the GAO confirms that:

1. Some electronic voting machines "did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, and it was possible to alter both without being detected." In other words, the GAO now confirms that electronic voting machines provided an open door to flip an entire vote count. More than 800,000 votes were cast in Ohio on electronic voting machines, some seven times Bush's official margin of victory.

2. "It was possible to alter the files that define how a ballot looks and works so that the votes for one candidate could be recorded for a different candidate."Numerous sworn statements and affidavits assert that this did happen in Ohio 2004.

3. Falsifying election results without leaving any evidence of such an action by using altered memory cards can easily be done, according to the GAO.

4. The GAO also confirms that access to the voting network was easily compromised because not all digital recording electronic voting systems (DREs) had supervisory functions password-protected, so access to one machine provided access to the whole network. This critical finding confirms that rigging the 2004 vote did not require a "widespread conspiracy" but rather the cooperation of a very small number of operatives with the power to tap into the networked machines and thus change large numbers of votes at will.

With 800,000 votes cast on electronic machines in Ohio, flipping the number needed to give Bush 118,775 could be easily done by just one programmer.

5. Access to the voting network was also compromised by repeated use of the same user IDs combined with easily guessed passwords. So even relatively amateur hackers could have gained access to and altered the Ohio vote tallies.

6. The locks protecting access to the system were easily picked and keys were simple to copy, meaning, again, getting into the system was an easy matter.

7. One DRE model was shown to have been networked in such a rudimentary fashion that a power failure on one machine would cause the entire network to fail, re-emphasizing the fragility of the system on which the Presidency of the United States was decided.

8. GAO identified further problems with the security protocols and background screening practices for vendor personnel, confirming still more easy access to the system.

In essence, the GAO study makes it clear that no bank, grocery store or mom & pop chop shop would dare operate its business on a computer system as flimsy, fragile and easily manipulated as the one on which the 2004 election turned.

The GAO findings are particularly damning when set in the context of an election run in Ohio by a Secretary of State simultaneously working as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign. Far from what election theft skeptics have long asserted, the GAO findings confirm that the electronic network on which 800,000 Ohio votes were cast was vulnerable enough to allow a a tiny handful of operatives -- or less -- to turn the whole vote count using personal computers operating on relatively simple software.

The GAO documentation flows alongside other crucial realities surrounding the 2004 vote count. For example:

The exit polls showed Kerry winning in Ohio, until an unexplained last minute shift gave the election to Bush. Similar definitive shifts also occurred in Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico, a virtual statistical impossibility.

A few weeks prior to the election, an unauthorized former ES&S voting machine company employee, was caught on the ballot-making machine in Auglaize County.

Election officials in Mahoning County now concede that at least 18 machines visibly transferred votes for Kerry to Bush. Voters who pushed Kerry's name saw Bush's name light up, again and again, all day long. Officials claim the problems were quickly solved, but sworn statements and affidavits say otherwise. They confirm similar problems in Franklin County (Columbus). Kerry's margins in both counties were suspiciously low.

A voting machine in Mahoning County recorded a negative 25 million votes for Kerry. The problem was allegedly fixed.

In Gahanna Ward 1B, at a fundamentalist church, a so-called "electronic transfer glitch" gave Bush nearly 4000 extra votes when only 638 people voted at that polling place. The tally was allegedly corrected, but remains infamous as the "loaves and fishes" vote count.

In Franklin County, dozens of voters swore under oath that their vote for Kerry faded away on the DRE without a paper trail.

In Miami County, at 1:43am after Election Day, with the county's central tabulator reporting 100% of the vote - 19,000 more votes mysteriously arrived; 13,000 were for Bush at the same percentage as prior to the additional votes, a virtual statistical impossibility.

In Cleveland, large, entirely implausible vote totals turned up for obscure third party candidates in traditional Democratic African-American wards. Vote counts in neighboring wards showed virtually no votes for those candidates, with 90% going instead for Kerry.

Prior to one of Blackwell's illegitimate "show recounts," technicians from Triad voting machine company showed up unannounced at the Hocking County Board of Elections and removed the computer hard drive.

In response to official information requests, Shelby and other counties admit to having discarded key records and equipment before any recount could take place.

In a conference call with Rev. Jackson, Attorney Cliff Arnebeck, Attorney Bob Fitrakis and others, John Kerry confirmed that he lost every precinct in New Mexico that had a touchscreen voting machine. The losses had no correlation with ethnicity, social class or traditional party affiliation---only with the fact that touchscreen machines were used.

In a public letter, Rep. Conyers has stated that "by and large, when it comes to a voting machine, the average voter is getting a lemon - the Ford Pinto of voting technology. We must demand better."
Nearly a year ago, senior Judiciary Committee Democrat John Conyers (D-MI) asked the GAO to investigate electronic voting machines as they were used during the November 2, 2004 presidential election. The request came amidst widespread complaints in Ohio and elsewhere that often shocking irregularities defined their performance.

According to CNN, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee received "more than 57,000 complaints" following Bush's alleged re-election. Many such concerns were memorialized under oath in a series of sworn statements and affidavits in public hearings and investigations conducted in Ohio by the Free Press and other election protection organizations.

The non-partisan GAO report has now found that, "some of [the] concerns about electronic voting machines have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes.

" The United States is the only major democracy that allows private partisan corporations to secretly count and tabulate the votes with proprietary non-transparent software. Rev. Jesse Jackson, among others, has asserted that "public elections must not be conducted on privately-owned machines."

The CEO of one of the most crucial suppliers of electronic voting machines, Warren O'Dell of Diebold, pledged before the 2004 campaign to deliver Ohio and thus the presidency to George W. Bush.

Bush's official margin of victory in Ohio was just 118,775 votes out of more than 5.6 million cast. Election protection advocates argue that O'Dell's statement still stands as a clear sign of an effort, apparently successful, to steal the White House.

But the GAO report now confirms that electronic voting machines as deployed in 2004 were in fact perfectly engineered to allow a very small number of partisans with minimal computer skills and equipment to shift enough votes to put George W. Bush back in the White House. Given the growing body of evidence, it appears increasingly clear that's exactly what happened.

President Gore, President Kerry and the Great Vacationer

If you thought Bush wasn't the best at anything, and especially if you thought he was actually elected President, you really ought to read this...

STORY HERE

no, it's not cat blogging--it's cartography