Neo-Con Lies: Thwarting Democracy, Updated 2x

I take back every harsh comment I have had for Katie Couric. Perhaps she simply sees the way the winds are blowing-- but whatever has stirred the transformation I applaud her improved reporting. Here she takes on the all important voter purge issue if a bit tepidly:



Here are the stats from 5 targeted states
courtesy of the Brennan Center:

"[I]n-person voter fraud is nonexistent. It doesn't happen, and ... makes no sense because who's going to take the risk of going to jail on something so blatant that maybe changes one vote?" --Republican campaign consultant Royal Masset.

Kudos to Senator Obama. Since the so-called Mainstream Press Has Failed to expose the systematic voter suppression behind the ACORN smokescreen the Obama Campaign has sent a letter of complaint to the Attorney-General. The complaint charges that the current bogus voter fraud investigation is directly related to the illegal firing of US attorneys. Read the campaign's letter here:



The most distressing thing about the way most Americans get their news is that the most dangerous lies can be amplified while the truth is ignored. Outright slander is obscured by false-equivalencies. TV networks no longer do very much actual reporting but when they do their reports are either amateurish or presented with obvious bias.

Take the issue of ACORN and voter registration fraud. According to the following CNN report Acorn deliberately submitted incomplete and falsified voter registrations. But what they do not mention is that ALL registrations received by ACORN must be submitted to the state election boards and contrary to CNN's claim, it was ACORN that first notified the boards in question about the discrepancies.



Here was Acorn's reply completely missing from the so-called "news report"

ACORN has submitted 1.3 million applications nationally and over 23,000 in Indiana.

ACORN engages in comprehensive quality control procedures, every card is called through three times.

ACORN flags and turns in three kinds of cards, those that it can verify, those that are incomplete, and those that it flags as problematic. It turns those in labeled in a special way and are very conservative in terms of what it flags as problematic. It has stacks of problematic cover sheets.

The Lake County Board of Elections refused to acknowledge the categories of cards when ACORN turned them in, or sign its paperwork. The Lake County Board knew about the questionable registrations today because ACORN flagged them for the board. For example, the Jimmy John’s card is one that a caller had flagged and labeled as problematic. ACORN can get that caller to talk to the press.

As the BRADBLOG confirms: Acorn must, by law turn in every form to election officials --- even if they find a registration to be fraudulent when they call the phone number submitted on the form, or if the forms are otherwise suspect or incomplete.

Here is the REAL story behind what is going on in Lake County.

Under Indiana election law, early voting can only take place in a county clerk's main office. This makes it difficult for voters in places like Lake County were that office is a far distance away from where most voters live. To correct that imbalance, the law gives each board of elections the authority to approve early voting centers elsewhere in their county.

The Democrats on the elections board agreed to add more centers but then in September the two Republicans voted against doing so. Their explanation? They claim that Lake County Democratic chairman Rudy Clay made an agreement to allow satellite voting during the primaries but not during the general election. Unsurprisingly the more populous areas (like Gary, 96,000) have large numbers of poor and minorities who tend to vote Democratic.

The CNN piece ignores all of that. Instead, what followed on "Anderson Cooper" was the reporter's "analysis" in which Griffin suggests that by submitting forms filled out by Wiley Coyote or members of the Dallas Cowboys ACORN is seeking to perpetuate voter fraud. One wonders if Griffin actual believes his ludicrous assertion or is simply too dumb to be considered a serious reporter. As for Anderson Cooper, he is proving to be quite the propagandist.

But here again, is the neoconservative "genius"-- otherwise known as "catapulting the propaganda". Many of us are concerned about voter suppression, voter purge and electronic vote tabulation. By trumpeting ACORN as a straw-man the Republicans are able to deflect the real story. As the The New York Times reports : thousands of voters have been illegally purged from the rolls in several swing states. This is the real story about what is happening in this election. Millions of potential Democrats are being purged from the roles by Rove operatives with the help of our politicized Justice Department and right wing judges.

As Lori Minnite, a professor of political science at Barnard College, who has spent the last eight years studying the role of fraud in U.S. elections, explains: "the Republican crusade against voter fraud is a strategic ruse. Rather than protecting the election process from voter fraud -- a problem that barely exists -- the true aim is to justify questioning the eligibility of thousands of would-be voters -- often poor and minority citizens in urban areas."

Illegal Funding

From the Washington Post: IN 2006 Karl Rove requested help for handpicked Republican candidates in the months before the November elections and the head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy complied by supplying half-million-dollar grants to create news conferences for two congressmen and a senator, earning a Rove aide's accolade of "superstar" after the election.

"visits to Utah, Missouri and Nevada were among at least 303 out-of-town trips by senior Bush appointees meant to lend prestige or bring federal grants to 99 politically endangered Republicans that year, in an orchestrated White House campaign. [ ] Although federal law prohibits the use of public funds or resources for partisan political activities -- most of these trips were paid for by taxpayer funds,"

Here we have proven historical abuse by high-level Republicans in the Bush Administration, yet the fact that citizens are being disenfranchised for the sake of the GOP merits scarcely a word on CNN or the three major networks. They are too worried about all those illegals that will be showing up to vote as Mickey Mouse.

"Mission Accomplished"

Buried in the avalanche of dire news on the financial meltdown is a scathing report from government investigators from both the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility who now confirm that political pressure led to the firing of United States Attorneys.

Just as the Bush Administration's refusal to oversee Wall Street has led the markets into chaos, it's politicization of the Justice Department has produced a cancer threatening the very heart of our wounded democracy. It is impossible to firmly assess the extent of the tumor without a proper biopsy, but we know that it grew from the intent to suppress Democratic voters in the 2004 elections. As the Boston Globe reported: the Bush appointee in the Civil Rights Division, Bradley Schlozman, clearly disregarded voting rights law in order to elect Republicans.

Joseph Rich, who was chief of the voting rights section of the Civil Rights Division under Schlozman, stated that: "Schlozman didn't know anything about voting law. . . . All he knew is he wanted to be sure that the Republicans were going to win."

When U.S. attorneys refused to bring bogus charges against Democratic candidates Karl Rove's political appointees in the Justice Department simply replaced them illegally. At the same time, the Guardian's investigative reporter, Greg Palast had begun to uncover that: "In the 2004 presidential election, Republican operatives blocked a quarter-million new voters nationwide from voting on grounds they brought the wrong IDs to the polls."

But the rot in the Bush Justice Department was not confined to corruption of our vote. Not only was it discovered on the eve of the elections that Halliburton had received no bid contracts from the Pentagon worth billions of dollars, the same company formerly run by Vice President Richard Cheney, had obtained a secret $7 billion deal for its subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), to restore Iraq’s oil fields from before Bush ordered the invasion.

It has since come to light that several of Halliburton's female employees had been sexually harassed and in at least one case, gang-raped by co-workers in Iraq. Yet despite dozens of similar charges having been lodged by women working for US defense contractors in the Middle East, the Justice Department has so far declined to pursue their cases. As a result, claims that US security contractors are abusing their employees continue to emerge. One lawyer in Houston, says that at last count his firm had fifteen clients who had suffered incidents of sexual assault, sexual harassment and retaliation.

But as destructive as the corrosion of our judicial system has been for victimized citizens, the unprecedented power that the Bush Administration has managed to obtain in order to insulate itself from criminal prosecution becomes even more alarming when one realizes that the power grab was facilitated by both the federal courts and the U.S. Congress.

Destroying the "Balance of Powers"

The Bush White House basically declared war on our laws supporting open government. In an article entitled: "Is Cheney 'Beyond the Reach of the Law'?" former Nixon White House counsel John Dean finds it extraordinary that the vice-president would attempt to claim that he is immune from Congressional oversight and that members of the Supreme Court would seek to validate such a radical "expanse of executive powers.”

For the last 8 years we have not been a country governed by Law but a land ruled by men who proved ruthless in pursuing their lust for wealth and power. It is not hard to appreciate the irony of our present predicament. In 2003, George Bush declared that he was invading Iraq to remove an "evil dictator" who defies the "rule of law" and in achieving that end Bush now presumes to possess the prerogatives of Saddam Hussein and Josef Stalin.

[Legal scholar, Jonathan Turley on the signing of the Military Commissions Act had warned that, "Congress just gave the president despotic powers…I think people are fooling themselves if they believe that the courts will once again stop this president from taking - overtaking - almost absolute power."]

Of course, just as we watch the craven cowards stampede us into a second Depression, Bush and Bin Laden succeeded by stoking our fears.

"Thanks to the overreaction by the Bush/Cheney administration along with the neocons and free market fundamentalists of the Republican Party, Bin Laden has succeeded in harming America far beyond his wildest dreams, much as the overreaction by the leaders of the Politburo to Reagan's arms build-up undermined an already faltering Soviet system"-- Miles Mogulescu.

No doubt, as they watch the financial markets crumble after an eight year binge of lawlessness, corruption and greed, those who supported Messrs Bush and Bin Laden are boasting "Mission Accomplished."