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| Elections: Ohio election fraud uproar blasting to new level |
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posted by admin
on Tuesday December 07, @05:38PM
from the Fraud-04 dept.
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http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/975
by Steve Rosenfeld, Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
December 7, 2004
The bitter battle over the stolen November 2 election in Ohio has
turned into a rapidly escalating all-out multi-front war with the
outcome of the real presidential vote count increasingly in doubt.
In Columbus, major demonstrations on Saturday, December 4, have been
followed by an angry confrontation between demonstrators and state
police at the office of Republican Secretary of State Kenneth
Blackwell, the Bush-Cheney state chairman who is also officially in
charge of certifying the election, at least for now. Civil Rights
leader Jesse Jackson has called on Blackwell to recuse himself from
dealings with the election, saying his role as Bush-Cheney chairman has
compromised his objectivity in delivering fair election results.
New revelations about voting machine allocations in Franklin County
emerged on Tuesday, December 7. William Anthony, Chair of the Franklin
County Board of Elections, told WVKO radio listeners that the Board
begins “stationing voting machines four weeks out” before Election Day.
Security questions were raised after a machine in Gahanna Ward 1B at
the New Life Church recorded 4258 votes for Bush where only 638 voters
cast ballots.
Cornell McCleary, former minority director of the Republican Party of
Ohio, argues that it would easy for computer hackers to hack directly
into the machines: “The two points of vulnerability are setting up a
computer and hacking directly into the machine, or the line that goes
directly down to the Board of Elections.” He dismissed the Gahanna
incident as a “prank.” Prank or not, Kerry’s decision to concede early
on November 3 was based in part on these imaginary votes that were
either a prank, a computer glitch, or a deliberate effort to boost
Bush’s total in Ohio.
Anthony also conceded that some voters in Franklin County waited up to
“five or six hours’ in order to vote. He admitted that the Board of
Elections usually holds back “a truckload of voting machines"---
75---in case there’s a truck accident." He blamed this on the lack of
machines and the fact that 77 voting machines malfunctioned on Election
Day. Two affidavits from voters obtained by the Free Press report that
voting machine maintenance people came out to fix machines and their
technique seemed to be to continually plug and unplug, or reboot, the
electronic machines until the machines functioned again.
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| War: Memo Says 2 Officials Who Saw Prison Abuse Were Threatened |
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posted by admin
on Tuesday December 07, @04:02PM
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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/07/politics/07cnd-abus.html
from Associated Press:
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- U.S. special
forces accused of abusing prisoners in Iraq threatened Defense
Intelligence Agency personnel who saw the mistreatment and once
confiscated photos of a prisoner who had been punched in the face,
according to U.S. government memos released Tuesday by the American
Civil Liberties Union.
The special forces also monitored e-mails
sent by defense personnel and ordered them "not to talk to anyone" in
the United States about what they saw, said one memo written by the
Defense Intelligence Agency chief, who complained to his Pentagon
bosses about the harassment.
...
The memos reveal behind-the-scenes tensions between the FBI and U.S.
military and intelligence task forces running prisoner interrogations
at Guantanamo and in Iraq as the Bush administration sought better
intelligence to fight terrorists and the deadly Iraq insurgency.
"These
documents tell a damning story of sanctioned government abuse -- a
story that the government has tried to hide and may well come back to
haunt our own troops captured in Iraq," said Anthony D. Romero,
executive director of the New York-based ACLU.
The documents
were released only after a federal court ordered the Pentagon and other
government agencies to comply with a year-old request filed under the
Freedom of Information Act filed by the ACLU, the Center for
Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common
Sense and Veterans for Peace.
A spokesman for U.S. Central
Command in Tampa, Florida, which directs special military operations in
Iraq and Afghanistan, declined to comment on specific allegations.
more...
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| US: relations with Russia 'outstanding' |
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posted by admin
on Tuesday December 07, @03:46PM
from the lol dept.
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http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/2004... WASHINGTON
(AFP) - The US State Department moved to minimize differences with
Russia over Ukraine and Iraq (news - web sites), saying that relations
between Washington and Moscow were "outstanding."
"The United
States and Russia have an outstanding relationship," said State
Department spokesman Adam Ereli, pointing out that these relations were
"broad, complex, intricate."
He said US President George W.
Bush (news - web sites) and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin
(news - web sites), "can find common understanding and cooperation on a
whole host of matters, whether it be arms reduction, whether it be
counterproliferation, whether it be the global war on terror, whether
it be other regional issues."
"There are also, as in any
relationship, issues where we see things differently," Ereli continued,
noting that this also was "the mark of a mature, nuanced, sophisticated
relationship."
more...
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| Dissent: City approves resolution against USA Patriot Act |
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| Texas to Florida: White House-linked clandestine operation paid for "vote switching" software |
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posted by admin
on Tuesday December 07, @09:06AM
from the fraud-04 dept.
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By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Download a .pdf file for printing.
Adobe Acrobat Reader required.
Click here to download a free copy.
December
6, 2004—The manipulation of computer voting machines in the recent
presidential election and the funding of programmers who were involved
in the operation are tied to an intricate web of shady off-shore
financial trusts and companies, shady espionage operatives, Republican
Party politicians close to the Bush family, and National Aeronautics
and Space Administration (NASA) contract vehicles.
An
exhaustive investigation has turned up a link between current Florida
Republican Representative Tom Feeney, a customized Windows-based
program to suppress Democratic votes on touch screen voting machines, a
Florida computer services company with whom Feeney worked as a general
counsel and registered lobbyist while he was Speaker of the Florida
House of Representatives, and top level officials of the Bush
administration.
According
to a notarized affidavit signed by Clint Curtis, while he was employed
by the NASA Kennedy Space Center contractor, Yang Enterprises, Inc.,
during 2000, Feeney solicited him to write a program to "control the
vote." At the time, Curtis was of the opinion that the program was to
be used for preventing fraud in the in the 2002 election in Palm Beach
County, Florida. His mind was changed, however, when the true
intentions of Feeney became clear: the computer program was going to be
used to suppress the Democratic vote in counties with large Democratic
registrations.
According
to Curtis, Feeney and other top brass at Yang Enterprises, a company
located in a three-story building in Oviedo, Florida, wanted the
prototype written in Visual Basic 5 (VB.5) in Microsoft Windows and the
end-product designed to be portable across different Unix-based vote
tabulation systems and to be "undetectable" to voters and election
supervisors.
more...
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posted by admin
on Monday December 06, @11:37PM
from the nytimes.com dept.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/07/opinion/07krugman.html
By PAUL KRUGMAN
 rivatizing
Social Security - replacing the current system, in whole or in part,
with personal investment accounts - won't do anything to strengthen the
system's finances. If anything, it will make things worse. Nonetheless,
the politics of privatization depend crucially on convincing the public
that the system is in imminent danger of collapse, that we must destroy
Social Security in order to save it.
I'll have a lot to say about all this when I return to my regular
schedule in January. But right now it seems important to take a break
from my break, and debunk the hype about a Social Security crisis.
There's nothing strange or mysterious about how Social Security
works: it's just a government program supported by a dedicated tax on
payroll earnings, just as highway maintenance is supported by a
dedicated tax on gasoline.
Right now the revenues from the payroll tax exceed the amount paid
out in benefits. This is deliberate, the result of a payroll tax
increase - recommended by none other than Alan Greenspan - two decades
ago. His justification at the time for raising a tax that falls mainly
on lower- and middle-income families, even though Ronald Reagan had
just cut the taxes that fall mainly on the very well-off, was that the
extra revenue was needed to build up a trust fund. This could be drawn
on to pay benefits once the baby boomers began to retire.
The grain of truth in claims of a Social Security crisis is that
this tax increase wasn't quite big enough. Projections in a recent
report by the Congressional Budget Office (which are probably more
realistic than the very cautious projections of the Social Security
Administration) say that the trust fund will run out in 2052. The
system won't become "bankrupt" at that point; even after the trust fund
is gone, Social Security revenues will cover 81 percent of the promised
benefits. Still, there is a long-run financing problem.
But it's a problem of modest size. The report finds that extending
the life of the trust fund into the 22nd century, with no change in
benefits, would require additional revenues equal to only 0.54 percent
of G.D.P. That's less than 3 percent of federal spending - less than
we're currently spending in Iraq. And it's only about one-quarter of
the revenue lost each year because of President Bush's tax cuts -
roughly equal to the fraction of those cuts that goes to people with
incomes over $500,000 a year.
Given these numbers, it's not at all hard to come up with fiscal
packages that would secure the retirement program, with no major
changes, for generations to come.
more...
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posted by admin
on Monday December 06, @03:53PM
from the lewrockwell.com dept.
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http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts82.html
by
Paul Craig Roberts
Has
President Bush lost his grip on reality?
In
his December 1 speech in Halifax, Nova Scotia, President Bush again
declared his intention to pre-emptively attack "enemies who
plot in secret and set out to murder the innocent and the unsuspecting."
Freedom from terrorism, Bush declared, will come only through pre-emptive
war against enemies of democracy.
How
does Bush know who and where these secret enemies are? How many
more times will his guesses be wrong like he was about Iraq?
What
world does Bush live in? The US cannot control Iraq, much less battle
the rest of the Muslim world and beyond. While Bush threatened the
world with US aggression, headlines revealed the futility of preemptively
invading countries: "Pentagon to Boost Iraq Force by 12,000,"
"US Death Toll in Iraq at Highest Monthly Level," "Wounded
Disabled Soldiers Kept on Active Duty."
We
are getting our butts kicked in Iraq, and Bush wants to invade more
countries? It is clear as day that we do not have enough troops
to deal with Iraq. The 12,000 additional troops "to improve
security" are being acquired by extending the combat tours
of troops already on duty in Iraq. More US soldiers were killed
in Iraq in November than in any previous month. The US is so hard
up for troops that the Pentagon is deploying soldiers who have lost
arms and legs in combat. On December 1 the Washington Post reported:
"US armed forces have recently announced new efforts to keep
seriously wounded or disabled soldiers on active duty."
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| Oil: OPEC Members Move Into Euros From Dollars - IHT |
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posted by admin
on Monday December 06, @06:39AM
from the uh-oh dept.
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"Members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries have
cut the share of their deposits denominated in dollars by more than 13
percentage points in the past three years, mainly to the euro's
advantage, according to a report from the Bank for International
Settlements. In its quarterly report released on Sunday, the bank, a
forum for world central banks, attributed the trend partly to U.S.
interest rates' having fallen below those of the euro zone.
The
report said that the dollar-denominated deposits of OPEC members had
fallen to 61.5 percent of their total deposits in the second quarter of
2004 from 75 percent in the third quarter of 2001.
The share of euro-denominated deposits rose to 20 percent from 12 percent over the same period.
The
bank, based in Basel, Switzerland, was cautious about its findings,
noting that less revenue from oil seemed to have gone into the
international banking system recently, but it added that there had been
a "subtle but noticeable" shift in the composition of deposits in the
past three years."
EDIT
http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/20...
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| Elections: FBI probe may involve more than vote fraud allegations |
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<
Yesterday's News
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