Rack Kevin Tillman

[LTS TRN 2]

Let the words of this U.S. Army Ranger ring forth, having been forged in the blood of his brother:


It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we got out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military.

Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a five-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet. It’s interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a five-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air as his body comes apart and his skin melts to the seat.

Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.

Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.

Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.

Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.

Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.

Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.

Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.

Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.

Somehow torture is tolerated.

Somehow lying is tolerated.

Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.

Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.

Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world.

Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.

Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.

Somehow this is tolerated.

Somehow nobody is accountable for this.

In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people. So don’t be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity. Most likely, they will come to know that “somehow” was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.

Luckily this country is still a democracy. People still have a voice. People still can take action. It can start after Pat’s birthday.



Couldn't have said it better myself.

Wakey Wake

[poptart]

Sounds like someone has some personal issues to deal with.

[Smackie Chan]

Sounds like someone has some personal issues to deal with.

A whole lotta someones. "Apathy through active ignorance" is a personal issue that's running rampant.

[Diego in Seattle]

Sounds like someone has some personal issues to deal with.

A whole lotta someones. "Apathy through active ignorance" is a personal issue that's running rampant.

Rack the fuck out of that! That describes Americans to a T.

[poptart]

Hysterical hand-wringing is a personal issue that's running rampant.

See below......

Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.

Illegal invasion ... ?

Hey dumb cunt, did Saddam, or did he not, break his cease fire agreement ... ?


Stupid fuck.

[MuchoBulls]

RACK poptart

[Headhunter]

I can't believe he's using a family member's death to voice HIS opinion.



Jackass...




Sin,

[Cicero]

Poptart gets a 2nd rack.

[PSUFAN]

Setting aside the argument about the motives of our leaders, I'll RACK those who serve our country and in the process place their lives in jeopardy.

[Jay in Phoenix]

Setting aside the argument about the motives of our leaders, I'll RACK those who serve our country and in the process place their lives in jeopardy.

With the second part of that statement, I completely agree. Not enough can be said for those who put on the uniform and serve and defend this country with their lives.

On the same token, we cannot ignore or forget hearts and minds, and with that being said, putting aside the argument about the motives of our leaders doesn't wash. It's a nasty little mixed bag, and the good comes with the bad. So yes, rack the troops and sing their praises.

But don't forget the underlying truth about why we are actually fighting.

[BSmack]

But don't forget the underlying truth about why we are actually fighting.

Yes, we are fighting to destroy the collective insanity of fundamental Islam practised as a political ideology.

By attacking and occupying a socialist state?

[Terry in Crapchester]

But don't forget the underlying truth about why we are actually fighting.

Yes, we are fighting to destroy the collective insanity of fundamental Islam practised as a political ideology.

Even Bush says we're not at war with Islam. Would he not be the "decider" as to with whom/what we are at war?

[Jay in Phoenix]

Obviously he's lying and for good reason. It's a head fake.

Cute analogy, though quite wrong. Now care to say why he's really lying? BTW...it has nothing to do with destroying "fundamental Islam as a political ideology", no matter how quaint that sounds. Try again.

[Goober McTuber]

Even Bush says we're not at war with Islam.

Obviously he's lying and for good reason. It's a head fake.

This must be his cross-over dribble.

[ADAM]

Even Bush says we're not at war with Islam.

Obviously he's lying and for good reason. It's a head fake.

Damn, I thought it was a "Stick & Move"....

All BS aside, the news is lying to you...
It's a Dem ploy used since time in memorium...

I love peace, but just how many mosques have popped up
in your neighborhoods....

You honestly think if we pull out of Iraq all the jihadis will simply go away?

I smell Neville Chamberlain type of thinking going on..........

Any Motherfucking ragheaded slack jawed sand monkeys want to take away my right
to Budweiser and Jim Beam.....

Well sir, I have a genuine problem with that!
Not to mention Hooters!

[Jay in Phoenix]

Because to come out and flatly state that we are at war with Islam would run the very real risk of destabilizing our allies in the Muslim world such as Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The War on "Terror" provides them with political cover.

So the lying justifies the means, at least in mvsworld. Don't want a little thing like the "truth" to destabilize our allies or anything. :rolling eyes: Ah well, at least you admit Bush is a liar.

If you think this is about oil or enriching his "corporate cronies", you are an irremediable moron and have no business in any serious discussion of these events.

Not that I said that, because I didn't, but are you going to suggest that oil and money doesn't at least play a factor? Of course it isn't the "only" factor in the course of these events, but to suggest, as you do, that we are fighting Islam as a political ideology only, is so fundamentaly ignorant, that you might as well excuse yourself from the discussion as well.

[ADAM]

Because to come out and flatly state that we are at war with Islam would run the very real risk of destabilizing our allies in the Muslim world such as Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The War on "Terror" provides them with political cover.

So the lying justifies the means, at least in mvsworld. Don't want a little thing like the "truth" to destabilize our allies or anything. :rolling eyes: Ah well, at least you admit Bush is a liar.

If you think this is about oil or enriching his "corporate cronies", you are an irremediable moron and have no business in any serious discussion of these events.

Not that I said that, because I didn't, but are you going to suggest that oil and money doesn't at least play a factor? Of course it isn't the "only" factor in the course of these events, but to suggest, as you do, that we are fighting Islam as a political ideology only, is so fundamentaly ignorant, that you might as well excuse yourself from the discussion as well.

Now, with that said....
Could you say that under Sharia law?

Don't play semantics J
This is not a "What If " world.....

I'm not playing Rep. or Dem.

I'm fucking-a-fucking AMERICAN, but the Reps. have been doing a much better
job of NATIONAL SECURITY than the Dems.

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

So the lying justifies the means...

Page 1 of the Neo-Con Bible.

Power for us, religious fairy-tales and tickertape parades for you.

Seriously, read Leo Strauss sometime. It's fairly unambiguous the contempt he has for the average citizen.

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

So the lying justifies the means,

Yes, it does. Who told you that you were entitled to The Truth, The Whole Truth and Nothing but The Truth 24/7? I hate to break it to you, but you have no such entitlement.

Right on fucking cue.

Why do you hate Americans?

[Jay in Phoenix]

Name one government, one administration that does not or did not lie.

Just one.

And that makes lying okay.....? How? Listen, to think that we haven't been lied to as a people by our leaders since day number one would be foolish indeed. But that in no way shape or form makes it tolerable. Being an American does carry with it an entitlement to free speach and free press. And freedom of information. The current administration has virutally raped us blind of these freedoms. If that is the sort of America you wish to worship, so be it. That is your freedom...as wasted as it is.

Carry on mvsquixote. Carry on.

[ADAM]

Reading Strauss is fine and dandy.....

And while you have your nose stuck in a book, the world is zooooming by.....


Reality is the fact that yes we are losing Americans over there

Anyone with any sense of war would understand "a dying gasp" type offensive...

THIS IS NO VIETNAM.....

[ADAM]

Name one government, one administration that does not or did not lie.

Just one.

In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.
--Winston Churchill

RACK

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

Name one government, one administration that does not or did not lie.

Just one.

In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.
--Winston Churchill

Now you're quoting Churchill?

Mazeltov, faggot.

What's next? You gonna remind us of what a spanking the IDF gave Hezbollah this summer?
Gonna rip up Mel Gibson a little more?

You are beneath contempt, you supine, dick-gagging faggot.

[Jay in Phoenix]

Who the fuck do you think you are anyway?

Someone who actually cares about the little things in the Amercian way of life, like you know....freedom.

Carry on Adolph. Carry on.

[Jay in Phoenix]

By all means share with us some specific examples of the freedoms that you have allegedly lost. What is it that you used to be able to do, but no longer can do?

Where did I say that I myself lost any freedom. I said I "care about freedom". I "suggested" that 'W's bleeding admenstruation have been doing their damndest to rape us of our entitlement to a free press, free speech and freedom of information. What about this concept does your slope-head not compute?

Carry on Kim Jong. Carry on.

[verbal]

I can't believe
































































we are still talking about this shit.

[free penis]

I can't believe



we are still talking about this shit.

verbal

is that like oral?

[LTS TRN 2]

From p-tart's pathetic whimper, to babs seething neocon meltdown, no one can deal with the clear words of Kevin Tillman, U.S. Army Ranger who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

His plain indictments of the corruption of this (unelected) administration--as well as the default of Americans everywhere who have allowed this heinous disaster to ensue--stand unopposed and undeterred.

The idea that we're somehow fighting a Islamic Fundamentalist movement in Iraq is so utterly ludicrous that it's basically suicidal--politcally and militarily speaking. We are CREATING an unprecedented recruitment and rallying point for otherwise non-militant muslims not seen since the Crusades. And we're VERY QUICKLY depleting our own military strength--bleeding out more every day. Our day-to-day military efforts are nothing more than trying not to get blown up or shot by a sniper. The puppet government we've set up doesn't dare stray out of the Green Zone. (Any one seen Richard Perle lately?)

The real motive? Simple--shifting our power base in the OIL region from Saudi Arabia to Iraq. What's so complicated about that? After all, despite all the bullshit being parroted by the Chimp, the contruction of gigantic PERMANENT bases continues in Iraq. Problem is, Rummy and his neocon (chickenhawk) pals grossly underestimated the sheer and complete resistance of Iraqis to being ruled by Haliburton.

The grotesque degree of profiteering by Haliburton--primarily through its NO-BID contracts adminstered within a procurment process known as "cost-plus"--is a crime of unprecedented proportions. Staggering amounts of your tax dollars--$BILLIONS--are being swallowed daily by Haliburton in a manner that would make a wallowing hog look starved.

The sheer criminality of this entire disaster is of an order on par with the Nazis--no exagerration. And remember, the Chimp's own grandfather, Prescott Bush had no qualms at all in working directly with the Nazis until 1942 (shortly before he became a U.S. senator!).


Can you stand up to Kevin Tillman's indictment? And it's implied mandate? I hope so.

[Cuda]

You want to suck his cock, don't you?

[LTS TRN 2]

Who, Prescott Bush?

No, I want the entire current (unelected) administration arrested and tried in a Nuremburg-like trial, etc.

As for Tillman and Cindi Sheehan and thousands of other Americans who've lost family members in this crime, I'd just offer whatever condolence I could.

What have you got, prick?

[LTS TRN 2]

No problem, have a quick informative read, and then we'll look at Florida, etc.


Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush -- and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in ''tinfoil hats,'' while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ''conspiracy theories,''(1) and The New York Times declared that ''there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.''(2)

But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots -- or received them too late to vote(4) -- after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)

The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.(11)

Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. ''We didn't have one election for president in 2004,'' says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. ''We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.''

But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn?t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)

''It was terrible,'' says Sen. Christopher Dodd, who helped craft reforms in 2002 that were supposed to prevent such electoral abuses. ''People waiting in line for twelve hours to cast their ballots, people not being allowed to vote because they were in the wrong precinct -- it was an outrage. In Ohio, you had a secretary of state who was determined to guarantee a Republican outcome. I'm terribly disheartened.''

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. ''You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb.''

I. The Exit Polls
The first indication that something was gravely amiss on November 2nd, 2004, was the inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote counts. Polls in thirty states weren't just off the mark -- they deviated to an extent that cannot be accounted for by their margin of error. In all but four states, the discrepancy favored President Bush.(16)

Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science. Indeed, among pollsters and statisticians, such surveys are thought to be the most reliable. Unlike pre-election polls, in which voters are asked to predict their own behavior at some point in the future, exit polls ask voters leaving the voting booth to report an action they just executed. The results are exquisitely accurate: Exit polls in Germany, for example, have never missed the mark by more than three-tenths of one percent.(17) ''Exit polls are almost never wrong,'' Dick Morris, a political consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such surveys are ''so reliable,'' he added, ''that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.''(18) In 2003, vote tampering revealed by exit polling in the Republic of Georgia forced Eduard Shevardnadze to step down.(19) And in November 2004, exit polling in the Ukraine -- paid for by the Bush administration -- exposed election fraud that denied Viktor Yushchenko the presidency.(20)

But that same month, when exit polls revealed disturbing disparities in the U.S. election, the six media organizations that had commissioned the survey treated its very existence as an embarrassment. Instead of treating the discrepancies as a story meriting investigation, the networks scrubbed the offending results from their Web sites and substituted them with ''corrected'' numbers that had been weighted, retroactively, to match the official vote count. Rather than finding fault with the election results, the mainstream media preferred to dismiss the polls as flawed.(21)

''The people who ran the exit polling, and all those of us who were their clients, recognized that it was deeply flawed,'' says Tom Brokaw, who served as anchor for NBC News during the 2004 election. ''They were really screwed up -- the old models just don't work anymore. I would not go on the air with them again.''

In fact, the exit poll created for the 2004 election was designed to be the most reliable voter survey in history. The six news organizations -- running the ideological gamut from CBS to Fox News -- retained Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International,(22) whose principal, Warren Mitofsky, pioneered the exit poll for CBS in 1967(23) and is widely credited with assuring the credibility of Mexico's elections in 1994.(24) For its nationwide poll, Edison/Mitofsky selected a random subsample of 12,219 voters(25) -- approximately six times larger than those normally used in national polls(26) -- driving the margin of error down to approximately plus or minus one percent.(27)

On the evening of the vote, reporters at each of the major networks were briefed by pollsters at 7:54 p.m. Kerry, they were informed, had an insurmountable lead and would win by a rout: at least 309 electoral votes to Bush's 174, with fifty-five too close to call.(28) In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair went to bed contemplating his relationship with President-elect Kerry.(29)

As the last polling stations closed on the West Coast, exit polls showed Kerry ahead in ten of eleven battleground states -- including commanding leads in Ohio and Florida -- and winning by a million and a half votes nationally. The exit polls even showed Kerry breathing down Bush's neck in supposed GOP strongholds Virginia and North Carolina.(30) Against these numbers, the statistical likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in 450,000.(31) ''Either the exit polls, by and large, are completely wrong,'' a Fox News analyst declared, ''or George Bush loses.''(32)

But as the evening progressed, official tallies began to show implausible disparities -- as much as 9.5 percent -- with the exit polls. In ten of the eleven battleground states, the tallied margins departed from what the polls had predicted. In every case, the shift favored Bush. Based on exit polls, CNN had predicted Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage points. Instead, election results showed Bush winning the state by 2.5 percent. Bush also tallied 6.5 percent more than the polls had predicted in Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent more in Florida.(33)

According to Steven F. Freeman, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in research methodology, the odds against all three of those shifts occurring in concert are one in 660,000. ''As much as we can say in sound science that something is impossible,'' he says, ''it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote count in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.'' (See The Tale of the Exit Polls)

Puzzled by the discrepancies, Freeman laboriously examined the raw polling data released by Edison/Mitofsky in January 2005. ''I'm not even political -- I despise the Democrats,'' he says. ''I'm a survey expert. I got into this because I was mystified about how the exit polls could have been so wrong.'' In his forthcoming book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count, Freeman lays out a statistical analysis of the polls that is deeply troubling.

In its official postmortem report issued two months after the election, Edison/Mitofsky was unable to identify any flaw in its methodology -- so the pollsters, in essence, invented one for the electorate. According to Mitofsky, Bush partisans were simply disinclined to talk to exit pollsters on November 2nd(34) -- displaying a heretofore unknown and undocumented aversion that skewed the polls in Kerry's favor by a margin of 6.5 percent nationwide.(35)

Industry peers didn't buy it. John Zogby, one of the nation's leading pollsters, told me that Mitofsky's ''reluctant responder'' hypothesis is ''preposterous.''(36) Even Mitofsky, in his official report, underscored the hollowness of his theory: ''It is difficult to pinpoint precisely the reasons that, in general, Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush voters.''(37)

Now, thanks to careful examination of Mitofsky's own data by Freeman and a team of eight researchers, we can say conclusively that the theory is dead wrong. In fact it was Democrats, not Republicans, who were more disinclined to answer pollsters' questions on Election Day. In Bush strongholds, Freeman and the other researchers found that fifty-six percent of voters completed the exit survey -- compared to only fifty-three percent in Kerry strongholds.(38) ''The data presented to support the claim not only fails to substantiate it,'' observes Freeman, ''but actually contradicts it.''

What's more, Freeman found, the greatest disparities between exit polls and the official vote count came in Republican strongholds. In precincts where Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of one percent -- a pattern that suggests Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush country.(39)

''When you look at the numbers, there is a tremendous amount of data that supports the supposition of election fraud,'' concludes Freeman. ''The discrepancies are higher in battleground states, higher where there were Republican governors, higher in states with greater proportions of African-American communities and higher in states where there were the most Election Day complaints. All these are strong indicators of fraud -- and yet this supposition has been utterly ignored by the press and, oddly, by the Democratic Party.''

The evidence is especially strong in Ohio. In January, a team of mathematicians from the National Election Data Archive, a nonpartisan watchdog group, compared the state's exit polls against the certified vote count in each of the forty-nine precincts polled by Edison/Mitofsky. In twenty-two of those precincts -- nearly half of those polled -- they discovered results that differed widely from the official tally. Once again -- against all odds -- the widespread discrepancies were stacked massively in Bush's favor: In only two of the suspect twenty-two precincts did the disparity benefit Kerry. The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct Mitofsky numbered ''27,'' in order to protect the anonymity of those surveyed. According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.(40)

Such results, according to the archive, provide ''virtually irrefutable evidence of vote miscount.'' The discrepancies, the experts add, ''are consistent with the hypothesis that Kerry would have won Ohio's electoral votes if Ohio's official vote counts had accurately reflected voter intent.''(41) According to Ron Baiman, vice president of the archive and a public policy analyst at Loyola University in Chicago, ''No rigorous statistical explanation'' can explain the ''completely nonrandom'' disparities that almost uniformly benefited Bush. The final results, he adds, are ''completely consistent with election fraud -- specifically vote shifting.''

II. The Partisan Official
No state was more important in the 2004 election than Ohio. The state has been key to every Republican presidential victory since Abraham Lincoln's, and both parties overwhelmed the state with television ads, field organizers and volunteers in an effort to register new voters and energize old ones. Bush and Kerry traveled to Ohio a total of forty-nine times during the campaign -- more than to any other state.(42)

But in the battle for Ohio, Republicans had a distinct advantage: The man in charge of the counting was Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of President Bush's re-election committee.(43) As Ohio's secretary of state, Blackwell had broad powers to interpret and implement state and federal election laws -- setting standards for everything from the processing of voter registration to the conduct of official recounts.(44) And as Bush's re-election chair in Ohio, he had a powerful motivation to rig the rules for his candidate. Blackwell, in fact, served as the ''principal electoral system adviser'' for Bush during the 2000 recount in Florida,(45) where he witnessed firsthand the success of his counterpart Katherine Harris, the Florida secretary of state who co-chaired Bush's campaign there.(46)

Blackwell -- now the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio(47) -- is well-known in the state as a fierce partisan eager to rise in the GOP. An outspoken leader of Ohio's right-wing fundamentalists, he opposes abortion even in cases of rape(48) and was the chief cheerleader for the anti-gay-marriage amendment that Republicans employed to spark turnout in rural counties(49). He has openly denounced Kerry as ''an unapologetic liberal Democrat,''(50) and during the 2004 election he used his official powers to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens in Democratic strongholds. In a ruling issued two weeks before the election, a federal judge rebuked Blackwell for seeking to ''accomplish the same result in Ohio in 2004 that occurred in Florida in 2000.''(51)

''The secretary of state is supposed to administer elections -- not throw them,'' says Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Cleveland who has dealt with Blackwell for years. ''The election in Ohio in 2004 stands out as an example of how, under color of law, a state election official can frustrate the exercise of the right to vote.''

The most extensive investigation of what happened in Ohio was conducted by Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.(52) Frustrated by his party's failure to follow up on the widespread evidence of voter intimidation and fraud, Conyers and the committee's minority staff held public hearings in Ohio, where they looked into more than 50,000 complaints from voters.(53) In January 2005, Conyers issued a detailed report that outlined ''massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio.'' The problems, the report concludes, were ''caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.''(54)

''Blackwell made Katherine Harris look like a cupcake,'' Conyers told me. ''He saw his role as limiting the participation of Democratic voters. We had hearings in Columbus for two days. We could have stayed two weeks, the level of fury was so high. Thousands of people wanted to testify. Nothing like this had ever happened to them before.''

When ROLLING STONE confronted Blackwell about his overtly partisan attempts to subvert the election, he dismissed any such claim as ''silly on its face.'' Ohio, he insisted in a telephone interview, set a ''gold standard'' for electoral fairness. In fact, his campaign to subvert the will of the voters had begun long before Election Day. Instead of welcoming the avalanche of citizen involvement sparked by the campaign, Blackwell permitted election officials in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo to conduct a massive purge of their voter rolls, summarily expunging the names of more than 300,000 voters who had failed to cast ballots in the previous two national elections.(55) In Cleveland, which went five-to-one for Kerry, nearly one in four voters were wiped from the rolls between 2000 and 2004.(56)

There were legitimate reasons to clean up voting lists: Many of the names undoubtedly belonged to people who had moved or died. But thousands more were duly registered voters who were deprived of their constitutional right to vote -- often without any notification -- simply because they had decided not to go to the polls in prior elections.(57) In Cleveland's precinct 6C, where more than half the voters on the rolls were deleted,(58) turnout was only 7.1 percent(59) -- the lowest in the state.

According to the Conyers report, improper purging ''likely disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters statewide.''(60) If only one in ten of the 300,000 purged voters showed up on Election Day -- a conservative estimate, according to election scholars -- that is 30,000 citizens who were unfairly denied the opportunity to cast ballots.

III. The Strike Force
In the months leading up to the election, Ohio was in the midst of the biggest registration drive in its history. Tens of thousands of volunteers and paid political operatives from both parties canvassed the state, racing to register new voters in advance of the October 4th deadline. To those on the ground, it was clear that Democrats were outpacing their Republican counterparts: A New York Times analysis before the election found that new registrations in traditional Democratic strongholds were up 250 percent, compared to only twenty-five percent in Republican-leaning counties.(61) ''The Democrats have been beating the pants off us in the air and on the ground,'' a GOP county official in Columbus confessed to The Washington Times.(62)

To stem the tide of new registrations, the Republican National Committee and the Ohio Republican Party attempted to knock tens of thousands of predominantly minority and urban voters off the rolls through illegal mailings known in electioneering jargon as ''caging.'' During the Eighties, after the GOP used such mailings to disenfranchise nearly 76,000 black voters in New Jersey and Louisiana, it was forced to sign two separate court orders agreeing to abstain from caging.(63) But during the summer of 2004, the GOP targeted minority voters in Ohio by zip code, sending registered letters to more than 200,000 newly registered voters(64) in sixty-five counties.(65) On October 22nd, a mere eleven days before the election, Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett -- who also chairs the board of elections in Cuyahoga County -- sought to invalidate the registrations of 35,427 voters who had refused to sign for the letters or whose mail came back as undeliverable.(66) Almost half of the challenged voters were from Democratic strongholds in and around Cleveland.(67)

There were plenty of valid reasons that voters had failed to respond to the mailings: The list included people who couldn't sign for the letters because they were serving in the U.S. military, college students whose school and home addresses differed,(68) and more than 1,000 homeless people who had no permanent mailing address.(69) But the undeliverable mail, Bennett claimed, proved the new registrations were fraudulent.

By law, each voter was supposed to receive a hearing before being stricken from the rolls.(70) Instead, in the week before the election, kangaroo courts were rapidly set up across the state at Blackwell's direction that would inevitably disenfranchise thousands of voters at a time(71) -- a process that one Democratic election official in Toledo likened to an ''inquisition.''(72) Not that anyone was given a chance to actually show up and defend their right to vote: Notices to challenged voters were not only sent out impossibly late in the process, they were mailed to the very addresses that the Republicans contended were faulty.(73) Adding to the atmosphere of intimidation, sheriff's detectives in Sandusky County were dispatched to the homes of challenged voters to investigate the GOP's claims of fraud.(74)


''I'm afraid this is going to scare these people half to death, and they are never going to show up on Election Day,'' Barb Tuckerman, director of the Sandusky Board of Elections, told local reporters. ''Many of them are young people who have registered for the first time. I've called some of these people, and they are perfectly legitimate.''(75)

On October 27th, ruling that the effort likely violated both the ''constitutional right to due process and constitutional right to vote,'' U.S. District Judge Susan Dlott put a halt to the GOP challenge(76) -- but not before tens of thousands of new voters received notices claiming they were improperly registered. Some election officials in the state illegally ignored Dlott's ruling, stripping hundreds of voters from the rolls.(77) In Columbus and elsewhere, challenged registrants were never notified that the court had cleared them to vote.

On October 29th, a federal judge found that the Republican Party had violated the court orders from the Eighties that barred it from caging. ''The return of mail does not implicate fraud,'' the court affirmed,(78) and the disenfranchisement effort illegally targeted ''precincts where minority voters predominate, interfering with and discouraging voters from voting in those districts.''(79) Nor were such caging efforts limited to Ohio: The GOP also targeted hundreds of thousands of urban voters in the battleground states of Florida,(80) Pennsylvania(81) and Wisconsin.(82)

Republicans in Ohio also worked to deny the vote to citizens who had served jail time for felonies. Although rehabilitated prisoners are entitled to vote in Ohio, election officials in Cincinnati demanded that former convicts get a judge to sign off before they could register to vote.(83) In case they didn't get the message, Republican operatives turned to intimidation. According to the Conyers report, a team of twenty-five GOP volunteers calling themselves the Mighty Texas Strike Force holed up at the Holiday Inn in Columbus a day before the election, around the corner from the headquarters of the Ohio Republican Party -- which paid for their hotel rooms. The men were overheard by a hotel worker ''using pay phones to make intimidating calls to likely voters'' and threatening former convicts with jail time if they tried to cast ballots.(84)

This was no freelance operation. The Strike Force -- an offshoot of the Republican National Committee(85) -- was part of a team of more than 1,500 volunteers from Texas who were deployed to battleground states, usually in teams of ten. Their leader was Pat Oxford, (86) a Houston lawyer who managed Bush's legal defense team in 2000 in Florida,(87) where he warmly praised the efforts of a mob that stormed the Miami-Dade County election offices and halted the recount. It was later revealed that those involved in the ''Brooks Brothers Riot'' were not angry Floridians but paid GOP staffers, many of them flown in from out of state.(88) Photos of the protest show that one of the ''rioters'' was Joel Kaplan, who has just taken the place of Karl Rove at the White House, where he now directs the president's policy operations.(89)




Now obviously you can't dispute a single part of this investigative piece--by Robert F Kennedy Jr., though if you'd like to try, go ahead.
Sooner or later, you're going to have to Wakey Wake.

[The phantorino]

Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

No, that was the one before. the 2004 election was 'lost', but considering a sitting president hadn't lost a re-election during "war" time (and does this count?), the neocons could have put a badly trained chimp up against Kerry amnd it would have won - wait a minute!!
The problem was not theft, but Kerry.

I appreciate your passion, but even I can see this, and don't even live there.

[poptart]

From p-tart's pathetic whimper, to babs seething neocon meltdown, no one can deal with the clear words of Kevin Tillman, U.S. Army Ranger who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Cum-face, I DEALT.

YOU absorbed, .... and failed to respond to my question.




Fuck off.

[Jay in Phoenix]

So even though you admit that you haven't actually lost any freedoms, you still attempt to make ludicrous comparisons to totalitarian states.

This is one of the things that is so endearing about you mvscunt. Your predictable and pedantic spinjobs of what was actually said. Show me where I compared the U.S. to a totalitarian state. As I will repeat, one more and final time, for your feeble little limp noodle of a brain to understand, was that Bushie and his company of clowns, have taken some pretty nasty steps into stripping away our Constitutional freedoms one bit at a time. All you have to do is look at the massive wiretappings they are using in their so-called "war on terror" as one example. Of course, you're so self-deluded that making a list of his administatrions other transgressions, and they are many and have all been listed on this board before, would be tantamount to beating the proverbial dead horse. You're going to spin the circle into whatever square pidgeon hole fits your neocon needs, so what's the point?

Nobody is being hauled off to jail for political speech. Fuck, Dubya has had some demented lunatic camped out in his driveway for the last year. She certainly hasn't disappeared into a hole. Not one news outlet has been shut down by government storm troopers. Freedom of information requests are still being accepted within statutory guidlines.

Again, did I say anything about anybody being jailed? Jesus fuck dude, you really enjoy just making shit up don't you? Seriously, you know what you remind me of? You're like an unbalanced version of that little white (insert joke here) polyhedron that bobbles up to the surface of that black slime that inhabits a Magic-8 ball, always giving the same dumb and wrong answer. It, like your rhetoric, used to be cute, for about ten seconds, and now it's just pointless and cliched. Get a new act, your clown-suit is wearing thin.

The inescapable conclusion here is that you are simply talking out your ass as you go down in flames.

Imaginary flames from a delusional dittotard. Outstanding.

Carry on mvsclown. Carry on.

[PSUFAN]

Yo Wakey Wakey, do us a favor and post a URL, not a KCTRL-V job. My scroll wheel is going to get worn out again.

[BSmack]

Freedoms HAVE been curtailed since 9-11. Anybody who has been in an airport could tell you that. The question ought to be about essential liberties. And yes, there are those who have had essential liberties taken away from them. Just the implementation of the "no fly" list alone has been a civil liberties nightmere.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/04/06/no.fly.lawsuit/

If one can seriously tell me that designating thousands of persons as walking criminal suspects, and punishing said people without so much as a hearing is not a gross violation of everything we as Americans have fought and died for these past 200 years, then please, by all means let's hear it.

[BSmack]

Yes, of course. Americans have been fighting and dying for over 200 years all just for your "right" not be inconvenienced at the airport.

It goes beyond a simple inconvience. These people have been judged and sentenced without so much as a scintila of due process.

[BSmack]

Sentenced to what?

Read the fucking article dolt.

[Jay in Phoenix]

Not in andy one of those quotes...not a single one, do I mention anything about a totalitarian state. That was your word you feeb. Am I being critical of the unsavory tactics being used by our current administration to satisfy their myopic and foolish "war on terror" bullshit? Hell yes. If you need proof, open your eyes, instead of wearing your neocon blackout goggles. It's right there in front of you sporto.

Now kindly go fuck yourself asswipe.

And please, by all means, carry on mvsmccarthy. Carry on.

[Jay in Phoenix]

You made it clear that anyone who agrees with any of these steps is either Adolph Hitler or Kim Jong Il.

But keep on packpedalling, douchebag. You truly are one sorry, stupid sack of shit.

You really are a dense little turd, aren't ya' mvs. I was just talking about you! The almighty Bush apologist.

Fuckstain, did you actually read the CNN article Bri linked to? Again, and again and again, that is but one example. Now speaking of pedalling, hop aboard your Big Wheel and go Jackass yourself off a nice, tall cliff. The world will thank you.