[Shadow_Group] Fw: We've Been Had

[shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca]

We've Been Had 

by Edgar J. Steele

November 8, 2004

"It's amazing I won. I was running against peace, prosperity and
incumbency."
   --George W. Bush, June 14, 2001, speaking to Swedish Prime Minister
Goran Perrson, unaware that a live television camera was still rolling

"You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays,
everybody's crazy."
   -- Charles Manson, serial killer and one-time cult leader

I'm glad that Kerry lost.  However, I am horrified that Bush won.  Or did
he?

We get the government we deserve, it is said.  What, exactly, did I do to
deserve this?  And I'm a conservative, too.  Imagine how the liberals
must feel.

For every person I know who voted for Bush, I know four who voted for
Kerry or a third-party candidate, not to mention another six who didn't
vote at all!  But, then, I run in some unusual circles.  Even so...

The Zogby Polls, which usually are pretty accurate, had Kerry winning a
clear majority, not just a plurality, and sweeping the Electoral College.
 Exit polls, which are even more accurate, had Kerry winning going away,
especially in the key "Battleground States" of Ohio and Florida, both of
which inexplicably ended up in Bush's column at the end.  I noticed that,
for once, none of the network anchors really discussed either type of
poll, though CNN has been accused of jiggering its report of exit poll
results.  In an excuse switch reminiscent of Iraq being blamed for
possessing weapons of mass destruction, suddenly the blame for the
voting-booth conversion to Bush is being placed upon the desire of the
common man to stamp out homosexual marriage.  As comedienne Judy Tenuta
likes to say: "It could happen!"  Yeah...right.

Dick Morris, ex Clinton political consultant, wrote an article for The
Hill, read by a great many Washington insiders, in which he said, "This
was no mere mistake.  Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as
they were on election night."

Yes, I called for Bush's ouster well over a year ago (IMPEACH BUSH NOW
and Bush Must Go!), but I'm still pretty much a conservative.  Aside from
the lunatic-fringe Christian fundamentalist/dispensationalists, many
conservatives started talking about Bush that way at about the same time.
 That's just paleoconservatives, however; we who predate
neoconservatives, those who are but old liberal whine in new battles. 
That's why you should listen to my ilk more closely than the liberals who
just upped their intake of Prozac, alcohol and a variety of other
reality-altering substances.  They would be railing against anything
Republican or conservative just now.  People like myself are a different
matter altogether.  And there are a lot of us.  Which is why Bush's
victory quite simply does not pass the smell test.

It seems clear to me that Bush didn't win fairly.  I think Kerry actually
won the election and allowed Bush to steal it.  In retrospect, it appears
to me that Al Gore did the same thing, albeit less abjectly than did
Kerry.  But, this time Bush got caught with his hand in the ballot box. 
I've just had a heel-of-the-hand-forehead-thumping "aha" experience.  How
could I, of all people, have missed something so obvious?  

Yes, I have noted rampant vote fraud in the past and expected it this
time, as well.  I have witnessed it first hand at the local level.  I
have read many credible reports from others at all levels, concerning
past vote fraud.  Yet, I did not believe it was so blatant...so massive
as what obviously just occurred.  How could I possibly expect others to
see it now if I didn't see it coming?  How could I be so...dumb?  

Now comes the hard part:  How do we make clear that free elections in
America were a thing of the past as long as four years ago?

It's a good thing that Kerry won't be in the Oval Office; but, another
four years like we just had?  America won't make it.  On the other hand,
that could turn out to be the good news, I suppose, for survivors of what
America is about to become.

Bad as Kerry would have been, he would have been gridlocked by the
Republican Congress.  None of that for Bush, though, who has presided
over the biggest runup in deficits and most criminal war that America has
ever seen.  Kerry could never have obtained the blank check for war that
Congress handed to Bush - and will again.  Expect the upcoming mid-term
election in 2002 to produce more of the same miraculous Republican
victories and give Bush the 60-Republican Senate edge that he needs to
advance any legislation without danger of Democrat filibuster.

The smell left over from Election Day is bad enough, all by itself, but
there is evidence, lots of evidence, of vote fraud on a scale not seen
since the heydays of Communist Russia.  Next we will see ballots with
only one name appearing in each slot (given our "choice" of candidates,
we essentially got there years ago, however).

How on earth did despicable Democrat Tom Daschle get beaten?  Mind you,
the only Senators I would be more pleased to see go are Hillary,
Feinstein and the execrable Charles Schumer, but it seems extremely
unlikely that Daschle's constituents would have voted him out of office
in a fair election.  Is it just coincidence that Daschle has been a
particularly nettlesome thorn in George W. Bush's side for the past four
years?

The problems in Ohio on election day are starkly outlined by attorney Ray
Beckerman in his Basic Report from Columbus: "Touch screen voting
machines in Youngstown OH were registering "George W. Bush" when people
pressed "John F. Kerry" ALL DAY LONG."  One precinct in suburban Columbus
reported that nearly 4,000 votes were "accidentally" credited to Bush.
Mr. Beckerman also reports that lines in predominantly-Democratic
precincts were 5-10 hours in length, versus near nonexistent in
Republican strongholds, for the simple reason that precincts expected to
line up in the Republican column had five times as many voting machines
as others.  Beckerman outlines a number of other irregularities in one of
this election's two key "battleground" states, the one that gave the
election to Bush, just as Florida did four years ago with a healthy
assist from the US Supreme Court.  Is all of this simply coincidental in
an election where the disputed votes decided the outcome?

The other key battleground state, Florida, reported similar problems: 
"(S)everal dozen voters in six states - particularly Democrats in Florida
- who said the wrong candidates appeared on their touch-screen machine's
checkout screen...In many cases, voters said they intended to select John
Kerry but when the computer asked them to verify the choice it showed
them instead opting for President Bush..." (Globe and Mail, 11/3/04). 
More coincidence?

But, the machines don't have to be obviously in error to be rigged. 
Ronnie Dugger, in How They Could Steal the Election This Time, several
months ago described the November 2004 election machinery:  "36 million
(votes) will be tabulated completely inside the new paperless,
direct-recording-electronic (DRE) voting systems, on which you vote
directly on a touch-screen...you get no paper record of your vote...you
never know, despite what the touch-screen says, whether the computer is
counting your vote as you think you are casting it or, either by error or
fraud, it is giving it to another candidate.  No one can tell what a
computer does inside itself by looking at it; an election official 'can't
watch the bits inside,' says Dr. Peter Neumann, the principal scientist
at the Computer Science Laboratory of SRI International and a world
authority on computer-based risks...The four major election corporations
count votes with voting-system source codes (which) are kept strictly
secret..."

Even if they aren't obviously in error or secretly rigged, these new
machines can still have their tabulations changed, with nobody the wiser.
 One of my favorite Internet columnists, Devvy Kidd, two weeks ago
predicted "monstrous problems that will make Florida 2000 pale in
comparison."  Quoting from the December 1996 issue of Cincinnatus News
Service, a vote fraud newsletter, Devvy went on to note, "The missing
link in the vote fraud investigation has been found. The November 1996
issue of Relevance Magazine reveals that two-way hidden modems are being
built into the ever growing number of computerized optical scanner/direct
recording voting machines in use all across the country from New England
to California...these hidden modems are accessible by remote cell phone
technology...these voting machines can be accessed and manipulated from a
central super computer without a phone line connected to the wall, and
without the local precinct workers knowing that anything is happening at
all."  I wonder why Dan Rather didn't tell us about this?

Just look at all the "user login" notations in this rare audit log from
Washington State's King County, where a number of voting tabulation
irregularities are now under investigation.  No notation is made, of
course, of what those anonymous users did, once logged into the database.
 Go here for an interesting report and speculation about how and by whom
the voting machines are being hacked - particularly, note the Republican
connection through an attorney.

Diebold, Inc., is one of the country's biggest suppliers of paperless,
touch-screen voting machines.  Diebold's CEO, Walter O'Dell, wrote a
letter four months ago soliciting major-league campaign contributions for
Bush, in which he said, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its
electoral votes to the president next year."   Diebold is based in
Canton, Ohio.  Coincidence?

Convinced yet?  I am.

This year apparently wasn't the first to see this new technology
exploited, either.  In "The Stolen Election of 2004:  Welcome Back to
Hell," Larry Chin reports on touch-screen "black-box" voting:  "The
technology had a trial run in the 2002 mid-term elections.  In Georgia,
serviced by new Diebold systems, a popular Democratic governor and
senator were both unseated in what the media called 'amazing' upsets,
with results showing vote swings of up to 16 percent from the last
pre-ballot polls.  In computerized Minnesota, former Vice President
Walter Mondale - a replacement for popular incumbent Paul Wellstone, who
died in a plane crash days before the vote - was also defeated in a large
last-second vote swing.  Convenient 'glitches' in Florida saw an untold
number of votes intended for the Democratic candidate registering instead
for Governor Jeb 'L'il Brother' Bush."  More coincidence, do you suppose?

Now pay particularly close attention to the very next sentence from Mr.
Chin's article:  "A Florida Democrat who lost a similarly 'glitched'
local election went to court to have the computers examined - but the
case was thrown out by a judge who ruled that the innards of America's
voting machines are the 'trade secrets' of the private companies who make
them."  So, the legal system steps in and removes any chance of our being
able to audit what these things do.  Coincidence?

And it's not just the touch-screen voting machines that are susceptible. 
CommonDreams.org's Thom Hartmann notes that  "(I)n Florida's smaller
counties the results from the optically scanned paper ballots - fed into
a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking - seem to have been
reversed" (Evidence Mounts that the Vote was Hacked, Rense.com).  Mr.
Hartman's analysis shows that Florida would have gone to Kerry, had those
small-county anomalies been more consistent with actual party affiliation
registration by voters.  Do you believe in coincidence?  Did all those
rural Floridian Democrats really vote for Bush, do you suppose?  Florida,
alone, would have changed the outcome of the election.

Also in Florida, the other key "battleground" state that was widely
expected to go Kerry, the official election results of Palm Beach's (of
2000's "butterfly ballot" fame) disclosed that, while 454,427 people
voted, 542,835 votes were tallied, a discrepancy of 88,000 votes. 
Shortly after this oddity was picked up and reported by The Washington
Dispatch, officials inexplicably "found" over 91,000 additional absentee
ballots which had, somehow, already been counted, thus balancing its own
tally.  More coincidence, I suppose.

Americans seem to believe that the world thinks as we do; that, somehow,
Bush is viewed favorably.  He is not, as vividly demonstrated by
England's Danny Dayus in his article, Don't Be American:  "According to
recent opinion polls, a majority of people in the USA actually believe
that most of the world favoured the re-election of George W Bush as
president - this despite several surveys that suggest that support for
Kerry over Bush in the wider world was something between a 2:1 and 10:1
ratio."

At left:  George W. Bush in an increasingly typical pose.  Talk about
character.  Can you imagine George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, John F.
Kennedy or, even, Richard Nixon ever doing this publicly?  Why is this
man's obvious mental imbalance, intemperance and lack of propriety not
apparent to every American?  This is precisely the image of America now
held by the rest of the world.

This election was a foregone conclusion, as some noted beforehand.  Greg
Palast, Harper's editor who investigated American vote fraud on behalf of
the British Broadcasting System, reported on November 1 that upwards of
one million votes, expected to be cast overwhelmingly for Kerry, would
not be counted "(B)ecause, in important states like Ohio, Florida and New
Mexico, voter names have been systematically removed from the rolls and
absentee ballots have been overlooked-overwhelmingly in minority
areas..."  More coincidence, of course.

Houston, we have a problem.  Many have taken me to task recently for
advocating voting - just not voting for Democrats or Republicans - rather
than pointedly not voting.  In view of the massive and unprecedented vote
fraud that now is apparent, my attitude concerning this is undergoing
revision...and I'm leaning toward not voting.  Of course, I'm having some
other leanings, too - leanings that might get me put in jail, were I to
share them with you.

Look - the people apparently disenfranchised this time around primarily
are those with whom I generally disagree, but it is the fundamental
unfairness of what has taken place that most offends me, not to mention
the path down which America now treads.  If I really believed this
election showed the true color of conservatism, I would join the liberals
in a heartbeat and replace my "Nuke the Whales" bumper sticker with one
that says "Save the Baby Seals."  

If this is what it means to be conservative today, I want to be liberal.

New America.  An idea whose time has come.

 
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