Saturday, January 27, 2007

Bush Was Never Elected

People have asked me why I didn't blog Bush's recent State of the Union. Well, to be honest, it's because I have a limited taste for lies. Not that I didn't watch the grand and boring speech, I did, but my feeling is that his lies are now so fucking obvious on the face of them that no one needed me to sit and analyze his bullshit. It's a waste of my time.

Ah, but more importantly, it's because I'm not willing to expend the energy writing about the speech of a man who has never been legitimately elected President.

See, in 2000, the Supreme Court could have ordered that every ballot in Florida be counted. Instead they pulled off a judicial coup and stole the election for Bush. Later recounts of every Florida ballot proved that if all counties had been recounted, Bush would have lost Florida by a few thousand votes.

Then, in 2004, we saw the election-rigging machine at it again in Ohio. Kenneth Blackwell, scumbag extraordinaire did everything he could to help Diebold steal the election. Robert Kennedy exposed much of this in the pages of Rolling Stone. Bush stole his re-election and the mainstream Corporate Media promptly ignored it.

Now they're ignoring THIS story, a story far more interesting than anything that President Citizen Bush might have to say...

Ohio Election Staff Convicted in Recount Rig

By M.R. Kropkop
The Associated Press

Wednesday 24 January 2007

Cleveland - Two election workers were convicted Wednesday of rigging a recount of the 2004 presidential election to avoid a more thorough review in Ohio's most populous county.

Jacqueline Maiden, elections coordinator of the Cuyahoga County Elections Board, and ballot manager Kathleen Dreamer each were convicted of a felony count of negligent misconduct of an elections employee. They also were convicted of one misdemeanor count each of failure of elections employees to perform their duty.

Prosecutors accused Maiden and Dreamer of secretly reviewing preselected ballots before a public recount on Dec. 16, 2004. They worked behind closed doors for three days to pick ballots they knew would not cause discrepancies when checked by hand, prosecutors said.

Defense attorney Roger Synenberg has said the workers were following procedures as they understood them.

Ohio gave President Bush the electoral votes he needed to defeat Democratic Sen. John Kerry in the close election and hold on to the White House in 2004.

Special prosecutor Kevin Baxter did not claim the workers' actions affected the outcome of the election - Kerry gained 17 votes and Bush lost six in the county's recount.

Maiden and Dreamer, who still work for the elections board, face a possible sentence of six to 18 months for the felony conviction. Sentencing is on Feb. 26.

A message left for Elections Board Director Michael Vu was not immediately returned Wednesday. The board released a statement that said its goal is to restore confidence in the county's election progress and pursue reforms in addition to those made since 2004.
I think it's amusing that the Elections Board Director's words are taken as truth in this article, especially considering that all three of the people charged in this case were placed on ADMINISTRATIVE LEAVE and their legal fees paid for BY that same Elections Board, who are clearly trying to cover up their ignominious record as election thieves.

This isn't some isolated incident... writers Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have a great account of how widespread and egregious the election fraud in Ohio was this last election.
But Cleveland, which usually gives Democrats an extremely heavy margin, was crucial to Bush's alleged victory of roughly 118,000 votes out of 5.5 million counted. Some 600,000 votes were cast or counted in Cuyahoga County. But official turnout and vote counts varied wildly and improbably from precinct to precinct. Overall the county reported about a 60% turnout. But several predominantly black precincts, where voters went more than 80% for Kerry, reported turnouts of 30% or less. In one ward, only a 7% turnout was reported, while surrounding precincts were nearly ten times as high. Independent studies indicate Kerry thousands of votes in Cuyahoga County that rightfully should have been counted in his column.

In the Cuyahoga case, the poll workers are charged with circumventing state recount laws that require a random sampling of at least three percent of the votes cast in a given precinct, to be recounted by hand and by machine. The prosecution charges that the workers instead hand picked sample precincts to recount that they knew did not have questionable results. Once they were able to match those recounts with official results, they could then do the rest of the recount by machine, in effect rendering the entire process meaningless. "This was a very hush operation," said prosecutor Baxter.

Similar allegations have been made in other counties. Indeed, such illegal non-random recounting procedures appear to have been common throughout the state, carried out by board of election employees with the tacit consent of Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. Blackwell was officially charged with administering the election that gave Bush a second term while simultaneously serving as the Ohio co-chair of his Bush's re-election campaign. Blackwell has just been overwhelmingly defeated in his own attempt to become governor of Ohio.

Defense attorney Roger Synenberg, who represents Dreamer, told the jury that the recount was an open process, and that his client and the others "were just doing it the way they were always doing it."
It's now very clear that this country is being led by an illegitimate fraud who calls himself The Decider. Why should Congress defer to anything he wants at this point?