Today I’m launching, in honor of the Columbus Dispatch’s poll on religion in Ohio, my “The ‘J’ is for Judas” campaign. If you wish to donate any money to my campaign by going to http://www.bobforohio.com/donate , I would like to begin buying billboards and bumper stickers and radio commercials.

J. Kenneth Hackwell is Judas. He took more than 30 pieces of silver. In fact, he’s a multimillionaire and he accomplished this while on a meager public salary as state treasurer. Remember, in 1978, Hackwell, then the Vice Mayor of Cincinnati, was co-chair of liberal Democratic Lieutenant Governor Richard Celeste’s campaign for Governor. People who knew Hackwell in the mid-70s constantly refer to his Black Power and progressive rhetoric. He still likes to use it as needed, to invoke Martin Luther King, Jr. while stealing the votes from poor and black people.

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Yesterday at the SPAN-Ohio rally (Single-Payer Action Network), Tim Kettler, the Green Party’s candidate for Secretary of State, and I were there to show our solidarity. Tim spoke as a small business owner, and called upon other business owners to pay a slightly higher rate of tax in order to insure all people in Ohio.

The SPAN rally was on the Third Street side of the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio. On the other side of the Statehouse, bikers (as in motorcycle riders) were holding their own rally. As irony would have it, Ohio Democratic Party gubernatorial candidate Ted Strickland was reportedly schmoozing the bikers, according to Columbus Indymedia. Meanwhile, some union forces and SPAN coalition members were just a bit hostile to Green Party candidates, who support their efforts – in contrast to their candidate, Strickland.

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For the United States to regain its moral stature in the world, we must quit waging illegal wars and instead act like every other advanced democracy by providing universal health care for all our citizens. 44 million Americans and 1.3 million Ohioans lack access to health insurance. In the 21 other western industrialized democracies, the figure is zero.

That’s why in my gubernatorial campaign, I support the Single Payer Action Network (SPAN) initiative to bring single-payer health insurance to Ohio. Single-payer means that one fund, administered by a non-profit government agency accountable to the public (not shareholders) would make payment for all medical services.

By creating universal health care, we would not be socializing medicine. Doctors and hospitals would operate on their own. By covering all Ohioans, we would become a more productive state and a state with a much better business environment. Additionally, I would allow state funds to be used for cities and towns in Ohio to issue bonds to create democratically and locally-controlled health care clinics, and money would go to subsidize doctors to set up practices in communities that are currently underserved.

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Readers of this blog might want to consider the major malfunctioning of the voting machines in Ohio in yesterday’s primary. It is only going to get worse in the fall. Here’s a breakdown of some of the day’s problems from the Columbus Dispatch and the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

Cuyahoga (used Diebold machines)
– court-ordered extension of voting hours, requested by Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, because they didn’t open until 1:30pm. Ordered to stay open until 9:30pm.
– poll workers could not get new Diebold touchscreen machines to work in Cleveland housing project
– some people had to vote on paper ballots

Franklin County (used ES&S machines)
– Matt Damschroder, Franklin County BOE Director, claimed 50 people walked away without voting (according to Columbus Dispatch)
– ballots loaded without school levies included
– 20% (160 precincts) opened late
– ES&S placed a dozen company representatives on the ground
– voters complained about the open viewing of voting machine screen and lack of a curtain
– Worthington, Westerville and Hilliard – voters complained locals school levy issue was not on voting machines

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When I was growing up in the 60s, the United States didn’t have the death penalty. Only nasty, brutal countries like the Soviet Union and the racist South Africa killed people. That was Michigan, where they still don’t have the death penalty. Now I live in Ohio, a state where they think nothing of taking an hour and a half behind closed curtains to viciously execute a man while, the Columbus Dispatch reported, “moaning, crying out and guttural noises” could be heard by the witnesses. Joseph Clark, the man who was tortured to death in the execution gone bad, died after the second attempt to kill him.

Any doctor or medical personnel who takes part in cold blooded murder by the state should lose their license as a health care provider. Any doctor taking part in an execution is clearly violating the Hippocratic oath. Remember, it was the Nazis who brought us the medical injection for killing their own “defective” citizens. While the Nazis gassed Jews, gypsies and gays, they preferred the medical injection for their own German inferiors.

As governor, I will immediately call for a moratorium on the death penalty and commute all death penalty sentences to life in prison without parole. I pledge to also review all cases to make sure that no prisoners were railroaded and order DNA tests if possible when a plausible claim of true innocence is put forward.

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To understand the character of Ken Hackwell, you need to understand his policy in running the secretary of state’s office. After reviewing the video of Monday’s scuffle with security when the statewide Ohio Green Party candidate petitions were filed, I see that the security guard was really clear:  no one may take a photo of candidates in the plaza outside in front of the building unless they’re pushed off to a public sidewalk. The only person who gets to decide who may hold a press conference at the Ohio secretary of state’s office is the Borden Building management and the secretary of state’s office. Anyone else must call the secretary of state’s office or the Borden Building management, who are paid by Hackwell to lease space to the secretary of state’s office.

As usual, Hackwell doesn’t see any conflict of interest here. Remember the procedure: Hackwell can hold a press conference in front of the Borden Building and secretary of state’s office by calling himself, and asking if he can have a press conference. All his political rivals must call a private company to which Hackwell’s public office pays a small fortune to every month. Or, call Hackwell’s office.

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Yesterday, when the Fitrakis/Rios for Ohio Governor and Lieutenant Governor campaign turned in our final tally of 10,960 signatures, we were told by one of Secretary of State J. Kenneth Hackwell’s employees that we probably won’t be approved for the ballot until late June, or early July, hence impairing our ability (and that of other third parties) to raise money as ballot-approved candidates for the fall 2006 election. Because a few members of the entourage took photos outside the Borden Building, the privately-owned building housing the secretary of state’s office, building security pushed a camera into the face of one of the photographers and called the police on us.

This is how the game works. Instead of building a state building, which would belong to the people and which could be sold during hard times as an asset, Hackwell pays a ton of our tax money to the private owners of the Borden Building. That way, Hackwell and his staff can play “good cop” while the private security company harasses his political opponents. Recall that Hackwell had former U.S. Congressman Dan Hamburg arrested in December 2004 while he sat at a table at the café in the Borden Building. Also, Hackwell had private security forces harass black activist Judith Powell when she went to his office with WVKO 1580AM Radio talk show host Charles Traylor to talk about voting irregularities.

The only thing the Democrats and Republicans can agree upon is that it is OK to harass.

The squirrelly little nonprofit called Election Science Institute (ESI), with perhaps one of the most Orwellian names in existence and whose director lacks any graduate background in statistical analysis, is at it again. ESI received nearly a quarter million dollar contract yesterday from the Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) Commissioners to reassure the public about the new wave of e-voting machines. In 2005, ESI received a contract from the Franklin County Commissioners, led by Mary Jo Kilroy, to come in and cover up the 2004 election fiasco. ESI’s director has long-standing ties to the military industrial complex and has no credentials to independently audit the machines.

The game that is now being played is for election officials to take out advertisements which say that the machines are federally certified or state certified or independently audited. In fact, Columbus’ daily monopoly (the Dispatch) ran a four page insert ad from the Franklin County Board of Elections on how wonderful, safe and secure the voting machines are, then a few days later, their “Insight” section ran an above-the-fold virtual word-for-word propaganda piece with pictures detailing how the voting machines are “designed for security and accuracy,” as if it was new news material.

Essentially the Dispatch plagiarized the Franklin County BOE propaganda. For example, the ad read: “Each machine stands alone and is not connected to the internet or any other electronic device, except its printer.” The Dispatch wrote: “Each machine stands alone with no wireless devices or modems. It can connect only to a printer.”

Last night, we were up counting and sorting our petitions to qualify the first Green-endorsed ticket for governor and lieutenant governor in Ohio history. As I write this morning at a little after 8am, Anita Rios and I have 10,960 signatures. 5,000 are required. Tim Kettler, the Green candidate for secretary of state, who worked so diligently on the recount in Coshocton County, phoned early to tell me he had over 9,000 signatures and will file with me as well, at 1pm today at J. Kenneth Hackwell’s office.

So, if you’re not doing anything at 1pm today, join us at the Borden building at the corner of 4th and Broad in downtown Columbus and help us make history. A press conference will follow immediately after the filing of petitions at the secretary of state’s office in the Borden building.

Under Ohio law, which is, like many Ohio laws, unfair and ludicrous, the Democrats and Republicans running for statewide office only had to get 1,000 signatures to get on the ballot, while “other party candidates” have to get five times as many signatures. And, under Ohio law, the Democrats and Republicans at the county Boards of Elections get to jointly verify our signatures without our presence. In Ohio, we have a two-party system, only slightly better than a dictatorship. And for every dollar the wealthy send the Republicans, they flip a 50-cent piece to the Democrats. Because they’re beholden to the same corporate money and studies indicate 1 percent of the population gives 90 percent of the money to political candidates, there’s very little real policy debate in Ohio, or the nation in general. Read more

Fraudbuster Bob Fitrakis and his longtime colleague and co-author Harvey Wasserman have written a new analysis of the current political situation entitled, “The ‘New Totalitarianism’ Now Defines A Desperate Neo-con End Game,” which is available in full at the Columbus (Ohio) Free Press website:  https://freepress.org/departments/display/20/2006/1946. Here are the first few paragraphs:

As the Bush/neo-con kleptocracy disintegrates in a toxic cloud of military defeat, economic bankruptcy, environmental disaster and escalating mega-scandal, its attack on basic American freedoms – its “New Totalitarianism” – has escalated to a desperate new level, including brutal Soviet-style prosecutions against non-violent dissidents and an all-out offensive for state secrecy, including an attack on the internet.

In obvious panic and disarray, the GOP right has turned to a time-honored strategy – kill the messengers. While it slaughters Americans and Iraqis to “bring democracy” to the Middle East, it has made democracy itself public enemy Number One here at home.

The New Totalitarianism has become tangible in particular through a string of terrifying prosecutions against non-violent dissenters, an attack on open access to official government papers, and the attempted resurrection by right-wing “theorists” of America’s most repressive legislation, dating back to the 1950s, 1917 and even 1797.

Bush’s universal spy campaign is the cutting edge of the assault. The GOP Attorney-General has told Congress both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln engaged in electronic wiretapping. He has deemed the Geneva war crimes accords a “quaint” document and treats the Bill of Rights the same way.

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