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Public Functions in Private Spaces

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.

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From Propaganda to News

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.”

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10,960 Signatures

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

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The “New Totalitarianism”

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.

Read more

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Justice for Carol Fisher!

The rise of fascism always begins with the corruption of the police. The recent conviction of Carol Fisher on two counts of felonious assault on two 200+ pound Cleveland Heights policemen must concern all Americans who believe in the Bill of Rights.

Carol’s real crime was posting the World Can’t Wait posters that demanded that Bush “step down.”  The cops, as foot soldiers of the Constitution, should have been defending Carol’s First Amendment right to post fliers. Instead, as thugs of the Repugnican Party, they assaulted Carol.

This is an old game, and I’ve seen more than more cop laugh about testi-lying. In this case, the lie was obvious. They were the victims. They were assaulted. Again, just another pair of lying jackbooted thugs who do the bidding of the Bush junta.

Read more

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More Voting Machine Problems

The debate over e-voting rages on. In Ohio’s Franklin County, the Board of Elections had a 4-page insert placed in the Daily Monopoly (The Columbus Dispatch) explaining the new voting machines that will be in place for our May 2 primary. Some are excited that the machines aren’t Diebold – Franklin County BOE Director Matt Damschroder could hardly  purchase Diebold machines after being suspended without pay for taking a $10,000 check/bribe from Bush and Hackwell’s favorite voting vendor – but Election Systems & Software (ES&S) has clear Republican ties through Sen. Chuck Hagel’s ownership interest in the company. 

While the ES&S machines sound wonderful in the Dispatch ad, when BOE employee Howard Heard first presented the machine to the Commissioners for demonstration, it didn’t work and had to be brought back for a second presentation.

Also, voting rights activist John Gideon has pointed out problems with ES&S optical scan machines in Ohio’s Summit County. ES&S admitted to making mistakes with the memory card and had to replace 70% of the instrument that records the vote.  So the memory card is one area voters should pay attention to.

Read more

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Dr. Bob Fitrakis on WVKO April 27, 2006, Bush, Nazis, Terror Flights, Local Issues

Dr. Bob 4/27/06 on WVKO

this is hot so watch your volume

DrFitrakis042706.mp3

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Ferris is Fraud

It looks like American Blackout II. In the award-winning documentary film “American Blackout,” Ian Inanda chronicles how Republicans crossed over in the primary to beat one of America’s most progressive Congressional representatives, Cynthia McKinney. Now, Barbara Anne Ferris, a 52-year-old “Democrat,” is being endorsed by the Cleveland Plain Dealer, over incumbent Dennis Kucinich. When I spoke to Ferris on Sunday, I was dressed in a golf shirt and tan dress slacks to gather signatures at the Earthfest at the Cleveland Zoo. I asked her if she was a Democrat. She said, “You have to be one in Cleveland to win” and pointed out that a lot of Republicans were supporting her. Her website recently directed Republicans to ask for a Democratic ballot to defeat Kucinich.

Now, what are Kucinich’s great sins? According to the Plain Dealer, it is the fact that he “cobbled together a creaky, left-slanted platform” in the presidential primary. The Plain Squealer also noted, that “His legislative initiatives, whether for universal health care or his long-talked-of federal Department of Peace, are most informed by his place well to the left of all of Ohio’s other representatives.”

Thus, the Republican-owned Plain Dealer, the Republican Party, and a Republican candidate in Democratic trappings are conspiring to oust the populist Kucinich, whose only sin is trying to bring health care to 44 million Americans – the type of universal health care available in every other democracy.

Read more

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Hackwell. Hypocrite.

Finally, someone used the “H” word against J. Kenneth Hackwell. Jim Petro decided to state the obvious: that Hackwell is a blatant amoral hypocrite. If you haven’t seen Petro’s new commercial yet, you should catch it on the web. Hackwell’s used to going unchallenged: when he steals elections; disenfranchises voters; returns their voter registrations because they aren’t on 80-bond unwaxed white paper. Indeed, he quotes Martin Luther King, Jr. in inverse proportion to how many minority and poor votes he steals and suppresses.

Petro, his Republican primary challenger, actually pointed out that it’s hypocritical to claim that you’re right-to-life while investing in a pharmaceutical company that manufactures a morning-after pill. That it’s hypocritical to claim you’re appalled by gambling and then you’re shocked to find you have stock in the company that makes the slot machines for the industry.

Politics is getting exciting in the Buckeye State as this bare-knuckled brawl in the Republican primary exposes the utter bankruptcy of the Republican front-runner. Of course, it’s still impossible to believe Hackwell will lose the election to Petro when Blackwell will count and certify the vote. The fact that this would not be allowed in any other Democracy has eluded the corporate mainstream media in Ohio.

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Thank You For Killing the Planet

A Columbus Dispatch op-ed today by Jonah Goldberg, editor of the National Review online, trots out the absurd claim that global warming is nothing more than a “green scare.” Goldberg goes on to attack Al Gore as a “scaremonger” and the local Dispatch editors chime in to attack Gore with the headline “Gore’s Green Scare Conveniently Avoids Facts.” Well, here’s a fact for you. The Dispatch has not endorsed a Democratic President since Woodrow Wilson in 1916 and the paper is owned by a prominent Republican family that owns the local Republican Party and rents the Democrats as needed.

But getting down to facts, Goldberg belittles Vanity Fair for saying that global warming is a “threat greater than terrorism.” Goldberg also dismisses the National Review’s old Cold War Red Scare partners at Time magazine for being worried about global warming.

Here’s a fact you won’t hear from the Dispatch, Goldberg or the National Review: George W. Bush’s own Department of Defense Security Planner Andrew Marshall led a team of risk assessment experts who found global warming to be a greater threat to U.S. national security than al Qaeda in the next 20 years. Marshall drafted Peter Schwartz, the former head of planning at Royal Dutch Shell Group, among other conservative forces, and they came up this fact: that the climate change “should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a U.S. national security concern.” The Bush administration has done everything to suppress the secret report by its own risk assessment team at the Pentagon. Read more

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