, ,

We Must Defend Cynthia McKinney

Progressives should rise to the defense of Rep. Cynthia McKinney. Having read Michael Rupert’s brilliant essay, “The Beloved Cynthia McKinney,” I can only wonder how twisted the politics are in this society where a possibly drunken Vice President can shoot his hunting partner and not answer to the police, while McKinney is vilified as a possible felon for a minor scrape with a Capitol police officer.

To understand McKinney’s relationship with the Capitol police, people should view the groundbreaking documentary “American Blackout.” The gutless and soulless mainstream Democrats that denounce McKinney are exactly the reason why the party has been in the minority for the last 12 years in Congress, and has allowed the Bush crime family to steal the last two elections.

McKinney is a national treasure. Whatever minor mistake she made, we should not allow a criminal presidency that is waging illegal war, responsible for the death of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens, to tell us who should be reprimanded in Congress and pursued for criminal charges.

Read more

/by
, ,

Blackwell: Just Another Crazed Neocon

So, Florida Governor Jeb Bush endorsed Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Hackwell for governor. After all, they were very close in the year 2000, when Hackwell was described as the Bush family’s “secret weapon” when the well-known political crime family stole the 2000 election. As more and more revelations come forward regarding the criminal nature of this White House, Hackwell’s ties become more apparent.

The AP reported yesterday that the phone jamming efforts in the 2002 election in New Hampshire, when Republicans jammed the Democratic “Get Out The Vote” phone lines, are linked to the White House. Republican operative James Tobin, recently convicted in the phone jamming scheme, made two dozen calls to the White House in the three day period surrounding Election Day 2002.

You can bet that Rove was at the other end of those calls. That’s the same Rove Hackwell is reported to have met with on Election Day 2004 in Ohio. What also occurred in Ohio prior to Election Day were the activities of the Mighty Texas Strike Force, a dirty tricks squad linked directly to the White House as well. Hackwell did nothing to stop the voter intimidation in Ohio and, in fact, aided and abetted those criminal activities.

Read more

/by
,

Immigration and Other Wedge Issues

By now, most are aware that the Republican Party deliberately gay-baited in the key swing states during the 2004 election. States like Ohio, where gay marriage was already illegal under state statute, adopted an absurd and repressive constitutional amendment outlawing all forms of domestic partnership. The issue passed overwhelmingly, particularly in Ohio’s rural counties — those that were hard hit by the economic downturn — where there’s no openly gay people or gay institutions.

This is the nature of vicious Republican wedge issues. It is basic divide and conquer, where people are so busy focusing on an emotional non-issue, you can impose massive economic hardship on them.

Following the 2004 election, commentators began to predict that “immigration” would be the divide and conquer issue during the 2006 congressional midterm elections. So, right on cue and as predicted, the country is busily debating immigration while Bush plots to attack Iran and make his cronies richer by looting the U.S. Treasury. While people worry about immigrants, they forget the fact that their President is a war criminal who got us into Iraq by openly lying and who committed a felony by ordering the leak of the name of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame. Read more

/by
, ,

J. Kenneth Hackwell’s Hypocrisy

The latest revelation regarding the single most unprincipled man in the history of Ohio politics, Secretary of State J. Kenneth Hackwell, is that the man who stole the 2004 election will no longer talk to Columbus Dispatch reporters. Hackwell, the frontrunner in the May 2 gubernatorial primary, won’t talk to a newspaper that hasn’t endorsed a Democrat for president since 1916.

There’s reasons why he won’t talk. Hackwell’s crafted an image of himself as a pious Christian man of the highest moral values. While soliciting the state’s theocrats and right-to-lifers’ vote, he privately holds stock in Barr Pharmaceuticals that manufactures a morning-after pill – or as Hackwell and his followers call it, a baby-killing abortion pill. While he’s opposed to gambling, he’s “shocked,” shocked, I say, that he found himself holding stock in the nation’s largest maker of slot machines. As Ohio’s chief election officer, he decides whether the signatures will be valid for the two casino initiatives attempting to be placed on the November ballot.

He was equally shocked to find that, while negotiating unbid contracts on Dieblod machines, he happened to hold stock in that company as well.

Read more

/by
, ,

Separation of Church and State in Ohio

On April 6th, fifty-three Ohio ministers filed a supplemental complaint with Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Mark W. Everson against the World Harvest Church of Canal Winchester, Ohio and the Fairfield Christian Church of Lancaster, Ohio. They allege the obvious, that “The churches have continued to organize and host political rallies featuring one, and only one, Ohio gubernatorial candidate — J. Kenneth Blackwell.”

Blackwell, as the chief elections officer in the state, has worked directly with Rev. Rod Parsley of World Harvest Church and Pastor Russell Johnson of the Fairfield Christian Church to destroy the separation of church and state. Parsley plans to do “Ohio for Jesus” radio spots for his Reformation Ohio project featuring Blackwell.

Rev. Parsley and Blackwell went on a bus tour together during the fall of 2004, to promote a state constitutional amendment against all forms of domestic partnership and gay marriage, which appeared on the ballot as Issue One. Blackwell, according to the tour’s information, would privately “minister” to voters prior to the rallies. He also ran the Issue One initiative out of his Secretary of State’s office. He was censured for that activity. Read more

/by
, ,

2004 Recount Indictments

The April 5 indictment of three top election officials in Cuyahoga County signals the unraveling of the biggest crime in the 21st century — the blatant theft of the 2004 presidential election in Ohio. While Michael Vu, the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections Director, whines about how his staffers are being unfairly treated, the quotes from Special Prosecutor Kevin Baxter describe clearly the criminal activities of Vu’s people.

Baxter told the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “If it didn’t balance [the hand count], they excluded those precincts.” Under Ohio law, the Green and Libertarian Party candidates were entitled to a “random” recount. That means that every ballot has an equal chance of inclusion in the initial 3% hand count. Only in Ken Blackwell and Michael Vu’s world does random mean its exact opposite — nonrandom. You can’t pick up a precinct, count it, and if it doesn’t match the official tally, toss it back and find one that does. That’s a crime. Read more

/by
, , ,

Blackwell, Diebold, and Campaign 2006

The common statewide wisdom is that “Ken Blackwell will never lose an election in which he is in charge of the vote count.” But Ohio Democrats never seriously questioned Blackwell’s rigged 2004 vote count that put Bush back in the White House.

An eyewitness ally of Blackwell told a small gathering of Bush supporters, with a Free Press reporter present, that Blackwell was in a frenzy on Election Day 2004, writing percentages and vote totals on maps of rural Republican counties, attempting to figure out how many votes, real or manufactured, Bush would need to overcome the exit poll results in Cleveland and Columbus. Read more

/by
, , ,

Blackwell’s Letter from Franklin County Jail

All along, J. Kenneth Blackwell has been engaging in criminal activity.

He’s responsible for the purging of over 300,000 voters in Ohio between the 2000 and 2004 election, telling voters they were registered on the wrong paper weight, not counting votes cast in the wrong precinct after he had the precincts switched, and stealing the election in Ohio.

He could always count on the Bush boys to bail him out. But now what? He’s caught dead to rights with an unlawful interest in a public contract.

Remember, Blackwell bragged about negotiating the “best in the nation” deal with Diebold. It wasn’t hard, since Wally O’Dell was one of the president’s Pioneer and Ranger team members. Read more

/by
, , ,

A Jail Cell for Blackwell

Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell was forced to reveal Monday in an Ohio Ethics filing that he had inadvertently invested in the notorious voting machine company, Diebold Inc. This is clearly a criminal act and Blackwell belongs in a jail cell. My favorite weasel words from the abysmally corrupt Republican gubernatorial candidate is that, because he didn’t know what his accountant and financial advisor were investing in, it’s “similar to a blind trust.”

The only people who would have to be blind are those who fail to see the deliberate theft of the election by Blackwell and the fact in April 2005, he personally negotiated what he called the “best in the nation” deal with Diebold to purchase their fraud-o-matic touch-screen machines for $2700. This, a la Halliburton, was an unbid contract.

The Diebold machines met with massive disaster in the November 2005 election as untrained workers lost memory cards and more votes that voters appeared in Carlisle and other Ohio cities. Read more

/by
, , ,

The New Face of Apartheid: J. Kenneth Hackwell

The most unprincipled and opportunistic man in the history of Ohio, Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, stands poised to claim the Republican primary for governor. Blackwell and his far-right theocratic “rapture-ready” Christian dominionists will doom the Buckeye State to further despair.

It should come as no surprise that the Free Press is the only newspaper in Ohio willing to out Blackwell for appearing before white supremacists in the secretive Council on National Policy. Blackwell understands power; he understands that there’s plenty of money in putting a black face on the new politics of high-tech Jim Crow. Blackwell also understands that in order for his strategy to succeed, he must convince a significant number of black ministers to join him in his open bigotry against gays and lesbians.
This is simply the old apartheid politics of divide and conquer. Blackwell wants to rule the new Buckeye State Bantustan.

Read more

/by