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J. Kenneth Blackwell – The J. Is For Jim Crow

Unlike most western democracies, the United States only became a democracy some 40 years ago with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Our country hired federal registrars, who were allowed to pack sidearms to break the tyranny of racist white Dixiecrats.

Now we have the new Jim Crow. You get a black man to do what Bull Connor and George Wallace did forty years ago. J. Kenneth is shrinking the electorate. He’s targeting minority and poor voters. He’s making it a crime to register people to vote. He’s doing the bidding of objectively racist white politicians like Republican Senator Jeff Jacobson of Vandalia, Ohio. The Secretary of State has come up with his interpretation of new registration rules. If you register new voters, you must deliver each voter’s new registration form in person within ten days to the Board of Elections in each person’s county of residence or face fifth degree felony charges.

This is the same Blackwell who threw out 356 votes in Franklin County because voters were in the right precinct, but pollworkers gave them a provisional ballot. This is the same hater of poor and minorities and ass-kisser to the rich, who returned voters’ registration forms because they weren’t on 80-lb. unwaxed white paper. This is J. Kenneth Blackwell, a black face on a red neck.

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Hacking The Vote In Miami County

Well, we finally got to Miami County in Ohio this week to check those strange numbers, as Richard Hayes Phillips wrote, there’s no way there was “a 98.55% turnout in Concord South West precinct or anywhere else in Ohio.  Nor was there a 94.27% turnout in Concord South precinct.”

Hacking The Vote In Miami County

Once again, Phillips and the Free Press are correct. I testified before U.S. Rep. John Conyers’ hearing and brought up Miami County, saying that the voter turnout was implausible. Really, it wasn’t overly hard to figure out.

At the Miami County Board of Elections, while Phillips began to count ballots and audit pollbooks in a moldly warehouse, I was given “revised” internal numbers from Steve Quillen, the Director of the BOE, that now has voter turnout in Concord Southwest at 79%.

Hence, the 98.55% that Christopher Hitchens called “Saddam Hussein-type turnout” in Vanity Fair’s “Ohio’s Odd Numbers,” proved to be an equally fraudulent number in Ohio. It makes you wonder why we’re occupying Iraq to bring democracy when we could have those troops in Miami, Warren, Clermont and Butler counties brining democracy to southwest Ohio.  

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Where Do You Hide With A Stolen Election, Stolen Planet

Having just watched the premier of Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” I couldn’t help but see the parallels between the global warming issue and the 2004 stolen presidential election. Gore related his attempts over the years to get Congress, the media and the public to believe that global warming is a crisis, only to be derided and discredited. Those of us who expose stolen elections often receive the same reaction – mostly from the media.

I had the privilege of seeing Vice President Gore’s presentation live at the Ohio State University on April 16, 2004. So it was no surprise when I heard theatergoers gasp as Gore presented the scientific evidence for global warming. The charts, the graphs, the pictures – all make a clear and convincing case.

My forthcoming book, with co-editors Harvey Wasserman and Steve Rosenfeld entitled What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election (New Press), attempts to put the issue of Ohio’s 2004 election in a similar light.

Mark Crispin Miller recently wrote in his open letter entitled “Some Might Call it Treason,” to Farhad Manjoo, an election theft “denialist” on salon.com, that when “extremely bright” people refuse to consider the possibility of a stolen election, it is often the result of “a subtler kind of incapacity: a refusal and/or inability to face a deeply terrifying truth.” Read more

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Hackwell Admits Crimes

So, Ken Hackwell is taking credit for the high voter turnout in the 2004 presidential election in Ohio. Today’s Columbus Dispatch reported that the Hackwell campaign states “The facts of the record show that Secretary Blackwell’s leadership resulted in record-setting voter turnout and voter registration drives in which one million more Ohioans gained the opportunity to vote.” It’s about time that he fessed up and took credit for his crimes. I have no doubt that Hackwell was responsible for the 131% voter turnout in Clyde, Ohio, initially reported. Also, I think he was behind the 124% and 120% turnout in two precinct in Perry County. And surely, a man of Hackwell’s religious faith was responsible for the glorious miracle of the loaves and fishes precinct in Gahanna Ward 1B, where 638 people voted, and 4258 votes were delivered unto the prodigal son, George W. Bush. And he’s no doubt responsible for that 98.55% turnout in that one precinct in Miami County. Indeed, wherever far-right white evangelicals surge to the polls, unseen to naked eye, at the last second, Hackwell should rightfully claim that cybervote.

Likewise, he should admit to massively repressing the votes of the least of our brethren, in Cleveland and other urban centers. Hackwell did everything he could, as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney Re-election Committee to make sure that black and poor voters were disenfranchised. Hackwell likes to compare himself to Gandhi and King – what he forgets is that these two giants Enfranchised people, they did not disenfranchise people.

Below is a piece I wrote right after the election that reflected his attack on black voters in Ohio’s inner cities. Hackwell’s “let every white Republican to vote twice campaign” should be placed alongside of Hackwell’s Jim Crow thuggery. Fewer people voted in the city of Cleveland in 2004 than in 2000, despite the “record turnout.” Read more

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Grassroots Green Activism

In “An Inconvenient Truth,” former Vice President Al Gore tells us that we only have a decade to turn around the destruction by global warming to our planet. What we would be entering into has been called “the birth of death” if we continue in our non-sustainable ways. The only way to clean up Ohio, one of the most polluted states in the country – with Columbus recently voted the least sustainable major city – is to elect a governor who is a real Green. Not one who has his photo taken in a canoe or who claims to be Green. I’ve been deeply involved in the environmental movement since the 1970s when I was an undergraduate. Let me briefly recap my actual grassroots Green activist experience.

As an undergraduate, I followed nuclear waste trucks from a plant in Traverse City, Michigan as part of a report on safety and security for PIRG and I also collected signatures to put a bottle bill on the ballot. In the last 20 years, I’ve engaged in a lot of grassroots campaigns and investigative reporting that directly challenged the corporate polluters:

  • I exposed Battelle’s hidden radioactive and toxic waste site at the King Avenue location and fought it from being located on the Olentangy River with the help of local activist Tim Wagner
  • I investigated and worked against the so-called “Mobile Chernobyl” with environmentalist Joanne Phillips when Governor Voinovich attempted to make Ohio the Midwest radioactive waste site
  • I investigated and exposed criminal activity in Hilliard, where elementary school children were having their lungs scarred by illegal toxic fumes
  • With Harvey Wasserman, I investigated Columbus’ notorious trash burning power plant and worked with area citizens such as Theresa Mills, Stan and Sherri Loscko and Ohio Environmental Council Directory Rick Sahli. We fought against it for a year until we prevailed and it was shut down
  • I exposed radioactive material from old nuclear missiles in a junkyard in Mansfield, Ohio
  • I also reported on the coal company’s plans to mine under Dysart Woods and destroy Ohio’s last strand of old growth trees, working with tireless activist Chad Kister
  • I investigated and exposed the radioactivity in Marion, Ohio that was being covered up by government officials. As a result of that reporting for Columbus Alive, in 2001, the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists voted me the best environmental writer in the state. The article is included in “The Fitrakis Files: Spooks, Nukes and Nazis” that exposes the underbelly of corruption in the state

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The Ohio Left, Out Of The Gubenatorial Debate

So Hackwell and Strickland plan a series of five debates. As always, they don’t invite the other parties, in this case the Libertarians and the Green candidate for governor (me). I suspect that the debates will span the political spectrum from A to B. Strickland will increasingly head to the center right as news articles indicate that he’s now picking up Republican money from lobbyists and corporate interests who see him ahead in the polls and want to invest in the next governor. As Strickland takes this Republican-tainted corporate money, he’s essentially to preserve the “pay-to-play” culture of corruption in Ohio, where donations to the governor are made in expectation of state government contracts being steered back to the firms that donate or to the interests represented by the lobbyists.

Ohio should become a clean money state – with matching funds to candidates who qualify on the ballot. Political candidates should be beholden to the people, not to the wealthiest 1% who give 90% of the money to the politicians. In the long run, this will save the state billions of dollars. Hopefully, I can talk the Libertarian candidate into joining me in crashing the planned Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dumb debates. You know my bias, Hackwell has to be Tweedle-dumb.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t count Hackwell out. As long as he plans to count the votes, I’m sure he already has November’s election results pre-programmed. So the Democrats were right recently in calling on Hackwell to step aside. Hackwell plans to do everything in his power to shrink the Ohio electorate. That’s his only way to win. So, we might expect Hackwell to throw red meat to his far-right-wing Christo-fascist and theocratic debate, during the debate, and drag Strickland to the right. Real issues should be discussed in Ohio, from renewable energy to improving Ohio’s educational system and guaranteeing universal health care for all citizens. Strickland and Hackwell won’t do that. Only by including all candidates will a real democratic debate ensue.

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Who The Hell Is Farhad Manjoo?

Here’s today’s assignment: who the hell is Farhad Manjoo? That’s right, bloggers. I spent a lot of time trying to find his credentials online. I found he was born in 1978 and graduated in 2000 from Cornell, where he wrote for his college newspaper. He also wrote for Wired News and now salon.com. So, the question becomes – why would a 20-something with apparently no advanced degrees in social science or political science be taken seriously by the mainstream corporate press?

Manjoo is much like the Tobacco Institute or the people they used to send around to show us film strips about “Readi Kilowatt” back during the Cold War. They are individuals who have developed a cottage industry as debunkers and denialists. And in a society famed for Know Nothings an anti-intellectualism, of course an opportunist like Manjoo would come forward.

Award-winning journalists are ignored or called conspiracy theorists. Ph.D.s are denounced by the droves. Sound familiar? Yes, that’s the sound of jackboots marching. The attack on the credentialed academy and the deference to the fly-by-night propagandist is a typical authoritarian model. What next? The youth corps tossing the truly credentialed down the stairs and out the windows at the colleges?

Why is Manjoo important? Because he serves the interests of W. Bush and Karl Rove and those who have perfected the art of “benign operations.” Why not go with a real expert – Kevin Phillips, the architect of the modern Republican Party, Nixon’s key strategist and creator of the “southern strategy.” He calls the Bush family “four generations of war profiteers” and stated that the Bush family couldn’t hold an election without a CIA manual.

We should think of Manjoo much like we think of Holocaust deniers. If you can find any REAL credentials he has, please let me know and I’ll post them.

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Reading Hallett And Why The Big D Always Defends The Republicans

Let’s begin with Hallett’s bizarre and disingenuous title to his July 11 op-ed in Columbus’ daily monopoly and Republican mouthpiece rag, the Dispatch. The last time the Dispatch endorsed a Democrat for President it was Wilson in 1916 and the pro-German Wolfe family liked his slogan: He kept us out of war. Hallett’s headline reads: “Democrats keep leveling charges at Blackwell they can’t back up.” The charges leveled against Blackwell prior to Election Day 2004 were primarily leveled by independent and nonpartisan grassroots voting rights activists, Greens and Libertarians. The Dems have generally been too cowardly to take on J. Kenneth, the good buddy of the Bush crime family.

Hallett says that “…Kerry told the Dispatch just a month ago that he did not lose the election because of fraud.” This is strawman argument 101. Bobby Kennedy, Jr. is on the record saying Kerry agrees with his analysis of the election in Ohio. Kennedy attributes the loss to both voter suppression and fraud. Hallett lost his integrity to fraud. In this article, he’s arguing against Kennedy’s article in Rolling Stone by using a Kerry quote that is only part of the story.

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Mob-Style Corruption In Ohio

The guilty plea on state and federal corruption charges from Terrence W. Gasper, the former Chief Financial Officer at the Ohio Bureau of Worker’s Compensation (BWC), masks a much greater scandal involving the systematic corruption of Ohio politics dating from former governor George Voinovich’s administration. As the Columbus Dispatch showed today, Gasper was hired at the direction of the late Paul C. Mifsud. Mifsud, who was Voinovich’s Chief of Staff, had direct ties to the Bush family. Mifsud was a former military intelligence officer who liked to brag of CIA connections and controlled a shadowy group called the Maltese Benevolent Society. Mifsud ran George H.W. Bush’s 1980 campaign for president in the Buckeye State as well as co-managing his 1988 run for president as well. Voinovich allowed Mifsud to essentially use Mafia-style “bust-outs” to collect political slush funds to bring the Republican Party to dominance in Ohio.

Mifsud saw the Ohio BWC as a cash cow and directly recruited convicted felon Tom Noe, a hobby shop owner from the Toledo area who sold baseball cards, beanie babies and a few old coins to secretly administer a $50 million rare coin fund. It was no surprise when he pleaded guilty to federal charges for laundering more than $40,000 into the 2004 Bush campaign. Much of this is outlined in my book “The Brothers Voinovich and the Ohiogate Scandal.” The Ohio Society of Professional Journalists awarded “The V Report” first place for coverage of government in Ohio. Basically, I detail former governor Voinovich’s corrupt activities through the legendary duo Paul and Pauly, that is, the late Paul Mifsud with his murky CIA ties and the late Pauly Voinovich, George’s brother, with ties to the mob.

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The Republicans Stole It Blind

RFK, Jr. wrote to my good friend Harvey Wasserman this quote from pollster Lou Harris: “’They stole the Democrats blind in the exurbs and rural counties. It’s obvious what they did – they stuffed the ballot box.’” Coming from a pollster with the credibility and experience of Lou Harris, this is an astonishingly powerful indictment.”

Farhad Manjoo, denialist for salon.com fails to note similar quotes from Harris that appear in Kennedy’s Rolling Stone article. The fact that a pollster of Harris’ stature would go on the record is precisely what’s new in the Kennedy article and of major significance.

As a Ph.D. in Political Science, I find the “reluctant responder” hypothesis by Warren Mitofsky implausible, as does pollster John Zogby. Basically, reluctant responders tended to be extreme third party candidate supporters, or voters for a major party candidate in an area dominated by the other major party. Mitofsky would have you believe Republican woman only became too shy to talk to pollsters only in the late afternoon and only in areas where people voted in a majority for Bush. This mythology fits into the Rovian spin that fundamental evangelical raced to the polls at the very last second to save W Bush. Local newspaper accounts and eyewitness observers reported no such surge.

The data from the Moss v. Bush election challenge in Ohio, the exit polls, the statistical analysis by Dr. Richard Hayes Phillips and the bizarre illegal behavior in Auglaize, Miami and Warren counties all point to voter theft in these counties. Read more

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