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Manjoo Errs In Fact, Knows Very Little About Ohio Election Law

In Farhad Manjoo’s “Was the 2004 Election Stolen? No” he claims Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s article in Rolling Stone contains “numerous errors of interpretation and his [Kennedy’s] deliberate omission of key bits of data.” As an Election Protection legal observer in Columbus and one of the four attorneys who challenged the Ohio election results, I was struck by Manjoo’s own numerous errors of fact and deliberate omissions of widely-known studies and data.

In his first claim about the Ellen Connally anomaly, where an under-funded retired municipal judge from Cleveland ran ahead of Kerry
in rural southwestern counties fails to indicate vote-shifting from
Kerry to Bush, Manjoo deliberately omits several well-known facts.The obvious fact on record is that Democratic nominee Al Gore pulled his
campaign out of the state six weeks prior to the 2000 election while
Kerry and his 527 organization supporters spent the largest amount of money in Ohio history. So to compare the non-Gore campaign in 2000 to the massive Democratic effort in 2004 seems disingenuous. Moreover,  Manjoo conveniently ignores the fact that sample ballots were everywhere in the state of Ohio and voters in these rural counties were repeatedly mailed and handed both party’s sample ballots. There were large and active campaigns in the key counties in question – Butler, Clermont, and Warren – passing out Republican and Democratic sample ballots. This is a major omission. Also, Manjoo might actually want to do some research on the amount of money Eric Fingerhut spent vs. John Kerry. Fingerhut’s major effort was walking across the state of Ohio because he didn’t have any funds. Hardly Kerry’s problem. Read more

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Airbrushed From History

With the clamor over Bobby Kennedy’s article in Rolling Stone, that has thankfully re-ignited interest in the theft of the 2004 election, I want to make sure that certain people aren’t airbrushed out of the picture. This important grassroots history was left out of the article.

First, let me make it clear that the original Kennedy article included specific references to the Free Press (the paper and website I publish) and my good friend Harvey Wasserman. Harvey and I wrote a piece prior to the 2004 election outlining how Bush was planning to steal the vote. Most of the evidence turned up about Ohio was a result of public hearings about election irregularities held on November 13 and 15, 2004 in Columbus, Ohio under the auspices of the Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism/Free Press. The co-sponsors of the hearings included: the Alliance for Democracy, CASE-Ohio, and the League of Pissed Off Voters. Cliff Arnebeck of the Alliance and Susan Truitt of CASE played key roles in the hearings and were two of the four lawyers who challenged the election results in Ohio. Amy Fay Kaplan and Jonathan Meier of the League were invaluable in organizing the public hearings where sworn testimony was taken. Read more

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From Robert Kennedy Jr. And RollingStone – Pollster Lou Harris Said “Ohio Was A Dirty Election” And How 350,000 Votes Disappeared In Ohio

The first thing you should do today is go to the Rolling Stone website and see if the article “Did Bush Steal the 2004 Election?: How 350,000 Votes Disappeared in Ohio” is posted. There’s been other articles, of course I’ve written many in my own publication the Free Press and posted them on the freepress.org, and there was Christopher Hitchens article in Vanity Fair “Ohio’s Odd Numbers” as well as Mark Crispin Miller’s article in Harper’s that was part of his seminal book “Fooled Again.” But the heavily footnoted Bobby Kennedy piece has the most explosive news — the reputable pollster Lou Harris going on the record to announce the theft of the election in Ohio. Bradblog reported yesterday: “Pollster Lou Harris of the Harris Poll — described in the piece as ‘the father of modern day political polling’ — says: ‘Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen.'”

This should finally silence the spineless New Democrats and the hipster progressive de-bunkers at Mother Jones and other outlets like tompaine.com. Once you get the story, immediately email it to your entire list. It’s important that democracy be restored and those who stole the election in Ohio be publicly damned for their actions. 
 

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Bush And Hackwell About To Be Stoned

Check out Leftyblogs.com – the Top 50 Headlines of the Week includes a blog by Cincinnati’s Andrew Warner. He’s asking Strickland to drop out of Ohio’s governor race, so as not to be a “spoiler” for my campaign. Thanks for the insightful analysis, Andrew!

This Thursday, Rolling Stone subscribers should be getting a historic issue of the magazine with one of the most anticipated articles ever written. Voting rights activists are excited about the article written by Stone reporters, as well as an extended piece by Bobby Kennedy, Jr. on the Ohio 2004 presidential election. The article should be on the web by Friday.

We need to buy as many copies as we can get and make sure they’re widely distributed before the Bush White House breaks open one of its secret slush funds to keep this important article from being disseminated.

If you want to get a feel for what might be in the article, my good friends at the Ecological Options Network have now posted all their videos through Google, so enjoy these and let me know what you think:

Here are the Google links: 

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End The Atrocities In Iraq

This Memorial Day I reflected on the war dead in Iraq. Not just the U.S. soldiers, but the more than 30,000, and possibly as high as 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians killed in this unjust war. When individuals make such atrocious mistakes, based on misinformation and lies, they should immediately cease their sinful actions and offer restitution. Rest assured that our president is a war criminal, guilty of conspiring, planning and waging an aggressive and illegal war on a country that posed no threat to us. J. Kenneth Hackwell, a well-known buddy of neo-con Richard Perle, supports the same policy of regime change embraced by the Bush administration. I believe that all life is intrinsically valuable and I like to call this position pro-life. That’s why I am opposed to war except as a last resort in an act of self defense.

The U.S. Marines who slaughtered the 24 innocent Iraqi civilians in the western town of Haditha are murderers and must be tried and condemned as such. The war in Iraq is over. We have lost the hearts of minds of the Iraqi people. Not that we ever had them. We were told our troops would be greeted with sweets and flowers – an absurd lie, and no imperialist occupying force has ever been thus treated. Now, as in Vietnam, our troops can’t tell the difference between the “good” Iraqis and the “bad” Iraqis. We are in the middle of a civil war, which is draining our country financially and militarily. The Bush regime is perhaps the most hated political regime in American history. Hated not only by the people of the world, but despised by the vast majority of U.S. citizens. If you love this country and support its troops, you’ll do all you can to bring them home and disassociated them with this illegal and immoral war.

As governor of the state I plan to issue a direct order prohibiting the Ohio National Guard from serving in Iraq and to appoint a commission of legal scholars and academics to investigate whether or not the president should be indicted for war crimes. That is the Ohio I would be proud of, the same one that stood firm against slavery during the Civil War. Not one that blindly supports an irrational war-mongering, war-profiteering faux Texan.

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Strickland: SPAN No-Show

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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Everyone Deserves Health Insurance

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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Thou Shalt Not Kill

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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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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Reviving the “No Nukes” Movement

Americans must first accept the fact that their president is criminal, and with his numerous twitches and jerks, perhaps criminally insane. But, around him is a small group of hardcore ideologues, so-called neocons.

In Ohio, we need to revive the “No Nukes” movement. The Bush administration’s dream of using “bunker busting” tactical nuclear weapons against Iran is an illegal violation of international law. Iran is no threat to the United States. Public documents indicate they are 10 years away from developing any sort of delivery system that would threaten the U.S.

It is absolutely hypocritical for the United States to allow Pakistan, which harbors bin Laden, sold nuclear weapons to the North Koreans, and created the Taliban, to have nuclear weapons while we threaten nuclear annihilation of the Iranian people. The Bush logic of saying “it’s bad to have nukes . . . so we’ll nuke you,” is beyond bizarre. The acceptance of the Israeli nuclear weapons, as well as our complicity in the creation of their nukes, must also be publicly dealt with.

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