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Dr. Robert Fitrakis Ohio Green Party Gubernatorial Candidate Finds The People’s Reality At the State Fair

I spent 12 hours at the Ohio State Fair on Saturday and Sunday at the Green Party booth. The best thing the Greens had going for them is that they are not Democrats, and particularly not Republicans. There was a fair amount of hostility against Bob Taft, even from the rock-ribbed rural Republican base. Couldn’t find any fans of Blackwell, either. And Strickland was an unknown to this crowd.

Some people were mad about the voting machines and long lines. We had a special appearance by General Bruce and the talking electronic voting machine on Saturday and Marj Creech, the “Honest Elections Cow” on Sunday. The cow was a huge, huge hit passing out voting instructions and stickers to youngsters. Of course the costume was a bit hot. Roast beef, as it were.

People want reforms and practical solutions. Our problem, as always, is to get the message out with limited resources and a virtual media blackout. Ohio is ripe for new and innovative ideas. Working the fair is a great grassroots way to get the pulse of the people.

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Big Lies Blackwell Loses Appeal Reichwing Bizarro World Mantra Continues

Deb Riechmann of the Associated Press has issued the single biggest lie of any mainstream corporate media outlet since Kenneth Blackwell orchestrated the theft of the 2004 presidential election. She refers to Ken Blackwell as the “honorary co-hair” of the Bush-Cheney Re-election Campaign in Ohio. Blackwell was a very active and involved co-chair of the Ohio Bush-Cheney Re-election Campaign. This is like referring to Hitler as the honorary Fuhrer of the Third Reich. And, he prided himself in being a very partisan activists, bragging that it was his idea to put the gay-bashing Issue One on the November 2004 ballot claiming that led to Bush’s victory. To now pretend that he held some honorary inactive role is false and disingenuous.

The Dispatch reported today that “…Blackwell has lost his appeal of a court decision, ordering him to pay $64,613 dollars in attorney’s fees related to a lawsuit filed during the 2004 presidential election.” Voting rights groups sued Blackwell, in part, for waiting too long to issue a directive on provisional voting in Ohio. Blackwell ruled late that votes in Ohio would not be counted if people were registered in the right county but at the wrong precinct, which sometimes means the wrong table at the same polling place. This disenfranchised thousands of urban Ohio Kerry voters. Meanwhile, rural Republican counties like Miami admit they refused to enforce Blackwell’s directive and even used the term “merged” voter to allow voters registered in other counties, but now residing in Miami County, to vote.

As part of Blackwell’s “Big Lie” campaign, he was a mere “honorary co-chair” for Bush and the lackey he’s training to replace him, Greg Hartmann, has a similar ludicrous talking point. Hartmann told the Cincinnati Enquirer today that Ohio’s election system is “the best in the country.” What Blackwell and Hartmann understand is that if you’re the laughing stock of the democratic world, you simply repeat the same mantra to the corporate media asserting the opposite. If you’re the most biased repressive state in the Union when it comes to voting rights and your elections are the most notoriously corrupt, you simply claim you’re number one. Then raise millions of dollars from rich Republican donors to run propaganda ads selling the Big Lie.

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Rep. Jim Trakis Introduces Ohio HB 638: Allows Independents To Choose Partisan Label Before Election

Congratulations to Republican representative Jim Trakas for believing in democracy. He introduced House Bill 638 in Ohio on July 27, 2006 that would allow independent candidates to choose a partisan label before an election. No more “Other Party” label and praying to get 5% of the vote. Any name can be used as long as it doesn’t mimic the name of an existing party, and isn’t overly long.

The Republican Party itself is the most successful third party in history. Back when the Whigs were whipping the populists into a religious fervor while looting their pockets, much like today, small parties at the state level with names like The Abolition Party and The Free Soil Party pressed the great issue of the day – abolishing slavery. Out of that grew a larger third party coalition known as the Republicans.

With the Republican and Democratic Parties agreeing to span the political spectrum from A-B and engage in the most boring, stilted and irrelevant debates in modern history, it is more important than ever to hear new voices and political perspectives. In many ways, the mainstream corporate media mirrors the boring political non-debates of our day. The great moral issues call out for debate and redress: an illegal war in Iraq, a president who embraces torture, the spying on American citizens, the repression of minority and poor voters’ rights.

Let the Libertarians and Greens flourish and the Republicans and Democrats wither and hopefully, go the way of the Whigs.

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Drive Lankford And The Hatemongers From The Temple

So the Rethuglicans have descended once again into the worst form of gutter politics. Expect more. When your party is morally bankrupt, reprehensible and relies on Christo-fascists as their base – name-calling, stereotyping, smearing and dehumanizing your opponents are your only tactics. At the core of their recent “Smear the Queer” attack on Congressman Strickland is the same type of tactic used by Mussolini, Hitler and other rightwing authoritarians.

A GOP operative, Gary Lankford, emailed out unsubstantiated allegations concerning Strickland’s personal life to targeted rightwing constituents claiming that Strickland was, among other things, “soft on those who sexually assault children.” I guess when you are 20 points behind in the race and desperate, you’ve got to shamelessly create works of fiction in order to arouse your base. You remember Karl Rove started that street rumor that John McCain was mentally ill and had an illegitimate black child with a hooker. This is standard fare for the Rove-Blackwell wing of the Republican Party.

Gary Lankford, the Republican Party’s social conservative “coordinator,” was just doing the despicable job the GOP paid him for. It should come as no surprise that Lankford is headmaster at a Christian home school and was also listed until recently as the state director of the Ohio Restoration Project. The Restoration Project is busy trying to round up thousands of so-called “patriot pastors” who would have you believe that Jesus is the greatest hater in history and that real pastors have to have mansions, Lear jets and Rolex watches.

Strickland needs to, like Jesus, metaphorically get out the whip and drive these hypocritical hatemongers out of God’s temple. Or, at least out of the people’s temple, known as the statehouse. Expect between now and Election Day that J. Kenneth Blackwell and his rightwing jackbooted thugs to tell every lie they can while praising Jesus and passing the cash to so-called patriot pastors in order to distort the truth and the Gospel to bring victory to the GOP.

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Trickster Rove Pawing His Hand In Columbus

Talk about the great ironies of history. Ohio’s leading kleptocrat, J. Kenneth Blackwell, recently compared being homosexual to being an “arsonist” or a “kleptomaniac.” Here’s the quote, in answer to the question by the Dispatch, can homosexuals change:

“And I think you make good choices and bad choices in terms of lifestyle. Our expectation is that one’s genetic makeup might make one more inclined to be an arsonist or might make one more inclined to be a kleptomaniac. Do I think that they can change? Yes.”

Blackwell, who has a propensity towards opportunism, clearly learned and nurtured by shameless ambition – not genetically implanted – believes in kleptocracy. That is, rule by thieves. He’s the leading shill for what can only be described as the Bush crime family.

The crime family run by the former CIA director is most well-known for bizarre speech patterns which makes them unable to complete complex sentences. See The Bush Dislexicon, by Mark Crispin Miller. The only reason the cognitively impaired George W. Bush is president, is because of two unprincipled kleptomaniacs – J. Kenneth Blackwell and Karl Rove.

Rove was in Columbus, Ohio today assuring Republicans that they shouldn’t worry about Blackwell being 20 points behind Ted Strickland. Why would he say this? Because Blackwell and Rove, with the help of Congressman Ney and corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff have implanted partisan Republican electronic voting machines into the Buckeye State and throughout the nation. Rove, a despicable dirty tricks expert, whose roots go back to Watergate, simply plans to steal another election in Ohio. The for-profit corporate media bows down and serves the kleptocracy. After all, business is business.

The people of Ohio should be outraged that Blackwell would be equating violent criminal and compulsive thieves with homosexuality. But this is the usual form that fascism takes. Blatant corruption and scapegoating of gays and other minorities.

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Bush-Blackwell-Brewer Continue African American Suppression

The Other Paper, Columbus’ faux “alternative” paper driven by the junior high hijinks of editor Danny Russell and the cynical search for “political relevance” by Dan Williamson, may have reached a new low. In the article “Blackwell and the black vote,” Williamson, who knows better, leads with the most absurd quote in modern Ohio gubernatorial history. East Cleveland Mayor Eric Brewer, making a bid to be in Uncle Ken’s cabinet, likens blacks who are opposed to Ken Blackwell to the slave Jim in Gone With the Wind. As Williamson describes it, “To Brewer, black Democrats trying to defeat Republican Ken Blackwell for governor are like Jim the slave.” Jim fought with the Southerners against the Yankees. Brewer goes on to say that the African American community doesn’t know “his record,” his being Blackwell’s.

Now let’s look at the facts. Ken Blackwell appeared earlier this year before the super secret far- right Council on National Policy which harbors many known white supremacists. They are based in Texas, a southern Confederate state. The Bush family also has a sordid history of an anti-black and anti-Semitic nature, and these are Blackwell’s political backers. Prescott Bush laundered money to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, it’s a known fact. George H.W. Bush, the former CIA director who suppressed people around the world and rigged elections, won as a Congressional candidate in Texas in 1966 opposing Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement.

There’s a reason that W lives in Texas and Jeb lives in Florida. These are former Confederate Jim Crow states. Jeb and W conspired in the 2000 with their key elections expert Ken Blackwell to suppress the vote of more than 92,000 Florida citizens who were eligible to vote but were denied the right to vote because their name was the same or similar to a felon or their birthdate was the same as a felon. A disproportionate number of these people were African Americans. Bush also targeted black and Latino soldiers during the 2004 election who were serving in Iraq challenging their right to vote in their home precincts.

Blackwell is Jim. No, he’s worse than Jim. Jim was a browbeaten, brainwashed, uneducated black man who may not have known better. Blackwell is an opportunistic, ass-kisser to a low-IQ’ed cracker named George W. Bush. Anytime Blackwell and Brewer start to talk about Blackwell doing things for blacks, all you have to remember is J. Kenneth is the key apologist in the Buckeye State for W Bush who left blacks to die in the rooftops in New Orleans. When Blackwell calls a black man brother, he should respond with the name Katrina

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We Must Reject Faith Based Voting

Those private vote-switching, election-stealing electronic voting machines are at it again. Early in the day, Cynthia McKinney supporters began registering complaints that when they tried to register their vote for McKinney in Georgia’s primary election today, it registered a vote for her opponent. Just like in the Ohio election, the vote hopping with Diebold machines always goes for the conservative candidate: push for Kerry – votes hops to Bush.

Or, if you voted for McKinney it hopped to Hank Johnson or John Coyne. Thankfully McKinney had her team of lawyers on the spot taking affidavits from voters who swore the machines switched their votes to one of her opponents. With a majority of counties in Ohio using Diebold electronic machines, other problems present in Georgia’a primary today are bound to plague the Buckeye State in the fall.

For example, complaints were lodged against Diebold’s electronic pollbooks. Election staff were not properly trained to access the voter registration database. Also, complaints came in about machines breaking down in the middle of the voting process and machines malfunctioning.

As I prepare to sign off, McKinney is barely ahead of Hank Johnson by a little over 500 votes with 53% of the precincts reporting. Our democracy must be transparent. We must reject this bizarre, faith-based voting. Let’s pray for McKinney’s victory, and equally important, for a real democratic system based on hand counted paper ballots.

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We Do Not Concede To The Bush Election Team In Mexico Or Here In Ohio

More than a million people were in the streets in Mexico City in perhaps the largest demonstration in the history of the western hemisphere. What’s the difference between Columbus, Ohio and Mexico City? Both had a stolen election by the same people. When I saw, a week or so before the election, that the Bush team was headed down to Mexico, you could tell that the son of a CIA director was about to steal again. Bush, Rove and Blackwell are chronic kleptomaniacs. They steal because they think they can get away with it – but that only works in Ohio. In Mexico, the difference is that people believe in democracy and they are not brainwashed by a propagandistic corporate media into ignoring the obvious.

We didn’t have a million, but I want to acknowledge the hard core voting rights activists who did hit the streets after the 2004 election and continue to fight for a fair election in Ohio to this day. My campaign is the direct result of that movement – we will not concede.

We should do everything we can to support the nonviolent civil disobedience and massive demonstrations that are rocking Mexico. I’ve enclosed two recent articles Harvey Wasserman and I have written on the elections in Mexico. Let me know what you think.

The Democrats must now say “We Do Not Concede” in the U.S. as it’s being said in Mexico

An open letter from Ohio to the people of Mexico

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And So The Lawsuits Are Blooming…

The first of many qui tam (fraud) legal suits has been officially filed against a major electronic voting machine manufacturer. Florida attorney Mike Papantonio, co-host with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on the Air America show “Ring of Fire,” described some of the details of the suit on Mike Malloy’s radio show.

Papatonio claims to have assembled a “dream team of lawyers” that will go after the well-known Republican operatives that are running the sham voting machine companies. Perhaps his best quote was: “When you hear the details, when you hear the caliber of the fraud . . . it’ll make Americans feel like they’re living in a damn banana republic, a Third World country. I’ve never heard such outrageous facts.”

Indeed. That’s how I felt when I first listened to the late Athan Gibbs describe the trail of money from voting machine companies that led back to conservative right-wing families and the software in the hands of a few people – in one case, the notorious Urosevich brothers. That’s why I blew the whistle on this fraud in a Free Press cover story called

“Diebold, electronic voting, and the vast right wing conspiracy.”

The disgusting details were also outlined in an article by me for MotherJones.com.

Diebold’s Political Machine

I’m indebted to Bev Harris for her expertise and guidance. Often maligned, Harris is the godmother of the movement, who fights to expose the evils of “black box voting.”

The reality we face is that a small group of Republican operatives, loyal to the former CIA Director and his son, George the Lessor, have hijacked our election process and we are, in fact, a banana republic. We have no transparency in our election process. We have privatized it to partisan, for-profit corporations who don’t make that much money off of selling electronic voting machines, but make a fortune off selling election results.

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IMMEDIATE UPCOMING COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP FORUM

Wednesday, July 19th, 7PM, Robert Fitrakis, Editor and Publisher of the Freepress and a practicing local attorney, Candidate for Governor, State of Ohio, will speak to the Community Leaders Forum on the topic,

“Will the Green Party Simply Be A Spoiler Factor in Ohio Politics?”

Many people are afraid that the Green Party in Ohio, as the Green Party nationally in the years 2000 and 2004, will this year, ruin the chances of the Democratic Party in Ohio to rebound from its many setbacks in state government elections in recent years.

Candidate Fitrakis will address this sensitive issue directly and head-on in a candid discussion of what is likely to happen in Ohio and nationally within the fall November state and national general elections. This forum is free and open to the broad Columbus community.

Well, this should be fun. But there’s really nothing like democracy, and democracy means trusting the people and being accountable, as a candidate for public office, for one’s actions. Since the Green Party and other independents have placed my name on the ballot as their candidate, I intend to explain the philosophy behind my candidacy as directly as possible. While I’ll go into much greater detail a week from today at the Unitarian Church, let me state the obvious.

Had the Democratic Party in Ohio and John Kerry campaign actually made good on their pledge to “count every vote” in 2004, I would not be running for governor in 2006. But that’s only one area where the Democratic Party has failed to provide a clear alternative. Remember, when an independent progressive candidate has done well, so have liberal Democrats like Presidents Wilson and Roosevelt.

But, more next Wednesday. Hope to see you there!

The Unitarian Church in Columbus is at

93 W. Weisheimer Rd.

Wednesday, July 19th, 7PM

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