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Will Karl Rove Bury The Record Of His 2004 Election Theft?

by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
January 10, 2011

An epic legal battle now rages between Karl Rove and Ohio election rights attorneys. The question is whether the public has the right to see full transcripts of a court deposition that could shed explosive new light on the bitterly contested presidential election of 2004.

The deposition came from the late Michael Connell, Rove’s IT guru. Connell died in a mysterious plan crash in December 2008, one month after he spoke under oath to election protection attorney Clifford O. Arnebeck. Connell had implanted the state-contracted software used to compute Ohio’s electronic voting tabulations during the contest between Bush and John Kerry.

On December 10, 2010, attorneys in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville Neighborhood Association case moved to release the Connell transcript in an ongoing legal struggle with Rove and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The King-Lincoln case was filed in 2006 by attorney Arnebeck alleging civil rights violations against blacks, young voters and others in Ohio’s 2004 election process.

Connell’s November 3, 2008 deposition in Cleveland concerned his role in the 2004 election and whether or not he was being threatened by Rove. Just over a month later on December 19, 2008, Connell died in the mysterious crash of his small plane near his Akron, Ohio, home. Suspicions of foul play surround the accident.

The Connell deposition has been sealed since his death. During the closing days of the 2010 election, King-Lincoln attorneys sought the deposition of Karl Rove in connection with his activities involving the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in all Ohio elections since 2000.

Rove and Chamber attorneys, as well as the Ohio Attorney General’s office, claimed that there was no connection between Connell’s deposition and more recent activities involving Rove and the Chamber.

Connell’s attorney, James L. Ervin, represented Connell at the deposition and also represented Connell’s estate. He filed papers with the court asking for a 30-day extension of time to file a response to the court on December 27, 2010 regarding the opening of Connell’s deposition.

According to Ervin, “Mr. Connell’s deposition is comprised of questions, answers, and topics that are privileged and/or confidential and are reflected as such by being designated ‘sealed.'” No part of Connell’s deposition has of yet been made public.

Arnebeck told how Connell described what he did: “One, he integrated voter data files with the vote tabulation process in the Ohio Secretary of State’s office in the 2004 election and two, he broadened the accessibility to this information, including facilitating its appearance on a mirror site at the SmartTech offices in Chattanooga, Tennessee.”

“His testimony provided facts of a general nature. He did not, as suggested by his counsel, reveal or discuss anything that could be fairly described as a trade secret or an expert opinion,” Arnebeck asserted.

In the spring and summer prior to Connell’s deposition, contacts were made on behalf of Connell with both U.S. Representatives John Conyers and Dennis Kucinich in an attempt to have Connell testify before Congress regarding his role in the 2004 election.

Memorandum to U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich [PDF]

Ervin’s motion before the court states: “During calendar year 2009, Mr. Connell’s businesses, New Media Communications and GovTech Solutions, came under new ownership, and Mr. Connell’s Estate was probated.”

These pleadings before the court may offer insight into who exactly owns Connell’s election computer businesses. Ervin’s motion states: “because the deposition transcript addresses issues that constituted privilege and/or proprietary matters, the new ownership of Connell’s former businesses may have an interest in the deposition transcripts and may be the owners of the transcript.”

Ervin concludes “Decisions must be made as to who owns Mr. Connell’s 2008 deposition transcript….” This same line of argument has been used to allow private vendors to use secret proprietary source code in election software.

In a democratic society, the people should own Connell’s deposition. Karl Rove should testify under oath about the electronic machinery Connell devised to link Ohio’s 2004 real-time vote count to an obscure company in Chattanooga, Tennessee. That company was SmarTech, which according to public records, was hosting a website that was operating out of the White House on that election night.

Says Arnebeck: “Mr. Connell’s testimony is important to the plaintiffs and the public because it reveals how those seeking to steal the 2004 Presidential election in the State of Ohio, led by Karl Rove, were better able to do so through the utilization of these integrated data files and more accessible tabulation processes. SmarTech was simultaneously serving the electronic data processes for the George W. Bush presidential campaign in that election.”

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Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman’s four books on election protection are at freepress.org, where this article was first published. Disclosure: Fitrakis serves as co-counsel with Arnebeck in the King-Lincoln case and was at Connell’s deposition.

Original article posted here:
https://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2011/4046

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Fight Back With Gerry, Part II Dec. 10 From WCRSFM Columbus

Conversation with Gerry Bellows, anti-racist, action activist.
Racism in Ohio, surrounding states, armed neo-nazis operating in the United States.
The KKK and terrorism in the U.S..

Original post:
http://www.wcrsfm.org/fightbackdec10

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Priceless: Karl Rove Under Oath

What would you give to have Karl Rove testify under oath about the flood of millionaire cash he used to influence elections in the last election cycle?

What would you give to have Rove forced to testify about his activities during the stolen election of 2004?

Priceless, you say? Then click the link in this email to donate to the Columbus (Ohio) Institute for Contemporary Journalism’s Election Protection and Litigation Fund, and make it happen!
https://freepress.org/store.php#donate

Ohio election attorney Cliff Arnebeck has filed a two-count complaint against The Partnership for Ohio’s Future, an affiliate of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce. Arnebeck charges that the Partnership is “…not truly independent, but rather has been coordinated with the Republican candidates, their agents, committees, parties and their de facto coordinated national campaign being directed by Karl Rove.”

Attorneys for the Ohio Chamber have moved to dismiss the case, and you can bet that a veritable army of highly paid Republican attorneys is ready to go to the mats to make sure that Rove is not forced to reveal the GOP’s secrets.

Arnebeck, co-counsel Robert Fitrakis, and a small band of election protection activists have borne the costs of this litigation on their own so far, but they need our help. If we give them the resources, they have what may be the last opportunity to get Rove to speak on the record about his election deceptions of the last six years. Arnebeck and Fitrakis estimate that they will need $12,000 for fees, copying costs, and other non-lawyer expenses, plus at least $11,000 for attorney costs, bringing the total to $23,000.

Here is where you can go to make a tax-deductible donation to support the litigation: https://freepress.org/store.php#donate

Here are two articles that describe the current litigation:
https://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2010/3981
https://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2010/3977

Here is an archive of court documents (pdfs) at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law that describes the King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association versus Kenneth Blackwell lawsuit being brought by attorney Cliff Arnebeck and his team:
http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/litigation/klbna.php

The election protection community helped to raise the money for the Ohio recount after the 2004 election. Let’s get together now to raise at least the $23,000 that will get Rove back on the stand and stop the flood of unmarked dollars that are undermining our democracy.

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Bob Interviews Jim Condit, Screen Shots Show Voter Manipulation

Boehner won but how the election proceeded was something to behold on the network screen captures.
1250 A.M. the final count changes, radically. Screen shot shows voter manipulation.

Jim suggests going to
http://tinyurl.com/29bmzqt

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Karl Rove, You Got Served

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Ohio Chamber Lies & Hides Election Buys

by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
November 2, 2010

The Ohio Chamber of Commerce will not reveal the list of individuals and corporations that have funded its election campaign in the Buckeye State, despite having promised to do so in a public hearing.

In Columbus on Monday, November 1, Cliff Arnebeck, lead attorney for the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville election theft lawsuit, argued in a racketeering complaint in front of the Ohio Elections Commission that the Partnership for Ohio’s Future, an affiliate of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, should disclose its secret donors. We are co-counsel and plaintiff in the King-Lincoln suit.

Arnebeck argued that former George W. Bush strategist Karl Rove and the Chamber of Commerce are illegally coordinating donations in Ohio. While the recent Citizens United U.S. Supreme Court decision allows for unlimited contributions from independent campaign organizations, it does not allow coordination between candidates and independent committees.

The Chamber spent more than $3 million in this year’s general election cycle to elect two Supreme Court justices, Judith Lanzinger and Maureen O’Connor, running for Chief Justice. The Chamber reported spending $1.45 million on TV ads alone. The Chamber’s $3 million dwarfed the campaign funds of the two candidates, since neither have raised $1 million.

Over the past four election cycles, the Chamber has made public its list of campaign donors. There’s been an ongoing struggle between the Chamber and its critics to list individual donors to the U.S. and Ohio Chambers, instead of their practice of listing lump-sum totals attributed to both Chambers.

Brad Smith, the Chamber’s Chief Counsel, promised in front of the Ohio Election Commission, that the Chamber would produce the names of the donors it has failed to disclose this year.

Formerly nominated by Bill Clinton to the Federal Election Commission, he chaired the Commission in 2004 under the Bush administration. Smith told the four-person Ohio Election Commission panel that “anyone who wants the list” of donors to the Chamber’s election campaigning could have it.

In his “ten-second rebuttal” before the Election Commisson’s Probable Cause panel, Smith complained that Arnebeck never asked him for the list.

In the hall after the hearing, Linda Woggan, the Chamber’s Vice President for Governmental Affairs, promised Arnebeck that she would provide the list of secret donors as well.

Arnebeck specifically asked for the list in electronic form so it could be disseminated to the media prior to Election Day.

In the wake of Smith’s promise, the Commission voted 3-1 to deny Arnebeck’s probable cause motion demanding that list. Arnebeck called Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner who agreed to have subpoenas issued to the Chamber and its affiliates. Brunner, in her capacity of secretary of state, is the party being sued in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville case, replacing former Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.

Following the hearing, Arnebeck, under the auspices of the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal case, then served subpoenas on the Partnership, the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, the Chamber’s Educational Foundation, as well as Woggon and Chamber President Andrew Doehrel at 11:30am at the Chamber building. The subpoenas demanded the names of the secret donors by 2pm.

Arnebeck has long maintained that the Chamber’s activities since the 2000 election year function as an ongoing illegal money laundering operation to take over Ohio’s Supreme Court. Documents submitted at the Commission hearing show the key role of former Ohio Governor Bob Taft in soliciting the secret donations through the Chamber of Commerce.

At 1:30pm, Smith called Arnebeck and assured him that the list of donors would be produced by 2pm, or no later than 3pm.

At 3:30pm, a courier delivered to Arnebeck the Chamber’s official response: a motion to quash the subpoenas, and to keep secret the Chamber’s donor list.

Despite Smith’s quite public promise to deliver the names of donors, he argued in his motion to quash the subpoenas that: “The information sought from these non-party witnesses is not relevant to this matter, nor reasonably intended to lead to the production of admissible evidence.”

In moving to quash, Smith argued that “the subpoenas seek substantially the same information he [Arnebeck] had earlier requested from the Ohio Elections Commission.” Smith failed to note that he had publicly promised to hand the list over before the Commission.

On Sunday, October 24, Arnebeck had served Karl Rove with a subpoena requiring him to testify in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville case concerning civil rights violations in the 2004 Ohio election.

Rove continues to work closely with national Chamber of Commerce chair Tom Donohue. Rove, Donohue and others have made clear their commitment to carrying Ohio for the Republican Party.

Arnebeck asserts their coordination with GOP candidates is a violation of federal election law.

However those charges play out, the Ohio Chamber of Commerce will not be telling the public who has funded its election campaigning efforts before the close of voting November 2.

Smith also has requested sanctions against Mr. Arnebeck because of the unreasonable request on the Chamber: “…particularly in light of Mr. Arnebeck’s claim this morning at the Ohio Elections Commission that the information was needed by this afternoon to prevent ‘a coup’ against the U.S. government.”

Arnebeck’s coup reference was in relation to his allegation that Rove and the Chamber are involved in an unprecedented secret and coordinated money laundering operation to shift U.S. and state politics to Republican control.

—

Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection at Free Press, where the FITRAKIS FILES also appear. HARVEY WASSERMAN’S HISTORY OF THE U.S. is at Harvey Wasserman They are co-counsel and plaintiff in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville lawsuit.

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Issue 12 – A Mockery Of A Sham: Orwell Rolls In His Grave

Bob Fitrakis
October 31, 2010

The Daily Monopoly, Columbus Dispatch, that masquerades as a newspaper, ran the following subhead in its editorial in support of Issue 12: “City charter change would provide public with more information.”

If you vote “yes” on Issue 12 this November 2, you will be voting to allow Council to hold closed meetings when discussing certain issues. This would include personnel matters, property purchase, litigation, collective bargaining, and security matters.

So, after nearly a hundred years of open City Council meetings mandated by the Columbus City Charter, we’re now being told that we will get “more information” and “accountability” by closing Council’s chamber doors to the public.

Let’s look at the reasons Council is proposing to close their meetings. First, following Tuesday’s election, the Council will be replacing Charleta Tavares who will doubtlessly be elected to the state Senate. Council claims it needs go behind closed doors for the purpose of vetting potential candidates who seek the open seat.

The Dispatch, whose editorial board has been doing PR for the pro-Issue 12 group, the so-called Columbus Citizens for Good Government, claimed that “Many good candidates for public jobs would refuse to apply if their interviews and Council discussions about them had to be public.”

The public interviewing of candidates has a long and honorable tradition in the United States. The U.S. Senate routinely interrogates cabinet and other high-level appointments of the President publicly. This tradition has served the public well. In Columbus in the past, the Council has attempted to ignore this law and pick candidates in closed meetings.

I know. In both 1991 and 1993, I was on the short list for Columbus City Council. I met with the then-Council President in a private meeting. Perhaps the Council President didn’t want the public to hear the questions I was asked, such as how much money I could raise for the campaign and whether or not I would continue to call myself a progressive, since it was a “leftist” term.

The City Attorney ruled that the last two City Council appointments violated the City Charter because they were done privately. It embarrassed City Council President Michael Mentel when he was forced to accept the resignation of the newly-anointed Council members, and then interview them in public and re-appoint them.

Instead of taking a training class in interviewing techniques and realizing that potential public officials should learn how to speak in public, Mentel has responded by attempting to change the City Charter to hide the interview process from the public.

In the last decade and half, every City Council member was appointed first, and elected later. This bizarre, undemocratic ritual, put forth by the one-party Democratic system that has held either a 6-1 or 7-0 majority throughout that period, is designed to allow Council to choose each incoming member and the Democratic appointees to run with the unfair advantage of incumbency.

Second, the Dispatch editorial made the absurd argument that: “A public body can’t strike a good deal to buy a piece of land or establish a strategy for a lawsuit if the details of the position must be reached in public view.”

City real estate deals are negotiated by the City’s Development Department and the Mayor. All Council does is approve the final deal. Maybe the Dispatch should read its own newspaper to understand this basic concept. The October 24 paper reported the following: “City Council President Michael C. Mentel, an early proponent of moving the casino out of the Arena District, said Penn National hasn’t shared its request with him. The Coleman administration is handing talks for the city, so he said. He’ll wait for an agreement to emerge.”

Thus, Mentel openly admits that Council has nothing to do with negotiating property buys under Columbus’ strong mayor system of government. Even if Council did negotiate real estate transactions, they need not worry about getting a better deal because they can just take the property they need at fair market value. Apparently the Dispatch has never heard of the term “eminent domain,” a practice Council may use at any time for the taking of public property.

The real reason Mentel wants to go behind closed doors is to talk about giving rich corporate entities and major donors tax breaks or tax increment financing that allows a private entity to keep the tax dollars they pay for improving their property. It is much easier to come up with schemes to give away subsidies in the form of infrastructure development or tax breaks if the pesky public is not around.

On the question of litigation, again, let’s start with the obvious. City Council only approves the final deal or expenditure, which we all should want to be publicly debated. It is again the executive branch of City government, through the City Attorney, that negotiates these settlements.

Like litigation, labor negotiations are handled by the Mayor and his representatives. Again, all Council is empowered to do is to publicly debate the prudence of the resulting expenditures.

Finally, the notion that City Council needs to retire to executive session for “homeland security” is laughable. The City has a Public Safety Director and a Chief of Police, and various joint task forces with other security and police agencies. The last thing that will happen in the case of an actual emergency will be calling of parttime City Council people into an emergency session. Both federal and state emergency management agencies working with fulltime professional public safety appointees of the Mayor will handle the issue.

We need Council to make sure, after the fact, that our rights aren’t being violated. We don’t need them to be secretly briefed and compromised under some local notion of “homeland security.”

Take a look at who’s putting up the money to bankroll the Columbus Citizens for Good Government–the usual group of unnatural citizens known as wealthy corporations. Ask yourself why the Limited Brand was the biggest reported donor of $10,000 for closed Council meetings, a company that has benefited by the destruction of the City Center mall and massive public welfare checks to help increase its riches.

Nationwide is on the Council’s side, coughing up $5000, no doubt to ensure its status as one of the recipients of tax breaks that allowed them to develop the area around its headquarters downtown while shafting the Columbus Public School district.

When the Dispatch reported the major donors to the Columbus Citizens for Good Government, the names missing were those of real citizens. Issue 12 is being pushed by those “legal fictions” we call corporations and the politicians they control as a wholly-owned subsidy–like Mike Mentel.

The only way they can get their closed meetings approved is to word their ballot language in such a way that convinces voters that voting “yes” would lead to open meetings. NBC4 asked six citizens what the wording meant for Issue 12. Three felt if you voted “yes” you kept Council meetings open. The other three couldn’t comprehend what the intentionally incomprehensible language meant.

The ballot language reads: “Shall Section 8 of the charter of the city of Columbus be amended to permit council or its committees to convene in the same manner as the general law of Ohio pertaining to open meetings of public bodies when discussing issues such as personnel matters, purchase of property, litigation, collective bargaining, and security matters, as recommended by the Charter Review Committee.”

“Yes,” however, means closed meetings. You have to vote “no” on Issue 12 to keep Council meetings open.

What the wording doesn’t tell us is that the City of Columbus has a higher standard of transparency than the minimum standard required under Ohio law. This is due mostly to the fact that many Ohio municipalities are weak mayoral systems where the City Council picks the Mayor or a Council member serves as Mayor. Under these types of charters, Council actually buys property, settle lawsuits, and negotiate with employees. This has nothing to do with how the City of Columbus conducts business.

Columbus’ long legacy of transparency is at stake on Election Day. Contrary to what the Dispatch and their corporate allies say, closed meetings will not provide the public “more information.” They will provide less, and it will be an embracing of big city backroom dealing that inevitably will lead to widespread corruption.

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Bob Fitrakis is a former candidate for Columbus City Council and a Professor of Political Science at Columbus State Community College.

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Ghoulish And Secretive Biowarfare Expert William C. Patrick III Dead

Bob Fitrakis
October 17, 2010

The New York Times reported on October 11 that one of America’s leading bioweapons experts, William C. Patrick III, had died on October 1. The 10-day delay in the report of his death is in keeping with the secret nature of Patrick’s life. The Times reported that Patrick “…made enough germs to kill everyone on Earth many times over.”

The frightening and ghoulish nature of Patrick’s work is fit for reflection this Halloween season. In 2001, the so-called “Amerithrax” attacks rocked the United States. Initially, an FBI agent in Columbus, Ohio told the Columbus Free Press that Patrick was being investigated as a possible suspect in the anthrax attacks which occurred through the U.S. mail system. In all, five people died and 17 others were infected.

As I reported in the Columbus Alive immediately following the anthrax attacks, Columbus-based Battelle Memorial Institute was involved in developing a new and stronger strain of the weaponized anthrax at its West Jefferson, Ohio labs. Patrick worked as a consultant for Battelle, along with Kanatjan Alibekov, the former number two man in the Soviet chemical and biological warfare division. Alibekov, now going by the name Ken Alibeck, was identified in a 1998 New Yorker article as working jointly with Patrick on an anthrax project.

Alibeck arrived in the U.S. in 1992, and the Washington Post would later report that he was “learning to be a capitalist.”

“Hadron Advanced Biosystems, Inc., Alibeck’s company, sports an unusual provenance for a biotechnical venture. No other company, doing any kind of work, can claim to be headed by a former No. 2 man in a vast program aimed at turning anthrax, plague, smallpox, tularemia, and many other germs into weapons of war,” noted the Post article.

While at Battelle, Patrick was reportedly working on Operation Jefferson. The project involved the military uses of anthrax, according to the New York Times. Battelle contracted Patrick specifically to conduct a risk assessment study concerning the dissemination of anthrax powder through the U.S. postal system. The Times also confirmed that the CIA was also involved with its own top secret anthrax project at the time, called by its code name “Clear Vision.”

In February 1999, Patrick issued a 28-page report on the possibility of anthrax attacks through the mail. A few mainstream news accounts mentioned Battelle’s dominant role in the production of U.S. military grade anthrax.

Interestingly, Battelle was in partnership with the Michigan-based Bioport during the time of the attacks and the joint operation had a virtual monopoly over all vaccines for military grade anthrax attacks. Both U.S. and British news sources identified one of Bioport’s owners as a top secret British biowarfare consortium, Porton Down.

During the first Gulf War, Porton Down reportedly made huge profits off vaccines related to possible anthrax attacks.

On August 1, 2008, Dr. Bruce E. Ivins died from an apparent suicide. Ivins was a U.S. biodefense researcher working at Fort Detrick. The Associated Press identified Ivins as a suspect in the anthrax attacks, who was about to be charged by the FBI. Earlier, the FBI had focused on Dr. Steven J. Hatfill as a person of interest. Why the FBI never followed up on its initial interest in Patrick remains a puzzle.

“He lived in Frederick for decades, his home atop a wooded hill, not far from where he once made anthrax. A single gallon of the concentrated agent contained enough spores to kill every person on the planet,” the Times noted in Patrick’s obituary. The Times failed to mention his ties to Battelle or his role in assessing the use of anthrax through the mail.

—

Bob Fitrakis is the author of The Fitrakis Files: Star Wars, Weather Mods and Full Spectrum Dominance, which has more information about the anthrax attacks. Originally published by https://freepress.org.
@ https://freepress.org/columns/display/3/2010/1857

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Bob Bytes Back Archives: 12/11/1996 Guilt By Location

12/11/1996
by Bob Fitrakis

Prior to the Chief James Jackson controversy, I can count on my middle finger the number of times I’ve supported Mayor Greg Lashutka in a political battle. The only other time concerned the building of Tuttle Mall in Columbus. Since I detest malls and that whole culture, I half-heartedly sided with the mayor’s position that a mall and its tax revenue would benefit the city more than the suburbs. Yet, on the Chief Jackson issue, I enthusiastically endorse the mayor’s inquiry. Hell, I believe the Big Guy’s showing some guts and character for the first time in his political career.

Now that an obscene gesture has been turned into a peace or victory sign, let me say that I think the mayor is ill-advised in his vilification of Gwendolyn Rogers, the head of Columbus’s Equal Business Opportunity Office. Lashutka’s voice has been joined by city council member Jennette Bradley, a fellow Republican who must live in a glass house. Bradley, who was quoted in Tuesday’s Columbus Dispatch as calling for a thorough investigation of Rogers’ office, must be forgetting the cloud of disgrace under which she left the Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority. The Dispatch extensively reported mismangement and waste at CMHA while she was executive director of the agency.

As strongly as I believe the Jackson investigation is not racially motivated, I believe just as strongly that the media campaign against Rogers—led by the Dispatch—is racist. The Columbus Dispatch, I contend, is punishing Rogers because she refused to play the role of Good House Negress. During the last three weeks, Professor Vincene Verdun, an African-American law professor at OSU, has been questioning the legality of Mayor Lashutka “waiving” the Title 39 statute that set goals for the city purchasing goods and services from minority- and female-owned businesses.

Rogers has been doing her job in questioning how the mayor received sole power to waive a statute, particularly since she drafted the original statute that had the term “joint” power in the ordinance language. Simply put, the City Council and the mayor may be acting illegally.

Not surprisingly, no front-page stories appeared in the Dispatch on this dispute, unlike Rogers’ trip to Hawaii. The Dispatch’s coverage of Rogers’ trip amounts to guilt by location. The trip was to Hawaii, it must be illegal!

Make no mistake, Rogers is being McNeal-ed. This is a time-honored Dispatch technique, perfected first in the Soviet Union by another daily monopoly, Pravda. Associated in central Ohio with the Dispatch’s campaign against Palmer McNeal, being McNeal-ed means you’re tried and condemned by the multi-millionaire Wolfe family, their editorial lapdogs and their executioners masquerading as “objective journalists.”

Let’s analyze the initial hatchet job that appeared as the lead story in the Metro section last Wednesday, December 4. Reporter Barbara Carmen’s third paragraph reads, “‘Aloha,’ Rogers said when the phone rang.” The Dispatch editorialists make this seem equivalent to Rogers saying, “I kidnapped and murdered the Lindbergh baby.”

The article tells us that the 10th anniversary Conference on Counseling and Treating People of Color, “according to the registration brochure…is for administrators, social workers, physicians, nurses, dentists, health and mental health workers, and other professionals.” This insinuates, of course, that Rogers had no business being there. Let’s see. Rogers easily falls into the categories of “administrators” and “other professionals.”

To really appreciate Carmen’s character assassination of Rogers, you’ve got to go to the seventh paragraph. Here, the article says: “Rogers’ office is responsible for developing programs that help small companies sell goods such as backhoes, computer software, construction contracts and cleaning services to the City.” The last, obviously, isn’t a “good,” it’s a “service,” a term that Carmen must avoid at all cost.

Now, to understand what the Disgrace is doing, let me rewrite the paragraph for you as if it concerned a lackey politician that the Dispatch wished to protect: “Rogers’ office is responsible for developing programs that help small companies sell goods and services such as medical supplies, computer software for health care providers, mental health service contracts, and diversity training programs to the City.” Ever heard of the city Health Department? Rogers is responsible for making sure that diversified small businesses have an opportunity to sell goods and services to that department, a fact intentionally ignored by the Dispatch in its quest to publicly spank Rogers. “Backhoes,” indeed.

By Friday, the Rogers story had jumped to the front page—signaling that the Dispatch was organizing a public print media lynching. Council President John P. Kennedy in the second paragraph blusters, “This is not good stewardship of taxpayer dollars.” Oh? Kennedy’s never had to account in the Dispatch pages for what he might know about legislation that benefited those close to him. What about T & R Properties, John? (see Columbus Alive November 13, page four) Was that good stewardship?

Mayor Lashutka should know better than to open a two-front war in the black community. Particularly against an administrator whose main offense seems to be being “too uppity.”

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Bob Bytes Back Archive: 12/03/1996 Reefer Madness: The Sequel

12/03/1996
by Bob Fitrakis

Attorney General Betty Montgomery vows to close the “loophole” that allows doctors to prescribe marijuana in Ohio; the governor’s spokesperson claims “it was snuck into the bill” unbeknownst to the Guv; and Franklin County Judge Dale Crawford asks, “How did it get there?” It’s called democracy and the legislative process.

O.K., so Voinovich, Montgomery and Crawford are all incompetent public officials incapable of either following publicly debated legislation or reading a newspaper.

That’s the only logical conclusion one can draw after reading last Wednesday’s Dispatch article, “State smokin’ over pot loophole,” and last Thursday’s “Lawmakers hid rule in plain sight.”

“Hid?” Hogwash. Poppycock. Twenty-mule-team dung droppings. Dispatch writer Catherine Candisky’s lead in Wednesday’s article is curious. “Ohio lawmakers quietly legalized the medical use of marijuana last summer . . . ,” scribed she. Evidently, she doesn’t read her own paper. On March 25, 1996, the Big D’s Dennis Fiely penned an excellent and informative piece, “Forbidden Medicine.” The balanced and non-hysterical article is well worth rereading. Or, in Voinovich’s, Montgomery’s and Crawford’s cases, a first reading. Had that clueless collage read the story in the first place, they might have seen the following:

“Senate Bill 2, one of Ohio’s crime bills, recognizes the medical use of marijuana as an ‘affirmative defense’ when an offender has a prior written recommendation from a doctor.” Or that, “The law, which will go into effect July 1, seems to lend ‘some credence to the idea that a doctor is on safe ground to make the recommendation’…”

Either our outraged trio was too busy thinking up new ways to throw AIDS and cancer patients into prison for using marijuana to relieve their suffering; or perhaps the three simply smoked something that impaired their memory.

The Dispatch articles are reminiscent of the heyday of the Hearst papers’ “yellow journalism.” William Randolph Hearst-“Citizen Hearst”-pioneered mass-hysteria reporting at the turn of the century. Hearst papers demanded prohibitions against alcohol, cigarettes, public dancing and popular music. The anti-Hispanic bigot had both a financial and ideological stake in his campaign against hemp and “marijuana,” both legal products in the U.S. before Hearst’s crusade. The hemp plant, the world’s premier renewable source of high-quality paper products, was in direct competition with poor-quality, highly acidic wood pulp paper that Hearst had a huge financial interest in promoting. He owned timberland, paper mills, and produced wood pulp paper products with DuPont.

Although you couldn’t get high off the low THC content in industrial hemp, this didn’t deter Hearst papers from first linking hemp to “marijuana” and next to “dope” associated with narcotics. Ignoring the Spanish word for hemp, can~amo, Hearst equated hemp with “marijuana” or “Mary Jane,” a slang word for pot.

Inflamed by the Mexican revolution, Hearst’s papers’ anti-Hispanic rhetoric led to the fist local ordinance against marijuana in 1914 in El Paso, Texas. There, a City Council composed of primarily drunken cowboys outlawed marijuana because of fear of violent Mexicans.

His reporters popularized the term “marijuana” especially after the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa seized 800,000 acres of prime timberland that Hearst owned in Mexico in 1916 and gave it to the Mexican peasants. The Mexican peasants and most of the rest of the world preferred hemp products for paper, clothing, rope and fuel.

Thus Hearst, through his newspapers, systematically demonized the use of both hemp products and the medical use of marijuana for his personal gain. Hearst’s Herald-Tribune enthusiastically promoted Mussolini’s crusade against pot in the 1920s with such headlines as “Mussolini leads way in crushing dope.”

By 1937, industrial hemp, a product grown and advocated by both Washington and Jefferson, was now illegal and the dreaded marijuana was a Schedule One narcotic-with “no therapeutic” use- alongside heroin. By contrast, both cocaine and morphine, an opium-derivative, are Schedule Two narcotics and can be prescribed by doctors.

Kenny Schweickart, spokesperson for the Ohio Industrial Hemp and Medical Use Coalition, said, “The only reason why the Dispatch recently wrote that marijuana has no recognized therapeutic benefits is because it is currently listed as a Schedule One narcotic, not because it’s actually true. Read Dennis Fiely’s earlier coverage.”

In 1988, Drug Enforcement Agency Law Judge Francis Young, after an extensive hearing, ruled that marijuana was one of the safest and most therapeutic substances known to humankind. His ruling rescheduled marijuana as a Schedule Two narcotic, but was overruled.

Marijuana, the Forbidden Medicine, a Yale University Press book, lists marijuana as medicine for not only AIDS and cancer patients but for those with chronic pain, epilepsy, glaucoma, insomnia, labor pains, menstrual cramps, migraine headaches, mood disorders, multiple sclerosis, nausea, paraplegia and quadriplegia.

Ohio’s “affirmative defense,” despite the Dispatch’s claim, does not “legalize” marijuana. It does, however, make it virtually impossible to prosecute any pot-smoker with a written prescription from a recognized physician.

Now, if the Dispatch would just quit doing its Hearst imitation and George, Betty and Dale would quit watching that Reefer Madness video, then we could alleviate some real human suffering.

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