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Another Sign Of Smiley-Faced Fascism

I marched in the Doo Dah Parade today in Columbus, Ohio; democracy requires dissent. And here’s where I dissent from W. Bush and his junta. Our founders held that people are born with certain “unalienable Rights” – among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We have a Constitution with a Bill of Rights that protects us from “unreasonable search and seizure.” The Bush administration violates this daily with its warrantless searches of U.S. citizens. This is the hallmark of an authoritarian regime, not a constitutional republic with guaranteed rights.

  Our Bill of Rights guarantees that people won’t suffer “cruel and unusual punishment.” The Bush regime and its Attorney General embrace torture by redefining it. Remember when Alberto Gonzales wrote the memo saying that torture isn’t torture unless a major body organ fails. This is another sign of smiley-faced fascism. We rip your toenails out with pliers and claim it’s not torture. We shock your genitals with electricity and say it’s not torture. Finally, we have a regime that is every bit as imperialist and ruthless as the British empire early Americans rebelled against. The Bush junta adopts the same tactics as King George. His is a belief in an empire based on lies and full-scale occupation of whole countries.

We must resist the tyranny of the Bush regime and drive them from power, just as we drove the original King George from these shores.

The Green Party in the Doo Dah Parade marched for clean elections, peace, the environment and prosperity. Thanks to everyone who joined us!

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How We Got On The Ballot

Here’s a breakdown from the Secretary of State regarding the filing of the Fitrakis/Rios gubernatorial slate. We filed 1,199 petitions representing 81 of Ohio’s 88 counties. In Franklin County alone, my home, we filed 7,124 signatures. We also filed 1,283 in the Cleveland area (Cuyahoga County) and 757 signatures in the Cincinnati area (Hamilton County). We filed 322 in the Toledo area (Lucas County), Anita Rios’ home, and 163 in the Akron area (Summit County). We also filed 102 in Lorain County and 1071 in the Dayton area (Montgomery County). We did well in the college towns of Athens (Ohio U) with 111 and 244 in Greene County where Antioch College is in Yellow Springs. Major party candidates only have to file 1,000 signatures, but the bipartisan bluster of two effete corporate lapdog parties are in agreement that independents and third party candidates should have to file 5,000 valid signatures.

Overall, we filed 12,295 signatures and the Secretary of State approved 7,853. What these numbers show is that the Green Party has a massive and active grassroots network throughout the state of Ohio, due in no small part to the fact that they stood up for the rights of the voters when the Democratic Party faded away following the 2004 election. The Greens funded and initiated the recount, and my running mate for Lieutenant Governor, Anita Rios, was a plaintiff in many voting rights actions before the court.

Tim Kettler, Green Party candidate for Secretary of State also gained ballot status this week. Kettler was instrumental in forcing Coshocton County to recount all its ballots by hand in 2004, the only county in the state of Ohio to do so.

Once again I want to thank all my signature gatherers and those who signed. We look forward to building a real party of the people. I know some of you are concerned about the Greens playing a spoiler role, so I intend to ask Ted Strickland to drop out of the race, as suggested by blogger Andrew Warner, so a real progressive can run against Blackwell. But here’s another idea: why don’t all the candidates – Democratic, Republican, Green and Libertarian – debate openly in the series of public town hall meetings and let the people decide. Isn’t that what democracy is all about?

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Ted Strickland In Gay Pride Parade?

I didn’t get a chance to blog over the weekend. I was busy volunteering at the Community Festival in Columbus, Ohio at Goodale Park. I also did a little campaigning. On Saturday, Tim Kettler, Green Party candidate for Secretary of State, and I, marched in the gay pride parade between the Peace Pride contingent and the Stolen Election float. Our banner read: Fitrakis-Rios-Kettler for Clean Elections – fraudbusterbob.com.

The Gay Pride Parade is clearly the largest march in Columbus each year. It looked like 100,000 or so marchers and spectators. It’s hard to call them spectators because they are so active in their participation as they line the route.

Back when the Franklin County Democratic Party had a progressive wing, I managed the campaign of then-very young Tom Erney for Congress in the 22nd district. He, by the way, got 41% of the vote and only spent $17,000. I later wrote a paper for the American Political Science Association entitled “Waging Guerrilla War in the Heartland.”

One of the things that Erney did was become the first politician to accept the endorsement of Stonewall Union – the gay activist organization. I remember some labor voters thinking we got the endorsement of the bricklayers union. In 1991, I was working high up in the campaigns of two Democratic women, and they became the first candidates to march in the gay pride parade. They were Ann Taylor for Municipal Judge and Mary Jo Kilroy for School Board. We were warned that it was the kiss of death to march in the gay pride parade. When both of them won in upsets over incumbents, suddenly many of the local Dems wanted to march in the gay pride parade.

In fact, one of my fondest memories is from 1992 was watching sheriff candidate Big Jim Karnes schmooze in the gay bars with other Democratic candidates. What I noticed this year, sadly, in the aftermath of the Issue One debacle (making gay marriage illegal in Ohio) and the emboldened Ken Hackwell homophobes, few political candidates marched in the parade this year. When I was marching, I didn’t see ANY. While Lee Fisher addressed the march before it began, I didn’t see him on the route. Hopefully, I’m wrong here. I was hoping Ted Strickland was there, but I didn’t see him either. There’s nothing I’d rather do than debate Strickland and Hackwell at Stonewall Union.

As for me, I believe that the state should sanction gay marriage under equal protection, just as I believe that it’s up to each individual church to decide who marries in their church, under the First Amendment.

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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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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.

Read more

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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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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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