The Democratic National Committee's investigation into Ohio's 2004 presidential election irregularities is the perfect postscript to the party's 'election protection' efforts last fall: it is a shocking indictment of a party caught completely off-guard in its most heated presidential campaign in years, and a party that still doesn't fully understand what happened and how to avoid a repeat in the future.

The report primarily documents the fact that Jim Crow voter suppression tactics targeting Democratic African-American voters were rampant in Ohio’s cities during the 2004 presidential election. It cites and spends most of its time analyzing the most visible problems: from shortages of voting machines in minority precincts, to unreasonable obstacles to voter registration, to disproportionate use of provisional ballots on Election Day among new voters and Democratic constituencies, to inadequate poll worker training and election administration, to poor post-Election Day record keeping.

The harder they come, the harder they fall.

The legendary reggae song says it all about the evil, soon over Karl Rove.

For years we've heard only of the GOP Guttermeister's "genius". But for all his alleged success, what matters most about Karl Rove's legendary career is that the world is a much worse place for who he is and what he's done. He leaves no legacy except pain and suffering, anger and devastation.

The gameplayers love Rove's uncanny mastery of the dirty trick and knife in the back, of the lowest common denominator and the perfectly timed smear. Gay marriage and flag burning, bigotry and fundamentalism, immigration and abortion....Rove's use of anything handy to divide and confuse has been peerless. No American better understands those ultimate fascist mainstays, the Terror Card and the Big Lie.

Rove began as a dirty trickster for Richard Nixon. He took the dubious George W. Bush and made him governor, then president, then "war president." He's engineered a near-absolute takeover of the American media and government in ways without precedent.

I am in process of writing another book on Christian pacifism and would like to include some interviews of conscientious objectors from WW2, Korea, Viet-Nam, Kuwait. The purpose of my book is to show that American Christian churches have failed in upholding their responsibility as preachers of the gospel of the Prince of Peace, and I want to know the attitude that their respective denominations and ministers had toward them for deciding to be C.O.

Because I live in Central California, if any of you can be so kind to either forward my request to any C.O.’s that you know in California, or else to forward to me their address or some manner of contacting them, so I can interview them.

Thank you so much,
Daniel H. Shubin
www.peacehost.net/peacechurch
Jim VandeHei of the Washington Post tells us that George Bush, who had hoped to spend the summer ramming Social Security firecrackers down our throats, is being forced by his plummeting poll numbers to take a second look at shoring up the lies about how peachy keen everything is in Iraq.  Not that Bush ever looks at poll numbers, or spends any time worrying about what the street rabble thinks -- but with elections coming up, some Frights (Friends on the Right) are beginning to nervously gnaw their fingernails...  

One of the more reasonable ones is South Carolina's Senator Lindsey Graham, who laments that the war is lasting much longer and isn't nearly as much whizbang fun as Bush promised. Graham says more people are dying than originally thought, and the insurgency against the illegal occupation isn't following Bush's democracy-and-freedom-spreading plan. Although Graham didn't say how many dead "people" were acceptable to him at the outset of this war we were lied into, or whether they are our people or their people, he did suggest if Bush has either a victory plan or an exit plan, maybe he should share them with the rest of us.

Dear Sir,

I have followed the discussions about voting machines and their use as they occurred before, during and after the 2004 election. As your recent article suggests they make a considerable contribution to the uncertainties raised in the last two presidential elections. It seems that there is no incentive with the current manufacturers to provide proof of performance.

I have no technical knowledge about the subject and as I am not an American I have no real idea about the voting procedures in your country.

I have the impression that several makes of voting machines are involved.

Ever since the 2004 election I have been wondering if there are people with technical knowledge to design and test a prototype of a satisfactory voting machine among those who believe that the present situation is fraught with problems.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- The world's most famous political prisoner, Burma's Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, will not be celebrating a happy birthday on Sunday (June 19) when she turns 60, because she is locked under house arrest.

Suu Kyi -- pronounced "Soo Chee" -- languishes behind spiked gates which guard her spacious garden and tranquil, two-story, lakeside villa in Rangoon, the capital of impoverished Burma.

In what has become depressingly routine, the U.S. State Department and other monitors reiterated their condemnation of Burma for its grim human rights record.

London-based Amnesty International said at least 1,350 political prisoners are locked up in the Southeast Asian country.

To score diplomatic points, the regime occasionally releases some inmates, but later arrests more dissidents.

Suu Kyi has spent more than nine of the past 16 years in detention.

Her latest sentence of house arrest began on May 30, 2003 after deadly clashes erupted between government supporters and her National League for Democracy (NLD) party sympathizers.

SAN DIEGO -- As that great American, Deep Throat, never said, "Follow the money." (The line is by William Goldman, who wrote the movie, "All the President's Men"). Keeping your eye on the shell with the pea under it is not easy when the right-wing echo chamber continually takes up new chapters in the culture wars -- the dread case of the senator who didn't, in fact, say the United States is as bad as the late Soviet Union and the equally grave perennial constitutional amendment to prevent the menace of flag desecration.

Meanwhile, largely unnoticed and unreported, the drumbeat of giveaways to big corporations continues: unnecessary tax breaks for the undeserving, more green lights for the rampant exploitation of the environment, and all manner of theft and skullduggery.

Seriously, this administration is starting to look like that old television show in which contestants lined up their shopping carts in a grocery store and, on the signal, began running around throwing every valuable item they could find in their carts. Whoever grabbed the most high-priced items won. The contestants here and now are corporations and lobbyists.
As long as I've lived in America, there's been this tragic-comic ritual known as the "hunt for the smoking gun," a process by which our official press tries to inoculate itself, and its readers, from political and economic realities.

The big smoking gun issue back in 1973 and 1974 concerned Richard Nixon. Back and forth the ponderous debate raged in editorial columns and news stories: Was this or that disclosure a "smoking gun"? Fairly early on in the game, it was clear to about 95 percent of the population that Nixon was a liar, a crook and guilty as charged. But the committee rooms on Capitol Hill and Sunday talk shows were still filled with people holding up guns with smoke pouring from the barrel telling one another solemnly that no, the appearance of smoke and the stench of recently detonated cordite notwithstanding, this was not yet the absolute, conclusive smoking gun.

The Ohio Senate Rules Committee is currently holding hearings to consider H.B. 3 - the election reform omnibus bill. This will not solve the problems witnessed in Ohio's elections last November. Legislation that requires all voters to show photo identification is misguided and will do more to disenfranchise legitimate voters than it ever will to curb "fraud". S.B. 36 needs to be defeated.

H.B. 3 contains language that would put barriers in the way of voters. There are glaring omissions in the bill and it fails to address several key OH election problems - such as a lack of notification of former felons when their voting rights have been restored, simply put, H.B. 3 does not go far enough to protect the voting rights of Ohioans and should not be passed in its current form. The Rules Committee is currently making decisions that affect all Ohio voters. You can help stop these bills by making two calls today! Please call Rules Committee Chairman Bill Harris as well as your own senator and tell them:
A) Vote NO to S.B. 36! Photo identification requirements harm Ohio voters.
Those who hold the sacred trust of overseeing the election procedures and voting systems in this country are an alphabet-soup of organizations. The National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS); the National Association of State Elections Directors (NASED), the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC), the Elections Assistance Commission (EAC); the Election Center. What do these groups have in common? They either receive their funding from the vendors or are greatly influenced by those who do receive funding from the vendors. We can only hope that the EAC can resist the influence. The others haven't.

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