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Look at who runs our boards of elections

At 10:03 A.M. on August 7, 2006, one month before Judge Algenon Marbley ordered all 88 Ohio Boards of Elections to continue to preserve the ballots from the 2004 presidential election, Jacqueline J. Neuhart, Director of the Guernsey County Board of Elections, sent an e-mail to "All Counties" asking if they were aware of a website called savetheballots.org. Her exact wording was: "Good morning, everyone. Has anyone else heard about this? I wonder how far it will go."

Pursuant to a public records request, Matthew Damschroder, Director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, graciously provided us with responses to said e-mail. Here they are:

Monday, August 7, 2006, 10:30 A.M. From Lorain County Board of Elections
"Someone should tell them to give it up. The election is over. They lost."

Monday, August 7, 2006, 10:32 A.M. From Brown County Board of Elections
"YES BROWN COUNTY HAS HEARD ABOUT IT"

Monday, August 7, 2006, 10:32 A.M. From Allen County Board of Elections

The dog ate my homework continues: inter-office Ohio Board of Elections email prompted by SAVE THE BALLOTS website gives a glimpse into the attitudes of Ohio election officials

A record request of August 6, 2007 made to the Director of Franklin County’s Board of Elections, Matt Damschroder, has turned up some very interesting records.

Additional proof that all of Ohio’s Boards of Elections knew that they should retain the 2004 election records. Deputy Director Denny White was in attendance at the time of the delivery of the request. I now am in the possession of interoffice emails where they discuss the records, and their repulsion for those of us that seek to know what the story is, which only the actual documents can tell.

Disciples of Yossarian

Following on the heels of his flirtation with violent "decisiveness" toward Pakistan, Barack Obama got twisted up even further in the conflicting loyalties that complicate the lives of Democratic presidential candidates and the people who vote for them. Pretty soon the other candidates were in there with him, like cats in the yarn.

After declaring in a speech last week that he might order military strikes on Pakistan border areas to take out suspected al-Qaida camps, he was asked by an AP reporter if he’d use nuclear weapons against al-Qaida in Pakistan.

I pause here a moment to ponder the insanity of this question, or what I might call the "Yossarian moment" it produces, referring, of course, to Joseph Heller’s notorious central character in the World War II novel "Catch-22," whose everyman sanity stood in constant amazed contrast to the routine insanities of war, like people all the time trying to kill each other. This is a Yossarian moment on steroids, reporter to almighty-deity-in-chief wannabe: When killing thine enemies, sir, would you be inclined to take ’em out 50,000 at a swath? A hundred thousand? A million?

How the Democrats blew it in only eight months

Led by Democrats since the start of this year, the U.S. Congress now has a "confidence" rating of 14 percent, the lowest since Gallup started asking the question in 1973, and five points lower than what the Republican-controlled Congress scored last year.

            The voters put the Democrats in to end the war, and it's escalating. The Democrats voted money for the surge in Iraq and the money for the next $459.6 billion military budget. Their latest achievement has been to provide enough votes in support of Bush to legalize warrantless wire tapping for "foreign suspects whose communications pass through the United States." Enough Democrats joined Republicans to make this a 227-183 victory for Bush.

            The Democrats control the House of Representatives. Speaker Nancy Pelosi could have stopped the bill in its tracks if she'd really wanted to. But she didn't. The Democrats' game is to go along with the White House agenda while stirring up dust storms to blind the base about their failure to bring the troops home or restore constitutional government.

Radioactive "bailout-in-advance" opens fierce new war over nuke reactors

After fifty years of what Forbes Magazine long ago called "the largest managerial disaster in business history," the nuke power industry is demanding untold billions in a federal "Bailout-in-Advance." Congress will decide on these proposed loan guarantees for new nukes in its September conferences over the new Energy Bill.

Both sides are gearing up for the new war over the irradiation of our energy future.

As usual, it's vital to "follow the money."

The industry once promised that atomic energy would be "too cheap to meter." But after a half-century of proven failure, Wall Street won't invest in new nukes without federal support. So buried in the Senate version of the new Energy Bill is a single sentence authorizing the Department of Energy to underwrite virtually unlimited loans for still more nukes. The sentence was slipped into the bill by industry backers without open debate.

The GOP's big health scare

Listening to the Republican candidates for president warn against "socialized medicine," you might believe that national health insurance is really a plot to institute Soviet rule in the United States. The most feverish rhetoric comes from Mitt Romney and Rudolph Giuliani, both hoping that their shrillness will prove that they are truly and deeply right wing -- all while trying to avoid honest debate about the future of American health care.

            For Romney, health reform is double-edged: As the former governor of Massachusetts, he claims credit for that state's new universal care program -- which he calls "fabulous" -- but he fears being labeled liberal. His solution is simply to ignore the basic provisions of the legislation that he signed. "This is a country that can get all of our people insured with not a government takeover, without HillaryCare, without socialized medicine," he proclaimed during a Republican debate this past spring. "We didn't expand government programs."

Culture of Fear

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Restore health to America's elections and pull the plug on SDD virus threat

New university studies in Connecticut and California join the growing list of academic warnings about the use of Software Driven Devices [SDD] in the casting or counting of votes. What the scholars are telling us, that the computer security experts already knew, is that there is no way to prevent undetectable malicious software code from altering the outcome of an election.

Software can be altered with self-deleting code to provide erroneous vote outcomes on all SDD equipment, without exception. The SDD machines cannot safely be trusted to provide an honest count, none of them.

The touch-screen SDD danger is greatest because there is absolutely no way to verify the outcome. In Sarasota, Florida, 18,000 votes were lost in a 2006 congressional election and no one has yet been able to explain what happened. SDD propagandists blame "ballot design" and voter ignorance but the truth is if the votes were stolen no one will ever know, that is the nature of the SDD threat.

Failure to stop Bush is not a victimless crime

If you support the ongoing occupation of Iraq, I'm sure you have your reasons and that they're based in hard scientific calculations. But please indulge me for a moment and help me do this little math problem:

All the benefits we've gotten out of invading and occupying Iraq (whatever they may be)…

Actually, let me stop right there. The benefits you have in mind for this calculation should not include the increased price of gas, the killed and wounded U.S. servicemen and women, or the creation of a breeding ground for terrorists in Iraq (that the invasion and occupation of Iraq have made us less safe is the consensus opinion of U.S. intelligence agencies, supported as well by a conservative British think tank). Oh, and please don't factor in the Iraqis' gratitude, since the majority of them believe the invasion and occupation have made them worse off, and they want the U.S. to leave.

Let us now praise an infamous woman -- and our own possibilities

The problem with letting history judge is that so many officials get away with murder in the meantime -- while precious few choose to face protracted vilification for pursuing truth and peace.

     A grand total of two people in the entire Congress were able to resist a blood-drenched blank check for the Vietnam War. Standing alone on Aug. 7, 1964, senators Ernest Gruening and Wayne Morse voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

     Forty-three years later, we don’t need to go back decades to find a lopsided instance of a lone voice on Capitol Hill standing against war hysteria and the expediency of violent fear. Days after 9/11, at the launch of the so-called “war on terrorism,” just one lawmaker -- out of 535 -- cast a vote against the gathering madness.

     “However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of restraint,” she said on the floor of the House of Representatives. The date was Sept. 14, 2001.

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