The national launch of the new book by Bob Fitrakis, DID GEORGE W. BUSH STEAL AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION? ESSENTIAL DOCUMENTS, begins on June 15, 2005.

“In contrast to the deadly silence of the media is the silent scream of the numbers. The more you ponder these numbers, and all the accompanying data, the louder that scream grows.” —Robert C. Koehler, Tribune Media Services

This book is filled with numbers and data showing what really happened in the 2004 election in Ohio. It includes many crucial source materials, commentary and investigative reports—including the complete text of the Conyers report, prepared by the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff. It is a must read for all people concerned about saving democracy and ensuring free and fair elections in the future.

So now we have the worst of all worlds: the prospect of some rotten new federal judges and the survival of the filibuster, which the Republicans have consented not to abolish and the Democrats pledged never to use.

As Sen. Russ Feingold said, "Democrats should have stood together firmly . Confirming unacceptable judicial nominations is simply a green light for the Bush administration."

Since I spent my youth reading fervent denunciations of the filibuster as the tool of southern reaction, I found it beyond my powers to take the urgent advice of liberals over the past month, shed the prejudices of a lifetime and promote the filibuster to the status of progressivism's stout bulwark.

The endless show that seems to fill America's every waking moment -- and many of its nightmares -- could be called "Media Jeopardy!"

Before proceeding, here’s a reminder of the rules: Listen to the answer and then try to come up with the question.

Let’s get started. The first category is “Media Untouchables.”

* They’re an ideological pair and stylistic opposites. On television, one is a slathering fount of bombast, the other is icy cerebellum, but both are widely syndicated columnists dedicated to helping the right wing of the Republican Party. One had a role in the scandal involving the Bush administration’s payback “outing” of a critic’s wife who was a CIA undercover agent. The other has been guilty of numerous ethical lapses, from unacknowledged conflicts-of-financial-interest to utilizing debate-prep papers stolen from the Carter White House to coach then-challenger Ronald Reagan in the fall of 1980. Yet neither man seems to suffer professional or legal consequences.

Who are Robert Novak and George Will?

* This cable network, partly owned by a major Pentagon contractor,
AUSTIN, Texas -- I often complain about the excess of irony in our national life, but this week, if you're not begoshed by the irony surplus, you haven't been paying attention. If we could just figure out a way to get energy out of the stuff, we'd be set for life.

Liberals for the filibuster; conservatives against it -- hilarious. Pentagon loses track of more than $1 trillion, and the Army can't find 56 airplanes, 32 tanks and 36 Javelin missile command launch-units. Not to mention Osama bin Ladin. And more:

-- Right-wing Republicans fight to make the world safe from "judicial activists" by appointing Priscilla Owen -- the biggest, baddest, worstest judicial activist Texas ever produced -- to the federal bench.

Owen is so notorious for reading her own opinions into the law, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, then her colleague on the Texas Supreme Court, described her opinion in a parental consent case as "an unconscionable act of judicial activism." (For further irony, see Gonzales' subsequent attempts to deny that he was describing Owen.)

We all know that election was phony from start to finish...where in the hell are the journalists....to support the whistleblowers... the journalists have become a bunch of frigging incompetent cowards.

Donna
The battle between Deputy Director Sherole Eaton, a recently fired federal whistleblower, and the Hocking County Board of Elections (BOE) she worked for, is becoming a bare-knuckled political brawl.

The Free Press has learned that Eaton supporters will protest at the Hocking County BOE Thursday, May 26 and plan to allege that Susan Hughes, a Democrat who seconded the motion to fire Eaton, is illegally on the BOE.

During last December’s presidential election recount, Eaton signed a sworn affidavit that a Triad, Inc. voting machine technician came into the BOE without being scheduled and changed out the county’s vote-tabulation computer hard drive. Eaton also claimed that he offered a “cheat sheet” to make sure the recount tally matched the original election results.

The Logan Daily News reported that BOE members privately complained “that Eaton was a disruptive influence in the office.” But, all BOE members “refused to be quoted on the record.”

AUSTIN -- Here in the National Laboratory for Bad Government, it's Duck and Cover time -- the Legislature is in session. The Can't-Shake-Your-Booty bill passed the House, saving us all from the scourge of sexy cheerleaders. But nothing else is getting done. The state is being run by people who do not know how to govern. Keep in mind that based on past form, whatever lunacy is going on in Texas will eventually sweep the country.

Rarely are the words of one state legislator worth national attention, but when Senfronia Thompson, a black representative from Houston, stalks to the back mike with a certain "get-out-of-my-way" look in her eye, it's, Katie, bar the door. Here is Thompson speaking against the Legislature's recent folly of putting a superfluous anti-gay marriage measure into the state constitution:

"I have been a member of this august body for three decades, and today is one of the all-time low points. We are going in the wrong direction, in the direction of hate and fear and discrimination. Members, we all know what this is about; this is the politics of divisiveness at it's worst, a wedge issue that is meant to divide.

Sherole Eaton is as defiant as ever and determined to stand up for democracy. Despite recovering from recent carotic artery surgery and scheduled for brain surgery on June 6 for a brain aneurysm, Eaton, perhaps Ohio’s most well-known whistleblower, refuses to resign as Deputy Director of the Hocking County Board of Elections.

Eaton made national news last December during Ohio’s election recount when she swore in an affidavit that a Triad voting machine technician replaced the hard drive on Hocking County’s central “computer and tabulation machine.”

“I still can’t understand what he was doing there on his own time replacing the hard drive on our computer, our brain, where all the county’s voting information was, in the middle of a recount,” Eaton offered.

Lisa Schwartze, Director of the Hocking County Board of Elections, told the Free Press that Eaton has until June 30 to resign. Initially she told the paper that Eaton was “on vacation” but, the Logan Daily News reported that Eaton was fired on Thursday, May 19 after a five hour meeting.

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