Elections

By Dave Lindorff

It would be easy to read too much into the few statewide races that were decided last night, but I think it’s fair to say that the results in New Jersey and Virginia, where Republican gubernatorial candidates won--in New Jersey’s case knocking off a well-funded Democratic incumbent--that the results were a blow to the Barack Obama/Rahm Emanuel strategy of playing to the right, of avoiding confrontation in Congress and of ignoring the progressive voters whose enthusiasm and effort back in the 2008 campaign put Obama in office.

Are you doing something to hold Cheney accountable? I would love to help and promote and fund. Are you subpoenaing him? My recommendation would be to put in a 1-sentence bill on Jay Bybee as was done on Alberto Gonzales that simply says the House Judiciary Committee shall consider whether he committed impeachable offenses. If you can do that, the support will be phenomenal.

In the meantime, I don't understand your message at all. How does giving you money hold Cheney accountable? Please explain.

A Censored Headline and why it Matters: German High Court Outlaws Electronic Voting
By Michael Collins | Daily Censored.com

The justices above are clearly the most rational group of high level functionaries in the industrialized world. They did what no other court would do in Europe or the United States. They effectively outlawed electronic voting. On March 3, 2009, the German Federal Constitutional Court declared that the electronic voting machines used in the 2005 Bundestag elections for the German national parliament were outside of the bounds of the German Constitution.

They reasoned that electronic voting is not verifiable because citizen votes are counted in secret. It is obscured a technology inaccessible to all but a very few initiates. Most importantly, the German high court noted, electronic voting machines don't allow citizens to "reliably examine, when the vote is cast, whether the vote has been recorded in an unadulterated manner" Mar. 3, 2009.

The written opinion effectively bars electronic voting in future elections based on the complexity of voting machines and the inability of voters to watch their vote being counted. This raises the bar of acceptability well above the meaningless solutions offered by "paper trails" for touch screen voting or the so-called "paper ballots" for computerized optical scan voting machines, the most popular form of voting in the United States.

Germany's 2009 Bundestag elections were conducted with hand counted paper ballots.

Election Monitor Claims 1M Tainted Karzai Votes
Afghan Showdown Adds Pressure to Obama Strategy Decision
By Chris Cuomo, Nick Schifrin and Devin Dwyer | ABC News

More than 1 million votes - most of them for Afghan President Hamid Karzai - were thrown out by election monitors in the disputed presidential election, a decision that the Afghan president has already indicated he will reject.

The ruling by the U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission would reduce the president's total from the 54 percent he has claimed to 48.3 percent. Anything under 50 percent is supposed to trigger a runoff between Karzai and his main challenger Abdullah Abdullah.

Over the weekend, Afghan election officials indicated they would not accept the possibility of a second vote.

Democracy International reported that the EEC has determined that 1.3 million votes were fraudulent, and about 1 million of those tainted votes were for Karzai. Another 200,000 votes for Abdullah were also thrown out, with the remainder for a handful of other candidates.

Those figures were confirmed to ABC News by election officials. Read more.

FRAUDULENT AFGHAN ELECTION RAISES ODDS AGAINST U.S. “SUCCESS”
By Sherwood Ross

The fraudulent Afghan election of last August 20th has delayed the possibility of a new regime taking over promptly to replace the corrupt rule of the discredited, U.S. hand-picked President Hamid Karzai.

The ballot box stuffing has blunted a key aspect of President Obama’s stated desire to bring about domestic reform there, not just to wage war, in that tortured nation.

While the recount drags on over what the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) called “clear and convincing evidence of fraud,” Pentagon officials are claiming the Taliban is growing ever stronger and they need tens of thousands of additional troops. General Stanley McChrystal, the Afghanistan commander, warned of possible “mission failure” without them. Civilians continue to die from U.S. air strikes aimed at Taliban targets as well as Taliban explosives and U.S. troops continue to die in record numbers in the fighting. Each day brings fresh headlines detailing the slaughter.

“This war has slogged on for nearly nine years, making it longer than America’s involvement in World Wars I and II combined. We’ve already spent $228 billion, 826 Americans have been killed (nearly 200 so far this year), and Obama’s summer surge has muscled up America’s Afghan presence to 68,000 troops (plus another 42,000 from NATO,” Jim Hightower and Phillip Frazer note in the October Hightower Lowdown. “Yet the Taliban forces we’re fighting are stronger than ever, and our own military commanders concede that not only is the war going badly for us, but the situation is rapidly ‘deteriorating.’”

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www.StopTheChamber.com

A VelvetRevolution.us Campaign

Stop The Chamber

The Chamber of Commerce, under the leadership of Tom Donahue, has gone from a well respected trade organization to an extremist political organization dedicated to corrupting American democracy by elevating the profits of big corporations over the well being of the citizens they serve. The most recent example of this corrupt behavior is the Chamber's announcement that it is spending more than $100 million to defeat initiatives to protect the environment and provide affordable health care to everyone.

The Chamber is the biggest lobbying operation in the United States, spending billions of dollars on behalf of big business over the past decade to corrupt the political system. Polluters like Big Coal, Big Asbestos, and Big Oil only need call the Chamber to stop any accountability for their toxic destruction. Wall Street banks and CEOs need only make sure that they have paid their Chamber dues to ensure that they can continue to rip off the taxpayers. And killers like Big Tobacco need only form a partnership with the Chamber to ensure that they will be given immunity from lawsuits that seek accountability for the death and sickness of millions of Americans.

Click here to sign on.

Tom Donahue has turned the once respected and even-handed Chamber into an extremist organization, bragging that the Chamber gutted the Clinton tobacco settlement, killed the Clinton health care plan, and scuttled previous oversight of Wall Street and the banking system. Now the Chamber is spending tens of millions on ads and lobbyists to stop health care for all, protect polluters from accountability, and shield the financial industry from government regulation.

Not only is the Chamber lobbying and advertising against the interests of Americans, it is also committing fraud and violating campaign finance laws by creating fake astroturfing front groups, with patriotic names like Citizens for a Strong Ohio, and then illegally funneling millions of anonymous dollars into those groups to attack candidates and judges who won't do their bidding. While this corrupts the electoral system, the Chamber persists, even when it is caught, fined and required to disclose its "anonymous" donors.

We have had enough and it is time to Stop The Chamber. Therefore, we demand the following:

• Fire Tom Donohue. Mr. Donohue is the Chamber's corrupter in chief who single handedly turned the Chamber "into a pay-to-play vehicle for right-wing causes and corporate dishonesty. As Eliot Spitzer put it, ''Tom Donohue has never once found a crime that he couldn't justify, as long as it was committed by one of his dues-paying members.'"
• Drop Corporate Support for the Chamber. Over the past month, several large companies have abandoned the Chamber because of its anti-science stance on global warming. These include, Apple, Exelon Energy, Pacific Gas & Electric, Nike, and Public Service Company of New Mexico. As Nike put it, "We fundamentally disagree with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on the issue of climate change, and their recent action challenging the E.P.A. is inconsistent with our view that climate change is an issue in need of urgent action." We will target companies with exposure and boycotts if they remain with the Chamber.
• Launch A Criminal Investigation Against The Chamber For Fraud, False Tax Filings And Campaign Finance Violations. The Chamber was found to have committed fraud and campaign finance violations in Ohio by creating a front group called Citizens for a Strong Ohio and funneling millions of dollars through it to defeat Supreme Court Justice Alice Resnick because she could not be bought. This Chamber practice is widespread and was also used against Karl Rove-targeted Mississippi Justice Oliver Diaz, and in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Alabama, Texas, Louisiana, Michigan, West Virginia, and Arkansas. We are asking the Department of Justice to investigate these illegal practices under RICO and to review whether the Chamber is actually a political action committee rather than a trade association. See our letter to DOJ here.
• Ask Congress To Investigate The Chamber. In addition to a criminal investigation, we want Congress to investigate the activities of the Chamber to include astroturfing and election manipulation as outlined by Public Citizen. Read U.S. Chamber of Commerce Failed to Report Electioneering Spending and Grants, Public Citizen Asks IRS to Investigate. Send a letter to Congress here.
• Reorganize The Chamber. The Board of the Chamber should shut down the Chamber's lobbying arm and legal reform arm, and return to being a respected trade organization rather than a partisan PAC.
• Speak Out Against The Chamber. We ask companies, politicians and others that do not agree with the flat earth, anti science, partisan, anti people approach of the Chamber to speak out publicly against the Chamber.

Click here to Send A Letter Asking Congress To Investigate The Chamber.

by Linda Milazzo

Our great buddy Mike is angry. For the past twenty years, Michael Moore, our everyday hero, has worked hard for us. He's documented sadistic acts against us by industry and government. He's exposed case after case of devious schemes that robbed us of our homes and our jobs, sent our children to war, and sacrificed our health. He's given us irrefutable proof that our leaders lied us to war, our insurers denied us care, and our lenders deceived us into hopelessness and destitution.

Mike's been our teacher, our ally and our devoted friend. Few people in recent memory have worked harder to inform us - ALL OF US - of the inhumanity and greed that are decaying our nation, which we perpetuate through apathy and inertia.

Death sentences for Iran protesters | alJazeera

Three people arrested after Iran's disputed presidential election have been sentenced to death, the Iranian ISNA news agency said.

"Three people who were accused in the post-election incidents have been sentenced to death," ISNA quoted Zahed Bashiri Rad, media officer at the justice ministry, as saying on Saturday.

Bashiri Rad, giving only the initials of the convicts, said that "MZ and AP were convicted for ties with the Kingdom Assembly of Iran and NA for ties with the Monafeghin (exiled opposition group commonly known as People's Mujahideen).

Prosecutors said the accused admitted to spying but human rights groups say torture is used to obtain so-called confessions. Read more.

www.PeterTrottam.com - 2010 State Assembly Candidate - 53rd District

Mikulski earmarks go to top campaign contributors
Senator tops among Md. delegation, denies any wrongdoing
By Paul West | Baltimore Sun

Democratic Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski has added tens of millions of dollars to a defense spending measure in earmarked grants for her top campaign donors, according to a Baltimore Sun analysis.

All but one of Mikulski's 16 funding requests were approved, making her the champion defense earmarker for the state. Final numbers won't be available until Congress completes action on the spending legislation later this fall.

Included in the senator's $42.1 million total is a combined $10.5 million for three companies, Northrop Grumman, Thales Communications and L-3 Communications, whose executives and political action committees have been among her most generous contributors.

Northrop Grumman officials and the company's PAC gave $57,900 to Mikulski's campaign and her political committee between 2005 and this year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan organization that tracks political money.

That makes Northrop Grumman the largest source of contributions to Mikulski's re-election, according to the center's figures. The other two companies, Thales and L-3, also ranked among her top 15 donors.

The Senate bill contains $4 million for a Northrop Grumman radar system being developed by the defense giant at its Electronic Systems division in Linthicum. Another $4 million went to a radio project for Thales, a French company whose U.S. division is headquartered in Clarksburg. Mikulski also obtained $2.5 million for an L-3 Communications division in Lexington Park that is working on an antenna project for unmanned drones. Read more.

NJ Ruling Banning Exit Pollsters Is Unfounded & Outrageous
By Paul R Lehto, J.D. | Demanding Democracy

Throughout the history of elections during most of the last century, laws against "electioneering" existed and were often upheld on the grounds that advocacy or pressuring voters to vote one way or the other disrupted the peace and non-intimidating atmosphere of polling places. To the extent such electioneering, by the very definition of electioneering, attempted to change or influence the votes of voters, it was reasonable to restrict it. However, even then, anything beyond a perimeter such as 100 feet was fair game, because beyond this
perimeter was a "quintessential public forum" as the US Supreme Court put it.

Nevertheless, NJ has purported to ban exit pollsters inside a 100 foot perimeter along with true electioneers, even though exit pollsters do not attempt to change or persuade votes, and only speak to voters AFTER they've voted. This is very bad news for secondary checks and balances on the secret computerized vote counts, because a 100 foot ban in many polling locations will allow voters various avenues of "escape" before those voters have an opportunity to say yes or no to the opportunity to do an exit poll. Very high percentages say yes to the exit pollsters, but the number that say "no" is sure to increase this way, and give another seemingly plausible reason to "explain" discrepancies between exit polls and actual results. In 2004, supposedly shy Bush voters that supposedly did not participate in exit polls like Democratic voters did, were seized on as an excuse to explain exit poll discrepancies.

US lawmakers to meet interim Honduras leader
By Ben Fox | Google News

A U.S. senator and three congressmen plan to meet Friday with Honduras' interim leader in defiance of official Washington policy barring contact with the architects of the military coup that ousted the nation's president.

South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint intends to meet with interim President Roberto Micheletti as well as members of the Central American nation's Supreme Court, election officials and business and civic leaders during the fact-finding trip, said Wesley Denton, a spokesman for the senator.

The visit comes as President Barack Obama's administration seeks to isolate the interim government and use other forms of pressure — including suspending aid and canceling the visas of some members of the country's wealthy elite — in hopes of returning ousted President Manuel Zelaya to serve the remaining months of his term.

DeMint, one of a number of U.S. conservatives who have defended Zelaya's ouster on June 28 in Central America's first coup in more than a decade, supports the interim government plan to hold elections Nov. 29.

"The best solution to the crisis in Honduras is free and fair democratic elections that allow the Honduran people to decide their own future," DeMint said in a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press. Read more.

Civil Rights Groups Seek International Help on Felony Voting | Blog of Legal Times

The Sentencing Project and two national civil rights organizations have asked an international human rights body for a hearing on felony disenfranchisement laws in the United States and other countries.

The groups may know as early as next week whether the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights will accept their request for a hearing. The groups want the commission to decide whether laws and policies prohibiting convicted felons from voting violate the right to vote free from discrimination under the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man and the American Convention on Human Rights.

"We wanted to bring attention to the issue of felony disenfranchisement and put a human rights framework on the issue," said Marcia Johnson-Blanco, a voting rights attorney with the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. "We've been litigating the issue in the courts and felt we sort of hit a block in our system."

By casting the issue as a human rights matter, she explained, advocacy groups have another avenue--an international one--in which to seek change.

The American Civil Liberties Union has joined the Lawyers' Committee and the Sentencing Project in requesting the hearing. Read more.

Messaging Publicly Financed Campaigns: Carrots and Sticks
By Barry Kendall | Down With Tyranny

A successful messaging strategy needs to present the recipient with both reasons to dislike and reject the problem/status quo and reasons to care about and aspire to the solution. Sticks and carrots, in other words.

It is our sad good fortune that recent history has given us plenty of reasons to dislike the way that political campaigns are currently financed-- corporate contributions, pay-to-play, and of course, lobbyists. There are a couple of films coming out next year about Jack Abramoff -- one documentary from Participant Media, the other a feature film, both (oddly) called Casino Jack. They present good opportunities to "name the enemy" and mobilize public resentment against lobbyists.

The carrot, however, always seems harder. Why should ordinary citizens care? When compared with pressing needs like healthcare or crime prevention, or more aspirational programs like public education, what's so exciting about fixing the money in campaigns? Read more.

In California’s congressional district 36, stretching from West LA south to San Pedro, community leader Marcy Winograd has announced the hiring of two professional campaign staff members who are joining the Winograd for Congress campaign

Daniel Tamm, who worked on staff for the winning campaigns of Obama For America, State Senator Fran Pavley and the newly-elected Los Angeles City Councilman Paul Koretz, will direct the campaign. Winograd For Congress also has begun working with Mona Sanchez, a professional fundraiser, who helped raise over a million dollars for Wendy Gruel's successful race for Los Angles city controller.

Candidate Marcy Winograd said “I am very exited to be working with both Daniel and Mona. They bring valuable professional campaign experience. They know what it takes to win.”

Your electronic vote in the 2010 election has just been bought
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman | Free Press

Unless US Attorney General Eric Holder intervenes, your electronic vote in 2010 will probably be owned by the Republican-connected ES&S Corporation. With 80% ownership of America's electronic voting machines, ES&S could have the power to shape America's future with a few proprietary keystrokes.

ES&S has just purchased the voting machine division of the Ohio-based Diebold, whose role in fixing the 2004 presidential election for George W. Bush is infamous.

Critics of the merger hope Holder will rescind the purchase on anti-trust grounds.

But only a transparent system totally based on hand-counted paper ballots, with universal automatic voter registration, can get us even remotely close to a reliable vote count in the future.

For even if Holder does void this purchase, ES&S and Diebold will still control four of every five votes cast on touchscreen machines. As the US Supreme Court seems poised to open the floodgates on corporate campaign spending, the only difference could be that those who would buy our elections will have to write two checks instead of one.

And in fact, it's even worse than that. ES&S, Diebold and a tiny handful of sibling Republican voting equipment and computing companies control not only the touchscreen machines, but also the electronic tabulators that count millions of scantron ballots, AND the electronic polling books that decide who gets to vote and who doesn't.

Let's do a quick review:

1) ES&S, Diebold and other companies tied to election hardware and software are owned and operated by a handful of very wealthy conservatives, or right-to-life ideologues, with long-standing direct ties to the Republican Party;

2) As votes will be increasingly cast on optiscans, touchscreens or computer voting machines in the United States in 2010, what scant few so-called paper trail mechanisms that are in place will offer little security against electronic vote theft;

3) The source code on all US touchscreen machines now used for the casting and counting of ballots is proprietary, meaning the companies that own and operate the machines---including ES&S---are not required to share with the public the details of how those machines actually work; Read more.

Tomgram: Arundhati Roy, Is Democracy Melting? | TomDispatch

So you, as a citizen, want to run for a seat in the House of Representatives? Well, you may be too late. Back in 1990, according to OpenSecrets.org, a website of the Center for Responsive Politics, the average cost of a winning campaign for the House was $407,556. Pocket change for your average citizen. But that was so twentieth century. The average cost for winning a House seat in 2008: almost $1.4 million. Keep in mind, as well, that most of those House seats don't change hands, because in the American democratic system of the twenty-first century, incumbents basically don't lose, they retire or die.

In 2008, 403 incumbents ran for seats in the House and 380 of them won. Just to run a losing race last year would have cost you, on average, $492,928, almost $100,000 more than it cost to win in 1990. As for becoming a Senator? Not in your wildest dreams, unless you have some really good pals in pharmaceuticals and health care ($236,022,031 in lobbying paid out in 2008), insurance ($153,694,224), or oil and gas ($131,978,521). A winning senatorial seat came in at a nifty $8,531,267 and a losing seat at $4,130,078 in 2008. In other words, you don't have a hope in hell of being a loser in the American Congressional system, and what does that make you?

Of course, if you're a young, red-blooded American, you may have set your sights a little higher. So you want to be president? In that case, just to be safe for 2012, you probably should consider raising somewhere in the range of one billion dollars. After all, the 2008 campaign cost Barack Obama's team approximately $730 million and the price of a place at the table just keeps going up. Of course, it helps to know the right people. Last year, the total lobbying bill, including money that went out for electoral campaigns and for lobbying Congress and federal agencies, came to $3.3 billion and almost 9 months into 2009, another $1.63 billion has already gone out without an election in sight.

Let's face it. At the national level, this is what American democracy comes down to today, and this is what George W. Bush & Co. were so infernally proud to export by force of arms to Afghanistan and Iraq. This is why we need to think about the questions that Arundhati Roy -- to my mind, a heroic figure in a rather unheroic age -- raises about democracy globally in an essay adapted from the introduction to her latest book. That book, Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers, has just been published (with one essay included that originally appeared at TomDispatch). Let's face it, she's just one of those authors -- I count Eduardo Galeano as another -- who must be read. Need I say more? Tom

What Have We Done to Democracy?

Of Nearsighted Progress, Feral Howls, Consensus, Chaos, and a New Cold War in Kashmir
By Arundhati Roy

While we're still arguing about whether there's life after death, can we add another question to the cart? Is there life after democracy? What sort of life will it be? By "democracy" I don't mean democracy as an ideal or an aspiration. I mean the working model: Western liberal democracy, and its variants, such as they are.

So, is there life after democracy?

Attempts to answer this question often turn into a comparison of different systems of governance, and end with a somewhat prickly, combative defense of democracy. It's flawed, we say. It isn't perfect, but it's better than everything else that's on offer. Inevitably, someone in the room will say: "Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia... is that what you would prefer?"

Whether democracy should be the utopia that all "developing" societies aspire to is a separate question altogether. (I think it should. The early, idealistic phase can be quite heady.) The question about life after democracy is addressed to those of us who already live in democracies, or in countries that pretend to be democracies. It isn't meant to suggest that we lapse into older, discredited models of totalitarian or authoritarian governance. It's meant to suggest that the system of representative democracy -- too much representation, too little democracy -- needs some structural adjustment.

The question here, really, is what have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions has metastasized into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximizing profit? Read more.

Diebold/Premier's Equipment and Software Must Be Immediately and Permanently Decertified and a Criminal Investigation Launched

As A Result Of The California Secretary Of State's Findings and Diebold/Premier's Own Admissions That Its Voting Systems Do Not Meet Federal Standards, Velvet Revolution Calls on the Company to Return the Well Over $100 Million in Taxpayer Funds Spent by Californians on Failed, Faulty Voting System Hardware and Software. 

Learn more and take action: http://dieboldreturnourmoney.com