The hard-right Washington Times running a fair piece on Velvet Revolution’s demands that James Baker leave the National Election Reform Commission? What’s their game?…Either way, we’re happy to see it…
We wrote earlier about a newly impaneled bipartisan presidential election reform commission made up of the likes of former President Jimmy Carter, former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, both Democrats, and former White House Chief of Staff James A. Baker III, a Republican.
Now, an election-reform advocacy group wants Mr. Baker, who served under former Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, removed as the commission’s co-chairman before the panel gets busy on whatever reform it can accomplish.
Representing about 100 affiliated election-reform organizations, the Velvet Revolution considers Mr. Baker “a partisan political operative and Bush family loyalist” who “will irreconcilably sully the credibility of such a commission and render its findings completely suspect, wholly useless and, regrettably, without merit.”
“Mr. Baker is, in fact, the architect behind the invidious scheme implemented to ensure that the votes of all Americans would not be counted in the unfortunate and undemocratic 2000 presidential election fiasco,” says the group, referring to when the soon-to-be-inaugurated George W. Bush dispatched Mr. Baker to voter-challenged Florida.
The piece above ran on March 31, but we only caught it today thanks to BRAD BLOG commenter, Bushw@cker. Now waiting for the other shoe to drop…
Nice find. Many Thanks to Bushw@cker for picking this up.
Is there an email address so we can thank them for running this?
We may as well give credit generously when it is due.
Well, don’t get all excited yet. How many times have we seen news papers print something, only to turn it into a laughing point days or weeks later?
I think they are just trying to cover all bases. If something comes out of it all, they can say "hey, we were in on breaking that story" (which is bullshit).. if the administration manages to bulldoze it, they will probably make a story about how blogging is only done by "fanatics" and "conspiracy theorists" and other such unpleasantnesses, thereby -helping- Shrubman and his ilk by driving people ‘away’ from learning the truth..
I say, wait and see..
it could be that the Rev. Moon (owner of the Wash Times, and our new, self-appointed "Heavenly Father") is getting tired of the Dominionists over-stepping "their place"… or maybe he’s tired of W’s holier-than-thou presence…
or it could be just covering all bases, just in case.
Good job BUSHW@CKER, average job Washington Times.
It should be the lead story, "so don’t worry if we hit a pothole."
Republicans areFascists & MMIIXX
Thanks for your thanks 🙂
TO SCOOBY
Re: Inside the Beltway story Bipartisan?
John McCaslin’s email jmccaslin@washingtontimes.com
TO BRAD
Regarding John McCaslin, do you think a Leopard can change its spots, I’d RATHER
hope so?
……curiuoser and curiouser said Alice!
AND FINALLY GUYS I’M REALLY PISSED (SEE MMIIXX I’M BEGINNING TO TALK LIKE AN AMERICAN! [sniggers]) THAT NOBODY COMMENTED ON MY TRIBUTE TO ANN COULTERFROM THE LAST THREAD!
(I’ve temporarily posted Ann C. on my kids webpage, as I couldn’t manage to upload it to this Blog, hope it doesn’t give them nightmares!)
LOOKS LIKE WE’VE FINALLY GOT THE BASTARDS ON THE RUN!
Well, it’s not even half the story, is it? What about ACVR "participants" at the commission? What about revealing their backgrounds? What about DV4D? Crumbs are not enough…The Baker issue is probably being used as cover by Rove & Partners to obscure the entire elections fiascos.
BUSHW@CKER #6
I visited your website to see the frightening picture of DAnn Coulter. S/He’s the grossest of the gross. I had seen the pic posted on another site and some of the comments there were so HILARIOUS! (Like, "I’d rather have sex with sand or a cheese grater." Hahah!)
Re-posting (inpart)#69 from David Schoen’s letter to Dr R. Pastor
p.s You really shouldn’t be so nasty to opinion leaders and activists who are trying to do the same think that you are allegedly doing. I hope you see the delicious irony in the fact that the head of an election reform commission has suggested to a group of activists that their similar views means that they don’t have to be listened to!
Re: #69 David, another delicious irony of the Good Doctor’s intemperate outburst is that Common Cause of which Dr Pastor is a Board Member, also not surprisingly has email "form letters" on their website for C C campaigns!
Hey KIRA
For what it’s worth, that’s my crappy piece of Photoshoping and for all I know, Time Magazine and Ms Coulter are probably out looking for me now!
Do you know of any safe places to hide?
BUSHW@CKER after looking at the pic of DAnn Coulter I think I may have worked out "W", when I was a kid at school people would say "If you play with yourself you’ll become stupid" ,well maybe when DAnn Coulter had his sex change operation "W" was on the next operating table and DAnn unwanted penis was transplanted onto "W" ,because how could he GET that STUPID playing with only one penis.
P.S. Don’t your kids get scared looking at their website now.
P.S.S. sorry for being OT,dang .
From the Rove/Baker Electoral Reform commission
I bring you, John Fundamentally STUPID!!
Bushw@cker #9
This whole thing is very strange, indeed. It’s obvious everybody uses the email "form letters" these days – I sign one every day or two. It’s just awful that Pastor is the Executive Director of the National Election Reform Commission, which is trying to implement computerized voting machines nationally – and he’s so ignorant about email form letters???
Pastor is embedded with Common Cause – now I’m wondering about Common Cause. They don’t seem to be working with VR. If they are another shill front group – we need to know.
BRAD!! Is Common Cause with us or not???
PS Bushw@cker #10 – I don’t think it was your picture, because your’s says "Ms Piggy" and the other one didn’t. Right now – I’m not sure about any safe places. Everything’s topsy-turvy, or as Brad puts it "through the looking glass."
MMIIXX
Was that whot Dudya (sic) wos referin two when he
says "there are the haves and the have mores"
There was a kid at my school we named trippledick!
And yes, like their bedrooms, their website is also mess!
P.S. Where in AUS did you live, 22 years ago?
Cronulla area Gymea Bay
KIRA #13
Did you read Common Cause’s testimony to the Rove/Baker Commission, and what were your thoughts?
Have some rels in Sydney, the old man lived in Rockdale!
Sydney’s a great place to visit!
Bushwacker #10
Hide –right out in the open sunshine, ‘they’ cannot go there to seek you out–the sun would make them shrivel up.
Bushw@cker #16
I heard a little of Chellie Pingree’s testimony on C-Span, but with other things going on at the same time, wasn’t able to give it my full attention. Are you referring to the .pdf file (Chellie’s Testimony) from CC’s site? I pulled it up and I’m reading it now.
What was your opinion?
Here’s a few sound bites with commentary by NPR’s Pam Fessler.
Also from Common Cause’s Blog:
More on Yesterday’s Commission Hearing
Today, Pam Fessler opened her "Morning Edition" story on the Carter-Baker Federal Election Reform Commission with this: "Chellie Pingree, President of Common Cause, said, `Voters waited in line for hours, were confronted with malfunctioning voting equipment, faced arbitrary ID requirements, and found they had been inexplicably deleted from the voter rolls.’" Yes! The message was getting through – the 2004 election did not go smoothly and this commission accepted that as a fact.
I sat through three panels’ presentations and the final press conference yesterday, my feelings ranging from concern to surprise and elation. Despite Democratic activists’ worries that the presence of Baker as co-chair and other Republicans with whom he has close ties and the recent formation of a blatant partisan press machine to push the Right’s election agenda, I heard lots of encouraging things. Among them:
Testimony by Chellie, League of Women Voters President Kay Maxwell, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights executive director Barbara Arnwine aptly pointed out the mess the current system is in.
Three DRE advocates sitting in front of me shook their heads and one whispered, "We’re sunk," as President Carter all but declared that one outcome of the commission would be the requirement of a paper ballot in all voting machinery.
Professor David Dill pointed out without fanfare that one of the commissioners, Ralph Munro, is on the board of VoteHere, creating a conflict of interest.
Panelist John Fund, of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, implored the commission members not to attempt to mandate a nationwide voter ID card (this seems to be of interest to a number of commission members).
So, will the commission end up with recommendations that we will be comfortable with? Time will tell. But the first indication isn’t as scary as some of us expected.
By Barbara Burt, Common Cause Election Reform Team Leader
I just finished reading Chellie’s testimony & it looked pretty good except for this: My complaint is the rush to implement this technology when it’s very difficult – and maybe impossible to make secure, fair and honest.
Someone can be bought off at any end of the process making it easy to massively manipulate vote totals. If we used paper ballots and pencils – it would be very difficult to commit large scale fraud and we would save a pile of money.
Of course we know how silly it is to think anyone would participate in any large scale fraud, eh?
Inform the commission that you will all be taking a pencil to the next election and using it to mark your ballot. If it is not going to be counted properly by the machine, you may as well mark the ballot with a pencil. Using a "cooked or cookable" machine is letting them rub their garbage in your face; using a pencil at least makes a "point".
Bushw@cker what does DRE stand for in #20 comment?
I’m Canadian but have been following this blog and I am very excited to see what is happening for Brad and all who have worked with him. ( I wrote a note to Dr. Pastor just to let him know how we would have liked ALL the votes to have been counted also so that we would not have to deal with undiplomatic Bush.
Hello GWN #23! Glad you put in your 2 cents with the Dr.
DRE stands for Direct Recording Electronic i.e. touchscreen voting machines.
GWN #23
DRE is the acronym for Direct Recording Electronic.
Here is a good Electronic Voting resource link here..
Agreed! I’m from Australia, so there! we share the same Commonwealth ties. I was drawn to Bradblog, out of a sense powerlessness as I witnessed our government and complicit media trading away our sovereignty to this corrupt unelected Bu$h Administration. The great community of thinkers and doers here and in Blogasphere give me some genuine hope we can lance this ugly boil before it kills the patient.
Hey GWN, have you bought your Commonwealth Games tickets for next year?
Who knows, could even put you up for a few nights!
Cheers
KIRA #19
HAS COMMON CAUSE BECOME TOO PASTORIZED?
Still giving it some further thought, but my initial take is that they are too softly softly and appear unwilling to use the "F" word when discussing the counting of votes and also make no reference to the damming Exit Polls as far as I have read. I think the good people at CC are serious about some aspects of Electoral Reform but are madly trying not to rock the boat in the more controversial realms.
A few less Robert Pastors and a few more Bev Harris’ and Brad Friedmans (sorry … there is only one Brad Friedman) on their Board would be a good start!
P.S. I liked Chellie’s opening statement "This Commission must not judge the 2004 election based on the outcome, [sadly Dr Pastor doesn’t agree with his CEO on this fundamental point] but instead look at how the voters fared under our current "system" of voting."
How about a bit of Grand Theft America to get that blood pulsing through our veins?
Kira like you say"mostly stuff we’ve read before"……
its not the half of it but sums up some things nicely.
Everybody I know that knows I’m following this "bushit" situation thinks I’m crazy and how could anyone "steal an election" .Then I re-read articles like the one you linked to and it blows me away everytime, are their eyes only painted on ?
http://whatreallyhappened.com/
What REALLY is happening?
Thanks MMIIXX. I’m so happy we have some folks from other countries participating in this quest. Just knowing you’re adding your support makes a lot of difference to me. And it blows me away when people look at me like I’m the one who’s crazy!!
Fact is – every aspect of the business world relies on the same numbers analyses provided by the group who crunched the exit poll data & came up with the could only happen a million to 1 report. Every good business person and every corporation and every bank uses that kind of analysis – they pay good money for it. Only when it’s used in this particular circumstance is it loony tinfoil hat conspiracy stuff.
Feels like the Twilight Zone.
KIRA #30
Deadly laughs!
Just about pissed myself laughing!
Reckon they thought they had got away with it until someone spotted that bulge in Bush’s suit during Presdent Duhbates!
Absolutely amazing what Turd Blossom can do with a gallon of formaldehyde, a couple of syringefulls of BOTOX, a Tandy Radio Controlled Glider and a crate full of Glen 20 air-freshner.
Fooled me!
Bushw@cker #33
Sorry – I should’a warned you! I still laugh everytime I watch it. Those guys are pretty clever. And – it’s just about the way it all happened, too.
Since we’re laughing, I’ll leave ya with this one:
Trip to the Moon
Oops – no children for the link in my #34. I forgot.
The Commission will dutifully issue a report. It will acknowledge "glitches and problems" in the election process. Some of these may even be fixed. What it will NOT do is admit that our computerized elections are now fraudulent. Our republic has been stolen from us, and the ONLY way the crooks will give up control of those voting machines is when their cold dead fingers are pried loose. Jerry Chin of "Online Journal" is correct. We cannot demonstrate, e-mail, or vote our way out of this horror. We must destroy the companies that make the machines. Either that, or learn to live as slaves.
A Time for Disobedience.
I bet Robert Paster never calls Brad on the phone again.
KIRA
Did you see Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell appears to have suddenly given the given the nod to Dieboldand the other Electronic Vote Fixing companies including Hart InterCivic Inc are not impressed.
I can just picture Wally O’Dell shaking kenneth’s
hand and promising to deliver the Governorship of Ohio for Blackwell in 06.
At least we can confirm our suspicions that the MSM can do the job if they want to.
That encourages me in the sense that there is hope, but it also means the MSM is the way it is because it wants to be – a bit discouraging.
The issue of cleaning up voting fraud is not even a partisan issue at its crux … which makes one wonder why there are not many such MSM articles out there.
They should be standard fare.
Feet on the ground needed in Harrisburg PA TOMORROW, April 22, 2005!
The DE-certified Unilect machines will be considered for RE-certification at a hearing on Friday!
See this alert here:
http://www.votepa.us/
(I posted a similar alert at VR as well)
Unfortunately I won’t be able to get out of work to make it.
On the MSM:
I wouldn’t get too excited about this Washington Times article. I’m sure that if you cherry picked through all the pre-Iraq war era, you could find all kinds of sage warnings in the MSM, but the problem is SUSTAINED and fair coverage. Overall, the pre-war coverage was a tragedy. The same goes for electoral reform. There may be an occaisional well written article, but if they tend to be on page 17, and only once every 8 months, it doesn’t do us much good. Look at Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, for example. He had the only decent TV coverage shortly after the election, but where is he now? Honestly I haven’t checked, but I think I would have heard if he resumed coverage of the issue. This is going to be a tough tough battle.
Could be a sign of a schism among the holy rollers. Rev. Moon has a huge ego, like Falwell, Dobson, Colson, Robertson, et al., and with all the talk about Terri Schiavo, activist judges, discrimination against "people of faith," not to mention all the news from the Vatican, he might feel this is a good way to attract attention.
I agree we should take a guarded approach. Good news, but Moon can’t be trusted.
"PASTORIZED" – yup. Gutless & Spineless or On The Payroll and I’m sick of the sugary-sweet way they dance around the real problem.
You know, Bushw@cker … sigh …, we have gone through the motions of casting our votes from 2000 through the last faux set of elections. The NeoCONs are packed in the House & Senate through a series of highly suspicious popular candidate upsets and it appears many of the Dems (Dims) are complicit in the scheme. Who can we trust (other than those who are speaking the truth loud & clear)? And what can we do?
And Pastor, did he make a Freudian slip when he yelled at Brad saying, "Well, they are not going to be listened to"? (they meaning us)
Congress has decided across the aisle that they’re going to forge ahead and implement the DREs no matter that they are 3 times more expensive than paper ballots. No matter that we unable able to secure the systems to prevent fraud. No matter that, as Baker said on Monday, we won’t get around to it until after 2006. And it will probably be after brother Jeb miraculously “wins” in ’08.
All reporting is greatly SANITIZED if not altogether scrubbed, intentionally, in order to hide the fraud and create more tension. These are the same tactics used by the master of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. There’s absolutely no doubt.
Some journalists are beginning to come out publicly on the propaganda issue – Mary Mapes (currently writing a book about the subject), Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite, Robert Koehler and Phil Donahue. They are all telling the same story – that the truth is not allowed. Can they do anything? Look at the huge number of books written about the mob in charge. Sheesh – are they doing any good? If the truth is not allowed, how in the bloody hell are we going to make changes in this system? I’m getting so tired … I just hope this thing picks up some steam in a hurry.
We have computer illiterates in charge of implementing computer systems across the nation. Excuse me – what kind of stupidity is that? Oh yes, I forgot – if it seems too illogical – it’s gotta be FRAUD.
I was just reading a good letter posted on Bartcop – here’s the addy:Computers Threw the Vote to Bush
It’s mostly stuff we’ve read before, but a nice compilation and a few things I hadn’t seen before.
Bushw@cker #27 – That’s one of my favorite videos! Thanks for posting the link.
Here’s a laugh:
Pretzels Anyone?
Bushw@cker #39
Yes, I had read about J. Katherine Blackwell cooing over his success in getting the Diebold machines with paper receipt printers as an excuse for witholding much of the money provided by the gov’t for election 2004. That money was withheld from the poorer precincts that would have voted against the CONS. What a waste of taxpayer’s hard earned money. These bloated maggots are all around us, sucking up our wages and infesting our Democratic system.
The only way to stop them is to shut down the country WITH, WITH a turnout of many millions of people demanding the resignation of the Bush Administration. It will take some discomfort and a lot of determination. A date should be set; e.g., the last week in June: 27, 28, 29, 30, 1st July before the 4th of July weekend. Shut the country down for those five days, and it will give those who need a wake-up call something to think about on July 2, 3, & 4th. No one goes to work, but instead to "work" on the sanctity of integrity in government for the people and the elections, and in the media. The American people, like every other people, must "work" to keep their democracy and their freedom.
Are Things getting curiouser and curiouser?
Karl Rove seems to indicate the media is not as liberal as rhetoric would have it … but that the media is too hard on government. Right.
He talks like the president did during the dabates and indicates governing is hard work and therefore the media should let up.
Right. As if the MSM is on the case …
(link here).
Dredd #46
A (not so) thinly veiled threat to the media to print only WH propaganda? So – are they getting prickly? I hope the media takes offense and refuses to be stifled even further.
Lets hope so.
On the subject of Diebold, today Bev Harris has posted some of her FOIA docs. I started reading one of the Diebold internal memos and had to laugh when I read the line: "Then we got into the brigade of hysterical activists. They let 6 or 7 of them testify and the testimony ranged from the misinformed to the bizarre."
Must be this same 6 or 7 Squad!! Haha.
But I digress. I’m having a real problem with the Partisan tone of this memo. Anybody else see it?
Here’s the link:
Diebold notes on "Ohio Mud Wrestling"…