James Kroeger, author of The Republican Nemesis has a new website:

Nontrivial Pursuits

And when referring to Diebold's "troubled history" they conveniently omit that minor detail of their lack of due diligence when they purchased Global Election Systems (complete with convicted felons, one of whom was kept on the staff till not that long ago).

Not to mention that one of the felons was convicted of using computers to accomplish multiple counts of fraud. (And that fraud involved programming accounts to have multiple sets of books. And guess what--within about a month of being hired by GES, the vote tabulating software suddenly acquired multiple sets of books. What a coincidence.)

Even though Ion Sancho points out publicly that he thinks a similar hack was what occurred in his county in the 2000 elections--NYT is still playing nice with Diebold. This should be page one news, with hard investigative journalism--not playing footsie with the Diebold PR people who are trying to do damage limitation.

What a copout by the NYT. Any shreds of reputation it had for being the newspaper of record are sliding quickly down the drain.

I think a few weeks ago, mitchell had an item about horrifically designed Web sites. Not sure if he mentioned the seizure-inducing effects of yellow text on a black background or not, though.

Anyway, instead of making stuff up about what stock he might own, you might have used that space to include the following bit from the same item. I know, it kinda destroys your whole thesis and your excuse to get all righteous and ideological...

The company may have largely itself to blame for the conspiracy theories surrounding it, what with the security flaws in its systems and the urgings last year of Walden W. O'Dell, then its chief executive, for potential campaign donors to "help Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president."

I'm your Pufnstuf President!

Well, sure the company has itself to blame--but given all the FACTS, why do you think a corporate conspiracy is hypothetical? Even leaving out O'Dell's personal political convictions, the facts include:

--Global Election Services (GES) hired known felons, including one who was a notorious fraudster for "cooking the books" by adding multiple sets of accounts
--Shortly after GES hires this felon, GES vote counting database has multiple sets of books (which were not in the program before)
--Diebold buys GES and keeps the felons/fraudsters on board (so much for "due diligence")
--Multiple vulnerabilities are discovered in Diebolds software code--the equivalent of wide-open back doors
--The wide-open back doors are carefully kept in place as the software goes through multiple versions (requiring lots of extra effort by the programmers to keep the back doors open)
--Diebold leaves software code unprotected on the internet for years (then after it's been circulating for years tries to claim its code is a "trade secret")
--Diebold leaves sensitive financial material in unprotected dumpster (which is against the law)
--Diebold's financial records reveal payments to lobbyists that it has not disclosed (which is also against the law)
--Diebold denies the software vulnerabilities, even though they are mentioned by staff in in-house emails
--Hacks to the GEMS counting computer database are demonstrated
--Diebold denies that this would be possible under election conditions, even though most counties are insecure
--Diebold denies that its setup includes software that would allow network/internet connectivity
--Readouts of software on Diebold machines on election day shows presence of programs that allow for networking/internet connectivity (and that observers also see is connected to internet and network)
--Computer experts see vulnerabilities (or rather intentionally-created "features") to use memory cards to re-program optical scanners (known by all the staff because they liked this facility)
--Not 1 but 2 different tests are carried out that successfully demonstrate the possibilitiy to completely change election results on both a scanner and the central counting computer, altering both poll tapes, and leaving no trace that the election was hacked.
--Diebold continues to say this would never be possible, and claims hackers were given passwords and code that would otherwise not be available--statements which were not true
--Diebold lies to election officials across the country about the vulnerability of its systems (denying the memory cards can be used to change the computer programs), even after the memory card hacks have been demonstrated to have changed what is on the computer

OK--how much more do you need to make a case for a corporate conspiracy to defraud its customers by selling them a dodgy piece of goods? And to sell equipment that is not compliant with federal and state requirements for security? And to break numerous federal and state laws and/or regulations?

Then there's the matters of selling its staff a health insurance policy, but then causing problems if they develop a serious health problem. And of selling its employees stock options, while denying the extent of its product problems and of potential legal liabilities. And the allegations of insider trading by 8 top executives.

Of course there's more--their proven track record of defrauding the state of CA with machines that didn't do what they claimed they did. And the fact that they haven't upheld the requirements the judge required of them as a condition of settling that lawsuit.

And this does not include any consideration as to whether or not there were specific ties or favoritism shown by Diebold to any particular party. Maybe they sold "back door access" on a non-partisan basis, or perhaps to the highest bidder.

Don't get too caught up in the party political thing. The evidence points to both major parties being eager to exploit any vulnerability they could get their hands on; the circumstances just differed from one location to another. Why do you think that neither Democrats nor Republicans are clamoring to inspect these machines?

There have been plenty of suspicious election results on both sides of the aisle since these machines came into play. It's just a shame that not enough people have been paying attention. The NYT and the rest of the media are still treating this story as "hush-hush", ensuring that people don't wake from their slumber.

The legislatorss that got elected on these machines sure don't want to have them looked at too closely. Why do you think there is so little movement in the Legislature for serious election reform with teeth?

Brad, though I've been tough on you at times, I thought of you a lot while editing in reminiscences for one of my mentors, whose obituary appeared today. Keep up the good work. (Perhaps they'll call you a shameless self-promoter and gossip-monger too.)

We badly need your work. Here is an excerpt from the commentary / article about the death of Jack Anderson that I just posted at Black Box Voting.

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I had the great honor of working for Jack Anderson for a while, doing primarily editorial and marketing writing for two of his publications. His passing, not unexpected, saddens me greatly. Would you believe, the idea to dumpster-dive Diebold came from a lunch with Jack Anderson, where he had us in stitches describing how he dumpster-dived FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover?

One obituary is really quite chilling. Most investigative reporting has been cut from the budget now, and much of what remains is corporate-toadying pablum.

This article gave me the creeps. It shows how much the free press has deteriorated.

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The Washington Post / AP as covered in the Seattle Times - Dec. 18 2005

Unbounded by contemporary notions of objectivity, Mr. Anderson was highly successful in the 1950s and '60s, when few reporters actively sought to uncover government wrongdoing. At one point, his column appeared in about 1,000 newspapers with 45 million daily readers.

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From Bev: "Unbounded by contemporary notions of objectivity." Translation: He was honest. Everyone who knew Jack remembers one very strong characteristic: He was absolutely honest and his stories checked out.

As we have learned in the voting issue, "contemporary notions of objectivity" mean reporters are supposed to report B.S. without checking it out ("HAVA made me do it") and can go only so far when covering obvious wrongdoing on the part of the private company that OWNS OUR VOTES. But okay. I hope we get more reporters like Jack Anderson, who are unbounded by contemporary standards of "objectivity."

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The number of scoops that he had a hand in was amazing: the Keating Five congressional-ethics scandal; revelations in the Iran-contra scandal; the U.S. tilt away from India toward Pakistan, for which he received the 1972 Pulitzer Prize; the ITT-Dita Beard affair, which linked the settlement of an antitrust suit against ITT by the Justice Department to a $400,000 pledge to underwrite the 1972 Republican convention; the CIA-Mafia plot to kill Fidel Castro; the final days of Howard Hughes; U.S. attempts to undermine Chilean President Salvador Allende; allegations about a possible Bulgarian connection to the shooting of the pope; an Iranian connection to the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut.

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From Bev: And this leaves out amazing work on the Kennedy assassination, where he ripped into the Warren Commission for its coverup of the combined role of Castro and organized crime figures in the assassination. It fails to mention breaking the Savings & Loan scandal in the 1980s. The heavy lifting on that was done by his lead assistant, Mike Binstein. In another hilarious lunchtime conversation, Jack related how this happened: They were hot on the trail of the S&L deterioration, where owners were loaning themselves money, defaulting, then (in the case of Dallas mayor Starke Taylor, who was alleged to have been rigged into office by Conny McCormack, resulting in a two-year election fraud investigation by the Texas Atty. General) they sometimes sued the failing S&Ls for making bad loans to themselves. At any rate, the Jack Anderson story: Mike Binstein was hot on the trail, but needed something rock solid. After all, it would trigger the biggest bailout in U.S. history. He approached his source, who nervously let him into the building after hours, then locked him in the copy room. Binstein spent all night copying incriminating S&L documents, and wasn't let out even to pee until 6 a.m. the following morning, when he hurried out with satchels of evidence and a full bladder.

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"He had such huge strengths and huge weaknesses," said Mark Feldstein, director of the George Washington University journalism program, who is writing Mr. Anderson's biography. "He practiced journalism like a blue-collar craftsman with a populist point of view. He was practicing a crusading craft rather than a profession, and [investigative reporting] has lost some of its juice, its verve, its gusto in trying to be objective. Anderson didn't try to hide his politics or his agenda."

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From Bev - No, investigative reporting has lost some of its juice because it is toadying up to corporate backers and bribed editors. I've seen so many reporters called off of live stories with witnesses and armloads of proof that it would make you sick for days. And investigative reporting has also lost some of its juice because in making the stories more palatable to the power structure, newspapers are (deservedly) losing circulation. People want to read the truth. We are bored when everything is politically correct. Newspapers would make more money if they went back to real reporting.

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Mr. Anderson was an investigator from the start, when he went to work in 1947 as a "legman" for his predecessor Drew Pearson's column. Pearson died in 1969 and left the column to him. Mr. Anderson ran it, with an ever-changing cast of interns, until he unofficially retired in 2001, when Douglas Cohn, his writing partner since 1999, and Newsweek's Eleanor Clift took over.

Mr. Anderson's work enraged those in power. President Nixon tried to smear him as a homosexual, the CIA was ordered to spy on him, and, according to the Watergate tapes, a Nixon aide ordered two cohorts to try to kill the journalist by poisoning.

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from Bev - Specifically, Jack told me that G. Gordon Liddy tried to slip LSD into his drink. You'll see that in the movie "Nixon" by the way --- a movie by Oliver Stone that, interestingly, rehabilitates Oliver Stone's film on the Kennedy assassination to some extent, changing the story and matching it up to Jack Anderson's investigation. The "Who Killed JFK" report that I edited and updated for Anderson as one of my last assignments for him led off with "Oliver Stone got it wrong." Then the Nixon movie came out and made subtle changes in the Kennedy assassination story, and mentioned the LSD story, which Jack told every time I saw him. Because of that, I've always wondered if he was a behind the scenes consultant for Stone's "Nixon" movie.

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Despite all his scoops and his high profile in middle America, the power elite in Washington, D.C., saw him as an uncouth gossipmonger and shameless self-promoter.

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From Bev - Huh. Imagine that. A shameless self promoter. That's what they say when you're right over and over and lots of people start listening to you.

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Mr. Anderson, a Mormon who eschewed smoking, drinking, cursing and caffeine, was cast from the dissenter mold of journalism. He called himself a muckraker, a term from the turn of the 20th century.

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From Bev --- Actually, he told me he called himself a muckraker because people were using it as an insult so he decided to take ownership of the term. He proudly called his publishing company "Muckrakers Inc."

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He launched the careers of scores of journalists, employing them as uncredited interns and underpaid associates. They included Brit Hume of Fox, Tony Capaccio of Bloomberg News Service, Howard Kurtz and Jonathan Krim of The Washington Post, Roll Call columnist Ed Henry and novelist Les Whitten.

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From Bev -- "underpaid associates." I met a lot of them, and they considered it an honor and a hoot to work for him. And by the way, when do you ever hear of interns being highly paid? I worked with his newsletter a lot, and I specifically remember proofing the CREDITS which appeared at the bottom of EVERY newsletter. This article shows us exactly how things are "spun" to rewrite history.

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Mr. Anderson himself grew into a multimedia personality, penning not only a syndicated newspaper column but more than a dozen books and subscription newsletters. He was Washington bureau chief for Parade magazine. He broadcast a syndicated radio show; had a years-long gig on ABC-TV's Good Morning America; and had a TV show, "Truth," which featured public figures hooked to a lie detector.

"I have to do daily what Woodward and Bernstein did once," he told The Washington Post in 1983, without a trace of embarrassment.

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From Bev - Yes. One thing he seemed to rue was not telling "the story behind the story" as he referred to "All the President's Men." The story behind the story is usually more interesting than the story itself. I'm not sure I want to read the biography written by the guy they refer to up above, but I'd love to read the story behind the story. Jack was legendary. It was related to me two months ago by a cohort who attended his last birthday party that he once jumped off a dock in his suit and swam to the bottom of the pilings, to check out whether some secret booty was stashed underwater, as had been rumored. (It wasn't.)

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Born in Long Beach, Calif., but reared in a small town outside Salt Lake City, Mr. Anderson was interested in newspaper work from an early age. At 12, he edited the Boy Scout page of the Deseret News and soon advanced to a $7-a-week job with the Murray (Utah) Eagle.

Mr. Anderson was considered significantly more accurate than his predecessor, although he was not error-free. He admitted he wrongly charged Donald Rumsfeld with lavishly decorating his office while cutting expenses on programs of the Office of Economic Opportunity. The columnist also admitted giving covert aid to Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the early days of his anti-Communist crusade, although he turned on McCarthy later.

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From Bev --- Actually, since Jack has been basically retired from his day to day news responsibilities for a decade due to his fight with Parkinsons (he had great difficulty even typing) I'd have to wonder if this was his error. He may not have fact-checked something his interns or staff did, and he was sick. I wonder about the date of the Rumsfeld story.

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Survivors include his wife of 56 years, Olivia Farley Anderson of Bethesda; nine children; 41 grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.

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From Bev: Speaking for myself, the folks at Citizens Against Government Waste, Muckrakers Inc., and all the others who knew Jack Anderson, we'll miss him and it was an honor to watch him show what happens to government when someone unafraid tells it like it is.

Bev Harris
Founder
Black Box Voting, Inc.

P.S.: Brad, keep it up. There are a lot of toes out there that need to be held to the fire.

Here's a more accurate article:

Muckraking Columnist Jack Anderson Dies

WASHINGTON --- Jack Anderson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning muckraking columnist who struck fear into the hearts of corrupt or secretive politicians, inspiring Nixon operatives to plot his murder, died Saturday. He was 83.

Anderson died at his home in Bethesda, Md., of complications from Parkinson's disease, said one of his daughters, Laurie Anderson-Bruch.

Columnist Jack Anderson testifies before a Government Information subcommittee in this May 1972 file photo, in Washington.

Anderson gave up his syndicated Washington Merry-Go-Round column at age 81 in July 2004, after Parkinson's disease left him too ill to continue. He had been hired by the column's founder, Drew Pearson, in 1947.

The column broke a string of big scandals, from Eisenhower assistant Sherman Adams taking a vicuna coat and other gifts from a wealthy industrialist in 1958 to the Reagan administration's secret arms-for-hostages deal with Iran in 1986.

It appeared in some 1,000 newspapers in its heyday. Anderson took over the column after Pearson's death in 1969, working with a changing cast of co-authors and staff over the years.

A devout Mormon, Anderson looked upon journalism as a calling. Considered one of the fathers of investigative reporting, Anderson was renowned for his tenacity, aggressive techniques and influence in the nation's capital.

"He was a bridge for the muckrakers of a century ago and the crop that came out of Watergate," said Mark Feldstein, Anderson's biographer and a journalism professor at George Washington University. "He held politicians to a level of accountability in an era where journalists were very deferential to those in power."

Anderson won a 1972 Pulitzer Prize for reporting that the Nixon administration secretly tilted toward Pakistan in its war with India. He also published the secret transcripts of the Watergate grand jury.

Such scoops earned him a spot on President Nixon's "enemies list." Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy has described how he and other Nixon political operatives planned ways to silence Anderson permanently _ such as slipping him LSD or staging a fatal car crash _ but the White House nixed the idea.

Anderson's biggest misstep also took place in 1972, when he reported that Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri _ at the time the Democratic nominee for vice president _ had a history of arrests for drunken and reckless driving. Anderson later acknowledged that his sourcing was faulty and apologized to Eagleton, who eventually dropped out of the race after revelations of treatment for mental illness.

Over the years, Anderson was threatened by the Mafia and investigated by numerous government agencies trying to trace the sources of his leaks. In 1989, police investigated him for smuggling a gun into the U.S. Capitol to demonstrate security lapses.

Known for his toughness on the trail of a story, Anderson was also praised for personal kindness. His son Kevin said that when his father's reporting led to the arrest of some involved in the Watergate scandal, he aided their families financially.

"I don't like to hurt people, I really don't like it at all," Anderson said in 1972. "But in order to get a red light at the intersection, you sometimes have to have an accident."

Anderson began his newspaper career as a 12-year-old writing about scouting activity and community fairs in the outskirts of Salt Lake City, Utah. His first investigative story exposed unlawful polygamy in his church. He was as a civilian war correspondent during World War II and later, while in the Army, wrote for the military paper Stars and Stripes.

After he went to work with Pearson, the team took on communist-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy, exposed Connecticut Sen. Thomas Dodd's misuse of campaign money, and revealed the CIA's attempt to use the Mafia to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Anderson also wrote more than a dozen books.

He was diagnosed with Parkinson's in 1986. In a speech a decade later, he made light of the occasional, uncontrollable shaking the disease caused.

"The doctors tell me it's Parkinson's," he said. "I suspect that 52 years in Washington caused it."

He is survived by his wife, Olivia, and nine children.

Thanks Bev for your own thoughts on Anderson. He was a favorite of mine since I was a boy. And thanks to all y'all who are helping root out the truth in this American age of fascism...

It seems that anytime the MSM reports on the issues that are so freely reported and discussed here at Brad Blog (and other blogs of its ilk), they always leave "the back door unlocked", leaving an escape valve in case they're pressured to back off the issue. Such noncommittal reporting really serves no one.

The great Jack Anderson didn't report that way. Could a new "Jack Anderson" exist in this current climate of being "...bound... by contemporary notions of objectivity" (which is just another way saying that no one's willing to rock the boat)?...seems that way, at least in the MSM....Here on the Brad Blog? NO PROBLEM! Brad is "rockin' 'em"!

I'd respectfully suggest there's a difference between muckraking and investigative journalism.

Pulitzer and Hearst pioneered muckraking in the late 19th century. Hearst, in fact, studied Pulitzer's methods while he was a student at Harvard (so much so that he neglected his real studies and flunked out). When Hearst's father decided to run for the Senate, William Randolph took over the San Francisco Examiner.

Hearst wasn't exactly your garden-variety populist.
He had traveled in Europe as a boy with his mother, who was wealthy in her own right. His father, though a semi-literate, had made a fortune in mining. Hearst was a paradox...a child of privilege who took on the high and mighty, not because he resented rich people (on the contrary, he cultivated them), but to become so successful in publishing that he could leverage that success into other fields...politics, real estate, and international diplomacy. The word "citizen" in Citizen Kane was meant sarcastically by Welles, I'm sure.

A true investigative journalist has purer motives. He wants the truth for the truth's sake. He wants to bring down the high and mighty, yes...but not so he can be high and mighty, as Hearst did. I think Jack Anderson was an investigative journalist, not a muckraker.

Brad I think it is hilarious that "NY TIMES: 'Counting of Votes is a Public Trust, Diebold Doesn't Get It'".

Here is a rag that has so many presstitutes doing stenography for this corrupt administration that Heidi Fleiss is in shock and awe.

Now all of a sudden they push the notion of the public trust? Wow, like Dylan said "We got lawbreakers making the rules".

There is so much corruption, including Diebold and the MSM, I can't keep track of it anymore.

The Public Trust seems to have been tossed aside as a nuisance.

WayneMadsenReport.com has begun a report on another way Repubs are 'maneuvering' monies through government agencies and into Repub political campaign coffers. It mirrors the earlier story about DoD contracts to fake companies, so it could be 'contributed' to campaigns.

It appears the Repubs have begun to think that all federal money can be stolen without any danger of oversight, since they 'own' Congress.

Somehow, I believe Jack Anderson and today's BradBlog.com would love to expose all the thievery and nonsense, just for the fun of it.

I had the pleasure of seeing Jack Anderson live at a local auditorium in my town in the early eighties. He was warning then about the corruption and was so honest and I think woke up a lot of people. I looked forward to reading his articles.
Thank you Bev for bringing this up, he was amazing.

I often wonder what happened to Peter Arnott of CNN, another truthteller, imo. He seems to have disappeared after CNN fired him. I have not googled him but hope he is continuing his search for truth. I believe he was from Australia but have a hunch the people are controlled there as we are here.

I have also watched the 'Deadwood' series on HBO. The Hearst empire has now come to Deadwood and began to buy up all the gold mines, this in late 1800's. This is interesting to me, they have been acquiring their fortune for quite some time. The series is supposed to be based on 'fact' but who knows.....

We certainly need some gutsy reporters out there but rather guess they will be coming from the blogs, MSM will never cover the real news again. Brad is a hero for following this voting coverage and BBV of course! M4

Go Catherine, #5 --- what a great description of the Dieboldic plot against democracy in the US you wrote! No wonder guv jeb is trying to act like he don't really know the diebold boys and their machines all that well. (Is he just trying to keep his suit clean when the stuff hits the fan?)

Bev, #6, thanks for praising Brad. As one who has been following his work since before the Nov. 2004 coup renewal event, I find him to be a rare and honest source of truth about the US crisis. If we can't vote the crooks out, we'll blog 'em out!

Bev- Bless you and Jack Anderson both, for refusing to give up no matter how much mud is slung your way. Even if it makes others uncomfortable, regardless of what side they hail from.

In our day and age we need all the investigative journalists we can get, even if its just us citizens.

And today Wayne Madsen is one of the best I know. He has never let me down and has always strived to be credible. Some will take issue with his methods, but I believe it would be in anyone's best interest to find out about these defense contractors and how the GOP or other congress is getting its money.

He was correct about David H. Brooks. Brooks and his company DHB just held a 30 million dollar 'barmitzfah' for their daughters, and sent it into political appointees. Rather than worry at all about sending the bullet-proof vests the soldiers in Iraq need right away, to be able to see another day tomorrow or live for even 2 more hours.

It's a real worthwhile read:

Contract fraud of unprecedented scale in Department of Defense

Doug E.

RE #12

Even tho the NYT withheld the story for a year, I commend them for finally releasing the story.

The president exerted influence to try to get them not to publish it, but they printed it anyway (link here).

The difference in this and PlameGate is that the leak uncovers criminal activity of the president, but the PlameGate outing harmed a CIA agent who was fighting the use of WMD against Americans.

Only the neoCons would not see the difference and that the NYT leak was the right thing to do.

The NYT opined about Diebold in an editorial, not in an Op Ed, which is short for Opposite the Editorial page. An Op Ed is a column written by an individual. The editorial represents the opinion of the newspaper editorial board, and is therefore more significant than an Op Ed.

Notice how there is no mention of the GAO report in the NYT editorial. :angry: