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Party Hacks
The fix is in for 2008.
By Chris Floyd
03/02//06 "Moscow
Times" -- -- Two weeks ago, an obscure, unelected,
Republican-appointed official in California decided the future of
the world. That future -- at least for the next several years --
will be an accelerating nightmare of war, corruption, repression,
atrocity and terror. That's because the loyal apparatchik has, with
the stroke of a pen, guaranteed the perpetuation of the Bush faction
in power in 2008 and beyond.
One of the few certainties in modern U.S. politics is that no
Democrat can win the presidency without carrying California. Thanks
to the Electoral College system set up by the Founding Oligarchs to
keep the low-born rabble from voting directly for president, the big
haul of California's electoral votes is crucial for Democrats to
offset the multitude of small, sparsely populated states that
reliably vote Republican. Bagging California doesn't guarantee
Democratic victory, but without it, the cliffhanger electoral counts
in the goosed elections of 2000 and 2004 wouldn't even have been
close.
Thus, the sudden, hugger-mugger decision by California Secretary of
State Bruce McPherson to override the objections of his own experts
and certify the eminently hackable voting machines of the
politically partisan firm, Diebold, for use throughout the state
means, quite simply, that the fix is in for 2008. It doesn't matter
who the Democrats run -- Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John
Edwards, George Clooney or Jesus H. Christ in an Uncle Sam suit. It
won't make a bit of difference. California is lost, the presidency
is lost and the Bushists are in -- already. It's over.
After Diebold's machines failed miserably in a battery of tests last
year, McPherson vowed to put their certification on hold until his
own hand-picked panel of experts had fine-combed the system to a
fare-thee-well, blogger Brad Friedman reports. The panel delivered
their conclusions last month -- and the results were staggering, far
beyond the worst fears of the most hard-core "conspiracy theorist."
The panel found that Diebold's machines were riddled with curious
built-in glitches that effectively "ceded complete control of the
system" to hackers who could "change vote totals, modify reports,
change the names of candidates and change the races being voted on."
What's more, "hackers wouldn't need to know passwords or
cryptographic keys, or have access to any other part of the system
to do their dirty work," the Los Angeles Times notes. "Voters,
candidates and election monitors wouldn't necessarily know they'd
been rooked." A more perfect vehicle for fixing an election can
hardly be imagined. And it would require nothing more than a handful
of high-tech zealots, not a vast conspiracy.
Naturally, after such a blistering condemnation, McPherson did what
any official charged with guaranteeing the integrity and credibility
of his state's elections would do: He approved the slipshod system
by the dark of the moon, on a Friday before a holiday weekend,
without any public hearings -- indeed, without waiting for the
results of a pending federal review of Diebold's mole-infested code.
Now, the Diebold contraptions, whose chronic "breakdowns" have
featured in numerous contested elections and last-second "miracle"
victories by Republican candidates across the country in recent
years, will control California's pot of electoral gold.
A good example of how this control works can be found in Alaska.
There, the state Democratic Party has long been seeking an audit of
some of the 2004 Diebold-counted returns, which produced a series of
strange anomalies -- including awarding President George W. Bush an
extra 100,000 votes that turned out to be phantoms. First, state
officials blocked the request because that information, the vote
count of a public election, was a "company secret" that belonged
exclusively to Diebold, Friedman reports. Then they decided that the
returns could be examined -- but only on the condition that Diebold
and the Republican officials be allowed to "manipulate the data"
before it was released. In the end, even this tainted transparency
was too much for the Bushist ballot crunchers; late last month,
Alaska officials suddenly declared that examining the returns would
pose a dire but unspecified "security risk" to the state.
America's votes are increasingly controlled by a small number of
interrelated corporations: Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia, all of which
have close political and financial ties to the Bush faction -- and
to other dark forces as well. Diebold and ES&S were both bankrolled
by tycoon Howard Ahmanson, who was also a major funder of the
Christian "Reconstructionist" movement, which openly advocates a
totalitarian theocracy in America, including the death penalty for
homosexuals, slavery for debtors, stoning for sinners and stripping
nonbelievers of citizenship. As journalist Max Blumenthal reports,
these extremists have been welcomed as a key part of the Bushist
base of politicized evangelicals, whose cadres have been quietly
filling government posts for the past five years. Meanwhile, Sequoia
-- whose machines racked up 100,000 "mistakes" in just one Florida
county in 2004, according to a recent audit -- is owned by a
business partner of the Carlyle Group, the investment firm whose
insider deals and war profiteering have earned millions for the Bush
family.
Thus, the 2008 election will be conducted largely on wide-open
machines programmed by avowed partisans and paymasters of a ruthless
gang that has already committed demonstrable vote fraud on a massive
scale in engineering narrow "victories" in 2000 and 2004. So it
doesn't matter who runs, who votes or how unpopular the Bush faction
becomes through the murderous ruin of its radical agenda. The
"consent of the governed" will be drowned in the blood money that
has bought the nation's electoral process.
Annotations
Integrity of E-Balloting System Still in Doubt
Los Angeles Times, Feb. 23, 2006
Watchdog Group Questions 2004 Florida Vote
Associated Press, Feb. 23, 2006
Vanishing Act: Disappearing the Republic at the Push of a Button
Empire Burlesque, Sept. 19, 2003
Bush Poll Ratings at All-Time Low
CBS News, Feb. 28, 2006
Audit Shows Electronic Voting in Disarray
Bradblog.com, Feb. 23, 2006
Alaska Now Refuses Release of 2004 Election Data Citing Security
Concerns
Bradblog.com, Feb. 24, 2006
Loot the Vote
Empire Burlesque, Jan. 19, 2006
Is the GOP "Shock-the-Vote" Brigade Planning to Heist California?
Huffington Post, Feb. 21, 2006
A State Senator Says Diebold Re-Certification in Violation of State
Law
Bradblog.com, Feb. 23, 2006
Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They'll
Steal the Next One Too
Mark Crispin Miller, Basic Books, October 2005
The Brutal Christ of the Armageddonites
Antiwar.com, Feb. 24, 2006
Pin Heads: The New Bush Push for Theocracy
Empire Burlesque, March 12, 2004
The
"Pro-Family" Movement and Killing Gays
Max Blumenthal, Feb. 14, 2006
Body Blow: Bush's Worldwide War Against Women
Empire Burlesque, Oct. 3, 2003
Millions Are Dying Because of American Policies
Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2005
Cry Havoc: Bush's Own Personal Janjaweed
Empire Burlesque, Aug. 27, 2004
US Wants to Build Network of Friendly Militias to Fight Terrorism
AFP, August 15, 2004
Pentagon Plan for Global Anti-Terror Army
Sydney Morning Herald, Aug. 11, 2004
Into the Dark: The Pentagon Plan to Foment Terrorism
Empire Burlesque, Nov. 1, 2002
Darkness Visible: The Pentagon Plan to Foment Terrorism is Now in
Operation
Empire Burlesque, Jan. 25, 2005
Slavery Under God's Laws
The Institute for Christian Economics,
Stoning: Integral to Commandment Against Murder
The Institute for Christian Economics,
World Conquest: The Obligation of Christian Politics
The Changing of the Guard, Dominion Press,
An
Anthology of Reconstructist Thought
Christian Reconstructionism, November 2002
Judicial Warfare: Christian Reconstructionism and its Blueprint for
Dominion
Crown Rights Press, 2003
E-Voting: How it
Can Put the Wrong Candidate in Office
Common Dreams, Sept. 3, 2003
The Theft of Your Vote is Just a Chip Away
Thom Hartmann, July 31, 2003
Now Your Vote is the Property of a Private Corporation
Thom Hartmann, March 11, 2003
From Superpower to Tin-Horn Dictatorship
Lew Rockwell.com, Feb. 28, 2006
Copyright © 2006 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.
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