First They Steal Two Elections and Now Murder??

Republican IT Specialist Dies in Plane Crash

A top Republican internet strategist who was set to testify in a case alleging election tampering in 2004 in Ohio has died in a plane crash. Michael Connell was the chief IT consultant to Karl Rove and created websites for the Bush and McCain electoral campaigns. Michael Connell was deposed one day before the election this year by attorneys Cliff Arnebeck and Bob Fitrakis about his actions during the 2004 vote count in Ohio and his access to Karl Rove’s email files and how they went missing.

Guest:
Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media culture and communication at New York University. He is the author of several books, including Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008 and Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too.

AMY GOODMAN: A top Republican internet strategist who was set to testify in a case alleging election tampering in 2004 in Ohio has died in a plane crash. Mike Connell was the chief IT consultant to Karl Rove and created websites for the Bush and McCain electoral campaigns. He also set up the official Ohio state election website reporting the 2004 presidential election returns.

Connell was reportedly an experienced pilot. He died instantly Friday night when his private plane crashed in a residential neighborhood near Akron, Ohio.

Michael Connell was deposed one day before the election this year by attorneys Cliff Arnebeck and Bob Fitrakis about his actions during the 2004 vote count and his access to Karl Rove’s email files and how they went missing.

Velvet Revolution, a non-profit investigating Connell’s activities, revealed this weekend that Connell had recently said he was afraid George Bush and Dick Cheney would “throw [him] under the bus.” Cliff Arnebeck had also previously alerted Attorney General Michael Mukasey to alleged threats from Karl Rove to Connell if he refused to “take the fall.”

Well, Mark Crispin Miller joins us now, a professor of media culture and communication at New York University, the author of several books, including Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008 and Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too. Mark Crispin Miller us now in our firehouse studio.
Welcome to Democracy Now!

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: It’s good to be here, Amy. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Alright, well, we had you on right before the election, because that’s when Mike Connell was being deposed. This news that came out of his death in a plane crash on Friday night, talk about what you understand has happened.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, I cannot assert with perfect confidence that this was no accident, but I will say that the circumstances are so suspicious and so convenient for Rove and the White House that I think we’re obliged to investigate this thing very, very thoroughly. And that means, first of all, taking a close look at some of the stories that were immediately circulated to account for what happened, that it was bad weather. That was the line they used when Wellstone’s plane went down. There had been bad weather, but it had passed two hours before. And this comes from a woman at the airport information desk in Akron. We’re told that his plane was running out of gas, which is a little bit odd for a highly experienced pilot like Connell, but apparently, when the plane went down, there was an explosion, a fireball that actually charred and pocked some of the house fronts in the neighborhood. People can go online and see the footage that news crews took. But beyond the, you know, dubiousness of the official story, we have to take a close look at—and a serious look at all the charges that Connell was set to make.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, he had asked the Attorney General Mukasey for protective custody, because of threats to him and his wife?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: He reported threats to his lawyer, Cliff Arnebeck, and Arnebeck—also, Velvet Revolution heard from tipsters, as well, tipsters who also claimed that Connell’s life was at risk. Stephen Spoonamore, the whistleblower who was the first—who was the one to name Connell in the first place, also had an ear to the inside. He’s also very connected. And all these people were saying Rove is making threats, the White House is very worried about this case.

Having heard all this, Arnebeck contacted Mukasey, he contacted Nancy Rogers, who is the Ohio Attorney General, and he wrote a letter to the court, telling all of them that “This man should be in protective custody. He is an important witness in a RICO case. Please do something to look after him.” And they didn’t respond to this.

AMY GOODMAN: So, explain what this case is all about and exactly what Mike Connell has been doing over these last years. What does it mean to be Karl Rove’s IT guru?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, the lawyers in the case refer to him as a high-IQ Forrest Gump, by which they mean that he seems to have been present at the scene of every dubious election of the last eight years. We’re talking about Florida in 2000. We’re talking about Ohio in 2004. We’re talking about Alabama in 2002. He seems to have been involved in the theft of Don Siegelman’s re-election for governor. There’s some evidence that links him with the Saxby Chambliss-Max Cleland Senate race in Georgia in 2002. To be Karl Rove’s IT guru seems to have meant basically setting it up so that votes could be electronically shaved to the disadvantage of the Democrats and the advantage of Republicans.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, “electronically shaved”? I mean, you’ve got all these precincts all over Ohio. They’re counting up their votes. What does he have to do with this?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, specifically, there’s a computer architecture setup called “Man in the Middle," which involves shunting the election returns from, you know, the state in question—in this case, Ohio—shunting them to a separate computer elsewhere. All of the election returns in Ohio in 2004 went from the Secretary of State’s website—this is Ken Blackwell—to a separate computer in a basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which was under the control of another private company called SMARTech.

So we have now two private companies: GovTech Solutions, which is Connell’s company, SMARTech, which is run by a guy named [Jeff] Averbeck. And the company—the third private company that managed the voting tabulators in Ohio was called Triad. All three of these companies worked closely together on election night in Ohio in 2004. It turns out that the state’s own IT person was sent home at 9:00 p.m. They said, “Go ahead. Go home. We’ll take care of this.” So that this trio of highly partisan and, let me add, Christianist companies basically took over the whole—

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, “Christianist”?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, they’re radical theocratic activists, particularly—particularly Triad and SMARTech. You know, they are fervently anti-choice.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Mike Connell was, in fact—many said that’s what motivated him through all of this, his fierce anti-abortion stance.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: He told—Connell told Spoonamore that one of the primary reasons why he helped Bush-Cheney steal elections was to save the babies. I do think, though, that we have to draw a distinction between Connell, on the one hand, and the Averbeck and the Rapp family, on the other hand, because Connell was far less ferocious in his political views. He was an ardent anti-abortionist, it’s true, but he wasn’t quite as hardcore as the others. And in fact, you know, he was a little bit alienated from the others, and that’s one of the reasons why he was inclined to talk, and so on.

But the fact is, to answer your question, that on election night in 2004, it had been Connell, with these other two companies working with him, who had managed the computer setup, enabling Ken Blackwell to study the maps of precincts and voter turnout very carefully and figure out how many votes they need. By shunting the data to Chattanooga, they kind of slowed down the data stream.

AMY GOODMAN: Wasn’t Karl Rove’s email also there in Chattanooga on some of these servers?
MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Yes, yes. The same servers were used to host a whole bunch of highly partisan websites. And also, indeed, Karl Rove’s emails were on that server, too.

AMY GOODMAN: That have gone missing.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: That have gone missing. Incidentally, Stephen Spoonamore, again, the whistleblower who’s the one who named Connell, has told us—and I’ve seen his own contemporary notes—

AMY GOODMAN: And explain again who he was. Why was he in a position to whistleblow?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Stephen Spoonamore is a conservative Republican, a former McCain supporter and a very prominent expert at the detection of computer fraud. He’s the star witness in the Ohio lawsuit, right, in which Connell was involved. He has done extensive work of this kind, involving computer security, and had therefore worked with Connell, knew Connell personally and knew a lot of the people who were involved in the sort of cyber-security end of the Bush operation.

Despite his conservatism—or I suppose some would say because of it—he’s a man of principle—I mean, believes in the Constitution. He believes elections should be honest. He’s the one who came forward and named Connell.

And I have seen his notes of a conversation in which Connell asked Spoonamore how one would go about destroying White House emails. To this, Spoonamore said, “This conversation is over. You’re asking me to do something illegal.” But clearly, clearly—this is the important point—Mike Connell was up past his eyeballs in the most sensitive and explosive aspects of this crime family that, you know, has been masquerading as a political party.

AMY GOODMAN: And what did Fitrakis, the attorney who has brought the suit with Harvey Wasserman, the Ohio lawsuit, learn in the deposition of Mike Connell in the day before the election, which hardly got attention, considering it was the day before this historic election?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Yeah. Harvey wasn’t part of it. Harvey writes articles with Bob. It’s Bob Fitrakis and Cliff Arnebeck are the attorneys. They learned very little. What they learned was that Bush-Cheney lawyer who accompanied Connell to the deposition was watching the whole thing like a hawk, repeatedly objected to questions. Connell was stonewalling like crazy at this deposition.

They only learned one thing. And that was, they got confirmation that it was Connell who brought these other private companies into the arrangement, in addition to his own GovTech Solutions. Again, there was Triad and SMARTech. It was Connell who brought those three companies into one unit, so that the three of them were, in effect, handling Ohio’s election returns on election night under Connell’s supervision. That’s what we learned.

We also know, Amy, that since the deposition—I want to make this clear; we said it before, I want to repeat it—that Connell has indicated very clearly a desire to talk further, to tell more, whether it’s his conscience bothering him or whether it’s fear of some kind of a perjury charge because of how vigorously he stonewalled at the deposition. He made it known to the lawyers, he made it known to reporter Larisa Alexandrovna of Raw Story, that he wanted to talk. He was scared. He wanted to talk. And I say that he had pretty good reason to be scared.

AMY GOODMAN: So why did he fly in—why did he pilot his own plane when he was so afraid?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, that’s a good question. We can’t ask him, unfortunately. I mean, this is kind of a grisly thought, but, I mean, I think we should be asking where the body is? We’re told that a trooper on the scene immediately identified Connell. But then we read elsewhere that there was nothing left but debris and that the fireball was enormous. So maybe he wasn’t on the plane. I mean, who knows, when you’re dealing with people as deep as these?
But the point is—I can’t stress this strongly enough—we’re dealing not just with a shocking accident, if that’s what it was, and a convenient one. We’re dealing not even just with a particular lawsuit that, you know, really requires vigorous promotion. The important point here is that this is all about our elections. That’s what this is about. This is about democratic self-government.
The fact that Obama won so handily has caused a lot of us to sit back and relax. There’s been a lot of popping of champagne corks and people drawing the conclusion that the system must work, because our guy won. Well, this is not a sports event. This is self-government.

In fact, the evidence strongly suggests—and we haven’t had a chance to talk about this since Election Day—that Obama probably won by twice as many votes as we think. Probably a good seven million votes for Obama were undone through vote suppression and fraud, because the stuff was extensive and pervasive, in places where you wouldn’t expect it.

The Illinois Ballot Integrity Project was monitoring the vote in DuPage County, right next door to Obama’s, you know, backyard, Cook County. And two of them, in only two precincts on Election Day, saw with their own eyes 350 voters show up, only to be turned away, told, “You’re not registered,” people who were registered, who voted in the primary. All but one of these people was black. That’s in Illinois.

People at the Election Defense Alliance have discovered, from sifting through the numbers, an eleven-point red shift in New Hampshire. That means that there’s a discrepancy in Obama’s disfavor, primarily through use of the optical scan machines, an eleven-point discrepancy in the Republicans’ favor, OK?

You start to combine this with all the vote suppression, all the disenfranchisement, all the vote machine flipping that went on in this election, you realize, OK, Obama won, but millions of Americans, most of them African American and students, you know, were not able to participate in any civic sense, ironically, a lot of the same people, you know, who would have been disenfranchised and were disenfranchised before the civil rights movement. So the fact that a black president was elected, while cause for jubilation, see, ought not to take place at the expense of a whole lot of our fellow citizens who seem to have been disenfranchised on racial grounds. My point is very simply this: We’ve got to get past the victory of Obama and look seriously at what our election system is like, or else, I promise you, see, the setup that was put in place in this last election, in 2004 and in 2000, OK, will still be there in 2010, still be there in 2012. So we’ve got to take steps to do something about it now.

AMY GOODMAN: Mark Crispin Miller, I want to thank you very much for being with us, professor of media culture and communication at New York University, most recent book Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008.

Dude You've Been Punked By Your Government....

Did America Get Punk'd on the Bailout?
By David Sirota, Campaign for America's Future
Posted on December 18, 2008

Editor's note: David Sirota appeared on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC show on Dec. 16 to discuss the bailout.

When I went on Rachel Maddow's show on Tuesday, she asked a question about the bailout that is really the question of our time: Did we get punk'd? As progressive bailout critics have been saying since the current Wall Street bailout was first proposed, the answer is yes.

As the Minneapolis Federal Reserve reports, the major claims about a credit crisis that justified Congress cutting a trillion-dollar blank check to Wall Street were demonstrably false. And new data and reports show they remain demonstrably false.

For instance, take a look at line 1 and line 5 of this December Federal Reserve report on bank lending. That's right -- you see no significant decrease in lending, and in some cases, an increase. Interbank lending has dropped some, but certainly not at the crisis levels the Bush administration and banks claimed.

Then take a look at this story from Reuters, recounting a big report from a widely respected financial analysis firm:

"The credit crunch is not nearly as severe as the U.S. authorities appear to believe, and public data actually suggest world credit markets are functioning remarkably well, a report [from Celent consulting] released on Thursday says. ... The report, much of which is based on U.S. Federal Reserve data, challenges a long list of assumptions one by one, arguing that there is indeed a financial crisis but that, on aggregate, the problems of a few are by no means those of the many when it comes to obtaining credit.

"It is startling that many of (Federal Reserve) Chairman (Ben) Bernanke and (Treasury) Secretary (Henry) Paulson's remarks are not supported or are flatly contradicted by the data provided by the very organizations they lead," said the report.

Regarding U.S. business access to credit, the report says: Overall U.S. bank lending is at its highest level ever; U.S. commercial bank lending is at record highs and growing particularly fast since May 2007; corporate bond issuance has declined, but increased commercial lending has compensated for this; [interbank] lending hit its highest level ever in September 2008 and remained high in October and that overall interbank lending is up 22 percent; the cost of interbank lending ... dropped to its lowest level ever in early November and remains at very low levels; [consumer credit] was at a record high in September; and local government bond issuance had continued at similar levels to those before the credit crisis, while bank lending for real estate reached a record level in October 2008, it says. (emphasis added)

Then there's this from the Wall Street Journal looking at a new study by the National Federation of Independent Business:

The report found that among small businesses "no 'credit crunch' has appeared to date beyond the normal cyclical tightening of credit." The NFIB found that worries about interest rates and financing were a concern to only 3 percent of respondents. ... By and large, the story of the NFIB report was that if credit is going untapped, it's largely because company operators are not choosing to pursue the credit. It's not that companies can't get the extra money, it's that they don't want or need it because of the broader slowdown in economic activity. (emphasis added)

That last point is the big one: The real crisis is in the real economy -- ya know, the real world of jobs, wages, health care premiums and pensions that Washington has totally ignored as it keeps writing checks to its well-heeled campaign contributors on Wall Street under the guise of a lending crisis. Adding insult to injury is the last thing I discussed with Rachel -- the fact that because the bailout money came with almost no strings attached, the financial-industry recipients of the taxpayer largesse are either hoarding the money, using it to pay shareholder dividends and executive bonuses, or devoting it to efforts to buy up smaller competitors.

So what to do?

First things first -- we have to pressure, cajole, lambaste and downright humiliate Wall Street stooges on Capitol Hill who claim nothing can be done. These are people like Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.. The recent subject of a scathing New York Times profile examining his complicity in the financial crisis, Schumer insisted to the Wall Street Journal that despite Congress' clear power to reform -- or even revoke -- the bailout, "there's not much we can do other than jawbone." It's the old Innocent Bystander Fable, designed to make us think Congress can do nothing other than keep forking over the money to campaign contributors. And it's a straight-up lie.

Second, Congress can reject the Bush administration's request to release the next $350 billion installment of no-strings-attached bailout money for Wall Street, if that request happens.

Third, Congress can add all the strings and oversight measures to the remaining money that bailout critics originally said were necessary. That means eliminating gaping loopholes in the executive pay limits; preventing the money from subsidizing shareholder dividends, forcing the government to buy voting shares of bank stock (rather than nonvoting stock, as it is doing today) so that regulators have the leverage to clean out bad bank management; following Britain's lead in making the money contingent on increased lending; and expanding the ways the money can be used so that it can be allocated to the real economy (i.e. manufacturing companies, etc.).

Finally, Congress can allocate the unspent bailout money to a robust economic-recovery package focused on job-creating infrastructure and health care priorities -- and Congress can pass that economic recovery package right now, rather than waiting for the next president.

Looking at what's gone on in the last three months, we see a classic example of Naomi Klein's "shock doctrine" and subsequent disaster capitalism. Bailout critics were attacked as "irresponsible" by Establishment pundits and politicians -- even though the data showed that those pundits and politicians were using an admittedly real problem to manufacture the perception of a full-on earth-shattering crisis so as to justify the biggest taxpayer heist in contemporary American history. And though that data was largely ignored by the same media that beat the drum for the bailout, it is now becoming too compelling to ignore.

As the real economy is ignored by Washington, and as the government's own numbers expose the shameless dishonesty of the Beltway's bailout proponents, it's time for our leaders to listen to the real pragmatists, who have been right all along.



David Sirota is a best-selling author whose newest book, The Uprising, was released this month. He is a fellow at the Campaign for America's Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network -- both nonpartisan organizations. His blog is at www.credoaction.com/sirota.

© 2008 Campaign for America's Future All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/113758/

Happy Christmas......Stop the Wars........Bring Our Troops Home!!!

Music Video:
Happy Christmas by (John Lennon)

Music Video Code by Video Code Zone

Thank You Odetta For Your Light You Shared.....

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Odetta Holmes dies at 77; folk singer championed black history, civil rights
By Randy Lewis and Mike Boehm

From the Los Angeles Times
December 3, 2008

Odetta, the classically trained folk, blues and gospel singer who used her powerfully rich and dusky voice to champion African American music and civil rights issues for more than half a century starting in the folk revival of the 1950s, has died. She was 77.

She was admitted to Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City for a checkup in mid-November but went into kidney failure. She died there Tuesday of heart disease, her manager, Doug Yeager, told the Associated Press.

With a repertoire that included 19th century slave songs and spirituals as well as the topical ballads of such 20th century folk icons as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, Odetta became one of the most beloved figures in folk music.

She was said to have influenced the emergence of artists as varied as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin and Tracy Chapman.

"The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta," Dylan once said. "From Odetta, I went to Harry Belafonte, the Kingston Trio, little by little uncovering more as I went along."

Her affinity for traditional African American folk songs was a hallmark of her long career, along with a voice that could easily sweep from dark, husky low notes to delicate yet goose bump-inducing high register tones.

"The first time I heard Odetta sing," Seeger once said, "she sang Leadbelly's ‘Take This Hammer’ and I went and told her how I wish Leadbelly was still alive so he could have heard her."

She was born Odetta Holmes in Birmingham, Ala., on Dec. 31, 1930. Her father died when she was young and she moved to Los Angeles at age 6 with her mother, sister and stepfather. She took the surname of her stepfather Zadock Felious, but throughout her career she used just her given name.

And although Los Angeles wasn't as overtly racist as the Deep South, she suffered some of the same indignities that came with being black.

"We lived within walking distance of Marshall High School," Odetta told The Times some years ago, "but they didn't let colored people go there, so we had to get on the bus and go to Belmont High School."

She attended Los Angeles City College after high school and earned a degree in music.

Trained as a classical vocalist as a child, she won a spot with a group called the Madrigal Singers in junior high school. She also realized early that despite her classical training, her options in that area were going to be limited because of the racism at the time.

By 19, Odetta had turned her attention to other forms of music and landed a part in a production of "Finian's Rainbow" as a chorus member. When the musical went on the road to San Francisco, she went with it.

The trip marked an important crossroads in her emergence as a folk singer.

She met an old friend from school who had settled in the city's North Beach neighborhood, and during a visit Odetta was exposed to a late-night session of folk songs.

"That night I heard hours and hours of songs that really touched where I live," she told The Times. "I borrowed a guitar and learned three chords, and started to sing at parties."

The traditional prison songs that she learned in her early days hit home the hardest and helped her come to terms with what she called the deep-seated hate and fury in her.

"As I did those songs, I could work on my hate and fury without being antisocial," she recalled. "Through those songs, I learned things about the history of black people in this country that the historians in school had not been willing to tell us about or had lied about."

Odetta left the theater company in 1950 and took a job at a folk club in San Francisco. She soon began to tour and recorded her first album, "The Tin Angel," in 1954. She soon caught the attention of such folk-music icons as Guthrie, Seeger and Ramblin' Jack Elliott. She was a fixture on the folk music scene by the time the genre's commercial boom came in the late 1950s and early '60s.

She played at the Newport Folk Festival, the showcase event for folk music, four times between 1959 and 1965. She also had a recording contract with Vanguard Records, which at the height of the folk music craze was the genre's leading label.

Over the years, Odetta branched into acting, with dramatic and singing roles in film and television including "Cinerama Holiday," "Sanctuary" and "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman."

But traditional folk music remained her forte.

"The folk repertoire is our inheritance. Don't have to like it, but we need to hear it," she said. "I love getting to schools and telling kids there's something else out there. It's from their forebears, and its an alternative to what they hear on the radio. As long as I am performing, I will be pointing out that heritage that is ours."

In 1999, she was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President Clinton. In 2004, she was a Kennedy Center honoree. A year later, the Library of Congress honored her with its Living Legend Award.

Information on survivors and funeral services was not immediately available.

Lewis and Boehm are Times staff writers.

randy.lewis@latimes.com

mike.boehm@latimes.com


Copyright 2008 Los Angeles Times

Need I Say More? Thanksgiving is so fleeting.....

Wal-Mart worker dies after shoppers knock him down

By COLLEEN LONG, Associated Press Writer Colleen Long, Associated Press Writer Sat Nov 29, 12:54 am ET

NEW YORK – A Wal-Mart worker was killed Friday when "out-of-control" shoppers desperate for bargains broke down the doors at a 5 a.m. sale. Other workers were trampled as they tried to rescue the man, and customers shouted angrily and kept shopping when store officials said they were closing because of the death, police and witnesses said.

At least four other people, including a woman who was eight months pregnant, were taken to hospitals for observation or minor injuries, and the store in Valley Stream on Long Island closed for several hours before reopening.

Shoppers stepped over the man on the ground and streamed into the store. When told to leave, they complained that they had been in line since Thursday morning.

Nassau police said about 2,000 people were gathered outside the store doors at the mall about 20 miles east of Manhattan. The impatient crowd knocked the man, identified by police as Jdimytai Damour of Queens, to the ground as he opened the doors, leaving a metal portion of the frame crumpled like an accordion.

"This crowd was out of control," said Nassau police spokesman Lt. Michael Fleming. He described the scene as "utter chaos."

Dozens of store employees trying to fight their way out to help Damour were also getting trampled by the crowd, Fleming said.

Items on sale at the store included a Samsung 50-inch Plasma HDTV for $798, a Bissel Compact Upright Vacuum for $28, a Samsung 10.2 megapixel digital camera for $69 and DVDs such as "The Incredible Hulk" for $9.

Damour, 34, was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead about 6 a.m., police said. The exact cause of death has not been determined.

A 28-year-old pregnant woman was taken to a hospital, where she and the baby were reported to be OK, said police Sgt. Anthony Repalone.

Police said criminal charges were possible in the case, but Fleming said it would be difficult to identify individual shoppers. Authorities were reviewing surveillance video.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc., based in Bentonville, Ark., called the incident a "tragic situation" and said the employee came from a temporary agency and was doing maintenance work at the store.

"The safety and security of our customers and associates is our top priority," said Dan Fogleman, a company spokesman. "At this point, facts are still being assembled and we are working closely with the Nassau County Police as they investigate what occurred."

Kimberly Cribbs, who witnessed the stampede, said shoppers were acting like "savages."

"When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling 'I've been on line since yesterday morning,'" she said. "They kept shopping."

Shoppers around the country line up early outside stores on the day after Thanksgiving in the annual bargain-hunting ritual known as Black Friday. It got that name because it has historically been the day when stores broke into profitability for the full year.

___

AP retail writers Anne D'Innocenzio and Mae Anderson and contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press.

An open letter to President-elect Obama from Iraq Veterans Against the War

Dear President-elect Obama,

Members of Iraq Veterans Against the War congratulate you on your victory, and we admire and respect both Senator John McCain and you for your strong, patriotic dedication and desire to fix the deep problems our country now faces.

We appreciate your inspiring words spoken at Grant Park in Chicago on Tuesday night - words which should give all Americans hope for our future. But we also remember the hope your words gave to many Americans in an August 2007 speech - especially those serving in our military: "Ending this war will be my first priority when I take office. There is no military solution in Iraq. Only Iraq's leaders can settle the grievances at the heart of Iraq's civil war."

Much has changed in our country since that speech, and the prevailing sentiment among Americans is that our faltering economy must now be your first priority. We understand and share their concern, but we believe that our faltering economy cannot be corrected if we continue the costly occupation of Iraq – an immense financial cost which is simply unsustainable. The American people are giving billions of dollars every week to continue an occupation that is draining our wallets, our respect, our security, and the lives of thousands of U.S. and Iraqi men, women, and children.

We fervently ask you to use all possible political and diplomatic pressure to quickly and completely end the occupation of Iraq. Though none of us know what the future will bring, we do know this: our service members are tired of an occupation seemingly without end, and they want to return home to their families.

And when our brave men and women return home, they need to be given full benefits, and adequate healthcare (including mental health) to repair their physical and emotional wounds. They deserve no less, and we as a country owe that care to them.

We also call on you not to ignore the humanitarian crises of enormous proportion that the Iraqi people continue to endure. Over four million Iraqis have been displaced or become refugees since the U.S. invasion of their country. Iraqi deaths are most accurately estimated at over 600,000 people, with many hundreds of thousands more having suffered physical and emotional injuries. The Iraqi people will be coping with the aftermath of our unjustifiable invasion and occupation of their country for generations to come. IVAW believes that it is the duty of our country to pay reparations to the Iraqi people for the damage we have caused to their lives, infrastructure, and culture.

We acknowledge the shift in focus from the war in Iraq to the war in Afghanistan. At the same time, Afghan President Karzai is calling for a change in strategy and Afghan families are mourning the deaths of their loved ones who have been killed in U.S. air strikes. We encourage you to listen to the Afghan people and U.S. veterans of that conflict before making any decision to escalate military force there.

We call on you to end the occupation of Iraq and repair our economy, and by doing so you will demonstrate that a "new dawn of American leadership" has arrived, a "defining moment of change" that will benefit and give hope to all Americans - young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled.

You once said that “change won’t come from the top. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.” We agree, which is why Iraq Veterans Against the War will continue organizing for an end to the occupation of Iraq, health care and benefits for returning veterans, and reparations for the Iraqi people. We hope that these are areas we can work together with you to address.

Respectfully,
Iraq Veterans Against the War

PAY ATTENTION AT THE POLLS!!!!!!!

On Eve of Election Day, Is the Nation’s Voting System Ready? Reports of Irregularities Pour in from Across US in Record Early Voting

From Democracy Now, November 03, 2008

Election Day is one day away. Tomorrow, tens of millions of Americans will head to the polls. Is the nation’s voting system ready for the unprecedented turnout? In record early voting, more votes have been cast before Election Day than ever before. Already, reports of voting irregularities, long lines, malfunctioning machines and badly managed polling stations are pouring in from across the country. We speak to NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller, author of Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy.

Guest:
Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media culture and communication at New York University. He is the author of several books, most recently Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008. His previous book is called Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too.

Report on PA voting filed by the American News Project,

AMY GOODMAN: Election Day is one day away. Tomorrow, tens of millions of Americans will head to the polls. Is the nation’s voting system ready for the unprecedented turnout?
Already, more votes have been cast before Election Day than ever before. As of Saturday night, there were some 27 million absentee and early votes in thirty states, according to the Associated Press. But already, reports of voting irregularities, long lines, malfunctioning machines and badly managed polling stations are pouring in from across the country.
Despite documented irregularities, about a quarter of all voters will use electronic machines that offer no paper record to verify their choice was accurately recorded. Voting rights groups have filed lawsuits against election officials in Pennsylvania and Virginia, saying they have not stocked enough paper ballots to prepare for the expected turnout.
In Colorado, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia, voters have reported using touch-screen machines that have flipped their votes to the wrong candidate or party. Meanwhile, Florida has switched to its third ballot system in the past three election cycles, and glitches associated with the transition have caused confusion at early voting sites.
This all comes in the wake of voter suppression tactics that have seen tens of thousands of voters potentially lose their right to vote. In the battleground state of Colorado, voter rights activists recently won a major victory after state officials agreed to reinstate tens of thousands of people whose names had been removed from the voter rolls.
Mark Crispin Miller is a professor of media culture and communication at New York University. He is the author of several books, most recently Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000–2008. His previous book, Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too.
Welcome to Democracy Now!

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Thanks for having me back, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s start where I haven’t seen much mention, and that is this man, Mike Connell, in Ohio, testifying. Who is he? What is his relevance to the big day, to Election Day tomorrow?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Yeah, this event in a courtroom in Columbus may be one of the most important things to happen in this whole election and may be one of the most important things to happen in American history. I mean, this sounds hyperbolic, I know, but it is true.
Mike Connell is—has been named as Karl Rove’s computer guru since 2000. The lawyers in the case refer to Connell as a high-IQ Forrest Gump, because he’s been on the scene of every dubious election we’ve had over the last eight years, starting with Florida 2000.
Now, he has been named by a man named Stephen Spoonamore, S-P-O-O-N-A-M-O-R-E, who’s a very unusual and particularly unimpeachable kind of whistleblower. He’s a conservative Republican; he’s a former McCain supporter. But above all, he is a renowned and highly successful expert at the detection of computer fraud. He works for big banks. He works for foreign governments, the Secret Service. His job is to figure out how computers are used to steal money or information or votes. Well, he’s named a lot of people in the Bush-Cheney election subversion conspiracy. He has worked with them. He knows them personally. And months ago, he named Mike Connell and his company GovTech Solutions as having played a crucial role in the—basically the electronic subversion of the vote in Ohio in 2004. And Spoonamore has actually described the computer architecture that was used to do this.
Now, on the strength of this testimony, the lawyers in the case had the judge issue a subpoena to Mike Connell last week. Connell defied the subpoena; he was in contempt. Late last week, the lawyers filed a motion to compel compliance, and to everyone’s surprise and delight, the judge ordered Connell to appear today and to be deposed for two hours about his role in this longstanding electronic plot, basically, to flip votes towards the Republicans.
Some of this deposition will be sealed, and I have to tell you the part that’ll be sealed. Apparently, Rove has threatened Connell. He told him that if Connell did not take the fall for this whole thing, the Department of Justice would start investigating Connell’s wife Heather for improper lobbying practices. Now, that part of the deposition we’re not going to know the answers to. But what’s astonishing to me—

AMY GOODMAN: Who does she lobby for?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Various politicians and so on. Whether she’s guilty or innocent is beside the point, because, as we know, the Department of Justice is a cudgel in the collective hands of the Bush administration. This would be more selective prosecution.
But what’s really astonishing here is that Karl Rove could make that threat with such impunity. This shut Connell up, and he was, you know, earlier inclined to talk about what was going on. Then he got himself three very expensive Republican attorneys who promised that they would make sure he could not be deposed before Election Day. Well, hallelujah, he’s being deposed before Election Day. And the reason why—

AMY GOODMAN: Today.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Today. The reason why this is so important and the strategy behind the early part of this case all along has been that if we can shine a spotlight on the perpetrators of this kind of fraud before Election Day, make them nervous, make them pull in their horns, distract them, there’s a good chance that they might not try to do what they’re clearly ready to do, because, let me just add, Connell is on the McCain payroll. He’s working for McCain right now, and he specializes in a particular kind of computer architecture whose only purpose, Spoonamore says, is to steal votes.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go back to two issues. One, how do you know Karl Rove made these threats? That’s a very strong allegation.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, it is a very strong allegation that comes from the lawyers that the lawyers were evidently told by Connell or someone close to him. But this stuff has been on the website of Velvet Revolution. Raw Story has reported it. The media, however, has remained over-focused, of course, on ACORN, which is a nothing story. But let me make clear that the brouhaha over ACORN, right, this orchestrated propaganda drive about ACORN, has many distracting purposes, and one of them, I promise you, is to distract us from this case. This case is an Ohio RICO case. Well, lately, the Republicans filed an Ohio RICO case against ACORN. And I think the purpose—

AMY GOODMAN: RICO, meaning racketeering?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: It’s a racketeering case. Ohio has the strongest racketeering statute in the country. This is one of the reasons why the lawyers decided to go there and do this.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean he specializes in the computer architecture, the internet architecture, that can steal elections?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, it’s a system—if people go to the website for Velvet Revolution, particularly http://www.rovecybergate.com/, they’ll find the documents that Spoonamore has filed describing the setup that’s known as “Man in the Middle.” This happened in Ohio in 2004.
It involves shunting the data that comes from the website for the Secretary of State—I mean, the election returns—taking those election returns as they come to the website in real-time and shunting them to a computer somewhere else. What happened in 2004 was the election returns from Ken Blackwell’s website were shunted to a computer in a basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee, under the control of a very partisan private company to which Connell was connected. The data was shunted to this strange computer in Chattanooga and then directed back to the Secretary of State’s website. As Connell—I mean, sorry, as Spoonamore has said, the only purpose of doing this Man in the Middle thing is to commit crime.
Bev Harris of Black Box Voting has lately reported that there are similar Man in the Middle setups in Colorado, Illinois and Kentucky. So it’s very important that tomorrow, when we’re out there engaging in election protection and working to make the turnout as large as it possibly can be, because the larger the turnout, the harder the theft, people have to be paying very close attention to the numbers. They have to be watching the traffic at different precincts, and so on.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to the issue of voting all over the country. What have—you’re following it very closely. You’re going to be with us Tuesday night for our five-hour broadcast, to be monitoring what’s happening in all the states, especially the key swing battleground states. What have you learned? It’s estimated about a quarter of people have already voted.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Yes, an astonishing number of people have voted. And I take that as very good news, not because that necessarily ensures their votes will be safe; I take it as good news because it indicates to me that an awful lot of Americans understand that the voting apparatus that we have out there is untrustworthy, and they’re taking, you know, special steps to see to it that their votes count.
But what we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks is basically a replay, on steroids, if you will, of what we saw in 2004—vote flipping by machines in West Virginia, Texas, Tennessee and Missouri, that we know of. And let me make something clear, Amy. All the flips go in one direction. It’s all from Obama either to McCain or to Cynthia McKinney, as it happens.
We did hear of three people who claimed that their votes were flipped from McCain to Obama in Tennessee. But they’re all related to a Republican official. Their numbers are unlisted. And they told the local newspaper and not the election commission, so I have my doubts about those three cases.
But there have also been, as usual, very long lines in Democratic precincts only. We’re talking about a calculated kind of shortage that magically does not afflict Republican precincts, only Democratic ones.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, now, in these pre-voting, in these long early lines, not all precincts are open, right?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Right, not all precincts. This is something that’s happening in some parts of the country.

AMY GOODMAN: Thirty-one states.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: And I want to make something clear here. Turnout on Election Day, massive turnout, unprecedented turnout, is all-important, because, again, the larger the turnout, the harder the theft. The more people show up at the polls, the better it is, which means that those people who vote early should also go out on Election Day and be physically present at the polls to help to build that national mass.

AMY GOODMAN: Mark Crispin Miller, I want to put off our break for a minute, because I want to play for you a piece from Pennsylvania and then get your comment. Pennsylvania, of course, a key battleground state, many believe could propel either John McCain or Barack Obama into the White House. The American News Project went to Pennsylvania to cover potential voting problems on Election Day. They filed this report.

REPORTER: Most polls suggest the presidential race in Pennsylvania is neck-and-neck, so the vote in Philly could easily determine whether the state goes red or blue. During the primary election on April 22nd, 2008, a strong warning sign of potential November 4th problems emerged when widespread machine breakdowns led to very long lines and lost votes. And with over 200,000 new voters in Philly, voter rights groups are worried that the city is unprepared for the upcoming surge in voting. And unfortunately for voters, the people in charge seem surprisingly unconcerned.

FRED VOIGT, Philadelphia Deputy Commissioner: Forget a long line. A long line is not justification for anything except waiting.

MARGE TARTAGLIONE (D), Chairwoman, Philadelphia Voting Commission: Anybody have anything to say now? Or forever hold their peace.

REPORTER: Your deputy commissioner Fred Voigt told me that “a long line is not justification for anything except waiting.” I was wondering if the commission has any response to that comment.

MARGE TARTAGLIONE: Did you see people waiting for baseball tickets all night long outside? Did you see the line that they wanted a new iPod? They all waited overnight and waited in line. Do you go to the supermarket? You see people waiting in line? They complain, they grumble, some of them. Some of them just talk. So what is the difference?

REPORTER: I’m sorry. Are you comparing voters who possibly have to work during the day to people who are standing in line to get an iPod or a Phillies ticket?

MARGE TARTAGLIONE: Yeah, it’s the same people. Same people. Same people. Come on! You’re mixing apples with—sit down!

ANGEL COLEMAN: It’s a right for every single person. I always vote, ever since I turned eighteen, the first election that I could vote in. It’s very, very important to me to be able to vote. I got to the school. I noticed that there were a lot more cars than in the past when I’ve come to a vote, and I thought, great, you know, there’s more people out voting. But then, when I got to the door, I noticed a couple people walking out, and people were saying that they didn’t get a chance to vote. The line was too long; they couldn’t wait. When I got inside, I definitely saw longer lines of people wanting to vote. And unfortunately, it wasn’t just that there were more people voting; it was that two out of three machines were broken down.

REPORTER: Single mother Angel Coleman has joined the NAACP and a coalition of groups called the Election Reform Network in suing the state of Pennsylvania. They hope to improve access to emergency paper ballots in case machines break down again. The groups argue that long lines amount to a form of voter disenfranchisement, and they note that the response of election officials to the impending crisis has been woefully inadequate.

ANGEL COLEMAN: This is real. This is a real problem. You know, it happened to me, it happened to the people that I saw walking out, it happened to the other people that were testifying in court with me yesterday. So this is a for real problem. This is all happening in Philadelphia to those people, to me. And it is representative of thousands of other people around the country.

MARGE TARTAGLIONE: I don’t want these stories going out there’s going to be long lines. These poor senior citizens are going to pick up the paper and say, “Oh, my god! Do I gotta wait two hours in line on my feet?” Never happened in Philadelphia. I’m tired of this propaganda that they put in, that they put in! Everybody wants a story. It’s going to be my story, the lines are going to be so long. Knock it off! Knock it off! Trying to run a smooth election. You can say what you want about me, I don’t care. Spell my name right.

REPORTER: Just hours after this hearing ended, a federal judge ruled in favor of Angel Coleman and the voters of Pennsylvania, which means that paper ballots will be issued as a backup to faulty machines. Officials like Voigt and Tartaglione are the ones responsible for implementing the court order.

AMY GOODMAN: That report, by American News Project. We’ll be getting reports from them throughout Tuesday night for the five-hour broadcast and Wednesday morning for our expanded two-hour broadcast the morning after. That voice, especially for our radio listeners who didn’t see her identified on the TV broadcast, was that of Marge Tartaglione. She said make sure you “spell my name right.” T-A-R-T-A-G-L-I-O-N-E. She is the chairwoman of the Philadelphia Voting Commission. Mark Crispin Miller, the significance of what she said—people wait all night for baseball tickets, they wait all night to get an iPhone—what’s the problem?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, that kind of contempt, that cavalier attitude towards people voting, and equating voting, which is like a crucial civic function, with waiting in line to get the latest toy, you know, demonstrates how weak a commitment these people have to democracy. I mean, she’s a Democrat, whoopee. All over the country, given how corrupt our political culture is, we have Democrats and Republicans essentially working together against the voters. The problem in Philadelphia with the long lines and so on, we’ve seen this elsewhere in the country. Just yesterday in Georgia, people were waiting over ten hours to vote. So this is something—

AMY GOODMAN: And who this disadvantages? You might say, well, everyone waits on the line.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: No, that’s just it. Here again, as with the vote flips, which go in one direction, the shortages afflict basically one side. They happen in the inner cities. They happen in Hispanic neighborhoods. They happen in college towns. You see? So these people give up; they have to go to work, and so on, and they can’t vote.

AMY GOODMAN: And even if the same—even if people from across the economic spectrum wait on the same line, the issue is, who can wait? If you’re a worker who’s got to get back to work, if you have to work that day, versus if you can take time off.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, that’s absolutely true. I’ve yet to hear, though, of any long lines afflicting, you know, the polling places in the suburbs or small towns, you know, where there’s a lot of Republican voters.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Mark Crispin Miller, voter assemblies, what are they?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Yeah, crucial, very important. I mean, there’s a lot of things people can do and must do on Election Day to keep this thing from being stolen. They’ve got to make sure they’re registered. They have to know the hotlines: 1-866-OUR-VOTE and 1-866-MY-VOTE-1. If anything happens to you on Election Day, if you’re told you’re not registered when you know you are, when people tell you that, you know—when the machine flips your vote, for example, when you’re intimidated, if there’s a police presence at the polls, if you get disinformation telling you your election day is the next day, anything at all happens, let somebody know. Call those numbers. If there are people from the media there, tell them. If there are Election Protection people there, tell them. But make sure the story gets out, because this is the kind of evidence that has to be gathered and preserved, because on election night, sure as shooting, on the networks they’ll all say, “Well, things went really well today. There were nowhere near as many problems as we thought there were.”
But finally, and most important, in the event something untoward happens and John McCain is right and he wins late at night on Election Day, as he recently said he’s going to do, any kind of an upset like that, people should be prepared to attend voter assemblies. This is something that’s being run by Liberty Tree as part of their pledge for No More Stolen Elections! The website is libertytreefdr.org. The aim here is to organize voter assemblies so that on November 5th people will turn out, nonviolently, convene, discuss what’s going on and press for the proper kinds of investigations.

AMY GOODMAN: And if you voted early, you think you should go back to the polls?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Not to vote, obviously. Even though I’m from Chicago, I don’t recommend that. I think people should go back to the polling places and be visible, be present, be out there. In other words, treat this Election Day not as your opportunity to make a political choice—of course it’s that or should be that; treat Election Day as a day for the assertion of your right to vote. That’s the all-important thing. And show this system that we’re not going to take our disenfranchisement lying down.

AMY GOODMAN: Mark Crispin Miller, I’ll see you right here tomorrow night, Tuesday night, with your computer, monitoring voting around the country. Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media culture and communication at NYU, New York University. Most recent book, Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000–2008.

OK! The Party Is Almost Over......................

What Happens After Election Day?
Memo to Progressives for Obama
By JOSHUA FRANK for CounterPunch

Unless John McCain has a bombshell of a scandal to drop on Barack Obama at the 11th hour, this election is beginning to look like it's in the bag for the Democrats. The Republicans will finally be kicked out of the White House and peace and calm will slowly return to Washington.

At least that's the message reverberating across the progressive landscape these days. One can almost hear a collective sigh of relief. Darth Cheney will be gone. Karl Rove will be forced to recoil, and President Bush can retire in ignorant bliss to his ranch in Crawford.

Ahhhh…

It is certainly comforting to believe the stars have aligned and progressive values are about to flood the Beltway. Barack Obama has campaigned on "Hope" and "Change" and we all but believe the guy is actually going to deliver on his varied promises.

But believing is what's caused so many to fall victim to Obama fever. You know the signs: they send you emails from MoveOn.org (claiming you're to blame for Obama's fictional loss) and hope-filled rants from Norman Solomon. They talk about Obama as if he's the next messiah, their wardrobe consists of more than two Obama shirts that they'll wear every day leading up to the election. They have a "Change" sign in their window and one in their front yard. It's as if they've become more or less Obama-zombies, just in time for Halloween.

No question the Obama strategists have accomplished what they set out to do. Just look at all they've achieved thus far: antiwar activists have exchanged their slogans for pro-Obama refrains despite the fact that their candidate inflates the alleged threat of Iran, wants to put more troops in Afghanistan and won't pull out of Iraq anytime soon.

Environmentalists have come out for Obama in large numbers, even though he thinks coal can be clean and nuclear energy can be safe. No big deal that he wants to drill baby drill off our coastal shores. At least the guy believes in global warming.

Or take the civil rights champions who have few qualms about his rabid support for FISA and the PATRIOT Act or social justice activists who aren't overly concerned that Obama condones the execution of convicts who have never murdered. Economic progressives, who would be the first to say the economic I.V. pumped into the Wall Street bloodline was hastily passed and rips off tax-payers, are the first to defend Obama's economic platform. No matter he supported the bailout without reservation. No matter his team of economic hit men includes a whole slew of Clintonite neoliberals like Robert Rubin. Obama is still their guy.

All of this wouldn't bother me much if it weren't for the overt hypocrisy so many progressives, and a few radicals, are exhibiting with their blind support for Obama. It's one thing to embrace pragmatic voting and lesser-evilism on the grounds that we don't really live in a true democracy. It's quite another to be excited about the prospect of electing a man who doesn't stand for the issues you do, and is in fact campaigning against them.

What will happen if Obama wins the electorate? Progressive Group Number One seems to believe he'll magically move left once inaugurated and is only running to the right in order to win the election. That position is a non sequitur and not worthy of real discussion as it's based on wishful thinking.

Progressive Group Number Two knows Obama is pretty damn conservative but is planning on voting "strategically," arguing that change comes in baby steps, yet they assure us they'll apply pressure once Obama's elected to get the little toddler strolling. A friend, who happens to be a professor at a large university, recently told me that he plans on coercing Obama by pressuring elected members of congress. He'll be "making a stink" and "scene," he assured me.

What a relief.

"The forces arrayed against far-reaching progressive change are massive and unrelenting. If an Obama victory is declared next week, those forces will be regrouping in front of our eyes -- with right-wing elements looking for backup from corporate and pro-war Democrats," Norman Solomon recently wrote in an article advising progressives to vote against their interests. "How much leverage these forces exercise on an Obama presidency would heavily depend on the extent to which progressives are willing and able to put up a fight."

Does Solomon even understand what it means to "put up a fight"? And what's with the notion that progressives will "apply pressure" once Obama wins? They have no cash and he's already going to receive most of their votes. What are they going to do to pressure him, poke him in his ribs? Cause a stink by farting through the halls of Congress? Obama may actually listen to us if he thought progressives were considering to vote for a guy like Ralph Nader, which is the point Nader seems to be making by campaigning in swing states this week. Nader knows how to put up a real fight, one not mired in hypotheticals and fear-mongering, so he's pressuring Obama where it matters most.

Of course, such a direct confrontation to Obama's backward policies ruffles the slacks of many devout liberals. But that is the point. Progressives are not flush with cash and as we all should know, flashing the almighty buck is usually the best way to grab a politician's attention. But the only thing we have at our immediate disposal now is votes. These crooks need us to get elected. Obama already has the majority of left-wing support shored up despite his resistance to embrace our concerns. Imagine if he had to earn our votes instead of receiving our support without having to do a thing for it?

So let's prepare for what's ahead. Obama may win next Tuesday, but what will happen to the movements that have been sidelined in order to help get the Democrats elected? What will become of the environmental movement after January 20? Will it step up to oppose Obama's quest for nuclear power and clean coal? Will the antiwar movement work to force Obama to take a softer approach toward Iran? Will they stop the troop increase in Afghanistan?

These are but a few of the questions I'd like progressive supporters of Obama to answer. I've yet to hear exactly how they will pressure an Obama administration. In fact, I don't think they will. George W. Bush will be gone and that will be enough for most. Progressives faced a similar confrontation in 1992 when Bill Clinton took office, but without much of a fight we saw neoliberalism take hold in the form of NAFTA and we endured the Telecommunications Act, Welfare Reform, a forest plan written by the logging industry, the dismantling of Glass-Steagall, the Iraq Liberation Act, and much much more.

What makes the Democrats believe that they even deserve our support now? President Bush has indeed been bad, but his most egregious policies were upheld and supported by the majority of Democrats. They gave Bush the green light to whack Saddam while they controlled the Senate. They supported the PATRIOT Act (Obama voted for its reconfirmation), the War on Terror, Bush's increased Pentagon budget, a no-strings Wall Street bailout and two awful Supreme Court confirmations. You may also remember that two years ago we ushered Democrats back into office with the belief that they might actually fight Bush on Iraq. Instead we've had nothing but complicity, with Democrats time and again supporting increased war funds.

I hope I'm not alone in saying that we deserve more than lofty rhetoric about "action" and "hope." We deserve a program for real progressive change -- the kind Democrats and Barack Obama will not bring as long as we give them our unconditional support.

Joshua Frank is co-editor of Dissident Voice and author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush (Common Courage Press, 2005), and along with Jeffrey St. Clair, the editor of the brand new book Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland, published by AK Press in July 2008.

He can be reached at: brickburner@gmail.com

now i'm no mad man, .................

Turn up the volume, get out your dancing shoes, and enjoy a cut from my current favorite album "Dear Science" by TV On The Radio:

Music Video:
Dancing Choose by (TV On The Radio)

Music Video Code by Video Code Zone

Hey Buddy Can You Spare a Dime?

Financial End Times

by Bennett Gordon for Utne Reader

Are Americans living in a recession or a financial apocalypse? Is now a time for prudent financial choices or a time to pray? Sean Cole reports for Marketplace that some economists are embracing the gloomy financial indicators as a sign that Armageddon is upon us. Cole talked to an “end times economist” who said that the current recession is God “saying that this world's financial system is built upon an unrighteous foundation.”

The financial system has become a religious cult of its own, Peter Laarman writes for Religion Dispatches. The financial crisis was caused in part by an adherence to “economism,” a creed that Laarman describes as “the notion that every part of human life is governed by economic considerations and that everything that happens—or at least everything that matters—is reducible to human monads pursuing their rational self-interest.”

Questions about financial regulation in the current presidential race should be treated with the same importance as religious questions, since the two have become so closely related. Laarman writes, “we are now in actual danger of losing what remains of democracy itself in our unseemly desire to enshrine the money-changing cult at the very center of the temple.”

“Whether you're a believer or not, maybe now is a good time to ask ourselves what we worship,” Cole said for Marketplace. That simple sentiment was applauded by Amy Frykholm, writing for Theoblog. Even if he didn’t mean to, Frykholm writes that Cole echoed Matthew 6:2, which reads, “Where your treasure is there your heart will be also”

Image by David Paul Ohmer , licensed under Creative Commons .

Wait a sec.......I'm a Christian From Ohio......

Body Politics: The Source Of McCain's Odd Body Language, And The Gift It Brings

by Kathlyn and Gay Hendricks

Posted October 17, 2008 | 09:34 AM (EST) on Huffington Post

Never mind that when John McCain smiles, it looks about as warm and inviting as a moonlit New England country graveyard.

Never mind that he exhibits more twitches, tics and jaw-clenches than the night shift at a meth lab.

Never mind that he's started having prison-camp flashbacks such as addressing the citizens of a rally as "My fellow prisoners."

A long campaign and economic uncertainty can stress out anyone, whether he's a 72-year-old presidential candidate or just some average retirement-age guy who's trying to keep nine houses and a dozen cars running in tough economic times.

However, when he came out with his recent macho swagger about fear, we felt it was time to intervene. Specifically, he gave a prescription for fear that is dangerous. It's a method of dealing with fear that will drive you nuts if it doesn't kill you first. If you missed the actual quote, he said, "I know what fear feels like...I know what hopelessness feels like. I felt those things once before. I WILL NEVER LET THEM IN AGAIN..."

Straight-Talk Expresso

We feel compassion for him and the circumstances that brought him to make the fateful choice to seal out his emotions. It's a serious problem for him health-wise, but when he seeks to inflict it on the rest of us, it's time to set him straight. Here's a shot of straight-talk expresso for John McCain: When you won't let yourself to feel your natural, organic feeling of fear, you get out of touch with reality. If you won't acknowledge the existence of fear, you can't tell the difference between what you're really scared about and what you think you're scared about. You don't have a clue about what's going on inside you. You don't know whether there's a real threat out there or just something your mind is making up. You think life is dangerous, but the reality is just the opposite: you're dangerous to life.

Being driven by fear forces McCain/Palin to run a campaign based on fear. Their goal is not to convince people that they have a better plan for the future, but to make people scared to vote for the other guy.

There are a lot of things people are scared about right now:
•They're scared about losing their homes.
•They're scared about losing their jobs.
•They're scared the Republicans are going to steal the election. In fact, we've heard several people say that they're praying for a landslide, because otherwise the Republicans will find some way to steal it. If you think that's slightly paranoid, you're probably not a Democrat.

McCain/Palin want us to forget about our real fears and focus on something unreal. McCain/Palin want us to be scared about what they want us to be scared about. They have an advantage, because the things they want us to be scared about are a lot more fun than the things we're really scared about:
•McCain/Palin want us to be scared that Obama is "the other,"
not like us, not a real American.
•They want us to be scared that Obama might secretly worship another god.
•They want us to be scared that Obama pals around with terrorists and gets his spiritual counsel from an America-hating minister.

It's more fun to be scared about those things because it gives you the opportunity to blame somebody else for the fear. When you point the finger at someone else, it relieves the pressure inside you. If we're scared about those things, maybe we'll forget about what we're really scared about. McCain/Palin are saying: it's a jungle out there, folks, and let's make sure we keep it that way.

As budding psychotherapists 35 years ago, we were taught the essentials of how to help our clients deal with fear. The key principle can be stated simply: what you resist, persists. If you hold fear at arm's length, if you seal it out of your awareness, you sentence yourself to living every moment in a prison of fear. The more you try to seal it out, the more it pervades your life. The stonewall barrier McCain has proudly built to keep out his fear makes him a prisoner inside his own arrogance. His stubborn unwillingness to let in the normal human emotion of fear makes him propelled by it. In the Pink Floyd phrase, he's "blown on the steel breeze."

This much we can tell you from working up-close with more than twenty thousand people: The only real solution to fear is to let yourself acknowledge it and feel it until it dissipates. Fear is natural. Your body spent hundreds of thousands of years perfecting it. It's there to tell you important things like these:

There's a potential threat--pay attention.
There's a problem I don't have a solution to--look for one quick!

When you're scared, look to see if there's a real threat. Figure out what the problem is and get creative about solving it. Get good at distinguishing between real threats and imaginary threats we make up in our minds. Don't use the McCain Prescription for fear, by shutting it out of your awareness. For the sake of his health and for the safety of the rest of us, he should take counsel from another war hero, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf: "Any man who doesn't cry scares me a little." That's a piece of useful wisdom, and it points to why John McCain scares a lot of people.

If we could counsel John McCain at this moment in history, when he has squandered much of the honor and good will Americans used to grant him, we'd embrace him, look him in the eye and say this:

"Go ahead and let yourself feel scared. It's normal, it's human and it helps you connect with the rest of us. When you feel scared, let yourself feel it. Breathe with it. Dance with it. Above all, don't tempt the universe by shaking a fist at fear and saying that you will not acknowledge its existence. Doing that puts you on a collision course with the forces of nature, like shaking your fist at thunder and saying you're never going to listen to it again. Instead, let your fear in. Speak about it to the ones you love. If you're out in public, speak about it to them, too. Ultimately, love is the best cure for fear. If you really want to have a great relationship with yourself and other people, love your fear just as it is, and watch the miracles that unfold as a result."

What happens when you let yourself feel your fear is that it opens up a direct connection to your creativity. The more you're willing to open up and embrace your fear, the more creativity flows through you. We would never have believed that remarkable fact until we experienced the truth of it ourselves and saw it work its magic on many other people.

An Integrity Problem

Being cut off from fear or any emotion puts you out of integrity with yourself. As one our mentors, Jack Downing, M.D., put it, "Integrity glitches cause body twitches." The source of John McCain's odd display of twitches, jaw-clenches and chilly grins is a fault-line gap of integrity at the center of himself, a place where he has cut himself off from fear and the rest of us. He wants to become a super hero, The Man Without Fear. That's not a bad idea for a cartoon, but in real life it would be a disaster. In real life, we need real heroes, people who are willing to acknowledge fear and look within it, to the gift it brings.

The gift fear brings is the opportunity to love it and thereby grow our capacity for love and creativity. Sometimes our fears get so great that love is the only thing that will put those fears to rest. We all need to become experts at dealing with fear right now. We need to let ourselves feel our fears in a spirit of loving acceptance, so that our willingness to embrace our fears opens the floodgates of creativity that we will need to solve the problems we all face.

There's a lot of fear in the air right now to deal with. To make matters worse, the McCain/Palin campaign is working overtime to increase the amount of fear in our lives. McCain/Palin's handlers know that the more scared they can make people, the more easily people can be manipulated into voting against their own interests and good judgment.

John McCain has been roundly criticized of late for sowing seeds of fear and hate. It's going to be hard to talk him out of that tactic, though, because it got George W. Bush elected twice. We don't know yet if McCain will change tactics again and try to convince us that the pit bulls he's unleashed are actually nice puppy dogs. We should be skeptical of this tactic, though, because as the old saying goes, you can take the lipstick off a pit bull, but it's still a hockey mom underneath, or something like that.

My Sympathies in This Presidential Election Process....

This shirt is designed by Ben Heine and sold by Urban Kleding

Success in the Middle East.....Are The Candidates Living In The Twilight Zone Or What???

The Age of the Warrior”: Robert Fisk on the US Elections, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Israel-Palestine

From Democracy Now October 2, 2008

Guest:

Robert Fisk, bestselling author and journalist. He has reported from the Middle East for more than three decades and covered eleven major wars. He is one of the world’s most celebrated foreign correspondents and has been named British Press Awards’ International Journalist of the Year seven times. He is currently the Middle East correspondent for The Independent of London. His previous books include Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanonand The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East. His latest is a collection of his essays from The Independent called The Age of the Warrior.




JUAN GONZALEZ: The US strategy in Afghanistan is back in the news, just ahead of the vice-presidential debate tonight. The British ambassador to Afghanistan has been quoted in a French newspaper as saying that the American military strategy in that country is “destined to fail.” Ambassador Sherard Cowper-Coles’s critical comments about the NATO operation in Afghanistan were part of a leaked memo from a French diplomat. He also said, “The coalition presence—particularly the military presence—is part of the problem, not the solution.”

The British ambassador’s leaked statements were published just as the top US commander in Afghanistan called for three additional combat brigades—that is, over 10,000 soldiers—to be immediately deployed to Kabul. General David McKiernan told reporters in Washington, D.C. Wednesday that Americans were facing a “tough fight” in Afghanistan that “might get worse before it gets better.”


AMY GOODMAN: As the US-led wars in the Middle East show no sign of abating, we turn now to a man who has chronicled eleven major wars in this part of the world and shows no sign of abating, himself. Robert Fisk is Britain’s most celebrated foreign correspondent, has borne witness to countless tragedies in the Middle East for over three decades.

Robert Fisk has been named British Press Awards’ International Journalist of the Year seven times. He is currently the Middle East correspondent for The Independent of London. His previous books include Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon and The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East. His latest is a collection of his essays and articles from The Independent; it’s called The Age of the Warrior. Robert Fisk joins us here in New York in our firehouse studio.

Welcome to Democracy Now!


ROBERT FISK: Thank you, Amy.


AMY GOODMAN: Well, you’re traveling through this country in the midst of a major crisis and a war abroad. Talk about your observations.


ROBERT FISK: Well, I suppose the first thing is how similar the two things are. I mean, first of all, the Europeans were constantly advising more banking regulation, in case they got infected by any economic crisis. The United States, this had to be a free market, deregulation totally. In other words, once more, the United States did not listen to its foreign partners and allies, on economic issues this time.

Number two is, rushed into a quick fix for a rescue bailout without any really serious planning, like crossing the Tigris River without a plan for post-war Iraq.

And three, it’s the little people who get hit: the little Iraqis, in the hundreds of thousands, who’ve died; and, of course, poor Americans, for the most part, who join the Marines or the Reservists because they want to have a university education, they end up in Iraq, and they get killed. The little people, once more, are the people who are getting hit. They’re very parallel things, in my view. I can see it all the time.


JUAN GONZALEZ: And, of course, here, in this country, as the number of US casualties has declined, so has the attention in the media or in the public to the situation in Iraq, and everyone has now bought into the thought that things are getting better.


ROBERT FISK: Ha ha ha, yes. Look, the degree of ethnic cleansing that actually took place—genocidal, in some ways—and the fact that the Americans have now built walls through every community in every major city in Iraq, which has divided between the communities, means that there isn’t, in fact, any free flow of movement. There isn’t a country operating anymore.

But now, I mean, if you stand back a little bit and look at it like this, first of all, we went to Afghanistan, we won the war. Then we rushed off to Iraq and won the war. Then we lost the war in Iraq, or maybe we won it again. And then we’re going back to Afghanistan, where we seem to have lost the war, to win it all over again. And in due course, perhaps we’ll have to go back to Iraq. I mean, in my reports, I’m calling this Iraqistan. And now, we’ve actually got soldiers on foot turning up in Pakistan. I mean, has nobody actually stood back and said, “What on earth are we doing out there?” I mean, I calculated for our Sunday magazine that we now have twenty-two times as many military personnel per head of population as the Crusaders had in the twelfth century. You know, what are we doing?

It was a baker in Baghdad who asked me this very obvious question. He said, “Why are you”—“you” meaning Western military—“Why are you in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, French air base at Dushanbe running close as support for the British in Helmand province in Afghanistan? Why are your people going into Pakistan? Why are you in Afghanistan and Iraq? Why are you in Turkey? Why are you in Jordan and Egypt and Algeria? US Special Forces have a base outside Tamanrasset in the southern Sahara. Why are you in Bahrain? Why are you in Oman? Why are you in Yemen? Why are you in Qatar? Biggest US air base.” I didn’t have a reply.

But I was struck when I was having lunch on the West Coast a few days ago, by a very educated lady sitting next to me, saying, “But the Muslims wanted to take over the world, and they had already taken over France.” I mean, how does this happen? I mean, she might have told me that Martians had landed in New Mexico, only thing you could do to counter that kind of argument. It looks like somehow we’re on a brainwashing trip. And we’ve all bought the narrative. You know, we even have Mrs. Palin talking about victory in Iraq. It doesn’t feel it if you go to Iraq. It doesn’t feel it if you live there.


AMY GOODMAN: She also has talked about Iraq as being God’s war.


ROBERT FISK: Yeah, well, we’ve had some generals who’ve talked about that, too—haven’t we?—and kept their uniform on in church when they said it. You know, more and more, I look back on the early statements by bin Laden, statements we never actually read. The narrative is always “Is this bin Laden?” when he appears. “Is he ill? When did he make the statement? And have the CIA confirmed it’s his voice?” What his voice actually says is never of any interest to us.

But if you remember, he went on and on about crusaders, and he actually made a very important statement before we invaded Iraq, in which he called upon Muslims in Iraq to collaborate with Baath Party officials against the crusaders, on the grounds that Salahadin had collaborated with the non-Muslim Persians against the crusaders in the twelfth century. We missed all this. And this was the detonation that set off the insurgency.


JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to ask you, at the debate, the presidential debate last Friday, we had the situation where the so-called candidate of peace—


ROBERT FISK: Yeah, yeah.


JUAN GONZALEZ: —Barack Obama, is talking about, well, we took our eye off the ball in Afghanistan, as if this is a game here that’s being played and we made a mistake in the game. And so, now we must go back to Afghanistan and possibly even into Pakistan.


ROBERT FISK: Look, I think you have to realize—and the Arabs do not, and I’ve been trying on Al Jazeera Arabic service to say this—it’s not going to make any difference who is the next president of the United States, as far as Southwest Asia and the Muslim world is concerned. I was in Qatar, actually, in the Al Jazeera Arabic studios when Obama made his famous Middle East trip. You know, he gave forty-five minutes to the Palestinians, twenty-four hours to the Israelis. And the Arabic anchorman turned to me. He said, “So, Robert, do you think Obama will win the election?” I said, “He’ll win the election for the Israeli Knesset. I don’t know if he’s going to get the presidency of the United States.” You know, we’ve got here a one-track policy into the Middle East by the United States, and it’s not going to change.


AMY GOODMAN: But, Robert, is that true? On the one hand, you have, yes, they don’t sound that different when it comes to, for example, Afghanistan. They agree that’s the main site of the war, the main candidates. But I guess it’s the question of what could happen next and what approach McCain or Obama would take.


ROBERT FISK: Look, the Taliban now control half of Afghanistan, not just at night, but in the day—during the day, too. There’s no doubt that Petraeus has got it right when he talks about things are going to get worse.


AMY GOODMAN: Petraeus.


ROBERT FISK: Petraeus. And there’s no doubt, too, that the famous British ambassador, Mr. Cowper-Coles—by the way, he’s in my book, and he’s the guy who persuaded the British, when he was ambassador to Saudi Arabia, not to continue with the bribes inquiry by the British fraud squad into arms sold to Saudi Arabia. He’s the guy who actually advised the fraud squad people to drop it.


AMY GOODMAN: And this involved Bandar Bush. This involved the former Saudi ambassador to the United States.


ROBERT FISK: Absolutely, it’s the same guy. I should add—I should just add that more than twenty years ago, a young diplomat in the Egyptian embassy—in the British embassy in Cairo advised me to drop one of our stringers in the region and take on another stringer who was rather favorable to the foreign office. I didn’t do as I was told. But that man was also Cowper-Coles. What a strange career he has!

However, let’s go back to your Obama thing. Look, at the end of the day, we cannot win in Afghanistan. The Taliban are not crossing porous borders. They don’t even acknowledge the border, because, for them, it’s Pashtunistan. The border was drawn by a British civil servant called Sir Mortimer Durand in the Victorian age, and no one there, apart from us, accepts that it’s there—and, I suppose, the Pakistani army.

And the fact of the matter is that we have no policy there. The Karzai government is totally discredited. Karzai himself only rules his palace, with the help of American mercenaries to protect him. His government is full of drug barons, warlords and criminals. And that includes the people down in Kandahar, which is virtually a lost city. The troops cannot enter Kandahar anymore. It’s gone, effectively, especially at night. You can’t go there. No Westerner can walk through the streets of Kandahar. And you don’t see any women, except in Kabul, who are not wearing burqas. You remember the famous liberation of women, equality, gender equality was coming? It’s all turned out to be totally false. And we’re going to win there? We’re going to win there?


JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, and, of course, the issue of Pakistan, to me, is the most frightening one of all, because—


ROBERT FISK: Absolutely.


JUAN GONZALEZ: —you’re talking about a country that is really almost a failed state at this point.


ROBERT FISK: We’ve been told that—the narrative is that the mad mullahs with black turbans and the crackpot Ahmadinejad of Iran—and he is a crackpot—are going to destroy Israel, and then, of course, they’re going to destroy the Palestinians, and they’ll get destroyed with all these nuclear weapons.

I’ve been saying for more than two years there is one nation in Southwest Asia, which is packed with Taliban supporters and al-Qaeda supporters, and it’s got a bomb, and it’s totally corrupted, from the shoeshine boy to the president, via its intelligence services and army, and it’s called Pakistan. And only now are we beginning to see Pakistan pop up. I bet you if you run a computer check in the next few months, Iran will go right down to the bottom of the page, unless Israel chooses to bomb it, and up will go Pakistan.

And suddenly, how do we deal with this country? It will be a whole crazed mixture, which is already symbolized by the fact that, first of all, we put troops in on the ground in Pakistan and infringed its sovereignty. Then, when the Marriott Hotel blows up, the FBI offers its help in finding out the criminals. I mean, are we friends, or are we enemies of Pakistan? We don’t even know that.

And we start talking, using phrases like “victory.” We should be talking about phrases like "justice for the people of the Middle East.” If you have justice, you can build democracy on it, and then we can withdraw all these soldiers. We’re always going—promising people in the Middle East democracy and packages of human rights off our supermarket shelves, and we’re always arriving with our horses and our Humvees and our swords and our Apache helicopters and our M1A1 tanks. The only future in the Middle East is to withdraw all our military forces and have serious political, social, religious, cultural relations with these people. It’s not our land.


AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk, just before we went on air, this came over AP: suicide bombers targeted Shia worshippers as they left morning prayers at two Baghdad mosques, killing nineteen people, injuring fifty others. In a separate attack, gunmen fatally shot six people as they traveled in a minibus at Wajihiyah, a town sixty miles north of Baghdad.


ROBERT FISK: Yeah, well, and we won, and the surge was successful, and everything’s going back to ordinary life, and people—I mean, that map which we saw, the two maps coming up—it’s preposterous. I mean, I get phone calls from Iraqis in Damascus, when I’m in Beirut, saying, you know, “Can you help us stay in Syria? Can we come to Lebanon? We cannot go back to Baghdad.” And they’re still getting calls saying, you know, “If you come back to your house, you’ll be murdered.” This is not a success; it’s a hell disaster for all the peoples of the Middle East. I mean, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, southern Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank—I mean, is no one waking up to say that there is no hope there at the moment? You know, there’s no light at the end of the tunnel out in the Middle East.


JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to ask you, you mentioned the West Bank, obviously, the original center of this entire conflict. The—


ROBERT FISK: I’m not sure it is the center anymore, by the way, but, yeah.


JUAN GONZALEZ: Right. But the comments recently by Ehud Olmert, saying that—


ROBERT FISK: Look, Ehud Olmert is a has-been. He’s gone.


AMY GOODMAN: But he is prime minister.


ROBERT FISK: Just.


AMY GOODMAN: And he said you should give back the West Bank.


ROBERT FISK: Yes, but he’s going, Amy. He’s going. This is the same as all your generals who go out to fight in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and when they’re asked to comment to the press, they say, “Everything is going fine; it may be a tough battle,” and they salute and click their heels to Rumsfeld, or they did. And the moment they retire, they demand Rumsfeld’s resignation and say it’s all gone wrong. I mean, if only just one of them, just one, would say it in a press conference when they still had their uniform on, we might see a few changes coming about, but they don’t. They keep their—they go heel.


AMY GOODMAN: Robert Fisk, we’ll end it there, but we’re going to do part two. Robert Fisk, bestselling author, journalist, writes for The Independent, currently the Middle East correspondent for The Independent of London. His latest collection of essays and articles is called The Age of the Warrior.