From a friend:

Dear Mark,

I have a hunch that this may be of interest.

You have been pretty vocal about Diebold and electronic voting machines.

I am not in any sense knowledgeable about the issue, but I was
chatting recently about Diebold with a Very Serious Techie in the
banking industry.

“It’s not divulged to the public because a bank’s most important
asset is people’s trust, but Diebold is a major player in the
electronic banking industry, and their record for error-free
transmission of data is horrendous.”

Please don’t quote me, ’cause I don’t have any verification that what
he said is true, but it seems to me that the banking side of Diebold
is worth some close attention.

Here’s the longer version of Clinton’s remarks:

http://aan.org/alternative/Aan/ViewArticle?oid=oid%3A166649

Q. [to Clinton] Talking about elections, Robert Kennedy Jr. just wrote an article in Rolling Stone claiming the Bush Administration stole the last election. Do you think it was, and how can we guard against something like that going on in the future?

WJC: I must say I read Robert Kennedy’s article in Rolling Stone, and I think all of you should if you haven’t. And before I read it, I was convinced that President Bush had won Ohio… I… I thought it would have been ironic if he had lost the election in the electoral college and won the popular vote–that is, if he went out the same way he came in. ButÅ  but I think thatÅ  I think that — two things. I think there is no question that Al Gore would have won Florida if all the votes had been counted and the people who intended to vote for him had their votes counted.

Between the people whose votes were thrown out for erroneous double voting instructions in Jacksonville, and the 3400 Jewish Democrats who voted for Pat Buchanan in the butterfly ballot, and several others, there’s no question that several thousand more people in Florida intended to vote for Gore and showed up on Election Day. And I still believe that the two Bush v. Gore decisions will go down as one of the four or five worst decisions in the history of the United States Supreme Court. I think it was a disgrace. And I think ifÅ  if Gore had been ahead and Bush had been behind, the Supreme Court would have voted nine to nothing to count all the votes by uniform standard. That’s what I think would have happened. You may not agree but that’s what I… I used to teach that course, Constitutional Law. That’s what I think.

In this case, I think… You know, I don’t have an opinion, but I thought Robert Kennedy made a very persuasive case, and what was clear is that the Secretary of State, now their candidate for governor, was a world-class expert in voter suppression, and that he was doing everything he could to keep voters that he thought were Democrats from voting–in every way that he could. And I think that is wrong. And I hope that the voters of Ohio will repudiate it. I mean, you know, we ought to be in the business of getting more people to vote, not fewer.

We don’t have as many people–heck, they had 70 percent of the voters voted in Iraq in the last election, they had a better voter turnout than we did, and a bunch of them were risking their lives. So I don’t think we ought to be ratifying the public service of anybody who thinks it’s his job to keep people from voting and that’s [applause]… but I don’t have an opinion because I didn’t know anything about it ’til I read Robert Kennedy’s article. But he sure as heck raised a–he made a compelling case, those numbers that he said in some of those precincts, the probability of the vote total being that much at variance with the exit polls was one in 600,000.

And it happened over and over and over again. So if you haven’t read the article, I urge you to read it and when you go back home I urge you to look at… you know, again this is without regard to party, I just don’t think we ought to be suppressing voters. We ought to be getting them to the polls and letting them vote and letting them have their say.

There’s a lot going on as the struggle for verifiable elections heats up in
New York State and around the nation. At the national level, the mainstream
media is finally starting to cover the dangers of electronic voting. In NY,
as voting machine vendors make a full court press to lock in hundreds of
millions of taxpayer dollars, the timeline for certification and selection
of voting systems still remains unclear.

One thing is certain, right now voting machine vendors are out there in
force trying to sell New York electronic voting machines which are still
prototypes, cost $8000 or more each, and have never, ever, been used in a
real election. With 2 or 3 DREs likely to be required to replace a single
lever machine the purchase cost for counties will be astronomical. And who
will provide all the additional money to buy these expensive, vulnerable
systems? We taxpayers of course.

Democracy needs your help this summer. Take a look below to see how you can
help in the fight for election integrity.

Bo Lipari
New Yorkers for Verified Voting
http://www.nyvv.org

Dear Mark,

A request to pass this on to your list(s). What opinion will be deemed too controversial to discuss next?

Thanks,
Allan Giles.

—————–

http://www.gnn.tv/B16396

Another Teacher Under Fire for 9/11 Opinion.

http://tinyurl.com/kv7mp

Wis. lawmaker wants lecturer fired for 9-11 conspiracy views

Thursday June 29, 2006

MADISON, Wis. (AP) A state lawmaker is calling on the University
of Wisconsin-Madison to fire a part-time instructor who has spoken
out on his beliefs that figures in the U.S. government, not al-Qaida,
were behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Kevin Barrett is scheduled to teach a class in the fall in the
UW-Madison Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia, UW-Madison
Provost Patrick Farrell confirmed in a statement Thursday.

But Farrell said Barrett’s comments on a Milwaukee radio talk
show “raised some legitimate concerns about the content and quality
of instruction in his planned fall course, ‘Islam: Religion and
Culture.’”

During his appearance Wednesday night on Jessica McBride’s show
on WTMJ, Barrett disputed most of the widely accepted information
about the attacks that brought down the World Trade Center in New
York City when airliners were flown into the twin towers.

—————————————————-

This marks the second time in as many months that an academic has
come under fire for opinions expressed outside of the classroom
regarding the events of 9/11.

Last month Tom Mustric, a substitute teacher in Ohio was on the hot
plate for his opinions expressed outside of a classroom setting. A
complaint was made trying to conflate his opinion with his teaching
content.

It looks like the same thing is happening here.

Here is Rep. Nass’ contact page.
http://www.legis.state.wi.us/assembly/asm31/asm31.html

Here is more information about Tom Mustric.
http://tinyurl.com/qexyx

Response to: The Hot Air Factory [Alexander Cockburn]

By Chris Lowe Portland, Oregon
Submitted to Portside, June 29, 2006

[This is a response to Cockburn's piece at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060703/cockburn.]

Alexander Cockburn is always interesting to read as a gamble:
will he turn a satisfyingly pointed phrase or jibe at some
malfeasant? Will he make a really thought-provoking point, as
he sometimes does? For about a decade the gamble has paid off
less than it did before. Cockburn seems to have decided at
some point to become programmatic to the point of robotic in
his left contrarianism. The effects on both style and insight
seem deleterious, but maybe that’s just me getting older . . .

In the case at hand, his gratuitous trashing of Truthout.org
as “loony,” as a rhetorical device for criticizing left
overemphasis on Karl Rove and inflated political claims for
blogs, is a great pity and a serious distortion. In the first
place Truthout, for Portside readers unfamiliar with it,
really isn’t a blog or blogger-center at all. In fact much of
it is a good deal like Portside, except web-rather than e-mail
based, highlighting stories from the press but giving them a
different priority than their original frames, with some
original content. Their op-eds are partly recruited from
other sources (e.g. there’s one up now by Medea Benjamin from
Alternet) and partly original to them. They also run long
analytical pieces that are more than op-eds and more than
reportorial journalism stripped of analysis, which often are
quite good, especially on legal matters and on the occupation
in Iraq. Check them out at .

Among its virtues, Truthout and its archive are an excellent
source of evidence against the canard that “everyone knew” and
no one doubted that Hussein’s Iraq had an active weapons of
mass destruction program, possessed large quantities of such
weapons and posed an imminent threat to someone (whether it be
the U.S., Israel or its regional neighbors). They were active
in providing evidence, including platforms for former weapons
inspectors, news stories buried on the inside pages in the
regular press, and their own analyses especially by William
Rivers Pitt, that such views were either questionable or
false, amounting to sheer mongering of war. Their case shows
clearly hat the definition of “everyone” in the “everyone
knew” excuse is circular, because you couldn’t be admitted as
a “serious” person to the hegemonic political debate if you
disagreed on the war party’s view of Iraq’s putative Ws of MD.

JUNE 28, 2006
Missing (Bill) Clinton
BY MARY ANNA TOWLER

It was a sight to see: hundreds of alternative-newspaper people standing and cheering Bill Clinton as he walked onstage, hanging on his every word through a nearly hour-long talk and 45 minutes of questions, and then rushing to the stage to shake his hand, get his autograph, and take his picture.

When Clinton was president, alt-weeklies published plenty of attacks on him. And a good many of us are way farther to the left than he is. But when Clinton addressed the annual convention of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies earlier this month in Little Rock, you’d have thought he was talking to a room full of supporters at the height of an election campaign.

[snip]

Asked his opinion about Robert Kennedy Jr.’s recent article in Rolling Stone, charging that John Kerry, not George Bush, won the majority of votes in Ohio and thus won the 2004 presidential election, Clinton said Kennedy made “a compelling case.”

And, he said, “I think there’s no question that Al Gore would have won Florida” if all the votes had been counted accurately and all the people who wanted to vote had been able to.

Read more.

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, “ARMED MADHOUSE: Who’s Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal ‘08, No Child’s Behind Left and other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War.”

Friday, June 30 — GEORGE Bush’s operatives have plans to jigger with the upcoming elections. I’m not talking about the November ‘06 vote in the USA (though they have plans for that, too). I’m talking about the election this Sunday in Mexico for their Presidency.

It begins with an FBI document marked, “Counterterrorism” and “Foreign Intelligence Collection” and “Secret.” Date: “9/17/2001,” six days after the attack on the World Trade towers. It’s nice to know the feds got right on the ball, if a little late.

Read more.

BOOK COMMENTARY:

A Government Hijacked

Reviewed by William E. Betz
Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election & Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them)
by Mark Crispin Miller
364 pages; New York, Basic Books, 2005; $24.95 hardback

The basic premise of this book is extremely painful to admit in spite of the overwhelming proof: Our government has been hijacked by undemocratic forces that manipulated election results to reinstall the Bush administration.
There is no joy in this book. It documents in excruciating detail overwhelming evidence of the broad-ranging election fraud that took place in the United States in connection with the 2004 national election. Unfortunately, the reaction of the typical na•ve American to the fact that the election was stolen by the right-wing Republicans who are currently in power in this country has been an insistent disbelief. The indisputable facts have been either roundly disputed or assiduously ignored by the mainstream print and broadcast media, and the proponents of this ugliest of truths have been relegated to the status of tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists.

The subject of this book is self-marginalizing. It utterly destroys the reflexive “It can’t happen here” response of those of us who refuse to believe that it HAS happened here. I say “those of us” because acknowledgement of the basic premise of the book is the most revolutionary of thoughts for anyone who has learned to believe in the sanctity of our electoral system, and the basic premise is extremely painful to admit in spite of the overwhelming proof: Our government has been hijacked by undemocratic forces that manipulated election results to reinstall the Bush administration, an illegitimate administration initially installed by a Supreme Court decision that invalidated the results of the 2000 election, an administration dedicated to world domination and the destruction of American democracy, the U.S. Constitution and the individual rights that made this country the envy of striving people throughout the world.

Read more.

I’ll be on Ed Schultz’s show on Air America today at 5:00 p.m. EST, with Jim Lampley sitting in for Schultz.