NYT: Bush Insider Who Planned To Tell All Killed In Plane Crash

Bush Insider Who Planned To Tell All Killed In Plane Crash: Non-Profit Demands Full Federal Investigation
New York Times, Business section
Published: December 20, 2008

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Michael Connell, the Bush IT expert who has been directly implicated in the rigging of George Bush's 2000 and 2004 elections, was killed last night when his single engine plane crashed three miles short of the Akron airport. Velvet Revolution ("VR"), a non-profit that has been investigating Mr. Connell's activities for the past two years, can now reveal that a person close to Mr. Connell has recently been discussing with a VR investigator how he can tell all about his work for George Bush. Mr. Connell told a close associate that he was afraid that George Bush and Dick Cheney would "throw [him] under the bus."


A tipster close to the McCain campaign disclosed to VR in July that Mr. Connell's life was in jeopardy and that Karl Rove had threatened him and his wife, Heather. VR's attorney, Cliff Arnebeck, notified the United States Attorney General , Ohio law enforcement and the federal court about these threats and insisted that Mr. Connell be placed in protective custody. VR also told a close associate of Mr. Connell's not to fly his plane because of another tip that the plane could be sabotaged. Mr. Connell, a very experienced pilot, has had to abandon at least two flights in the past two months because of suspicious problems with his plane. On December 18, 2008, Mr. Connell flew to a small airport outside of Washington DC to meet some people. It was on his return flight the next day that he crashed.


On October 31, Mr. Connell appeared before a federal judge in Ohio after being subpoenaed in a federal lawsuit investigating the rigging of the 2004 election under the direction of Karl Rove. The judge ordered Mr. Connell to testify under oath at a deposition on November 3rd, the day before the presidential election. Velvet Revolution received confidential information that the White House was extremely concerned about Mr. Connell talking about his illegal work for the White House and two Bush/Cheney 04 attorneys were dispatched to represent him.


An associate of Mr. Connell's told VR that Mr. Connell was involved with the destruction of the White House emails and the setting up of the off-grid White House email system.


Mr. Connell handled all of John McCain's computer work in the recent presidential campaign. VR has received direct evidence that the McCain campaign kept abreast of the legal developments against Mr. Connell by reading the VR dedicated website, www.rovecybergate.com.


VR demands that the Ohio Attorney General and the United States Justice Department conduct a complete investigation into the activities of Mr. Connell and determine whether there was any foul play in his death. VR demands that federal law enforcement officials place the following people under protective custody pending this investigation. Heather Connell who

is the owner of GovTech Solutions, Randy Cole, the former President of GovTech Solutions, and Jeff Averbeck, the CEO of SmartTech in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Both GovTech and SmartTech have been implicated in the rigging of the 2000 and 2004 elections and the White House email scandal. Our prior request to have Mr. Connell protected went unheeded and now he is dead.


SOURCE Velvet Revolution

Raw Story: Georgia election at risk -- after 2002 Election Stolen

Allegations about 2002 Georgia election raise doubts on current voting

11/21/2008 @ 1:59 pm

Filed by Muriel Kane


As the state of Georgia prepares to conduct a runoff between incumbent Senator Saxby Chambliss and his Democratic challenger, Jim Martin, old doubts about the election in which Chambliss took the Senate seat from Max Cleland six years ago are attracting fresh notice.

Chambliss was the victor in the 2002 election by seven percentage points, despite polls which showed him trailing by five points just a week earlier. That unexpected turnaround, combined with the exclusive control over the voting machines by Diebold Election Systems, raised suspicions of electronic vote-tampering from the start.

According to cyber-security expert Stephen Spoonamore, "If you look at the case of Saxby Chambliss, that's ridiculous. The man was not elected. He lost that election by five points. Max Cleland won. They flipped the votes, clear as day."

Spoonamore has been speaking out since last summer about the problems with the 2002 election, drawing on his examination of a software patch which the president of Diebold's election unit personally brought to Georgia to be installed prior to the voting.

Spoonamore received the patch from Diebold whistleblower Chris Hood, who first came forward two years ago and spoke with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for an article in Rolling Stone.

"We ran the election," Hood told Kennedy. "We had 356 people that Diebold brought into the state. Diebold opened and closed the polls and tabulated the votes. Diebold convinced [Georgia Secretary of State Cathy] Cox that it would be best if the company ran everything due to the time constraints, and in the interest of a trouble-free election, she let us do it."

Hood has now repeated his doubts about the 2002 Georgia election, as well as about voting problems in Maryland in 2004, in an interview with former ABC News producer Rebecca Abrahams. "I have come to believe that these errors are now permanently embedded into the system," Hood told Abrahams.

Abrahams states, "Jim Martin should be concerned about the veracity and validity of the November election results after anomalies in the last election and the statement by Chris Hood. In fact, voters should demand to know if Chambliss had any knowledge that the 2002 election was rigged and whether he knew that Georgia citizens voted on electronic voting machines that had been patched with uncertified software days before the election in clear violation of Georgia law."

Chambliss, meanwhile, may be growing testy as the runoff election approaches. He was recently asked about his refusal to testify in a case involving Imperial Sugar and responded by putting his hand over the camera lens and saying, "You can take it away now."


This video was posted by Velvet Revolution on YouTube on November 21, 2008.

Karl Rove: Obama Hasn't Closed the Sale

Wall Street Journal
OPINION
OCTOBER 16, 2008WSJ
Obama Hasn't Closed the Sale
Both candidates continue to tinker with their strategies.
By KARL ROVE

RB writes:

Anything by Karl Rove on the election campaign has got to be scary because of his track record on engineering voter fraud. He also gives us a clue as to where we should look to first for suppression of the Democrat vote, electronic voting games and other election fraud maneuvers



Rove writes that

McCain is...narrowing his travels almost exclusively to Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, Missouri, Colorado and Nevada. If he carries those states, while losing only Iowa and New Mexico from the GOP's 2004 total, Mr. McCain will carry 274 Electoral College votes and the White House. It's threading the needle, but it's come to that.

Karl Rove writes:

In the campaign's final two weeks, voters will take a last serious look at both presidential candidates. The outcome of the race isn't cast in stone yet.

Barack Obama holds a 7.3% lead in the Real Clear Politics average of all polls, but the latest Gallup tracking poll reveals that there are nearly twice as many undecided voters this year than there were in the last presidential election. The Investor's Business Daily/TIPP poll (which was closest to the mark in predicting the 2004 outcome -- 0.4% off the actual result) now says this is a three-point race.


AP
This week also brought a reminder that Sen. Obama hasn't closed the sale. The Washington Post/ABC poll found 45% of voters still don't think he's qualified to be president, about the same number who doubted his qualifications in March.

This is seven points more than George W. Bush's highest reading in 2000 and the worst since Michael Dukakis's 56% unqualified rating in 1988. It explains why Mr. Obama has ignored Democratic giddiness and done two things to keep victory from slipping away.

First, he is using his money to try to keep John McCain from gaining traction. The Obama campaign raised $67 million in September and may be on track to raise $100 million in October. Sen. McCain opted last month for roughly $85 million in public financing, giving him less than half of Mr. Obama's funds for the campaign's final two months. Even with robust Republican National Committee fund raising to augment his spending, Mr. McCain is at a severe financial disadvantage.

So Mr. Obama is spending $35 million on TV this week versus the McCain/RNC total of $17 million. Mr. Obama is outspending Mr. McCain on TV in Virginia by a ratio of 4 to 1, in Florida by 3 to 1, and in Missouri and Nevada by better than 2 to 1. The disparity is likely to grow in the campaign's final weeks.

Money alone, however, won't decide the contest. John Kerry and the Democrats outspent Mr. Bush and the GOP in 2004 by $121 million and still lost.

Mr. Obama's other strategy is to do all he can to look presidential, including buying very expensive half-hour slots to address the country next week. He wants to give a serious, Oval-Office type address. This is smart. People appreciate Mr. Obama's empathy on the economy, but as they take a long look at what he wants to do about it, they will be less impressed, especially if Mr. McCain draws sharp contrasts with clear policy proposals.

Mr. Obama is trying to make the case that his lack of experience or record should not disqualify him. But in doing so, he seems to recognize that the U.S. is still a center-right country. His TV ads promise tax cuts and his radio ads savage Mr. McCain's health-care plan as a tax increase. It's a startling campaign conversion for the most liberal member of the Senate. We'll know on Election Day if he is able to get away with it.

About Karl Rove
Karl Rove served as Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush from 2000–2007 and Deputy Chief of Staff from 2004–2007. At the White House he oversaw the Offices of Strategic Initiatives, Political Affairs, Public Liaison, and Intergovernmental Affairs and was Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, coordinating the White House policy making process.

Before Karl became known as "The Architect" of President Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaigns, he was president of Karl Rove + Company, an Austin-based public affairs firm that worked for Republican candidates, nonpartisan causes, and nonprofit groups. His clients included over 75 Republican U.S. Senate, Congressional and gubernatorial candidates in 24 states, as well as the Moderate Party of Sweden.

Karl writes a weekly op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, is a Newsweek columnist and is now writing a book to be published by Simon & Schuster. Email the author at Karl@Rove.com or visit him on the web at Rove.com.
Similarly, Mr. McCain appears to be making three important course corrections. First, he and Gov. Sarah Palin are sharpening their stump speeches so their sound bites come off well on TV. Gone are offhand remarks and awkward comments read from notes perched on a podium. In are teleprompters and carefully crafted arguments. Mr. McCain is also more at ease than before and has an ebullient, come-from-behind underdog optimism that will serve him well in the final weeks.

Second, Mr. McCain is shaping a story line that draws on well-founded concerns about Mr. Obama's lack of record or experience. Mr. McCain is also bowing to reality and devoting most of his time to the economy. His narrative is he's the conservative reformer who'll lead and work hard to get things done, while Mr. Obama is the tax-and-spend liberal who's unprepared to lead and unwilling to act.

Mr. McCain is hitting Mr. Obama for wanting to raise taxes in difficult economic times, especially on small business and for the purpose of redistributing income, and for having lavish spending plans at a time when the economy is faltering. He's criticizing Mr. Obama for lingering on the sidelines while Mr. McCain dove in to help pass a rescue plan, necessary no matter how distasteful. And he's attacking Mr. Obama for not joining the fight in 2005 when reformers like Mr. McCain tried to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Mr. McCain's other adjustment is his schedule. His campaign understands the dire circumstances it faces and is narrowing his travels almost exclusively to Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, Missouri, Colorado and Nevada. If he carries those states, while losing only Iowa and New Mexico from the GOP's 2004 total, Mr. McCain will carry 274 Electoral College votes and the White House. It's threading the needle, but it's come to that.

This task, while not impossible, will be difficult. By mid-September, the McCain camp was slightly ahead in the polls. Then came the financial crisis. The past month has taken an enormous toll on the McCain campaign.

Whether it can find the right formula in the next 19 days to dig out is a question. If Mr. McCain succeeds, he will have engineered the most impressive and improbable political comeback since Harry Truman in 1948. But having to reach back more than a half-century for inspiration is not the place campaign managers want to be now.

Mr. Rove is a former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.

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Chris Floyd: The New York Times eschews accountabliity on millions of disenfranchised voters aud

Without a Trace: The Smokeless Gun of Flagrant Election Fixing

by Chris Floyd

http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/3/1625-without-a-trace-the-smokeless-gun-of-flagrant-election-fixing.html

The idea of "victimless crimes" has been around for a long time, but the ultra-modern 21st century has given us a bold new concept: perpetratorless crimes.

This is by now a familiar dynamic: Outright, undeniable crimes are committed, often very heinous ones -- mass murder, military aggression, torture, vast financial corruption and fraud, warrantless spying, egregious violations of the Constitution -- but somehow, no one is actually responsible for them. They just sort of, you know, happened, all by themselves.

The most we can possibly do about these crimes is to conduct a non-binding "investigation" -- preferably by a committee of "serious" Establishment figures -- who will then offer suggestions on how to avoid such unseemly situations in the future. Of course, most of the time it would be too "divisive," too "partisan," to do even that much. But in any case, you certainly can't prosecute anyone for these crimes.

(This innovative concept only covers crimes in which powerful people might be involved, of course. Any ordinary person remains subject to the full weight of the increasingly draconian law -- although, if said ordinary person was commiting crimes at the behest of powerful people, the application of the law can suddenly become miraculously light, or even non-existent.)

The New York Times points us to yet another of these perpetratorless crimes. In fact, the venerable Gray Goose -- sorry, Gray Lady -- of American journalism acts as close accomplice of a crime wave that seems to strike nationwide every two to four years: the deliberate and illegal disenfranchisement of millions of citizens, almost all of them the poorest and most marginalized in American society.

After eight years of a veritable Ossa of evidence of gamed, thrown, fixed and finagled elections, this week the NY Times bestirred itself to notice that something might possibly be amiss in the nation's electoral process. A headline writer topped the story with weakest possible statement of the undeniable truth: "States' Actions to Block Voters Appear Illegal." And you can bet your bottom dollar (as it falls through the bottomless pit of the Beltway bailout banditry) that if the New York Times deigns to acknowledge even the "appearance" of some mischance in the divinely ordained machinery of the Establishment, the actual rot is very far gone indeed.

Thus the thoroughgoing disenfranchisement of eligible voters -- as many as three million in 2004, as Greg Palast has noted -- has finally spilled into the paper's sacred precincts. The first paragraph puts in plainly:
Tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law, according to a review of state records and Social Security data by The New York Times.

Hard to put it more plainly than that: voters in key states are being disenfranchised in violation of federal law. In other words, a very serious crime is being committed, a bloody shiv job to the heart of the democratic process.

Wow! Wonder who could be behind such a brazen and dastardly crime -- a crime that benefits very powerful people seeking even greater power? Why, no one, of course! Here's the very next paragraph of the story:

The actions do not seem to be coordinated by one party or the other, nor do they appear to be the result of election officials intentionally breaking rules, but are apparently the result of mistakes in the handling of the registrations and voter files as the states tried to comply with a 2002 federal law, intended to overhaul the way elections are run.

You see? It just sort of, you know, happened. And even though these open violations of federal law -- i.e., crimes -- are affecting likely Democratic voters "disproportionately," the Times says, they are not being directed by anyone toward any particular aim. Nope. It's just some kind of strange repeat of this really weird thing that happened back in 2004 and 2000, when the same kind of people were tossed from the voting rolls by the multitude.

The paper traces the crimes to the "Help America Vote Act" of 2002. The Times, along with the rest of the corporate media, continues to treat this bill as if it were a serious attempt to address the ludicrously inept and decrepit U.S. electoral process, instead of what it transparently was: an attempt to codify into law the vote-suppression machinery that threw the bollixed 2000 Florida vote into the hands of the partisan extremist faction on the Supreme Court, two of whom had family members pocketing wads of cash from the Bush campaign. HAVA was meant to spread this deliberate chaos throughout the entire country -- and it has done so.

But the tender eyes of Times readers must be shielded from such ugly truth. Instead, we get yards and yards of carefully hedged, bled-dry prose, obscurely outlining a pattern of systematic vote suppression in key states but ensuring that, once again, no one can possibly blamed for it -- and certainly no one can possibly be charged for it. It's just some kind of rare and unpleasant natural phenomenon, like, say, a boll weevil infestation. Or the war crime in Iraq. Or the American torture program. Or the destruction of the American economy. And so on.

At the moment, with the McCain campaign cratering like a merchant bank, the disenfranchisement crime wave will probably not be enough to skew the election. Even with a few million voters blocked from the polls, the widespread revulsion toward the ruling party will probably swamp the polls and put the Democrats back in the White House. Whether this result will be an unmitigated joy and genuine change in the nation's headlong degradation is another matter, one which we'll be taking up in a later column. The merits, or lack of same, of the contending candidates are not the issue here. The point is that millions of the poorest, most marginalized Americans are being denied their right to vote for whomever they please. This is, as even the New York Times acknowledges, a federal crime. But it is not, however much the Times tries to obsfuscate the issue, a perpetratorless one.

Fiction?!: Cassandra, Chanting: An Election Insider's Nightmare by Anonymous

Editorial Reviews from Amazon dot com.

Product Description
At the center of Cassandra, Chanting is a plot to steal the next American presidential election. Written by an election world insider who must remain anonymous, the novel exposes in authentic and chilling detail just how vulnerable our electoral system is today. It also reveals how warnings by experts are going unheeded and leaving Americans dangerously exposed, just as warnings by the mythological Cassandra went unheeded, resulting in the destruction of ancient Troy. As the novel opens, plotters travel to America and seduce and recruit government officials in order to gain access and then manipulate in undetectable ways the computer programs that control voting systems. The subversive group targets weak leaders and government bureaucrats whose thirst for power or other gain makes them susceptible. They find many eager takers. Meanwhile, the National Institute of Standards and Technology in D.C. has assembled a team led by former Navy SEAL Carl Martello to work on federal election oversight. He is joined by Angela Elanthos, brilliant at computers and decoding, and soon they become suspicious of one of the largest voting companies controlling millions of voting machines, certain they have rigged their programs. Despite government inertia and very different backgrounds, Carl and Angela race against the clock to uncover the high-tech complexities of a plot to fix the outcome of the election. As the novel so alarmingly reveals, the means by which the democratic institutions can be sabotaged within the voting process are all too real, as is the public's continuing indifference to what could happen. Cassandra, Chanting is a gripping tale telling us why we must be ever diligent in protecting our institutions against those who exercise no restraint attempting to destroy those institutions and us. "Embedded in this spell-binder of a novel is a startling and convincing message -- the vulnerability of the very voting system the US is now adopting. The author clearly understands the new system and what makes it tick and shows how it could be 'fixed' to produce a winner different from the popular vote. In the process, the very legitimacy of our political system would be subverted. November 2008 is not so far away. We must heed this warning." Marvin Zonis is a Professor in the Graduate School of Business, The University of Chicago. He also heads Marvin Zonis + Associates, Inc., political risk consultants. www.cassandrachanting.com