B’Man’s Crooked Election Watch: How They Stole The 2008 Elections

B’Man: I’m beginning a new series of posts/categories that will address the many issues of election fraud and disenfranchisement that has been occurring and I suggest will occur again this election. There are several sources that I want to gather from, but if you happen to read or see something out on the tubes, please let me know and I would like to focus on it here. You can respond down in the response area of any post or send us an email.

Greg Palast has long been following election fraud and intimidation for the past several election cycles and has published many findings, especially relating to Ohio, Florida, New Mexico and other states. The focus has mainly been on the poor and minorities… Jim Crow stuff.

As the next election unfolds, let’s stay on top of the crooks who stole the last ones and not allow it to happen again without shouting at the top of our lungs.

Chip at After Downing Street offers this video today and this great post:

Watch a Segment of “Uncounted” – Jim Crow: Winning an Election with a Full Deck of Race Cards

Mary Mancini, co-producer of “Uncounted: The Movie” sent in the Week 5 Segment in the movie’s preview mini-series

On Election Day 2004, the most vulnerable Americans were the targets of massive and systematic voter disenfranchisement – long lines and other artificial barriers were manufactured to make it as difficult as possible for American citizens of certain targeted demographics to exercise their legal right to vote.

Why should anyone have to stay in line for 12 hours to vote? And with our busy lives and overwhelming responsibilities, is it even possibly to do so? Or is that the idea?

This week we get to know Jim Crow – the bully who can disenfranchise millions with one simple act.

Also Available Weeks 1 thru 4: The “Whistleblowers Should Have Their Own Trading Cards. With Bubblegum” Series.

• Week 1: The Ballad of Steve Heller All he was doing was his job when Steve Heller found “smoking gun proof” that an electronic voting machine manufacturer was using illegal uncertified software in their voting machines.
• Week 2: Million Dollar Programmer Clint Curtis was asked to create a vote-rigging software prototype that he assumed would be used to try and “catch” would-be fraudsters. The truth, of course, was something completely different.
• Week 3: Diebold’s Disreputable Distinction is Dead On Deserved Ex-Emory County, Utah County Clerk, Bruce Funk, is the kind of man you wish was your grandfather – soft-spoken, kind, and able to recognize what has been called “the nuclear bomb of security flaws” in Diebold’s electronic voting machines.
• Week 4: What Happens to a Dream Deferred? Nashville businessman Athan Gibbs had a question: Why, if you’re an ATM manufacturer, would you make a machine that doesn’t provide a paper trail and can’t be audited?

If You Want Bush’s Impeachment… Sign The Petition

I ain’t asking your opinion of whether or not you think it will happen or whether the Congress will do anything for whatever reason you can think of.

I am asking you, if you believe that Bush should be impeached for his crimes, to sign the petition.

If Americans sign up, the Congress cannot easily ignore it.

Over 100,000 signatures so far.

I wish it were 1,000,000

We did it!

Dear Friends,

Last week, Congressman Dennis Kucinich delivered a petition bearing more than 100,000 names to the Speaker of the House urging that impeachment proceedings begin into the conduct of President Bush. In a special video message, Dennis is asking for your help to deliver an even more powerful message to Congress when it reconvenes in September.

With new disclosures that the Administration tried to “cook the books at the CIA” by creating a phony, forged link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, “We cannot step back and let this President escape accountability.”

If you have already signed the impeachment petition at www.kucinich.us, thank you. If you haven’t, please do. And, in the next few weeks, please ask just one more person to sign so we can let the members of Congress hear our collective demand that they meet their obligation to uphold the Constitution.

Thank you.
The Re-Elect Congressman Kucinich Committee

Sign The Petition

Bro’ Jack’s Elitist Celebrity Quiz

I almost forgot this little diddy that my bud Jack at The Familographer sent me to share. Speaking of ‘Elitism’:

The Elitist Celebrity Quiz

Which presidential candidate hosted Saturday Night Live (hint — the musical guests were The White Stripes)?

Which one had cameos on “24” and “Wedding Crashers“?

Whose wife secretly got her pilot’s license and owns a jet?

Who is pals with Warren Beatty?

Whose daughter is friends with Heidi from MTV’s The Hills?

Whose wife once told Vogue, explaining the purchase of a 7th or 8th house, this one a beach house, “When I bought the first one, my husband, who is not a beach person, said, ‘Oh this is such a waste of money; the kids will never go. Then it got to the point where they used it so much I couldn’t get in the place. So I bought another one.”

Whose family credit cards have been known to ring up more than $500,000 in charges in one month?

Just askin’…

B’Man’s Hypocrite Watch: John McCain, 9 Houses, $520 Shoes & the Obama Elitism

How hypocritical can a person/party get? The media doesn’t bother evaluating the hypocrisy it feeds regarding McMoneyBags’ antics calling Barack an Elitist, when he and his wife are far more “elitist” than Obama.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Barack is bad for this country, but not for the idiotic reasons they give.

Thank goodness we have Rachel Maddow address the subject. Look how the attempted discounting ensues, but she explains it perfectly.

From my (BuelahMan’s) YouTube Channel:

WTF Thursday: He’s Got Big Balls

That shit ain’t funny.

Nuclear Power and the Presidential Candidates

The McCain Plan: Homer Simpson without the Donut

By Greg Palast

[Thursday, August 7, 2008. North Shore, Long Island]

I’m guessing it was excessive exposure to either radiation or George Bush, but Senator John McCain’s comments from inside a nuclear power plant in Michigan are so cracked-brained that I fear some loose gamma rays are doing to McCain’s gray matter what they did to Homer Simpson’s.

On Tuesday, the presumptive Republican candidate descended into the colon of a nuke to declare we need to build 45 new nuclear plants – that this is the way out of our energy crisis. Nuclear power, declared the senator, is a “safe, efficient [and] inexpensive” alternative to oil.

Really? We can argue all day about whether nuclear plants are safe (they aren’t –period). But there can be no argument whatsoever that these giant radioactive tea-kettles are breathtakingly expensive.

Nuclear plants are cheap until you actually try to build one. Not one of the last 49 nuclear plants cost less than $2 billion apiece. I’m looking down the road at the remainders of the Shoreham nuclear plant which took nearly 20 years to build at a cost of $8 billion – or close to $7,000 per customer it was supposed to supply. When I say “supposed to,” it was closed for safety reasons after operating just one single day.

We’re told that the new generation of plants will be different. Just like an alcoholic child-beater, the nuclear plant builders promise us that, “This time it will be different.” Sure. And McCain believes them.

I don’t. Maybe that’s because I headed the government racketeering investigation of the Shoreham nuclear plant’s builders. Stone & Webster Engineering and its partner paid hundreds of millions of dollars to settle the civil racketeering claim over the evidence we found of fraud and perjury. Now Stone & Webster will cash in big-time under Plan McCain.

The other big builder which will hit the jackpot under the McCain scheme is KBR, the one-time subsidiary of Halliburton, whose best known project is the rebuilding of Iraq. (Halliburton dumped KBR last year. Can’t blame them.) KBR has built many nukes –not one within a mile of its promised cost.

But that doesn’t bother McCain. So who is McCain getting his energy advice from? I’m looking at a photo of the perplexed senator inside the control room, looking like Homer without a donut, getting a lecture on the wonders of nuclear energy from a power company CEO, one Tony Early. Early is the former President of LILCO, the very corporation the Feds and State of New York charged with civil racketeering. (We did not name Early as a co-conspirator. When the government got him on the witness stand, it was clear the guy was too clueless to recognize he was in the midst of a billion-dollar swindle. McCain’s got quite some team.)

Now, you Obamaniacs might not want to read this next paragraph:

While McCain is pushing nuclear power, a Senator from Illinois who shall remain nameless (skinny, just gave up smokes), was already embracing radiation as the solution to pollution. This Senator voted for George Bush’s energy bill, a law which contained massive giveaways to nuclear energy, legislation which diss’es and dismisses conservation. Indeed, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate has been derided as the “Senator from Commonwealth Edison,” the Chicago company which is the nation’s largest operator of nuclear plants – and whose executives were the money backbone to his early presidential campaign.

So, we’ve got both candidates hawking the nuclear snake oil. But there is one difference between them. A big big BIG difference.

McCain’s ready to spend a hundred billion dollars on nuclear power, no questions asked. But Barack Obama puts a crucial condition on his approval for building new nukes: an affordable method of disposing the new plants’ radioactive waste.

That’s not small stuff. While The New York Times reporters following McCain repeated his line about “inexpensive” nuclear power without question, a buried wire story on the same day noted that the Energy Department is putting the unfunded bill for disposing nuclear plant waste at $96.2 billion – nearly a billion dollars per plant operating today. And no one even knows exactly how to do it, or where. Obama has the audacity to ask about the nuclear waste’s cost. “Can we deal with the expense?” he said on Meet the Press.

McCain’s plan to spend endless billions on nuclear plants without a waste disposal system in place is like building a massive hotel without toilets. I suppose you can always tell the guests to poop in buckets until someone comes up with a plan for plumbing. But the stuff piles up. And unlike the fecal droppings of tourists, nuclear waste will stay hot and dangerous for a thousand generations.

So there you have our election in a nutshell. We have two candidates who rise above their parties – only to agree on a ludicrous pro-nukes energy plan.

But at least Senator Obama, when confronted with an economic question, doesn’t have to take off his shoes to add up the facts.

***********

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse: Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild. Sign up for updates on Palast’s investigation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the threat to the integrity of the 2008 election at www.GregPalast.com – as well as Myspace.com, Facebook.com and now Twitter. Or subscribe to Palast’s RSS feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/gregpalast-articles and the audio podcast RSS feed at http://www.gregpalast.com/section/podcasts/feed. And watch Palast’s investigative reports for BBC Television and Democracy Now! on our YouTube channel.