Diebold center of voter RAGE against their machines....

The first paragraph in this story is a journalistic marvel.... We can only ask, "WHY do we only read this story ON THE DAY OF THE ELECTION this November 2006?"

Isn't there ONE SINGLE EDITOR, writer, publisher, or news organization in America who would like to EARN A PULITZER PRIZE by doing what it takes - writing a good investigative series - that brings America BACK into the global "LEADERSHIP IN DEMOCRACY" business? Instead of the LAUGHINGSTOCK of nations who see us FOLLOWING two-bit BANANA REPUBLIC style vote confusion if not vote-fixing?

<< Here's a five-step plan guaranteed to make an obscure company absolutely notorious.
First get into a business you don't understand, selling to customers who barely understand it either. Then roll out your product without adequate testing. Don't hire enough skilled people. When people notice problems, deny, obfuscate and ignore. Finally, blame your critics when it all blows up in your face.
- - - With missteps like those, it would be hard to succeed in the gumball business. But when your product is the hardware and software of democracy itself, that kind of performance gets you called not just incompetent but evil - an enemy of democracy. And that is what has happened to Diebold Inc. (Charts) of Canton, Ohio, since it got into the elections business in 2001. >>


Rage against the machine
Diebold struggles to bounce back from the controversy surrounding its voting machines.

By Barney Gimbel, Fortune writer-reporter
November 3 2006
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/11/13/8393084/index.htm?cnn=yes

(Fortune Magazine) -- Here's a five-step plan guaranteed to make an obscure company absolutely notorious.

First get into a business you don't understand, selling to customers who barely understand it either. Then roll out your product without adequate testing. Don't hire enough skilled people. When people notice problems, deny, obfuscate and ignore. Finally, blame your critics when it all blows up in your face.

With missteps like those, it would be hard to succeed in the gumball business. But when your product is the hardware and software of democracy itself, that kind of performance gets you called not just incompetent but evil - an enemy of democracy. And that is what has happened to Diebold Inc. (Charts) of Canton, Ohio, since it got into the elections business in 2001.

The move seemed like a good idea at the time. The $3 billion public company, whose core products are ATMs, bank vaults and security systems, had just sold 186,000 voting machines to Brazil, where they delivered a quick and clean count in the 2000 elections.

Surely, Diebold reasoned, it could duplicate this success closer to home. "We thought if we got this right," says Thomas Swidarski, the company's CEO and president, "then we could do it across the globe."

But faster than you can say hanging chad, things went wrong. In early 2003, activists found a version of Diebold's secret software on the Internet. The code had so many security flaws that one group would later post a video of a chimpanzee changing votes.

Weeks later, Diebold's then-CEO Walden O'Dell famously wrote to fellow Bush supporters in a fundraising letter that he was committed to "help Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President." It didn't take long for political activists, many of them already suspicious of the new voting technology, to begin diving through the company's dumpsters and picketing its shareholder meetings.

Though other voting-machine companies have also had their difficulties, it is "the dreaded Diebold," as one blogger on DailyKos refers to it, that stirs up the likes of Michael Moore. "The reason Diebold gets so much heat," says activist Bev Harris, author of "Black Box Voting: Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century," "is not because they're any worse than their competitors. It's because we got more information on them early on."

The drumbeat of bad news has never stopped. This year, researchers have found more security flaws, and another version of the software was leaked. In Maryland, Diebold allegedly knew that some of its machines had defective motherboards but did not replace them for a year. Both candidates for governor there advised their supporters to vote via absentee ballot rather than use Diebold machines.

Rolling Stone published an article alleging that Diebold helped deliver Georgia to the GOP (Diebold calls the story "fiction"). The company is an unwitting star in a new HBO documentary called "Hacking Democracy." Oh, and the SEC is investigating accounting irregularities.

Deep in a corporate nightmare, Diebold is wondering how to shake itself awake. After all, this is a 147-year-old company once headed by Eliot Ness, the storied crime fighter. Internally there is little doubt that the company rues the day it stepped out of its comfort zone and into the maw of electoral politics.

Selling political equipment to politicians is an ugly business - and thanks to lawsuits, lobbying expenses and public relations consultants, the profit margins have been stingy too. (The voting division, which accounts for just 5 percent of the $3 billion company's revenue, only started making money last year.)

But after a close look at Diebold and its operations, it's hard to see the company as evil. Naive? Yes. Ignorant? Sure. Stupid? Sometimes. "We didn't know a whole lot about the elections business when we went into it, "admits Swidarski. "Here we are, a bunch of banking folks thinking making voting machines would be similar to making ATMs. We've learned some pretty painful lessons."
A history of success

A cow, a lantern, and a straw-filled barn made Charles Diebold (pronounced DEE-bold) a household name in the banking world. It was the night of Oct. 8, 1871, when, as legend has it, the Great Chicago Fire started in Mrs. O'Leary's cowshed. When 878 Diebold safes survived with their contents unharmed, business took off.

Canton became known as "Little Germany," thanks to the thousands of immigrants who flocked to work in the Diebold factories. (German immigrants arriving in New York reportedly only had to say "Diebold" for directions to Canton-bound trains.)

By the beginning of the 20th century, the company was making jails, trapdoors for gallows, and padded cells for asylums. During World War II it made armor plating for tanks and airplanes. Then, in the 1960s, the company bet its future on a speculative technology: automated teller machines.

Diebold quickly became a global market leader. But it stayed intensely Midwestern, content to manufacture its machines locally and allow companies like IBM (Charts) to distribute them overseas.

In the mid-1990s, however, when rival NCR (Charts) passed it to become the market leader, Diebold changed tactics and took control of its worldwide distribution (today its share is 30 percent). The company began buying up suppliers around the world, including a Brazilian ATM maker, Procomp Amazonia, in October 1999.
Entering the political sphere

Around the same time, the Brazilian government was looking to fully automate its election system. Procomp got the $106 million contract - Diebold's largest ever - to make 186,000 identical electronic voting machines for the 2000 election.

At the exact same time that Florida's officials were haggling over butterfly ballots, Brazil's were congratulating themselves on a clean and tidy result.

Emboldened by Diebold's success in Brazil, CEO Walden O'Dell set out to ensure that the company got a serious piece of the U.S. elections business.

The first problem was that the Brazilian machines weren't sophisticated enough for the U.S. market and couldn't be certified quickly. So O'Dell needed to buy a company to get into the market for the 2002 midterm elections.

In June 2001, Diebold announced it was acquiring Global Electronic Systems, based in McKinney, Texas, for about $30 million. Global was a $7 million operation that made most of its money printing ballots for its optical-scan reading machine. Its touch-screen system, the Accu-Vote-TS, wasn't a big seller.

Nothing was a big seller then. The elections business was populated by a couple dozen private firms that often literally sold equipment out of the back of their cars. That's because their customers were poor.

U.S. elections are intensely local affairs, run by more than 3,000 separate counties. Buying new equipment was a luxury. If county commissioners had to choose between filling a pothole or buying new voting equipment, the pothole invariably won.

That all changed when Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002. With it came $3.9 billion in grants for states to replace punch-card and mechanical-lever machines and to set up statewide voter lists.

Local election officials soon found themselves inundated by high-powered lobbyists. "I don't think those election boards had ever seen as many dinners out," says Paul Tipps, a prominent Democrat who lobbied for Diebold in Ohio.

With its main rivals - Oakland, Calif.-based Sequoia Voting Systems and Omaha, Neb.-based Election Systems & Software - making inroads in Florida, Diebold targeted other states. In March 2002, just two months after it completed its purchase of Global, Maryland put in a $13 million order to equip four counties with touch-screen machines. In May, Georgia signed a $54 million contract to buy 20,000 Diebold machines.
Early warning signs

After the takeover, the big contracts meant big problems. Diebold had let the Global operation alone, but it just couldn't keep up. Orders were lost, manufacturing fell behind schedule, the technical staff was overwhelmed.

Recalls Swidarski, the unit lacked "the wherewithal really to know how to manage a business. They were doing complex rollouts without the depth or breadth or skill set to deal with what they were going to do."

The same could be said of the customers. Election administrators were often unsophisticated county employees who had been in the job forever. "If we work with Bank of America and they want to roll out 1,000 ATMs, they'll have 25 professional project managers," says Swidarski. "You go to a meeting at a county and you're looking at two people."

It didn't help that Global's touch-screen system, the AccuVote-TS, was flawed from the start. It had purchased the technology from a small company called I-Mark, whose founders had designed it as an unattended voting terminal that could be used in places like shopping malls or supermarkets. "The only problem was they weren't looking at security," says Douglas Jones, a computer science professor at University of Iowa who has been testing voting machines since 1994.

Not quite the only problem. Because there was little demand for touch-screen systems before 2001, Global hadn't spent much on software development. (Jones thinks they needed to start over.)

So the system voters used in 2002 was bug-ridden. Diebold machines crashed early and often, and there was insufficient trained staff to cope with the inevitable problems. (One problem: "vote hopping," where, due to an uncalibrated touch screen, pressing one candidate counted the one next to it.) Even so, after the election, press accounts largely glossed over the problems as isolated hiccups. Orders continued to roll in. And then things fell apart.

Until recently, hardly anyone gave a thought to the mechanics of voting. Even fewer thought about hackers. But in the wake of 2000, the mechanics of voting became politicized.

One key moment came when Bev Harris heard her suburban Seattle county was considering switching to electronic touch-screen machines. Curious, she started trawling the Internet for information - and late one night in January 2003, she discovered a cache of files on an unprotected Diebold server. In it were e-mails between programmers discussing the system's problems.

"Distributing this software is extremely dangerous," a programmer wrote in 2001. "Our smart-card format has absolutely no security, so if someone were to get a copy of this software and a reader, they could stand at the ballot station and quietly burn new voters cards all day.... I can see the cover of USA Today in my head. Consider everyone warned." (Diebold says the problem was fixed before the 2002 elections.)

Digging further, Harris found a version of the company's secret software that ran the machines. She passed it to Avi Rubin, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Within an hour, Rubin says, he discovered that the software's encryption system was one "everyone knew was broken since 1998." That same day, he found that the administrative password to all the machines was the same: 1-1-1-1.

"It looked like an experimental student project," Rubin says. "If it was my student's project, they would have gotten an F." His report, which came out two days after Maryland had awarded Diebold a $56 million contract for 11,000 touch-screen machines, galvanized those who had always been suspicious of electronic voting.

The company pointed out in a 27-page retort that the software wasn't in use and that there were checks and balances to prevent fraud. The response didn't satisfy the skeptics; an avalanche of criticism - some of it thoughtful, some of it wacko - began to bear down.

In 2004, California decertified Diebold machines and joined a civil lawsuit filed by Bev Harris that alleged Diebold lied when it said its equipment had been federally certified. The company admitted no guilt but agreed to settle, paying California $2.6 million.

At the same time, it continued to have manufacturing problems, once shutting down production because the touch-screen machines were malfunctioning. (It took a year to replace the defective motherboards.)
Changing gears

Soon, Swidarski, then a senior marketing executive in the ATM unit, took over the elections business. "The board understands, as best anyone can, the volatile nature of the business/media and that politics are involved," Swidarski wrote in an e-mail to his deputies in the elections division. "However, the board cannot understand how the [Secretary of State] of [California] indicates that we have lied, misled, and withheld information."

Swidarski fired many Global staff and brought in a new boss from Canton, Dave Byrd, to run the business. The voting unit began to operate more smoothly, grossing $150 million in 2005 and making a small profit.

In December 2005, the board pushed O'Dell out and named Swidarski CEO. Just as he did with the elections business, Swidarski cleaned house: Only two of the seven top executives he inherited are still at Diebold today.

Swidarski is cut from a different cloth than his predecessor. O'Dell liked deals and was frankly bored by ATMs; he loved being known as one of Bush's Pioneers - generous Republican donors. A former senior executive with Emerson Electric, O'Dell's top priority was to make the numbers.

Swidarski, by contrast, is more focused on the customers than he is on Wall Street. (He refuses to give quarterly earnings guidance.) A former marketing executive at PNC Bank in Pittsburgh, he is straightforward and unpretentious. In his short tenure as CEO, he has changed the mood at Canton. "This place is dramatically different from a year ago," says CFO Kevin Krakora, "almost night and day."

Smart Business 100, Swidarski's $100 million plan to cut costs and increase customer service, is beginning to show dividends. Since fading to less than $35 in September 2005, Diebold's stock is now at $42. Profits dropped 41 percent last year, but were still a healthy $161 million on $2.6 billion of revenue.

Diebold looks set to beat those numbers this year. "The new management team," says Gil Luria, a research analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities, "seems to be on top of what they really need to do to turn around the company." Krakora puts it simply, "This company prints cash."
Dubious voting

But its voting machines continue to attract scorn. In August, Edward Felten, a computer-science professor at Princeton University, got his hands on a Diebold machine similar to those still used in Georgia. With the help of two graduate students, he posted a video online that showed him infiltrating and installing a virus in what appears to be less than a minute.

Felten found that the key to the lock protecting the memory card, which is used to both update the software and record votes, was one commonly used in office furniture and even hotel minibars. Once the door to the slot was open, he could slip in a virus-infested memory card and alter votes. "We were completely floored by how easy it was," Felten says.

Diebold disputes the accuracy, integrity and plausibility of the Princeton study, pointing out that Felten's team used an old machine with two-year-old software not in use today. Plus, the team had four months to figure it all out.

"The report all but ignores physical security and election procedures," says Mark Radke, marketing director of Diebold Election Systems. "Every local jurisdiction secures its voting machines - every voting machine, not just electronic machines. Electronic machines are secured with security tape and numbered security seals that would reveal any sign of tampering."

Therein lies the rub, says Michael Shamos, a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University who has been testing election equipment since 1980.

"Diebold doesn't fully get it about security," he says. "Their position every time somebody raises the prospect of insider manipulation of elections is, 'Are you telling me you think that these election officials would commit a felony?' And the answer is, 'Yes, that's what we're saying. They might commit a felony, and what is your system doing to prevent them?'"

Even so, Shamos doesn't completely buy the Princeton study. "What Felten found wasn't a bug in the software," he says. "It was a deliberate feature that comes from the need to be able to update the machines quickly."

Felten, he says, makes it seem like anyone with a memory card could go into a Diebold machine, root around and swing an election. Shamos points out that since the machines aren't networked, a virus would have to be tailored to the ballot and inserted into each machine one wanted to manipulate. That's a lot more work - and a lot more opportunities to screw up - than it looks like on video.

A national rollout of almost any product is bound to have glitches. But when elections depend upon the product in a country whose politics are scarred by distrust, there is little tolerance for error.

The problem critics had with the early touch-screen systems was the lack of a tangible way - such as the kind of receipt consumers get at ATM machines - to verify results. (Oddly, few made this complaint about lever machines.)

Though about half of the touch-screen systems in use today provide an audit trail that voters can see, that presents its own problems, such as installing the paper or keeping it from jamming.

What really gets the critics going, though, is the possibility of stealing or "editing" votes by the bundle, either in a specific precinct or, worse, by hacking into a central database. As William "Boss" Tweed, who effectively ran New York City in the mid-1800s, once noted, "The ballots made no result; the counters made the result."

Diebold's critics say that is the problem. But for all the sound and fury swirling around the company, there has not been a single confirmed incident of tampering with a Diebold or any other electronic machine; it's much more difficult to write a computer virus than to tinker with a ballot box. (Ah, say the critics, but prove it hasn't happened.)

So what's the prediction for this election? The primaries were a mixed bag. One big story was that Florida was not a story, but there were problems elsewhere, from poll workers unable to boot up the machines, to transmission problems, to unexpected screen freezes.

"History shows us it always takes at least three good-sized elections before we have any new system down," says Doug Lewis, the executive director of the Election Center, an organization that represents and trains local election administrators. "It would be a miracle if there weren't problems in this election."

As for Diebold, Swidarski is questioning whether the election business "fits into our product portfolio." He says he'll make a decision within the next three months. But it says something that the company recently ordered the name "Diebold" removed from the front of the voting equipment. Why? A spokesman would only say, "It was a strategic decision on the part of the corporation."

Reporter associate Susan Kaufman contributed to this article.

Fox/Newscorp owner Rupert Murdoch- "US deaths in Iraq 'MINUTE'...."

Murdoch says US death toll in Iraq 'minute'
Rupert Murdoch runs Newscorp/Fox 'news' as the propaganda or PR arm of the Republican Party.
He fulfills the same service in Communist China, where another of his media empire companies has the monopoly to broadcast from satellites China's official state-run 'news' (propaganda).

-----------------------------------

Technically, Rupert Murdoch is 'right' as in "correct": by the standards of the great battles of the World War II or the US Civil War (or countless other wars in history), the US military death toll in Iraq is, indeed, "minute."

BUT! the US death toll there (swiftly approaching 3,000) does NOT include the US wounded, disabled, and traumatized, a statistic that is approaching 30,000 or more soldiers and Marines.

Worse still, the US quagmire in Iraq has all the hallmarks of a classic "professional army vs. entire population" insurgency. that is, a US combat military in Iraq facing some portion of active insurgents out of Iraq's population of over 20 million. (We can discount the more than 5 million Kurdish nationals who support the US presence there.)

It is the classic guerrilla war: Professional army vs insurgents. In South Korea, the western (American) friendly government quickly eliminated (or never had) any insurgency against the US presence. In Vietnam the South Vietnamese government was not created until 1954, that is, until after the expulsion of the French from their attempts to reestablish an imperial colony in all of Vietnam. Vietnam just happened to have a thousands-year legacy of guerrilla warfare against outside conquerors. Korea actually had a similar resentment of Chinese and Japanese occupations, but the American presence in South Korea was so much more benign than the brutal Japanese occupations there, that Americans were welcomed as friends and allies. In Vietnam, by contrast, the French actively sided with the brutal Japanese occupation during WWII, leading to a massive famine of over one million Vietnamese during WWII as French and Japanese troops extorted local rice stocks to supply the Imperial Japanese army. Not only did America aid and supply the hated French occupation (colony) in Vietnam after WW II ended, but when the Vietminh finally expelled the despised (French) overlords, the Americans stepped right in where the French, Japanese, and Chinese had left off. Thus when comparing a classic insurgency (VC in Vietnam) to a classic neo-colonial industrial relationship (e.g. US "capitalism" in South Korea), it is extremely critical to pay attention to history and details.

IN IRAQ, we (Americans) have a situation where BOTH Arab secular nationalities detest the American occupation- up to 80% want America out. As American troops continue to suppress both sides of this Arab proto-civil war (Sunnis vs. Shiites), they will continue to kill large numbers of insurgents and military-aged men. In Vietnam, US/CIA "Phoenix" death squads ultimately considered ALL men, from boys to elders, and large quantities of women and children, to be "enemy combatants." See Mai Lai massacre, and even former Navy SEAL and US Senator Bob Kerrey's combat record. (When on an assassination mission in a given village, the SEAL teams would routinely kill ANY villagers who could give a warning of the team's presence; i.e. women and children as well as young and older males.) To see the logical extensions of these "covert" policies, search for "Anfal", Saddam's genocidal 'ethnic cleansing' campaign against Iraqi Kurds during the 1980s, with full US government approval and assistance. (Besides committing to the rather insane policy of aiding Saddam's specific WMD programs with "WMD precursor technologies" (which google) during the 1980s, the Bush-Reagan administrations also funded millions of dollars worth of the regime's wars and more general policies via US "agricultural credits" during this period.)

ALL THE ABOVE to say that, indeed, the US KIA rate of the Iraq war to date is small compared to most great wars. BUT the American WIA toll continues to mount, and the mere presence of US troops EMPOWERS unemployed males to become guerrilla fighters, that is feared if not respected members of the local communities. Even under THE BEST US leadership of the war, this trend - empowering Iraqi males to take the risk of killing Americans - will not dissipate quickly. But of course the singular distinction of the Bush administration's "leadership" of the Iraq occupation is to be as arrogant, brutal, secretive, dictatorial, ruthless, and unopposable as possible.

Under this scenario, Mr. Murdoch's "MINUTE" death toll of American military in Iraq probably isn't going to go down any time soon.



Murdoch says US death toll in Iraq 'minute'
6 Nov, 2006
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/342795.cms


TOKYO: Media mogul Rupert Murdoch said on Monday he had no regrets about supporting the US-led invasion of Iraq and argued that the US death toll in the conflict was "minute" from a historical perspective.

The conservative News Corp chief spoke on the eve of US elections where President George W Bush's Republican Party was expected to lose seats in part due to a backlash over the war.

"The death toll, certainly of Americans there, by the terms of any previous war are quite minute," Murdoch told reporters at a conference in Tokyo.

"Of course no one likes any death toll, but the war now, at the moment, it's certainly trying to prevent a civil war and to prevent Iraqis killing each other."

A total of 2,832 US troops have been killed in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion. Thousands more Iraqis have died.

Murdoch -- whose News Corp empire includes the New York Post and Britain's most widely read newspaper, The Sun tabloid -- said while the United States made mistakes in the war its intentions were good.

"I believe it was right to go in there. I believe that certainly the execution that has followed that has included many mistakes," Murdoch said.

"But that's easy to say after the event. It's much easier to criticize the conduct of the war today in the media than it was in previous wars. I'm sure there were great mistakes made in the past, too."

"I think that one forgets that American foreign policy for the whole of the (20th) century saved the world from terrible things three times," he said, "for which they certainly got no thanks and for which they never had imperial ambitions at all."

George Stephanopoulos gives VP Cheney a HUGE FREE PASS in his Nov. 5 interview, FAILS to ask the tough follow-up questions...

George Stephanopoulos' interview with Vice President Dick Cheney this weekend demonstrates the tendency of "the Mainstream Media" to NOT ASK THE TOUGH QUESTIONS that any college sophomore would reflexively ask in any journalism, history, or political science class, if that student were not paid millions of dollars per year to AVOID asking the tough questions.

The ABC interview started with a video clip of the Vice President speaking at a military base to a uniformed audience:

VP: "America's cause is right, America's cause is just, and with your efforts, America will prevail."

Stephanopoulos ("ABC") does start his interview with a tough, hard-hitting question:

ABC: "You have said that you believe that the insurgents are trying to determine the outcome of this election.
Do you believe that a win for the Democrats is a victory for the insurgents?"

VP: "When insurgents see what has happened in Conn. with the Democrats PURGING Leiberman, essentially for his support for the President's leadership of the war...
Its a tough war, its very difficult to complete the mission..."

Stephanopolous UTTERLY FAILED to come back with the OBVIOUS tough FOLLOW-UP QUESTION, "WHY ARE YOU GIVING TAX-CUTS to the wealthy, and WHAT KIND OF SACRIFICE have you asked from the American public to win this 'tough, difficult war'?"

Cheney later in the interview made the case that the economy "IS DOING VERY, VERY WELL... BECAUSE OF THE TAX CUTS."

BUT Stephanopoulos FAILED TO EVEN MENTION the huge, budget-busting US BUDGET DEFICITS and TRADE DEFICITS. The economy is, at the moment, enjoying a small boom in market prices, but the Dow average is not even 15% higher than it was in 2000, which is what a six years-times-three-percent inflation rate would demand to just stay even. (6 yrs. x 3%/yr. = 18% JUST TO MAINTAIN PARITY with inflation from where the market was in 2000.)

And, #2. the current boom is to at least some degree based on $2.25 per gallon gas prices.. which NO ONE, ANYWHERE, expects to last long beyond this current election season. When fuel and gas prices again go higher (the oil companies, having tasted $3/gal. fuel prices, are no doubt hungry to get back to them), America's driving-dependent businesses and industries (trucking, farming, airlines, even plumbers and other service workers) will once again be under the hammer of skyrocketing costs that exceed profit margins.

George Stephanopolous just posted a prime-time interview on ABC news with the Vice President, Stephanopoulos leaving _unchallenged_ the Vice President's assertion that the economy is booming. This is like Florida Governor Jeb Bush declaring that the Republican candidate for state treasurer is a "FISCAL CONSERVATIVE", Florida's billion-dollars Jeb-Bush-deficits be left unmentioned and damned.

Especially given that George Stephanopoulos was once a part of the Clinton-Gore "WAR ROOM" that famously declared "IT'S THE ECONOMY STUPID!" as their unofficial motto in 1992, his (Stephanopoulos') FAILURE to bring up BUDGET DEFICITS and the vulnerability of the US economy to energy prices and trade deficits is an especially egregious omission.... and that's not even to MENTION that Stephanopolous failed to contest Dick Cheney's assertion that we are "winning" the Iraq war, when actually America is stuck in a horrificly costly war of attrition that will almost certainly demand MORE TROOPS be sent to Iraq shortly after this election. Mr. Stephanopolous, that is AT LEAST THREE tough FOLLOW-UP questions that YOU REFUSED to follow through with in your trophy, oh-so-deferential interview!

----------------------------------------------------------
American commanders in Iraq have privately told the President that ADDITIONAL TROOPS will be needed in Iraq to maintain the current policy there:
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/529

Saddam's kangaroo court hanging verdict betrays American media whores blood-lust, and our own "hang the savage Injuns!" savage, lynch-mob roots....

"Special Envoy" from President Reagan, Donald Rumsfeld shakes hands with Saddam Hussein, 20 December 1983.
As a result of US approval (and substantial assistance) for his regime, Saddam would accelerate his regime of terror.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/

Talk about "Tough questions the American whore press-media FAIL TO ASK"!!

How can ANY court announce, so far in advance, the day that THEY KNOW they will arrive at a verdict? Much less in a long, drawn out, complicated trial like the Saddam Hussein trial, which if there were any 'justice' in the process, would be held by the International War Crimes court in the Hague, and not by a puppet government installed at the dictates of an American president, an American president whose own Vice President and Secretary of Defense are well known throughout the world for HAVING SUPPORTED THAT VERY DICTATOR's MURDEROUS POLICIES, at the very height of his reign of terror.

For an exceptionally well written, fast reading, concise record of America's support for Saddam's reign of terror - that is the Bush Sr./Don Rumsfeld/Dick Cheney/George Schultz/James Baker record of SUPPORT for Saddam's war-and-terror machine, the first two chapters of Peter Galbraith's "The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End" has an excellent, first-person review.
- excerpt at: http://www.nybooks.com/authors/10454

----------------------------------

Saddam, 2 others sentenced to death
By HAMZA HENDAWI, Associated
November 5, 2006
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061105/ap_on_re_mi_ea/saddam_verdict;_ylt=AkOAchSYnnS_C8hs255P49Ss0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA2Z2szazkxBHNlYwN0bQ--

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Saddam Hussein was convicted and sentenced Sunday to hang for crimes against humanity in the 1982 killings of 148 people in a single Shiite town, as the ousted leader, trembling and defiant, shouted "God is great!"

As he, his half brother and another senior official in his regime were convicted and sentenced to death by the Iraqi High Tribunal, Saddam yelled out, "Long live the people and death to their enemies. Long live the glorious nation, and death to its enemies!" Later, his lawyer said the former dictator had called on Iraqis to reject sectarian violence and refrain from revenge against U.S. forces.

The trial brought Saddam and his co-defendants before their accusers in what was one of the most highly publicized and heavily reported trials of its kind since the Nuremberg tribunals for members of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime and its slaughter of 6 million Jews in the World War II Holocaust

"The verdict placed on the heads of the former regime does not represent a verdict for any one person. It is a verdict on a whole dark era that has was unmatched in Iraq's history," Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq's Shiite prime minister, said.

Some feared the verdicts could exacerbate the sectarian violence that has pushed the country to the brink of civil war, after a trial that stretched over nine months in 39 sessions and ended nearly 3 1/2 months ago. Clashes immediately began Sunday in north Baghdad's heavily Sunni Azamiyah district. Elsewhere in the capital, celebratory gunfire rang out.

"This government will be responsible for the consequences, with the deaths of hundreds, thousands or even hundreds of thousands, whose blood will be shed," Salih al-Mutlaq, a Sunni political leader, told the Al-Arabiya satellite television station.

Saddam and his seven co-defendants were on trial for a wave of revenge killings carried out in the city of Dujail following a 1982 assassination attempt on the former dictator. Al-Maliki's Islamic Dawa party, then an underground opposition, has claimed responsibility for organizing the attempt on Saddam's life.

In the streets of Dujail, a Tigris River city of 84,000, people celebrated and burned pictures of their former tormentor as the verdict was read.

Saddam's chief lawyer Khalil al-Dulaimi condemned the trial as a "farce," claiming the verdict was planned. He said defense attorneys would appeal within 30 days.

The death sentences automatically go to a nine-judge appeals panel, which has unlimited time to review the case. If the verdicts and sentences are upheld, the executions must be carried out within 30 days.

A court official told The Associated Press that the appeals process was likely to take three to four weeks once the formal paperwork was submitted.

During Sunday's hearing, Saddam initially refused the chief judge's order to rise; two bailiffs pulled the ousted ruler to his feet and he remained standing through the sentencing, sometimes wagging his finger at the judge.

Before the session began, one of Saddam's lawyers, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, was ejected from the courtroom after handing the judge a memorandum in which he called the trial a travesty.

Chief Judge Raouf Abdul-Rahman pointed to Clark and said in English, "Get out."

In addition to the former Iraqi dictator and Barzan Ibrahim, his former intelligence chief and half brother, the Iraqi High Tribunal convicted and sentenced Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the head of Iraq's former Revolutionary Court, to death by hanging. Iraq's former Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan was convicted of premeditated murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Three defendants were sentenced to 15 years in prison for torture and premeditated murder. Abdullah Kazim Ruwayyid and his son Mizhar Abdullah Ruwayyid were party officials Dujail, along with Ali Dayih Ali. They were believed responsible for the Dujail arrests.

Mohammed Azawi Ali, a former Dujail Baath Party official, was acquitted for lack of evidence and immediately freed.

He faces additional charges in a separate case over an alleged massacre of Kurdish civilians — a trial that will continue while appeals are pending.

The guilty verdict is likely to enrage hard-liners among Saddam's fellow Sunnis, who made up the bulk of the former ruling class. The country's majority Shiites, who were persecuted under the former leader but now largely control the government, will likely view the outcome as a cause of celebration.

Al-Dulaimi, Saddam's lawyer, told AP his client called on Iraqis to reject sectarian violence and called on them to refrain from taking revenge on U.S. invaders.

"His message to the Iraqi people was 'pardon and do not take revenge on the invading nations and their people'," al-Dulaimi said, quoting Saddam. "The president also asked his countrymen to 'unify in the face of sectarian strife.'"

In Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, 1,000 people defied the curfew and carried pictures of the city's favorite son through the streets. Some declared the court a product of the U.S. "occupation forces" and condemned the verdict.

"By our souls, by our blood we sacrifice for you Saddam" and "Saddam your name shakes America."

U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad issued a statement saying the verdicts "demonstrate the commitment of the Iraqi people to hold them (Saddam and his co-defendants) accountable."

"Although the Iraqis may face difficult days in the coming weeks, closing the book on Saddam and his regime is an opportunity to unite and build a better future," Khalilzad said.

U.S. officials associated with the tribunal said Saddam's repeated courtroom outbursts during the nine-month trial may have played a key part in his conviction.

They cited his admission in a March 1 hearing that he had ordered the trial of 148 Shiites who were eventually executed, insisting that doing so was legal because they were suspected in the assassination attempt against him. "Where is the crime? Where is the crime?" he asked, standing before the panel of five judges.

Later in the same session, he argued that his co-defendants must be released and that because he was in charge, he alone must be tried. His outburst came a day after the prosecution presented a presidential decree with a signature they said was Saddam's approval for death sentences for the 148 Shiites, their most direct evidence against him.

About 50 of those sentenced by the "Revolutionary Court" died during interrogation before they could go to the gallows. Some of those hanged were children.

"Every time they (defendants) rose and spoke, they provided a lot of incriminating evidence," said one of the U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Under Saddam, Iraq's bureaucracy showed a consistent tendency to document orders, policies and minutes of meetings. That, according to the U.S. officials, helped the prosecution produce more than 30 documents that clearly established the chain of command under Saddam.
One document gave the names of everyone from Dujail banished to a desert detention camp in southern Iraq. Another, prepared by an aide to Saddam, gave the president a detailed account of the punitive measures against the people of Dujail following the failed assassination attempt.

Saddam's trial had from the outset appeared to reflect the turmoil and violence in Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

One of Saddam's lawyers was assassinated the day after the trial's opening session last year. Two more were later assassinated and a fourth fled the country.

In January, chief judge Rizgar Amin, a Kurd, resigned after complaints by Shiite politicians that he had failed to keep control of court proceedings. He, in turn, complained of political interference in the trial. Abdul-Rahman, another Kurd, replaced Amin.

Hearings were frequently disrupted by outbursts from Saddam and Ibrahim, with the two raging against what they said was the illegitimacy of the court, their ill treatment in the U.S.-run facility where they are being held and the lack of protection for their lawyers.

The defense lawyers contributed to the chaos in the courtroom by staging several boycotts.

Cheney cries "You only report the Bad news!" Where was Cheney when the DC press reported the LYING "White House TRASHING" scandal against Clinton?

The fact remains that the Rethuglicans have won the Super-Trifecta... MONOPOLY CONTROL over ALL branches of US Government - (1. House, 2. White House, 3. Senate, 4. Supreme Court, 5.federal courts, 6. federal agencies like the EPA, immigration, and FEMA which are supposed to be above politics; 7. and of course almost monopoly control of the "4th Estate," the press/media) by relentlessly ACCUSING and CRITICIZING Democratic Party leaders, candidates, issues, and policies. Even issues and policies Americans LOVE, like Social Security, veteran's care, and education grants.

The Republican's CRITICISM and SMEAR-MONGERING of the Clinton White House was so bad, that for years "LINCOLN BEDROOM" was synonymous with "a SCANDAL!", even though there was NO scandal in a president and First Lady inviting their close personal friends (and, yes, supporters) to spend the night at the White House. Bush Sr., if not Bush Jr. had KEN LAY spend the night at the White House, and the US 'mainstream media' HAS even NEVER MENTIONED, much less TURNED-TO-SCANDAL, the Bush's overnight WH guest list!

This atrocious disparity between Republican ACCUSATIONS against Democrats, and Dick Cheney crying about "unfair" media coverage, of course reached its zenith with the Karl Rove-Karen Hughes orchestrated "WHITE HOUSE TRASHING SCANDAL," where the Bush-Cheney administration got the Washington Post and New York Times and network and cable media to broadcast the "WHITE HOUSE TRASHING SCANDAL!" for days, if not weeks on end.... WITHOUT ONE_SINGLE_PHOTOGRAPH of EVIDENCE of the so-called "trashing"!

<< When asked why he thinks the president doesn't get enough credit for the economy and the recent news that the nation has a 4.4 percent unemployment rate, Cheney said, "Well, you guys don't help," referring to the media.

"What's news is IF THERE'S BAD NEWS, and THAT GETS COVERAGE," he said. "But the good news that's out there, day after day after day, doesn't get as much attention." >>

(This from the Vice President whose administration inherited a BUDGET SURPLUS, PEACE and PROSPERITY, and was handed a National Security portfolio by the outgoing President, Vice President, and National Security Advisor, - "Al Qiada terrorism will be the greatest threat to America's security in the coming decade".... Whose administration did NOTHING about that threat to America's security until after the attacks of 9-11-2001, and has, to this day, STILL RECEIVED a FREE-PASS whitewash from the media-press for NOT finding and arresting the ANTHRAX TERRORIST.)


==========================================

Cheney: 'Full Speed Ahead' on Iraq
Vice President Tells ABC News That Election, Public Sentiment Will Not Influence War Policy
By ED O'KEEFE
Nov. 3, 2006
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=2627805


Four days before the election, as Republican candidates battle to save their seats in Congress amid a backlash over the war in Iraq, Vice President Dick Cheney told ABC News the administration is going "full speed ahead" with its policy.

"We've got the basic strategy right," Cheney told George Stephanopoulos in an interview to be broadcast Sunday on "This Week."

Watch the full interview this Sunday morning, including the vice president's candid comments on John Kerry's gaffe this week and Hillary Clinton.

October was one of the deadliest months in Iraq for U.S. troops. Cheney said that while the administration's policy may not be popular, "This is the right thing for us to be doing."

In the most recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, 57 percent of Americans said that the war was not worth fighting. The poll also showed President Bush's job approval rating dropped to 37 percent, the second-lowest mark of his presidency.

Cheney said that even with pollsters predicting that Democrats would likely make gains in both houses of Congress Tuesday, voter sentiment would not influence Bush's Iraq policy.

"It may not be popular with the public -- it doesn't matter in the sense that we have to continue the mission and do what we think is right. And that's exactly what we're doing," Cheney said. "We're not running for office. We're doing what we think is right."

First Reaction to Vanity Fair Report

Cheney also gave his first reaction to the Vanity Fair report that two of the Pentagon's strongest supporters of the war, Richard Perle and Ken Adelman, now say they would not have supported the invasion if they had known how incompetently the administration would handle it.

Cheney said, "I haven't seen the piece I'm not going to comment on it. I think there is no question that it is a tough war, but it is also the right thing to do," he said. "And it is very important that we complete the mission."

Cheney asserted that the anti-war message is coming primarily from the Democrats, despite their own policy disagreements.

"They haven't offered up a plan, but they have several different positions -- withdraw, withdraw at some future date, cut off funding," Cheney said. "The fact of the matter is, this is the right thing for us to be doing. We need to succeed here. It has a direct bearing on how we do around the world on the global war on terror."

On another subject, the vice president touted the Bush administration's economic policies, arguing that if Democrats take control of Congress, the tax cuts he and the president deem essential would not be extended. Cheney then complained that the White House had not been given enough credit on the economy, which he described as going "gangbusters."

When asked why he thinks the president doesn't get enough credit for the economy and the recent news that the nation has a 4.4 percent unemployment rate, Cheney said, "Well, you guys don't help," referring to the media.

"What's news is if there's bad news, and that gets coverage," he said. "But the good news that's out there, day after day after day, doesn't get as much attention."

Torture: Bush-Cheney-Gonzales-Rumsfeld creeps seek to CLASSIFY victim's testimony as "state secrets"!!

Thanks to Mark Kleiman of HuffPost for pointing this, America's Torquemada "We Torture because God commands us to!" insanity at the orders of the demented axis of evil that occupies the very top positions of our government...

<< Can you imagine a government so absurdly tyrannical, so brutally insane, that it forbids "enemies of the state" to complain about being tortured on the grounds that interrogation techniques are state secrets? >>
Kleiman, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-kleiman/beyond-kafka_b_33243.html

<< The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the "alternative interrogation methods" that their captors used to get them to talk.

The government says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation's most sensitive national security secrets and that their release -- even to the detainees' own attorneys -- "could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage." >> (wp article)

============================================

U.S. Seeks Silence on CIA Prisons
Court Is Asked to Bar Detainees From Talking About Interrogations
By Carol D. Leonnig and Eric Rich
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, November 4, 2006; A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/03/AR2006110301793_pf.html

The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the "alternative interrogation methods" that their captors used to get them to talk.

The government says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation's most sensitive national security secrets and that their release -- even to the detainees' own attorneys -- "could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage." Terrorists could use the information to train in counter-interrogation techniques and foil government efforts to elicit information about their methods and plots, according to government documents submitted to U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton on Oct. 26.

The battle over legal rights for terrorism suspects detained for years in CIA prisons centers on Majid Khan, a 26-year-old former Catonsville resident who was one of 14 high-value detainees transferred in September from the "black" sites to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents many detainees at Guantanamo, is seeking emergency access to him.

The government, in trying to block lawyers' access to the 14 detainees, effectively asserts that the detainees' experiences are a secret that should never be shared with the public.

Because Khan "was detained by CIA in this program, he may have come into possession of information, including locations of detention, conditions of detention, and alternative interrogation techniques that is classified at the TOP SECRET//SCI level," an affidavit from CIA Information Review Officer Marilyn A. Dorn states, using the acronym for "sensitive compartmented information."

Gitanjali Gutierrez, an attorney for Khan's family, responded in a court document yesterday that there is no evidence that Khan had top-secret information. "Rather," she said, "the executive is attempting to misuse its classification authority . . . to conceal illegal or embarrassing executive conduct."

Joseph Margulies, a Northwestern University law professor who has represented several detainees at Guantanamo, said the prisoners "can't even say what our government did to these guys to elicit the statements that are the basis for them being held. Kafka-esque doesn't do it justice. This is 'Alice in Wonderland.' "

Kathleen Blomquist, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said yesterday that details of the CIA program must be protected from disclosure. She said the lawyer's proposal for talking with Khan "is inadequate to protect unique and potentially highly classified information that is vital to our country's ability to fight terrorism."

Government lawyers also argue in court papers that detainees such as Khan previously held in CIA sites have no automatic right to speak to lawyers because the new Military Commissions Act, signed by President Bush last month, stripped them of access to U.S. courts. That law established separate military trials for terrorism suspects.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is considering whether Guantanamo detainees have the right to challenge their imprisonment in U.S. courts. The government urged Walton to defer any decision on access to lawyers until the higher court rules.

The government filing expresses concern that detainee attorneys will provide their clients with information about the outside world and relay information about detainees to others. In an affidavit, Guantanamo's staff judge advocate, Cmdr. Patrick M. McCarthy, said that in one case a detainee's attorney took questions from a BBC reporter with him into a meeting with a detainee at the camp. Such indirect interviews are "inconsistent with the purpose of counsel access" at the prison, McCarthy wrote.

Dorn said in the court papers that for lawyers to speak to former CIA detainees under the security protocol used for other Guantanamo detainees "poses an unacceptable risk of disclosure." But detainee attorneys said they have followed the protocol to the letter, and none has been accused of releasing information without government clearance.

Captives who have spent time in the secret prisons, and their advocates, have said the detainees were sometimes treated harshly with techniques that included "waterboarding," which simulates drowning. Bush has declared that the administration will not tolerate the use of torture but has pressed to retain the use of unspecified "alternative" interrogation methods.

The government argues that once rules are set for the new military commissions, the high-value detainees will have military lawyers and "unprecedented" rights to challenge charges against them in that venue.

U.S. officials say Khan, a Pakistani national who lived in the United States for seven years, took orders from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the man accused of orchestrating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Mohammed allegedly asked Khan to research poisoning U.S. reservoirs and considered him for an operation to assassinate the Pakistani president.

In a separate court document filed last night, Khan's attorneys offered declarations from Khaled al-Masri, a released detainee who said he was held with Khan in a dingy CIA prison called "the salt pit" in Afghanistan. There, prisoners slept on the floor, wore diapers and were given tainted water that made them vomit, Masri said. American interrogators treated him roughly, he said, and told him he "was in a land where there were no laws."

Khan's family did not learn of his whereabouts until Bush announced his transfer in September, more than three years after he was seized in Pakistan.

The family said Khan was staying with a brother in Karachi, Pakistan, in March 2003 when men, who were not in uniform, burst into the apartment late one night and put hoods over the heads of Khan, his brother Mohammad and his brother's wife. The couple's 1-month-old son was also seized.

Another brother, Mahmood Khan, who has lived in the United States since 1989, said in an interview this week that the four were hustled into police vehicles and taken to an undisclosed location, where they were separated and held in windowless rooms. His sister-in-law and her baby remained together, he said.

According to Mahmood, Mohammad said they were questioned repeatedly by men who identified themselves as members of Pakistan's intelligence service and others who identified themselves as U.S. officials. Mohammad's wife was released after seven days, and he was released after three months, without charge. He was left on a street corner without explanation, Mahmood said.

Periodically, he said, people who identified themselves as Pakistani officials contacted Mohammad and assured him that his brother would soon be released and that they ought not contact a lawyer or speak with the news media.

"We had no way of knowing who had him or where he was," Mahmood Khan said this week at the family home outside Baltimore. He said they complied with the requests because they believed anything else could delay his brother's release.

In Maryland, Khan's family was under constant FBI surveillance from the moment of his arrest, his brother said. The FBI raided their house the day after the arrest , removing computer equipment, papers and videos. Each family member was questioned extensively and shown photographs of terrorism suspects that Mahmood Khan said none of them recognized. For much of the next year, he said, they were followed everywhere.

"Pretty much we were scared," he said. "We live in this country. We have everything here."

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

America's media reports how easy it is to HACK computerized voting.. mere HOURS before election 2006!

America's electronic voting debacle is an international EMBARRASSMENT foisted on America by Republicans, and Republican owned voting-machine companies, with more than a little complicity from "major media" and even the "opposition party" Democrats.

As this lengthy MSNBC report explains, details of THESE SECURITY FLAWS and "looming voting nightmares" WERE KNOWN TO EXPERTS back in 2004.

HOW could VOTING, the process AT THE VERY CORE of America's democracy, be SUCH A CHAOTIC NIGHTMARE, with practically DOZENS of computer security experts now providing detailed analysis and tests that DEMONSTRATE how easy it is to HACK THE VOTE?

answer- America's voting process is a nightmare MESS (reminding us, in fact, of the administration of the Iraq occupation)**BECAUSE REPUBLICANS in LEADERSHIP, POWER POSITIONS WANT IT THAT WAY.

**note: for a textbook example of how gross corruption appears to be a DESIRED part of the Iraq war /US occupation, this article by the New York Times details how the Bush administration has secretively "fired" the INSPECTOR GENERAL from the job of oversight of Iraq war contracts, spending, and operations. The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld administration's scorn for, not just Iraqis, not just American voters, BUT EVEN AMERICA's TROOPS serving in Iraq - is now clearly criminal and pathological.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/world/middleeast/03reconstruct.html

===============================================

<< He showed how easy it would be for someone with access to the hardware that counts votes to launch Microsoft Access, edit the table containing the totals, clean up any traces of his vote-rigging and close the program.

He showed how easy it would be for someone with access to the hardware that counts votes to launch Microsoft Access, edit the table containing the totals, clean up any traces of his vote-rigging and close the program.

When a state official suggested removing Microsoft Access from the machine to foil hackers, Thompson showed how to do the same thing with a five-line program written on Microsoft’s basic text-editing program, Notepad. >>


E-voting grows, concerns remain
by Bob Sullivan
Friday, November 3 2006
http://redtape.msnbc.com/2006/11/post.html


Dr. Herbert H. Thompson was ready to hack democracy, but he had to wait an extra two hours.

Thompson was sitting outside the California Secretary of State’s Office, ready to demonstrate that electronic voting machines could be fooled into miscounting ballots, but there was a glitch. A “60 Minutes” camera crew was on site and eager to film the demonstration, but state officials balked at the melodrama and refused to allow the crew in. The meeting was almost canceled.

After some tense negotiations, Thompson and a group of electronic voting detractors were allowed inside – sans the cameras.

That didn’t make the meeting any less dramatic. Over the next hour, Thompson, an adjunct professor at the Florida Institute of Technology and author of four books on computer security, virtually undressed California’s new voting tabulation machines.

He showed how easy it would be for someone with access to the hardware that counts votes to launch Microsoft Access, edit the table containing the totals, clean up any traces of his vote-rigging and close the program.

When a state official suggested removing Microsoft Access from the machine to foil hackers, Thompson showed how to do the same thing with a five-line program written on Microsoft’s basic text-editing program, Notepad.

Open Notepad, hack democracy. It is that easy, Thompson said.

That was Aug. 18, 2004. Thompson, who also works as a computer security consultant, has been highlighting e-voting problems ever since. It’s a big part of the HBO documentary “Hacking Democracy” which premiered Thursday night. But despite his road show, and similar demonstrations of other flaws by computer security experts, little has changed since 2004, other than this: Next Tuesday, one third of the country will face new voting equipment – the largest such change in voting procedures in our nation’s history, according to the Washington D.C.-based Election Data Services.

The machines are fragile, and security flaws are rampant, Thompson maintains. The recent Robin Williams movie “Man of the Year,” where a computer bug leads to the incorrect election of a candidate for president, is not far-fetched, he said.

“It's just remarkable, it just doesn’t seem like progress has been made in the face of a continual barrage against these systems,” Thompson said. “Here we are in 2006 but we have the same kinds of problems we had in 2004, problems that are pretty obvious to anyone in the security space.”

Diebold spokesman David Bear bristles at the idea that electronic machines aren’t safe.

“It’s important to separate fact from fiction,” he said. “The technology has been successfully used for 15-20 years. Touch screens are more accurate than other forms of voting.”

He also says the company has been responsive to many suggestions from security experts, such as the ability to protect computers with better password schemes.

And not all outside election experts are critical of the new system. A recent study released by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says more votes were lost using old voting machines, such as punch cards, than with electronic voting machines.




Dr. Herbert H. Thompson talks with MSNBC's Lester Holt about the flaws in electronic voting machines. Click to watch


Other computer security experts aren’t convinced. Many believe the country rushed headlong into the digital voting age without addressing major security issues because a lot of money was at stake. After the hanging chad debacle of 2000, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), and offered $4 billion to states so they could buy the latest voting technology.

All parties agree the legislation was well-intentioned, but the stick to that carrot was a deadline, which has arrived. States that wanted the money had to spend it by this year, for this federal election.

Like a mystery novel
The e-voting saga has taken many twists and turns, and at times has the flavor of a spy novel.

Earlier this month, computer disks containing the secret source code to Diebold Election Systems voting machines were anonymously dropped off Deep Throat-style at the Washington Post.

Last week, partial Venezuelan ownership of voting machine vendor Sequoia Voting Systems became an issue, as the Miami Herald reported that the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment was investigating the possibility of a link between Sequoia and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a fierce critic of the Bush administration. Sequoia denies any involvement by the Venezuelans government.

A small army of bloggers and independent researchers chronicle every electronic vote misstep at sites like BlackBoxVoting.org and BradBlog.

Even off the Web, the machines have been accused of fomenting chaos. Primary electronic voting headaches in Maryland led Gov. Robert Ehrlich, who is running for re-election, to withdraw his support for the systems and urge residents to vote with paper absentee ballots instead. After his comments, requests for absentee ballots jumped threefold.

The e-voting controversy has garnered much mass media attention. In addition to the HBO documentary, news outlets around the country have aired investigations into the machines. And Diebold was named Keith Olberman’s ‘Worst Person in the World” this week for asking HBO not to air its e-voting documentary.

How are consumers to know?
While voters are awash in critiques of the systems, they are hardly in a position to evaluate their safety or accuracy – no more than fliers are in a position to judge the airworthiness of an airplane. For that, they must rely on the public sparring match between software vendors and security experts.

On one side are the geekiest of geeks, computer security experts who can sound paranoid, and at times are guilty of conjuring up the unlikeliest of disasters to make their points. On the other side are technology vendors led by Diebold (the ATM maker), Sequoia and Election Systems & Software. They at times sound condescending (Just trust us) or dismissive (these attack scenarios presume election officials are corrupt, and they’re not).

The two sides tend to duke it out using inexact metaphors, which don’t help. Vendors say the machines are capable of printing out a “zero-vote” sheet at the beginning of the day to, showing vote totals start at zero, comparing that to officials looking into an empty ballot box at poll opening. Critics say that converting punch-cards systems to touch screens is hard on aging poll workers, like asking coal miners to suddenly work at a nuclear power plant.

The controversy matters. According to The New York Times, votes in about half of the 45 most competitive congressional races will be cast on paperless machines. Some states have anticipated that problem, and now legally require electronic machines to be outfitted with a printer that produces a paper receipt. But those receipts have their own issues, including the fact that they may unintentionally make it easy for an observer to determine who voted for which candidate. The receipts are sometimes stored in order, so a poll watcher could identify the 14th voter at a machine by looking at the 14th receipt, thereby destroying the fundamental anonymity of the ballot box.

Avi Rubin, a professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of the new book “Brave New Ballot,” was the first outside security expert to analyze Diebold computer source code. It was left on an Internet site by accident, and discovered in 2003 by e-voting critic and activist Bev Harris of Black Box Voting.

Rubin said the program appears amateurish and sloppy. Experienced programmers can look at a programmer’s code and tell if it’s professional by examining its style – how clear the commented internal documentation is, for example – just as an English professor can quickly judge the writing level of students.

Geeks and politics: A strange marriage
Rubin, who as an election judge in Maryland witnessed problems with September’s primary voting, thinks the relentless march towards electronic democracy is purely a function of money and timing.

“A lot of states locked themselves into this, and now they are finding out (the machines) are not as secure and reliable as vendors said they were, but there isn't an alternative to them. They are backed into a corner,” he said. “Election officials who spent hundreds of millions will lose a lot of faith if they admit it’s a mistake.”

The political arena is a strange one for computer security geeks. Thompson makes his living as chief security strategist of a consulting firm Security Innovation. There, he spends much of his time fighting denial from clients who can’t believe their million-dollar technology is so fragile. When he describes the process, it sounds strangely similar to psychiatrist Elizabeth Kulber-Ross detailing the five stages of acceptance in her book “On Death and Dying.”

"When you realize you have a risk, you can practice risk avoidance or risk mitigation,” Thompson said, indicating that companies can quit using the faulty software or add a process that makes it safer. Then, there’s the third option: Do nothing. He calls is “Risk acceptance.” That’s what election officials around the country have decided to do, he said, despite all the warnings.

There are many different types of electronic voting machines, but all systems must have two basic components: a machine that collects votes and one that tabulates votes. Voters only see the collector – in decades past, a lever machine, or even an empty box. Next week, about 60 percent of voters will see a touch screen device or an optical scanner that accepts paper ballots marked up SAT-style.

But the real mathematics happen in the tabulator. Votes collected by individual machines must be centrally tabulated, generally by a computer housed at county offices. In many precincts, couriers will hand carry memory cards similar to laptop PC cards from polling places to country offices. Some counties allow transmission of the data via modem.

Hackers can attack either collectors or tabulators -- or they can attack the transmission of data between them.

Hacking possibilities demonstrated
Earlier this year, Princeton University Professor Edward Felten and his graduate students attacked collectors. They found a method for injecting a computer virus onto voting collection machines in as little as 60 seconds by picking the lock that guards a removable memory card, and swapping the card with an infected card.

Last year, Finnish researcher Harri Hursti also demonstrated he could change the vote calculations on a machine by swapping memory cards.

Those attacks required physical access to a voting machine, but Thompson doesn’t believe proximity is necessary. He’s focused his attention on attacking he tabulator machines, some of which are at least temporarily connected to the Internet, he said. Such machines often run Microsoft Windows and require regular installation of security patches. Downloading such patches would open a pathway for a long-distance attack, he said.

Diebold’s Bear dismissed the vote hacking demonstrations as “magic tricks”

“These are things that could not be done except in the sanitary environment of a laboratory,” he said. “...They are not representative of a real election environment. These what-if scenarios are all based on complete and unfettered access to system, working around pass codes and (with) unlimited amount of time.”

He said Diebold appreciates the public discourse on voting hardware and software, but accused detractors of engaging in scare tactics.

“When the dialog turns to rhetoric, it only serves to confuse and frighten voters,” he said.

For the most part, electronic voting critics have focused their attention on the flaws of paperless touch-screen machine, known in the industry as DREs, for Direct Recording Electronic. Users can have a strange, unsatisfying feeling after voting on a DRE. With no paper to touch or no lever to pull, voters can be left wondering if anything happened when their ballot was cast.

But Thompson’s worries are even broader. In studying vote-counting machines, he’s exposed weaknesses even on hand-marked ballots that are fed into optical scanners, which had been considered safer by many than touch-screen machines. Even optical-scan votes must eventually be added in a central tabulation machine. There are multiple ways someone with access to the machine could alter the results, he said.

Poll workers aren’t tech pros
Thompson’s biggest concern isn’t hardware or software; it’s people. Elections officials are rarely professional IT security experts.

“I’m giving you something that does magical things," Thompson said. “That’s all you know.”

Computer security experts stay up late nights working and reworking policies that are at the heart of a security system, such as, “Only managers can have remote modem access to servers.” But in the voting world, such policies are often unwritten, or non-existent, Thompson said.

For example, there have numerous examples of notorious “sleepovers,” where election officials allow poll workers to take voting machines home with them for a night or two before the election to ease the burden of distribution on Election Day. Any one of them could commit the kinds of election fraud Thompson describes, and so could anyone who knows the machines are in their homes for the night.

Of course, no election is perfect. Recent history proves that vote counts can be markedly imperfect. Some argue that electronic voting, while still fighting its own unique set of kinks, is still a grand step forward for U.S. voters. Thompson doesn’t think so.

In the past, he said, someone who wanted to rig results of an old-fashioned lever machine had to work very hard and recruit multiple assistants to create large tabulation errors. Technology voting allows a single person to do the work of a small army.

“If someone wanted to affect the results of an entire county, I could potentially do so fairly easily as single individual,” he said.

There is no telling how electronic balloting will fare on Tuesday. There might be obvious glitches, such as lost memory cards or power outages that lose votes. But these glitches don’t concern Avi Rubin. He’s much more worried about the glitches that no one will ever see. As Thompson has demonstrated, someone could retabulate votes, erase their tracks, and no one would ever know. Because of this, when asked if an election had already been hacked in America, Rubin said he couldn’t answer the question.

“The answer to that is I don't know, and it will always be I don't know,” said Rubin, who advocates a permanent return to paper ballots.

Thompson is not so severe. But he’s wondering why electronic voting has been rolled out so quickly with little public dialogue about its safety. Sure, he’s enjoying a bit of notoriety this week, as he did in November 2004. But he’s concerned that interest in hacking of democracy will quickly fade again. As a computer scientist, he knows a week of attention is no way to solve a computer security issue.

“What we need is sustained attention to the problem,” he said. “But I’m worried that now people are just desensitized to it.”

For more information on your state’s voting technology, see a detailed state-by-state map compiled by Computerworld.

MSNBC makes viewer gains, led by Keith Olberman's COUNTDOWN show, the news show most vocally critical of the Bush presidency....

MSNBC makes double-digit viewer gains
By Paul J. Gough
Nov 1, 2006
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/television/news/e3invDY7O%2FFa2fpNWIR%2BdEawA%3D%3D

NEW YORK -- Things are looking up at MSNBC, with the channel registering double-digit gains in viewers and adults 25-54 for October while Fox News Channel led all news networks for the 250th straight week.

Leading the charge was "Countdown With Keith Olbermann," which jumped 67% in viewership and 61% in the adults 25-54 demographic compared with October 2005. "Countdown" averaged 637,000 viewers (including 233,000 in the demo) for the month, according to data released Tuesday by Nielsen Media Research. It's nowhere near "The O'Reilly Factor" (which led all of cable with 2.1 million viewers) but it beat CNN's "Paula Zahn Now" in the demo and narrowly missed tying it in viewership.

"Keith Olbermann is the right person at the right time, and doing it in the right way," MSNBC general manager Dan Abrams said.

MSNBC was up in viewers total day and primetime as well as in the demo in both total day and primetime. "Scarborough Country" remained behind Fox News Channel's "Hannity & Colmes" and CNN's "Larry King Live," but was up 13% in the demo. The 7 p.m. edition of "Hardball" was up 27% in adults 25-54 and up 5% in viewers. MSNBC's "Imus in the Morning" simulcast gained some ground on "American Morning," averaging 324,000 viewers last month compared with 425,000 for "American Morning."

MSNBC is in the best competitive position in total day since April 2003 in the opening weeks of the war in Iraq. Abrams said the strength was almost completely across the board -- praising Joe Scarborough, Chris Matthews and Don Imus as well as Olbermann -- but he said he was also cautious.

"This is a really good sign for MSNBC on the whole. I think that we've found a voice to some degree," Abrams said. "We still have a ways to go. One month does not make ratings success, but this is certainly the right direction."

Fox News marked its 250th week atop the cable ratings the same month it celebrated its 10th anniversary. Fox News was down 17% in viewership total day compared with October 2005, with 786,000 viewers last month to 948,000 viewers a year ago. The channel was down 25% in primetime year to year, with 1.3 million viewers to last October's 1.7 million. It was down 9% in primetime in the adults 25-54 demo, 355,000 viewers to last October's 392,000.

But Fox still was on top by a comfortable margin in all measures, and with nine of the top 10 shows.

CNN also registered declines in viewership for total day and primetime, and was flat in the demo during primetime. CNN was down 8% to 490,000 in total day and down 13% to 720,000 in primetime. But it did see some success with its "Broken Government" series and a series of town-hall style meetings hosted by Lou Dobbs. The specials were up 31% in viewers and 51% in the demo compared with year-to-date averages for the programs they pre-empted, 7 p.m.'s "The Situation Room" and 8 p.m.'s "Paula Zahn Now."

The Lyin' Times FINALLY gets honest! President Bush's "UGLY BEHAVIOR", his "Divisive themes" and his "Hideously damaging fantasy...to Divide America."

Wow! We can barely highlight this editorial, it is so brutally honest throughout every sentence.
(Click on our headline/link to go to the NYT un-highlighted original.)

Mr. Bush's "HIDEOUSLY DAMAGING FANTASY" writes the NY Times editors, about our current president and the DISASTROUS course he has put America on, and his "NASTY" agenda of being "A DIVIDER" and most certainly NOT the "uniter" he PROMISED us that he would be, when he ran for office all thorugh the year 2000.

This is a terrific editorial, every word the honest, plain-spoken truth, and we can only wonder "Why?" it took the Times so damn long to notice just how hateful, divisive, destructive, and anti-American Mr. Bush's agenda is, and how damaging that legacy will be to America.


The Great Divider
Published: November 2, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/02/opinion/02thu1.html

As President Bush throws himself into the final days of a particularly NASTY campaign season, HE has settled into A FAMILIAR PATTERN of UGLY BEHAVIOR. Since HE CAN'T DEFEND the real world CREATED by HIS policies and HIS decisions, Mr. Bush is inventing a FANTASY WORLD in which to CAMPAIGN ON _PHONY ISSUES_ against fake enemies.

In Mr. Bush’s world, America is making real progress in Iraq. In the REAL world, as Michael Gordon reported in yesterday’s Times, the index that generals use to track developments shows an INEXORABLE SLIDE TOWARDS CHAOS. In Mr. Bush’s world, his administration is marching arm in arm with Iraqi officials committed to democracy and to staving off civil war. In the real world, the prime minister of Iraq orders the removal of American checkpoints in Baghdad and abets the sectarian militias that are slicing and dicing their country.

In Mr. Bush’s world, there are only two kinds of Americans: those who are against terrorism, and those who somehow are all right with it. Some Americans want to win in Iraq and some don’t. There are Americans who support the troops and Americans who don’t support the troops. And at the root of it all is the HIDEOUSLY DAMAGING FANTASY that there is a gulf between Americans who love their country and those who question his leadership.

Mr. Bush has been pushing these DIVISIVE THEMES all over the nation, offering up the ludicrous notion the other day that if Democrats manage to control even one house of Congress, America will lose and the terrorists will win. But he hit a particularly CREEPY LOW when he decided to distort a lame joke lamely delivered by Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. Mr. Kerry warned college students that the punishment for not learning your lessons was to “get stuck in Iraq.” In context, it was obviously an attempt to disparage Mr. Bush’s intelligence. That’s impolitic and impolite, but it’s not as bad as Mr. Bush’s response. Knowing full well what Mr. Kerry meant, the president and his team cried out that the senator was disparaging the troops. It was a depressing replay of the way the Bush campaign Swift-boated Americans in 2004 into believing that Mr. Kerry, who went to war, was a coward and Mr. Bush, who stayed home, was a hero.

It’s not the least bit surprising or objectionable that Mr. Bush would hit the trail hard at this point, trying to salvage his party’s control of Congress and, by extension, his last two years in office. And we’re not naïve enough to believe that either party has been running a positive campaign that focuses on the issues.

But when candidates for lower office make their opponents out to be friends of Osama bin Laden, or try to turn a minor gaffe into a near felony, that’s just depressing. When the PRESIDENT of the United States GLEEFULLY BATHES IN THE MUCK to DIVIDE AMERICANS into those who love their country and those who don’t, it is DESTRUCTIVE to the FABRIC OF THE NATION he is supposed to be leading.

This is hardly the first time that Mr. Bush has played THE POLITICS of FEAR, ANGER, and DIVISION; if he’s ever missed a chance to wave the bloody flag of 9/11, we can’t think of when. But Mr. Bush’s latest outbursts go way beyond that. They leave us wondering whether this president will ever be willing or able to make room for bipartisanship, compromise and statesmanship in the two years he has left in office.

The Lyin' Times FINALLY gets honest! "DIVIDER" Bush's "UGLY BEHAVIOR" and his "Hideously damaging fanstasy"

Did you get that in our headline/title? Mr. Bush's "HIDEOUSLY DAMAGING FANTASY" writes the NY Times editors, about our current president and the DISASTROUS course he he put America on, and his "NASTY" agenda of being "A DIVIDER" and most certainly NOT the "uniter" he PROMISED us that he would be, when he ran for office all thorugh the year 2000.

This is a terrific editorial, every word the honest, plain-spoken truth, and we can only wonder "Why?" it took the Times so damn long to notice just how hateful, divisive, destructive, and anti-American Mr. Bush's agenda and legacy will be to America.


The Great Divider
Published: November 2, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/02/opinion/02thu1.html

As President Bush throws himself into the final days of a particularly nasty campaign season, he’s settled into a familiar pattern of ugly behavior. Since he can’t defend the real world created by his policies and his decisions, Mr. Bush is inventing a fantasy world in which to campaign on phony issues against fake enemies.

In Mr. Bush’s world, America is making real progress in Iraq. In the real world, as Michael Gordon reported in yesterday’s Times, the index that generals use to track developments shows an inexorable slide toward chaos. In Mr. Bush’s world, his administration is marching arm in arm with Iraqi officials committed to democracy and to staving off civil war. In the real world, the prime minister of Iraq orders the removal of American checkpoints in Baghdad and abets the sectarian militias that are slicing and dicing their country.

In Mr. Bush’s world, there are only two kinds of Americans: those who are against terrorism, and those who somehow are all right with it. Some Americans want to win in Iraq and some don’t. There are Americans who support the troops and Americans who don’t support the troops. And at the root of it all is the hideously damaging fantasy that there is a gulf between Americans who love their country and those who question his leadership.

Mr. Bush has been pushing these divisive themes all over the nation, offering up the ludicrous notion the other day that if Democrats manage to control even one house of Congress, America will lose and the terrorists will win. But he hit a particularly creepy low when he decided to distort a lame joke lamely delivered by Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. Mr. Kerry warned college students that the punishment for not learning your lessons was to “get stuck in Iraq.” In context, it was obviously an attempt to disparage Mr. Bush’s intelligence. That’s impolitic and impolite, but it’s not as bad as Mr. Bush’s response. Knowing full well what Mr. Kerry meant, the president and his team cried out that the senator was disparaging the troops. It was a depressing replay of the way the Bush campaign Swift-boated Americans in 2004 into believing that Mr. Kerry, who went to war, was a coward and Mr. Bush, who stayed home, was a hero.

It’s not the least bit surprising or objectionable that Mr. Bush would hit the trail hard at this point, trying to salvage his party’s control of Congress and, by extension, his last two years in office. And we’re not naïve enough to believe that either party has been running a positive campaign that focuses on the issues.

But when candidates for lower office make their opponents out to be friends of Osama bin Laden, or try to turn a minor gaffe into a near felony, that’s just depressing. When the president of the United States gleefully bathes in the muck to divide Americans into those who love their country and those who don’t, it is destructive to the fabric of the nation he is supposed to be leading.

This is hardly the first time that Mr. Bush has played the politics of fear, anger and division; if he’s ever missed a chance to wave the bloody flag of 9/11, we can’t think of when. But Mr. Bush’s latest outbursts go way beyond that. They leave us wondering whether this president will ever be willing or able to make room for bipartisanship, compromise and statesmanship in the two years he has left in office.

Media whores make a career out of kissing Rush Limbaugh's LYIN', sneering, drug-abusing, send-maid-out-to-buy-illegal-drugs ___.

MedaiMatters.org does yeoman work keeping up with the TSUNAMI of Right-Wing LIES and authortarian propaganda disquised with a thin veneer of theocratic devotion to "obedience."

In this case, MediaMatters editor ERIC BOEHLERT details how the "Mainstream Media" SYSTEMATICALLY gives RUSH LIMBAUGH a patina of RESPECTABILITY and competent journalism that the Right-Wing blowhard and Vietnam War draft-dodger most certainly does NOT deserve. In a stunning piece, Boehlert explains that it is abject journalistic cowardice - "CAREERISM" (the desire to put one's career ahead of reporting the facts) - that gives Limbaugh his 'free pass' from reporters:

<< The truth is Beltway media players routinely play nice with Limbaugh and his fringe brand of conservatism. Anxious for his right-wing seal of approval (and spooked by his liberal bias charges), the mainstream press corps has for years treated Limbaugh with undeserved respect, worked to soften his radical edges, and presented him as simply a partisan pundit. And make no mistake, careerism is a key element behind the media's kid glove handling of Limbaugh. Very few Beltway press insiders want to cross him or feel the wrath of his press-hating listeners. >>

(HuffPost summary of Boehlert's MM article at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-boehlert/playing-nice-with-rush-li_b_32973.html )


Limbaugh, in sneering at Michael J. Fox's "PARTISAN" work for Democratic candidates, joins female Right-Wing ghoulish media blowhard Ann Coulter, who demonized the 9-11 widows who requested a independent investigation into the 9-11 attacks as "WIDOWS WHO ABUSE THE CELEBRITY gained from their husbands death for partisan issues."

Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter deriding others who 'abuse' their CELEBRITY on behalf of "PARTISAN ISSUES"??!

- WHAT THE HELL is WRONG with America's "mainstream media" that ANN COULTER and RUSH LIMBAUGH and MICHAEL SAVAGE (et al) are given a FREE PASS for ABUSING THEIR OWN CELEBRITY STATUS (for example, SNEERING at combat veterans such as Max Cleland and John Kerry for their service in the Vietnam War) while deriding the 9-11 widows for demading answers to their husband's and communites' tragic deaths?

HERE is a short list of the "Mainstream Media" newpaper and network stories that LIED to their readers, presenting Limbaugh's sneering NON-apology AS AN APOLOLGY to Michael J. Fox, who is suffering from the debilitating affects of Parkinson's disease:

* "Limbaugh apologized for saying Fox was faking." [ABC News]
* "Limbaugh's remarks caused a furor this week and prompted him to issue a rare apology." [The Baltimore Sun]
* "Limbaugh apologized later in the broadcast." [AP]
* "Rush Limbaugh apologizes." ]National Public Radio]
* "Limbaugh, who was attacked for his comments about Fox, later apologized." [Newsday]
* "Limbaugh later apologized." [USA Today]
* "Mr. Limbaugh has since apologized." [The Washington Times]
* "Limbaugh later apologized." [Los Angeles Times]

====================================

Playing nice with Rush Limbaugh
Media Matters for America
by Eric Boehlert
Tue, Oct 31, 2006
http://mediamatters.org/columns/200610310013

Question: When is an apology not an apology?

Answer: When the press corps is covering for Rush Limbaugh.

Last week's spectacle of right-wingtalker Limbaugh mocking actor Michael J. Fox for allegedly faking the symptoms of his crippling Parkinson's disease while appearing in a Democratic-sponsored campaign ad was equaled only by the media spectacle of news outlets erroneously, and methodically, reporting that the talker quickly apologized for his outlandish smear. Things got so bad that at one point news consumers were better off reading the Canadian press to find out the actual facts of the American-based controversy. (Fox is a native of Edmonton, which explained the Canadian interest in the story.)
And it's not like the facts were complicated. Fox made a heartfelt plea urging voters in Missouri to support Democratic Senate candidate Claire McCaskill, who he stated "shares [his] hope for cures" through stem cell research. Limbaugh promptly belittled the actor, telling listeners the herky-jerky motions Fox was making during the commercial were a con; "purely an act" to elicit an emotional response. Limbaugh even uncorked spastic, in-studio gesticulations to mimic Fox's awkward appearance.

Limbaugh said if he was proven wrong he'd apologized. But the press took that for an apology itself. Days later, as the controversy raged, Limbaugh was even clearer, insisting, "I stand by what I said [about Fox]. I take back none of what I said. I wouldn't rephrase it any differently. It is what I believe. It is what I think. It is what I have found to be true."
That quote was key to understanding the radical, remorseless position Limbaugh had staked out for himself. And here, according to a search of the Nexis database, is a list of major Canadian papers that published the direct, "I stand by what I said" quote from Limbaugh:
The Edmonton Journal, The Gazette (Montreal), the Regina Leader-Post (Saskatchewan), the National Post, the Ottawa Citizen, the Saskatoon StarPhoenix (Saskatchewan), The Province (Vancouver, BritishColumbia), the Vancouver Sun (British Columbia), and the Windsor Star (Ontario)
Meanwhile, here's a list of major American newspapers that published the same revealing quote from Limbaugh:
(Crickets)
The sounds of silence were fitting for a press corps that treated Limbaugh's allegation as rational, manufactured a central element of the story (his 'apology'), mischaracterized Fox's commercial, suggested his actions had "spark[ed]" the controversy, and absolutely refused to put Limbaugh's attack in any sort of historical context regarding the talker's established record of hate speech.
But this is nothing new. Despite Limbaugh torrent of rhetoric about how the press vilifies him (it's called a schtick; every radio talk show host needs one), the truth is Beltway media players routinely play nice with Limbaugh and his fringe brand of conservatism. Anxious for his right-wing seal of approval (and spooked by his liberal bias charges), the mainstream press corps has for years treated Limbaugh with undeserved respect, worked to soften his radical edges, and presented him as simply a partisan pundit.
Why else would The Washington Post equate Limbaugh to Comedy Central's award-winning late-night satirist Jon Stewart? And why else would washingtonpost.com describe Limbaugh as a "mainstream conservative" who simply "pokes fun" at Democratic "policy" and not at individuals?
As if on cue last week, the press treated Limbaugh's odious, left-field attack as if it were a normal part of the public discourse -- naturally somebody would question whether Fox's body contortions were part of an act. "Rush has done his job well," blogger Jane Hamsher wrote at firedoglake.com last week. "The goalposts are suddenly moved, this is considered a legitimate line of inquiry."
And it was key press players, such as NBC's Matt Lauer, who dutifully helped move those goalposts. In fact, Lauer may have uttered the Quote of the Year when he painted Limbaugh as some sort of Everyman, speaking the quiet truths of most Americans:
LAUER: Rush Limbaugh started a lot of controversy when he said perhaps Michael J. Fox is exaggerating or faking these effects of Parkinson's Disease in that ad promoting stem cell research. Didn't Rush Limbaugh just say what a lot of people are privately thinking? [Emphasis added]
Lauer assumed lots of people watched Fox, who suffers from an incurable brain disorder, and figured, yeah, he's fakin' it.
Shelter from the storm

Unfortunately, that's been the knee-jerk response to dealing with Limbaugh controversies, particularly in the world of network news, where the rule of thumb is to provide the powerful right-wing talker with all sorts of cover. Lauer's former colleague Katie Couric was so anxious to make sure she got Limbaugh's side of the Fox story last week that she personally contacted the host. Limbaugh told Couric the point he had tried to make on his program was that Fox "is stumping for Democrats in the political arena and is, therefore, open to analysis and criticism as we all are." Of course, that was not the point Limbaugh made when he mocked Fox's disease, but Couric pretended not to know the difference. (The only celebrity network TV host I saw who responded to Limbaugh's off-the-chart smear the way any rationale person would (i.e."WTF?") was Good Morning America's Diane Sawyer.)
Keep in mind that last month, during her first week in the anchor chair at CBS, Couric personally contacted Limbaugh and asked him to contribute a "Free Speech" segment for her nightly newscast. "Free Speech" is where outsiders are invited to tape op-eds and is touted by CBS as a forum to restore "civil discourse." I'm guessing Couric was aware of the multiple layers of ironies involved with including Limbaugh in a forum designed to restore "civil discourse." I assume she and her staff understood that Limbaugh has, among an endless litany of insults, called Sen. John Kerry a "gigolo," mocked Democratic Party chief Howard Dean as "a very sick man," labeled liberal philanthropist George Soros a "self-hating Jew," and announced that Democrats "hate this country." It seems clear Couric was so anxious to have Limbaugh onboard that she didn't much care about the uncomfortable ironies.
Couric's not the only network anchor in recent years to genuflect before Limbaugh in search of a conservative seal of approval. Just weeks after he took over the NBC Nightly News anchor chair in late 2004, Brian Williams told a C-SPAN interviewer that he felt it was his duty to listen to Limbaugh every day and hoped that Limbaugh would get his "due" as a broadcaster.
Earlier that year, and just months after insisting, "What's good for Al Qaeda is good for the Democratic Party in this country today," Limbaugh broke with his traditional no-guest rule and welcomed NBC Meet the Press host Tim Russert on his radio show. An appreciative Russert, out peddling a new book, said it was "an honor" to be on the program. In fact, at one point Russert playfully suggested nominating Limbaugh as the next host of Meet the Press. Limbaugh signed off the boys club chat with, "Anyway, this has been fun. I always enjoy talking to you, and I appreciate our relationship over the years."
Make no mistake, careerism is a key element behind the media's kid glove handling of Limbaugh. Very few Beltway press insiders want to cross him or feel the wrath of his press-hating listeners -- the same listeners who helped drive Dan Rather from his job as CBS anchor following the 2004 controversy regarding CBS' report on Bush and the Texas Air National Guard.
Read this back-and-forth between ABC News' Ryan Owens and deputy political director David Chalian and note how nervous they were about offending the mighty Limbaugh. The program was Inside the Newsroom, which is part of ABC's digital and broadband news service. The two were discussing the Fox/Limbaugh controversy and had just aired the shock jock's quote about how Fox was "exaggerating the effects of the disease. He is moving all around and shaking. And it's purely an act":
OWENS: Guess what, I'm gonna stay out of this and toss it right over to you, David. What do you think?
CHALIAN: You know, as for Rush Limbaugh -- I'm not gonna pick a fight with Rush Limbaugh.
OWENS: At least you try to respond, which makes you a better man than me.
Perhaps the timidity isn't surprising considering that their boss at ABC News, Mark Halperin, the director of the networks' political unit, is a longtime Rush admirer. "Twelve o'clock for a normal person might be 'Let's think about having lunch,' but for me it's 'Rush Limbaugh is on,' " he once told a reporter. (Last week, Halperin labeled Limbaugh an "American iconic" figure.)
Keep in mind that Halperin recently agreed with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly that the mainstream media have a liberal bias and that his duty at ABC is to convince conservative partisans that his news organization can be trusted. In that context, ABC's continuously skewed coverage of Limbaugh's '"apology'" begins to make sense.
ABC shifts the focus onto Michael J. Fox
For instance, ABC erroneously described the Fox stem cell ad as "tough," insisted Fox had "blasted" Republicans, and that following Limbaugh's attack the actor had publicly "fired back." None of the characterizations was accurate. Tough? The facts-only text of the ad was downright timid compared to traditional campaign mudslinging. "Blasted"? Fox simply took issue with the Republican position on embryonic stem cell research. (They largely oppose it.) "Fired back"? Fox's initial public response to Limbaugh was almost comically reserved; a one-sentence joke about how his meds currently seemed to be working fine.
ABC News also worked overtime to shift the attention away from Limbaugh and place the onus on Fox, as the network falsely reported it was the actions of the sick actor that were "raising lots of eyebrows." ABC insisted there was "a big debate about Michael J. Fox." It pushed the false story that "the political backlash of the Fox ad lasted well into this week." And ABC reported, "The bitterest political battle in the closing days of this campaign has erupted in Missouri. And it centers on Michael J. Fox." [Emphasis added.]
Let's be clear, Fox's commercial in and of itself when it aired in Missouri on October 21 was a non-story nationally. The real-time reaction to the ad in the press as well as by big-time conservatives was virtually nil. (Go back and check the transcripts and the clips. I did.) Without Limbaugh and his baseless, tasteless allegation, the Fox ad would have quietly come and gone, generating only minor interest. But the press, led by ABC, seemed determined to tag Fox for creating the uproar.
And then there was the botched apology reporting. There, ABC had lots of company. Here's what Limbaugh said on October 23:
"So I will bigly, hugely admit that I was wrong and I will apologize to Michael J. Fox, if I am wrong in characterizing his behavior on this commercial as an act." [Emphasis added]
"That's not an apology," JohnAravosis correctly noted on his Americablog last week. "It's not even one of those lame 'I apologize if you were offended' apologies." Not matter. The media had their script -- Rush apologized! -- and they were sticking with it. That included news outlets such as CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC,the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Time, the Associated Press, The Kansas City Star, The Washington Post, the New York Daily News, the Houston Chronicle, and The Wall Street Journal, just to name a few.
Then midway through last week, Limbaugh, as if irked by the inaccurate press accounts of his so-called apology, defiantly announced "I stand by what I said." Yet even after he erased any doubt, the press refused to adjust its preferred narrative:
* "Limbaugh apologized for saying Fox was faking." [ABC News]
* "Limbaugh's remarks caused a furor this week and prompted him to issue a rare apology." [The Baltimore Sun]
* "Limbaugh apologized later in the broadcast." [AP]
* "Rush Limbaugh apologizes." ]National Public Radio]
* "Limbaugh, who was attacked for his comments about Fox, later apologized." [Newsday]
* "Limbaugh later apologized." [USA Today]
* "Mr. Limbaugh has since apologized." [The Washington Times]
* "Limbaugh later apologized." [Los Angeles Times]
Those press mentions of an apology all came within the 48 hours after Limbaugh pointedly refused to express any regret. Yet the media still clung to the quaint, naive notion that Limbaugh, seeing the error of his ways, said he was sorry for smearing a sick man suffering from a degenerative disease.
The press just can't bring itself to tell the truth about Rush Limbaugh.