Experts Fail Government on Cybersecurity

[And we foolishly trust them (IRS) with our private financial tax data. Ed]


December 27, 2007
San Jose Mercury News


Since the outbreak of a cybercrime epidemic that has cost the American economy billions of dollars, the federal government has failed to respond with enough resources, attention, and determination to combat the cyberthreat, a San Jose Mercury News investigation reveals.

“The U.S. government has not devoted the leadership and energy that this issue needs,” said a former administration homeland and cybersecurity adviser.

Even as the White House asked in November for $154 million toward a new cybersecurity initiative expected to reach billions of dollars over the next several years, security experts complain the administration remains too focused on the risks of online espionage and information warfare, overlooking international criminals who are stealing a fortune through the Internet.

The difficulties are systemic and widespread, and include limited resources, fractured responsibility, and an unfamiliar threat.

Source:
http://www.ohio.com/business/12844007.html
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Kurt Vonnegut PBS interview


On "A Man Without a Country," His Last Book




Lost words from a master of American letters Kurt Vonnegut died April 11, 2005 to very little notice considering his position in American writing and his influence on people.

His last years were spend writing for the Chicago magazine, "In These Times," where his editor, Joel Bleifuss regularly printed his articles and thoughts.

These were edited by Joel and then re-edited by Kurt and Dan Simon at Seven Stories Press in New York City. The result was Vonnegut's last published work, "A Man Without a Country."

Listen to his wit and wisdom. "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

As a tribute to Kurt Vonnegut, NOW proudly shares one of his last broadcast television interviews. On our October 7, 2005 program, NOW Host David Brancaccio interviews Vonnegut about his life and the current state of American democracy.

With his classic wit, the legendary author of CAT'S CRADLE and SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE delivers some choice words for our parties, our system, and our president.

For more information about this episode of NOW, and to see the *entire* interview visit http://www.pbs.org/now/arts/vonnegut.html .

To find out when NOW airs on PBS in your area, check local listings or http://www.pbs.org/now http://www.pbs.org/now (less)

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Who murdered Benazir Bhutto?

Was she murdered by intelligence agency supported terrorists?


Brasscheck TV
December 18, 2007




View this video to understand the Pakistani-US alliance to support and protect terrorist operations in the US and the Middle East

When Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan to take a stand for democratic government, 3 million Pakistanis greeted her at the airport.

Now she is dead.

At 6:15 in this video, Benazir Bhutto refers in a matter-of-fact manner to "the man who killed Osama bin Laden."

If this was a misstatement, she did not correct herself, nor did the interviewer call attention to it.

Before she was murdered, there was another attack on Benazir Bhutto's life.

She told David Frost that she was not even allowed to file a police report let alone get a serious investigation of the attack.

She specifically stated that she wanted the finances of the terrorists traced.

Saeed Sheikh is the man Bhutto refers to in this interview.

He is charged with killing Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl who tracked the relationship between Pakistani intelligence and terrorist groups.

He is also suspected of having wired money to Mohamed Atta on behalf of Pakistani intelligence right before the 9/11 attacks.

George Bush & Company wholeheartedly support the current Pakistani regime.

911 - Pakistani Al-Qaeda Money Connection



Protected by Bush ?

On October 1, 2001, the FBI uncovered evidence that Lt. General Mahmood Ahmed, the Director of the Pakistani Intelligence Service (the ISI) authorized the wiring of $100,000 to Florida to Mohammed Atta (supposed hijack ringleader of the 911 attack) through Omar Saeed Sheikh (an alleged ISI agent)?

Why did only a single US press outlet, the Wall Street Journal website, mention this connection in the editorial section (James Taranto writing) on October 10, 2001, saying it was an "internet only" story - when in fact it was a major story reported at great length in the main line Indian press?

Does this mean that Al-Qaeda was used as a tool by members of the American government in the same way that they used the Mujahdeen against the Soviets in Afghanistan?

Sources:
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/242.html
http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/243.html
http://opinionjournal.com/best/?id=95001298
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Cheney Accused of Conspiring Against California Emissions Law




by Dan Glaister
December 24, 2007
The Guardian






The US vice-president, Dick Cheney, was behind a controversial decision to block California's attempt to impose tough emission limits on car manufacturers, according to insiders at the government Environmental Protection Agency.

Staff at the agency, which announced last week that California's proposed limits were redundant, said the agency's chief went against their expert advice after car executives met Cheney, and a Chrysler executive delivered a letter to the EPA saying why the state should not be allowed to regulate greenhouse gases.

EPA staff members told the Los Angeles Times that the agency's head, the Bush appointee Stephen Johnson, ignored their conclusions and shut himself off from consultation in the month before the announcement. He then informed them of his decision and instructed them to provide the legal rationale for it, they said.

"California met every criteria ... on the merits," an anonymous member of the EPA staff told the Times. "The same criteria we have used for the last 40 years ... We told him that. All the briefings we have given him laid out the facts."

In an editorial, the New York Times described the decision as, "an indefensible act of executive arrogance that can only be explained as the product of ideological blindness and as a political payoff to the automobile industry".

Johnson said that because Bush signed an energy bill last week which raised fuel economy standards, there was no justification for separate state regulation. The president, the agency said, had provided a "clear national solution" and there was no need for a "confusing patchwork of state rules to reduce America's climate footprint from vehicles".

But Johnson's staff gave him the opposite advice, warning him that should he block California, the state would probably sue him in the courts and would probably win. The state's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, immediately announced that he would challenge the EPA's ruling in the courts, describing it as "legally indefensible".

California had wanted to implement a 2002 law limiting greenhouse gas emissions from cars and lorries. Had it been successful, 16 other states had said they would follow suit, effectively creating a national standard that car makers would have been obliged to follow.

Source:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2231965,00.html

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The Evangelical Rebellion


December 24, 2007
TruthDig.com
by Chris Hedges
[Emphasis News2U]


The rise of Mike Huckabee as a presidential candidate represents a seismic shift in the tactics, ideology and direction of the radical Christian right. Huckabee may stumble and falter in later primaries, but his right-wing Christian populism is here to stay. Huckabee represents a new and potent force in American politics, and the neocons and corporate elite, who once viewed the yahoos of the Christian right as the useful idiots, are now confronted with the fact that they themselves are the ones who have been taken for a ride.

Members of the Christian right, recruited into the Republican Party and manipulated to vote against their own interests around the issues of abortion and family values, are in rebellion. They are taking the party into new, uncharted territory. And they presage, especially with looming economic turmoil, the rise of a mass movement that could demolish what is left of American democracy and set the stage for a Christian fascism.

The corporate establishment, whose plundering of the country created fertile ground for a radical, right-wing backlash, is sounding the alarm bells. It is scrambling to bolster Mitt Romney, who, like Rudy Giuliani or Hillary Clinton, will continue to slash and burn on behalf of corporate profits.

Columnist George Will called Huckabee’s populism “a comprehensive apostasy against core Republican beliefs.” He wrote that Huckabee’s candidacy “broadly repudiates core Republican policies such as free trade, low taxes, the essential legitimacy of America’s corporate entities and the market system allocating wealth and opportunity.” National Review’s Rich Lowry wrote that “like [Howard] Dean, his nomination would represent an act of suicide by his party.”

Huckabee spoke of this revolt on the “Today” show. “There’s a sense in which all these years the evangelicals have been treated very kindly by the Republican Party,” he said. “They wanted us to be a part of it. And then one day one of us actually runs and they say, ‘Oh, my gosh, now they’re serious.’ They [evangelicals] don’t want to just show up and vote, they actually would want to be a part of the discussion.”

George Bush is a happy stooge of his corporate handlers. He blithely enriches the oligarchy, defends a war that is the worst foreign policy blunder in American history and callously denies medical benefits to children. Huckabee is different. He has tapped into the rage and fury of the working class, dispossessed and abandoned by the mainstream Democrats and Republicans.

And he refuses to make the ideology of the Christian right, with its dark contempt for democratic traditions and intolerance of nonbelievers, a handmaiden of the corporate establishment. This makes him a much more lethal and radical political force.

The Christian right is the most potent and dangerous mass movement in American history. It has been controlled and led, until now, by those who submit to the demands of the corporate state. But the grass roots are tired of being taken for rubes. They are tired of candidates, like Bush or Bill Clinton, who roll out the same clichés about working men and women every four years and then spend their terms enriching their corporate backers.

The majority of American citizens have spent the last two decades watching their government services and benefits vanish. They have seen their jobs go overseas and are watching as their communities crumble and their houses are foreclosed. It is their kids who are in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The old guard in the Christian right, the Pat Robertsons, who used their pulpits to deliver the votes of naive followers to the corporatists, is a spent force. Huckabee’s Christian populism represents the maturation of the movement. It signals the rise of a truly radical, even revolutionary force in American politics, of which Huckabee may be one of the tamer and less frightening examples.

Hints of Huckabee’s bizarre worldview seep out now and then. Bob Vander Plaats, Huckabee’s Iowa campaign manager, for example, when asked about his candidate’s lack of foreign policy experience, told MSNBC: “Well, I think Gov. Huckabee has a lot of resources that he goes to on national security matters. Here’s a guy, a former pastor, who understands a theological nature of this war as we’re fighting a radical religion in Islam.”

Robert Novak noted that Huckabee held a fundraiser last week at the Houston home of Dr. Steven Hotze. As Novak wrote, Hotze is “a leader in the highly conservative Christian Reconstruction movement.”

Huckabee has close ties with the Christian Reconstructionist or Dominionist branch of the Christian right. The Dominionist movement, which seeks to cloak itself in the mantle of the Christian faith and American patriotism, is small in numbers but influential.

It departs from traditional evangelicalism.

It seeks to redefine traditional democratic and Christian terms and concepts to fit an ideology that calls on the radical church to take political power. It shares many prominent features with classical fascist movements, at least as such movements are defined by the scholar Robert O. Paxton, who sees fascism as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cultures of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

Dominionism, born out of Christian Reconstructionism, seeks to politicize faith. It has, like all fascist movements, a belief in magic along with leadership adoration and a strident call for moral and physical supremacy of a master race, in this case American Christians. It also has, like fascist movements, an ill-defined and shifting set of beliefs, some of which contradict each other.

Paxton argues that the best way to understand authentic fascist movements, which he says exist in all societies, including democracies, is to focus not on what they say but on how they act, for, as he writes, some of the ideas that underlie fascist movements “remain unstated and implicit in fascist public language” and “many of them belong more to the realm of visceral feelings than to the realm of reasoned propositions.”

Dominionism teaches that American Christians have been mandated by God to make America a Christian state.

A decades-long refusal by most American fundamentalists to engage in politics at all following the Scopes trial has been replaced by a call for Christian “dominion” over the nation and, eventually, over the Earth itself. Dominionism preaches that Jesus has called on Christians to actively build the kingdom of God on Earth. America becomes, in this militant Biblicism, an agent of God, and all political and intellectual opponents of America’s Christian leaders are viewed, quite simply, as agents of Satan.

Under Christian dominion, America will no longer be a sinful and fallen nation but one in which the Ten Commandments form the basis of our legal system, in which creationism and “Christian values” form the basis of our educational system, and the media and the government proclaim the Good News to one and all.

Labor unions, civil rights laws and public schools will be abolished.

Women will be removed from the work force to stay at home, and all those deemed insufficiently Christian will be denied citizenship.

Baptist minister Rick Scarborough, founder of Vision America and a self-described “Christocrat,” who attended the Texas fundraiser, has endorsed Huckabee. Scarborough, along with holding other bizarre stances, opposes the HPV (human papillomavirus) vaccine on grounds that it interferes with God’s punishment of sexual license. And Huckabee, who once advocated isolating AIDS patients from the general public and opposed increased federal funding in the search for a cure, comes out of this frightening mold. He justified his call to quarantine those with AIDS because they could “pose a dangerous public health risk.”

“If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague,” Huckabee wrote. “It is difficult to understand the public policy towards AIDS. It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population, and in which this deadly disease for which there is no cure is being treated as a civil rights issue instead of the true health crisis it represents.”

Huckabee has publicly backed off from this extreme position, but he remains deeply hostile to gays.

He has used wit and humor to deflect reporters from his radical views about marriage, abortion, damnation, biblical law, creationism and the holy war he believes we are fighting with Islam. But his stances represent a huge step, should they ever become policy, toward a theocratic state and the death of our open society. In the end, however, I do not blame Huckabee or the tens of millions of hapless Christians-40 percent of the Republican electorate-who hear his words and rejoice.

I blame the corporate state, those who thought they could disempower and abuse the working class, rape the country, build a rapacious oligarchy and never pay a political price.

Chris Hedges, who graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.“

©2007 TruthDig.com

Source:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20071223_the_evangelical_rebellion/
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Ohio Secretary of State confirms 2004 election could have been stolen


by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
December 14, 2007


Ohio's Secretary of State announced this morning that a $1.9 million official study shows that "critical security failures" are embedded throughout the voting systems in the state that decided the 2004 election. Those failures, she says, "could impact the integrity of elections in the Buckeye State."

They have rendered Ohio's vote counts "vulnerable" to manipulation and theft by "fairly simple techniques." Indeed, she says, "the tools needed to compromise an accurate vote count could be as simple as tampering with the paper audit trail connector or using a magnet and a personal digital assistant." In other words, Ohio's top election official has finally confirmed that the 2004 election could have been easily stolen.

Brunner's stunning findings apply to electronic voting machines used in 58 of Ohio's 88 counties, in addition to scanning devices and central tabulators used on paper ballots in much of the rest of the state.

Brunner is calling for widespread changes to the way Ohio casts and counts its ballots. Her announcement follows moves by California Secretary of State Deborah Bowen to disqualify electronic voting machines in the nation's biggest state. In tandem, these two reports add a critical state-based dimension to the growing mountain of evidence that the US electoral system is rife with insecurities.

Reports from the Brennan Center, the Carter-Baker Commission, the Government Accountability Office, the Conyers Committee Task Force Report, Princeton University and others have offered differing perspectives that add up to the same conclusion.

Coming in the state that decided the 2004 election for George W. Bush, Brunner's confirmation of the electoral system's vulnerabilities adds huge new weight to the charge that the Buckeye State's vote count was stolen.

In a series of investigative reports dating to well before the 2004 election, the Columbus Free Press and Freepress.org have documented several dozen different means used by the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign to steal the official 2004 vote count. The final official tally for Bush---less than 119,000 votes out of 5.4 million cast---varied by 6.7% from exit poll results, which showed a Kerry victory.

Exit polls in 2004 were designed to have a margin of error of about 1%. In various polling stations in Democrat-rich inner city precincts in Youngstown and Columbus, voters who pushed touch screens for Kerry saw Bush's name light up. A wide range of discrepancies on both electronic and paper balloting systems leaned almost uniformly toward the Bush camp. Voting procedures regularly broke down in inner city and campus areas known to be heavily Democratic.

In direct violation of standing federal election law, 56 of Ohio's 88 counties have since destroyed all or part of their 2004 election data. The materials were additionally protected by a federal court injunction in the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal civil rights lawsuit (in which we are attorney and plaintiff). To date, no state or federal prosecutions have resulted from this wholesale destruction of presidential election records, including 1.6 million ballots, cast and uncast, needed for definitive auditing procedures.

However, two Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) election officials have been convicted of felony manipulation of an official recount. The Cleveland Plain-Dealer, the state's largest newspaper, recently editorialized that there is "no evidence" the 2004 election was stolen, but omitted mention of the destruction of the electoral records by more than half the counties in the state.

The Plain-Dealer and other mainstream media have consistently ignored findings by the Free Press and others indicating widespread manipulation and theft of the kind Brunner has now confirmed was eminently do-able within the Ohio system. Brunner says "the results underscore the need for a fundamental change in the structure of Ohio's election system to ensure ballot and voting system security while still making voting convenient and accessible to all Ohio voters."

Among other things, she advocates replacing touch-screen machines with optical-scan units that include a paper balloting system.

The study was managed by the Battelle Corporation, and conducted by Columbus-based MicroSolved Inc., SysTest Labs of Denver along with a consortium of academic subcontractors. It was reviewed by a dozen county officials, and included scrutiny of voting systems produced by Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Hart Intercivic and Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold).

Brunner is the Democratic successor to Republican J. Kenneth Blackwell, who administered the 2004 election as Secretary of State while also serving as state co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign. The report comes as part of her pledge to guarantee a fair and reliable vote count in the upcoming 2008 presidential election.

Under Blackwell, Ohio spent some $100 million installing electronic voting machines as part of the Help America Vote Act, passed by Congress in the wake of the scandals surrounding the 2000 election. Former Ohio Congressman Bob Ney, HAVA's principle author, now resides in a federal prison, in part for illegalities surrounding his dealings with voting machine companies.

Blackwell, who was defeated in a 2006 race for the Ohio governorship, outsourced web hosting responsibilities for the 2004 vote count to a programming firm that also programmed the web site for the 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign. Blackwell's chosen host site for the state's vote count was in the basement of the Old Pioneer Bank Building in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where the servers for the Republican National Committee, and the Bush White House, were also located.

Brunner has now recommended that all Ohio's voting be done on optical scan ballots, with reliance on central tabulation. Voters with disabilities could use AutoMark touchscreen machines with built in audio systems that allow the marking of ballots with little or no additional assistance. "It's a testament to our state's boards of elections officials that elections on the new (federally) mandated voting systems have gone as smoothly as they have in light of these findings,"

Brunner said. Conversely, it is also a testament to the ease with which the 2004 election was stolen by election officials who had clear conflicts of interest aimed at keeping George W. Bush in the White House.

--Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-authors of HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008 (www.freepress.org) and of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO? (The New Press) with Steve Rosenfeld. THE FITRAKIS FILES are available at www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared. Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030, is at www.solartopia.org.

Source:
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2007/2920
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Lakota announcement:
Where does it go?


Rapid City Journal
by Mikel LeFort
The issues


Where should a story like this be played in the Journal?

That’s what we asked ourselves after Native American activist Russell Means and his Lakota Sioux group declared Thursday they were a sovereign nation and withdrawing from all treaties from the U.S. government.

The debate was compelling in the afternoon meeting.

On the one hand, this was going to be one of the biggest ‘talkers’ of the day, and had already had 121 comments since being posted early afternoon. The LNI is in town. Russell Means is a prominent figure in the Native American community. The treaties and sovereignty are key issues in Indian Country.

On the other hand, there were no tribal presidents in the group which made the announcement, no one from the top ranks of any of the Lakota Sioux tribes. The timing with the LNI was curious. Russell Means has been known to stage public events to get his message out, and there are some Lakotas who don’t feel Means speaks for them.

And so we determined the story would not go on A1, unless we could confirm support of this group’s decision by any of the top officials from any of the Lakota tribes. Otherwise, this may amount to nothing more than talk.

The story:

A group represents the Lakota Sioux Indian representatives from various reservations and states said Wednesday that it is declaring sovereign nation status and withdrawing from all treaties with the U.S. government.

“This is an historic day for our Lakota people,” said Native American action and activist Russell Means. “United States colonial rule is at its end!”

Means was part of a four member Lakota delegation that traveled to Washington, culminating years of internal discussion among treaty representatives of the various Lakota communities.

Other delegation members included Women of All Red Nations founder Phyllis Young, Oglala Lakota Strong Heart Society leader Duane Martin Sr., and Garry Rowland, Leader Chief Big Foot Riders. Means, Rowland, Martin were all members of the 1973 Wounded Knee takeover.

The move to form an independent nation will focus on property rights in a five-state area where the treaties in question were drawn up. The states include South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana – areas that the group say have been illegally homesteaded for years despite knowledge of Lakota as the historic owners.

If the U.S. government does not immediately enter into diplomatic negotiations, the group said in a news release, liens will be filed on real-estate transactions across the region — an action it says could cloud title issues over thousands of square miles of land and property.

“In order to stop the continuous taking of our resources – people, land, water and children- we have no choice but to claim our own destiny,” said Phyllis Young, a former Indigenous representative to the United Nations and representative from Standing Rock.

Young added, “The actions of Lakota are not intended to embarrass the United States but to simply save the lives of our people.”

The group has been meeting all week with foreign leaders in an effort to gain political support for sovereign nation status, including Bolivia Indigenous President Evo Morales. Morales said his country is “very, very interested in the Lakota case.”

Source:
http://rapidcityjournal.com/blogs/editor/?p=339
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US Passes Tighter Gun Checks Law


December 20, 2007


The US Congress has approved the first major gun legislation since 1994, improving background checks on buyers.

The bill was prompted by the deaths of 32 people at Virginia Tech University in April, when a mentally ill student used two guns he had been able to buy.

The law clarifies what mental health records must be included in checks and gives funds to states to help automate the processing of records.

It has been widely welcomed but critics say it will do "more harm than good".

The shooting rampage by student Cho Seung-hui on the campus at Virginia Tech in April shocked Americans.

That shock was all the greater when it emerged that a judge had ruled that Cho was a danger to himself and should receive mental health treatment.

But because of concerns over privacy laws, the judge's report never made it into federal records.

This meant Cho was able legally to buy the guns he used to kill 32 people and himself.

"A credible...federal database to provide accurate background checks benefits everyone," said Sen Patrick Leahy, a co-sponsor of the bill.

Privacy laws

Under existing legislation from 1968, people barred from buying guns include those convicted of a crime punishable by more than a year in prison, drug addicts and those found by a court to be mentally disabled.

But privacy laws and budget restraints have meant most states fail to pass on such information to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), the main way gun dealers determined whether potential buyers are legally able to purchase a gun.

The new legislation aims to close those gaps:

• it provides funds to improve NICS
• sets out which mental health records should be reported
• provides $375m (£187m) a year for five years for states and state courts to improve processing of mental health information
• states failing to comply could lose federal funds
• states with good records could receive financial incentives

The bill also provides funds to allow people who have "overcome a disqualifying mental illness or disability" to petition for the restoration of their right to own a gun.

'Hijacked'

The legislation has been welcomed by the powerful National Rifle Association gun lobby, which said that it did not impose new restrictions on gun ownership but improved compliance with the existing rules.

"This would ensure that purely medical records are never used in NICS. Gun ownership rights would only be lost as a result of a finding that the person is a danger to themselves or others, or lacks the capacity to manage his own affairs," an NRA statement said.

A gun control group, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, also urged President George W Bush to sign the bill into law.

"Every day that passes until this legislation becomes law, dangerous people will go into gun stores and not be blocked from buying deadly weapons, thus putting lives at risk," the group said.

But another campaign group, the Violence Policy Center, said the legislation had been "hijacked by the gun lobby and would now do far more harm than good".

"Rather than focusing on improving the current laws prohibiting people with certain mental health disabilities from buying guns, the bill is now nothing more than a gun lobby wish list," the VPC said.

The legislation would waste money to restore the gun privileges of people previously determined to present a danger to themselves or others, the group said.

It is estimated that there are some 250m privately-owned guns in the US, which has a population of 300m.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/americas/7153339.stm
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Ohio E-Voting System Security Criticized in New State Report


December 17, 2007
Computerworld




E-voting in Ohio faces a host of potential security, equipment, and process changes following the release of an 86-page report that criticizes the existing evoting systems used in the state.

The report concludes that security shortcomings in Ohio’s e-voting systems are a continuing danger to the accuracy of elections there.

The study was done at the request of Ohio’s secretary of state, who is in charge of the state’s elections.

Between October 5 and December 7, teams of academic researchers, accredited e-voting system testing labs, and scientists evaluated the state’s existing hardware and software and made recommendations for improvements.

The stakes are big for Ohio, which faces two key elections next year -- a March 4 primary election, and the November 4 general election.

“The findings of the various scientists engaged by Project EVEREST are disturbing,” the report states.

EVEREST is short for Evaluation & Validation of Election-Related Equipment, Standards & Testing.

The main problem, according to the report, is that while security and privacy standards generally exist for critical technology systems, “unfortunately ... the computer-based voting systems in use in Ohio do not meet computer industry security standards and are susceptible to breaches of security that may jeopardize the integrity of the voting process.”

[So they finally figured out how bad the electronic voting systems are today, what about the integrity of the last 8-10 years of elections that these hacked and compromised systems were used in? How much have we really been screwed? Ed.]

The report is available in PDF form at:
http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/info/EVEREST/00-SecretarysEVERESTExecutiveReport.pdf

Source:
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9053326&source=rss_news10
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Paul Raises Over $6 Million in 24 Hour Effort


December 16, 2007
The New York Times


Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul's supporters raised over $6 million Sunday to boost the 10-term Texas congressman's campaign for the White House.

Called a ''Money Bomb,'' the goal was to raise as much money as possible on the Internet in one day. The campaign's previous fundraiser brought in $4.2 million.

At midnight EST, donations were over $6 million, according to the campaign Web site. Those donations are processed credit card receipts, said Paul campaign spokesman Jesse Benton.

Benton said the median donation is about $50 in the fundraiser, which was the idea of Paul supporters who are not officially connected to the campaign.

Trevor Lyman, a Paul supporter who is traveling the country following the Ron Paul blimp, said the date of the fundraiser coincides with the 234th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party.

The Ron Paul blimp is an aerial billboard emblazoned on one side with ''Who is Ron Paul? Google Ron Paul.'' The other side reads ''Ron Paul Revolution.'' The blimp, another grass-roots effort, was in Chester, S.C., on Sunday, and organizers hope to get it to New Hampshire before the Jan. 8 primary there.

Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Paul-Fundraising.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
________________


Ron Paul Fundraising Statistics

December 16 Fundraising
http://paulcash.slact.net/December-16th/

Campaign Fundraising
http://paulcash.slact.net/

________________

Justice's Voting Chief Steps Down Amid Controversy


By Greg Gordon
McClatchy Newspapers
December 14, 2007


The Justice Department's voting rights chief stepped down Friday amid allegations that he'd used the position to aid a Republican strategy to suppress African-American votes.

John Tanner became the latest of about a dozen senior department officials, including former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who've resigned in recent months in a scandal over the politicization of the Justice Department in the Bush administration.

In recent months, McClatchy has reported on a pattern of decision-making within the department's Civil Rights Division, of which the Voting Rights Section is a part, that tended to narrow the voting rights of Democratic-leaning minorities.

Tanner has been enmeshed for months in congressional investigations over his stewardship of the unit that was established to protect minority-voting rights. He drew increased focus this fall after he told a Latino group: "African-Americans don't become elderly the way white people do. They die."

In addition, the Justice Department opened an internal investigation into allegations that Tanner unfairly had deprived two veteran African-American staffers of bonuses and that he and a deputy had misused tax dollars on official trips.

Department spokesman Peter Carr said in a statement that Tanner, of his own accord, "made the decision to pursue (an) opportunity" to work in the Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices. But his transfer to a lower-profile job appeared to continue a quiet housecleaning that began after retired judge Michael Mukasey took over as attorney general early last month with a vow to rid the agency of partisanship.

Chris Coates, a veteran lawyer in the Voting Rights Section, was named the acting chief.

The change drew a hopeful reaction from congressional Democrats.

Michigan Rep. John Conyers, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, assailed the department for "a remarkably poor record of protecting voting rights" and expressed hope that Tanner's successor "will mark a departure from efforts to limit the participation of elderly and minority voters."

In an e-mail note to staffers announcing his departure, Tanner said that "to better assist in a smooth transition, I am stepping down from my position as section chief immediately while I pack and sort through three decades of work."

While Tanner hailed his accomplishments, asserting that the section had "tripled the number of new lawsuits" compared with the period before he took office, critics have charged that the department has filed few suits on behalf of African-American voting rights.

Shortly after he became section chief in 2005, Tanner reversed the recommendation of the career staff that the department object to a Georgia law requiring voters in that state to produce photo identification cards. The staff had argued that the law would disenfranchise minority voters.

A federal judge later blocked implementation of the law, likening it to a Jim Crow-era poll tax because poor minority voters, who are most likely to lack driver's licenses, would be required to buy photo IDs.

This October, after making his comments about the shorter life span of blacks while defending the Georgia law, Tanner apologized for his "clumsiness" before a House Judiciary subcommittee.

Tanner also drew harsh criticism for directing a crackdown to force states to purge hundreds of thousands of names from voter registration rolls, an initiative that critics charge was aimed at disenfranchising minority voters, who move frequently.

He's facing an investigation by the department's Office of Professional Responsibility into multiple allegations that he mistreated staff and abused his travel privileges. At least two of the inquiries stem from formal complaints from members of his staff.

In late November, the Web site TPM Muckraker reported that Tanner had made taxpayer-funded trips to Hawaii for three straight years, twice staying a full week although his work was completed within a couple of business days. The Web site said he'd made 36 trips covering 97 days since taking the helm in May 2005.

Source:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/23160.html
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Gore at UN Climate Change Conference in Bali

The US Is "Principally Responsible" for Blocking Climate Talks Progress


by Adam Howard
AlterNet
December 13, 2007




At the 190-nation talks on global warming in Bali yesterday, former vice president Al Gore drew “rapturous applause and cheers” when he criticized the Bush administration for opposing mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions: “My own country the United States is principally responsible for obstructing progress in Bali.”

Watch a portion of Gore’s speech to your right. Gore drew an even louder ovation when he “reminded delegates that President George W. Bush has only one year and 40 days left in the White House.”

Transcript:

GORE: "Just this week, new evidence has been presented. I remember years ago, listening to the scientists who specialize in the study of ice and snow, express concern sometime toward the end of the 21st century, we might even face the possibility of losing the entire North polar ice cap. I remember only three years ago, when they revised their estimates to say it could happen halfway through the century, by 2050. I remember at the beginning of this year, when I was shocked, along with others, to hear them say it could happen in as little as 34 years. And now, this week, they tell us it could completely disappear in as little as 5-7 years.

One of the victims of the horrors of the Third Reich in Europe during World War II, wrote a famous passage about the beginnings of the killings and he said, “First they came for the Jews, and I was not a Jew, so I said nothing. Then they came for the gypsies, and I was not a gypsy, and I said nothing.” And he listed several other groups, and with each one, he said nothing. And then he said, “And then they came for me.”

For those who have believed this climate crisis was going to affect their grandchildren, and still said nothing, and who were shaken a bit to admit that it would affect their children, still did and said nothing. It is affecting us, in the present generation."


Sources:
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/#70567
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/12/13/gore-draws-rapturous-ovation-at-un-climate-meeting/
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Mitt Romney to Buy Clear Channel Communications


by Chris Brunner
December 13, 2007


What would it cost to buy the support of just about every nationally-syndicated neocon talk show host in America?

About $19.5 Billion, which is what Mitt Romney's private equity firm, Bain Capital, and Thomas H. Lee Partners have agreed to pay in a leveraged buyout agreement with Clear Channel Communications, the largest radio station owner in the country.

Clear Channel owns over 1,100 full-power AM, FM, and shortwave radio stations, twelve radio channels on XM Satellite Radio, and more than 30 television stations in the United States.

Premiere Radio Networks, which is the largest syndication company in the United States, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Clear Channel and is home to Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and many others. Sean Hannity recently signed a large multi-market contract with Clear Channel, as well.

From an anonymous email:
"I'll bet those hosts won't reveal that conflict of interest, but it's worth noting when you hear them begin hyping Romney, which has already begun. A lot of GOP supporters will support whomever they are told to support, so be prepared for a big push for Romney. On the bright side, Romney has more vulnerabilities than Rudy, based on his record. Look at this as the GOP establishment doing us a favor. Rich men can bankroll their own campaigns (a la John Kerry), but it takes a special breed to use investors' money to buy entire networks that can operate as passive wings of a presidential campaign."

Source:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/017694.html
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Tragedy of the Ridiculous White House

The Coup Against Bush and Cheney


By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Counterpunch.org
Dec. 8, 2007


The one thing a president cannot afford to be is ridiculous.

This week George Bush lurched into that fatal category and into the true twilight of his presidency, festooned with all the traditional discomfitures. Senior aides and close advisors parley with literary agents and find compelling reason to quit the White House and spend more time with their families. In public even the First Lady seems to edge away from her stricken mate.

The latest, fatal instrument of Bush’s public humiliation is the National Intelligence Estimate proclaiming in its unclassified version that Iran stopped trying to build a nuclear weapon in 2003, thus deliberately, with humiliating clarity contradicting Bush and Cheney’s unending invocation of the Iranian nuclear threat.

For months the blathersphere has quivered with predictions of a coup here in the US coinciding with an attack on Iran. The bit they got wrong was that their supposed perps turned out to be on the receiving end and the coup was aimed at preventing such an attack.

Now, in theory an NIE represents the objective consensus of 16 US intelligence agencies on matters of national security. In practice it is a useful guide to how a bunch of bureaucratic knife-fighters assess the balance of forces in Washington.

In 2002 Bush and Cheney were strong enough to ram their dire assessments of Iraq’s WMDs into the infamous October, 2002 NIE that began with the assertion that “We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs … if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.” The 2002 NIE gave this prediction a “high confidence” rating, while appending a dissent from the State Department’s Intelligence Bureau.

The cover story for the recently released NIE on Iran, with its u-turn on previous assessments, is that new information suddenly became available. In practice this means that in the late summer senior intelligence officials figured the consensus in Washington and Wall Street Iran against an attack on Iran was powerful enough for them to lower the boom on the neo-cons.

The latter have now retreated in disarray to their bunkers at the Weekly Standard and the National Review for a last stand, bellowing that it’s a filthy plot by peaceniks in the State Department.

Actually, it is, in part, exactly that. It strikes at the neo-cons and it strikes at Israel, which has staked much on firing the US to attack Iran.“It’s no secret,” snarled the National Review “that careerists at the CIA and State have been less interested in implementing the president’s policies on Iran, Iraq, and North Korea than in sabotaging them at every opportunity.”

The Wall Street Journal’s nutty editorial page went further, fingering ‘hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials’ including Tom Fingar, formerly of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research as drafters of the treacherous NIE.

Humiliated by the NIE which flatly contradicted all his recent claims about Iran’s rush for nuclear weapons, Bush flailed away in his Tuesday press conference, eliciting contempt as he claimed he’d only just become aware of the NIE. “If that’s true,” Senator Joe Biden declared, “ he has the most incompetent staff in modern American history and he’s one of the most incompetent presidents in modern American history.”

Only the former CIA spook, Bob Baer – model for George Clooney Jr’s CIA role in the film Syriana -- tried to give Bush a better role than mere dupe and fall guy, claiming that Bush himself had pushed for the NIE to go public. Motive?

To head off an attack on Iran, which would undercut any American successes in Iraq. One can imagine one of America’s more Macchiavelian presidents doing this, like FDR or LBJ, but Bush?

The only ray of comfort for the president was that Hillary Clinton chose the start of the week to make herself equally ridiculous, if not more so. As she slipped behind Barrack Obama in the polls in Iowa, her campaign issued a press release on December 3 designed to paint Obama as a man consumed by ruthless, lifelong ambition: “In kindergarten, Senator Obama wrote an essay titled 'I Want to Become President.’ "

Iis Darmawan, 63, Senator Obama's kindergarten teacher, remembers him as an exceptionally tall and curly haired child who quickly picked up the local language and had sharp math skills. He wrote an essay titled, 'I Want To Become President,' the teacher said." In kindergarten!

As the Clinton campaign might say, echoing St Ignatius of Loyola, “Give me the child until he is seven, and we’ll do a good smear job on him.”

Source:
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn12072007.html
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Our Troops Must Leave Iraq


by Walter Cronkite and David Krieger
CommonDreams.org
December 4, 2007
[Emphasis News2U]


The American people no longer support the war in Iraq. The war is being carried on by a stubborn president who, like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War, does not want to lose. But from the beginning this has been an ill-considered and poorly prosecuted war that, like the Vietnam War, has diminished respect for America. We believe Mr. Bush would like to drag the war on long enough to hand it off to another president.

The war in Iraq reminds us of the tragedy of the Vietnam War. Both wars began with false assertions by the president to the American people and the Congress. Like Vietnam, the Iraq War has introduced a new vocabulary: “shock and awe,” “mission accomplished,” “the surge.”

Like Vietnam, we have destroyed cities in order to save them. It is not a strategy for success.

The Bush administration has attempted to forestall ending the war by putting in more troops, but more troops will not solve the problem. We have lost the hearts and minds of most of the Iraqi people, and victory no longer seems to be even a remote possibility.

It is time to end our occupation of Iraq, and bring our troops home.

This war has had only limited body counts. There are reports that more than one million Iraqis have died in the war.

These reports cannot be corroborated because the US military does not make public the number of the Iraqi dead and injured. There are also reports that some four million Iraqis have been displaced and are refugees either abroad or within their own country.

Iraqis with the resources to leave the country have left. They are frightened. They don’t trust the US, its allies or its mercenaries to protect them and their interests.

We know more about the body counts of American soldiers in Iraq.

Some 4,000 American soldiers have been killed in this war, about a third more than the number of people who died in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. And some 28,000 American soldiers have suffered debilitating injuries. Many more have been affected by the trauma of war in ways that they will have to live with for the rest of their lives - ways that will have serious effects not only on their lives and the lives of their loved ones, but on society as a whole. Due to woefully inadequate resources being provided, our injured soldiers are not receiving the medical treatment and mental health care that they deserve.

The invasion of Iraq was illegal from the start.

Not only was Congress lied to in order to secure its support for the invasion of Iraq, but the war lacked the support of the United Nations Security Council and thus was an aggressive war initiated on the false pretenses of weapons of mass destruction. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Nor has any assertion of a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda proven to be true. In the end, democracy has not come to Iraq. Its government is still being forced to bend to the will of the US administration.

What the war has accomplished is the undermining of US credibility throughout the world, the weakening of our military forces, and the erosion of our Bill of Rights.

Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz calculates that the war is costing American tax payers more than $1 trillion. This amount could double if we continue the war. Each minute we are spending $500,000 in Iraq.

Our losses are incalculable. It is time to remove our military forces from Iraq.

We must ask ourselves whether continuing to pursue this war is benefiting the American people or weakening us. We must ask whether continuing the war is benefiting the Iraqi people or inflicting greater suffering upon them. We believe the answer to these inquiries is that both the American and Iraqi people would benefit by ending the US military presence in Iraq.

Moving forward is not complicated, but it will require courage.

Step one is to proceed with the rapid withdrawal of US troops from Iraq and hand over the responsibility for the security of Iraq to Iraqi forces. Step two is to remove our military bases from Iraq and to turn Iraqi oil over to Iraqis. Step three is to provide resources to the Iraqis to rebuild the infrastructure that has been destroyed in the war.

Congress must act.

Although Congress never declared war, as required by the Constitution, they did give the president the authority to invade Iraq.

Congress must now withdraw that authority and cease its funding of the war.

It is not likely, however, that Congress will act unless the American people make their voices heard with unmistakable clarity. That is the way the Vietnam War was brought to an end.

It is the way that the Iraq War will also be brought to an end. The only question is whether it will be now, or whether the war will drag on, with all the suffering that implies, to an even more tragic, costly and degrading defeat. We will be a better, stronger and more decent country to bring the troops home now.

Walter Cronkite is the former long-time anchor for CBS Evening News. David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

Source:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/12/04/5598/
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What We Choose to Ignore





When in the course of human events...




House of Cards



"For those who thought a Democratic congress would end the war in Iraq, think again: their new budget proposes supplemental funds totaling about $150 billion in 2008 and $50 billion in 2009 for Iraq. This is in addition to the ordinary Department of Defense budget of more than $500 billion, which the Democrats propose increasing each year just like the Republicans."
- Congressman Ron Paul M.D.
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