‘Unusual Weapons’ Used in Fallujah
By Dahr Jamail for Common Dreams.
The U.S. military has used poison gas and other non-conventional weapons against civilians in Fallujah, eyewitnesses report..
This is from the November 17, 2004 program.
Sorry the next bunch of clips may be a bit out of order.
Daily Show opening bit November 17, 2004
(
Mirror of this clip)
Included in this clip:
Jon makes the insightful observation that, although the families of America were supposedly shocked and offended by the Desperate Wives/NFL cross promotional advertisement where the actresses shows off here naked….back! A bit later in that same broadcast, the same families were apparently unbothered by two women wrestling each other over a bud light. (And presumably scantilly-clad in some fashion – as is the tradition with beer ads – note: hearsay alert! I have not seen this ad)
He then goes on to discuss the first official partisan act of new CIA chief Porter Goss: to tell his ranks to shut up and support everything the Shrub Administration does (and, generally, to not question authority).
Jon ends the segment by reminding us all that Robert Novack still hasn’t been penalized or prosecuted in any way for endangering the life of a CIA agent by leaking her identity in one of his articles.
Hel-lo? Is there anybody out there? Now our government is sending National Guard troops to old WWII Prisoner of War camps and treating them like prisoners themselves before shipping them off to Iraq to become inevitable casualties of War.
They are treated horribly, given poor combat training, and then sent off to perform extremely dangerous tasks for a government that doesn’t care if they live or die.
Many of them are going AWOL. Who can blame them? They are running off to see their families one last time before being sent to their deaths. (Theoretically, many are coming back after Thanksgiving. To these people I say: “Save yourself! Keep going! Don’t ever come back if you want to stay alive!”)
Will somebody please do something to stop this madness? I feel so helpless hearing about this stuff. So powerless to do anything to stop these nut cases in charge of our country.
Guardsmen Say They’re Facing Iraq Ill-Trained
Troops from California describe a prison-like, demoralized camp in New Mexico that’s short on gear and setting them up for high casualties.
By Scott Gold for the LA Times.
Members of a California Army National Guard battalion preparing for deployment to Iraq said this week that they were under strict lockdown and being treated like prisoners rather than soldiers by Army commanders at the remote desert camp where they are training.
More troubling, a number of the soldiers said, is that the training they have received is so poor and equipment shortages so prevalent that they fear their casualty rate will be needlessly high when they arrive in Iraq early next year. “We are going to pay for this in blood,” one soldier said…
“I feel like an inmate with a weapon,” said Cpl. Jajuane Smith, 31, a six-year Guard veteran from Fresno who works for an armored transport company when not on active duty.
Several soldiers have fled Do
My sister, Sierra, has a supporting role in a play down in L.A. over the next few weeks in
“A Mulholland Christmas Carol.”
She’s always great (and I’m not just saying that because she’s my little sister :-),
and she’s always in great stage productions! This one’s a musical comedy.
This is from the November 22, 2004 episode of Countdown w/
Keith Olbermann’s Report On The Latest Ohio Recount Developments
(In one 20 MB vid or two smaller vids)
This also goes with this blog entry of Keith Olbermann’s. This is actually a link to a bunch of posts on election developments.
This is from the November 10, 2004 program.
Note that there is a zip file of all 4 clips also available for download.
Daily Show Clips From November 10, 2004
Included in these clips:
Ashcroft’s resignation and hand written resignation letter
Ed Helms on Florida’s disenfranchisement ploy of a checkbox in which
voters had to affirm that “I have not be adjudicated mentally incapacitated
with respect to voting, or, if I have, my competency has been restored.
Science Scope – finding the 18,000 year-old remains of a man-like “hobbit”
Global Warming creating a lovely “Northern Sea Route” in Russia
(Makes global warming worth it all!)
Tom Wolfe interview about his new book: “I am Charlotte Simmons.”
Although they’re not linked or described properly yet, you should know that you can always just look in my directory by date for Daily Show clips.
There are some more in the November 2004
section, I uploaded over the weekend, for instance…
This post contains both an article and video.
Here’s where you can download the PDF and data for yourself.
Here’s a direct link to the PDF file. (Working Paper: The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections
by Michael Hout, Laura Mangels, Jennifer Carlson, and Rachel Best)
ATTENTION: This isn’t just some bumpkin like me at home with a calculator spouting off, this is the
University of California’s Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Team.
These guys give new meaning to the phrase “Do The Math.”
It took a little while to get the numbers together and crunch them and double and triple (and quadruple x 10 to the 6th power)-check everything, but now the numbers are in baby, and they just plain don’t add up.
In fact, it’s statistically impossible for them to be what the official count says they are.
UC Berkeley Research Team Sounds ‘Smoke Alarm’ for Florida E-Vote Count
Research Team Calls For Investigation
By UC Berkeley.
There’s also some video of the researchers explaining their findings:
http://undergroundclips.com/video/ucdata/11-18-04_VidConf_HQ.mov
(120 MB)
http://undergroundclips.com/video/ucdata/11-18-04_VidConf_LQ.mov
(26 MB)
(
My mirror up of these clips is here.)
Today the University of California’s Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Team released a statistical study – the sole method available to monitor the accuracy of e- voting – reporting irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election. The study shows an unexplained discrepancy between votes for President Bush in counties where electronic voting machines were used versus counties using traditional voting methods – what the team says can be deemed a “smoke alarm.” Discrepancies this large or larger rarely arise by chance – the probability is less than 0.1 percent. The research team formally disclosed results of the study at a press conference today at the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center, where they called on Florida voting officials to investigate.
The three counties where the voting anomalies were most prevalent were also the most heavily Democratic: Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade, respectively. Statistical patterns in counties that did not have e-touch voting machines predict a 28,000 vote decrease in President Bush’s support in Broward County; machines tallied an increase of 51,000 votes – a net gain of 81,000 for the incumbent. President Bush should have lost 8,900 votes in Palm Beach County, but instead gained 41,000 – a difference of 49,900. He should have gained only 18,400 votes in Miami-Dade County but saw a gain of 37,000 – a difference of 19,300 votes…
“No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained,” said Hout. “The study shows, that a county’s use of electronic voting resulted in a disproportionate increase in votes for President Bush. There is just a trivial probability of evidence like this appearing in a population where the true difference is zero – less than once in a thousand chances.”
The data used in this study came from public sources including CNN.com, the 2000 US Census, and the Verified Voting Foundation. For a copy of the working paper, raw data and other information used in the study can be found at: http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/.
‘Stinking Evidence’ of Possible Election Fraud Found in Florida
by Thom Hartmann for Commondreams.
This is an incredible sequence of events. The entire article is available below, but for those of you who have less time, I thought I’d summarize it for you:
Bev Harris shows up at Florida’s Volusia Country Elections Office on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 16, 2004 to see, under a public records request, each of the poll tapes for the 100+ optical scanners of that county. The elections workers were notified in advance of her request. When she shows up, they give her a set of printouts that were oddly dated November 15 and lacking the proper signatures.
Bev complains that the printouts provided were not the original poll tapes and had no signatures, and were therefore not what she requested. They tell her that the originals were actually kept in another location, the Elections Office Warehouse, and that, since it was the end of the day, she should meet them there the following morning to see them.
Bev shows up bright and early on November 17th — several hours before the scheduled meeting — to discover three of the Elections Officials in the Elections Warehouse standing over a table covered with what looks like the poll tapes. When they see her and the others there, she is thrown out and the door is slammed in her face.
Once thrown out on the porch, she noticed a garbage bag on the porch with what appears to be the original poll tapes in it (signed appropriately, etc.).
When the Elections Officials see them looking through the trash on the porch, they call the cops on them. They fought for the garbage, kept it, and took it back to compare the original tapes to the printouts given to them previously that were dated November 15th.
During the comparison, they had a camera crew from votergate.tv there. As they are doing their comparison, another election employee passes by with another bin of “garbage” that clearly looked like more polling tapes. Bev and her crew recover the garbage and, sure enough, it turned out to be more signed original polling tapes.
The officials had excuses for why they were throwing out what they claimed were “back up copies” (signed, back up copies?!) — and the Elections Supervisor for the Volusia County Elections Office, Deanie Lowe, was unavailable/unwilling to speak to reporters.
I don’t have to tell you how the comparison turned out: the “new” printouts provided to Harris from November 15th had hundreds of extra votes for The Shrub.
Ohio Presidential Results to be Challenged
By Steven Rosenfeld for the FreePress.org.
Ohio’s 2004 presidential vote will be challenged as soon as next week in the state Supreme Court, a coalition of public-interest lawyers announced Friday.
The lawyers have taken sworn testimony from hundreds of people in hearings in Columbus and Cincinnati, and will use excerpts as well as documents obtained from county election officials and Election Day exit polls to make a case that thousands of votes were incorrectly counted or not counted on Election Day.
“The objective is to get to the truth,” said Columbus Ohio lawyer Cliff Arnebeck, coordinator of the Ohio Honest Elections Campaign. “What’s critically important, whether it’s President Bush or Sen. Kerry, whoever’s been elected actually elected, is to know you won by an honest election. So it’s in the interest of both sides as American citizens to know the truth and have this answered.”
The challenge comes as the Green Party has plans to file for a recount of the state’s 2004 presidential vote. The Green Party and the Ohio Honest Elections Campaign both believe the unofficial results announced on Election Day were wrong. Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell has not yet certified the Nov. 2 vote. The state’s election law says an election challenge must show the wrong candidate was been declared the winner, or it can be dismissed without a hearing. The state Supreme Court’s chief justice hears the case…
The ‘Ohio Honest Election Campaign’ is a coalition of public-interest groups and citizens interested in free and fair elections. The three lawyers announcing the challenge are associated with a variety of established groups. Arnebeck is the counsel for Common Cause’s Ohio chapter and The Alliance for Democracy. Attorney Susan Truitt is with Citizens Alliance for Secure Elections-Ohio, www.caseohio.org. The boards of groups have not yet formally endorsed the election challenge but are expected to do so in coming days.
The Honest Election campaign is part of a populist groundswell to safeguard voting rights. The 2004 campaign saw the most new voters in a generation. Even though Kerry conceded on Nov. 3, many people were not satisfied with national media explanations of the Ohio vote. Scientifically designed nonpartisan exit polls taken during the day showed a different result from the result reported that night, when George W. Bush was declared the victor.
Moreover, on Election Day there were long lines and widespread accounts of people who did not get to vote in urban Democratic-leaning precincts across the state. These factors and other reports of voter frustration, computerized voting miscounts and still-changing provisional ballot counting rules left many doubts about the unofficial vote count and George W. Bush’s 130,000 vote margin.
Those concerns coalesced into a grassroots campaign for an answer. Within two weeks following Election Day, Arnebeck had talked to the Green and Libertarian Parties about filing for a recount – if the funds could be raised. The Greens and the Honest Election Campaign started fundraising the same day, and in less than a week, the Greens had raised $150,000 via their website to file for the recount. The Ohio Honest Election Campaign raised about $90,000 via the Alliance for Democracy site, after two Air America Radio hosts, Laura Flanders and Randi Rhodes, embraced the cause and talked up the campaign.
Meanwhile, FreePress.org’s Bob Fitrakis inspired Amy Kaplan and Jonathan Meier, two young members of the League of Pissed-Off Voters’ Ohio chapter (www.indyvoter.org) to organize public hearings to gather testimony under oath of the people who saw or experienced what they thought was voter suppression or intimidation. Such intentional acts would violate the federal Voting Rights Act. Two hearings were held in Columbus and hundreds of people showed up and testified. Then activists in Cincinnati and Cleveland organized hearings.
At these hearings, scores of people said too few voting machines were put in Democratic-leaning inner-city precincts, creating long lines and deterring many people from voting. In contrast, Republican-leaning suburbs had plenty of voting machines and did not have the long lines. There were also reports of miscounts by computer voting machines, as well as errors registering the wrong candidate for president. Minority voters also spoke of disproportionately getting provisional ballots, including long-time residents.
Early in the weeks those hearings were being held, the Green and Libertarian Parties announced they would seek a statewide recount. By week’s end, the Honest Election Campaign announced its intention to challenge presidential election result at the Ohio Supreme Court.
Others lawsuits may be announced next week, Arnebeck said, because there is limited time to hold a meaningful recount and to address election irregularities before the Electoral College meets in December.