Respond to Local Papers attacks of RFK JR (Fitrakis to Dispatch)

We need to respond to the concerted efforts of many in MSM to dismiss the RFK Jr story. Here is Bob Fitrakis's Response to the Columbus Dispatch (who he reminds us hasn't supported a Dem since 1916:

Reading Hallett and why the Big D always defends the R’s

Let’s begin with Hallett’s bizarre and disingenuous title to his July 11 op-ed in Columbus’ daily monopoly and Republican mouthpiece rag, the Dispatch. The last time the Dispatch endorsed a Democrat for President it was Wilson in 1916 and the pro-German Wolfe family liked his slogan: He kept us out of war. Hallett’s headline reads: “Democrats keep leveling charges at Blackwell they can’t back up.” The charges leveled against Blackwell prior to Election Day 2004 were primarily leveled by independent and nonpartisan grassroots voting rights activists, Greens and Libertarians. The Dems have generally been too cowardly to take on J. Kenneth, the good buddy of the Bush crime family.

Hallett says that “…Kerry told the Dispatch just a month ago that he did not lose the election because of fraud.” This is strawman argument 101. Bobby Kennedy, Jr. is on the record saying Kerry agrees with his analysis of the election in Ohio. Kennedy attributes the loss to both voter suppression and fraud. Hallett lost his integrity to fraud in this article, he’s arguing against Kennedy’s article in Rolling Stone by using a Kerry quote that is only part of the story.

Hallett then sends readers to everyone’s favorite hack political site salon.com to read Farhad Manjoo’s so-called rebuttal to the Rolling Stone article. In Hallett’s world of propaganda Manjoo “spent a year exhaustively studying the Ohio election rather than, a la Kennedy, dipping his toe in into it 19 months later.” I received a fax on February 20 from Kennedy requesting sources and documents from the 20,000 collected during the Moss v. Bush case and from official public records requests. Kennedy assigned a fulltime fact-checker from his staff and Rolling Stone assigned two, as well as a fulltime editor. Manjoo spent a day fabricating a response. In Hallett’s world, Manjoo does “exhaustive research” which usually relies on initially false reports that were never verified and news reports, and ignores the data readily available from the likes of Steve Freeman, Mark Crispin Miller, Christopher Hitchens, John Conyers and the Free Press – that was actually on the ground in Ohio and continues to analyze precinct-by-precinct the unexplainable statistical anomalies in the Republican-controlled counties.

Hallett sticks to the standard spin put forth by the Republican Party that “scores of Democratic election officials and hundreds of lawyers for Kerry in Ohio would have been bought off….” Hallett knows this isn’t true. All you really need is a few technicians from Triad and ES&S voting machine companies with access to the central tabulators. Butler County Board of Elections officials acknowledge that an ES&S technician showed up to tweak the counting machines linked to the central tabulators on election morning. In Hocking County, a Triad technician showed up unscheduled and removed the hard drive from a central tabulator just prior to the recount. The reality is, most election officials, Democrat or Republican, know little about the software and hardware used to count the votes.

<snip>
http://fraudbusterbob.com/blog/2006/06/12/reading-hallett-and-why-the-big-d-always-defends-the-r%e2%80%99s/

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More examples to come. Please post your rebuttals as well. RFK Jr was willing to stick his neck out on this important subject. We expected attacks from the right who failed to cover the story. Now that we have gotten the message out, there appears to be a concerted effort to dismiss it.

Democrats keep leveling charges at Blackwell they can’t back up
Sunday, June 11, 2006
JOE HALLETT




Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell is flypaper for controversy.

By sticking his nose into fights and poking his finger in eyes, he has become a well-known political maverick, a trait in this year of the anti-Republican incumbent that led him to the GOP gubernatorial nomination.

<snip>

Ohio has a bipartisan election system with an equal number of Democrats and Republicans at the county level, where elections are actually run, Niquette said. For the massive fraud outlined in stories such as Kennedy’s to have occurred without being exposed at the time, scores of Democratic election officials and hundreds of lawyers for Kerry in Ohio would have had to have been bought off, incompetent or both.

Kennedy rails about the woefully inadequate number of voting machines in Franklin County’s inner-city precincts, but with bipartisan approval, a Democrat decided where the machines would be placed. Kennedy accuses Blackwell of twisting the rules on provisional ballots to help Bush block Democratic votes but neglects to mention that 32 other states have the same rules for counting such ballots – and that Ohio’s rate for counting them was 77 percent, the third highest in the nation.

More at:



http://www.dispatch.com/editorials/editorials.php?story=dispatch/2006/06/11/20060611-E5-00.html

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Ok "Ohio has a bi partisan election system w equal number of Dems and Republicans". TRUE BUT WHAT THEY FAIL TO MENTION IS BLACKWELL IS THE TIE BREAKER WHEN THE VOTE IS SPLIT.

Ohio rate for counting provisional ballots was 77%, the third highest in the nation, BUT the story was quite different in Dem strongholds like Lucas County where 41% of the ballots were NOT counted:

Published on Sunday, January 9, 2005 by The Toledo Blade (Ohio)
Purging of Rolls, Confusion Anger Voters
41% of Nov. 2 provisional ballots axed in Lucas County
by Fritz Wenzel

*****

Altogether, 86,472 of the 158,642 provisional ballots cast, or 54.5%, came
from the 16 counties Kerry won. An additional 18,789 came from other
urban counties – Clark, Hamilton, and Wood – where Bush won narrowly, with
50.78%, 52.50%, and 53.03% respectively. Traditionally, Hamilton County’s
provisional ballots are disproportionately cast in the African-American
majority wards of Cincinnati and not in the affluent Republican-dominated
suburbs. Thus, 105,261 provisional ballots, nearly two-thirds (66.35%)
came from areas where the provisional ballots are likely to be pro-Kerry.

Now that most of the provisional ballots have been examined and counted,
the disparity is even more pronounced. Altogether, 26,673 of the
uncounted provisional ballots, more than three-fourths (76.00%), came from
these same 19 counties. Only 78,588 of 105,261 (74.66%) were counted,
compared to 44,960 of 53,381 (84.22%) in the other 69 counties of Ohio.
<snip>

http://web.northnet.org/minstrel/provisional.htm

Both the Dayton Daily News and the Dispatch were less than kind in their assessment of the RFK Jr. Rolling Stone article. Let’s get busy.

--John

Here’s the link for the Dayton piece,
http://www.daytondailynews.com/search/content/opinion/daily/0610rolling.html

You may have to do a free registration to access.

To the Dayton Daily News:

Your June 10th piece “"Robert Kennedy Jr. fails to carry Ohio for John Kerry” misses the point.

Ohio has failed to demonstrate the credibility of its election process to its citizens. When that happens we all lose, Democrats, Republicans and independents. True enough, Kennedy threw down the gauntlet of “stolen” election. I shouldn’t be too harsh on DDN for engaging in high school debate club tactics of nit-picking a 10,000 word article.

That said, the Sixth Circuit recently found our election process in violation of the Equal Protection Clause (Stewart v. Blackwell). OSU law professor Dan Tokaji finds our state practices “vote dilution” (South Carolina Law Review, Vol. 57, 2006). Former EAC chair DeForrest Soaries (a Republican) emphatically asserts our state’s 22+ percent rejection rate of provisional ballots does not represent the intent of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). If one were to nit-pick election performance close to home, a little place named Carlisle, a voting machine company based In Canton, Ohio, and an election botched so badly It had to be re-run comes to mind. The take-home point: No honest observer can look at Ohio elections with pride.

You are correct that the 1960 and 2004 debate will continue. Let us not debate. Let us get busy restoring public trust In our elections and democracy.

Regards,

John XXXXX

To the writer of the Dispatch editorial:

Dear Mr. Hallett,

I’m an occasional Cincinnati reader who found some of your recent metaphors intriguing. When I read “Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell is flypaper for controversy,” I had to chuckle recalling the other substance that attracts flies.

Your mention of the Secretary’s “sticking his nose into fights and poking his finger in eyes” reminded me the Secretary just had his own nose bloodied and eyes blackened, not by Democrats, but the Sixth Circuit which ruled against Blackwell (Stewart v. Blackwell), holding the state’s election system violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. This is hardly a rave review for Blackwell’s election administration.

You mention Ohio’s provisional ballot acceptance rate of 77 percent as an achievement. I call a 23 percent rejection rate an abysmal failure, especially when a number of rejections were for voting at the wrong table. Even OSU law professor Dan Tokaji writes of “The New Vote Denial” (South Carolina Law Review, Vol. 57, 2006). But the Dispatch readership will not be aware of these things. Your readership outside the Columbus city limits will likely consider your defense of Blackwell clever.

Blackwell should step aside based not on debate club arguments whether he did or did not “steal” the ‘04 election, but because he has demonstrated time and again that he is about voter denial rather than voters’ rights.

Regards

John XXXXX
--
John XXXXX MEd, LPCC

une 11, 2006

Letter to the Editor

Columbus Dispatch

I was stunned to read Joe Hallett’s editorial on Sunday headlined "Democrats keep leveling charges at Blackwell that they can’t back up". Voting reform advocates are disgusted with Democrats for failing to take on the battle for fair and transparent elections (and thus democracy itself). The fact is that fairness demands that Blackwell should not have been allowed to chair the Bush/Cheney reelection campaign while running the election, and he certainly should not be allowed to control his own election. Blackwell should recuse himself as suggested by the NY Times. What could be a greater conflict of interest?

Mr. Hallett then proceeds to mention Robert F Kennedy Jr’s Rolling Stone article entitled "Was the 2004 election stolen?", an article 4 months in the making. In the very next paragraph, he asks readers of Kennedy’s article to "go to Salon.com and read the rebuttal" that was created in one day, and is a lame effort at best to refute the detailed analysis presented by Rolling Stone.

Hallet then quotes fellow Dispatch reporter Mark Niquette who claims that stealing the 2004 election would have required "widespread complicity by the Democrats". This statement is flat out wrong. Ohio uses voting machines that are not only insecure, but are controlled by partisan corporations. Who can forget Diebold CEO’s promise "to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president". While Lou Dobbs rails against voting machine corporations being owned by Venezuelan companies, I would suggest that voting machine companies owned by unabashed Republican supporters is a larger threat to democracy.

It is clear to those of us who have studied the issue that voting machines can be controlled without the knowledge of the Democrat/Republican team at the Boards of Election. The Government Accountability Office report states that the machines are "eminently hackable". Avi Rubin, computer science professor states "With electronic machines, you can commit wholesale fraud with a single alteration of software". As Rolling Stone states in their editorial "Only a complete investigation…can determine the full extent of any bribery and vote rigging that has taken place". The public must be assured that the power to count the votes…will not be ceded to for profit corporations with a vested interest in superseding the will of the people".

Pete XXXXXXX

Citizens Alliance for Secure Elections

guilty of misrepresenting these issues.

:kick: