Romney

[Greg Burnham]

I worked with a Mormon in the '70s. He told me Battlestar Gallactica was pure Mormon doctrine, the story of survivors from a planet on an extended journey to find a new planet.

I was born and raised Catholic. I attended a seminary for 5 years. Now: I'm agnostic, an American (by birth), a human by Universal design, and a seeker of truth by choice.

JFK was a Catholic. He was feared during the 1960 campaign due to his religion, but that fear was ill founded.

Still, it was extremely difficult to convince Americans in the 1950's / early 1960's that JFK was:

1) an intelligent, "not beholden to Rome" candidate
2) a defender of the absolute separation of church and state
3) not even a very good Catholic (as per Jackie's judgment)

I don't know what kind of president Romney will make. We'll just have to see. But, I do know one thing: My decision will have nothing to do with his religion.

"It is difficult to abolish prejudice in those bereft of ideas. The more hatred is superficial...the more it runs deep." -- (James Hepburn, Farewell America, 1968)

Greg, I was a Lutheran divinity student '68-'72 after my B.A in Philosophy. Then I spent 5 years trying to fit myself onto the Procrustean bed of ministry. Long gone after several decades and lifetimes.

Regarding Mormons: if you listened to Webster Tarpley's interview, he regards Mormonism as more of a political movement than a religion, at least in the upper echelons.

The "upper echelons" of all religions are political movements...without exception.

[Peter Lemkin]

Broken US System Needs Watching: International Election Observers Could Face Arrest

By Dave Lindorff

Voter suppression was over long ago. Now it's more sophisticated by ThisCantBeHappening


Tuesday's national election in the US is shaping up to be a bruising affair, with both parties hiring armies of lawyers to fight over likely contentious battles over voter access to polling stations, dealing with long lines that could prevent people from voting after polls officially close, the counting of votes cast, and now, the right of international inspectors from the respected Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to monitor the process.

The OSCE, a 56-member international organization (including the U.S.) which routinely sends observers to monitor and oversee elections in countries around the world, has been monitoring US elections since the highly controversial presidential election of 2000, which ended up having the presidential race decided by a split 5-4 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. (The OECD was invited to start monitoring US elections in 2004 by none other than President George W. Bush, who was handed the presidency in 2000 by the Supreme Court.) Until this year, its monitors have had no problems doing their job, but this year hard-right officials in at least two states -- Texas and Iowa -- have threatened to have the international observers arrested and criminally charged if they attempt to monitor any polling places in those two states. Other states may join them.

"The OSCE's representatives are not authorized by state law to enter a polling place," said Texas Attorney General Greg Abott, an activist in the right-wing Tea Party movement who is in his first term as the state's top law enforcement officer. "It may be a criminal offense for OSCE representatives to maintain a presence within 100 feet of a polling place's entrance. Failure to comply with these requirements could subject the OSCE's representatives to criminal prosecution."

Abbot's threat to arrest OSCE poll watchers was echoed a few days later by Iowa's secretary of state, Matt Schultz, who warned that any international monitors who came within 300 feet of voting stations in his state would be "criminally prosecuted."

Meanwhile, in Florida, Congressman Connie Mack, the Republican candidate for US senate in that state, playing to widespread antipathy among right-wingers towards the United Nations, which the more fevered among them believe is trying to take over the US, angrily denounced the monitors saying, "The very idea that the United Nations -- the world body dedicated to diminishing America's role in the world -- would be allowed, if not encouraged, to install foreigners sympathetic to the likes of Castro, Chávez, Ahmadinejad, and Putin to oversee our elections is nothing short of disgusting." (Mack needs to do his homework: The OSCE is a European-based organization, not a UN organization, and in any case, Cuba, Venezuela and Iran are not members. Only Russia is, and it allows monitors -- including US monitors -- at its elections.)

Ambassador Janez Lenarčič, director of the OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, has fired back an angry letter to the US Department of State and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denouncing the threats. She wrote, "The threat of criminal sanctions against international observers is unacceptable. The United States, like all countries in the OSCE, has an obligation to invite observers to observe its elections." She added, "Our observers are requested to remain strictly impartial and not to intervene in the voting process in any way. They are in the US to observe the elections, not to interfere in them."

The US State Department has issued a statement saying that "in general we give monitors protected status, as we expect of our people when we participate in OSCE delegations." It is not clear, however, how state and federal courts would rule in a dispute between state and federal authorities over a state's arrest of monitors who are charged with violating state election laws. Under the US Constitution, voting is the responsibility of the states, not the federal government, although the US Supreme Court has said the federal government has a responsibility to ensure that states do not deny people the right to vote.

The OSCE was asked to come and observe this election by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and other organizations this year especially to monitor a range of voter suppression efforts being implemented in dozens of US states where the state legislatures and governor's officers are in the hands of the Republican Party. An organization of Republican state officials, known as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), has over the last two years sent out a number of boiler-plate laws related to voting and elections designed to suppress the votes of those groups -- particularly minorities, students and the elderly who tend to vote for the Democratic Party's candidates -- and many of the states currently being run by Republican Party officials did adopt some of them, although no study has found evidence of voter fraud involving the use of false identities in any state.

One particularly controversial law proposed by ALEC, and passed into law by such states as Texas, Pennsylvania , Georgia, South Carolina, Wisconsin, Kansas and Florida, requires that anyone going to their neighborhood polling station to cast a vote has to provide a state-issued photo ID -- either a drivers license or a state ID. Experts estimated that these laws, if applied on November 6, could reduce the number of Democratic voters allowed to cast votes by several million.

In Pennsylvania alone, where one very strict version of the law was passed last summer, it was estimated that 800,000 of the state's 8 million voters, mostly blacks and elderly citizens who do not drive cars, could be blocked from voting. In that state, opponents went to court and got the law blocked, at least for the current election, but the Republican-run state government is still running advertisements warning voters -- incorrectly -- that if they don't have a state photo ID they will not be allowed to vote on Nov. 6.

It is this kind of chicanery (as well as others, such as conducting computerized "purges" of voter lists that attempt to remove convicted felons, who are barred from voting in some states, but that then remove all people with common last names like Jones, Thompson or Freeman, or running fake "voter registration" efforts in which the collected registration forms are then tossed in the trash instead of being filed with election authorities) that the international observers are being asked to monitor and expose.

There will, of course, also be lawyers and activists from the Democratic Party on hand at most polling stations to try to make sure that those who show up to vote who are registered but do not have photo IDs, do get to cast their ballots.

It is ironic that the US, which has been dispatching its military to invade far-flung countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, claims to be "bringing democracy" to their people, while at home one of its two main political parties is openly trying to prevent millions of Americans from exercising the basic right to vote. Ironic too that the US government, through the so-called National Endowment for Democracy, sends funds to other countries allegedly to help encourage democracy (a dubious claim, to be sure, as it generally funds opposition groups that have been linked to coup attempts as in Venezuela).

Most ironic of all, of course, the US itself regularly sends election monitors under OSCE auspices to countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela and other states to monitor the fairness of their elections, but when it comes to monitoring elections at home, it threatens other countries' monitors with arrest and jail for trying to do the same thing.

Even the conservative magazine the National Review acknowledges that foreign monitors are justified. As the magazine's national columnist John Fund notes, " Representative Mack claims that election monitoring "should be reserved for third-world countries, banana republics, and fledging democracies.' Well, no. The 2000 Bush v. Gore Supreme Court case exposed to the rest of the world the fact that Florida and some other U.S. states have sloppy election systems that are far less advanced than, say, countries such as Mexico."

The truth is that the whole election process in the US is badly broken. Not only has the country moved backwards over the past 12 years in terms of making it easier for people to vote. It has also put the whole process in jeopardy by pushing for electronic voting, substituting computers, which leave no paper trail to audit them for accuracy or for recounts, for mechanical voting machines or paper ballots.

The computer voting machines are produced, maintained, run and even tallied up by the private companies that make them, not by elected or civil servant officials of municipal or county or state elections departments as in years past. Some of the companies that make the machines and do this counting are directly linked to Republican candidates. For example, Hart InterCivic, one company that has supplied computer voting machines to the state of Ohio -- seen as the crucial "swing" state in the current presidential election -- is run by executives who have made $195,000 in financial contributions to the campaign of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. That this kind of thing can be allowed to happen makes a joke out of the whole election process.

The OSCE says it has sent 57 monitors to the US to monitor voter suppression, campaign finance, and new voting technologies in the US election. It looks like they will have their hands full, even if they aren't locked up for their efforts.

DAVE LINDORFF is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper. His work, and that of colleagues JOHN GRANT, LORI SPENCER, LINN WASHINGTON, JR. and CHARLES M. YOUNG, can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net

[Magda Hassan]

Breaking: Romney Paid Zero Taxes From 1996 To 2009

Harry Reid was right. Bloomberg finally cracked the story...

Using a tax shelter called a CRUT (charitable remainder unitrust) that was held by the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons), Mitt Romney was able to pay zero taxes (legally) every single year from 1996 to 2009. Why did he stop in 2009? Because he would make public his 2010 tax return, that is why.This tax loophole was killed by Congress in 1997. However those including Romney that were already using it were allowed to continue it. The way it works, is that Romney makes a "charitable" contribution to the Church of Latter Day Saints and it goes into a trust. Since the trust is held by the church, the money is tax deferred. Any capital gains, are non taxed because of the charities status. Like an annuity, the donor gets a charitable tax deduction and an stream of cash payments. When Romney dies, the church accepts full ownership..

Bloomsberg's attorneys estimate as the Romneys have received these payments, the money that will potentially be left for charity has declined from at least $750,000 in 2001 to $421,203 at the end of 2011.....

Romney has refused to answer any thing on this topic. His campaign puts out that it was all legal....

Legal perhaps. Ethical for the president of the United States? Well, only if you want a crook running the country.... Imagine! Legally stealing from your church!.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/04...96-To-2009

[Greg Burnham]

Breaking: Romney Paid Zero Taxes From 1996 To 2009

Harry Reid was right. Bloomberg finally cracked the story...

Using a tax shelter called a CRUT (charitable remainder unitrust) that was held by the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons), Mitt Romney was able to pay zero taxes (legally) every single year from 1996 to 2009. Why did he stop in 2009? Because he would make public his 2010 tax return, that is why.This tax loophole was killed by Congress in 1997. However those including Romney that were already using it were allowed to continue it. The way it works, is that Romney makes a "charitable" contribution to the Church of Latter Day Saints and it goes into a trust. Since the trust is held by the church, the money is tax deferred. Any capital gains, are non taxed because of the charities status. Like an annuity, the donor gets a charitable tax deduction and an stream of cash payments. When Romney dies, the church accepts full ownership..

Bloomsberg's attorneys estimate as the Romneys have received these payments, the money that will potentially be left for charity has declined from at least $750,000 in 2001 to $421,203 at the end of 2011.....

Romney has refused to answer any thing on this topic. His campaign puts out that it was all legal....

Legal perhaps. Ethical for the president of the United States? Well, only if you want a crook running the country.... Imagine! Legally stealing from your church!.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/04...96-To-2009

Imagine! Legally stealing from your church!

With that church acting as a willing participant to boot! I find these issues more germane to the subject of Romney's suitability to be president than his "religious" affiliation.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Except the Church of the Latter Day Saints isn't really a religion.

It's a huckster scam, frequently used by intelligence agencies as a cut out and for operations requiring (im)plausible deniability.

As pseudo-religions go, it's probably closest to the Unification Church, aka the Moonies.

There's a DPF thread here.

[Peter Lemkin]

[Magda Hassan]

Personally I think there was a whole lot more than some app failure to Romney not winning but interesting anyway.

Inside Team Romney's whale of an IT meltdown

Orca, the Romney campaign's "killer" app, skips beta and pays the price.

by Sean Gallagher - Nov 10 2012, 8:55am AUSEDT

Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock
It was supposed to be a "killer app," but a system deployed to volunteers by Mitt Romney's presidential campaign may have done more harm to Romney's chances on Election Daylargely because of a failure to follow basic best practices for IT projects.
Called "Orca," the effort was supposed to give the Romney campaign its own analytics on what was happening at polling places and to help the campaign direct get-out-the-vote efforts in the key battleground states of Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Colorado.
Instead, volunteers couldn't get the system to work from the field in many statesin some cases because they had been given the wrong login information. The system crashed repeatedly. At one point, the network connection to the Romney campaign's headquarters went down because Internet provider Comcast reportedly thought the traffic was caused by a denial of service attack.
As one Orca user described it to Ars, the entire episode was a "huge clusterfuck." Here's how it happened.
Develop in haste, repent at leisure

The Romney campaign put a lot of stock in Orca, giving PBS NewsHour an advance look at the operation on November 5. But according to volunteers who saw and used the system, it was hardly a model of stability, having been developed in just seven months on a lightning schedule following the Republican primary elections. Orca had been conceived by two menRomney's Director of Voter Contact Dan Centinello and the campaign's Political Director Rich Beeson. It was named in honor of the killer whale as an allusion to the Obama campaign's own voter identification program, code-named Narwhal; orcas are the top predator of narwhals, Romney campaign staffers explained, and they were preparing to outshine the Democratic voter turnout effort.
As Romney's Communications Director Gail Gitcho put it in the PBS piece, "The Obama campaign likes to brag about their ground operation, but it's nothing compared to this."
Romney campaign Communications Director Gail Gitcho brags about the power of Orca on PBS NewsHour.
To build Orca, the Romney campaign turned to Microsoft and an unnamed application consulting firm. The goal was to put a mobile application in the hands of 37,000 volunteers in swing states, who would station themselves at the polls and track the arrival of known Romney supporters. The information would be monitored by more than 800 volunteers back at Romney's Boston Garden campaign headquarters via a Web-based management console, and it would be used to push out more calls throughout the day to pro-Romney voters who hadn't yet shown up at the polls. A backup voice response system would allow local poll volunteers to call in information from the field if they couldn't access the Web.
But Orca turned out to be toothless, thanks to a series of deployment blunders and network and system failures. While the system was stress-tested using automated testing tools, users received little or no advance training on the system. Crucially, there was no dry run to test how Orca would perform over the public Internet.
Part of the issue was Orca's architecture. While 11 backend database servers had been provisioned for the systemprobably running on virtual machinesthe "mobile" piece of Orca was a Web application supported by a single Web server and a single application server. Rather than a set of servers in the cloud, "I believe all the servers were in Boston at the Garden or a data center nearby," wrote Hans Dittuobo, a Romney volunteer at Boston Garden, to Ars by e-mail.
Throughout the day, the Orca Web page was repeatedly inaccessible. It remains unclear whether the issue was server load or a lack of available bandwidth, but the result was the same: Orca had not been tested under real-world conditions and repeatedly failed when it was needed the most.
All tell, no show

Before Election Day, volunteer training at Boston headquarters amounted to a series of 90-minute conference calls with Centinello. Users had no hands-on with the Orca application itself, which wasn't turned on until 6:00 AM on Election Day.
"We asked if our laptops needed to be WiFi capable," Dittuobo told Ars. "Dan Centinello went into how the Garden had just finished expansion of its wireless network and that yes, WiFi was required. I was concerned about hacking, jamming the signal, etc...Then we were told that we would not be using WiFi but using Ethernet connections."
Field volunteers also got briefed via conference calls, and they too had no hands-on with the application in advance of Election Day. There was a great deal of confusion among some volunteers in the days leading up to the election as they searched Android and Apple app stores for the Orca application, not knowing it was a Web app.
John Ekdahl, Jr., a Web developer and Romney volunteer, recounted on the Ace of Spades HQ blog that these preparatory calls were "more of the slick marketing speech type than helpful training sessions. I had some serious questionsthings like 'Has this been stress tested?', 'Is there redundancy in place?', and 'What steps have been taken to combat a coordinated DDOS attack or the like?', among others. These types of questions were brushed aside (truth be told, they never took one of my questions). They assured us that the system had been relentlessly tested and would be a tremendous success."
In a final training call on November 3, field volunteers were told to expect "packets" shortly containing the information they needed to use Orca. Those packets, which showed up in some volunteers' e-mail inboxes as late as November 5, turned out to be PDF fileshuge PDF files which contained instructions on how to use the app and voter rolls for the voting precincts each volunteer would be working. After discovering the PDFs in his e-mail inbox at 10:00 PM on Election Eve, Ekdahl said that "I sat down and cursed, as I would have to print 60+ pages of instructions and voter rolls on my home printer. They expected 75 to 80-year old veteran volunteers to print out 60+ pages on their home computers? The night before election day?"
Invalid passwords, crashing servers

When the Romney campaign finally brought up Orca, the "killer whale" was not ready to perform. Some field volunteers couldn't even report to their posts, because the campaign hadn't told them they first needed to pick up poll watcher credentials from one of Romney's local "victory centers." Others couldn't connect to the Orca site because they entered the URL for the site without the https:// prefix; instead of being redirected to the secure site, they were confronted with a blank page, Ekdahl said.
And for many of those who managed to get to their polling places and who called up the website on their phones, there was another, insurmountable hurdletheir passwords didn't work and attempts to reset passwords through the site also failed. As for the voice-powered backup system, it failed too as many poll watchers received the wrong personal identification numbers needed to access the system.Joel Pollak of Briebart reported that hundreds of volunteers in Colorado and North Carolina couldn't use either the Web-based or the voice-based Orca systems; it wasn't until 6:00 PM on Election Day that the team running Orca admitted they had issued the wrong PIN codes and passwords to everyone in those states, and they reset them. Even then, some volunteers still couldn't login.
In Boston, things weren't much better. Some of the VoIP phones set up for volunteers were misconfigured. And as volunteers tried to help people in the field get into the system, they ran into similar problems themselves. "I tried to login to the field website," Dittuobo told me, "but none of the user names and passwords worked, though the person next to me could get in. We had zero access to Iowa, Colorado, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Seems like the only state that was working was Florida."
As the Web traffic from volunteers attempting to connect to Orca mounted, the system crashed repeatedly because of bandwidth constraints. At one point the network connection to the campaign's data center went downapparently because the ISP shut it off. "They told us Comcast thought it was a denial of service attack and shut it down," Dittuobu recounted. "(Centinello) was giddy about it," he addedpresumably because he thought that so much traffic was sign of heavy system use.
Flying blind

As the day wore on and information still failed to flow in from the field, the Romney campaign was flying blind. Instead of using Orca's vaunted analytics to steer their course, Centinello and the rest of Romney's team had no solid data on how to target late voters, other than what they heard from the media. Meanwhile, volunteers like Ekdahl could do nothing but vote themselves and go home.
This sort of failure is why there's a trend in application testing (particularly in the development of public-facing applications) away from focusing on testing application infrastructure performance and toward focusing on user experience. Automated testing rigs can tell if software components are up to the task of handling expected loads, but they can't show what the system's performance will look like to the end user. And whatever testing environment Romney's campaign team and IT consultants used, it wasn't one that mimicked the conditions of Election Day. As a result, Orca's launch on Election Day was essentially a beta test of the softwarenot something most IT organizations would do in such a high-stakes environment.
IT projects are easy scapegoats for organizational failures. There's no way to know if Romney could have made up the margins in Ohio if Orca had worked. But the catastrophic failure of the system, purchased at large expense, squandered the campaign's most valuable resourcepeopleand was symptomatic of a much bigger leadership problem.
"The end result," Ekdahl wrote, "was that 30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help. The bitter irony of this entire endeavor was that a supposedly small government candidate gutted the local structure of [get out the vote] efforts in favor of a centralized, faceless organization in a far off place (in this case, their Boston headquarters). Wrap your head around that."
Republican campaigners will undoubtedly try to wrap their heads around it for some time to come.
http://arstechnica.com/information-techn...-meltdown/

[Peter Lemkin]

Inside Team Romney's whale of an IT meltdown

Orca, the Romney campaign's "killer" app, skips beta and pays the price.

Sounds like a post-facto excuse. It is also painted as only a benign get out the vote tool....not its likely voter challenge and suppression tool.

[Magda Hassan]

Inside Team Romney's whale of an IT meltdown

Orca, the Romney campaign's "killer" app, skips beta and pays the price.

Sounds like a post-facto excuse. It is also painted as only a benign get out the vote tool....not its likely voter challenge and suppression tool.

You got it there Greg. I'm sure they had great plans for it.

[Magda Hassan]

Just Too Weird

Category:

• Biography
  
• History
  
• Religion
  

Subtitle:
Bishop Romney and the Mormon Takeover of America: Polygamy, Theocracy and Subversion


Author bio:
Webster Griffin Tarpley





Ships promptly from Midwest warehouse. [URL="https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/244377"]E-book available here.
[/URL]
Researcher warns against the horrors of Mormonism.
Tarpley reveals that Mormonism, Mitt Romney's tradition, is not actually a religion but a synthetic ideology sponsored by British intelligence, as part of their campaign of covert warfare against the United States.
The first Civil War took place in 1857 when the Mormons in Utah attempted to secede. Utah was selected as a strategic location which would break the United States in two between east and west.
The Romney family later moved to Mexico to avoid the ban on polygamy in the US.
To their credit most Americans believe in religious tolerance and separation of church and state. They find it unseemly to attack a candidate based on his religion. However, Mormonism is not actually a religion but a subversive political party that has donned the disguise of a religion for protection.
Even if it is a religion, a Mormon should not be holding high political and ecclesiastical offices at the same time.
Mitt Romney's loyalties are first and foremost to the Mormon cult, which is also fundamentally Zionist. Romney and Netanyahu are old friends.
More: If Romney Wins, Get Set for a Big Upsurge of Polygamy in the United States Webster G. Tarpley on Truth Jihad Radio with Kevin Barrett, October 12, 2012
Joseph Smith's White Horse Prophecy for World Conquest Makes Romney a More Dangerous Warmonger Than George W. Bush Webster G. Tarpley on INN World Report Radio with Tom Kiely, Oct. 11

Pages:
278


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$14.95


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