Debate

[Greg Burnham]

Romney: "Well, the President didn't do 'enough of the same' in the last four years to reduce the deficit. Had he done 'more of the same' maybe we'd be in better shape."

Obama: "Governor Romney did 'too much of the same' while he was in Massachusetts. Had he done 'the correct amount of the same' his argument might stand."

Romney: "If I'm elected president, I promise to 'not do too much of the same and not enough of the same old thing' and get the country working again."

Obama: "If you give me four more years I promise to not be too insane."

Yada yada yada...zzz

[Peter Lemkin]

But right now, to talk more about the debates themselves, we're joined now by two guests. George Farah is the founder and executive director of Open Debates. He's also author of No Debate: How the Republican and Democratic Parties Secretly Control the Presidential Debates. And we're joined by Glenn Greenwald on the West Coast, columnist and blogger for The Guardian newspaper, author of With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful.

We welcome you both back to Democracy Now! George, let's begin with you. Last night, the contract between the campaigns was released for this debate. Talk about it. How long is it? What did you learn? How significant is it?

GEORGE FARAH: This is a 21-page contract that was negotiated by the Republican and Democratic parties, by the Obama campaign and the Romney campaign, and it dictates the terms of the presidential debates that we're seeing this election season. This contract was not made public in 2008. It was made public in three prior election seasons only because we got copies from whistleblowers. So this is a fantastic primary document to see just how much the Republican and Democratic campaigns manipulate the process.

And there are some fascinating provisions that are harmful to our democratic process. First and foremost, the contract actually says that the candidates cannot participate in any other debate with any other candidate and the other sponsor. We had 27 Republican primary debates. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debated seven times in 1858, but we're only having three presidential debates, precisely because the candidates have contractually prohibited themselves from participating in any other forum.

And it gives the Commission on Presidential Debates a de facto monopoly over our most important election forums. Instead of allowing other organizations, like the League of Women Voters, to host exciting debates that might include some possible third-party voices, the commission is in total control of this process and allows the Republican and Democratic nominees to negotiate these very kinds of detailed contracts that eliminate spontaneity from some of the formats and exclude all viable third-party voices.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: George Farah, can you explain how was this contract revealed, if in the previous instances it was only through whistleblowers?

GEORGE FARAH: Time magazine's David Halperin [sic] actually managed to get a copy of the contract. We don't know how, but it was leaked. It wasn't by virtue of the commission operating with transparency.

AMY GOODMAN: Mark Halperin.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Mark Halperin, right?

GEORGE FARAH: I'm sorry, Mark Halperin, yes. The commission survives on a lack of transparency. In fact, the commission was denying this contract even existed. Mike McCurry, the former press secretary to President Bill Clinton, is one of the co-chairs of the Commission on Presidential Debates, and he repeatedly denied the very existence of this contract. When we confronted the executive director of the commission, Janet Brown, about the existence of a contract that's dictating the terms of the debates, she said there is no such contract, the commission is not a party to it. Once some of the features of the contract started to come out, the commission then said, well, the contract is only about podium heights and temperatures in the auditoriums and whether the candidates can wear risers in their shoes, but denied that there was any substance.

Now that we're actually seeing the contract, we're seeing that for tonight's town hall format there are extraordinary restrictions that are preventing there from being more unpredictable questions. We're seeing the exclusion, of course, of all third-party voices according to the candidate selection criteria. And we're seeing the prohibition on additional debates. We're facing an unemployment crisis. We're facing complex foreign policy issues. Why are we rationing debates, which are really the best antidote to money in our political process?

AMY GOODMAN: You've been on before talking about the Commission on Presidential Debates, what this is, but if you can once again just review how we came to this point in electoral politics, how the League of Women Voters had control of these debates wrested from them?

GEORGE FARAH: The League of Women Voters ran the presidential debate process from 1976 until 1984, and they were a very courageous and genuinely independent, nonpartisan sponsor. And whenever the candidates attempted to manipulate the presidential debates behind closed doors, either to exclude a viable independent candidate or to sanitize the formats, the League had the courage to challenge the Republican and Democratic nominees and, if necessary, go public.

In 1980, independent candidate John B. Anderson was polling about 12 percent of the polls. The League insisted that Anderson be allowed to participate, because the vast majority of the American people wanted to see him, but Jimmy Carter, President Jimmy Carter, refused to debate him. The League went forward anyway and held a presidential debate with an empty chair, showing that Jimmy Carter wasn't going to show up.

Four years later, when the Republican and Democratic nominees tried to get rid of difficult questions by vetoing 80 of the moderators that they had proposed to host the debates, the League said, "This is unacceptable." They held a press conference and attacked the campaigns for trying to get rid of difficult questions.

And lastly, in 1988, was the first attempt by the Republican and Democratic campaigns to negotiate a detailed contract. It was tame by comparison, a mere 12 pages. It talked about who could be in the audience and how the format would be structured, but the League found that kind of lack of transparency and that kind of candidate control to be fundamentally outrageous and antithetical to our democratic process. They released the contract and stated they refuse to be an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American people and refuse to implement it.

And today, what do we have? We have a private corporation that was created by the Republican and Democratic parties called the Commission on Presidential Debates. It seized control of the presidential debates precisely because the League was independent, precisely because this women's organization had the guts to stand up to the candidates that the major-party candidates had nominated. And instead of making public these contracts and resisting the major-party candidates' manipulations, the commission allows the candidates to negotiate these 21-page contracts that dictate all the fundamental terms of the debates.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: But who runs the commission, and who funds it?

GEORGE FARAH: The commission is co-chaired by two individuals: Frank Fahrenkopf and Mike McCurry. Frank Fahrenkopf is the former chair of the Republican Party and the nation's leading gambling lobbyist. He's the president of the American Gaming Association. And Mike McCurry is theyeah, Mike McCurry is the former press secretary to Bill Clinton.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, it's a good bet for both parties.

GEORGE FARAH: Exactly. And he's also thelobbying on behalf of the telecommunications industry. These are men who have demonstrated repeatedly a willingness to sacrifice our democratic process for what they perceive to be either financial interests or political interests. And the commission is largely financed by private corporations. The entity that's given the most amount of money to the Commission on Presidential Debates is Anheuser-Busch. Our presidential debates are brought to you by Bud Light. And they've given millions of dollars to the Commission on Presidential Debates, in which

NERMEEN SHAIKH: But what do these corporations stand to gain for funding the commission on the debates?

GEORGE FARAH: First, the just nice advertising, of course. They get toyou know, Philip Morris sponsored one of the presidential debates, paid $250,000 and got to hang its banner in the post-debate spin room that was seen throughout the country. But more importantly, they get access, and they get to show support for both major parties.

AMY GOODMAN: The major parties on their podiums have Bud Light on the podium?

GEORGE FARAH: Not yet. We're getting there. We're getting there, Amy. But they get to show support for both major parties. How often can corporations find a way to make a single donation that strengthens both the Republican and Democratic parties and get a tax deduction for that kind of donation? So it's a rare contribution. And it also gives them access. They get to go to the actual debate themselves and rub shoulders at private receptions with the campaigns and their staff.

AMY GOODMAN: The CEOs of these companies.

GEORGE FARAH: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Like the International Bottled Water Association.

GEORGE FARAH: Exactly. It's fascinating that liquids are the principal sponsorship of the presidential debates this year.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, after the contract was revealed yesterday, a member of the commission, a Newton Minow, and the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, defended the criteria at least for the exclusion of the vast majority of candidates. He said, "There are 410 candidates. Let me repeat," he said, "410 candidates for president registered with the Federal Election Commission. Do you really want to have 410 candidates in the debate?" Is that right that there are that many, and that's whatif inclusion were not restricted in the way that the commission has restricted it, would all of these candidates have to participate in the debate?

GEORGE FARAH: Absolutely not. And this is part of the commission's propaganda. They like to say every four years that hundreds of candidates run for president every four years, including Joe Crustacean the Crustacean Liberation Party that wants lobsters to colonize the moon. He runs every four years. But these candidates are not on enough state ballots to come close to having a mathematical chance of winning the White House. If you just say, "Let's include all the candidates in this election cycle that are actually on enough state ballots to have a chance to actually win the White House," we have four, maybe five, candidates in total, and that's including Obama and Romney. We had seven, eight candidates in the Republican primaries. So, even having the most liberal candidate selection criteria would only result in five candidates.

And if you ask the American peopleif we're going to use polling to actually determine who gets to participate in the debates, which is what the commission doesthe commission says a candidate must reach 15 percent in the polls to participate in the presidential debates, which, if you apply that criteria historically, excludes every third-party candidate for the last 100 years from any conceivable presidential debate. But if we're going to use polling criteria, why not simply ask the American people, "Who do you want included in the presidential debates?"

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking on MSNBC's Morning Joe on Monday, Mark Halperin said both the Obama and Romney campaigns had expressed concerns about the role of the moderator in tonight's town hall session.

MARK HALPERIN: Candy Crowley, who's moderating the town hall on Tuesday, has got a unique challenge, as compared to the other moderators. The commission and the campaigns want this to be driven by the questions that come from the people chosen by Gallup to ask questions, citizens who are likely voters. And both campaigns have been struck, as has the commission, by some of the interviews that Candy has done talking about her role and what she envisions her role to be. The campaigns and the commission envision a much more limited role than they've heard her describe. And things are a bit in flux. It's clear that the campaigns have asked the commission, as I report, to check with Candy, to say, you know, "Do you get the fact that we think this should be very a limited rolevery few follow-ups, basically just traffic cop after an audience question?" And it remains a little bit unclear at this point about if she envisions this role the way the commission and the campaigns do or whether she wants to play a more active role in following up after they've answered the question from the citizen.

AMY GOODMAN: That's Mark Halperin of Time, who released the contract between the Obama and Romney campaigns, George Farah, talking about the candidates' concerns about the role Candy Crowley will play.

GEORGE FARAH: The town hall debate we're going to see tonight is the most constrained and regulated town hall debate in presidential debate history. The first town hall debate was introduced in 1992, and no one knew what anyone was going to ask, none of the audience members were going to ask. The moderator could ask any follow-up questions. It was exciting, and it was real.

Well, President George H.W. Bush stumbled in response to an oddly worded question about the federal deficit, and the candidatesthe campaigns have panicked and have attempted to avoid that kind of situation from happening again. In 1996, they abolished follow-up questions from the audience.

In 2004, they began requiring that every single question asked by the audience be submitted in advance on an index card to the moderator, who can then throw out the ones he or she does not like. And that's why the audience has essentially been reduced, in some ways, to props, because the moderator is still ultimately asking the questions.

And this election cycle is the first time that the moderator herself is prohibited from asking follow-up questions, questions seeking clarification. She's essentially reduced to keeping time and being a lady with a microphone.

AMY GOODMAN: It's interesting you say that, because Carole Simpson was just on, from ABC, talking about the role of women in these debates. You had Martha Raddatz, who was the questioner of the vice-presidential candidates, not the presidential candidates, and then Candy Crowley holding the microphone. Now, of course, she can choose the questions this morning, as she's going to be reviewing them. And the person who's called on, I suppose, doesn't have to ask that question, who

GEORGE FARAH: We don't know, exactly. Who knows what kind of spontaneity is going to happen? But there is something ugly about having the League of Women Voters losing control of the presidential debates to the commission, co-chaired by two men who then reduce all female moderators to kind of sideshows and trivializing their role in the actual presidential debates.

[Peter Lemkin]

Some Dumbocracy we live in!....the Green Party Candidates for Pres. and V.P. were arrested, chained to chairs and their staffs threatened if they did not leave the area in Hempstead [where I was born and lived for my first 25 years], during the ONE PARTY [American Corporate/Oligarchy/Business Party] faux preplanted question 'debatertainment' took place.... Stalin once said, it is not who votes, but who counts the votes....that is true and even more true is that if someone [literally 40-50 smaller parties] are not allowed to debate or enter the race - even be acknowledged by the media - they don't exist and the ONE PARTY rule can continue its plan for a neo-fascist permanent war outside, police state inside policies.......

AMY GOODMAN: President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney sparred last night in their second of three debates. The debate took place on the campus of Hofstra University on Long Island. Third-party candidates were barred from participating.

In a moment, we'll be expanding last night's debate by including responses from three third-party candidates to the same questions put to the major-party candidates. But we want to begin with Green Party nominee Dr. Jill Stein. On Tuesday, she and her running mate, Cheri Honkala, were arrested as they attempted to enter the debate site. Democracy Now! was there at the time of their arrest.

DR. JILL STEIN: We are here at the barred gates of American debates to say that we need to open up this debate and make it a full, fair and inclusive debate.

CHERI HONKALA: It shouldn't just be whether or not you have billions of dollars that determine whether or not the American people can hear about your platform.

DR. JILL STEIN: Our Green campaign is on the ballot for 85 percent of voters. Eighty-five percent of voters deserve to know who their choices are in this election and what the real solutions are that can solve the desperate problems that we're facing. The Commission on Presidential Debates makes a mockery of democracy by conducting this fake and contrived debate.

HOFSTRA OFFICIAL: Do you have credentials?

CHERI HONKALA: Yes, we do have credentials.

HOFSTRA OFFICIAL: Can I see?

CHERI HONKALA: We've been on the ballot in 85 percent of the country.

DR. JILL STEIN: Eighty-five percent of voters.

HOFSTRA OFFICIAL: This is an event. This is something that Hofstra has sponsored. It's an event, an educational experience for our faculty, our students.

DR. JILL STEIN: Well, we think it's more than that.

POLICE OFFICER 1: You've got to move out [inaudible] run over by a car.

POLICE OFFICER 2: If you could just slide over here.

POLICE OFFICER 3: Just slide over is all we need you to do, just for a minute while she makes [inaudible]

POLICE OFFICER 1: [inaudible] a little bit. You're going to get run over.

POLICE OFFICER 2: You can stand here, just slide over.

POLICE OFFICER 1: Move in with the traffic cone.

POLICE OFFICER 3: While she makes her phone call [inaudible].

POLICE OFFICER 2: Just right over here.

POLICE OFFICER 3: Ma'am, please.

DR. JILL STEIN: Well, we're here to stand our ground. We're here to stand ground for the American people, who have been systematically locked out of these debates for decades by the Commission on Presidential Debates. We think that this commission is entirely illegitimate; that ifif democracy truly prevailed, there would be no such commission, that the debates would still be run by the League of Women Voters, that the debates would be open with the criteria that the League of Women Voters had always used, which was that if you have done the work to get on the ballot, if you are on the ballot and could actually win the Electoral College by being on the ballot in enough states, that you deserve to be in the election and you deserve to be heard; and that the American people actually deserve to hear choices which are not bought and paid for by multinational corporations and Wall Street.

POLICE OFFICER 4: Ladies and gentlemen, you are obstructing the vehicle of pedestrians and traffic. If you refuse to move, you are subject to arrest.

Remove them. Bring them back to arrest them, please.

POLICE OFFICER 5: Come on, ma'am.

POLICE OFFICER 6: Would you step up, please? Stand up, please?

POLICE OFFICER 5: We'll help you. Come on. Thank you, ma'am.

POLICE OFFICER 6: Thank you, ladies.

POLICE OFFICER 5: Watch the flag.

POLICE OFFICER 4: Thank you, ladies.

POLICE OFFICER 5: Thank you.

POLICE OFFICER 6: Come with us.

POLICE OFFICER 5: Just come with us.

POLICE OFFICER 6: Thank you. You guys have to stay here. All right, everybody, we're going to ask you to please move back.

DR. JILL STEIN: Well, I'd say this is what democracy looks like in the 21st century. I'm afraid it's going to take somesome politics and courage here to get our democracy back. So, more to come.

AMY GOODMAN: Green Party candidates Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala were held for about eight hours before being released. Dr. Stein joins us now in our studio as part of our "Expanding the Debate" special. But before we go to it, Jill Stein, what happened? You were arrested and held for eight hours? Where and how?

DR. JILL STEIN: We were held at a facility, especially created for detaining protesters at the debates. It appeared to be a warehouse which had been specially equipped. It was obviouslyyou know, they were prepared to handle a lot of people. They had 13 officers there and three plainclothesmen. For most of the time, it was just Cheri Honkala and myself, yet they felt the need to keep us in tight plastic restraints, tightly secured to metal chairs.

AMY GOODMAN: You were handcuffed to chairs?

DR. JILL STEIN: We were handcuffed to chairs for the entire duration of our time there.

AMY GOODMAN: How long were you handcuffed to the chair?

DR. JILL STEIN: It was about eight hours. And we were charged only with violations, not even with misdemeanors, and yet they felt compelled, despite having 13 officers there to keep these two women, mothers, handcuffed to chairs for the entire time.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you ask to be released?

DR. JILL STEIN: Yes, yes, and they said, no, we couldn't be released because then we might go wandering around. And we said, "Well, how about if we tell you that we will stay in our chairs?" And they said, "No, that's not OK."

AMY GOODMAN: Handcuffed to the chairs

DR. JILL STEIN: That's right.

AMY GOODMAN: for the eight hours.

DR. JILL STEIN: That was their procedure for handling people who were arrested at the debates.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you get to see the debate in the warehouse?

DR. JILL STEIN: Absolutely not.

AMY GOODMAN: And then they released you as soon as the debate was over?

DR. JILL STEIN: No, they held us for about another half-hour, hour, and then they released us, telling us that our car was waiting in the parking lot. It was actually a Secret Service car, apparently, that was waiting in the parking lot. We didn'twe weren't allowed to make a phone call. There was no phone that was working. They wouldn'twe didn't have ours. We had given our phones to our assistant, so it wasyou know, it took quite a bit of work to be able to borrow a cellphone from someone in a gas stationyou know, there we are in the freezing coldto even be able to find our staff.

AMY GOODMAN: They didn't give you an opportunity to make a call during this entire period of your detention?

DR. JILL STEIN: No, they did at one point. They allowed me to return a call to our lawyer. But at the time, we didn't know when we would be released, so there were no arrangements made for a pickup. And they actually told our staff that they would be arrested if they continued to wait on site, so they had to leave.

[Peter Lemkin]

MY GOODMAN: Our guests are George Farah of Open Debates and Glenn Greenwald, who just wrote a very interesting piece about howwho gets to ask the questions. He is author of the book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. But his piece in The Guardian is the one we want to talk about. Let's turn to a question onby moderator Martha Raddatz during the vice-presidential debate, when she asked the two candidates, Paul Ryan and Vice President Joe Biden, this question.

MARTHA RADDATZ: Let's talk about Medicare and entitlements. Both Medicare and Social Security are going broke and taking a larger share of the budget in the process. Will benefits for Americans under these programs have to change for the programs to survive?

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, can you comment on the question?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, the question is grounded on an assumption that is not just dubious but very vociferously debated among the nation's leading economists, which is the idea that Social Security and Medicare are going broke. In the case of Social Security, it's almost impossible to make that case that it actually is going broke. The Social Security actually makes money. To the extent that it is burdened with that, it's because other government programs, whether it be military spending or all kinds of corporate cronyism, create all kinds of debt that Social Security essentially ends up funding.

And with regard to Medicare, the same thing. Lots of economists have pointed out that Medicare, with a few minor alterations, will be economically sound for many decades. This notion that it's going broke is something that lots of right-wing millionaires have promulgated as a way of pressuring Americans into feeling like they have to give up their basic entitlements.

And so, to watch Martha Raddatz, posing as an objective journalist, embracing what is an extremely controversial premise in her question, and then watching both candidates accept that assumption rather than challenge them, sort of is the microcosm of how these debates work, which is, they pose as objective, neutral moderators designed to have this wide-ranging debate, when in reality it takes place within a very suffocating, small confine of ideas. And as George has been detailing, that's what it's designed to do.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I want to turn, Glenn, to another question that was raised during the debate, and this one on foreign policy. This is again moderator Martha Raddatz asking the candidates about Iran.

MARTHA RADDATZ: Let's move to Iran. I'd actually like to move to Iran, because there's really no bigger national security

REP. PAUL RYAN: Absolutely.

MARTHA RADDATZ: this country is facing. Both President Obama and Governor Romney have said they will prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, even if that means military action. Last week, former Defense Secretary Bob Gates said a strike on Iran's facilities would not work and, quote, "could prove catastrophic, haunting us for generations." Can the two of you be absolutely clear and specific to the American people, how effective would a military strike be?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Glenn Greenwald, your comments on the Iran question?

GLENN GREENWALD: Right. Well, there again you see the core assumption of her question, the idea that there is no greater national securityit's unclear if she said "issue" or "threat." I think she just left out the word, but what she was clearly asserting was that, in terms of the array of national security challenges America faces, Iran is the most important, at the top of the list. This idea is ludicrous; it's laughable. Iran has a minuscule military budget when compared to the United States. It is surrounded militarily, has been encircled by the United States for a decade. It has no capability to attack the United States and demonstrated no propensity to do so and would be, as Hillary Clinton once infamously said, obliterated, instantly destroyed, if it tried. So this idea that they pose any kind of national security threat to the United States is one of those myths that has been used to keep fear levels high and to justify continuous military spending and all sorts of abridgments at home to get the Americans to think we need to be in endless war. And here is the neutral moderator embracing that premise, though it's not even debatable, as what will shape the entire Iran discussion.

Moreover, the question that she asked, if you noticed, was strictly about the efficacy of military strikes. Will a military strike on Iran advance American interests, or will it achieve a strategic goal? Whether the United States has the legal and moral right to attack Iran, whether it will create all kinds of havoc in the world, whether this will cause millions and millions and millions of Muslims to hate the United States even more is something that is just never considered, because the assumption that the United States has the legal and moral right to attack Iran is something that both the Republican and Democratic parties agree on and don't even debate. By excluding third-party candidates, you ensure that that's not even in question.

The same is true for the sanctions regime. Both parties, both candidates competed to say who supported a stronger sanction regime, which of course is causing extreme suffering for the Iranian people, the way the sanctions regime in Iraq for a decade not only caused suffering but killed hundreds of thousands. That, too, is completely excluded from the debate. So you don't just have third-party candidates being excluded byas a result of these rules; what you have is the vast bulk of political opinions and political facts being excluded because these moderators are chosen very specifically to ensure that they will embrace only the orthodoxy shared by both parties while posing as objective, neutral and non-ideological actors.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn, we're going to reconnect with you, so we're going to drop our Democracy Now! video connection with you and go for a moment to the clip of third-party candidates, because Democracy Now! broke the sound barrier with the first presidential debate when we expanded the debate live, in real time, to include responses from third-party presidential contenders who were shut out of the official event. You know, the first debate was at University of Denver. We were just down the road in Littleton at a Comcast studio with similar podiums, with a blue backdrop just like the presidential candidates had. And after Jim Lehrer asked the question to President Obama, gave him two minutes, then to Mitt Romney, gave him two minutes, we'd stop the tape, and we'd say, "Dr. Jill Stein, presidential candidate of the Green Party, you've got two minutes." And we put the same question to Rocky Anderson. I want to play an excerpt of Jill Stein's response to moderator Jim Lehrer's question about so-called "entitlement" programs and Social Security.

DR. JILL STEIN: It's very important to point out that while we hear a very different narrative from Barack Obama and the Democrats than we do from Mitt Romney, with Mitt Romney's narrative being usually harsh, scary, selfishness on steroids, and the Democratic narrative being warm and fuzzy and we're all in this together, let's just wait for things to get better, you know, it's really important to look beyond the talk, to look at the walk, to look at what's actually being proposed.

And Jeffrey Sachs at the University of Columbia has pointed out in his analysis of the budget proposals of both Obama and of Romney-Ryanpoints out that they're both aiming for essentially for the same targets. They're both aiming for Social Security to be about 5 percent of GDP some years down the line, whether it's four or eight years, and on Medicare, they're both aiming for Medicare to be reduced to about 3.2 percent of GDP. So, the point is, while they have different scenarios, they both have the same targets.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. This is Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party responding to a question about healthcare reform.

ROCKY ANDERSON: Well, we're talking here about "Obamacare" and "Romneycare." I would call it "Insurance Companycare," because they're the ones that wrote it. They joined up with a very conservative foundation years ago to develop this plan, to make the American people buy this perverse product. Again, we're the only country in the world that depends upon for-profit insurance companies for the majority of our coverage for healthcare, for those who are lucky enough to have it.

There are now over 50 million people without basic healthcare coverage in this country. The latest report indicates that there will be over 30 million people without essential healthcare coverage when "Obamacare" is fully implemented. That means misery. It means extended disease. It means extended illness and injuries. And it means the loss of lives.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party. And both Jill Stein of the Green Party and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party and Virgil Goode of the Constitution Party will be joining in the debate at the town hall, not tonight at Hofstra, but when we expand the debate tomorrow on Democracy Now! in a special two-hour broadcast called "Expanding the Debate." And we're hoping stations will take it around the country, or you can also go to democracynow.org. Glenn, let's just talk to you on the phone right now. Glenn Greenwald, when you listen to these candidates giving their responses, third-party candidates, your thoughts?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, I think you see exactly why it is that those candidates have been excluded. And I think, actually, what you're doing in having these debates in a way that includes them is really quite innovative and important and really brilliant, because it illustrates two things. Number one is, when you have these candidates on the stage who are credible, who, as George said, represent parties who have ballot access and have been funded and recognized by lots of people, what it does is it illustrates just how mythological this idea is that the Democrats and Republicans are universes apart, that in reality they share all kinds of policy premises and, most importantly, serve exactly the same interests. Only by excluding those candidates and having the two parties focus on the tiny differences that they have and vociferously fight about them can this mythology be maintained that we have massive and real choice in this country.

The other aspect of it is, is that if you have, for example, Gary Johnson, who is the Libertarian Party candidate, and even a couple of other candidates on the right, who oftentimes are far morefar greater advocates of what progressives have long claimed to be their valuesantiwar, pro-civil liberties, anti-harsh penal policies, anti-drug warwhat then begins to happen, as well, is that the ideological and partisan spectrum begins to blur a great deal. Loyalties break down. Cultural identities can be subverted. And that, more than anything, is what the two parties do not want. They want both of theirtheir followers to think that the only way that these views can be represented is by clinging to either one of the two political parties. And introducing these third parties into the debate shows that actually the ideological spectrum is far less rigid and linear than these two parties insist on perpetuating. And that's why they're joined together at the hip and have a common interest in keeping this process as it is and why this collusion exists so smoothly, as George described, because they both want to keep these candidates out for the same reasons.

AMY GOODMAN: George Farah, do think that form determines content?

GEORGE FARAH: In many ways, yes. The exclusion of these viable third-party candidates from these kinds of actual presidential debate processes have the consequence of a certain ideological containment that Glenn is describing. Third parties are responsible for the abolition of slavery, women's right to vote, child labor laws, unemployment compensation, Social Security, direct election of senators, public schools, public powerthe list goes on and on. And when you exclude those third-party voices by structuring the debate in such an exclusionary format, you're preventing third parties from actually breaking the bipartisan silence on critical issues, and doing exactly what Glenn is saying, which is presenting a narrow bandwidth in a wide manner, presenting the illusion that there's extraordinary difference between the parties when in fact there's [inaudible]

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader was almost arrested when he went to one of these presidential debates, when he was running for president.

GEORGE FARAH: In 2000, 64 percent of the American people wanted to see Ralph Nader in the presidential debates. He was on the ballot in the vast majority of states. But when he got a ticket to watch the debate in a viewing audience room adjacent to the debate stadium, he was escorted by police out of the actual presidential debate arena. Ultimately, he filed a lawsuit, and the Commission on Presidential Debates had to issue a formal apology and make a $25,000 donation to a pro-democracy organization.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Glenn Greenwald, you've also talked about the fact that the vast majority of the most consequential issues facing the United States today will not be addressed during this debate process. Can you talk about some of those issues that will be and have been excluded?

GLENN GREENWALD: Oh, yes. I mean, the list of consequential issues that will be completely ignored by these debates because the two parties agree on them is vastly longer than the list of issues that they disagree on and will be talked about. Obviously, if you look at foreign policy, you see President Obama engaging in endless war; attacking various countries with drone, killing innocent people; claiming the right to assassinate American citizens without a whiff of transparency or due process; waging an unprecedented war on whistleblowers in the United States here at home, prosecuting more than all previous presidents combined; the United States's vast, massive penal state, where we imprison more of our fellow citizens than all other countrythan any other country in the world. We have a policy of punishing people for drug usage that is racist in both its application and design, putting huge numbers of minorities into prison for no good reason. There is massive poverty in the United States, a huge and exploding income gap in between the rich and the poor, greatest in many decades. None of these issues will be remotely addressed, because there's nothing for the two parties to say on them other than the fact that "we agree." And it's by excluding those issues, some of the most consequential policy debates that the United States faces, including things like union rights and climate changethe list goes ononly by ignoring them can this myth be maintained that the two parties have some vastly different philosophical approach. And it's the inclusion of third-party candidates, who would insist on talking about those, that would give the lie to this mythology.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Glenn Greenwald, I want to turn to another issue, a foreign policy issue confronting the U.S., which is that the ACLU is at Guantánamo Bay this week to attend the pretrial hearings before a U.S. military commission in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-defendants. The five are charged with conspiring in the attacks of September 11th, 2001, and may face the death penalty if convicted. The ACLU hopes to block a so-called "protective order" that would prevent the revelation of classified details gathered during the defendants' CIA interrogations. ACLU attorney Hina Shamsi told the Associated Press, quote, "What we are challenging is the censorship of the defendants' testimony based on their personal knowledge of the government's torture and detention of them." Glenn Greenwald, can you talk about some of the concerns around this pretrial hearing?

GLENN GREENWALD: Sure. Well, first of all, let me just say that thethis story perfectly illustrates everything that we were just talking about, because four years ago, issues like military commissions and the way in which the government cheated in these cases by denying due process and trying to ensure guilt through these joke tribunals were widely debated. These were constantly talked about, and that's because the Democrats pretended to have a different view than the Republicansthe Democrats opposed them, the Republicans favored themand so you had conflict and controversy over them, and therefore they were included in the debate. Four years later, you have the Democrats fully on board with all of the injustices that President Obama and his party pretended to find so objectionable, and they therefore have disappeared completely from the realm of public debate. That's what happens when you have full consensus between the two political parties.

What is happening at Guantánamo with these commissions is really quite extraordinary, because it is an attack on every single precept of Western justice that we have long considered to be the hallmark of any decent society, things like allowing lawyers to have access to their clients, to have access to evidence, to be able to have that aired in open court. What you really have is a process designed for two things: to ensure guilt, to ensure it, no matter what the evidence is, and, more importantly, to suppress relevant evidence that's embarrassing to the United States. So these defendants are not permitted to talk about or to introduce evidence concerning the extraordinarily oppressive, torturous treatment to which they were subjected that impacts the statements that they gave that are to be used against them, that impacts the entire notion of justice surrounding the trial. You have secret evidence. You have evidence that is from witnesses that cannot be confronted. It is an extraordinary travesty of everything that we claim to believe in, but because it's the Democrats doing it and the Republicans fully on board, it has disappeared from public discourse.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who spoke by videovideolink at a side meeting of the U.N. General Assembly from inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he's taken refuge. Of course, Ecuador has granted him diplomatic asylum to prevent him from being extradited to Sweden. He is concerned about being sent to Sweden to answer questions about two women who have said that he sexually abused them, because he's concerned that Sweden will then extradite him to the United States, where he's concerned he could potentially face charges relating to WikiLeaks. This is an excerpt of his address at the U.N.

JULIAN ASSANGE: The U.S. administration has been trying to erect a national regime of secrecy, a national regime of obfuscation, a regime where any government employee revealing sensitive information to a media organization can be sentenced to death, life imprisonment or espionage, and journalists from the media organization with them. We should not underestimate the scale of the investigation which has happened into WikiLeaks.

AMY GOODMAN: That's WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Glenn Greenwald, your final comment? Of course, these kinds of issues, from Guantánamo to Julian Assangewell, we don't know. In a town hall meeting, I suppose they could be asked. But what do you think?

GLENN GREENWALD: Right, I think it'sI can't imagine Candy Crowley choosing a question that relates to the war on whistleblowers or Julian Assange or secrecy. But just think about that contrast. When Daniel Ellsberg was prosecuted by the Nixon administration, this was a huge story. It went to the Supreme Court. Liberals and progressives undertook his cause. He became a symbol of heroism and bravery. Here you have WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning facing exactly the same treatment, and it's completely disappeared from public discourse. Progressives could not care less, even though, as every investigative journalist who does real work, including at major newspapers, will tell you, this has all created an incredible climate of fear that not only deters and intimidates their sources out of whistleblowing, but intimidates a lot of journalists, as well. And that's what it's designed to do. So you have this massive attack on transparency, this bolstering of secrecy, this undermining of investigative journalism, all concentrated within the WikiLeaks case, specifically the broader war on whistleblowers, and this, too, will be ignored, because both parties could not be more fully on board with it than if they tried.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you, Glenn Greenwald, for being with us, columnist and blogger for The Guardian newspaper, author of With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. We will link to your latest piece at The Guardian. And George Farah, thanks so much for joining us. Final question: the organizations that are trying to open these debates and wrest control away from this private corporation, which is the Commission on Presidential Debates?

GEORGE FARAH: We are making some actual ground. For the first time, we've hadwe've convinced three of the 10 corporate sponsors that are financing the Commission on Presidential Debates to peel off. We have a

AMY GOODMAN: YWCA pulled out?

GEORGE FARAH: YWCA, Philips Electronics and BBH advertising all pulled their support from the Commission on Presidential Debates. This is totally unprecedented. We're resulting in the consistent process of actually making these secret contracts public. The media is beginning to really understand that this is a bipartisan corporation that doesn't serve the interests of an electorate in which 40 percent of the voting population is independent. So, I think it's just a matter of time, Amy, before we actually break the monopoly of the Commission on Presidential Debates.

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to leave it there. I want to thank you for being with us, George Farah, founder and executive director of Open Debates, author of No Debate: How the Republican and Democratic Parties Secretly Control the Presidential Debates. Again, Democracy Now! will be broadcasting live from Hofstra with our own community forum, as well as broadcasting the town hall debate. You can start tuning in at 8:00 p.m. at democracynow.org. That's 8:00 p.m. Eastern [Daylight] Time. Or tune in to your radio or television station that is broadcasting us. And tomorrow morning, a special two-hour broadcast of Democracy Now!, where we'll be joined by three third-party candidates. They will answer the same questions put to the major-party presidential candidates at Hofstra. So you'll hear all. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Back in a minute.

[Peter Lemkin]

MY GOODMAN: Greg, I was wondering, before we go, if you could talk about your latest book, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps. Talk about the whole issue of voter rights, voter suppression.

GREG PALAST: Well, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits is just as the title says. By the way, this story, hunting down Mitt Romney and his money with the vultures, is in Billionaires & Ballot Bandits.

But how do they steal the election in nine easy steps? We've been here before. If you remember, I did the story about how Katherine Harris knocked off tens of thousands of black voters off the voter rolls: she called them felons. But their only crime was voting while black. That was in 2000. That felon purge, other purgepurges, are back with a vengeance.

We've lost two3.2 million people off the voter rolls who are citizens who should be allowed to vote. In the last election, 2.7 million ballotsthis is the official number, Amy2.7 million ballots were cast and not counted. They call those, by the way, "spoiled ballots" in the ballot business. But, you know, votes don't spoil because you leave them out of the fridge; they spoil because someone is challenging those ballots. And right now, you've got a massive new challenge machine, created first by the Koch brothers, who have a computer system called Themis, and that's one of the things they can use to challenge and knock out voters. Karl Rove, who is funded mainly by Paul Singer and his buddiesthere we are with the vulture againKarl Rove has a massive database called DataTrust, which they have usedwe've caught themthey have used to challenge voters of color throughout the nation.

So, they are using the old purging systems. They are challenging votes; that's called "spoiling." You have something called "caging," in which we have, again, caught Karl Rove sending letters to, if you can imagine, active-duty soldiers. They send letters to these active-duty soldiers at their military bases. In the letters, they write, "Do not forward." Those letters come back. Those voters, who are active-duty soldiers, lose their vote because they've been challenged as fraudulent voters. So, in other words, if you go to Afghanistan and you're a black soldier in Florida, you can expect to see your ballot challenged. And you don't even know it. We talked to one of the voters, who said, "I got to mail in my ballot from overseas," while he was on duty. But he didn't realize that his ballot had been challenged by the Rove machine.

Now, Bobby Kennedy, who wrote the introduction to Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, is of course a dean of the law school at Pace University. And he has said this is a felony crime. So, some of the nine ways that they burgle the vote are not only creepy, but in fact they're illegal.

And this is one of the things that we are trying to say. Here's nine ways that they take your ballot from you, but we also include, by the wayand very important for people is, at the back of Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, we have what we call the ballot condom for safe voting. What it is is seven ways to beat the ballotsballot bandits so that you can protect your own vote. I'm very concerned about this. I don't want people to say, "Oh, my god, they're stealing my vote. I'm not going to vote. I give up." Don't do that. Don't let them shoplift your ballot.

For example, one of the things we have saidand I was just talking to some of the people here in the studiocheck your registration. We have the seven ways to beat the ballot bandits poster at ballotbandits.org; you can download it for free to protect yourself. The guy who designed the poster for me didn't take advice from thedidn't take our suggestion number threecheck your registration. He showed up and was listed as an inactive voter. Nine million people are listed as inactive voters, as if they know that you haven't been doing your sit-ups or something. You lose your vote. Please check your registration.

That's why in Billionaires & Ballot Bandits we're not only telling you the nine ways that they steal the election, but the seven ways to kind of steal it back. And I say "we," because in the middle of the book, of course, there is a comic book, 50-page comic book, by Ted Rall. So, this is put out by our not-for-profit foundation for the purposeit's nonpartisan. We are just trying to get people to be aware that their votes can be shoplifted, and here's how you could save them.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, it's interesting. This news just came out today, Greg, came out of Sheriff Arpaio's Maricopa County in Arizona that Spanish copies of the election information were sent out with the wrong election date. ABC15 reports that the error appears on a document containing a voter ID card. In addition to the ID card, the piece of paper it comes in lists other information, such as important election dates. In the corner of the document, it says "November 6" in English, but in Spanish it reads "8 de Noviembre," the 8th of November. Of course, Election Day is November 6th, not November 8th.

GREG PALAST: Yeah, this trick has been going on. And by the way, in Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, you'll see a picture of me going into Joe Arpaio's famousor infamoustent city prison, because he claims that he is not profiling Mexican Americans to charge them with crimes or the act of illegal voting. And so, we went into his prison to see who he waswho he was gathering up. There's a big sign that I walked by that says, "No aliens allowed." I went in with my assistant, my chief investigator, with me, whoshe is not an American citizen, but she did bring her white skin, so they didn't even ask her for her papers. So, to say that they don't profile in Arizona, this is happening all over the place. In fact, we did seein Wisconsin, during the recall vote, we did see in Wisconsin during the recall vote that the Koch Themis operation did send out letters, again, giving to Democrats falsefalse information on the date of the election.

[Lauren Johnson]

Peter,

Palast certainly does a nicely packaged presentation of the nine ways to steal an election, which by the way are IN HIS BOOK. But there is another way, which is to just fucking steal it.
Of course, Mike Connell was a live liability, but that has been since cleared up.

Sources:
The Raw Story, September 29, 2008
Title: "Republican IT consultant subpoenaed in case alleging tampering with 2004 election"
Authors: Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane
The Brad Blog, December 22, 2008
Title: "OH Election Fraud Attorney Reacts to the Death of Mike Connell"
Author: Brad Friedman
Democracy Now! December 22, 2008
Title: "Republican IT Specialist Dies in Plane Crash"
Interviewee: Mark Crispin Miller
Student Researchers: Ashleigh Hvinden, Christine Wilson and Alan Grady
Community Evaluator: Mary Ann Walker
Sonoma State University

Karl Rove's chief IT consultant, Mike Connellwho was facing subpoena in connection with 2004 Presidential election fraud in Ohiomysteriously died in a private plane crash in 2008. Connell was allegedly the central figure in a longstanding plot to electronically flip votes to Republicans.

In July 2008, Connell was named as a key witness in the case known as King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association v. Blackwell, which was filed against Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth J. Blackwell on August 31, 2006 by Columbus attorneys Clifford Arnebeck and Robert Fitrakis. It initially charged Blackwell with racially discriminatory practicesincluding the selective purging of voters from the election rolls and the unequal allocation of voting machines to various districtsand asked for measures to be taken to prevent similar problems during the November 2006 election.
On October 9, 2006, an amended complaint added charges of various forms of ballot rigging as also having the effect of "depriving the plaintiffs of their voting rights, including the right to have their votes successfully cast without intimidation, dilution, cancellation or reversal by voting machine or ballot tampering." A motion to dismiss the case as moot was filed following the November 2006 election, but it was instead stayed to allow for settlement discussions.

The case took on fresh momentum in July 2008 when Arnebeck announced that he was filing to "lift the stay in the case and proceed with targeted discovery in order to help protect the integrity of the 2008 election." The new filing was inspired in part by the coming forward as a whistleblower of GOP IT security expert Stephen Spoonamore, who said he was prepared to testify to the plausibility of electronic vote-rigging having been carried out in 2004. The stay was lifted September 19, 2008 and Connell was served a subpoena on September 22.

Spoonamore, a conservative Republican who works for big banks, international governments, and the Secret Service as an expert in the detection of computer fraud, found evidence that Karl Rove, with the help of Mike Connell and his company GovTech Solutions, electronically stole the Ohio 2004 election for Bush.

Spoonamore testified that the "vote tabulation system [which Connell designed] allowed the introduction of an additional single computer between computer A and computer B." This is called a "man in the middle" attack. According to Spoonamore, "This centralized collection of all incoming statewide tabulations would make it easy for a single operator, or a preprogrammed force balancing computer' to change the results in any way desired by the team controlling the Computer C." Spoonamore further testified that the only purpose for such man in the middle architecture is to commit crime.

Despite Connell's efforts to quash his subpoena to testify, he was ordered to appear for a two-hour, closed-door deposition on November 3, 2008, just eighteen hours before the 2008 national election. Though Connell had expressed willingness to testify, he was reticent after receiving threats from Rove.

Arnebeck presents evidence that Karl Rove threatened Connell, cautioning that if Connell didn't "take the fall" for election fraud in Ohio, Connell would face prosecution for supposed lobby law violations. After this threat, Arnebeck sent letters to the Department of Justice, as well as messages to high-ranking members of the department, seeking protection for Connell and his family from attempts to intimidate. Despite Connell's elite status as a top-rung Republican consultant for years, whose firm New Media Communications provided IT services for the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign, the US Chamber of Commerce, the Republican National Committee, and many Republican candidates and campaigns, witness protection requests went unheeded.

Election fraud analyst and author Mark Crispin Miller notes that the timing and circumstances of Connell's deathbetween deposition and trialare too suspicious and convenient for Rove and the Bush administration, not to merit a thorough investigation. Arnebeck and Fitrakis intended to both further depose and call Connell to testify as key witness in the federal conspiracy case. Connell was also to be questioned about his key role in the disappearance of thousands of White House-RNC email transactions. These emails are believed likely to have shed light on the White House role in the political firings of US Attorneys, as well as decisions to prosecute former Alabama Democratic Governor Don Siegelman. Attorneys in the case said that Connell's testimony would likely lead to the subpoenaing and under-oath questioning of Karl Rove.

Connell was an experienced pilot. His plane had been recently serviced. He had been in the nation's capital on still-unknown business before his single engine plane crashed December 22, 2008 on the way home, just three miles short of the runway in Akron, Ohio. The cause of the crash remains unknown.

Timing of Connell's deposition may have saved the 2008 presidential elections from electronic theft. However, Bev Harris at Black Box Voting notes that man in the middle systems are still in place in Illinois, Colorado, Kentucky, and likely across the nation.1

Citation: Bev Harris, "Man in the Middle Attacks to Subvert the Vote," Black Box Voting, November 2008.

Update by Larisa Alexandrovna
The extreme vulnerability of electronic voting systems to systematic fraud has fallen out of public awareness because it did not become a major issue during the 2008 elections, but the problem has never been resolved or even seriously examined by any official body. Questions about alleged vote count irregularities in Ohio during the 2004 election remain the strongest indication of the potential for large-scale tampering with these systems. The lawsuit, which sought testimony from GOP information technology expert Michael Connell as to any personal knowledge he might have had of those irregularities, has represented the most determined effort to get at the truth beyond these allegations.

Michael Connell testified under subpoena in November 2008 but died the following month, when his single-engine plane crashed as he was attempting to land at an Ohio airport near his home. At the time of his death, the only mainstream news outlet to even mention Connell's death and the controversies surrounding his involvement in electronic voting was a single CBS/AP story.

However, there appears to have been no direct response in the mainstream press to the articles on Connell published by Raw Story. In fact, a deafening silence on his alleged relationship with the Bush White House has prevailed, even after his sudden and tragic death in December of 2008.

The case of King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association v. Blackwell is still ongoing.
Additional information on the King Lincoln case can be obtained here:
http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/lit.../klbna.php.
An organization that has taken a pro-active role in making public both the case of King Lincoln and the various articles on it is Velvet Revolution. See http://velvetrevolution.us/.


Update by Brad Friedman

Little of note has changed since the death of Mike Connell as this book goes to press. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is still investigating, but is likely not to release a final report until mid to late 2010. They released a preliminary report, however, indicating decreasing visibility at the Akron airport, with visibility still at 2.5 miles at the time of the crash and temperatures just above freezing. According to the NTSB report, and confirmed via transcripts and tapes received via FOIA requests, Connell radioed to ask "whether there were any reports of icing, to which air traffic control [ATC] responded that there were no reports."

The tapes and transcripts indicate that something suddenly happened up there, as his last words to ATC, recorded on tape, were a declaration of emergency followed quickly by "Oh, fuck," before he was not heard from again.

Curiously, for a man as well connected to the very top echelons of the Republican Party as Connell was, no GOP officials, or George W. Bush, or John McCain, or Karl Rove, to my knowledge, ever issued a public statement upon his tragic death.

For the time being, the Ohio voting rights case has been stalled since Connell's death. Cliff Arnebeck continues to investigate how he plans to move forward, and is considering broader subpoenas in hopes of taking depositions from, among others, Karl Rove, as he widens the scope of his conspiracy case.

http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stori...ion-thief/

Here is a link to Brad Frieman's work on Mike Connell and the 2004 election which was going on well before Connell's death.

http://www.bradblog.com/?cat=403

[Lauren Johnson]

http://www.rawstory.com/images/other/200...ematic.jpg

I couldn't get it to display.

[Peter Lemkin]

http://www.rawstory.com/images/other/200...ematic.jpg

I couldn't get it to display.

It displayed fine for me....quite complex. Yes, they now have the pattern worked out and the computer power and 'cover' [many of the voting machine makers and voting specialty companies are Reich-wing run and owned] to just plain steal the votes and make it look 'close' and 'normal'...and the press and public fall for it...minus a few skeptical deep political thinkers. Our democracy is a joke on SO MANY levels it is hard to believe....and sinking. Palast lays it out plain and simple...if only more would read him and watch his videos etc. Oh, and yes, THEY kill all kinds of people who become a 'problem'.....a stone in someone's shoe...even if the Mr. Big with the shoe thought up and paid for the idea/crime behind the 'stone'. Our political and corporate mafia are no different that the 'regular' mafia - and they are all often associates and friends to boot.

[Lauren Johnson]

http://www.rawstory.com/images/other/200...ematic.jpg

I couldn't get it to display.

It displayed fine for me....quite complex. Yes, they now have the pattern worked out and the computer power and 'cover' [many of the voting machine makers and voting specialty companies are Reich-wing run and owned] to just plain steal the votes and make it look 'close' and 'normal'...and the press and public fall for it...minus a few skeptical deep political thinkers. Our democracy is a joke on SO MANY levels it is hard to believe....and sinking. Palast lays it out plain and simple...if only more would read him and watch his videos etc. Oh, and yes, THEY kill all kinds of people who become a 'problem'.....a stone in someone's shoe...even if the Mr. Big with the shoe thought up and paid for the idea/crime behind the 'stone'. Our political and corporate mafia are no different that the 'regular' mafia - and they are all often associates and friends to boot.

I meant I couldnt't get it to display in this thread. I keep getting error msgs that say the URL is the in the wrong format.

EDIT: If you haven't looked into Mike Connell, you should. It is a story of an earnest conservative Catholic who believed liberals were killing babies and needed to be stopped by stealing the election if necessary. He also said he would not lie about it. So they capped him.