This Thursday in Washington Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), the senior minority member of the House Judiciary Committee, will formally object to the counting of the Ohio electoral vote in the 2004 presidential election. If any senator joins him, the counting of the vote is suspended and the House and the Senate must convene separately to hear the objections filed, and to vote on whether to accept them.

The grounds for the objections are clear: The irregularities in the Ohio vote and vote count are widespread and blatant. If the Ohio election were held in the Ukraine, it would not have been certified by the international community.

By Rev. Jesse Jackson, AlterNet. Posted January 5, 2005.

Ohio Recount Steeped in Fraud There is something you can do.
The presidential vote recount in Ohio is over - or is it? The Green and Libertarian Party candidates who paid for the recount may have a claim of fraud against election officials and at least one voting machine company. If they can't get a new recount, they ought to at least get their money back.

Here's what happened.

http://www.thenation.com/thebeat/index.mhtml?bid=1&pid;=2090
John Nichols Online Beat
Rule One: Count Every Vote
12/27/2004 @ 11:20am

Politics is a game played by rules. And the most important rule regarding close elections is that you don't win by being conciliatory during the recount process. Indeed, the only way a candidate who trails on election night ends up taking the oath of office is by refusing to concede and then confidently demanding that every vote be counted -- even when the opposition, the media and the courts turn against you.

That is a rule that Al Gore failed to follow to its logical conclusion in 2000, and that John Kerry did not even attempt to apply this year. Both men were so determined to maintain their long-term political viability that they refused to fight like hell to assure that the votes of their supporters were counted. That refusal let their backers down. It also guaranteed that, despite convincing evidence that the Democrat won in 2000, and serious questions about the voting and recount processes in the critical state of Ohio in 2004, George W. Bush would waltz into the White House.

Maybe someday, if the Democrats really want to win the presidency, they will nominate someone like Christine Gregoire. Gregoire is the Washington state attorney general who this year was nominated by Democrats to run for governor of that state. She is hardly a perfect politician -- like too many Democrats, she is more of a manager than a visionary; and she is as ideologically drab as Gore or Kerry.

But Gregoire had one thing going for her, and that was her determination to win.

When the initial count showed her trailing Republican Dino Rossi by more than 200 votes, she refused to accept the result. Certain that there were Democratic votes that had yet to be tallied, she demanded a recount. The second review showed her trailing Rossi by 42 votes and -- as in the 2000 fight over recounting presidential ballots in Florida -- the Republicans accused Gregoire of traumatizing the state by continuing to demand that every vote be counted. "It's time to move forward," chirped Rossi, who ridiculed Democratic demands for a fuller, sounder recount. Rossi claimed that Gregoire wanted to count and recount the ballots until she was declared the winner.

In a sense, Rossi was right.

Gregoire did want to keep counting until she won. But, of course, that is the point of the recount process: If you think that the votes are there to assure your victory, you keep demanding that they be counted and tabulated. This is the fundamental rule that neither Gore nor Kerry ever quite got.

As Christmas approached, the pressure on Gregoire to back off was intense. But the Democratic gubernatorial candidate and her supporters continued to press for a full review of the ballots -- paying more than $700,000 for another count and going to court to defend the principle that every voted counts and every vote must be counted.

Two days before Christmas, with a go-ahead from the state Supreme Court, Gregoire got a full count. That reversed previous results and gave her a 130-vote lead over Rossi.

The fight may not be over yet. Rossi is crying foul. But the likelihood is that, in Washington state, the Democrat, not the Republican, will be taking the oath of office in January. There are two reasons why this is the case. First, Christine Gregoire got more votes. Second, she demanded that they be counted.

12/23/2004
A well-respected and popular professor at the University of California in Berkeley has been fired after publishing a scientific paper regarding the uncontrolled contamination of irreplaceable native Mexican corn varieties by genetically engineered corn. Dr. Ignacio Chapela, whose corn contamination article was published in the science journal "Nature," was denied his tenure due to pressure from the biotech company Monsanto on the University (the UC Berkeley tenure review panel had actually voted almost unanimously to approve his tenure). Professor Chapela has been told to have his office cleaned out by December 31. Sign a petition to demand a review of Dr. Chapela's tenure denial. SIGN PETITION

Military slogans and ideals encourage thousands to join our military, and millions more to give unconditional public support when soldiers go to war. Through intimate and candid interviews with returning soldiers of all ranks, veterans, military families, and independent footage and photographs not seen on the news, The Ground Truth looks at the long-term and often invisible effects this war is having on thousands and thousands of nameless, undecorated Americans.

"This war has destroyed me. I come home at night and breakdown. I see pictures of Iraqi children with their limbs gone and wonder, 'Did I have anything to do with this? Was my unit a part of this?"
Lt. Michael Hoffman

"Just to brush my teeth is a task. My post traumatic stress from two wars, coupled with my panic attacks and depression...feeling betrayed by the military just made it worse."
Sgt. Phillip Goodrum

"You hear in the news, ‘Seven Wounded’. You never hear their names or what unit they are in. I was in Mosul when our Humvee was hit. Unfortunately, it had no doors. I’m 24…I lost my left leg.”
Sgt. Melissa Stockwell

60.5% of the eligible electorate -- which was 55.8% of the voting-age population -- voted in 2004; 59.5% of the eligible electorate -- which was 54.7% of the voting-age population -- did so in 2000. In short, it took a whopping 30% rise in campaign costs to achieve practically the same turnout rates as 2000.

A good look at Matt Blunt's and MO Republican's baloney on tort "reform"

"Matt Blunt, Missouri’s new governor, relied heavily on medical malpractice tort reform to get elected. He promised to accomplish the “reform” by hobbling citizens’ ability to bring malpractice suits and capping damages in such suits."

War Crimes



Thursday, December 23, 2004; Page A22


THANKS TO a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and other human rights groups, thousands of pages of government documents released this month have confirmed some of the painful truths about the abuse of foreign detainees by the U.S. military and the CIA -- truths the Bush administration implacably has refused to acknowledge. Since the publication of photographs of abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison in the spring the administration's whitewashers -- led by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- have contended that the crimes were carried out by a few low-ranking reservists, that they were limited to the night shift during a few chaotic months at Abu Ghraib in 2003, that they were unrelated to the interrogation of prisoners and that no torture occurred at the Guantanamo Bay prison where hundreds of terrorism suspects are held. The new documents establish beyond any doubt that every part of this cover story is false.