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BBC Bush Election Expose (CENSORED by US MEDIA)
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| ZinG |
About 14 minutes long. It's a good summary of how Bush stole the election by Greg Palast, taken from the BBC. Not great quality, but worth watching.
Download Bittorrent to get the Movie
Cheers |
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| Renegade |
Here's the file in RAM format for those who can't be bothered downloading BT:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/cta/p...ight/palast.ram
Yeah it's quite amazing what the Republicans did to get into office, and it's even more amazing how none of it was reported in the US media. This is just the tip of the iceberg:
Theft of the Presidency
Bush and his crew have a lot to answer for. :-/ |
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| Galapidate |
| I think we have enough evidence to show that the Republicans are attempting to snuff out the anti-Bush, liberal voice. |
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| MisterOpus1 |
Just finished reading Palast's book, "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy". His 1st chapter outlines everything about how Bush stole the election in explicit detail. An amazing chapter. Jeb Bush and Kathy Harris should be serving hard time for their crimes. The rest of the book is fantastic as well - everything from Enron and energy scandals in CA, Bush's consistent business failures wherever he goes, World Bank and it's collective crushing of small countries, Pat Robertson and his diamond mining swindling, Walmart and other corporations using 3rd World countries' cheap child/slave labor while calling their products "American", and much more.
Highly recommended read. |
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| occrider |
I can't check it out at work but it definetely looks interesting. I'll be sure to check it out. But to be fair here's what's her names rebuttal to his arguments:
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A Florida Makeover
Greg Palast's Annotation ["Ex-Con Game," March] distorts and misrepresents the events surrounding the 2000 presidential election in Florida in order to support his twisted and maniacally partisan conclusions. To the chagrin of responsible journalists everywhere, Palast's effort implodes under the slightest scrutiny, owing to his abject failure to check the accuracy of his facts.
Palast erroneously claims that my predecessor and I "ordered 57,700 'ex-felons,' who are prohibited from voting by state law, to be removed from voter rolls," when in fact the Florida legislature, through Florida Statute Section 98.0975, mandated that we use a private firm to provide to Florida's 67 county supervisors of elections a list identifying potentially ineligible voters whose names remained on the voter-registration rolls. The legislature, not the Department of State, required county supervisors to remove the names of these persons from the voting rolls if they were unable to determine that this information was incorrect.
Revealingly, Palast provides examples of persons whose names allegedly appeared on the list in error without mentioning whether these persons had been permitted, or even had attempted, to vote in the election. He claims that "Bush's win would certainly have been jeopardized had not some Floridians been barred from casting ballots at all" but neglects to mention that, according to a study conducted by the Palm Beach Post, "[t]housands of felons voted in the presidential election . . . [who] almost certainly influenced the . . . election" in favor of former vice president Al Gore. According to the Post, this estimated number of illegal voters far outnumbered the persons who allegedly could not vote because they were erroneously removed from the voter rolls.
Showing the laughable depths to which he will stoop, Palast ominously notes that Florida's contract with DBT Online, a private company, was "marked 'Secret' and 'Confidential,'" neglecting to mention that 1) DBT, not the Department of State, requested this notation in an effort to prevent other companies from copying and selling the computer software used to generate the list, and 2) Florida's expansive public-records law would have prohibited us from making that contract "secret" even if we had tried to do so.
Further, Palast contends that, "with the state's blessing, DBT did not call a single felon" without noting that we provided this "blessing" at the behest of Florida's county supervisors of elections, who wished to contact the persons on the list themselves, pursuant to their statutory responsibility.
Palast even misrepresents two rulings of the Florida District Courts of Appeal as orders of the Florida Supreme Court, while ranting that these decisions prohibited Florida from removing any names of felons from the voting rolls whose civil rights had been restored automatically in another state. Before the 2000 election, the Department of State asked Florida's Office of Executive Clemency, which answered to Governor Jeb Bush and an executive cabinet that included Democratic attorney general Bob Butterworth and Democratic U.S. senator Bill Nelson, for its opinion on this matter. The Office of Executive Clemency issued a letter advising us that felons who had not received an order of clemency from another state must apply to have their civil rights restored in Florida before being eligible to vote.
Florida's difficult experience in Election 2000 exposed flaws in the elections process that had festered across America for decades, since the political will to address these flaws had never existed. I am proud to have helped Florida become the nationally acclaimed leader in election reform since that time. Last year, the Florida legislature passed virtually all of my bills as part of its landmark Election Reform Act. This legislation placed the burden on the state to prove a person's ineligibility to vote before removing that person from the rolls, correcting the problem in the law that led to any erroneous removal of eligible voters before the 2000 election. In Florida we have moved aggressively to prevent such concerns from arising ever again. I regret that Greg Palast's political agenda does not permit him to acknowledge this simple fact.
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Additionally, many claim as well that the democrats attempted to steal the election.
http://www.florida2000election.com/sections/1.htm
http://www.innerx.net/personal/tsmith/DJgb.html
http://www.fraudfactor.com/ff2kelectionfraud.html
I dunno, after reading everything I'm inclined to read that all politicians are dirty and lie to us. But with respects to the 2000 elections, nobody knew that the election would come down to one electoral state, or that that vote would come down to under a 1000 people. And most certainly Katherin Harris or whoever could not have predicted this 5 months before the election even occured, dispelling some of the claims of a massive conspiracy/coverup. More likely, the entire election system is a complete mess, is being manipulated by both sides, and critics can easily look back at specific examples and claim a stolen election.
http://www.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS...imes.votecount/ |
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| MisterOpus1 |
| quote: | Originally posted by occrider
I can't check it out at work but it definetely looks interesting. I'll be sure to check it out. But to be fair here's what's her names rebuttal to his arguments:
Additionally, many claim as well that the democrats attempted to steal the election.
http://www.florida2000election.com/sections/1.htm
http://www.innerx.net/personal/tsmith/DJgb.html
http://www.fraudfactor.com/ff2kelectionfraud.html
I dunno, after reading everything I'm inclined to read that all politicians are dirty and lie to us. But with respects to the 2000 elections, nobody knew that the election would come down to one electoral state, or that that vote would come down to under a 1000 people. And most certainly Katherin Harris or whoever could not have predicted this 5 months before the election even occured, dispelling some of the claims of a massive conspiracy/coverup. More likely, the entire election system is a complete mess, is being manipulated by both sides, and critics can easily look back at specific examples and claim a stolen election.
http://www.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS...imes.votecount/ |
Damnit Occ, you're opening up a can of worms with me on this one! I've got a bunch of good info. to counter Harris' claims as well as some other stuff Palast has posted lately. When I get some more downtime at work, I'll post it. |
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| occrider |
| quote: | Originally posted by MisterOpus1
Damnit Occ, you're opening up a can of worms with me on this one! I've got a bunch of good info. to counter Harris' claims as well as some other stuff Palast has posted lately. When I get some more downtime at work, I'll post it. |
Yea actually I read the counter claim to the harris argument as well after doing further reading on the matter. Can't remember where I read it. Anyway Palast does make some good arguments. Doesn't counter the claim that the democrats are subject to the same scandalous behaviour however. |
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| MisterOpus1 |
| quote: | Originally posted by occrider
Yea actually I read the counter claim to the harris argument as well after doing further reading on the matter. Can't remember where I read it. Anyway Palast does make some good arguments. Doesn't counter the claim that the democrats are subject to the same scandalous behaviour however. |
No question about that! |
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| MisterOpus1 |
Okay, here’s my longwinded summary of Palast’s first chapter in his book. I apologize for it’s length. I do recommend you spend some time reading the links – there’s some good info. there that compliments my summary here. By the way, at times I am paraphrasing and personally commenting, while other times I am outright plagiarizing, so forgive me here for the plagiarism. I really didn’t want to spend too much more time paraphrasing this all on my own. Anyways, enjoy!
First came a list from DBT (aka Choicepoint) of 8,000 felons to be stripped from voting rights. The problem with the list, however, is that it came from Texas, and none of the people on the list were felons. They merely had misdemeanors.
New list of 57,700 people who supposedly have felons were purged in Florida. At least 90.2% of those on this list are innocent – not felons. Notably, over 54% are Black and Hispanic voters. Overwhelmingly, it is a list of Democrats.
http://archive.salon.com/politics/f.../04/voter_file/
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/busi...,409137,00.html
Then to top it off, another 40,000 people were wiped off the map of voting rights. You see, some ex-cons in the state of Florida do actually still have a right to vote. Jeb Bush was ordered to stop interfering in the civil rights of ex-cons who did have the right to vote, but he refused:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?...05&s=palast&c=1
So if you total that up, we’re somewhere in the neighborhood of some 94,000 names being scrubbed.
Some info. about Choicepoint and their board from an interview with Palast:
“It looks like a Republican country club meeting. You've got Ken Langone, the investor who was also the treasurer for the Rudy Giuliani for Senate campaign. You've got Bernard Marcus, the founder of Home Depot, a big Republican sugar daddy. You've got Vin Weber, the ultra-right ex-congressman who is their Washington lobbyist. You've got Howard Safir, the New York Police Chief of Repression. They've got all these Republican politicos like George Bruder out of Florida, who was deeply involved in their operations for getting rid of "the dark vote." So, look, it's a Republican firm.”
Interestingly, Choicepoint’s DBT was not the first contractor for the job. The first contractor, Professional Services Inc., charged $5,700 for the job in 1998. The Florida Dept. of Elections then eliminated this first contractor and hired DBT for only $2.3 million!!! It was an open bidding here, but DBT somehow won albeit the costliest contractor – several thousand percent more than any other competitor!
Choicepoint said it used crosschecks with social security numbers. That was a lie. It also said it used over 1,200 databases for crosschecking – also a lie. Address history was a third criterion supposedly used by Choicepoint – also not true. As an example, one county, Leon (Tallahassee) carried out the purge as the law required, but went back and cross-checked the purge list one by one. OF the 694 named felons in their county, they could only verify 34 names as felons – a 95% error rate!
So it begs the question, why would Choicepoint have such a faulty list, and why would they lie about their crosschecks? Did someone want it wrong? Well, this is where that Palast documentary comes in, where he has a sheet marked “CONFIDENTIAL”, and confronts Clayton Roberts – director of the Florida Divison of Elections and who works directly under Katherine Harris. Palast asked Roberts if he and Harris had checked whether DBT had verified the accuracy of a single name on the purge list before they paid the company millions, and of course he answered, “No, I didn’t ask DBT”, and you know the rest. He also said that it was left up to the counties for verification. But according to the CONFIDENTIAL document, that is a flat-out lie. You see, the CONFIDENTIAL document Palast presented showed that DBT was being paid $2.3 million for their lists and “manual verification using telephone calls and statistical sampling.” Problem is, Roberts and Harris had testified to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission – under oath- that verification of the voter purge list was left completely up to the county elections supervisors, not to the state or the contractor, Choicepoint. Oopsie!
So despite that flat out lie by Florida Elections and Harris, let’s go with the presumption that DBT was supposed to do verification, according to their contract. Guess what? Well, they did nothing of the sort. No record whatsoever exists of DBT making verification phone calls. According to a DBT phone message to Palast, “manual verification by telephone” did not “require us to actually make telephone calls” to anyone on the list. The scrub list itself is quite hilarious, as outlined in his book with an example portion of the list. The State of Florida was content with a partial match of four criterion: name (the first four letters were close enough), date of birth, gender, and race. That’s it! Address and state didn’t even matter (many names were from different states other than Florida, as they later found out).
So now it begs the question, why didn’t the State of Florida go after DBT for this fraudulent list? How could Choicepoint, who in the past has done database work with the FBI, done such a horrendous job in Florida? Well, the obvious is true – the State of Florida, along with Harris, ORDERED them to get it wrong. In February 2001, James Lee, vice president of Choicepoint, stated to the BBC that the State of Florida “wanted there to be more names than were actually verified as being a convicted felon.” Then, following the February 2001 BBC broadcast, Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney called for a Congressional investigation (the only Congressman to pay attention, I might add). McKinney represented Atlanta, which was where Choicepoint’s headquarters resides, so she had reason to be upset. (side note: for an interesting inquiry as to what happened to McKinney and the effective smear campaign against her that effectively got her ousted from Congress, go to http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=229&row=1). On April 17, 2001, Choicepoint’s VP James Lee confessed that the State of Florida was the whole matter. Lee said that, for example, the state had given DBT the truly insane directive to add to the purge list people who matched 90% of the last name – if Anderson committed a crime, Anderson lost his vote. DBT objected, knowing this would sweep in a huge number of innocents. The state then went further and ordered DBT to shift to an 80% match!!!!!! Names were reversed – Thomas Clarence could knock out the vote of Clarence Thomas. Lee confirmed that middle initials were skipped, “Jr.” and “Sr.” suffixes dropped. Then, nicknames and aliases were added to puff up the list. “DBT told state officials that the rules for creating the purge list would mean a significant number of people who were not deceased, not registered, in more than one county or NOT A FELON would be included in the list. Likewise, DBT made suggestions to reduce the numbers of eligible voters included on the list.” However, the state told DBT to do nothing of the sort, and keep their suggestions as is.
Race was definitely an issue as well. Florida did not count 179,855 ballots. And whether your vote counted depended on color. In Leon county, a primarily white county, only 1 in 500 ballots was uncounted. In neighboring Gadsden, with a high population of Black voters, 1 in 8 ballots was never counted!!! This a consistent pattern with other counties as well (Madison, Hamilton, Jackson, to name a few). How was this possible? The answer lied in the machines that counted the ballots. In Leon County for example, the machines spit out the ballots that have been erroneously marked (Gore and Bush marked together, for example). That way you know it was an error, and you can try again. In Gadsden, however (predominantly Black), the same mistake didn’t spit out your card – it ate it! Yep, you wouldn’t know it was an error, and your vote would no longer count! There was a reject mechanism that was simply not turned on here. So Palast asked a Florida elections clerk a question, “By any chance, do you know the racial profile of counties where machines accept bad ballots?” His response: “We’ve been waiting for someone to ask that.” The proportion of uncounted ballots to the Black population, county by county, was nearly a perfect match. So Palast then asked if Harris and Jeb Bush were aware of this racially loaded technical problem. His answer from the clerk, “That’s why we set up this machine, so they could see it – BEFORE the election.” Umm, holy !
It wasn’t reported in mainstream press, but the NAACP sued Harris and the gang for the black purge, and won. The state threw up its hands immediately and said, ‘You got us! We’ll put these people back as soon as we can. The NCAACP simply wanted voting rights to be returned to those whom were wrongly named as felons, but Jeb Bush and Harris continues to refuse to restore their civil right to vote. Having not learned their lesson, the Florida legislature voted to bar the secretary of state (Harris) from ever again hiring an outside firm like DBT to generate a purge list. The legislature directed Harris to turn over this work to the experts, the Florida Association of Court Clerks. The problem for Republicans is that the Clerks had done this work before and in a reasonably fair, accurate and notably unbiased way.
Harris overcame the problem of the new law rather quickly: she broke it. The law says her office “may not hire an outside firm…”. Yet in August of 2001, Harris’ cronie, Clay Roberts, broke off a deal with the Florida Ass. of Court Clerks because they were going to spend too much - $750,000, which was $250,000 more than Harris was willing to spend. Nice sandbagging job Harris, considering she spent 4 million on Choicepoint:
http://archive.salon.com/politics/f.../08/04/florida/
Of course, in December 2001, they got it right. Harris shut the door for good on meetings with the FACC and hired an outside firm – deliberately against the new law. Roberts claimed Harris’ motives was because the FACC requested $300,000 for their new voting assessment system (considerably better than originally proposed $750,000). Strange, considering the new consulting firm being hired was getting a $1.6 million dollar contract. Oh yeah, the new firm for hire – Accenture – alias of Arthur Anderson Consulting. Jesus Christ oh mighty!:
http://www.sptimes.com/News/120201/...lls_arous.shtml
As for Choicepoint, they decided their voting database days are over, considering all the hoopla. Bush is handing them the big contracts in the War on Terror; immigration reviews, DNA cataloging, airport profiling, and their voting systems are being rolled out across the country. So I guess they’re just peachy now regardless.
In regards to Harris’ reply to Palast and calling his conclusions “twisted”, something interesting occurred in her reply. First off, she basically doesn’t deny the core allegation that her list of 57,700 felons contained the names of thousands of innocent Democratic voters. But what got Palast’s attention was Harris’ excuse for the illegal purge of out-of-state convicts. Harris wrote that the governor’s Office of Executive Clemency “issued a letter” telling her elections divisions to carry out the deed. Well, Palast called Harris’ clerk wondering if she could fax him a copy of this letter that came from the Governor’s Office of Executive Clemency - and he received it. It was dated September 18. It read as follows:
“Any individual whose civil rights were restored automatically by statute in the state of conviction, and does not have a written certificate or order, would be required to make application for restoration of civil rights in the State of Florida.”
This, of course, was in direct violation of Florida law – felons should not have had that requirement for an application of restoration. That was illegial, and both Bush and Harris knew it – but they required felons to do it anyway if they wanted to vote.
Well, that may be all well and good, but the problem is Palast called Janet Keels in Governor Bush’s Office of Executive Clemency for this same letter prior to Harris’ reply, and he received a completely different letter which said the exact opposite, which was dated FEBRUARY 18, and read,
“If a former felon’s civil rights were restored in another state, or if a person’s civil rights were never lost after being convicted of a felony in another state, the individual possesses his or her civil right in Florida and NEED NOT APPLY FOR RESTORATION OF CIVIL RIGHTS IN FLORIDA.”
Palast asked Janet Keels for the Sept. 18 memo, but was told it didn’t exist. How could that be, considering it’s what Harris was referring to? In other words, Jeb Bush’s office was trying to cover up the fact that felons did not need apply for restoration of civil rights. But Harris in her letter and thanks to her office referred to the wrong letter which supposedly didn’t exist, and was illegal in the first place. So not only was Jeb Bush and Harris deliberately lying, they were breaking the law.
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There’s also the question as to what Bush and the Repubs. really did with those overseas ballots, as well as their on-time validity:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstra...DAE0894D9404482
http://archive.salon.com/politics/f...03/05/military/
But that’s a little off topic here.
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Well, there you have it. I apologize again for the length. I wanted to make sure I got the details down pretty good. Again, be sure to check out the links – they are well worth the read. As for the material, I think it’s pretty obvious who won this election, and it’s pretty obvious who stole the election. As for whether both parties cheat in elections, I do agree with you there, but I have yet to come across an example of Democrats cheating to such an incredible extent, covering tens of thousands of voters. But I could be wrong. |
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| LiquidX |
| Interesting video, I just PRAY for it to be shown here in the states, Bush and his people would be so fried!;) |
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| nic01445 |
| quote: | Originally posted by LiquidX
Interesting video, I just PRAY for it to be shown here in the states, Bush and his people would be so fried!;) |
seriously.
i always heard that the election was stolen, but i never believed it because i was never presented any proof. man, im just blown away by how corrupt the US government is. i cant wait for this to get shown in the US. i doubt it will thought, esp with republican-controled government. :sadgreen: |
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| LiquidX |
| quote: | Originally posted by nic01445
seriously.
i always heard that the election was stolen, but i never believed it because i was never presented any proof. man, im just blown away by how corrupt the US government is. i cant wait for this to get shown in the US. i doubt it will thought, esp with republican-controled government. :sadgreen: |
LoL Bro, as you can see I live in Florida, you dont know all the crap that went down.. |
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