BBC-TV: "Set up to steal it again." Is 2008 already fixed?

[DJOldskool]

Quote:BBC-TV: "Set up to steal it again." Is 2008 already fixed?
Friday October 10, 2008

"A lot of Europeans wonder: Why are Americans so crazy, they keep reelecting this guy?" Well the answer is, we don't! They keep stealing these elections! And they stole it in 2000, they stole it in 2004,and they’re all set up to steal it again!" - Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on BBC Television Newsnight.

On Friday at 6pm and 10pm Eastern Time, BBC America will bust open the story of the systematic attack on US voters that could easily cost Barack Obama the White House.

Watch it, beginning Friday night, at http://www.Gregpalast.com.

Newsnight investigative reporter Greg Palast travels from the Native pueblos of New Mexico to the war-zone of the 8 Mile neighborhood of Detroit to meet some of the three million voters who have been disappeared by a GOP campaign draining voter rolls of the victims of the economic collapse.

In Detroit, Palast is bounced out of the local McCain headquarters - housed under the black flag (literally) of foreclosure profiteers. We meet Robert Pratt, a union worker, who fears he will lose his home - and his vote. Are the Republicans turning a economic devastation into an electoral bonanza?

BBC Reporter Palast follows the path of investigation laid out by civil rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - encountering along the way the Republican Party lawyers, funders - and Karl Rove. The GOP charges that the Democrats have registered five million fraudulent voters, a claim backed by a recent US government report. Palast meets the report's author - who claims her words were turned upside down. And they went to court to stop her from speaking out.

Democrats don't have clean hands either, as Palast discloses: from the Acoma Pueblo, we find Natives (almost all Democrats) who've had their ballots illegally junked by local Democrats.

But whichever party attacks the poor, it's McCain that's the winner.

Newsnight is the British Broadcasting Corporation's premier current affairs show. Broadcast earlier this week in London, it exposed the story of the mass purge of voters in Colorado, re-reported in the New York Times.

The show will be repeated 8am Eastern on Sunday.

*********
Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are co-authors of "Steal Back Your Vote" the investigative comic book and voter guide - available at StealBackYourVote.org. Jesse Jackson says "download it - NOW!"

Edit: Click here to view BBC Newsnight - The Theft of 2008

I now both parties are more or less the same on the main points, But I would certainly wish the Neo-cons dont get in again. McCain seems a lot like Bush, only more competant.

[Hans Olo]

Would like to see it. Let us know when it's on the tracker, thanks.

[rsol]

Quote:McCain seems a lot like Bush, only more competant.

Bush is perfectly competent. He's done exactly as he was briefed.

"Get us into a few wars and bankrupt the state George." "alrighty"

[DJOldskool]

Quote:

Quote:McCain seems a lot like Bush, only more competant.

Bush is perfectly competent. He's done exactly as he was briefed.

"Get us into a few wars and bankrupt the state George." "alrighty"

All bush seems to be is the one with the pen who signs things, its his mate Dick Cheney who is doing the work!

[Melchor]

I don't know if I agree with the proposition set up to steal it again. It reinforces the notion that we have free elections, which hasn't been the case in my lifetime at least. I think Obama is the better pick for TPTB anyway, because nobody buys the Neo-con agenda anymore except for the true Kool-Aid drinkers. Obama on the other hand has a large support group of young voters who are into politics but still in the two-party paradigm. Furthermore, the Congress is likely to increase it's democratic majority. Really I think that was the reason for them crashing the economy when they did. This way they get to pin it on Bush who is already discredited and a lame duck. I don't see them making McCain the president, unless they do it in such a way to make the fraud blatantly obvious to the sheep in order to foment riots. Guess we'll see though. No doubt the winner will be the candidate of the oligarchy, be it McCain or Obama.

As to McCain being more competent, have you seen some of his gaffes. He thinks Putin is the president of Germany. He wants to give bottled hot water to dehydrated babies. The guys cancer has to be back or he has way too much aluminum in his neural pathways. Either way he's clearly batshit crazy and incompetent.

[mothandrust]

Quote:I don't know if I agree with the proposition set up to steal it again. It reinforces the notion that we have free elections, which hasn't been the case in my lifetime at least. I think Obama is the better pick for TPTB anyway, because nobody buys the Neo-con agenda anymore except for the true Kool-Aid drinkers. Obama on the other hand has a large support group of young voters who are into politics but still in the two-party paradigm. Furthermore, the Congress is likely to increase it's democratic majority. Really I think that was the reason for them crashing the economy when they did. This way they get to pin it on Bush who is already discredited and a lame duck. I don't see them making McCain the president, unless they do it in such a way to make the fraud blatantly obvious to the sheep in order to foment riots. Guess we'll see though. No doubt the winner will be the candidate of the oligarchy, be it McCain or Obama.

As to McCain being more competent, have you seen some of his gaffes. He thinks Putin is the president of Germany. He wants to give bottled hot water to dehydrated babies. The guys cancer has to be back or he has way too much aluminum in his neural pathways. Either way he's clearly batshit crazy and incompetent.

sound argument. i am reminded of a quote from Malcolm X:

Quote:If the master's house caught on fire, the house Negro would fight harder to put the blaze out than the master would. If the master got sick, the house Negro would say, "What's the matter, boss, we sick?" We sick! He identified himself with his master, more than his master identified with himself. And if you came to the house Negro and said, "Let's run away, let's escape, let's separate," the house Negro would look at you and say, "Man, you crazy. What you mean, separate? Where is there a better house than this? Where can I wear better clothes than this? Where can I eat better food than this?" That was that house Negro. In those days he was called a "house nigger." And that's what we call them today, because we've still got some house niggers running around here.

[Easy Skanking]

Quote:The guys cancer has to be back or he has way too much aluminum in his neural pathways. Either way he's clearly batshit crazy and incompetent.

My opinion is that he truly is a Manchurian Candidate. You can just look into his eyes and see the glaze of mental conditioning in there. All of his goofs seem to be cracks in the programming.
Creepy.

I think it doesn't matter if the elections are fixed or not. Both parties are fronts for TPTB. I agree with Melchor in that the elections might be used as a tool to foment riots so they can declare martial law... as could electing Obama and then assassinating him. I just see so many opportunities they have set up to bring about one world government it's difficult to decipher which method will be the most likely.

[DJOldskool]

OK I'll have admit my mistake, I didn't know about all his gaffs. I just know about the'my fellow prisoners' speech.

TBH I havnt followed the elections closely, its more like a soap opera or schoolyard popularity contest, than a debate about how best to run the country.

[shoobdebabde]

Let's just put it this way: Voting is not at all essential to the process

[DJOldskool]

Had a thought on the subject of gaffs

Have all the presidents done this, I dont remember clinton doing it, What about Bush Sr and before? Any historians who have listened to a lot of their speeches?

Would be interesting to know.

[wakenthedead]

Is this out as a torrent yet anywhere? I tried to catch it on virgin replay (uk) and ended up watching friday's newsnight which was all about the economic meltdown (and was blatantly touting globalization as the answer to all our problems...and they had screen graphics which clearly said NEW WORLD ORDER, but no mention of this anywhere in the discussion - all very odd!).

[Guest]

I'd like to see it... never been disappointed by Palast... :)

[DJOldskool]

youtube link half way down page BBC Newsnight - The Theft of 2008

Havn't looked for a torrent of it yet.

[DJOldskool]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/m.s.-bellows...n_b_134920.html

Exclusive Interview: Voting Experts Bobby Kennedy and Greg Palast on How to "Steal Back Your Vote!"

The perennial issues of vote fraud and voter suppression are becoming front-page news as several states conduct early voting and as Election Day itself nears. The candidates themselves will continue to stump, trying to win votes in contested states, but after tonight's final debate, the parties will focus less on persuading undecided voters and instead put more and more energy into "get out the vote" or "GOTV" efforts or, more ominously, into "voter suppression" efforts, which discourage or bar the other side's likely voters from casting ballots.

GOTV includes simple acts like helping homebound voters obtain and cast absentee ballots or driving voters who don't have cars to the polls on Election Day. More broadly, the concept also can include all kinds of efforts to increase voter turnout: voter registration drives, websites that help voters confirm that they're still registered in time to fix any problems (one good, nonpartisan example is the National Association of Secretaries of State's CanIVote.org), and public service announcements reminding voters that Election Day is approaching.

Voter suppression practices are the flip side of such efforts. Suppression efforts can appear innocuous, such as requiring voters to show photo I.D.s - a requirement that excludes a surprising number of poor, minority, very young and very old voters and kept several elderly nuns from voting in Indiana's Democratic primary this year. Suppression can pose as false righteousness, such as Fox News's 342 negative mentions of a single voter-registration group in just four days (casting the group's efforts to register underrepresented demographics as a threat to democracy, and frightening voters registered by that group into thinking that their registrations might be unlawful), or the past Republican practice of stationing armed, uniformed "Ballot Integrity" personnel in minority polling places (again, tamping down turnout). And there is no lack of flatly illegal suppression schemes, such as vote "caging" (in which voter resident status is challenged merely because their house is in foreclosure or because a piece of direct mail was returned by the post office), robo-calls falsely telling voters their polling places have changed, and deceptive flyers (like the ones posted in Pennsylvania's inner-city and college neighborhoods, warning of police plans to arrest voters for unpaid child support or parking tickets).

The parties argue every year over whether vote suppression or vote fraud is the greater threat to democracy, but the numbers suggest that it's no contest: about six people are convicted each year of actually casting ballots fraudulently, while hundreds of thousands of people who are entitled to vote fail to do so because of misinformation, intimidation, deception, or bureaucratic hurdles.

Illustrating the point, the Republican National Committee has issued more than 50 press releases and convened at least 12 press conference calls in the past month to air complaints about the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now ("ACORN"), which turned in more than 1.3 million new voter registrations nationwide this year. The RNC has even unveiled silly anti-ACORN mascots in time for Wednesday night's final presidential debate. In a call just this morning, however, when I and other reporters pressed RNC communications director Danny Diaz and RNC chief counsel Sean Cairncross to name specific instances of ACORN-registered voters who had actually cast fraudulent ballots, they could name just one: a single Ohio man who was caught yesterday trying, unsuccessfully, to cast a fraudulent ballot. Even Florida's Republican governor says that his fellow Republicans may be exaggerating the problem.

Two of the most knowledgeable and outspoken advocates of voting rights are Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a law professor at Pace University and cohost of Air America Radio's "Ring of Fire," and Greg Palast, an investigative journalist with the BBC. Following the Florida debacle in 2000, it was Palast who dug deep and revealed the widespread suppression efforts that, in conjunction with the Supreme Court's order to stop counting votes, led to George W. Bush's 537-vote margin of victory. And Kennedy, in a Rolling Stone article last June, carefully explained how voter suppression and election fraud cost John Kerry enough key-state votes in 2004 to hand the election, again, to George W. Bush.

This year, Kennedy and Palast have teamed up to educate citizens about how their Constitutional voting rights could be taken away and how to protect themselves -- how to, in their words, "Steal Back Your Vote!" In a new Rolling Stone article, a movie, and even a comic book, Kennedy and Palast have outlined six ways votes could be stolen and seven ways voters can "steal them back." In an exclusive interview with OffTheBus, Kennedy and Palast explained, at breakneck pace, what they're afraid of this year -- and what they hope voters will do to make sure the 2008 election is fair, open, and small-d democratic.

In the first part of the interview, both Kennedy and Palast riff on an encyclopedia's worth of voter suppression information: the nonexistence of "voter fraud"; the history of Republican (and, in some cases, Democratic) efforts to suppress the votes of African American, Latino, American Indian, young, and senior citizen voters; the ways that seemingly sensible vote "protection" measures like photo I.D. and database cross-matching requirements are designed to reduce the Democratic vote; why "provisional ballots" are really just "placebo ballots"; why absentee ballots are a bad idea; how "fraud prevention" measures cost a group of elderly nuns their right to vote in the Indiana primaries; how Colorado's Republican former secretary of state wiped 1/5 of the names off the state's voter rolls without the Democratic governor even knowing; and the new methods being unveiled this year to disenfranchise voters.

Want to hear everything you need to know about vote fraud, vote suppression, and how to protect yourself, all in 15 minutes? Buckle your seat belt, download the mp3 podcast or click the player below, and hang on:


After the first part of our interview, Palast answered more questions about what concerned voters should expect in coming weeks. Want to know why Palast believes Colorado and Nevada may be this year's Florida and Ohio? How black students and black airmen were "caged" while they were away from their college addresses for the summer or deployed overseas? Instances of Democratic officials interfering with voting rights, either out of self-interest (e.g., to force through a uranium mine on sacred native lands) or because they incorrectly believe federal law requires it? What the relationship is between the US Attorney firings scandal and this year's Republican efforts to disenfranchise voters? Why Republicans are gunning for ACORN, and what other tricks might be in store between now and the election? And, most importantly, whether Mary Poppins will actually show up to vote on Nov. 4? You can listen to the audio player below, or you can download an mp3 of part 2 of our interview here. (18 min.; edited for length and clarity.)


More resources:Much more information is available from Kennedy and Palast's StealBackYourVote.org, including:

"Steal Back Your Vote!" comic book (available for download for a donation of any amount, or for purchase in hard copy; they're also making plates available so the comic can be reproduced by college newspapers, newsweeklies, and other periodicals)