what irony. russia lecturing America on democracy. from yesterday's pravda:

The stance taken by Bush and Blair in blowing their trumpets so often spells out two things: first, that they are deep-down uneasy with what they have done, indeed Tony Blair nearly resigned earlier this year and contemplated changing from Anglicanism to Catholicism, which, however noble a quest, reveals that he is troubled inside and second, this Anglo-Saxon Alliance remains and continues to be an insult to the international community which through the United Nations Organization, made one simple request: that Washington and London adhere to international law.

They did not because they had committed their troops in the area before bothering to find out the facts and were not man enough to back down. Bush and Blair do not stand for freedom and democracy or anything else because free and democratic states must follow the principles of freedom and democracy, namely debate, discussion, dialogue and the UN Security Council is the proper forum for crisis management, not the rule of the rifle.

Bush behaved like an American settler, taming the wilderness with the bullet and the Bible. Blair followed him because he would do anything to gain protagonism. It is as simple as that.

the lapdog media has a long history of protecting the bushit empire, and now they're out to destroy those who dare question their credibility. what a joke. what a sad, dastardly-evil joke.

couldn't have said it better myself, from TIA on DU:

To believe that Bush won the election, you must also believe:

1- That the exit polls were WRONG...

2- That Zogby's 5pm election day calls for Kerry winning OH, FL were WRONG. He was exactly RIGHT in his 2000 final poll.

3- That Harris last minute polling for Kerry was WRONG. He was exactly RIGHT in his 2000 final poll.

4- The Incumbent Rule I (that undecideds break for the challenger)was WRONG.

5- The 50% Rule was WRONG (that an incumbent doesn't do better than his final polling)

6- The Approval Rating Rule was WRONG (that an incumbent with less than 50% approval will most likely lose the election)

7- That Greg Palast was WRONG when he said that even before the election, 1 million votes were stolen from Kerry. He was the ONLY reporter to break the fact that 90,000 Florida blacks were disnfranchised in 2000.

8- That it was just a COINCIDENCE that the exit polls were CORRECT where there WAS a PAPER TRAIL and INCORRECT (+5% for Bush) where there was NO PAPER TRAIL.

9- That the surge in new young voters had NO positive effect for Kerry.

10- That Bush BEAT 99-1 mathematical odds in winning the election.

11- That Kerry did WORSE than Gore agains an opponent who LOST the support of SCORES of Republican newspapers who were for Bush in 2000.

12- That Bush did better than an 18 national poll average which showed him tied with Kerry at 47. In other words, Bush got 80% of the undecided vote to end up with a 51-48 majority - when ALL professional pollsters agree that the undecided vote ALWAYS goes to the challenger.

13- That Voting machines made by Republicans with no paper trail and with no software publication, which have been proven by thousands of computer scientists to be vulnerable in scores of ways, were NOT tampered with in this election

globe and mail has this interesting tidbit:

WASHINGTON -- What do moral values have to do with legalized brothels? Not much in Churchill County, Nevada, or so it seems.

Last week, the small county in northern Nevada voted 71 per cent for the re-election of President George W. Bush, whose campaign leaned heavily on fundamentalist Christian values such as opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion.

On the same ballot, voters also crushed an effort to ban the county's legalized brothels by a margin of nearly 2-1.

"It totally blows me away," said Alan Perazzo, head of the Coalition to End Prostitution in Churchill County. "I'm as confused as the next guy. We voted 72 per cent for Bush and 63 per cent to keep the brothels."

from the chitrib:
Some artillery guns fired white phosphorous rounds that create a screen of fire that cannot be extinguished with water, The Washington Post reported. Insurgents reported being attacked with a substance that melted their skin, a reaction consistent with white phosphorous burns.

Consortium News

George W. Bush’s vote tallies, especially in the key state of Florida, are so statistically stunning that they border on the unbelievable.

i'm confused. if the bush administration (i.e., allawi) will not negotiate with terrorists, then what was all the negotiations going on before this assault? we are not fighting terrorists. we are fighting iraqis who want more than what they're getting.

josh marshall puts the bushit win into perspective:

Another measure of the Bush landslide.

President Bush won reelection last Tuesday with 286 electoral votes (over Kerry's 252).

That is the second lowest electoral margin for the winning candidate since 1916 when Woodrow Wilson beat Charles Evans Hughes by a margin of 277 to 254.

(ed. note: Between 1900 and 1912, the size of the electoral college went from 447 to 531 -- only seven fewer than there are today. So comparisons to elections more than one hundred years ago don't work unless the electoral spread is judged in percentage terms.)

Given that fact, it seems worth pointing out that this election, rather than being a decisive win or a "landslide", was actually, by every objective measure, one of the half dozen or so closest presidential contests in modern American history, along with 1876, 1916, 1960, 1968 and 1976.

election problems nicely laid out at DU.

from keith oberman, who only now has put a smile on my face knowing that there are still some reasonable anchors over at cnn. anyway, he writes about ohio, and the bushfix saga that is rolling up to be a story with some headlines (hopefully, God willing):

Thus the majority of the media has yet to touch the other stories of Ohio (the amazing Bush Times Ten voting machine in Gahanna) or the sagas of Ohio South: huge margins for Bush in Florida counties in which registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans 2-1, places where the optical scanning of precinct totals seems to have turned results from perfect matches for the pro-Kerry exit poll data, to Bush sweeps.

somehow i knew this whole relationship with chalabi was going to backfire. the picture of him sitting next to laura bush during bush's SOTU speech after the invasion of iraq, is just priceless now. from the NY Times:

The two main religious Shiite parties in the interim Iraqi government have already banded together. But they face a formidable challenge to their prominence from an unlikely and possibly anti-American alliance that is looming between Ahmad Chalabi, the former exile and Pentagon favorite, and Moktada al-Sadr, the firebrand cleric who ignited two deadly uprisings against the Americans and the interim government.

are libertarians jumpin on the "stolen election" bandwagon? over on lew rockwell's site, one could certainly think so.

I want to know the truth and I'm not afraid to acknowledge that it appears that we have been bamboozled again in this election. There is too much evidence and I'm throwing a red flag on the field. Let's take a timeout, have an instant replay and review the evidence from all angles and then make an informed decision. The stakes are too high. Here's what makes me very uncomfortable;

1. WASHINGTON – November 4 – Teresa Fedor, [via Greg Lestini]
Ohio State Senator Teresa Fedor said today: "There was trouble with our elections in Ohio at every stage. It's been a battle getting people registered to vote, getting to the ballot on voting day and getting that vote to count. There is a pattern of voter suppression; that's why I called for [Ohio Secretary of State] Blackwell's resignation more than a month ago. Blackwell, while claiming to run an unbiased elections process, was also the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio. Additionally, he was the spokesperson for the anti-business, anti-family constitutional amendment "Issue 1," and a failed initiative to repeal a crucial sales-tax revenue source for the state. Blackwell learned his moves from the Katherine Harris playbook of Florida 2000, and we won't stand for it."

2. Susan Truitt, Co-founder of the Citizens Alliance for Secure Elections, Truitt said today: "Seven counties in Ohio have electronic voting machines and none of them have paper trails. That alone raises issues of accuracy and integrity as to how we can verify the count. A recount without a paper trail is meaningless; you just get a regurgitation of the data. Last year, Blackwell tried to get the entire state to buy new machines without a paper trail. The exit polls, virtually the only check we have against tampering with a vote without a paper trail, had shown Kerry with a lead. ... A poll worker told me this morning that there were no tapes of the results posted on some machines; on other machines the posted count was zero, which obviously shouldn't be the case."

3. Bob Fitrakis, an attorney who monitored the election with the Election Protection Coalition, said today: "There were far fewer machines in the inner-city districts than in the suburbs. I documented at least a dozen people leaving because the lines were so long in African-American areas. Blackwell did a great deal of suppressing before the election – like attempting to refuse to process voter registration forms. The absentee ballots were misleading in Franklin County. Kerry was the third line down, but you had to punch number four to vote for him. Bush was getting both his votes as well as Kerry's."

2. John Zogby, considered to be the "gold standard" of presidential polling, predicted that John Kerry and John Edwards would win with over 300 electoral votes. Following Zogby’s prediction to the letter, the preponderance of the exit polling stated that John Kerry would carry all of the major battleground states: Florida, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Oregon. These exit polls were interpreted as further confirmation of Zogby’s final predictions.

3. When comparing the exit polls to the actual "official" final results, it appears that EVERY state that had electronic voting, without paper trails, had an "unexplained" advantage for Bush of about 5%.

And it appears that EVERY STATE that had paper trails on their Electronic Voting, the exit poll results match the actual results reported within the margin of error.

So it appears that they remotely electronically messed with the electronic voting results in every state where they could get away with it (because there was no paper trail to disprove it in those states).

Does this sound like something Karl Rove might do to guarantee a victory for Bush? Don't answer – it's a rhetorical question.

SO HOW WAS THE ELECTION TECHNICALLY STOLEN?

Roz Hill explains how easy it is to steal an election with paperless electronic voting machines.

So, here are the numbers (so far): 112,596,922 voters counted in the presidential race. Bush has been consistently polling at 45%, which SHOULD have given him 50,668,614 votes, instead of 58,073,612. This translates into 7,404,998 votes being siphoned off from Kerry votes. Now, how does that magic work???

Taxpayers get hit with a bill for $3600 (or more) for EACH of the touch-screen "voting" computers, which are nothing more than dedicated COUNTERS except that they are marketed by Republicans (who vowed to ensure Bush's victory); and the American people have not been allowed to examine or certify the software in these units.

Here is how easy it is to "make magic";

We need COUNTERS - (B) = Bush; (K) = Kerry; (V) = Vote; (T) = Tally

If V = B, add 1 to B
If T = 8, add 1 to B; Clear T; Skip 3
If V = K, add 1 to K; Add 1 to T
This extremely simple bit of programming would shift 12% of the vote from Kerry to Bush, it would defy exit polls, and it would make it look like Bush had a huge popular win, which is precisely what happened.

At this point, why has no one raised the spectre of criminality or a criminal conspiracy to inflate votes for Bush and deflate tallies for Kerry via hacking the computerized voting machines?

In addition, it is highly suspicious to note that the scale of Bush’s vote far exceeded the best of the pre-election polling, which could certainly be explained by this scenario.

Time out is over and you've seen the evidence.

Is it too painful to acknowledge that we have been bamboozled or are you going to demand the truth?

then the kicker, for all the bush sympathizers out there, who voted for the king because he would do more than kerry to keep them safe.

SUCKERS!

WASHINGTON - Despite the Bush administration's pledge to battle terrorist financing, the government's average penalty against companies doing business with countries listed as terrorist-sponsoring states fell sharply after the Sept. 11 attacks, an Associated Press analysis of federal records shows.

The average penalty for a company doing business with Iran, Iraq (news - web sites), North Korea (news - web sites), Sudan or Libya dropped nearly threefold, from more than $50,000 in the five years before the 2001 attacks to about $18,700 afterward, according to a computer-assisted analysis of federal records.

After the attacks, Bush grouped North Korea, Iran and Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s Iraq together as an "axis of evil" countries with both weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorists.

A Treasury Department (news - web sites) spokeswoman said that despite the smaller average fines, the administration was doing a good job of enforcing economic penalties against nations considered sponsors of terrorism. Molly Millerwise said the department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, "is committed to ensuring that U.S. entities abide by U.S. sanction laws. We are not in the business of making money."

so you see, black is white, wrong is right. and you're stupid for not drinking the kool-aid.

and while all that is going on in iraq.... it's just not enough killing for king georgie. from the mercurynews:

Counterterror specialists look for ``chatter'' in Islamic extremist circles preceding an attack. There is a lot of chatter going on today in Washington -- only this time, it is about an American attack on Iran.

In seminars and hallways, there is eager anticipation of an airstrike against Iran's nuclear facilities. Sure, the talk goes, we may not get all those buried nuclear labs. But a few waves of cruise missiles and bombers will set Iran's program back several years, enough time to pursue regime change in Tehran.

The Iran buzz is loud enough to have prompted an unusual statement by British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw on Thursday that any attack on Iran would be ``inconceivable.'' In a message meant for Washington and for countrymen nervous about joining yet another war, Straw added: ``I don't see any circumstances in which military action would be justified against Iran, full stop.''

the assault on fallujah has begun. the 60-day martial law declared by allawi was just a signal, a ruse that there would still be time, but obviously, when you're working with the devil's handmaiden, you can't trust anything said.

the early reports:
from IFC (Information Clearing House)

11/06/04 "ICH" -- As the hubris of the American election is passed, the people of Fallujah are under new massive US assault. The world “only” superpower is posed to flatten the city of 300,000 people in order to pacify (kill) its citizens because of their opposition to US Occupation. This new massacre is sold by the Bush Administration and mainstream Western media as a “necessary step to hold election” in Iraq.

The US took over the main hospital and converted to a military hospital. In other words, the people of Fallujah no longer have a hospital to treat injured men, women and children. The US Occupation forces are currently preventing men of age 14-60 years from leaving the city. It is a crime against humanity to massacre unarmed civilians. US forces are also preventing journalists from entering the city to report on the ongoing massacre of innocent civilians.

As I write, the BBC reports that the US strikes on the centre of Fallujah have completely destroyed the Nazzal Emergency Hospital in the centre of the city. There are no reports on casualties of a criminal attack on a hospital in the centre of the city. Can you imagine this happening in Manchester or Boston?

In April 2004, the first US massive attacks on Fallujah killed more than 1300 Iraqis, mostly innocent women and children, reported by AFP. The heroic Iraqi Resistance forced the Marines to capitulate, and Fallujah became the symbol of Iraqi Resistance to US Occupation.

According to Rahul Mahajan of Empire Notes, who was in Fallujah at the time of the siege in April 2004, “[o]f 20 people I saw come into the clinic I observed in a few hours, only five were "military-age males." I saw old women, old men, a child of 10 shot through the head; terminal, the doctors told me, although in Baghdad they might have been able to save him”.

Since then, the city has been under constant aerial bombardments by US forces killing many more innocent civilians. Reuter’s news agency reported on September 02, 2004, the US killed 17 people, including 3 children, a woman and an elderly man. Reuters reported on the night of September 07, 2004, US warplanes and helicopters “pounded Fallujah all night and killed ‘up to 100 militants’ according to US military; though local hospital sources reported ‘only’ 6 dead and 23 wounded”.

The new assault comes even as Iraqi Muslim Scholars denounced the aerial bombardments as “terrorist acts”. In a statement to Aljazeera, they pointed out that the victims of the US air strikes were “women and children, most of them less than 10-years old”. They urged the international community to earnestly work for an end to the US acts of aggression in Iraq.

The Fallujah community leaders tried to negotiate a peaceful solution, but the US forces refused any negotiation. Instead, the US forces through their spokesman, Iyad Allawi, tried to paint a distorted picture of the people of Fallujah and opted for “military solution”.

The pretext for this barbarity is that the US intended to kill a “terrorist” by the name of al-Zarqawi. According to the people of Fallujah, “al-Zarqawi does not exist. He is a made-up figure”. The US Occupation forces in Iraq have been claiming that al-Zarqawi and his Arab and non-Iraqi Muslim fighters are hiding out in Fallujah. Dr Muhammad al-Hamadani, a Fallujah resident told Aljazeera News that he had no knowledge about any non-Iraqi fighters in the town.

It appears that al-Zarqawi is replacing the old and elusive pretext of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Unlike the WMD pretext, the al-Zarqawi pretext is dangerous because the one-leg elusive man can move site. In other word, if al-Zarqawi is not found in Fallujah, the Bush Administration can say that he run to another city.

However, according to Article 50 of the Geneva Conventions, “[t]he presence within the civilian population of individuals who do not come within the definition of civilians does not deprive the population of its civilian character”. The Bush Administration is committing war crimes in violations of international law.

The Iraqi Resistance has revealed the limits of the US superpower. Fallujah is the symbol of resistance to US hegemony. Fallujah is an example the Bush and his gang of terror are obsessed with and they want to destroy it. Bush and his gang of terror naïvely think that if they succeed in Fallujah, they will succeed in the rest of Iraq. Fortunately, they proved to be dead wrong.

then, the whores over at the NYTIMES:

The wave of attacks came a day after insurgents launched coordinated bomb and mortar attacks in Samarra and the surrounding area, killing at least 30 people, many of them Iraqi police officers. Those strikes demonstrated that a major American-led offensive last month in Samarra, a "no go" zone for the Americans during much of the summer, had failed to rid the city of insurgents or secure key parts of town. The senior American military official said that a "resurgence" of the insurgency had taken place because there was "a lag in providing sufficient Iraqi police."

Before the move into Falluja, about 10,000 American troops, mostly marines, amassed outside the city. Early Sunday and again Sunday night, American forces continued heavy aerial bombardments and artillery shelling of parts of Falluja, with explosions lighting up the night sky. The attacks were intended to weaken the defenses that the guerrillas had built up, the senior military official said.

Edward Wong provided reporting from Baghdad for this article. Iraqi employees of The New York Times also contributed reporting.

didn't they "practice" in samarra for the fallujah operation?

why bush's ownership & taxation reform plans will fail. it goes against every business model ever conceived. what he wants to do is tax those who work their asses off, while rewarding those that let money do the work.

we are not at that point in world relations to make this work. nice idea, but it can not work at this time.

bartcop has a thread that's interesting.

OHIO strikes again!

In a letter dated Oct. 21, Ken Nuss, former deputy director of the Auglaize County Board of Elections, claimed that Joe McGinnis, a former employee of Election Systems and Software (ES&S), the company that provides the voting system in Auglaize County, was on the main computer that is used to create the ballot and compile election results, which would go against election protocol. Nuss claimed in the letter that McGinnis was allowed to use the computer the weekend of Oct. 16.

Nuss, who resigned from his job Oct. 21 after being suspended for a day, was responsible for overseeing the computerized programming of election software, according to his job description. His resignation is effective Nov. 11.

SLASHDOT

Mihg writes "Try searching Google Images for abu ghraib, lynndie england, or Lynndie's boyfriend charles graner and note how you don't get any pictures of US soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners of war. Now try it with some of their competitors, like AltaVista, Lycos, or Yahoo!. Google used to be able to find them, as is discussed in this AnandTech forum thread." I'm guesing that this is another case of our administration confusing "National Security" with "Politically Undesirable".

motherjones is uberfabulous:

Norquist calls it the "Leave-Us-Alone Coalition," a grouping of gun owners, the Christian right, homeschoolers, libertarians, and business leaders that he has almost single-handedly managed to unite. The common vision: an America in which the rich will be taxed at the same rates as the poor, where capital is freed from government constraints, where government services are turned over to the free market, where the minimum wage is repealed, unions are made irrelevant, and law-abiding citizens can pack handguns in every state and town. "My ideal citizen is the self-employed, homeschooling, IRA-owning guy with a concealed-carry permit," says Norquist. "Because that person doesn't need the goddamn government for anything."

Few in American politics are as blunt about their plans. "If the American people really want to know what George W. Bush is up to, the best place to look is the candor of Grover Norquist," says Ralph G. Neas, president of People for the American Way. Norquist is not above equating tax collection with a street mugging, or suggesting that arguments for higher taxes on rich people echo the ones Nazis used to justify their targeting of Jews. "Bipartisanship is another name for date rape," he told a reporter in May, borrowing a phrase from former House Majority Leader Dick Armey. He likes to say he wants to shrink the size of government in half over the next 25 years "to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

the scariest line of the day (and there are indeed too many to remember):

The church has been awakened to its responsibility to keep this nation the way God intended it to be.

what better way to effectuate a perfect coup, than by using untraceable, proprietary coded vote counters?

whenever i need to point out the hypocrisy of the new league of biblethumpers, all i have to do is point to the superbowl of 2003. remember that? when janet had that costume malfunction, and the evangelicals saw the chance to get the natives riled up in a frenzy? their screaming bloody hell over a tit, and how were they going to explain it to the millions of children who were glued to the television.

i have one question: how did you explain erectile dysfunction lasting more than 4 hours? although my bets are that they wouldn't know anything about such things, they no doubt would have tried to justify their tit-anger by saying commercials aren't the same thing.

the thing that gives me the edge is that i know what goes on behind closed doors. homosexuals will have knowledge that some will be working to hide. homosexuals know all too well the hypocritical personalities some have. homosexuals naturally see both sides (and by virtue, have better compromising abilities) especially when they're still living in the closet.

yet, the christian reich will have you believe that that's evil. that they can say God loves them more with a straight face is truly amusing.