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Blog: 9/11 -- No planes, just special effects  
This one takes us deep down the rabbit hole.

On 9/11, "hijacked airliners" did things that were physically impossible and beyond the capacity of any pilots, experienced or not.

Here's why the news media doesn't want to look too closely into the simple, indisputable facts of aviation reality.

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/401.html

- Brasscheck


P.S. Please share Brasscheck TV e-mails and videos with friends and colleagues.

That's how we grow. Thanks.


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Posted: Aug 12, 2008 9:37am | comment (1) | discuss (0) | permalink
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Blog: Rein in DHS Travel Abuses  


Planning a vacation? Thinking about traveling outside the country?

If you travel outside the United States, you can kiss your right to privacy, and perhaps your laptop, digital camera and cell phone, goodbye.

With no suspicion and no explanation, the U.S. government can seize your laptop, cell phone, or PDA as you enter the United States and download all your private information -- including your personal and business documents, emails, phone calls, and web history. The Department of Homeland Security confirms that this is the official policy.

Tell Congress: it’s time to rein in travel abuses by the Department of Homeland Security.

What happens if you refuse to let the agents download your personal photos? Or if you have encrypted your private information? Then Border Patrol -- which is now an agency of the Department of Homeland Security -- can simply copy your entire hard drive or even take your device and hang on to it indefinitely.

Unfortunately, seizing laptops and cameras at the border isn’t the only travel security measure that infringes on our civil liberties.

Just last month, the U.S. government's "terrorist watch list" surpassed one million names and is growing by over twenty-thousand names per month. The watch list includes the names of prominent people, like Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), plus hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans -- many of them with common names like Robert Johnson and James Robinson. Your name might be on the list, but there's no way to know for sure until you are delayed -- or even detained for hours in a back room. If you discover your name is on the list, it's nearly impossible to get off. It actually took an Act of Congress to get Nelson Mandela off the list. No joke. An Act of Congress.

These abuses have something in common: They make all of us into suspects, with no rule of law and no accountability.

Tell Congress: it’s time to rein in travel abuses by the Department of Homeland Security.

It’s hard to know what surveillance-state bureaucrats will come up with next. For instance, many airports are using scanners that are so invasive that they are like a virtual strip search! See-through body scanning machines are capable of showing an image of a passenger's naked body. Security measures like this are extremely intrusive -- and should only be used when there is good cause to suspect that an individual is a security risk.

And recently, the TSA expressed interest in having every traveler wear an "electro-muscular disruption" bracelet that airline personnel or marshals could use to shock passengers into submission. Unless something is done, this plan may not be as far-fetched as one would think.

Tell Congress: it’s time to rein in travel abuses by the Department of Homeland Security.

Traveling shouldn’t mean checking your rights when you’re checking your luggage. It’s time for some sanity when it comes to security. Please, speak out now.

Caroline Fredrickson, ACLU
Caroline Fredrickson, Director
ACLU Washington Legislative Office

P.S. Many Americans don’t know about these travel abuses. Please forward this email on to anyone you know who travels and ask them to take action, too.

© ACLU, 125 Broad Street, 18th Floor New York, NY 10004

 
Posted: Aug 7, 2008 4:35pm | comment (0) | discuss (0) | permalink
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Alert: Justice for Julie  
Focus: Civil Rights
Action Request: Petition
Location: United States
Justice for Julie

Target: Kevin Kane, Thomas Griffin, State's Attorneys, Connecticut

Sponsored by: The Care2 Coalition for Justice

Horror story of a substitute teacher right here in my home state, tried and wrongly convicted on several counts of Risk of Injury to a Minor.

Her conviction was overturned over a year ago on the basis of shoddy police work, school negligence and flawed "expert" testimony. She still faces 40 years in prison if tried and convicted again. 

Why won't Connecticut leave her alone? The State's Attorney won't drop the charges and won't schedule a new trial.

Please sign to ask Connecticut prosecutors to DROP all the charges still pending aainst Julie, who is guilty of nothing more than computer illiteracy and working in a school system that failed to comply with state regulations on classroom computer security.

You can read her full story here:

Justice for Julie

Case against Julie Amero needs to be deleted 
 
Let's End Teacher's Long Nightmare

NEW!   MORE INFO HERE: Mouse-Trapped



PLEASE SIGN HERE.

 
Posted: Aug 3, 2008 9:40am | comment (0) | discuss (0) | permalink
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Blog: IN SOLIDARITY FOR CATE -- WHO HAD THIS ARTICLE WRONGFULLY REMOVED FROM C2NN  
July 18, 2008
The Audacity of Vanity
By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama wants to speak at the Brandenburg Gate.

He figures it would be a nice backdrop. The supporting cast -- a cheering audience and a few fainting frauleins -- would be a picturesque way to bolster his foreign policy credentials.

What Obama does not seem to understand is that the Brandenburg Gate is something you earn. President Reagan earned the right to speak there because his relentless pressure had brought the Soviet empire to its knees and he was demanding its final "tear down this wall" liquidation. When President Kennedy visited the Brandenburg Gate on the day of his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, he was representing a country that was prepared to go to the brink of nuclear war to defend West Berlin.

Who is Obama representing? And what exactly has he done in his lifetime to merit appropriating the Brandenburg Gate as a campaign prop? What was his role in the fight against communism, the liberation of Eastern Europe, the creation of what George Bush 41 -- who presided over the fall of the Berlin Wall but modestly declined to go there for a victory lap -- called "a Europe whole and free"?

Does Obama not see the incongruity? It's as if a German pol took a campaign trip to America and demanded the Statue of Liberty as a venue for a campaign speech. (The Germans have now gently nudged Obama into looking at other venues.)

Americans are beginning to notice Obama's elevated opinion of himself.

There's nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?

Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted "present" nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.

It is a subject upon which he can dilate effortlessly. In his victory speech upon winning the nomination, Obama declared it a great turning point in history -- "generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment" -- when, among other wonders, "the rise of the oceans began to slow." As economist Irwin Stelzer noted in his London Daily Telegraph column, "Moses made the waters recede, but he had help." Obama apparently works alone.

Obama may think he's King Canute, but the good king ordered the tides to halt precisely to refute sycophantic aides who suggested that he had such power. Obama has no such modesty.

After all, in the words of his own slogan, "we are the ones we've been waiting for," which, translating the royal "we," means: "I am the one we've been waiting for." Amazingly, he had a quasi-presidential seal with its own Latin inscription affixed to his podium, until general ridicule -- it was pointed out that he was not yet president -- induced him to take it down

He lectures us that instead of worrying about immigrants learning English, "you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish" -- a language Obama does not speak. He further admonishes us on how "embarrassing" it is that Europeans are multilingual but "we go over to Europe, and all we can say is, 'merci beaucoup.'" Obama speaks no French.

His fluent English does, however, feature many such admonitions, instructions and improvements. His wife assures us that President Obama will be a stern taskmaster: "Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism ... that you come out of your isolation. ... Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."

For the first few months of the campaign, the question about Obama was: Who is he? The question now is: Who does he think he is?

We are getting to know. Redeemer of our uninvolved, uninformed lives. Lord of the seas. And more. As he said on victory night, his rise marks the moment when "our planet began to heal." As I recall -- I'm no expert on this -- Jesus practiced his healing just on the sick. Obama operates on a larger canvas.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

Copyright 2008, Washington Post Writers Group

Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/07/obamas_egoaccomplishment_gap.html at July 24, 2008 - 03:59:09 PM PDT

 
Posted: Jul 24, 2008 3:51pm | comment (0) | discuss (0) | permalink
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Blog: Mail Ballots - cost, convenience, voter turnout, and other lies  

July 18, 2008

Mail Ballots - cost, convenience, voter turnout, and other lies

By Charles Corry

~
In Colorado we are approaching a primary election on August 12th and bumbling county clerks and other election entities are scrambling to promote mail balloting. Ostensibly they are doing this for the convenience of the voters, to save money, and to increase turnout. At least those are the reasons we've been given in the past for why we should use this fraud-prone method of voting.
But in 2008 a record turnout of voters is expected so the latter reason doesn't apply.
~
Now convenience is used. However, in El Paso County the only time we've had significant lines at the polls are when the clerk let a few precincts in the eastern part of the county run out of ballots. Some counties have been experimenting with vote centers using electronic poll books together with DREs and huge lines have formed when things went wrong with those experiments. So again the problem is with the county clerks, not precinct voting. However, voters are now so scared of what the county clerk has done to precinct voting that mail ballots may seem the better alternative to them. At least they won't have to stand in line until 1:30 AM the next morning to vote as many have had to do in recent Colorado failed election experiments.
~
So we are down to cost as a reason that has been given in the past for promoting mail ballots. But in a presidential election Colorado law requires county clerks to have all precincts open for voting in any case. Where is the cost savings?
~
Why then are county clerks repeatedly spending tens of thousands of dollars to send out promotional materials for mail ballots at public expense? Ostensibly, election officials should be neutral as to the choice of voting. But tens of thousands more mail ballots have now been sent because of intense and expensive promotion by our, and other Colorado county clerks.
~
Curiouser and curiouser
~
Recently, under the guise of mailing a "Voter Identification Card" (incidentally these used to be a convenient wallet size and now measure 14 x 22 cm, or 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches) the El Paso County, Colorado, Clerk recently sent out another mail ballot promotion that had some very interesting characteristics.
In the Balink-ID_theft.pdf attachment I've reproduced a postcard voters were supposed to return to the clerk to get a mail ballot. I don't know about identity theft where you live but here only an idiot would put their name, address, driver's license number, birth date, and signature all together on a postcard. Voters have complained long and loud about just having their signature on the outside of a mail ballot. Now we get this nonsense and these are the people running the elections!
~
OK, so anyone smarter than the county clerk and his minions won't fill out this postcard and stick it in the mail as is, or at least we can hope for that.
But the problems don't stop there. Note on the postcard (Balink-ID_theft.pdf attachment ) that a voter can have three, yes three, addresses. Now to register to vote you must provide a physical residential address, i.e, not a business, vacant lot, etc. As mail service may not be available to that address a voter may use a post office box, etc. So a separate mailing address is allowed. That contributes to the problems with fraud for mail ballots as many ballots may be sent to the same box, or the mailing address may be a forwarding service for someone in Beijing, or some other scam. But the address problem doesn't end there as a voter who wants to sign up for a "permanent" mail ballot is asked to list yet a third address. Presumably, once a "voter" has signed up for a "permanent" mail ballot they will be mailed a ballot to this third address for every election in the future unless "they" don't vote in two consecutive federal elections, their ballot is returned as undeliverable and "they" don't respond to the clerk's query. Note that with mail ballots there is no way to check whether "they" are corporeal now or in the future. And there is really no way to check if someone using a mail ballot is actually eligible to vote in the election.
~
Now some dirty Democrat in Boulder County who wants to rig El Paso County elections can use a mailing address for their "permanent" mail ballot that is valid and the clerk really has no way to check once the "they" are initially registered (hey, it happened to me and I only found out by accident). Of course no god-fearing Republican in El Paso County would ever do the same to rig elections in Boulder County but Republicans are going to need a lot of election fraud in 2008 if John McCain is going to win.
~
If you haven't figured out how to commit election fraud using mail ballots yet then I've got a great bridge (mostly) across Bear Creek you'll definitely be interested in. And I really shouldn't single out the El Paso County Clerk as he and his minions are simply going along with the rest of the lemmings.
~
Voter registration databases
~
Any computer geek will tell you that many of the problems with elections can be stopped or greatly limited with a properly designed and maintained voter registration database, which is true. The problem is we don't have such a database. In the past ten years Colorado has not successfully deployed even one large database and we are on our second try for an election database that will be used for the first time in 2008 elections.
~
How is that database doing? A letter to State Senator Dave Schultheis (Schultheis-SCORE_report.pdf ) written by Al Kolwicz is attached reviewing results from Boulder County. Note that we have not been able to examine the entire database, or even been given an entity relationship diagram (ERD), so the review is extremely cursory. But even these results indicate a database disaster, e.g., in the limited data available 35 non-citizens are registered to vote, 33 don't have a precinct number and invalid precinct numbers are present in the database, invalid addresses are included, more ballots can be cast than there apparently are registered voters because of "confidential' voters (sign up for a mail ballot as a "confidential" voter if you want to work from Shanghai), and on and on.
~
Bear with me for a moment for technical details on a relational database management system -- RDBMS -- like Oracle, which Colorado is using for its voter registration database, and how the problems outlined in Kolwicz's letter are prevented by what is known as referential integrity (RI). RI is essential in a database if it is to be of any value. For example, two identical social security numbers (SSN) for two different people make that data worthless. Typically the data architect or modeler would put a unique index on the SSN entity in the RDBMS. Also, a SSN is numeric so any alpha characters, e.g., "-",
would be stripped out before entering the data. Further, the range would be controlled by a "rule." SSN's are always positive and range from 001010001 to 999999999. Any number outside that range could not be entered into the database if properly designed and RI is intact. Other "rules" would control what data can be entered into other database entities, e.g., a number or odd character like "^" could not be entered into a last name field.
~
Other entities within the database may be affected when data are inserted, deleted, or updated. For example, if a new SSN is entered then a name must be entered as well, and perhaps other data. Or if a SSN is deleted from the database then the name and other associated information must be deleted as well. To insure all those things happen typically "triggers" are used with the RDBMS to take care of these relationships and insure RI.
~
RI may also be insured by stored procedures within the RDBMS, front-end programs, and external scripts (e.g., Korn shell on Unix machines and one prays they have this database on a Unix server). In a well-designed database there are always several layers of referential integrity to insure and maintain data quality.
Obviously, the design and development of a RDBMS is time consuming, expensive, and requires highly-skilled database architects, modelers, and developers, who were in very short supply when I was working in this field. And it is just as obvious from even the very truncated view Kolwicz has been able to obtain of the SCORE II voter registration database that the design and implementation was not done by people with the requisite skills to implement the essential referential integrity. And without proper RI the security of the database is impossible to maintain as well. And to make matters worse we can't even determine that all the requisite entities are defined in SCORE II.
Clearly an honest election is not, and cannot be possible without a properly designed and implemented voter registration database.

Up the creek and looking for a paddle
~
As I was writing this newsletter KIm Zetter published an article in Wired Magazine documenting that in New York State 50% of the new Sequoia voting machines are flawed. Note that these are new machines built after a decade of experience behind the company. However, Sequoia has simply ignored all the critiques of electronic voting machines and simply produced more junk.
The mantra of voting machine vendors and election officials when questioned about the manifold disasters, catastrophes, and security breaches (typically referred to as "glitches") so evident since the widespread implementation of electronic voting is that the "election process" will protect the votes and voters against the weaknesses of the electronic voting machines and guarantee an honest and accurate election. Possibly someone besides election officials still believes that but even the voting machine vendors must be incredulous by now.
To add to the farce our elections have become, county clerks are using mail ballots counted on secret machines hidden in back rooms, and operated either by the voting machine vendors or government employees. History clearly demonstrates that is a steep path to election fraud.

Election fraud for fun and profit
~
The following problems stand out for the 2008 elections in Colorado, and probably in many, if not most other areas in the United States:
  • Voter registration database was poorly designed and implemented without adequate, or possibly any referential integrity (RI).
  • Security of the voter registration database without RI cannot be maintained.
  • Election fraud is enabled by mail balloting.
  • Election fraud is enabled by counting ballots in the "back room" out of public view.
  • Clerks are either deliberately or naively using mail ballots to minimize or cover up problems with the voter registration database and electronic voting machines.
  • Election fraud is enabled by using electronic vote counting machines running on secret code using a Microsoft Windows operating system.
  • With electronic voting there is no protection against an insider attack.
  • It is virtually impossible to distinguish between election fraud and simple incompetence.
  • Even in the extremely rare cases where election fraud has been proven courts have virtually never reversed the fraudulent election results.
    •
I have been stating these problems for nearly a decade now so there aren't any secrets or revelations here. At this late date the only solution seems to be extensive audits of paper ballots where they are used. And for a meaningful audit a printed poll book is essential and the ballots must be counted by hand. Obviously an audit of DREs is meaningless and simply running paper ballots through an optical scanner a second time proves nothing.
~
Halderman, Shacham, Rescorla, and Wagner offer more extensive suggestions in You Go to Elections with the Voting System You Have: Stop-Gap Mitigations for Deployed Voting Systems. As Halderman et al. put it: "In light of the systemic vulnerabilities uncovered by recent reviews of deployed e-voting systems, the surest way to secure the voting process would be to scrap the existing systems and design new ones." As they point out new systems will take years to design, develop, and test and many billions more of taxpayer dollars and in all probability the next generation won't be any more transparent or reliable than what we have now given New York's experience with Sequoia.
~
Why not just junk all of the electronic "vote counting" machines, DREs and optical scanners, and count the ballots by hand? There is no need, or even possibility with e-voting machines, that election results will be available Election Night. A longer wait is worth the accuracy.
~
It should go without saying that referential integrity must be implemented and maintained on the statewide voter registration database and security put in place that works. The database design and integrity must also be subject to public review by qualified citizens.
~
When something is broken and can't be fixed it is a common ploy of children and bureaucrats to attempt to hide it. With regard to electronic voting, mail ballots are just such a childish tactic, fertile ground on which election fraud will grow.
A further caveat is that every election process and device must be completely transparent to concerned citizens.
Charles E. Corry, Ph.D., F.G.S.A.

About the author
Dr. Corry is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and an internationally-known research scientist whose biography has appeared in Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in America, Who's Who in Science and Engineering, among others, for more than ten years.
After service with 1st Marines he became involved with the early space program in 1960, doing preflight testing and failure analysis on Atlas and Centaur missiles, including all the Project Mercury birds. In 1965 he switched to oceanography and did research at both Scripps Institution in San Diego and Woods Hole Oceanographic on Cape Cod. He has also taught geophysics at university and worked as a research manager for a Fortune 500 company.
Dr. Corry became interested in the problems with electronic voting machines in 2000 while a member of the board of the local chapter of the ACLU. In 2001 colleagues from Schreiver Air Force Base suggested he join the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Voting Equipment Standards committee and he has served on that since. By 2002 his interest in election problems had expanded to issues with mail ballots. Working with Al Kolwicz and others, he helped defeat Amendment 28 that would have mandated all Colorado elections be done by mail balloting that year.
Presently Dr. Corry is president and founding director of the Equal Justice Foundation.




Authors Bio: Dr. Charles Corry is President of the Equal Justice Foundation.

 
Posted: Jul 18, 2008 1:21pm | comment (0) | discuss (0) | permalink
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Blog: Conyers Trying to Avoid Impeachment of Bush and Cheney  
Ok, Patriots . . . THIS SH*T HAS GONE FAR ENOUGH!
Take a stand -- we are ALL being toyed with and mocked!

Note it, circulate it, and act on it!!!!

*C*

IMPEACH THEM!



Conyers Trying to Avoid Impeachment of Bush and Cheney
".....left little doubt that the committee's review was meant to fend off demands....for impeachment.."

HEY FOLKS, IT'S TIME WE MADE IT CLEAR TO CONYERS WE WON'T TAKE THIS GARBAGE.
They can still attack Iran and destroy the US even more than they have...

 
Posted: Jul 18, 2008 10:43am | comment (0) | discuss (0) | permalink
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Blog: Ohio Attorney Files to Lift Stay on '04 Election Case, Cites Allegations, Evidence of Massive Fraud by a Number of GOP Operative  
Ohio Attorney Files to Lift Stay on '04 Election Case, Cites Allegations, Evidence of Massive Fraud by a Number of GOP Operatives
Leading Data Security Expert Joins Press Conference, Case, Notes Fraudulent Patterns That Should Have Triggered Investigation
Motion to Proceed with Targeted Discovery in Case Explained as Effort to Help Protect Integrity of '08 Election...

-- Special to The BRAD BLOG by Steve Heller of Velvet Revolution

At a press conference this morning in Columbus, Ohio, Cliff Arnebeck, lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the case of King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell, announced that he is filing a motion to "lift the stay in the case [and] proceed with targeted discovery in order to help protect the integrity of the 2008 election."

"We anticipate Mr. Rove will be identified as having engaged in a corrupt, ongoing pattern of corrupt activities specifically affecting the situation here in Ohio."

Arnebeck will also "be providing copies of document hold notices to the U.S .Chamber Institute for Legal Reform and the U.S. Justice Department for Karl Rove emails from the White House."

This case has the potential to put some of the most powerful people in the country in jail, according to Arnebeck, as he was joined by a well-respected, life-long Republican computer security expert who charged that the red flags seen during Ohio's 2004 Presidential Election would have been cause for "a fraud investigation in a bank, but it doesn't when it comes to our vote."

"This entire system is being programmed in secret by programmers who have no oversight by anybody," the expert charged, as Arnebeck detailed allegations of complicity by a number of powerful GOP operatives and companies who had unique access both to the election results as reported in 2004, as well as to U.S. House and Senate computer networks even today.

The presser was attended by some of the corporate-controlled media, including the head of the Ohio AP bureau, the Columbus Dispatch, and IndyMedia. Listening in by phone were ABC News, our friends from RAW STORY, and me, your humble blogger. I recorded the presser, so I have no links for the quotes in this post, but I transcribed them word-for-word and can vouch for their accuracy.

One of the more delightful and interesting quotes comes from Arnebeck, concerning what he expects to discovery as the stay is lifted: "[W]e anticipate Mr. Rove will be identified as having engaged in a corrupt, ongoing pattern of corrupt activities specifically affecting the situation here in Ohio"...

According to Arnebeck, his expert witness, Stephen Spoonamore, "works for credit card companies chasing data thieves, identity thieves around the globe, and also consults with government agencies including the Secret Service, the Pentagon, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in criminal matters. [He's] really one of the top, and in fact the top private cop in the world on the subject of data security."

First, some background. The King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case was filed on August 31, 2006. At issue was "whether the rights, privileges, and immunities guaranteed to Plaintiffs by the Civil Rights Act, and the First, Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution have been violated by the past and ongoing conduct of Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell in connection with past elections in Ohio."

A stay was previously entered into on joint motion of the parties, Ohio's Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner and the plaintiffs, to support settlement discussions in the case. "At one point," Arnebeck noted this morning, "this was interrupted when the Secretary wanted to bring all the ballots that had been ordered preserved by Judge Marbley, bring them in to one location. When the ballots came in, there was significant omissions and reports of the destruction of some of the ballots."

The BRAD BLOG reported previously on some of some of the ballots missing from 56 of Ohio's 88 counties, despite the federal court order.

Arnebeck explained that part of the reason for the stay, at the time, was to allow the Ohio Attorney General to proceed first, as provided in Ohio House Bill 3 which states, in part:
...the attorney general may initiate criminal proceedings for election fraud under section 3599.42 of the Revised Code which results from a violation of any provision of Title XXXV of the Revised Code, other than Chapter 3517. of the Revised Code, involving voting, an initiative or referendum petition process, or the conducting of an election, by presenting evidence of criminal violations in question to the prosecuting attorney of any county in which the violations may be prosecuted. If the prosecuting attorney does not prosecute the violations within a reasonable time or requests the attorney general to do so, the attorney general may proceed with the prosecution of the violations with all of the rights, privileges, and powers conferred by law on a prosecuting attorney, including, but not limited to, the power to appear before a grand jury and to interrogate witnesses before a grand jury.

Arnebeck said that the Attorney General's office said they were ready to begin the investigation of the 2004 presidential election in Ohio, and Arnebeck said he submitted a great deal of material to them, including "Bob's [Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman's] book on what happened in Ohio, documentation of the exit poll discrepancy, [and] John Conyers' report to the Congress which was the factual basis for the challenge to the electoral votes of the Ohio vote in January of 2005."

About a month later, the Attorney General's office contacted Arnebeck and asked him, "Who do you want to indict?"

Arnebeck explained that the AG's "concept of looking at this from a criminal standpoint was not to convene a grand jury and cast the net broadly and use the grand jury process to investigate and narrow the focus into the question of who may have tampered with those votes. But rather they wanted us to come to them with a more focused case."

Arnebeck then informed the AG that they were going to file the motion to lift the stay so that the plaintiffs "could proceed with the civil case in order to collect discovery to do that" and create a more focused case.

Fitrakis, who was also at today's presser, said that early on they went to Washington and met with the House Judiciary staff who agreed to come to Ohio in early March of 2007. Fitrakis informed Ohio's then-Attorney General Mark Dann's office, but the office never got back to them.

Arnebeck said they are prepared "to go after the issues of election integrity in a very targeted way, as opposed to a casting of a fishing net. We're able to do some 'rifle shots.'"

Arnebeck also explained that he met with Conyers within the last two weeks. He made Chair of the House Judiciary Committee aware of what they have: new resources and information, and the assistance of Spoonamore to help the state of Ohio, the Congress, and the court understand what needs to be done to help secure the 2008 election.

Also, Arnebeck has sent out document "hold" notices. A hold notice is, essentially, a letter sent to the parties of a lawsuit informing them of their legal obligation to hold on to (and not destroy) all relevant documents, including electronic documents such as emails, pending the outcome of the suit.

Hold letters have been sent to the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, asking them to hold documents relating to their activities to use corporate money to influence the Ohio Supreme Court elections. Another hold letter was sent to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey asking that he advise the federal government to hold emails from Karl Rove.

Arnebeck said "We think [Rove] is an individual who has been at the center of both the use of corporate money to attack state Attorneys General and their elections and candidates for the Supreme Court and their elections in the states, and also in the manipulation of the election process.

"We expressed concern about the reports that Mr. Rove destroyed his emails and suggested that we want the duplicates that should exist [be put] under the control of the Secret Service and be sure that those are retained, as well as those on the receiving end in the Justice Department and elsewhere, that those documents are retained for purposes of this litigation, in which we anticipate Mr. Rove will be identified as having engaged in a corrupt, ongoing pattern of corrupt activities specifically affecting the situation here in Ohio."

Arnebeck said they are prepared "to go after the issues of election integrity in a very targeted way, as opposed to a casting of a fishing net. We're able to do some 'rifle shots.'"

Along those lines, Arnebeck plans to subpoena and depose GOP operative Michael (Mike) L. Connell, who as described by SourceWatch, is....
Chief Political Strategist and CEO of New Media Communications, Inc., a Republican website development and internet services firm based in Richfield, OH.

New Media's GOP clients are a "'Who's Who' of Republican politics", having provided campaign web services and Internet strategy for Bush-Cheney 2000/2004, as well as Republicans such as Dick Armey, Spencer Abraham for Senate 2000, Heather Wilson for Congress 2000/2002/2004, Rick Santorum for Senate 2000/2006, and John Thune for Senate 2002/2004 to name just a few. New Media also designed GOP.com for the Republican National Committee, RGA.org for the Republican Governors Association, and between two and three dozen state GOP sites.

According to Arnebeck, Connell "[D]esigns websites and he manages the information technology. Interestingly, he's done this for the Bush campaign of 2000 and the Bush campaign of 2004. Simultaneously, he was doing IT work for the State of Florida in 2000, and for the office of the [Ohio] Secretary of State in 2004.

"And just think of this: here's a person who is an instrument of a major presidential campaign simultaneously setting up the hosting of the votes in the Ohio election."

"And just think of this: here's a person who is an instrument of a major presidential campaign simultaneously setting up the hosting of the votes in the Ohio election."

Arnebeck added: "We're not saying that he [Connell] did anything wrong in the sense of his conduct, but we're saying that these conflicting roles raise some issues."

According to Arnebeck, "Mr. Connell also worked with the various front groups for the US Chamber, tobacco industry front groups, and starting in 2000 after the New Hampshire primary, there was an unleashing of a variety of these Washington-based lobbying groups that created these phony grass-roots groups that attack candidates, supposedly independently. We believe there is clear evidence of a coordinated campaign in which Mr. Rove is involved, in which Mr. Connell is an instrument. And this emphasizes his value of a witness in bringing some of this together."

Indeed, Arnebeck believes that Connell's role in the suit, at least at first, will be that of a witness. "He, by virtue of his involvement in a variety of these roles that we're concerned with --- as a witness, he can provide a perspective. He's the one person who can bring a great deal of information together to better inform folks of what happened and what some of the vulnerabilities are and where some of the data security breaches may have occurred."

One of the more frightening aspects of Connell's work is that he created the firewall for the U.S. Congressional computer system. Of course, it is completely possible that the firewall could have been created with secret security gaps that can be exploited to hack into any congressional computer. If that has happened, every computer in any senate or congressional office is subject to hacking by Bush/Republican operatives.

Currently, Connell is running the IT operations for the McCain campaign. Isn't that a comforting thought…

Expert advisor Stephen Spoonamore, who among other things designs and runs computer programs to analyze and detect fraudulent financial activity for the world's leading credit card companies, said, "You cannot secure electronic voting. You set up a bunch of grandmothers to put together a bunch of computers once every two years, basically those machines are architected in such a manner to maximize their capacity [for] fraud.

"In the 2004 election, from my perspective, on any of the programs we run for any of my credit card clients, the results from the 14 counties, those are the sort of results that would instantaneously launch a credit card fraud investigation or a banking settlement investigation."

Spoonamore's reference to the "14 counties" refers to the so-called "Connelly Anomaly" in which down-ticket candidates got more votes than John Kerry. The name comes from the candidacy of C. Ellen Connelly, an African-American woman who was running for the Ohio Supreme Court in 2004. She was endorsed by pro-choice and civil rights groups, and was relatively unknown to Ohio voters, in addition to being vastly outspent by her opponent in the campaign. Yet, somehow, state-wide Connelly got scores of thousands more votes than did John Kerry at the very top of the ticket.

Arnebeck said that "if you adjust for the [Connelly] anomaly or that situation, it's enough votes to have changed the outcome of the election. So the focus of our efforts, in cooperation with the Secretary of State, would be to find out who is responsible for that."

He targeted the Rapp family and the Triad Voting Systems company, who ran the tabulators in a number of Ohio counties in 2004, as those who need to be closely investigated.

"If it's the Rapp family and the programming of the [Triad] tabulators," Arnebeck stated, "we need to know that so that the Rapp family will be closely monitored, if not put in jail