Mc Mike
Mc Mike's JournalPsst! Here's an inside tip for Romney repugs:
If you yell 'potato famine' at the Irish, like Belushi did in his 'Luck of the Irish' piece on Week-End Update, it scares us away.
Don't tell the bhoys who 'informed' you of this.
Sproul, Rove, Kochs -- RICO prosecution, A.G. Holder? Thanks, Brad Blog.
The Feds should be following these guys around, like they did to DeNiro's Jimmy 'the Gent' Burke character in GoodFellows. Or like they were peaceful anti-war or OWS activists.
I still have the Tech's business card.
He didn't swap memory cards out. He used the master PEB (yellow coded) cart, for our precinct (Ward 19, Precinct 4), which is used for set up and break down the Ivotronic, instead of using the Supervisory PEB cart (the red coded voting cart). He nserted it to access the diagnostic tool. I watched the big mouthed repug poll worker from 19, 3 let him use her Master PEB cart and do it on her machines before he came over to our section of the polling place. I questioned him, got his card, and watched him access the diagnostic, and saw the pretty graphics of voltage dips and swells. (This was the '07 mayor's race, which led me to raise concern in the '08 training for the presidential election.) But I thought at the time that they could show me a 'Space Invaders' graphic if they wanted to, and still 'Check Voltage' = Vote flip.
I'm an electrician (IBEW Local Union 5), so I know how to check voltages, but we're not talking receptacle source voltage, instead it's internal machine voltage, and the Ivotronics lack a diagnostic port. At least our machines did, in the 5 elections where I set up and broke down the machines. At any rate, the orange light at the back of the machine, by the power strip, will light up to show that the machine is getting ac voltage instead of working off of battery voltage, as I was informed in my spring of '07 training, and none of the machines were experiencing trouble, so it seemed senseless to mess with them.
The young technician worked in IT for the Planning Division of the Allegheny County Economic Development Dept., and was pressed into service for tech trouble shooting for the elections division, during election day of '07. He was just obeying orders, and if anything sinister was occurring, may not have been in the know. Both precinct 3 and 4 went repug for mayor in '07, and Dems have a 24 to 7 edge in registered voters around here. The race went to the Dems, but our precincts didn't. Doesn't matter.
But I still have the tech's card, and a written record of O'Brien's day and time of call to me, and the number he called from, and a record of my calls to Common Cause's 866 MY VOTE 1 hotline, and PFAW's 866 OUR VOTE hotline, and correspondences with the LWV's Vote411 website, and Fitrakis and Wasserman's FreePress, and the rest.
I 'pre-complained' in '08 to everyone. Our county didn't wind up experiencing a vote flip to repug, so I didn't need to follow up with an actual complaint, after the election. For my pre-complaining efforts, despite running several prior flawless elections at 19, 4's poll, I was suddenly deluged by a ton of problems. I documented them all and still have the documentation, right down to the problem machine serial number. At the end of the '08 final election, there was no issue for which elections officials could fault my handling of the machines or polls, (and I also worked elections after that, without any difficulties). But I got the drift. Since I pointed out the possible problem, all of the sudden a bunch of problems popped up that I had to field, like I was getting tossed an increasing number of raw eggs to juggle, so they could say for the record, election problems come from Mike, instead of Mike says election problems come from them. They still didn't leave me with egg on my face.
West PA Dems & ES & S Ivotronics
I don't have the latest info on voting machine vendor contracts for all the other counties, but in the Dem heavy 9 county area of Western PA (the Democratic left under-arm of the 'T'), 6 counties used ES&S Ivotronics, (Allegheny, Butler, Beaver, Greene, Lawrence, and Westmoreland), 2 used Diebold Premier TSx (Armstrong and Washington), Fayette used Hart Intercivic E-Slate, in '08.
Only Allegheny and Lawrence went Dem in '08, which was a real erosion for the PA Dems' side. A big increase in suburban Philly Dem votes kept the state Dem. In Allegheny County (Pittsburgh area), we learned just before the '08 elections that the Elections Assistance Commission of the F.E.C. 'de-certified' the private Colorado company (SysTest), who had just certified our paperless ES&S machines days earlier. We still use the Ivotronics.
I had an e-mail correspondence with Prof. F. and Jason P. of FreePress about the issues at the time. The appointed Elections Division Manager was and is Mark Wolosik in Allegheny County. The Manager of the Voting Machines Section of the Allegheny County Elections Department is still John O'Brien, according to his current 'LinkedIn' profile.
Back then, O'Brien sure got mad at me for wondering whether having a County Tech come to our poll near the end of the voting day, to 'check the voltage' on all 5 machines from both precincts (when they weren't having any problems), by inserting the Master PEB carts -- whether that was a sound move in machine, or election integrity, protocol terms. In all my dealings and communications attempts with the elections department as a poll worker, I had never had such a rapid or negative response. But i just didn't want to see a vote total flip to Repug occur in this Dem strong-hold, leaving me (as majority inspector) liable for helping to steal the election for the bad guys. I could never live down being filmed in a perp walk for something like that. I wouldn't even try to steal it for OUR side.
I took Prof. Bob's advice in '08 and informed the Downtown Obama elections office personnel about it. This year, I've broached the subject with the South Side Obama elections office personnel, and Common Cause's 'volunteer voter's rights protection poll watch' organizer. I didn't inform Labor, because they mistakenly put me on the list for the NWPA area Labor Federation volunteers, instead of Pittsburgh and South West PA area, when I signed up to help them watch out for voters' rights at the polls. It doesn't matter, I can still watch the polls for us and identify myself as a labor member, anyway.
What Brad F. said on RT recently is right. The more we talk about this, the higher the turnout is for our side, and the less likely they will be able to steal it. Our side gets more energized from it, and the vote thieves also know we're watching, which scares them into remembrances of the perp walks of crooked repug elections personnel in OH, KY, MA, etc.
Anything fishy that I personally witness or can verify from first-hand testimony, I'll report to ALL the key election protection groups and indivduals. Thanks for your work, Free Press.
Har Har! It was only temporary, but
you have to admit, to lose 220 out of 270 posts, with 5 temporary ignores, is an interesting phenomenom, from nearly any point of view.
There are a wide range of respectable people and groups in this fight.
Bev Harris at Black Box Voting. Brad Friedman at Brad Blog and VelvetRevolution. Fitrakis and Wasserman at FreePress.org. The League of Women Voters. Prof. Mark C. Miller at NYU. NAACP LDF, NC of La Raza, NOW, AFL-CIO, ACLU. The 866 OUR VOTE number and site. PFAW, Common Cause. I think The Nation teamed up with ColorOfChange on requests for local coverage.
This isn't to say "we should do nothing, other people have the point" on this issue. Our side has to be on their toes on election day and after. We report to anyone and everyone any bull we experience, and get the truth about anything we hear second hand, then contact everyone else in the loop.
These electronic voting manipulation tactics make our side nervous and edgy about the possibilities. But the fact that they have to build in up to 20% flip for their side shows how certainly right our side is, and how few members of 'the 47%' actually buy the repugs' horrible lying agenda, despite lies by the corporate media and polling companies. In other words, anytime we're talking politics to the general public, that person we're speaking to is 70% likely to not like the repugs agenda. Because Romney is just hoping to hit 51%, all along he has just been fighting to win at least 31% approval. Bush-level approval.
The dog don't like its food, while Romney Repugs campaign in a 'dog ate my homework' style. His Libya lies, his 'America the Beautiful' quartet, positions on women labor civil rights, his blizzard of tone-deaf 1% moves and fantastic gaffes, the media retails to us as a dog-food commercial, offering to take the American public on a car-roof ride. The collar don't fit, Mitt,
I wonder how many third-trimester fetuses
the 'pro-life' l'il bush let drown during Katrina.
'Pro-life' politicos' policy positions are simple: government-enforcement is used to keep the 'person' alive for month 0 thru 9, then let the little welfare fraud die.
Santorum opposed ALL pre-natal care, as a gate-way to abortion, all EXCEPT for the 'mandatory trans-vaginal ultrasound' pre-natal procedure.
The 'pro-life' base double-thinks around all the unpleasantness easily, without batting an eye. They jump right on board putting these swine into power, because the swine expressed their 'moral' 'concern' for 'helpless little living people'.
Hitchens was exposed as a fraud and repug intel operative when he spun his bull-shit April Glaspie narrative, to 'explain' Poppy bush's war, when Desert Shield became Desert Sword (then Storm). Now you post under a 'mechanistic materialist' handle, reintroducing a post from a Fundamentalist Moslem, who fondly remembers a pro-life atheist that 'turned' repug because of fundy Islamicists -- and he fondly remembers Hitchens because 'the Hitch' thought that the pro-life fundy Christians were right.
The writing's on the wall. It's obviously time for Dems to rethink their committment to reproductive civil rights, and switch over to backing the position espoused by Romney-Ryan-Akin-Walsh, since everyone thinks they're right. Everyone from fundy Christians to Atheists to fundy Moslems to "fans of an 'evil-horror-style' novel mythos which features an 'atheistic' nihilism that paradoxically promotes worship of 'fallen angel' aliens as deities". If Dobson, Hitchens, Hasan, and Lovecraft are all in agreement with the repugs, might as well surrender now, two weeks before the elections.
The biggest laugh is that the 'pro-life' repugs have long been positing a conspiracy that has radical feminists in bed with fundy Islamicists in an attack on America. In reality, the women ARE America, and the repugs are attacking.
I like the other version of the segment's title
on the left of the viewing screen: "Right Wing Truthers lead Romney to debate disaster". And the screen capture of Corsi on Bircher Jone's Infowars and Prisonplanet site. Because Romney's 'slip' came from running on 9-11 (2012) terror attack 'truth'.
Brad Blog amplified coverage from Zack Beauchamp from Think Progress's story: that Romney and his campaign waited 14 and 9 days, respectively, to refer to the attacks as terror. Anyone keeping track can see that Romney waited 2 weeks to say it, then lied and accused the President of waiting 2 weeks to say it.
+1, Thanks.
In the GOP response to Prez O's 'State of the Union' speech this year, Mitch Daniels gave rave reviews to the creation of these jobs that are rooted in Chinese Communist serf labor conditions. Mitch was simultaneously shoving 'right to work' laws down his constituents' throats, while Indiana hosted the Super Bowl and the NFL Players union joined fellow AFL-CIO members in actively opposing his attacks on American workers and jobs.
The "Up" with Chris Hayes show that week-end did a roundtable discussion on the State of the Union speech and the response, during which a GOP speechwriter (for Condi Rice), named Elise Jordan, glibly dismissed concern for the documentably terrible labor conditions that corporate out-source moves spawned in Apple Corp's labor dorms. She advised us not to look at 'the grisly underbelly' of the visionary business model expressed by Steve Jobs, but to regard it and him as laudible and important because 'Americans don't want to look backwards, they want to look forward'.
It was an Orwellian phrase, since the repugs have been 'looking backwards' and attacking US Labor and good jobs as 'communist' and 'bad', since the late 1800's. Their whole 2012 campaign is currently based on telling America how great it was 'backwards' in US history, before Social Security, unemployment insurance, and Medicare existed, before labor had rights, before Roe v. Wade, before women had rights, before the Jim Crow poll tax was outlawed, before Civil Rights, before governmental regulation or oversight of businessman 1%ers. David Axelrod aptly summed it up by saying they "have the foreign policy of the '80's, the social policy of the '50's, and the economic policy of the '20's". But never mind, now the GOP wants to 'look forward'.
They look forward to making us compete with foreign workers who live in grinding abject misery, in a 'race to the bottom', as the USW film you posted puts it. They look forward to making us work like enslaved communist workers.
They look backward to attack labor and good US jobs, unless they want to look forward and attack labor and good US jobs. It really doesn't matter which way the hypocritical GOP looks, because whenever and where ever they look, they think that American labor is 'communist' and 'bad', but actual Chinese communist labor is 'all American' and 'good', as long as Apple, Bain, and Sensata make a huge profit.
The Chinese Communist corporate GOP. So delusionally, insanely sure of their frankly treasonous game plan, that they're now running a 1% aristocrat whose 'job' it is to destroy good jobs and create slave jobs, and profit from it. My money is on the 99% of working Americans winning in November, not the treasonous bad communist 1%er repugs.
Dug up an old Maddow clip from 3-30-12.
It runs a bit long (16 min), but if you skip to minute 7, 15 sec and view it thru min 11, 45 sec, you see something that Maddow & co call "The Mitt Romney Surrogate Problem". All kinds of big GOP endorsers are shown giving Mitt tepid or harmful endorsements.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/vp/46911759#46911759
I also like the clip of Newt calling Ryan's 'Kill Medicare' budget plan 'Right-Wing Social Engineering', and the subsequent clip of Newt saying 'anyone who quotes me on that is lying'. I can't find those clips, but they're memorable.
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