BBC/The Guardian Investigative reporter Greg Palast first broke the story about the disenfranchisement of over 90,000 heavily Democratic Florida residents of color prior to the 2000 election–without which Gore would have been the clear victor and thus become President.

Now, he tells us that the GOP around the country systematically sent do-not-forward letters to the home addresses of soldiers stationed overseas who lived in mostly black, mostly Democratic precincts, and then when they came back as undeliverable, challenged these soldiers’ right to vote. Also targeted: residents of homeless shelters.

There’s quite a bit more, but here’s a little excerpt:

What about black soldiers? Here’s what they did. They sent, we found out – here’s now what we’ve just found out. They sent first-class letters to the homes of African-American soldiers shipped overseas. They wrote on the envelopes “Do not forward. Return to addressee.” Well, of course, they’re shipped overseas, so the letter can’t be forwarded, to Baghdad or Germany, or wherever. Letters are sent back to the Republican National Committee, filtered back out to the state committees, and then elections officials are told, ‘These people don’t live at that address. We have evidence that they’re falsely registered.’

Now, here’s the trick. You send in your absentee ballot. That is a great act of faith, probably the greatest religious act of faith since Moses walked across the Red Sea, you know, hoping that he wouldn’t get drowned. You just mail in that ballot, and soldiers – this is, remember the Republican Party made a big deal about Al Gore complaining about soldiers’ illegal absentee voting. These people knew that these soldiers couldn’t defend themselves, would not know that their ballot would not be counted, would be challenged. And there’s no way, I mean you could – from Baghdad you can fight George’s war, but you can’t fight for your ballot – massive, massive, nationwide challenge.

In places like Wisconsin, by the way, we’ve just discovered – How did they even know how to challenge these people? They were using Blackberries loaded with the names. This is one expensive multimillion-dollar operation, and by the way, Amy, it’s illegal, okay? One of the reasons why the Republican Party didn’t ‘fess up when we showed them the sheets and they said, ‘Oh, it’s donors,’ is that if you target black people, or Jewish voters, as they did in a few districts, because that’s a democratic demographic, if you challenge these people, that’s against the law. That’s against the voting rights act of 1965. It’s a felony crime, you know.

WHY do we still let these thugs and crooks stay in office?

Aside: Isn’t it ironic that Palast, an American, works for two of the most well-respected British journalism outlets. Why won’t any major US media hire him? His website and books are accessible to us, though.

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Bruce Funk was just trying to do his job! The County Clerk of Emery County, Utah for 23 years, Funk was locked out of his office and forced to resign. Why? Because he had the temerity to question whether the Diebold voting machines his county had purchased were accurate, and brought in an outside expert who in fact verified that the machines were highly manipulable and had insufficient backup.

The initial thing that led me to getting a hold of Black Box Voting was that when I re-examined the machine, I found a number of them with insufficient backup memory, some as little as four megabytes, whereas a normal machine had anywhere from 27 to 29 megabytes…

Something was worked out that if they could terminate me as the election official of Emery County, then they would recertify the machines. And so they changed my locks, effective April 1, and locked me out of my office.

This is an outrage! There have been so many election irregularities in both the 2000 and the 2004 elections that there has been a cloud of illegitimacy over the GWB administration from the beginning (a cloud made darker by the consistent misbehavior of this administration once it got into office: a sordid history of vindictive reprisals, lavish favors to friends and special interests, not just a reluctance to hear criticism but constant attacks on those who criticize, and so forth.

And yet when an a election official who has very good reason to be concerned–who knows that the backup memory is inadequate if, for instance, the plug gets knocked out of the wall socket–asks an expert to investigate, he loses his job.

Is this the America that claims to be a beacon of democracy around the world?

Shameful!

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Speculation about this on the SF Chronicle blog–from a commentator who thinks the Bush administration has done a good job on corporate crime (a premise with which I strongly disagree)–but his lawyer friends who actively cover the trial think it’s a real possibility.

It wouldn’t shock me–I don’t think he’s been that concerned about his legacy, as the rampant cronyism that’s been all over his administration demonstrates.

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Shel Horowitz is the award-winning author of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and five other books, and the creator of the Business Ethics Pledge to make crooked business as unthinkable in the future as slavery is today.

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The US House of Representatives struck a major blow against our Internet freedom the other day, voting for the so-called Communications, Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement Act of 2006.

This disastrous bill, if also passed by the Senate, would take away the principle of “Net Neutrality”–that every website gets to load as fast as the server can manage and be found as easily as it shows up in the search engines. A vast coalition of 752 groups on both the left and right joined forces to block this bill, but the House passed it 321-101, including 92 Democrats.

Contact your Senators NOW and speak out against this bill–or face a world in which not the government but big telecommunications corporations effectively decide which websites you will see, and promote the sites that pay them the most. The Internet has been the backbone of the independent press, one of the last bastions of people unafraid to tell the real news. We must protect our rights to view these sites, read these blogs, watch these videos–and if content providers have to pay for the privilege of having their sites accessed, that channel will dry up mighty fast. Our browsers will be sold to the highest bidder, and that will not be the alternative voices.

* * * *
Shel Horowitz is the award-winning author of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and five other books, and the creator of the Business Ethics Pledge to make crooked business as unthinkable in the future as slavery is today.

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How small-minded and unethical they get! the Washington Post, which offers several articles on the incident, and found these examples:

“People in Washington are morally repugnant, cheating, shifty human beings.” is softened to “I learned in Washington that there is an ‘overclass’ in this country stocked with cheating, shifty human beings that’s just as morally repugnant as our ‘underclass.’ ”

Leaving aside for a moment the question about whether you want your president’s domestic policy advisor to think that the poor are morally repugnant–he altered this quote while leaving the name of the New Times reporter on the article!

Helen Thomas was all over White House press secretary Tony Snow about the content of this quote and what kind of man Zinsmeister must be–but it wasn’t reported that she addressed the issue of changing the remarks.

On Iraq…

“To say nothing of whether it was executed well or not, but it’s brave and admirable.” The altered copy deleted any hint of presidential criticism, saying only, “It’s a brave and admirable attempt to improve the world.”

Zinsmeister says he did it to increase the accuracy of the quotes and protect the reporter, Justin Park, from embarrassment. But given the very happy thank-you note he sent to Park immediately after the piece ran, this is highly dubious.

I begin to wonder if there is anyone in the high levels of the Bush administration who actually understands ethics. Note to the administration: chutzpah is not a substitute for ethics.

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As a PR professional, I’m often amused by the sheer incompetence of the Bush spin machine–can you say “Brownie, you’re doing a heckofa job”?–as well as their desire to micromanage everything in a usually failed attempt to make the president look good. (If the Dems don’t make much hay over “Mission Accomplished” in 2008, they’re really asleep at the switch.)

But this one takes the cake. Or maybe the wheatfield. Or the henhouse. Today’s New York times ran an editorial about–are you sitting down?–a Department of Agriculture talking points memo that provided ways to jump from discussions of American crop issues to what a bully good job the administration is doing in Iraq. The paper used the marvelous headline, “An Agriprop Guide to Cluck and Awe.”

And watch out, because the bureaucrats are keeping score:

Included was a caution that speechmakers should keep a record of their compliance, and turn in point-scoring summaries to be tallied for weekly reports to the White House.

And what might some of these talking points be?

  • “Iraqi farmers use U.S. aid to buy American feed and are working to ‘update 25-year-old chicken houses'”
  • “‘Iraq is part of the ‘fertile crescent’ of Mesopotamia,’ where mankind first domesticated wheat thousands of years ago, this suggestion begins. Then it moves to the clincher: ‘In recent years, however, the birthplace of farming has been in trouble.'”

    Clearly the see-no-evils are at it again–and I am one copywriter who’s real glad I don’t work for this agency!

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    It’s not some flaming leftist saying this. George W. Bush himself, according to the Reuters newswire, told a German paper,

    “I would say the best moment of all was when I caught a 7.5 pound (3.402 kilos) perch in my lake,” he told the newspaper in an interview published on Sunday.

    Pretty sad. An administration so disgraceful, so scandal-ridden, such a failure in both policy and operations that even the president can’t think of anything he’s proud of.

    Georgie, my boy, let me prod your memory a bit–I can think of at least a few proud moments:

  • In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, you made a conscious and I believe sincere effort to distinguish between the terrorists and ordinary Muslims and Arabs. Of course, that didn’t stop various government agencies from coming down very hard on those communities, imprisoning people on spurious grounds, etc.
  • In one of your State of the Union addresses, you advocated hydrogen cars–a good thing, if designed in ways that foster sustainability and independence from the big oil companies. I think that was the same year your State of the Union speech honored Rosa Parks, who was in the audience.
  • And finally, in the very recent past you’ve said we must end our oil addiction. I’d like to think you’re sincere about that, and that you’ll follow up that statement with a significant infusion of R&D money into solar, wind, geothermal, even biodiesel (but not nuclear, for heaven’s sake). In the nearly two years left in your administration, you could go down in history as the president who solarized America–a rather better legacy than catching a fish!

    Your real legacy to date, however, is a lot less positive. To bring up just a handful of the many, many low points:

  • Lying repeatedly to get us into a stupid, stupid war in Iraq
  • Leaving New Orleans to drown
  • Doing nothing to prevent 9/11 even though evidence strongly suggests the attack was widely known, in advance
  • Overseeing an administration dogged by corruption, mismanagement, venality, yes-man-ism, and unwillingness to listen to critical voices
  • Turning over public resources for private gain
  • Squandering both the reservoir of international good will following 9/11 and the considerable surplus you inherited

    And on and on it goes–this list could continue for pages. We’ve had presidents who were outdoorsmen before, including both Roosevelts and Ronald Reagan, among others. But never a president who felt his best moment in office was catching a fish!

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    This is an oddity: I know four people running for non-local office this year–and three of them are from the publishing world.

    Jeeni Criscenzo, self-publisher of a lovely novel about Mayan civilization, running for Congress in California

    Sander Hicks, whom I interviewed several Book Expo Americas ago–and who courageously published a critical biography of Geroge W. Bush after St. Martin’s pulled it off the market under apparent pressure from the Bush family–running in New York on the Green Party for Senate against Hillary Clinton

    Tony Trupiano, media trainer who moderates the teleseminar series from publicity firm Annie Jennings PR, and who is himself an author, running for Congress in Michigan

    (The fourth is my cousin-in-law, Aaron Klein, running for a seat in the Maryland Legislature. https://www.kleinformaryland.com )

    Isn’t that weird? Even weirder–I heard about all four of these campaigns from other people, and not directly from the candidates.

    It will be interesting to see what happens when media figures become political figures. Let’s hope we have better results over here than the Italians got with Berlusconi. Of course, we’ve had media politicians before–but most of them have been move stars, like Ronald Reagan and Clint Eastwood. Small-press publishers and their consultants are a rather different animal.

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