Too Many Reasons

Happy Thanksgiving

Aftermath of the Election

There's a lot of very disturbing reports emerging from aftermath of the election. Unless someone has something to hide, there's absolutely no reason to not sign this petition. Let's dig up the facts, and find out if there's any legitimacy to all the different claims.

Why did Cuyahoga County, Ohio report 93,000 more votes than actual voters? This is just the tip of the iceberg, I've been told. There's some seriously weird stuff going on......

We do need better accountability.

How about Petition to Congress requesting an investigation into the Presidential Election of 2004?

http://www.petitiononline.com/uselect/petition.html

The American government has certainly spent a lot of money for seemingly useless investigations over the years. When it comes to confirming the legitimacy of democracy, we cannot afford to compromise on this sort of thing.

If you need more information on this situation, go to:

http://www.truthout.org
http://www.blackboxvoting.org
http://www.gregpalast.com
http://www.verifiedvoting.org
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1106-30.htm
http://www.clevescene.com/issues/2004-11-10/news/feature_print.html

By all means, please write to your government officials or favorite newspaper to ask for better investigations of this situation.

House Dems Seek Election Inquiry

By Kim Zetter, Wired News
04:38 PM Nov. 05, 2004 PT

Three congressmen sent a letter to the General Accounting Office on Friday requesting an investigation into irregularities with voting machines used in Tuesday's elections.

The congressmen, Democratic members of the House of Representatives from Florida, New York and Michigan, cited a number of incidents that came to light in the days after the election. One was a glitch in Ohio that caused a memory card reader made by Danaher Controls to give George W. Bush 3,893 more votes than he should have received. Another was a problem with memory cards in North Carolina that caused machines made by UniLect to lose 4,500 votes cast on e-voting machines. The votes were lost when the number of votes cast on the machines exceeded the capacity of the memory cards.

There were also problems with machines that counted absentee ballots in Florida. Software made by Election Systems & Software began subtracting votes when totals surpassed 32,000. Officials said the problem affected only certain countywide races on one of the last pages of the ballot. Elections officials knew about the problem two years ago, but the company failed to fix the software before the election this year.

Reports from voters in Florida and Ohio also indicated that some of them had problems voting for the candidate of their choice. When they tried to vote for John Kerry, they said, the machine either wouldn't register the vote at all or would indicate on the review page that the vote was cast for Bush instead.

In their letter, representatives John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, Jerrold Nadler of New York and Robert Wexler of Florida asked the GAO to "immediately undertake an investigation of the efficacy of voting machines and new technologies used in the 2004 election, how election officials responded to difficulties they encountered and what we can do in the future to improve our election systems and administration."

READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE AT:
http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65623,00.html

BinLaden Plan- Drive Bankruptcy of USA

Bin Laden Transcript Outlines Plan to Bankrupt U.S. Through War

Nov. 1 (Bloomberg) -- Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden said he is trying to bankrupt the U.S. through its war on terror, a strategy he says felled the Soviet Union two decades ago in Afghanistan, according to a translation by al-Jazeera television of his full, videotaped statement.

``The mujahedeen recently forced Bush to resort to emergency funds to continue the fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, which is evidence of the success of the bleed-until-bankruptcy plan -- with Allah's permission,'' bin Laden said in the video that aired on the Qatar-based satellite network, according to the translation, posted today to al-Jazeera's Web site. The channel aired portions of the statement on Oct. 29.

President George W. Bush's administration plans to seek an additional $70 billion from lawmakers for Iraq and Afghanistan, the head of the U.S. Army Materiel Command, General Paul Kern, said on Oct. 26. The U.S. Congress last year approved $87 billion for military operations and rebuilding in the two countries.

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE AT:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=aQwY7PFwX6oI&refer=us

377 Tons of Missing Explosives? How About 250,000 Tons?

from MSNBC News / Associated Press, dated October 31, 2004:

“There is something truly absurd about focusing on 377 tons,” said Anthony Cordesman, a defense analyst and Iraq expert with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. He contends Iraq’s prewar stockpiles “were probably in excess of 650,000 tons.”

Underscoring the depth of Iraq’s militarization before the March 2003 invasion, the Pentagon says U.S.-led forces have destroyed 240,000 tons of munitions and have secured another 160,000 tons that is awaiting destruction.

Through mid-September, coalition forces inspected and cleared more than 10,000 caches of weapons, U.S. arms hunter Charles Duelfer said in a recent report. But up to 250,000 tons remain unaccounted for, according to military estimates, much of it in small stashes scattered around the country.

“I caution that there is a lot that we probably don’t know about, because this was a country, as the inspectors acknowledged, that was awash in weapons,” Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said Friday in Washington.

The 377 tons that Iraq says vanished from Al-Qaqaa sometime after the April 9, 2003 fall of Baghdad represents just “one 1,000th of the material that we are aware of,” Di Rita said.

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE AT:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6376212/

Bush Win Would Mean Dark Times

World Would Perceive Support For Preemptive War
by Helen Thomas
Published on Saturday, October 30, 2004 by the Hearst Newspapers

The presidential election on Tuesday is one of the most crucial in American history.

There are many reasons -- in foreign policy and on the domestic front -- why President George W. Bush should not be reelected.

Among them is the dominance of the radical right in his advisory councils, who are taking the United States down the wrong road at the start of the 21st century.

The road could lead to more mindless wars abroad and a widening gap between the rich and the poor in this country.

There will be only one way to read the election results if Bush wins: The world will see his victory as an affirmation by the American people of his disastrous preemptive war policy, which led the United States to invade Iraq without provocation.

The U.S. attack on Iraq is a clear violation of international law and has made us helpless to condemn others for similar acts.

If he wins reelection, Bush may see his victory as a signal to follow the neo-conservative dream of a political transformation of the Middle East through military force.

The president also would likely continue his new-style isolationism by giving short shrift to post-World War II treaties, such as those banning biological and chemical weapons. There is nothing to indicate Bush is willing to stop the gross violations of the Geneva Conventions on the humane treatment of prisoners of war.

Dark reports of the shameful treatment and secret transfers of detainees still emanate from Iraq and the U.S. brig at the Guantanamo Bay base in Cuba.

Despite his vehement denials, Bush may be compelled to call for another military draft if he persists in making war.

He is scraping by now with his all-volunteer military, along with reservists and National Guard members, keeping them on duty longer than planned with a so-called a back-door draft. If he wins a second term, he wouldn't have to worry about running again and would have a free hand to undo his read-my-lips campaign promises.

On the homefront, the rich will be sitting pretty again with big tax cuts while the budget deficit and national debt zoom sky high.

Bush donors from the military-industrial complex are being well rewarded, especially Halliburton, formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, which already has reaped no-bid contracts to the tune of billions of dollars.

Organized labor will still be behind the eight ball under a new Bush administration. Workers will be pressured to accept "comp time" in place of overtime pay, and the lowered safety standards imposed by Bush's Labor Department will lead to more industrial accidents.

Don't expect Bush to lift a finger to stem the tide of outsourcing of the nation's biggest companies to China, India and other points East, where they can find cheaper labor.

The president is expected to keep trying to weaken public education with voucher programs to aid private schools, many of them religious. He is certain to follow through on his pet project to privatize part of the Social Security system with voluntary private investment accounts, driving a big hole in the program's trust fund. We should all hope that Congress won't go along with such a dangerous idea.

Social Security was the 1936 Depression-era program to support the elderly, the disabled and deprived dependent children.

Senior citizens, meantime, are staying away in droves from Bush's highly touted prescription drug program, which the administration publicly underpriced by $1 billion. Furthermore, the resident's compassionate conservative legislation banned importation of cheaper drugs from Canada. That is not expected to change in a new Bush term.

Bush also wants to cater to corporate interests by capping damages in medical malpractice suits at $250,000.

If reelected, Bush -- who has injected religion into public affairs more than any president has in modern times -- is expected to continue his messianic mission in the White House. He will blur even more the separation of church and state.

For women and minorities who support abortion rights and affirmative action, there is the scary prospect that the candidate who wins Tuesday may be able to appoint three, perhaps even four Supreme Court justices.

Bush undoubtedly will see his reelection as a mandate to push the country further to the right. And if he elected, he will be answerable to no one.

© 2004 Hearst Newspapers

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1030-24.htm