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--in the recent hearing? I'm a little worried about how all this is being handled. Granted, there are closed hearings going on, and maybe he didn't need to catch Gonzo in any more lies, but that (failure to put him under oath, the 2nd time around) and the often lame Dem questioning (and giving the Pukes too much obstruction/distraction time) make me concerned.
I hesitate to say this. Cuz we don't have many in Congress that we can trust. And Conyers has seemed like one of the good guys. Also, very smart and very competent, and VERY experienced. (Really, I was surprised at that sloppy hearing.) I had a little twinge against him during the Ohio '04 hearings, and in their report, because--while electronic voting run on "trade secret," proprietary programming code, owned and controlled by Bushite corporations, wasn't the biggest issue in Ohio election fraud (because Ohio hadn't been fully Diebolded--the issue there was more the massive overt, visible vote suppression), it WAS the biggest issue everywhere else. These riggable machines had been fast-tracked all over the country. And there was even then strong evidence that they used this new vote stealing capability to keep Bush in power. Now, my read on Conyers is that he would have pursued the larger fraud, if it had been up to him, but he bowed to the will of the McAuliffe DNC and other corrupt Democratic leaders, who had been "black-holing" the story of the fraudulent voting SYSTEMS and their funny numbers. Conyers kept the focus narrowly on Ohio. That was wrong. The biggest fascist coup in human history thus escaped attention, and is known only by a few today--although the voters themselves are increasingly distrustful of the machines (as evidenced by the huge increase in Absentee Ballot voting in '06, up to 50% in some places; they may not have all the facts, and they may not understand that AB voting isn't safe from electronic fraud either, but they sense that something is wrong, and their good sense tells them that secret vote counting is unreliable; they want a handcounted paper ballot).
Anyway, I see Conyers as having bent to pressure. He's honest, and a great man. And we all have our weak spots. Also, the Pukes were treating the "minority" party chairmen like dirt. They were denied all kinds of normal "minority" party rights. It was difficult to do anything at all, along the lines of good government, in that Congress. And he was heroic even to hold hearings on Ohio--and his hearings were a great blessing to the Ohio activists, who worked so hard to expose that election horror, and who went on the reclaim Ohio for democracy over the next 2 years. A noble work!
But, but, but...Diebold/ES&S are still with us, still doing massive, and possibly fatal, harm to our democracy, and are lurking for '08. And they may even have tempered the fraud a bit, in '06, once they saw that the people were going to outvote their machines in some cases, in order to protect their election theft capability (although they didn't do so in FL-13--where ES&S machines 'disappeared' 18,000 Democratic votes for Congress, in an election decided--for the Republican, naturally--by some 300-400 votes; a case that's still pending in Congress). I think it's possible they were selective--and shaped a Congress that could squawk about the Iraq War and do nothing to stop it (--packed with 40 or so "Blue Dog" Democrats, who want to cut everything except military spending).
That kind of damage. Potentially fatal damage---to our democracy, and, of course, fatal to actual people in military service in Iraq, and to Iraqis.
So, is Gonzogate going to the go where Plamegate seemed to go?: Into corporate news monopoly amnesia, with a few minor characters resigned or even indicted, but Rove and Diebold/ES&S still in charge? Is this what the Democratic leadership WANTS, for some reason? Lots of smoke and fire, but no consequences?
With Plamegate, many of us also hoped that Fitzgerald had a wealth of indictable knowledge, and other indictments in his back pocket, that he would use at the appropriate moment. Rove and Cheney seemed particularly indictable, just on the known facts. At the least, I expected a Grand Jury report naming "unindicted co-conspirators."
Nothin'. High treason--and the traitors are still running the country, and killing people in Iraq!
Could be that people like Conyers and Fitzgerald have hobbles around their ankles--that Bush/Cheney/Rove & Cartel are just too powerful and are such dirty players that they cannot be attacked head on. It wouldn't surprise me at all. Who knows what they might pull? War on Iran. A second 9/11. Martial law. Jailing of the opposition. Massive or selective blackmail (they're surely spying on everybody). Bumping people off (which they may have done already). And all anyone can do is hedge them round, curtail them, pick off some of their operatives, expose what can be exposed, and gradually restore order.
But I tend to keep coming back to Diebold/ES&S, and the mind-boggling silence of the entire Democratic Party leadership on the Bushite corporate takeover of vote "counting" which is now conducted under a veil of corporate secrecy. WTF?! IF they were working the edges, and trying gradually to restore order, wouldn't that be the first thing they would fix?
A requirement to disclose the "trade secret" code was just REMOVED from our Democratic leaders' election "reform" bill, by a specific person: Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from Silicon Valley. Who did she act on behalf of, and why was this permitted? The bill was lame to begin with. It leaves Diebold/ES&S in place and lards more billions of taxpayer dollars upon them. It leaves the secret code in place, in all the machines and central tabulators. It requires a "paper trail" (no-brainer!*). And it requires a mere 2% audit (way, way inadequate)--if that's even still in the bill.
Why didn't they just say: a ballot for every vote, and count every goddamned one of them, in a way that everyone can see and understand? Why all this money? Why all this gobble-de-gook and secrecy? Why these bandaids? Corrupt officials can keep their corrupt machines, but they cannot use them for the initial count, which MUST BE VISIBLE!
Did they WANT Bush to be re-elected? Did they want a hobbled Congress? Is that the big secret?
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*How could these machines have been fast-tracked across the country with NO "paper trail"? Machines whose secret code is owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations--big donors to Bush/Cheney, major players, and contributors to nutball fascist 'christian' causes? How could Democrats have voted for this in the first place? (--and most of them did). And now they put a bandaid on it? Something's not right. And good guys, like Conyers, seem to be caught in the middle--hobbled. And something is not smelling right about Attorneygate as well.)
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