Did Gingrich Give Marching Orders To House GOP To Vote Against Bailout?

ThinkProgress.org, 09/30/08
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/09/30/gingrich-against-bailout/

Now that House Republicans are insisting their vote against the bailout yesterday had nothing to do with Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s supposedly “partisan” speech, some are wondering what in fact turned at least 10 Republican votes Blunt thought he had against the bill.

NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported this morning that conservatives may have been taking their marching orders from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who “was whipping against this up until the last minute” — despite issuing a statement supporting the bill as the vote was taking place:

MITCHELL: I’m told reliably by leading Republicans who are close to him, he was whipping against this up until the last minute when he issued that face-saving statement. Newt Gingrich was telling people in the strongest possible language that this was a terrible deal, not only that it was a terrible deal, that it was a disaster, it was the end of democracy as we know it, it was socialism. And then at the last minute comes out with a statement when the vote is already in place.

Reacting to the news, NBC’s Mike Barnicle said he had been told by congressional conservatives that the move was “the opening salvo of Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign four years hence.” Speaking at the National Press Club today, Gingrich denied Mitchell’s claim, saying MSNBC is wrong and probably “wrong deliberately” because its a “stunningly dishonest network.” “I was actually reluctantly trying to help it get through,” he said.

Even throughout yesterday, Gingrich’s position was nearly impossible to pin down. On Glenn Beck’s radio show, he admitted, “I’m not sure if I were in the Congress I could vote against it” while also declaring that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson “should be fired” and that the bailout plan “is still a bad bill.” On Fox News last night, he seemed to praise the House’s rejection of the bill: “The vote today indicated that even when they’d worked for five days to try to improve what was really a pretty terrible original plan that [Paulson] sent up, it still couldn’t get a majority in the House.”

Apparently, Gingrich was against the bailout before he was for it — before he was against it again.

Republican IT consultant subpoenaed in case alleging tampering with 2004 election

Rawstory.com
Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane
Published: Monday September 29, 2008

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Republican_IT_consultant_subpoenaed_in_case_0929.html

COLUMBUS—A high-level Republican consultant has been subpoenaed in a case regarding alleged tampering with the 2004 election.

Michael L. Connell was served with a subpoena in Ohio on Sept. 22 in a case alleging that vote-tampering during the 2004 presidential election resulted in civil rights violations. Connell, president of GovTech Solutions and New Media Communications, is a website designer and IT professional who created a website for Ohio’s secretary of state that presented the results of the 2004 election in real time as they were tabulated.

At the time, Ohio’s Secretary of State, Kenneth J. Blackwell, was also chairman of Bush-Cheney 2004 reelection effort in Ohio.

Connell is refusing to testify or to produce documents relating to the system used in the 2004 and 2006 elections, lawyers say. His motion to quash the subpoena asserts that the request for documents is burdensome because the information sought should be “readily ascertainable through public records request” – but also, paradoxically, because “it seeks confidential, trade secrets, and/or proprietary information” that “have independent economic value” and “are not known to the public, or even to non-designated personnel within or working for Mr. Connell’s business.”

According to sources close to the office of Clifford Arnebeck, one of the Ohio attorneys who brought the case, Arnebeck intends to ask the court to compel Connell to testify. An emergency conference with the judge, originally scheduled for Monday, is to be rescheduled.

King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association v. Blackwell

The case, known as King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association v. Blackwell, was filed against Kenneth J. Blackwell on Aug. 31, 2006 by Columbus attorneys Clifford Arnebeck, Robert Fitrakis and others. It initially charged Blackwell with racially discriminatory practices—including the selective purging of voters from the election rolls and the unequal allocation of voting machines to various districts—and asked for measures to be taken to prevent similar problems during the November 2006 election.

On Oct. 9, 2006, an amended complaint added charges of various forms of ballot-rigging as also having the effect of “depriving the Plaintiffs of their voting rights, including the right to have their votes successfully cast without intimidation, dilution, cancellation or reversal by voting machine or ballot tampering.” A motion to dismiss the case as moot was filed following the November 2006 election, but it was instead stayed to allow for settlement discussions.

The case took on fresh momentum earlier this year when Arnebeck announced in July that he was filing to “lift the stay in the case [and] proceed with targeted discovery in order to help protect the integrity of the 2008 election.” The new filing was inspired in part by the coming forward as a whistleblower of GOP IT security expert Stephen Spoonamore, who said he was prepared to testify to the plausibility of electronic vote-rigging having been carried out in 2004.

Arnebeck’s hope was that in the course of the discovery procedure it would be possible to subpoena Michael Connell, former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, and others to obtain additional information and improve the focus of the case. The stay was lifted Sept. 19, 2008 by an order from Magistrate Judge Terrence P. Kemp of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, and a subpoena was served to Connell on the following Monday, Sept. 22.

Allegations against Connell

The interest in Mike Connell stems from his association with a firm called GovTech, which he had spun off from his own New Media Communications under his wife Heather Connell’s name. GovTech was hired by Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell to set up an official election website at election.sos.state.oh.us to presented the 2004 presidential returns as they came in.

Connell is a long-time GOP operative, whose New Media Communications provided web services for the Bush-Cheney ’04 campaign, the US Chamber of Commerce, the Republican National Committee and many Republican candidates. This in itself might have raised questions about his involvement in creating Ohio’s official state election website.

However, the alternative media group ePlubibus Media further discovered in November 2006 that election.sos.state.oh.us was hosted on the servers of a company in Chattanooga, TN called SmarTech, which also provided hosting for a long list of Republican Internet domains.

“Since early this decade, top Internet ‘gurus’ in Ohio have been coordinating web services with their GOP counterparts in Chattanooga, wiring up a major hub that in 2004, first served as a conduit for Ohio’s live election night results,” researchers at ePluribus Media wrote.

A few months after this revelation, when a scandal erupted surrounding the firing of US Attorneys for reasons of White House policy, other researchers found that the gwb43 domain used by members of the White House staff to evade freedom of information laws by sending emails outside of official White House channels was hosted on those same SmarTech servers.

Given that the Bush White House used SmarTech servers to send and receive email, the use of one of those servers in tabulating Ohio’s election returns has raised eyebrows. Ohio gave Bush the decisive margin in the Electoral College to secure his reelection in 2004.

IT expert Stephen Spoonamore says the SmartTech server could have functioned as a routing point for malicious activity and remains a weakness in electronic voting tabulation.

According to Spoonamore’s Sept. 17 affidavit, the “computer placement, in the middle of the network, is a defined type of attack.” Spoonamore describes this as a “Man in the Middle Attack” or MIM.

“It is a common problem in the banking settlement space,” he writes. “A criminal gang will introduce a computer into the outgoing electronic systems of a major retail mall, or smaller branch office of a bank. They will capture the legitimate transactions and then add fraudulent charges to the system for their benefit.”

“Any time all information is directed to a single computer for consolidation, it is possible, and in fact likely, that single computer will exploit the information for some purpose,” he adds. “In the case of Ohio 2004, the only purpose I can conceive for sending all county vote tabulations to a GOP managed Man-in-the-Middle site in Chattanooga before sending the results onward to the Sec. of State, would be to hack the vote at the MIM.”

Hold letters were sent out in July to parties in the case, informing them of their obligation not to destroy relevant documentation. One such letter went to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, asking him to advise the federal government of its responsibility to preserve emails from Rove.

Arnebeck explained, “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.”

More recently, Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff has revealed that John McCain’s presidential campaign paid nearly a million dollars for web services to a firm called 3eDC, created and partly owned by McCain campaign manager Rick Davis. According to an archived version of a 3eDC webpage from 2007, that firm’s five “strategic partners” included not only Connell’s New Media Communications but also Campaign Solutions – a firm run by Connell’s sometimes-partner, Rebecca Donatelli – and a component of SmarTech called AirNet.

The Origin of the Case

The roots of the King Lincoln Bronzeville case go back to the case of Moss v. Bush, which Arnebeck, Fitrakis and other attorneys filed immediately after the 2004 presidential election. In that filing, they challenged the results of the Ohio voting on the basis of numerous irregularities and allegations of fraud and sought to depose President George W. Bush, Vice President, Dick Cheney, and then-White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Karl Rove, as well as Secretary Blackwell.

That case was dropped by the plaintiffs in January 2005, after the US Senate accepted the casting of Ohio’s electoral votes for George W. Bush. Two weeks later, Ohio’s Republican Attorney General James Petro attempted to sanction and fine the attorneys for what he described as a “frivolous filing,” but they were supported by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) – then the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee - who had already held a hearing at which Arnebeck and Jesse Jackson testified concerning the suppression of minority votes. Those same concerns are now at the heart of King Lincoln Bronzeville.

Sarah Palin’s Foreign Policy Follies

Time.com
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1845116,00.html
By Romesh Ratnesar Saturday, Sep. 27, 2008

It takes a hard heart not to like Sarah Palin. She has a winning personal story. She can be poised, charming and funny. As she showed at the Republican National Convention, her ability to deliver set-piece speeches — a big part of the job for all politicians, but especially Presidents — is considerable. On balance, she’s probably an asset to John McCain. But we should stop pretending that she is ready now or anytime in the forseeable future to be Commander-in-Chief.

I reached this conclusion after watching the foreign-policy portion of her disastrous Sept. 25 interview with Katie Couric. A number of commentators, including The Atlantic’s James Fallows and Slate’s Christopher Beam, have said that Palin resembled, in Beam’s words, “a high-schooler trying to BS her way through a book report,” which is an insult to both high-schoolers and B.S. Palin’s answers were hesitant, convoluted and at times — like when she appeared to suggest that Vladimir Putin might be preparing a one-man airborne invasion of Alaska — downright loony.

But the more worrisome responses were the ones that betrayed her lack of curiosity about current events and reliance on bumper-sticker wisdom over complex thoughts. There were moments, in fact, in which you wondered whether she had been paying any meaningful attention to the world outside Alaska before McCain picked her as his running mate a month ago. (See photos of Sarah Palin on the campaign trail here.)

Set aside her strange imagining of Putin’s flight path and her failure to remember that her tutor Henry Kissinger actually supports talking to Iran (which McCain also forgot during Friday’s Presidential debate). Though less YouTube-able, two other moments in the CBS interview stood out as even more troubling. The first was when Couric asked Palin whether she believes “the Pakistani government is protecting al-Qaeda within its borders.” This was Palin’s response:

I don’t believe that new President Zardari has that mission at all. But no, the Pakistani people also, they want freedom. They want democratic values to be allowed in their country, also. They understand the dangers of terrorists having a stronghold in regions of their country, also. And I believe that they, too, want to rid not only their country, but the world, of violent Islamic terrorists.

There’s nothing inherently incorrect about that answer: Zardari, whose wife was assassinated by al-Qaeda, isn’t in league with Osama bin Laden, and the vast majority of Pakistanis oppose terrorism. The trouble is that the same could be said about nearly every country in the world. But anyone who has picked up a newspaper in the last few months knows that Pakistan is now home to al-Qaeda’s top leaders and is the staging ground for the dramatic increase in suicide bombings in Afghanistan — and that elements of its security services are indisputably aiding that cause. Afghanistan’s President, Hamid Karzai, said this week that “the murder, killing, destruction, dishonoring and insecurity in Afghanistan is carried out by the intelligence administration of Pakistan, its military intelligence institutions.” Just last month, the top U.S. Commander in Afghanistan, David McKiernan said, “Do I believe there has been some complicity on the part of organizations such as the ISI over time in Pakistan? I believe there has been.” In fact, it’s precisely the Pakistani government’s unwillingness to go after militants along the Pakistan-Afghan border that has prompted the Bush Administration to authorize raids by U.S. commandos into Pakistani territory.

In short, most foreign-policy hands — including members of the current Administration — would have given Couric the exact opposite answer that Palin did. If U.S. officials once praised Pakistan’s cooperation in the war on terror, they almost never do now. But Palin doesn’t seem to have noticed.

Then there was her pained, and painful, response to Couric’s questions about the Bush “freedom agenda” — the goal of spreading democracy in the Islamic world. Predictably, Palin repeated standard Bush platitudes about making “every effort possible to help spread democracy for those who desire freedom, independence, respect for equality. That is the whole goal here in fighting terrorism. It’s not just to keep the people safe, but to be able to usher in democratic values and ideals around this, around the world.” That theory, though, has been discredited by the debacle in Iraq and years of inconvenient outcomes in the Middle East, in which elections have brought to power parties that are more extreme, not less. As a result, the Bush Administration abandoned the lofty talk about transforming the region roughly, oh, three years ago. Couric pressed Palin on this:

Couric: What happens if the goal of democracy doesn’t produce the desired outcome? In Gaza, the US pushed hard for elections and Hamas won.

Palin: Yeah well especially in that region, though, we have to protect those who do seek democracy and support those who seek protections for the people who live there. What we’re seeing in the last couple of days here in New York is a President of Iran, Ahmadenijad, who would come on our soil and express such disdain for one of our closest allies and friends, Israel ... and we’re hearing the evil that he speaks and if hearing him doesn’t allow Americans to commit more solidly to protecting the friends and allies that we need, especially there in the Mideast, then nothing will.

Couric’s question was beyond difficult — it’s the most vexing question that has faced US policymakers over the last seven years. What do you do when democracy produces results you don’t like? There’s no good answer, but there are many ways to grasp at one. Palin could have said that elections are only one component of democracy; that bringing extremist groups into the political process helps to moderate their behavior; that extremists tend to lose support once in power, because they don’t know how to govern. She could even have said, Those are the breaks — we don’t get to choose.

Instead, she changed the subject to the threat Iran poses to Israel. Why did she do this? Was it because she didn’t want to acknowledge that democracy sometimes produces undesired results? Did she calculate that, since Gaza shares a border with Israel, she could use it as an opportunity to turn the discussion to Iran, where McCain and Obama disagree? Or did she just not know what Couric was talking about?

If she didn’t, that’s understandable. Most Americans are not particularly interested in the nuances of politics in Pakistan or the Middle East. But we should expect our leaders to be fluent in at least the basics of foreign policy. So far Palin is still struggling for words.

Paper Endorses First Democrat For President In 72 Years: Obama

Huffingtonpost.com, 09/28/08
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/28/paper-endorses-first-demo_n_130054.html

The Record, of Stockton, California, may not be the most well-known of newspapers, but they have been, for a number of decades, one of the most consistent. The last time the paper endorsed a Democrat for the White House, the year was 1936 and the lucky endorsee was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Since then, the closest a Democrat has come was in 1992, when they endorsed neither Bill Clinton nor George H. W. Bush to send a message that “a larger role for the third-party candidate” was warranted.

That’s all changed over the weekend, in a move the California paper describes as a turning of the “tide”:

For the first time in 72 years, The Record is endorsing a Democrat for president.

Franklin D. Roosevelt got our nod in 1936.

The reasons for the endorsement of Barack Obama over John McCain are articulated in the editorial on this page.

The unanimous decision was made by our editorial board, which consists of Publisher Roger W. Coover, Managing Editor Donald W. Blount, Opinion Page Editor Eric Grunder, Human Resources Director Sandi Johnson and me.

There are many who will question - with some validity - the power or value of such an endorsement. Our decision is hardly going to tip the balance in a competitive presidential election.

In their endorsement, the Record writes:

Barack Obama is our choice for president of the United States.

He has demonstrated time and again he can think on his feet. More importantly, he has demonstrated he will think things through, seek advice and actually listen to it.

Obama is a gifted speaker. But in addition to his smarts and energy, possibly his greatest gift is his ability to inspire.

For eight years, American politics has been marked by smears, fears and greed. For too long, we’ve practiced partisanship in Washington, not politics. The result is a cynicism every bit as deep as that which infected the nation when Richard Nixon was shamed from office and when Bill Clinton brought shame to the office.

This must end, but John McCain can’t do it. He can’t inspire, nor can he really break from a past that is breaking this nation.

Elk Grove Staff with Joan Buchanan and Speaker Karen Bass

Cathlyn Daly, Joan Buchanan, Nancy Fox

Nancy Fox, Speaker Karen Bass, Cathlyn Daly, Damon Mireski