I'm out in the garden today and so I don't really have time to get into this. But if true I'd be unsurprised. It reminds me of bad Clancy novels, or something. Anyway, via Avedon, haxxorwarz:

Last week, VR interviewed GOP Cyber security expert Stephen Spoonamore about the upcoming election and his testimony in the new Ohio litigation to take depositions of Karl Rove and others.

The video is posted in full below with ten short clips for You Tube viewing. This interview is so important and explosive that we urge everyone to watch it.

Spoonamore says that the GOP wanted e-voting to steal elections but now foreign governments will be hacking and the winner will be determined by the best hackers. He says that if the GOP wins the hacking competition, McCain will win 51.2 percent with three electoral votes over Obama, and it will be a stolen election.

Spoon also makes a crucial point about the people who have been implicated in much of the election theft: "They are religious extremists." He names those who know about stolen elections, and he insists that the only way to protect this election is with paper ballots, hand-counted. Read more…

[UPDATE Well, the site just ran into bandwidth limitations. Bad news, but good news.]

[WARNING: Give the site, say, thirty seconds or a minute for the movie to buffer (more time than the site says) Then it will play; I just tested it.]

Powerful. Worth it. Read more…

[I'm going to leave this sticky. A big story not covered by our famously free press? Incroyable! And you'd think they'd want to the story covered before the TX convention this week....]

[After I started this post, Wampum posted the El Paso incident reports,* a few of which this post puts on the record. And it took me too long to finish because of the all-to-typical sort of RL issues a DFH like me would have....]

Let me start with my own caucus experience. My caucus--perhaps I should say the caucus I attended--was held on a Sunday, in the afternoon, in a high school gym; I live near a college town, and I stood in line for an hour before I got in. Right off the bat, I could see that the caucus system discriminated: Although the line was full of college students -- many of them wearing Obama paraphernalia and working the line for votes -- there were (of course) no sick people and very few older people, and very few people with kids. In fact, the woman I was in line with, who had a hip replacement, wasn't able to stay through the vote. It was clear just by eyeballing the line that caucus attendance didn't represent the town -- and that's before we get to other people who can't attend: People without cars (there's no public transportation on Sunday), people who have to work (my friend with the bleeding feet, a Hillary supporter, works 7 days a week), as well as people with child- or elder-care issues, and people who had to be out of town that day, whether on business, vacation, or serving in the military.

The caucus itself was not especially abusive. We all sat in the bleachers to be counted off. The chair, an Obama supporter complete with sticker, did treat the initial caucus, that included Edwards and Kucinich supporters, in perfunctory "Let's get this over with" fashion, and did make the minority [not Obama] supporters walk down from the bleachers onto the floor both times, but that wasn't my prime takeway; rather, the sustained blast of rage and contempt I received from someone I had thought of as a friend, because I was voting for Hillary, was my takeaway. (I'm sure others have had similar experiences.) One advantage of the secret ballot is that it's, well, secret, so relationships don't get destroyed over politics.

* * *
Not only is the caucus system unrepresentative, it's open to abuse by anyone who wants to game it. Over at TalkLeft, one P. Cronin has a detailed comparison of the caucus system vs. true, secret ballot elections, and it's not a pretty sight [PDF, and please read and disseminate widely]. Here's the first comparison table, and boy, is it gruesome:

Why are we doing this? Why, in the Year of Our Lord Or Lady, If Any 2008, after election 2000 was stolen in FL, and election 2004 was pretty iffy in OH, are we relying on a system where the results are not transparent or auditable, and the results are not officially certified? Does this travesty of a caucus system make any sense?**

Which brings me to the TX caucuses. Read more…

Read this. And weep. Or scream. And keep watching this story, because this is the nut: Read more…

This story doesn't seem to have gotten the attention in the blogosphere that it deserves. The non-Beltway McClatchy reports:

The ways in which the department's Civil Rights Division has enforced the 2002 Help America Vote Act and the 1993 National Voter Registration Act go to the heart of allegations that the Bush administration has used the unit to suppress the votes of poor minorities.

First, the voting machines:

The Help America Vote Act [as Orwellian a name as "Healthy Forests"] required states to upgrade voting machines and to create central, computerized databases of registered voters by Jan. 1, 2006.

he department accused New York state of failing to upgrade its voting systems and to create a centralized voting list by the deadline and sued Indiana for failing to screen out ineligible voters.

Former Justice Department officials noted that other states - such as Texas, Colorado and Utah - had similar or worse voter-registration problems, but the department didn't sue their Republican election officials.

Gosh, gosh, you'd think the Justice Department wants only Democratic voters to use electronic voting machines. I wonder why that would be?

Second, purging voter rolls: Read more…

When talking about the USA firings, even Republicans use the word "politicize." Why? Because it's a vague, wishy-washy word that opens the door to an "everybody does it" narrative. (And Democrats, idiotically, use this Republican talking point as if it were, fer gawdsake, neutral.)

But what the USA firings are really about is using the criminal justice system to affect election outcomes. That's why the Bush regime has to corrupt not just their own appointees to get fake charges brought, but the civil service as well--the grunts who gather the evidence and handle the cases. Once again, the non-Beltway McClatchy gets the story right, as Pravda on the Potomac and Izvestia on the Hudson shamelessly fumble it: Read more…