The man who ran the phone jamming scheme for the republicans in New Hampshire blames the culture of Win At Any Cost, Even If It Means Trashing America in the republican party.  As if we didn’t know…

WASHINGTON — For nearly a decade, Allen Raymond stood at the top ranks of Republican Party power.

He served as chief of staff to a cochairman of the Republican National Committee, supervised Republican contests in mid-Atlantic states for the RNC, and was a top official in publisher Steve Forbes’s presidential campaign. He went on to earn $350,000 a year running a Republican policy group as well as a GOP phone-bank business.

But most recently, Raymond has been in prison. And for that, he blames himself, but also says he was part of a Republican political culture that emphasizes hardball tactics and polarizing voters.

Raymond, 39, has just finished serving a three-month sentence for jamming Democratic phone lines in New Hampshire during the 2002 US Senate race. The incident led to one of the biggest political scandals in the state’s history, the convictions of Raymond and two top Republican officials, and a Democratic lawsuit that seeks to determine whether the White House played any role. The race was won by Senator John E. Sununu , the Republican.

In his first interview about the case, Raymond said he doesn’t know anything that would suggest the White House was involved in the plan to tie up Democrats’ phone lines and thereby block their get-out-the-vote effort. But he said the scheme reflects a broader culture in the Republican Party that is focused on dividing voters to win primaries and general elections. He said examples range from some recent efforts to use border-security concerns to foster anger toward immigrants to his own role arranging phone calls designed to polarize primary voters over abortion in a 2002 New Jersey Senate race.

"A lot of people look at politics and see it as the guy who wins is the guy who unifies the most people," he said. "I would disagree. I would say the candidate who wins is the candidate who polarizes the right bloc of voters. You always want to polarize somebody."

I’m a uniter, not a divider…  Remember that?  You know how you can tell that George Bush is lying?  His mouth is moving.  America is today so bitterly divided against itself, because the republicans want it that way.  It wins them elections.  Garrison Keillor was right when he said that they are republicans first, and Americans second.  They want power, and they don’t care what they have to destroy in order to get and keep it.  Our constitution …

They came for the tenth amendment in the name of expansive federal powers.  I didn’t speak up because I am not a terrorist.  Also, I don’t grow wheat.  Or weed.

They came for the ninth amendment in the name of expansive federal and state powers of law enforcement.  I didn’t speak up because I am not a criminal.

They came for the eighth amendment in the name of extracting information from terrorists by any means necessary.  I didn’t speak up because I am not a terrorist.

They came for the seventh amendment in the name of binding arbitration.  I didn’t speak up because I don’t sue people.

They came for the sixth amendment in the name of protecting us from terrorists.  I didn’t speak up because I am not a terrorist.

They came for the fifth amendment in the name of protecting us from criminals and terrorists.  I didn’t speak up because I am neither a criminal not a terrorist.

They came for the fourth amendment in the name of catching criminals and terrorists.  I didn’t speak up because I am neither a criminal nor a terrorist.

They came for the third amendment in the name of preserving order.  I didn’t speak up because I am not a criminal.

They came for the second amendment in the name of stopping gang violence in the streets.  I didn’t speak up because I don’t own a machine gun.

They came for the first amendment in the name of supporting national unity and protecting national secrets.  I didn’t speak up because I no longer may.

…or our precious democracy itself…

Blackwell’s dual roles draw fire
Candidate is also top elections official

Columbus — Secretary of State Ken Blackwell’s dual roles as Republican nominee for governor and the man responsible for ensuring a fair and impartial election in November have subjected him to an avalanche of criticism this week.

Pilloried by voter-registration groups for drafting new rules that they say are intended to suppress the poor-, black- and Democratic vote, Blackwell also is being threatened with a lawsuit for Ohio’s failure to enforce the national "motor voter" law.

Viewing the battle from afar, the New York Times weighed in Wednesday with a lead edit orial titled "Block the Vote, Ohio Remix." The Times labeled Ohio’s election system "corrupt" and called for Blackwell to relinquish all duties pertaining to this fall’s election.

That’s not going to happen, Carlo LoParo, Blackwell’s spokesman, angrily replied. He ripped the Times and said Democrats and left-leaning voter-registration groups were hypocrites…
 

Dig it.  The man running for Governor, is also the man deciding how the election will be conducted.  Pretty nifty eh? 

…Blackwell’s latest ploy is couched in an extremely narrow interpretation of House Bill 3, a recently passed election reform measure. The bill, championed by Republican legislative leaders and signed into law by Gov. Bob Taft, purportedly is designed to eradicate vote fraud.

But Blackwell is using the new law to draft highly restrictive voter registration rules that tightly govern the work of groups engaged in mass registration drives. Registrars could be subject to felony prosecution for violations.

Most disturbing to many election activists is Blackwell’s insistence that completed registration forms be returned by the registrar directly to a county board of elections – and not to any of the legitimate organizations, like public libraries and the League of Women Voters, that regularly encourage voter registration.

Blackwell must stop acting in ways that leave the clear impression that he is trying to drive down voter turnout in the fall. Otherwise, he runs the risk of this newspaper and others joining the growing chorus of those calling for him either to step aside as secretary of state, or to hand over election-related duties to someone who will act in the best interest of all Ohioans.

Blackwell "must" eh?  Says who?

Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted — enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.

BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush — and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush’s victory as nut cases in ”tinfoil hats,” while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ”conspiracy theories,”(1) and The New York Times declared that ”there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.”(2)

But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots — or received them too late to vote(4) — after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment — roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)

The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush’s victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.(11)

Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America’s voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. ”We didn’t have one election for president in 2004,” says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. ”We didn’t have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.”

But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I’ve become convinced that the president’s party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) — more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio’s Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn?t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes — enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)

”It was terrible,” says Sen. Christopher Dodd, who helped craft reforms in 2002 that were supposed to prevent such electoral abuses. ”People waiting in line for twelve hours to cast their ballots, people not being allowed to vote because they were in the wrong precinct — it was an outrage. In Ohio, you had a secretary of state who was determined to guarantee a Republican outcome. I’m terribly disheartened.”

You’re terribly disheartened are you?  Well that’s why the republicans are getting away with it.  You should be livid.  Until democrats start acting like they give a good goddamn that this democracy survives long enough to pass down the promise of liberty and justice for all to the next generation, until they get blood in the face angry enough to fight the republicans for the fate of America, the republicans will do what they damn well please whether its legal or not, because they can, and we will loose our democracy.  Blackwell fixed Ohio for Bush, why shouldn’t he fix it for himself too?  Who says he can’t?