Appearing on ABC’s This Week program, Specter, chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, which will open hearings soon on whether or not President George W. Bush broke the law by ordering spying on Americans by the National Security Agency, said impeachment is a possible remedy.

"The remedy could be a variety of things, including impeachment or criminal prosecution, but the principal remedy under our society is to pay a political price," Specter said."

Specter qualified his remarks by also saying “I don't see any talk about impeachment here.”

The Senator from Pennsylvania is lying when he says that. Nervious Republican talk about impeachment has swirled just below the surface in the hallways and byways of the Hill since news of the spying broke. And while Republicans whisper the word in the back alleys, Democrats have already gone public.

Democratic Senators Edward Kennedy and Sen. Russ Feingold, along with independent Vermont Congressman Bernie Sanders talked about Bush's impeachment on the Sunday news interview shows a week ago.

“I'm concerned about the abuses of executive power in the areas of torture and the areas of spying – and about how we're treating individuals in terms of the court systems," Kennedy says.

"I think Bush probably broke the law here, but we need to know why they did it this way and what the legal justifications were, and then we need to determine what kind of accountability will occur if laws were broken," Feingold says.

“There will be hearings to ask some of the fundamental questions about the Bush administration's actions that have not been asked in five years,” says Sanders.

Rep. John Conyers, Democrat from Michigan, introduced H.Res. 635 on December 18, calling for creation of a select committee to investigate possible impeachment proceedings against Bush. So far Conyers has seven co-sponsors – all Democrats. They are: Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA), Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX), Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Rep. Donald Payne (D-NJ), Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), and Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA).

Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) says he will sign a bill of impeachment. Senator Barbara Boxer has requested a legal analysis from four Presidential scholars on whether or not Bush’s actions are grounds for impeachment.

One of those scholars is John Dean, the Republican White House laywer whose testimony helped bring down Richard Nixon.

Bush “is the first president to admit to an impeachable offense,” Dean says.

“We are a government of laws, theoretically, at least,” Dean says. Why do we need a Patriot Act if Bush has all these powers? If anyone reads the Article 2 the way Bush does then there are just no powers they don't have in the name of defending the country against terrorism, and terrorism is an indefinite threat. Therefore, they can do anything indefinitely that they wish. That isn't what I think the Constitution contemplates.”

“The thing is out of the box now, says Rep. Conyers. “People have had as much as they can stand…President Bush has taken for himself more authority than any other president in the 20th century. I think censure will highlight the incredible number of mistakes, manipulations of intelligence, the encouraging of torture of prisoners, the surprising amount of retaliation that this administration has indulged in against its critics and how they determined to go to war before they had Congressional authorization. It may lead to consideration of articles of impeachment.”
© Copyright 2006 by Capitol Hill Blue

We find ourselves living out a scene in a bad Western. A movie filmed long after all the old plot lines have been exhausted, the grizzled character actors put out to pasture, the Indians slaughtered and confined to desert prisons, the cattle slotted into stinking feed lots, the scenic montane backdrops pulverized by strip mines. All that remains are the guns, bulked up beyond all comprehension, and the hangman and his gibbet. We've seen it all before. But there's no escape now. Someone's locked the exits. The film rolls on to the bitter end. Cue music: Toby Keith.

Perhaps only the Pasolini of Salo: 120 Days of Sodom could have done this celluloid scenario justice. Or the impish Mel Brooks, who gave us Blazing Saddles (one of the greatest films on the true nature of American politics), if you understand the narrative as comedy, which is probably the most emetic way to embrace it. Both Pasolini and Brooks are masters of scatological cinema. And there's mounds of bullshit to dig through to get at the core of George W. Bush.

Because it's all an act, of course, a put on, a dress game. And not a very convincing one at that. Start from the beginning. George W. Bush wasn't born a cowboy. He entered the world in New Haven, Connecticut, hallowed hamlet of Yale. His bloodlines include two presidents and a US senator. The cowboy act came later, when he was famously re-birthed, with spurs on his boots, tea in his cup and the philosophical tracts of Jesus of Nazareth on his night table. Bush is a pure-blooded WASP, sired by a man who would later become the nation's chief spook, a man frequently called upon to clean up the messes left by apex crooks in his own political party, including his own entanglements (and those of his sons) with the more noirish aspects of life. His grandfather was a US senator and Wall Street lawyer, who shamelessly represented American corporations as they did business with the Nazi death machine. Old Prescott narrowly escaped charges of treason. But those were different times, when trading with the enemy was viewed as, at the very least, unseemly.

His mother, Barbara, is a bitter and grouchy gorgon, who must have frightened her own offspring as they first focused their filmy eyes onto her stern visage. She is a Pierce, a descendent of Franklin, the famously incompetent president, patron of Nathaniel Hawthorne and avowed racist, who joined in a bizarre cabal to overthrow Abraham Lincoln. (For more on this long neglected episode in American history check out Charles Higham's excellent new book Murdering Mr. Lincoln.)

Understandably, George Sr. spent much of his time far away from Barbara Bush's icy boudoir, indulging in a discreet fling or two while earning his stripes as a master of the empire, leaving juvenile George to cower under the unstinting commands of his cruel mother, who his younger brother Jeb dubbed "the Enforcer." This woman's veins pulse with glacial melt. According to Neil Bush, his mother was devoted to corporal punishment and would "slap around" the Bush children. She was known in the family as "the one who instills fear." She still does...with a global reach.

How wicked is Barbara Bush? Well, she refused to attend her own mother's funeral. And the day after her five-year old daughter Robin died of leukemia Barbara Bush was in a jolly enough mood to spend the afternoon on the golf course. Revealingly, Mrs. Bush kept Robin's terminal illness a secret from young George, a stupid and cruel move which provided one of the early warps to his psyche.

Her loathsome demeanor hasn't lightened much over the years. Refresh you memory with this quote on Good Morning America, dismissing the escalating body count of American soldiers in Iraq. "Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many," the Presidential Mother snapped. "It's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"

Even Freud might have struggled with this case study. Imagine young George the Hysteric on Siggy's couch in the curtained room on Berggasse 19. The analysand doesn't enunciate; he mumbles and sputters in non-sequential sentence fragments. His quavering voice a whiny singsong. The fantasy has to be teased out. It's grueling work. But finally Freud puts it all together. This lad doesn't want to fuck his mother. Not this harridan. Not this boy. He wants to kill her and chuckle in triumph over the corpse. Oh, dear. This doesn't fit the Oedipal Complex, per se. But it explains so much of George the Younger's subsequent behavior. (See his cold-blooded chuckling over the state murder of Karla Faye Tucker.)

Perhaps, Freud isn't the right shrink for Bush, after all. Maybe the president's pathology is better understood through the lens of Freud's most gifted and troubled protégé, Wilhelm Reich. (I commend to your attention Dr. Reich's neglected masterpiece Listen, Little Man.) Sadly, we cannot avail ourselves of psychological exegises of either Freud or Reich. So Justin Frank, the disciple of Melanie Klein, will have to substitute. In the spirit of his mentor, Frank, author of Bush on the Couch, zeroes in on the crucial first five years of W's existence, where three factors loom over all others: an early trauma, an absent father and an abusive mother. It is a recipe for the making of a dissociated megalomaniac. Add in a learning disability (dyslexia) and a brain bruised by booze and coke and you have a pretty vivid portrait of the Bush psyche.

With this stern upbringing, is it really surprising that Bush evidenced early signs of sadism? As a teenager he jammed firecrackers in the orifices of frogs and snickered as he blew them to bits. A few years later, as president of the DKE frathouse at Yale, Bush instituted a branding on the ass-crack as an initiation ritual. Young pledges were seared with a red-hot wire clothes hanger. One victim complained to the New Haven police, who raided the frathouse. The story was covered-up for several decades until it surfaced in Bush's first run for governor of Texas. He laughed at the allegations, writing the torture off as little more than "a cigarette burn." From Andover to Abu Ghraib.

In his teens, this man child was shoved into a distant boarding school. It must have been a relief for him. The squirrely adolescent with the pointy ears did just enough to get by. At Andover they called him "Bushtail." Ambition wasn't his thing. And he didn't have the athletic talent or thespian skills to do much more than play the role of class goof. So he went on to an undistinguished academic career, highlighted only by his ebullient performances as a cheerleader and a reputation for selling fake IDs. Even in his youth he was adept at forgery.

George the Younger snuck into Yale on a legacy admission, a courtesy to his father and grandfather. He was a remedial student at best, awarded a bevy of Cs, the lowest score possible for the legacy cohort. Repositories like Andover and Yale know what to do with the dim children of the elite. George nestled in his niche. No demands were made of him. He spent much his time acquainting himself with a menu of designer inebrients. He was arrested twice. Once for petty theft. Once for public drunkenness. No one cared.

When Vietnam loomed, Lil' George fled to New Haven for Houston and the safe harbor of the Texas Air National Guard, then jokingly known as Air Canada--a domestic safe-haven for the combat-averse children of the political elite. It was a deftly executed dodge. His father pulled some strings. Escape hatches opened. The scions of the ruling class, even the half-wits, weren't meant to be eviscerated in the rice paddies of the Mekong--that's why they freed the slaves.

But soon George grew bored of the weekend warrior routine. And who among us wouldn't? He slunk off to Alabama, and promptly went AWOL for a year and a half. Nobody seemed to miss him. He wasn't a crucial cog in anyone's machine. George? George Bush??

How did the president-in-training fritter away those idle days? Supposedly he was lending his expertise to the congressional campaign of Winton "Red" Blount. But he apparently soon went AWOL from this assignment as well. Other campaign staffers recall young George ambling into the campaign office in the late afternoon, propping his cowboy booted heals on a desk and recounting his nocturnal revels in the bars, strip joints and waterbeds of Montgomery. The other staffers took to calling him the "Texas Soufflé.". As one recalled, "Bush was all puffed up and full of hot air."

Precisely, how did he wile away those humid nights on the Gulf Coast? According to the intrepid Larry Flynt, he spent part of his time impregnating his girlfriend and, like a true southern gentleman, then escorting her to an abortion clinic. Checkbook birth control, the tried and true method of the ruling classes. A year later, according to Bush biographer J.H. Hatfield, George W. got popped in Texas on cocaine possession charges. The old man intervened once again; George diverted for six months of community service a Project PULL in a black area of Houston and the incident was scrubbed from the police blotter and court records. Today, Bush denies all knowledge of those squalid indiscretions. Just two more lost weekends in George's blurry book of days.

Speaking of cocaine, Bush, by many accounts, had more than a passing familiarity with the powder. Several acquaintances from his days at Yale tell us that Bush not only snorted cocaine, but sold it. Not by the spoonful, but by the ounce bag, a quantity that would land any black or Latino dealer in the pen for at least a decade. Young Bushtail had become the Snow Bird of New Haven.

Even the Bush family, so smugly self-conscious of its public image, didn't seem to care much. Jr wasn't the star child. They just wanted him alive and out of jail. (The habitual drunk driving was already a nagging problem. On a December night in 1973, George came up from Houston to visit his family in DC. He took his younger brother Marvin out drinking in the bars of Georgetown. Returning home after midnight, Bush, drunk at the wheel, careened down the road, toppling garbage cans. When he pulled into the driveway, he was confronted by his father. Young Bush threatened to pummel his old man, mano-a-mano. Jeb intervened before young George could be humilated by his father. A couple of years later, the drunk driving would later land him in the drunk tank of a Maine jail-his fourth arrest.) No need to plump up his resumé with medals or valedictory speeches. Anyway back then, the inside money was riding on Neil, who they said had a head for figures, or perhaps young Jeb, whose gregarious looks hid a real mean streak. (Neil, of course, came to ruin in the looting of the Silvarado Savings and Loan (though he deftly avoided jail time), while Jeb proved his utility in Florida and amplified his presidential ambitions.)

By all accounts, the family elders saw George as a pathetic case, as goofy as a black lab. They got him out of the National Guard eight months early (or 20 months, if you insist on counting the Lost Year) and sent him off to Harvard Business School. He didn't have the grades to merit admission, but bloodlines are so much more important than GPA when it comes to prowling the halls at the Ivy League. The original affirmative action, immune from any judicial meddling. In Cambridge, he strutted around in his flight jacket and chewed tobacco in class. The sound of Bushtail spitting the sour juice into a cup punctuated many a lecture on the surplus value theory. At Harvard, one colleague quipped that Bush majored in advanced party planning and the arcana of money laundering. George met every expectation.

Then came the dark years. Booze, drugs, cavorting and bankruptcy in dreary west Texas. There he also met Laura Welch, the steamy librarian who had slain her own ex-boyfriend, by speeding through a stop sign and plowing broadside into his car with a lethal fury. (Rep. Bill Janklow got 100 days in the pen for a similar crime; Laura wasn't even charged.) They mated, married, raised fun-loving twins. In 1978, George decided to run for congress. His opponent cast him as carpetbagger with an Ivy League education. It worked. And it didn't help his chances much that Bush apparently was drunk much of time. After one drunken stump speech, Laura gave him a tongue lashing on the ride home. Bush got so irate that he drove the car through the garage door. He lost big.

Eventually, Laura got George to quit the booze--though the librarian never got him to read. It wasn't a moral thing for her. Laura still imbibes herself, even around her husband. She smokes, too. Refreshingly, so do the Bush Twins, who have both been popped for underage drinking.

George was Laura's ticket out of the dusty doldrums of west Texas. She sobered him up and rode him hard all the way to Dallas, Austin and beyond. "Oh, that Welch girl," recalled a retired librarian in Midland. "She got around." Wink, wink.

If the son of a millionaire political powerbroker can't make it in Midland, Texas, he can't make it anywhere. George was set up in his own oil company in the heart of the Permian Basin. His two starter companies, Bush Exploration and Arbusto, promptly went bust, hemorraghing millions of dollars. His father's cronies in a group called Spectrum 7 picked up the pieces. It flatlined too. A new group of savoirs in the form of Harken Oil swooped in. Ditto. Yet in the end, George walked away from the wreckage of Harkin Oil with a few million in his pocket. One of the investors in Harken was George Soros, who explained the bail out of Bush in frank terms. "We were buying political influence. That was it. Bush wasn't much of a businessman."

Among the retinue of rescuers in his hours of crisis was a Saudi construction conglomerate, headed by Mohammad bin Laden, sire of Osama. The ties that blind.

Flush with unearned cash, George and Laura hightailed it to Arlington, the Dallas suburb, soon to be the new home of the Texas Rangers, perennial also rans in the American League. Bush served as front man for a flotilla of investors, backed by the Bass brothers and other oil and real estate luminaries, who bought the Rangers and then bullied the city of Arlington into building a posh new stadium for the team with $200 million in public money, raised through a tax hike, for which Bush, the apostle of tax-cuts for the rich, sedulously lobbied. Here's a lesson in the art of political larceny. The super-rich always get their way. When taxes are raised, public money is sluiced upward to the politically connected. When taxes are cut, the money ends up in the same accounts. As William Burrough's hero Jack Black (the hobo writer, not the rotund actor) prophesied, you can't win.

The Rangers deal was never about building a competitive baseball team for the people of Dallas/Ft. Worth. No. The Bush group seduced the city into building a stadium with nearly all the proceeds going straight into their pockets. It was a high level grifter's game, right out of a novel by Jim Thompson, the grand master of Texas noir. Bush played his bit part as affable con man ably enough. Even though he only plunked down $600,000 of his own cash, he walked away from the deal with $14.7 million-a staggering swindle that made Hillary Clintons's windfalls in the cattle future's market look like chump change.

As team president, Bush printed up baseball cards with his photo on them in Ranger attire, endulging his life-long fetish for dress-up fantasies. He would hand out the Bush cards during home game. Invariably, the cards would be found littering the floors of the latrines, soaked in beer and piss.

Tomorrow: Mark His Words.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and, with Alexander Cockburn, Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils.

The dictatorship of the Roman emperors was not based on an ideology. The Nazis had an ideology of sorts, but Hitler’s dictatorship was largely personal and agenda-based. The dictatorship that emerged from the Bolshevik Revolution was based in ideology. Lenin declared that the Communist Party’s dictatorship over the Russian people rests "directly on force, not limited by anything, not restricted by any laws, nor any absolute rules." Stalin’s dictatorship over the Communist Party was based on coercion alone, unrestrained by any limitations or inhibitions.

In this first decade of the 21st century the United States regards itself as a land of democracy and civil liberty but, in fact, is an incipient dictatorship. Ideology plays only a limited role in the emerging dictatorship. The demise of American democracy is largely the result of historical developments.

Lincoln was the first American tyrant. Lincoln justified his tyranny in the name of preserving the Union. His extra-legal, extra-constitutional methods were tolerated in order to suppress Northern opposition to Lincoln’s war against the Southern secession.

The first major lasting assault on the US Constitution’s separation of powers, which is the basis for our political system, came with the response of the Roosevelt administration to the crisis of the Great Depression. The New Deal resulted in Congress delegating its legislative powers to the executive branch. Today when Congress passes a statute it is little more than an authorization for an executive agency to make the law by writing the regulations that implement it.

Prior to the New Deal, legislation was tightly written to minimize any executive branch interpretation. Only in this way can law be accountable to the people. If the executive branch that enforces the law also writes the law, "all legislative powers" are no longer vested in elected representatives in Congress. The Constitution is violated, and the separation of powers is breached.

The principle that power delegated to Congress by the people cannot be delegated by Congress to the executive branch is the mainstay of our political system. Until President Roosevelt overturned this principle by threatening to pack the Supreme Court, the executive branch had no role in interpreting the law. As Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote: "That congress cannot delegate legislative power to the president is a principle universally recognized as vital to the integrity and maintenance of the system of government ordained by the Constitution."

Despite seven decades of an imperial presidency that has risen from the New Deal’s breach of the separation of powers, Republican attorneys, who constitute the membership of the quarter-century-old Federalist Society, the candidate group for Republican nominees to federal judgeships, write tracts about the Imperial Congress and the Imperial Judiciary that are briefs for concentrating more power in the executive. Federalist Society members pretend that Congress and the Judiciary have stolen all the power and run away with it.

The Republican interest in strengthening executive power has its origin in frustration from the constraints placed on Republican administrations by Democratic congresses. The thrust to enlarge the President’s powers predates the Bush administration but is being furthered to a dangerous extent during Bush’s second term. The confirmation of Bush’s nominee, Samuel Alito, a member of the Federalist Society, to the Supreme Court will provide five votes in favor of enlarged presidential powers.

President Bush has used "signing statements" hundreds of times to vitiate the meaning of statutes passed by Congress. In effect, Bush is vetoing the bills he signs into law by asserting unilateral authority as commander-in-chief to bypass or set aside the laws he signs. For example, Bush has asserted that he has the power to ignore the McCain amendment against torture, to ignore the law that requires a warrant to spy on Americans, to ignore the prohibition against indefinite detention without charges or trial, and to ignore the Geneva Conventions to which the US is signatory.

In effect, Bush is asserting the powers that accrued to Hitler in 1933. His Federalist Society apologists and Department of Justice appointees claim that President Bush has the same power to interpret the Constitution as the Supreme Court. An Alito Court is likely to agree with this false claim.

This is the great issue that is before the country. But it is pushed into the background by political battles over abortion and homosexual rights. Many people fighting to strengthen the executive think they are fighting against legitimizing sodomy and murder in the womb. They are unaware that the real issue is that America is on the verge of elevating its president above the law.

Bush Justice Department official and Berkeley law professor John Yoo argues that no law can restrict the president in his role as commander-in-chief. Thus, once the president is at war – even a vague open-ended "war on terror" – Bush’s Justice Department says the president is free to undertake any action in pursuit of war, including the torture of children and indefinite detention of American citizens.

The commander-in-chief role is probably sufficiently elastic to expand to any crisis, whether real or fabricated. Thus has the US arrived at the verge of dictatorship.

This development has little to do with Bush, who is unlikely to be aware that the Constitution is experiencing its final rending on his watch. America’s descent into dictatorship is the result of historical developments and of old political battles dating back to President Nixon being driven from office by a Democratic Congress.

There is today no constitutional party. Both political parties, most constitutional lawyers, and the bar associations are willing to set aside the Constitution whenever it interferes with their agendas. Americans have forgotten the prerequisites for freedom, and those pursuing power have forgotten what it means when it falls into other hands. Americans are very close to losing their constitutional system and civil liberties. It is paradoxical that American democracy is the likely casualty of a "war on terror" that is being justified in the name of the expansion of democracy.

Dr. Roberts is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, former contributing editor for National Review, and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

There is significant controversy about whether the 2004 presidential election was conducted fairly and its votes counted correctly. According to results of the major national election exit poll conducted for the National Election Pool by Edison/Mitofsky (E/M), Kerry won Ohio's pivotal vote, though the official tally gave the state, and thus the presidency, to Bush. The conduct of Ohio's election was formally debated by Congress in January 2005.

The National Election Data Archive (NEDA) is the first mathematical team to release a valid scientific analysis of the precinct-level 2004 Ohio presidential exit poll data "The Gun is Smoking: Ohio 2004 Exit Poll Discrepancies Are Consistent with Outcome-Altering Vote Miscount" available at http://electionarchive.org/ucvanalysis/oh/ohio-exit-polls-2004.pdf. NEDA's analysis provides significant evidence of an outcome-altering vote miscount.

The analysis is based on the most accurate statistical method yet devised for determining whether exit poll error, random variations, or vote count manipulation cause the discrepancies between exit polls and official vote tallies. This analysis method was made public recently by NEDA in "Vote Miscounts or Exit Poll Error? New Mathematical Function for Analyzing Exit Poll Discrepancy" available at http://electionarchive.org/ucvanalysis/us/exit-poll-analysis.pdf

Exit Polls were conducted in 49 of Ohio's 11,360 precincts. At least 40% of Ohio's polled precincts show statistically significant differences between Kerry's exit poll percent and official vote count percent. 35% of these discrepancies underestimated the Kerry official vote share. This is five times the number expected. Three of the most glaring examples are:

1. In E/M precinct 27, with an estimated 100 respondents, Kerry's official vote count was 29% less than his exit poll share, creating a 58% difference between Kerry and Bush exit poll and official vote margins. There is less than a one in 867,205,500 chance of this occurring due to chance.

2. In E/M precinct 25, with an estimated 62 respondents, Kerry's official vote count was 28% less than his exit poll share, creating a 56% difference between Kerry and Bush exit poll and official vote margins. There is less than a one in 234,800 chance of this occurring due to chance.

3. In E/M precinct 48, with an estimated 100 respondents, Kerry's official vote was 16% less than his exit poll share, creating a 32% difference between Kerry and Bush exit poll and official vote margins. There is less than a one in 17,800 chance of this occurring due to chance.

There are also two precincts where the Bush official vote count is significantly less than the Bush exit poll share. The number of significant discrepancies and the pattern of Ohio's discrepancy shown in the NEDA report provide strong support for the conclusion that vote count errors converted a Kerry win to a Bush win.

New electronic voting equipment without voter verified paper ballots, implemented under the 2002 Help America Vote Act, makes it easier for a small number of people to manipulate vote counts and nearly impossible to independently audit vote count accuracy. Virtually every county in America today publicly reports its vote counts in a way that hides evidence of miscounts. This allows those with access (whether authorized or not) to manipulate or make mistakes in vote counting with negligible possibility of detection.

Without accurate elections, America is not a democracy. NEDA urges the media to publicize the results of this report and its recommendations, in order to return to the American people their right to determine the country's leaders.

The National Election Data Archive is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose mission is to scientifically investigate the accuracy of elections through the creation and analysis of a database containing precinct-level vote-type election data for the entire United States. By making detailed election data publicly available NEDA furthers its goal of providing the means for independent analysts to evaluate the accuracy of vote counts in time to ensure that properly elected candidates are sworn into office following future elections.

For further information contact: Kathy Dopp, MS Mathematics, NEDA, President kathy@uscountvotes.org Ron Baiman, PhD, Economics, NEDA, Vice President, ron@uscountvotes.org

To receive our email announcements, please email election-subscribe@uscountvotes.org

Common-sense solutions to ensure accurate vote counts:

Please donate to our 501(c)(3) to help implement NEDA:

NEDA brochures are available:

National Election Data Archive P.O. Box 682556 Park City, UT 84068

Kathy Dopp is President of the National Election Data Archive and can be reached at kathy@uscountvotes.org.

Let's start with vote fraud. This is different from old-fashioned vote-buying that, though attractive, still limits you to one vote per voter. The point of vote fraud is to increase the votes per voter by having them vote in place of other people.

It's a great idea, but pulling it off isn't easy. You need a lot of corrupt supporters willing to impersonate legitimate voters, and the legitimate voters must be people who won't be voting. Maybe you've got the corrupt supporters, but finding people for them to impersonate will be difficult. Virginia is quick to purge voters from the rolls when they die, get convicted of a felony, or move.

AND THEN there is the risk of getting caught people know the neighbors who share their polling places, and they may notice if someone shows up claiming to be Mrs. Jones when Mrs. Jones looks nothing like her and, moreover, is dead.

Vote fraud just isn't that common. As far as we can tell, there hasn't been a proven case of vote fraud in Virginia in 40 years.

So what's a slimebag to do? If you can't increase votes for your guy, decrease them for your opponent. Your goal is to prevent some of the other guy's supporters from exercising their constitutional right to vote.

The time-honored method for this is voter intimidation. It works wonders for suppressing the vote, but you have to match your tactic to the people you're trying to scare. If your opponent has an edge with well-off white men, you have a problem. You could ask the IRS to announce it will use voter lists for random audits of tax shelters. Good luck with that.

If, however, the well-off people are your voters, and your opponent appeals to poor people, minorities, and immigrants, then you have lots of options. One popular technique involves putting up flyers in targeted neighborhoods announcing that people will not be allowed to vote if they are behind on their rent or child support. Having a police presence in precincts where minorities live is another good tactic. No matter how law-abiding they are, people who see police officers as a potential source of harassment may decide that voting isn't worth it.

THE BEST OPTION for disenfranchising poor people, though, is legislation requiring voters to show a government-issued photo ID at the polls. Your middle-class supporters have these because they are necessary to a lifestyle that includes cars, bank accounts, and plane travel. But many poor voters, especially those without cars, don't. If Virginia required photo IDs for voting, some people would be disenfranchised. Those people could represent your candidate's margin of victory.

Virginia does not now have this requirement, but the idea has support in the legislature from people who say they are worried about vote fraud. So even though vote fraud is difficult to pull off, your candidate should say he is gravely concerned about the possibility. If the legislature follows through, then you will suppress the turnout of your opponent's voters by much more than vote fraud could increase the votes of yours. Not bad.

But say that voter intimidation and an ID requirement are not enough, or that these tactics don't help you, because your voters are the poor people whose votes would be suppressed. Never mind the voters, change the votes.

This is the ultimate dirty trick, though you can do it only in counties that use computer-based voting rather than paper ballots. Paper ballots, even if they are tallied by computers, are available for hand recounts, and this makes them hard to manipulate. But if you can change the software in a computer to have it count more votes for your guy than for his opponent, then you don't need to win the election -- you can steal it.

How hard is this? That depends on who you ask. But there is a growing concern among computer professionals and election officials nationwide that election machines could be manipulated by outsiders through hacking, or deliberately misprogrammed by insiders with access. You should look into both.

AND IF YOU succeed, you will probably get away with it because Virginia does not require its machines to print receipts for voters to verify their votes have been recorded properly. Virginia doesn't even require Election Day audits of randomly selected machines, which likely would reveal the existence of problems.

So you see, you have some options to explore. But better hurry. There are fair-minded people in Virginia who would like to take away your opportunities to game the election. The Assembly is considering election-reform bills even now.

We all agree, it's time for action.

Ivy Main is the policy director for the New Electoral Reform Alliance of Virginia, a nonpartisan advocacy group formed in 2004 to address problems in the Virginia electoral system.

What have sealed Navy records given to the neo-cons to blackmail McCain? Plenty, according to eyewitness on the USS Forrestal.

According to an eyewitness to the Navy's worst fire disaster that killed 134 sailors and injured 62, McCain and the Forrestal's skipper, Capt. John K. Beling, were warned about the danger of using M-65 1000-lb. bombs manufactured in 1935, which were deemed too dangerous to use during World War II and, later, on B-52 bombers. The fire from the Zuni misfire resulted in the heavy 1000 pounders being knocked loose from the pylons of McCain's A-4, which were only designed to hold 500-pound bombs.

During the fighting of the fire and while VF-74 and VF-11 were still counting their dead, McCain was helicoptered off the Forrestal to the USS Oriskany, which suffered a major fire on October 27, 1966, that killed 44 sailors. In that event, thousand pound bombs were jettisoned away from the fire but the lessons of the Oriskany went unheeded by the Forrestal's officers, including McCain, who served with the VA-163 Saints on board the Oriskany when the fire on that vessel occurred. On October 26, 1967, McCain was shot down over North Vietnam during a bombing sortie from the Oriskany.

The unstable bombs had a 60-second cook-off threshold in a fire situation and this warning was known to both Beling and McCain prior to the disaster. On January 14, 1969, the USS Enterprise, steaming 75 miles southwest of Pearl Harbor, suffered a major fire. In that episode, similar unstable 1000-pound bombs detonated, killing 27 sailors and injuring more than 100. At the time of the Enterprise disaster, the Commander-in- Chief of US Pacific Forces was Adm. John S. McCain, Jr.,Sen. McCain's father.

At the time of the Forrestal disaster, Admiral McCain was Commander-in-Chief of US Naval Forces Europe (CINCUSNAVEUR) and was busy covering up the details of the deadly and pre-meditated Israeli attack on the NSA spy ship, the USS Liberty, on June 8, 1967. The fact that both McCains were involved in two incidents just weeks apart that resulted in a total death count of 168 on the Forrestal and the Liberty, with an additional injury count of 234 on both ships (with a number of them later dying from their wounds) with an accompanying classified paper trail inside the Pentagon, may be all that was needed to hold a Sword of Damocles over the head of the "family honor"-oriented (McCain's persona is supported by his book about his father and grandfather, both Navy admirals, titled "Faith of My Fathers") and the "straight talking" McCain.

The Bush administration and neo-cons may have uncovered reams of documents that throw cold water on that public perception. STORY IN PROGRESS.

They same is true for activists. Constant focus on the puppets who are out front can only lead to feelings of futility. We have to start thinking about the players behind the scenes. It’s time to go back to the beginning and try to understand our enemy. Time to consider the question, who is the enemy.

For example, I’ve gotten into the unconscious habit of thinking of journalists as reluctant accomplices to this rightwing takeover, as unhappy, hijacked professionals much like the experts in the State Department—and, for that matter, the experts throughout government. I think that because I forget that the media are their own best apologists. The truth is, the corporate media are leading this revolution, not merely following along and scavenging.

Consider the Abramoff scandal. This is undeniably the worst corruption scandal in our country’s history, easily out-doing Tea Pot Dome, not only because it’s international in scope, but because it represents the engineering of what Tom DeLay modestly refers to as permanent majority status. That spectacular feat was accomplished by means of the so-called K Street Project, which mandated that the Republican Party and all its members would henceforth deal only with Republican lobbyists.

I realize the Democrats are blameless only because they were ruthlessly cut out of the action, but it’s still a treat watching Wolf Blitzer trying to twist the facts to fit the bipartisan scenario demanded by the RNC talking points of the day. I highly recommend this video of Blitzer interviewing Howard Dean for a little comic relief.

It’s time we learned the rudiments of “scandalology,” as John Dean calls it in his excellent book, Worse Than Watergate. For a scandal to be a scandal, Dean says, the media must certify it. When Newsweek’s Howard Fineman said of Bill Clinton at the height of the Lewinsky scandal, “We have to wonder whether we can continue to respect ourselves as a people if a man like this remains president,” he was expressing exactly the kind of moral outrage that makes a scandal.

If the media have the power to manufacture a crisis, as with the Clinton impeachment, conversely, “if the media learn of a transgression and fail to react, there is no scandal.” In a very real sense, our mass media establish the rules governing public and political decency.

In that regard, Plamegate set a benchmark in the journalistic management of Bush-based scandals: suddenly, after years and years of hearing about the “character issue,” the accepted standard for press censure of a president became criminal indictments. And even after the indictment, pundits argued that the indictments were too few, or for puny crimes (i.e., perjury instead of treason).

Bob Woodward was one of those publicly scoffing at the seriousness of the charges. The Washington Post quoted Mr. Woodward as saying of Plamegate that ultimately “there is going to be nothing to it. And it is a shame. And the special prosecutor in the case, his behavior, in my view, has been disgraceful.” Furthermore, Woodward warned, Fitzgerald “made a big mistake” in going after Judy Miller.

But that was before someone in the White House tipped Fitzgerald that Woodward knew about Plame even before Libby did. After he got caught, Mr. Woodward started singing a much less bellicose tune. Suddenly it was “pretty frightening” that Judy went to jail.

“I hunkered down,” Woodward said in an interview. “I’m in the habit of keeping secrets. I didn’t want anything out there that was going to get me subpoenaed.”

Woodward is, of course, famous for his part in the prototypical media scandal of our times, Watergate. One could argue that the arc of Woodward’s career perfectly describes the whole trajectory of media in the electronic age. In the early seventies, the media landscape was highly diversified. Virtually all cities and most towns had their own independent newspapers. There were a large number of independently owned radio stations, rooted in the communities they served, and FCC regulations for radio and television included the now-obsolete fairness and equal time doctrines.

In the seventies, the Times published the Pentagon papers and the Post competed with the Watergate story. The regulated press performed their function as economic competitors to each other and adversaries to unbridled and secretive government. Because of the press, Richard Nixon resigned. The political class did their bit, too, certainly, but the press acted as the public conscience. The press enforced and enacted respect for the law.

Thirty years down the road things have changed just a bit. Now Woodward is not only a managing editor at the Post, but he has a sweetheart deal where he can sit on scoops he gathers for his books in return for serializing them first in the Post. Good for him, bad for us. Very, very bad for us, as it turns out. The hero of Watergate has become a wealthy businessman.

But that’s only possible because of a lot of other changes that have occurred. It took years of work, years of capitalist indoctrination—greed is good, greed is good, greed works—but bit by bit the FCC regulations designed to prevent the kind of propaganda machine built by the Third Reich have been chipped away: equal time, fairness, the laws against consolidation and monopoly. The result: Rupert Murdoch’s dark parody of equal time and fairness, “fair and balanced” news.

George W. Bush is Rupert Murdoch’s star personality, and worth every damn billion. Rupert Murdoch is the undeniable leader of the corporate media consortium; all the other networks have been good and Foxified. Roger Ailes, Murdoch’s news genius, is rolling out the Fox method to the network affiliates, closing up any gaps in their total control of the message. (There can be no greater compliment from a pundit than that someone’s “on message.”) Fox is certainly holding up the broadcast end of the Total Information Awareness campaign, with emphasis on the word total.

Public Broadcasting, however, has the potential to surpass even Fox. Think what a network under the control of a Republican Congress and a Republican White House will one day be capable of doing. Money buys a very long view.

Until recently, it’s my feeling that a lot of the control exerted was purely economic. By insisting that newsgathering and journalism—which in the past had been viewed as loss-leaders and part of the price of doing business—achieve profit margins similar to the selling of soap and cereal, corporate executives effectively insured superficial coverage without ever taking a red pencil to an editorial. According to an article in the New Yorker by Ken Auletta [October 10,2005], high profit targets and consequent cuts in personnel have been at the heart of a conflict at the LA Times.

The corporate executives in the case scoff at such an elitist caricature of the dispute:

Journalists express dismay that bottom-line pressures are reducing the quality of news coverage. What this actually means is that when competition is intense, providers of a service are forced to give the consumer what he or she wants, not what they, as proud professionals, think the consumer should want, or, more bluntly, what they want.



But now, taking the next step, failure to hit profit targets not only means cutting people, but direct intervention in shaping editorial content, a significant benchmark in corporate management of the message. Tribune chain executives cashiered the LA Times’ liberal columnist Robert Scheer in favor of a rightwing columnist Jonah Goldberg, author of Liberal Fascism. (Have you noticed that there’s been a lot of rightwing effort to co-opt and nullify the word fascist lately?) Scheer says that the publisher who fired him, Jeff Johnson “is an accountant who cares nothing at all about a free press and cares nothing about journalism, he’s a right winger who supported the war . . . who told people two years ago he couldn’t stand a word that I wrote.”

The entire Knight-Ridder chain, which includes the Daily News, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Miami Herald, is allegedly facing sale because of irritation in some quarters with the negative stories they’ve been breaking. The feeling on the right seems to be if you don’t like the news, buy a paper and change it.

The White House’s demand that news services doctor the transcript of a Scott McClellan press conference is another benchmark of sorts. If we ever get used to them tinkering with the public record, reality itself may become obsolete.

It’s time to start attacking the messengers. When Chris Matthews tells us that George W. Bush sometimes “glimmers” with “sunny nobility,” you know that the only economic competition in this market is in seeing who can kiss the most neocon butt, proof positive that media giants are no more capable of self-regulation than the coal mining industry.

Here’s another Matthews nugget: “Everybody sort of likes the president, except for the real whack-jobs, maybe on the left.” And another: “I think this is the brilliant political move here by the president, forcing the Democratic carpers and complainers to come forward, and say, ‘Alright, you don’t like my strategy for victory in Iraq? Vote against it. Go ahead, make my day.’ This is Clint Eastwood stuff.”

I have to ask myself, do they have something on this guy, or was he born this way? I hope for his sake it’s the former. This is the voice of the left on the network news channels, folks. When is someone going to have the guts to ask Matthews point-blank when he runs one of these numbers if he’s getting payola.

To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the media is the scandal.

Patricia Goldsmith is a member of Long Island Media Watch, a grassroots free media and democracy watchdog group. She can be reached at plgoldsmith@optonline.net.

When we compare father and son, we see stark contrast. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Bush senior ruled out plans for college and entered Navy flight school on his 18th birthday. At age 19 he became the youngest combat pilot in the Navy and was assigned to a torpedo bomber squadron in the Pacific. Bush flew 58 combat missions, was shot down once, and was decorated for heroism. Later at Yale he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and was also a fine athlete, the first baseman and captain of the Yale baseball team.

Compare this to the younger Bush. He also went to Yale, but as a “legacy” student, a product of his father’s status (and hard work) as a Yale alumnus. Lacking athletic talent or any real competitive instincts, the younger Bush became a cheerleader, just as he had been at Andover Prep. When graduation came and he was faced with military service in 1968, he used his family name and influence to secure a safe spot in the Texas Air National Guard. Thus, he was able to avoid service in Vietnam although he had professed a belief in the merits of the war.

Following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the first President Bush assembled a strong international coalition, including the Arab countries of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to forcibly expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. But Bush stopped short of sending U.S. troops into Baghdad to remove Hussein from power. As Bush explained in his book, “A World Transformed,” coauthored with Brent Scowcroft, toppling Saddam Hussein would have made the U.S. “an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land… The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well.” In looking back at the first Gulf War, one can’t help but appreciate now the elder Bush’s much-maligned “nuanced thinking” as his administration carefully weighed the long-term consequences of its actions. In a Time Magazine article of March 1998, Bush and Scowcroft explained their thinking:

“The Gulf War had far greater significance to the emerging post-cold war world than simply reversing Iraqi aggression and restoring Kuwait. Its magnitude and significance impelled us from the outset to extend our strategic vision beyond the crisis to the kind of precedent we should lay down for the future. From an American foreign-policymaking perspective, we sought to respond in a manner which would win broad domestic support and which could be applied universally to other crises. In international terms, we tried to establish a model for the use of force."

Bush apologists will argue that it was just this “failing” of the first Bush administration to remove Hussein from power that forced the younger Bush to confront Iraq as it became -- suddenly and somehow -- a threat to U.S. security. But this is nonsense. The rationale for war – the weapons of mass destruction and Hussein’s link to 9/11 – have both been proven false. Rather, we know now that before the ashes had even settled over the Twin Towers, George W. Bush was salivating at the thought of invading Iraq. The careful weighing of the pros and cons of war that characterized the first Bush administration played no role in George Bush’s thinking or in the thinking of any of his confidants in the administration, all of whom were only too willing to play “follow the leader,” including the once proud soldier Colin Powell who revealed a streak of moral cowardice that surprised most everyone.

America, once the land of the proud and the brave, can no longer claim such title. After 9/11 we became America the Afraid and turned our wills and our lives over to “a closet weakling who seizes on inflexibility as a way to show America that he is strong,” as Norman Mailer once described George W. Bush. Added Mailer, “[Bush], left on his own, might have become a successful movie actor…He has been impersonating men more manly than himself for many years.” Bush’s father perhaps?

Nevertheless, slightly more than half of the voting public fell for this machismo ruse, and as a result our young men (and women) in Iraq are paying the price – more than 2,200 dead and 15,000 more wounded. And the end of the human carnage is not in sight, for as George Bush told the nation recently, “We will stay the course.”

But the “We” Bush speaks of isn’t the American people. Our lives are safe and comfortable. In fact, we don’t even have to pay for the war. We will just continue borrowing the money. The last thing Bush wants is a public suddenly feeling the impact of the war on its pocketbooks.

And George Bush doesn’t lack for security. On his trip to Argentina in November for the Fourth Summit of the Americas, Jordana Timerman tells us of Bush’s “imperial-style arrival…with an entourage of 2,000 people and four AWACS surveillance systems.”

And yet as the New York Times' Michael Moss reported last week, a secret Defense Department study conducted by the military’s chief medical examiner concluded thatas many as 80 percent of the marines who have been killed in Iraq from wounds to the upper body could have survived if they had had extra body armor. Such armor has been available since 2003, but until recently the Pentagon has largely declined to supply it to troops despite calls from the field for additional protection. The ceramic armor plates in question cost about $260 a set."

None if this is to argue that George H.W. Bush was without shortcomings. But I think the record shows, that as a WWII combat veteran and someone who saw up close the inner workings behind the Vietnam War, he brought to the presidency a sense of decency and compassion that is entirely missing in the reckless ideologue, George the son.

In a 1999 reunion commemorating the 8th anniversary of the end of the first Gulf War, the senior Bush addressed the audience of veterans and spoke of “the toughest decision any president can make ... when you're going to send somebody else's kid into harm's way." He explained that perhaps because of his own service in the military, the decision was never easy. More tellingly, he added, “The decision to go to war is one that defines a nation to the world, and perhaps more importantly, to itself.”

Gerald S. Rellick, Ph.D., worked in aerospace industry for 22 years. He now teaches in the California Community College system. He can be reached at grellick@hotmail.com.