Hungry Blues

Just in case it's faster for you to find it if I link it, there is a page for today's not-a-hearing on the House Committee on the Judiciary Democratic Members website. Right now, it includes only a very partial record of the proceedings. Presumably they'll get the rest of material up there soon. I believe Conyers said they are putting everything that was submitted for the record onto the site.

As you might surmise from these several postlets, I finished the thing I was writing. It was a commissioned piece for the annual Martin Luther King, Jr. commemorative booklet put out by the state of Hawaii. I retain copyright, so I can publish it here without difficulty, but I think I'll wait till MLK Day.

This year the theme of the King commemoration is the 1965 Voting Rights Act, an especially poignant topic this year. It was an interesting exercise to tone down my own political opinions for the venue, stay relatively general and non-partisan, yet still make the basic points that were important to me.

Check it out (requires Real Player).

It's 3 hours long; so far I've watched half. There is much that is moving and important.

Go to the program ID page to see who testified at the hearing.

At today's hearing held in DC by John Conyers on allegations of irregularities and fraud in the 2004 presidential election an ordniary white working class woman got to speak. Very calmly she said:

I am not as educated and up on things as some of you people here in Washington..that's why I don't understand why you don't seem to get how it works here...You ask me for my sons and daughters...and you want me to pay my hard earned money for taxes...and you don't want to give me my vote. You want me to send my son to die..and you are supposed to give me something back for that...you are supposed to give me a vote. You don't seem to get how it works. You want me to give you everything I have and you don't want to give me anything back...that is not how it works here.

(Transcription courtesy of Heather Baum.)

I'm under deadline for some writing I was commissioned to do in honor of Martin Luther King Day. I will be back to my frequent yet irregular pace of posting shortly. It may still be a little while before I get back to my research and writing from the book project (remember that? the whole reason I started blogging . . .). Until I figure out the job thing, it may be hard to do get back to my primary source documents and put the necessary time into them. If you're new to HungryBlues you may want to check out the "Some Research" section in my sidebar, just below the Google site search, or the Paul Greenberg 101 category to get an idea of what this site is all about.

They confirmed that they WILL televise the John Conyers hearing on allegations of fraud and irregularities in the 2004 Presidential election in Ohio. I don't have a TV, so I hope one of my friends can tape it or TIVO it or whatever people do these days. (I haven't had a TV in over 10 years.)

From truthout.org:

[truthout] Editor’s Note | Any who wish to see this hearing receive wide attention should contact their Senators and Representatives and ask that they attend. Furthermore, any who wish to see this hearing receive wide attention should contact the television network C-SPAN and ask them to broadcast the event in its entirety. C-SPAN accepts suggestions for events to be broadcast at events@c-span.org. The network can also be contacted via telephone at (202) 737-3220. - wrp

Conyers to Hold Hearings on Ohio Vote Fraud
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Report

Friday 03 December 2004

Democratic Representative John Conyers, Jr. of Michigan, ranking Minority member of the House Judiciary Committee, will hold a hearing on Wednesday 08 December 2004 to investigate allegations of vote fraud and irregularities in Ohio during the 2004 Presidential election. The hearing is slated to begin at 10:00 a.m. EST in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington DC.

Democratic Representatives Melvin Watt and Robert Scott will also be centrally involved with the hearing. Rev. Jesse Jackson will be in attendance, along with Ralph Neas (President, People for the American Way), Jon Greenbaum (Director, Voting Rights Project, Lawyers Committee For Civil Rights Under Law), Ellie Smeal (Executive Director, The Feminist Majority), Bob Fitrakis ( The Free Press), Cliff Arnebeck (Arnebeck Associates), John Bonifaz (General Counsel, National Voting Institute), Steve Rosenfeld (Producer, Air America Radio), and Shawnta Walcott (Communications Director, Zogby International). Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell has been invited to attend.

The term ‘hearing’ is technically not accurate in this matter, as Conyers and his fellow Representatives will be holding this forum without the blessing of the Republican Majority leader of the Judiciary Committee. Staffers from the Minority office at the Judiciary Committee describe the event as a ‘Members Briefing.’ That having been said, this event will be a hearing by every meaningful definition of the word. Expert testimony will be offered, and a good deal of data on potential fraud previously unreported to the public will be discussed and examined at length. (emphasis added)

The hearing came together thanks to a confluence of events, and through the work of like-minded individuals who are deeply concerned about the allegations of vote fraud in the Ohio Presidential election. Tim Carpenter and Kevin Spidel, along with other members of Progressive Democrats of America, went to Washington DC to speak with the Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee about the need for an investigation into these allegations. They found Rep. Conyers, his fellow Judiciary Democrats, and their staffers already working on assembling such an investigation.

The core of what Conyers and his fellow Minority members will be discussing at this hearing can be found in the letter below, which was sent by the Minority office to Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell on 02 December. In the letter, Conyers, along with Reps. Watt, Nadler and Baldwin, outline a broad and detailed series of questions and concerns about the manner in which the Ohio election took place.

Text of letter is here [html] and here [pdf, scanned original].

Call (202-737-3220) and email C-SPAN.

Tell them you want continuous coverage of this hearing.

Find your members of Congress HERE. Call them!

Tell them to show their commitment to restoring our faith in American Democracy.

Tell them you want them at the entirety of the hearing.

Note that calls are much more effective than emails for getting the attention of Congress people.

Spread the word! Jam the phone lines! Let the Congress know we care about this!

You have to still read the NY Times print edition (and live in the New York metropolitan area) to notice what Daniel Kreiss did on Sunday.

At my parents house in New Jersey last weekend, I got a copy of the Sunday Times. On the cover of the magazine is a white child, a boy, looking down at puzzle pieces of his face. It is The Design Issue of "The Ever More Carefully Arranged, Artfully Blueprinted, Technologically Devised, Painstakingly Organized American Childhood." In Park Slope, Brooklyn it is the same white child on the cover.

Where I live In Boreum Hill, Brooklyn, a black child, a girl, is looking down at that same puzzle.

The obvious question is which New York does the Times report on?

[I]n the waning days of 2004 The New York Times does not expect a white suburban family to relate to a black child on the cover of a magazine dealing with childhood development, and does not expect a black family in Brooklyn to respond to the white child. But perhaps the latter is the more correct assumption; the childhood design magazine was largely geared towards the white suburban set and devoid of any content relating to rearing children on limited budgets, through public schooling and transportation, and with limited space in overcrowded apartments. As the story of demographics and income in the New York City metro-area tells you, those are the experiences of black and Hispanic families.

Go to Exegesis to read the whole thing; Daniel's blog is one of those quieter corners of the blogosphere where you can routinely find quality journalism and good media analysis.

The article gives pretty good coverage of what we know about electoral problems nationwide in the 2004 election. Unfortunately, the journalists are not able to discuss the real issues without also devoting a swath of print to dismiss all the "conspiracy theories." (Thanks to Marsha for sending me the link.)

Keith Olbermann wants to know why Bev Harris won't show her video tapes of the Volusia County debacle on Countdown:

I have not dealt with Ms. Harris directly, but my staff has, and though we have asked her on a regular basis to let us show these tapes on national television, she has declined.

I hate to say it, but Olbermann is right to question her integrity:

What Ms. Harris has left herself open to is a charge that as much as any interest she has in the justifiable public concern over our most precious right - the right to a reliable, honest election - she may also have an interest in making her own documentary, on her own schedule, for her own purposes.

What Ms. Harris has also left herself - and by extension anybody who is advocating investigation, or merely covering the story - open to,is the charge of grandstanding, of tin-foil hatting, of being somebody who bursts in to a room and screams at public officials, videotape running all the time, artificially creating news.

Harris is demanding full disclosure from public officials (as she should) but is refusing to meet that standard herself. This is irresponsible particularly because it undermines everyone else who shares her passion for truth. From Olbermann:

I don’t know her motivations and I don’t know her bona fides. But I’m afraid at this stage, intentionally or by the simplest of communication failures, she isn’t helping illuminate this issue. And every step that attracts heat but not light is another step towards discrediting the entire process.

Read the whole thing.

The process of executing the election is at least as important as the underlying ballot technology. Perfect technology cannot repair a fundamentally flawed process. Adequate policies, institutions and people are needed to make sure that the voting systems are properly used. In every electronic technology, particularly security technologies, the human factor is a critical component. The process and people require investment as least as great as the investment in the technology. There are certain inherent trade-offs in the process that the technology may obscure but does not resolve. The emergence of election administration as a profession, including the maturation of professional associations, is worthy of support. Other options include creation of professional guidelines, certification, training or testing for those who are in public positions with the responsibility of administering elections. International interaction of election officials can support the creation of a knowledge base. Many other nations have trained, civil-service election administrators to guarantee a non-partisan process.

(Jean Camp, Allan Friedman and Warigia Bowman, Electronic Voting Best Practices: A Summary [pdf], Voting, Vote Capture & Vote Counting Symposium, June 2004, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 9)

The news conference was yesterday, and the AP picked it up. Why is Keith Olbermann's MSNBC blog the closest thing to coverage by a national news outlet?

[Jesse] Jackson may have also introduced a new rotting fish into the pile of evidence that suggests Ohio did a very lousy job of running an election four weeks ago. “We don’t want to be presumptuous, but these numbers in Butler, Clermont, Warren and Hamilton counties are suspicious.” Jackson refers in part to the incongruity of an underfunded Democratic candidate for the Ohio Supreme Court, C. Ellen Connally, getting 45,000 more votes in Butler County than did Kerry. She finished ahead of her party’s presidential nominee by 10,000 votes or more in five Ohio counties; by 5,000 or more in ten others.

It is not unprecedented for a statewide candidate - especially a popular, well-publicized one - to finish “ahead of the ticket.” But Connally was a retired African-American judge from Cleveland, and Butler County is as about as far away from Cleveland (on the Indiana border, and 40 miles north of Kentucky) as you can get and still be in Ohio. Moreover, The Cleveland Plain Dealer noted that the Republican candidates in the three Supreme Court races raised 40% more in official campaign funds than did Connally and the other Democrats. The Toledo Blade showed that the fund-raising, and thus visibility, was far more lopsided than even the party documents would suggest: “Citizens for a Strong Ohio, a nonprofit arm of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, raised $3 million to fund TV and radio ads that gave the winners exposure Democrats couldn't match,” the newspaper reported on November 4th.

Also over at Bloggerman is a less sensational but equally important bit of news about Ohio's provisional ballots:

The Cincinnati Post Saturday quoted Chairman Tim Burke of the Hamilton County Board of Elections as saying that approximately 400 of the 3,000 provisional ballots invalidated in his jurisdiction were thrown out for an extraordinary reason. In some cases, one polling place served more than one voting precinct - and though they were in the correct building, voters were disqualified because they got in the wrong line. “400 voters were in the right place,” Burke says, “but not at the right table.” The newspaper says Burke plans to object to those disqualifications when Hamilton County meets Tuesday to certify its vote.

Other discarded provisional ballots will be sued over. Cuyahoga County tossed a third of all its provisionals, and a group called ‘The People for the American Way Foundation’ filed Friday for a writ of mandamus against Secretary of State Blackwell in the 8th Ohio District Court of Appeals, asking the court to order Blackwell to notify each of the 8,099 disqualified voters and afford them the opportunity to contest their disenfranchisement.

Thank goodness Kenneth (you'd better not be) Black (if you want to vote) well is committed to making sure there is full public confidence in Ohio's final, certified election results.

though he legally has until December 6 to certify the Ohio vote, Cincinnati television station WCPO reported Sunday that Blackwell is in fact expected to do so on Wednesday of this week.

Since I'm complaining about the news coverage as well as the news, here's one breath of fresh air to finish on. Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle carried a front page article on most of the recent developments in Ohio, complete with links to The Neighborhood Network video from Ohio's public
hearings and Election Day lines and quotes from Tova Wang, a real expert from The Century Foundation, a real non-partisan electoral reform organization.

"A working person having to wait in line for five hours to vote is arguably a denial of voting rights," said Wang of the Century Foundation.

In a video from Columbus, Ohio, posted on the Web site theneighborhoodnetwork.org, a diabetic woman who waited 2 1/2 hours in line stepped outside the crowded polling place for air. In the short time she was outside, the polls closed, the doors were locked and she was not allowed back inside to vote.

It poured rain on election day in Ohio and the videos show long lines of people waiting outside under umbrellas or pulling garbage bags over their heads like ponchos.

"We're not making accusations (of fault) against individuals, but we're talking about institutional, systemic problems that disproportionately affect poor people and people of color," said Amy Kaplan, a Columbus resident and organizer for the League of Pissed-Off Voters, a New York-based group focusing on younger voters.

Finally some mainstream, post-election coverage of voting irregularities that avoids quoting the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project and is not all about internet conspiracy theorists.

Out of the blue and into the black
They give you this, but you pay for that
And once you're gone, you can never come back
When you're out of the blue and into the black . . .

The idea keeps coming up that Alberto Gonzales is going to make for a kinder, gentler DOJ.

Earlier today Lambert at Corrente posted on the latest example in this syrupy genre, but the crucial background link was dead. I asked for it in the comments; he fixed the link and was kind enough to let me know with an email.

Lambert hones in on one of those ever so slightly concerning moments from Gonzales' tenure as White House Counsel that ought to cause at least a little more trouble for Bush's nominee for Attorney General than it has so far:

the point on Gonzales isn't that he thinks the Geneva convention is "quaint," bad though that is. The point is that Gonzales wrote the brief that says Bush has the "inherent authority" to set aside the law[.]

That's not moderation in any sense of the word. In fact, it is, precisely, a revolution; taking power by overthrowing the rule of law. (emphasis in original)

If you want to read a little more about this, I suggest a concise but informative article by Phillip Carter in Slate:

Gonzales sat at the apex of the storm that swirled within the Bush administration's legal ranks over the use of "coercive interrogation" practices and torture to extract information from detainees in Cuba, Afghanistan, and Iraq. One of the "torture memos," produced in this period by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel for Gonzales, argued that the president had the extra-constitutional power to nullify both the Geneva Conventions and the federal war crimes statute when he deemed it necessary, based on his inherent authority as commander in chief of the armed forces. Another memo, produced by the Defense Department's lawyers, opined that an interrogator was "guilty of torture only if he act[ed] with the express purpose of inflicting severe pain or suffering on a person within his custody or physical control." Together, these legal policies and memoranda adopted by the Bush administration on Gonzales' watch for the war on terrorism had the effect of eviscerating the nation's institutional, moral, and legal constraints on the treatment and interrogation of prisoners. President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld may not have personally ordered the abuses at Abu Ghraib, but on advice from lawyers like Gonzales, they adopted policies that set the conditions for those abuses and the worst scandal to affect the U.S. government since Watergate. Yet, despite the incredible damage done by this scandal to the nation's political and moral standing in the world, not to mention its prospects of winning hearts and minds in the Middle East, no one of any significance has yet answered for these policies. Indeed, it appears many of the lawyers responsible for Abu Ghraib have been rewarded—OLC chief Jay Bybee now sits as a judge on the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals; Pentagon General Counsel William Haynes II was nominated (but not confirmed) for a seat on the 4 ^th Circuit; and now Gonzales stands to be promoted, too.

Carter also rightly expresses some concern about Gonzales' work as former Governor Bush's lawyer in the Texas State House:

The state of Texas executed 150 men and two women during Bush's six-year tenure as governor—a rate unmatched by any other state in modern U.S. history. As governor, Bush had statutory power to delay executions and the political power to influence the state Board of Pardons and Paroles to commute them entirely, where there was a procedural error, cause for mercy, or a bona fide claim of innocence. Then-Gov. Bush assigned Gonzales a critical role in the clemency process—asking him to provide a legal memo on the morning of each execution day outlining the key facts and issues of the case at hand. According to Alan Berlow, who obtained Gonzales' memoranda after a protracted legal fight with the state of Texas and wrote about them in the July/August 2003 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Gonzales' legal skills fell far short of the mark that one might expect for this serious task:

A close examination of the Gonzales memoranda suggests that Governor Bush frequently approved executions based on only the most cursory briefings on the issues in dispute. In fact, in these documents Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence.

On the basis of these memos, Gov. Bush allowed every single execution—save one—to go forward in his state. It's not clear whether Bush directed Gonzales to provide such superficial and conclusory legal research, or whether Gonzales did so of his own accord. Regardless, the point remains that the White House's new nominee to head the Justice Department turned in work that would have barely earned a passing grade in law school, let alone satisfy the requirements of a job in which life and death were at stake. Perhaps more important, these early memos from Texas revealed Gonzales' startling willingness to sacrifice rigorous legal analysis to achieve pre-ordained policy results at the drop of a Stetson.

I happened to be listening to NPR when they covered the press conference where Bush made the Gonzales nomination. Gonzales made a statement, closing with heartfelt thanks to Bush:

Finally, to our President, when I talk to people around the country I sometimes tell them that within the Hispanic community there is a shared hope for an opportunity to succeed. "Just give me a chance to prove myself" -- that is a common prayer for those in my community. Mr. President, thank you for that chance. With the consent of the Senate, God's help and the support of my family, I will do my best to fulfill the confidence and trust reflected in this nomination.

Carter, a former U.S. Army officer, hits a grand slam to drive home the hypocrisy in all of this:

In the days since the presidential election, the conventional wisdom has emerged that President Bush won re-election on the basis of values. And fittingly, he has pledged to govern on the basis of his mandate from the American people to implement those values. But the Gonzales appointment makes clear that the Bush administration prizes certain values—such as personal loyalty as the president's consigliere—over more democratic ones such as accountability and a commitment to the rule of law.

There's more to the picture
Than meets the eye
Hey hey, my my . . .

Courtesy of VotersUnite.org. Also see Vote Watch 2004.