Taking Matters Into Our Hands

I have my doubts about this nation after reading a couple of seemingly unconnected stories that probably wouldn't have been written if we had a functional federal government. I have no doubt whatsoever that if a McCain administration is sworn in next January, all hope for justice in this country is lost. I'm not too sure an Obama administration will have the cojones to do the right thing either, even if John Edwards is appointed Attorney General -- but that would be a good start.

I absolutely agree with John Cole's observation that Congress is a "Joke." Their decision to put on a useless "charade" by holding impeachment hearings (or should that read, <quote> "impeachment" </quote>) while electing not to vote on any findings they may make is the epitome of "farce." That so many spineless men and women could be gathered together, all sworn to uphold the Constitution they so casually disregard on a daily basis, is simply astounding. No wonder they have such a pathetic and historically low approval rating.

To put it in perspective, with Congress at 14% the Worst President Ever is twice as popular as Congress -- with good reason. They are Teh Suck!

It's embarrassing enough that if I were Dennis Kucinich, the Ohio Congressman who submitted the Articles of Impeachment against President Bush, I would withdraw them and go on a spree of of the most disruptive procedural nonsense to ever hit a legislative body since the Albanian U.N. delegation would read the complete text of "new" speeches by their fearless leader, Enver Hoxha, into the record of the General Assembly three full years after the dictator had died -- even though they didn't tell anyone.

Of course, a useless protest is simply useless, and America really doesn't care much about what Kucinich does, and expects the bizarre from him. (When the wacko right goes off the deep end, they get a good-looking guy like Rick Santorum to do it, not some twerp like Dennis the Menace, but that's another story.) Since the the White House still is a sanctuary for felons and Congress has abdicated it's moral and legal authority, as long as we wish to stay within the system we as citizens have no other recourse than the (other) last bastion against tyranny -- the courts.

Here in Ohio, the best efforts of one of our Representatives to call the administration into account having been thwarted, again, we're turning to the judiciary, with Karl Rove at the top of the list of people to indict. With cooperation from the Ohio Attorney General and John Conyer's (useless) Judiciary Committee, Cliff Arnebeck, lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the case of King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell, is proceeding with a suit and commencing "targeted discovery" to prove that the 2004 election was stolen, and they're looking for heads to role as the Ohio Attorney General took the leash off the litigators.

One of the more delightful and interesting quotes comes from Arnebeck, concerning what he expects to discover as the stay is lifted: "[W]e anticipate Mr. Rove will be identified as having engaged in a corrupt, ongoing pattern of corrupt activities specifically affecting the situation here in Ohio"...

[snip]

Arnebeck said that the Attorney General's office said they were ready to begin the investigation of the 2004 presidential election in Ohio, and Arnebeck said he submitted a great deal of material to them, including "Bob's [Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman's] book on what happened in Ohio, documentation of the exit poll discrepancy, [and] John Conyers' report to the Congress which was the factual basis for the challenge to the electoral votes of the Ohio vote in January of 2005."

About a month later, the Attorney General's office contacted Arnebeck and asked him, "Who do you want to indict?"

Arnebeck explained that the AG's "concept of looking at this from a criminal standpoint was not to convene a grand jury and cast the net broadly and use the grand jury process to investigate and narrow the focus into the question of who may have tampered with those votes. But rather they wanted us to come to them with a more focused case." [all emphasis mine ~ Mark]

Here's the skinny. The perjury trap being set in the civil case is one way this thing might end up nabbing these guys. it worked against Clinton. But that's too obvious. Since the Federal Office of Special Counsel is as hopelessly politicized as the rest of the Justice Department, the Inspector General is just as useless, and the harbinger of Fitzmas can only do so much at one time, it's only fitting that States and local citizenry take matters into their own hands.

State politics plays its part here as well. Ohio's new Attorney General Nancy Rogers was appointed at the end of May to replace Marc Dann, just elected in 2006 and resigned under the cloud of a sexual harassment scandal. If her office
undertook a Grand Jury investigation targeting the conspirators in the State and National GOP along with the computer companies that supplied the tainted election machines suspected of stealing the 2004 predidential election and the programmers who rigged them it would instantly devolve into a media circus and the November special election for Ohio Attorney General would become a referendum on Diebold, Ken Blackwell and Karl Rove. (We'd probably still win, but why ask for trouble.)

If some well intentioned (and funded, which I intend to look into) citizens are willing to carry the water on this through the end of the year and get the ball rolling, and the AG's office gave them the green light, they can blaze a trail though the forest of corruption. This is just as heartening as the idea that George Bush could be indicted for murder by some brave county prosecutor who follows the case laid out by Helter Skelter author Vincent Bugliosi

In The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, Bugliosi presents a tight, meticulously researched legal case that puts George W. Bush on trial in an American courtroom for the murder of nearly 4,000 American soldiers fighting the war in Iraq. Bugliosi sets forth the legal architecture and incontrovertible evidence that President Bush took this nation to war in Iraq under false pretenses—a war that has not only caused the deaths of American soldiers but also over 100,000 innocent Iraqi men, women, and children; cost the United States over one trillion dollars thus far with no end in sight; and alienated many American allies in the Western world.

I've heard at least one prosecutor on Thom Hartmann's program promise that he would bring such charges if and when a soldier from his jurisdiction ends up in Arlington. More from the civil case as reported by Brad Blog:

Hold letters have been sent to the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, asking them to hold documents relating to their activities to use corporate money to influence the Ohio Supreme Court elections. Another hold letter was sent to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey asking that he advise the federal government to hold emails from Karl Rove.

Arnebeck said "We think [Rove] is an individual who has been at the center of both the use of corporate money to attack state Attorneys General and their elections and candidates for the Supreme Court and their elections in the states, and also in the manipulation of the election process.

"We expressed concern about the reports that Mr. Rove destroyed his emails and suggested that we want the duplicates that should exist [be put] under the control of the Secret Service and be sure that those are retained, as well as those on the receiving end in the Justice Department and elsewhere, that those documents are retained for purposes of this litigation, in which we anticipate Mr. Rove will be identified as having engaged in a corrupt, ongoing pattern of corrupt activities specifically affecting the situation here in Ohio."

[snip]

We believe there is clear evidence of a coordinated campaign in which Mr. Rove is involved [. . .]

Now this wouldn't be a corruption investigation if there wasn't a McCain connection. At the center of the subpoena wish list, Arnebeck is going after Republican website developer and information manager Michael L. Connel, the Bush/Cheney IT guy in both 2000 and 2004, who was doing work for the State of Florida in 2000 and Ohio Sec. of St. in 2004, who also wrote the firewall for the U.S. congressional computer system. Mr. Connel is now in charge of Senator McCain's IT program (presumably showing the old codger how to log onto the Googles).

Arnebeck's own expert on computer fraud, Stephen Spoonamore says,

"In the 2004 election, from my perspective, on any of the programs we run for any of my credit card clients, the results from the 14 counties, those are the sort of results that would instantaneously launch a credit card fraud investigation or a banking settlement investigation."

Spoonamore's reference to the "14 counties" refers to the so-called "Connelly Anomaly" in which down-ticket candidates got more votes than John Kerry. The name comes from the candidacy of C. Ellen Connelly, an African-American woman who was running for the Ohio Supreme Court in 2004. She was endorsed by pro-choice and civil rights groups, and was relatively unknown to Ohio voters, in addition to being vastly outspent by her opponent in the campaign. Yet, somehow, Connelly got scores of thousands more votes than did John Kerry at the very top of the ticket.

Arnebeck said that "if you adjust for the [Connelly] anomaly or that situation, it's enough votes to have changed the outcome of the election. So the focus of our efforts, in cooperation with the Secretary of State, would be to find out who is responsible for that."

[snip]

"Certainly if that happened at one of our banks, you could be arrested."

[snip]

"None of us [the American people] really want to confront the fact that there appears to be an extremely coordinated effort by a very small group of people to rig elections and take control of the executive branch."

"You can spend all day every day looking at this stuff and saying, 'Well that would certainly launch a fraud investigation in a bank, but it doesn't when it comes to our vote.' Why?"

You can also spend every day looking at this stuff, and it can just drive you nuts. No wonder there was more digital ink spilled last week in reaction to a cartoon than any of the latest travesties committed in our name by our government. We as a nation are just about burnt out by these crooks.

If it's any consolation, the GOP itself is burnt out -- on itself -- resorting to bribing it's members to fill time on the House floor making useless speeches to their useless selves. They can't wait for a new government either, even if they're hopelessly outnumbered.