3-18-05

Meet Great Americans Ion Sancho & ROBERT C. KOEHLER

We live in a very evil world. The number of people who lie and don't think a thing about it is amazing. If you have not read the following article by Bob Koehler about Ion Sancho you might want to. Bob Koehler and Ion Santos are what my America is all about. Courage and the Truth. What Koehler and Sancho are fighting is something worth dying. Not the garbage to the right, killing kids who do not need killing. Little George should be ashamed of himself. And he wonders why the vast majority of Americans think his mess in Iraq is a crock. The USA is bombing and killing vast numbers of Iraqi civilians. Why? The bad guys running the USA want more of our kids in the military killed. The bad guys know if they bomb and kill enough innocent Iraqi the Iraqi will kill more of our fine brave kids in the military and the death expands. The bad guys plan is complex and evil. The bad guy plan is to conquer the world. Not just Iraq.

Wow! Is that in TN press? link to article? Thanks -

At 12:35 PM 3/17/2006, you wrote:
>Go Bob! This is such a punchy, strong pro-democracy message. Thank
>goodness for strong newspaper people. Too bad he's almost the lone ranger
>on our issue. Wouldn't hurt to jot him a thank you email too.
>
>Deborah
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Shannon and Anne Williford
> To: Gathering_to_Save_Our_Democracy@yahoogroups.com
> Sent: Friday, March 17, 2006 6:08 AM
> Subject: [Gathering_to_Save_Our_Democracy] Bob Koehler's latest...
>
>
> latest Bob Koehler column (he got hip to this issue a year ago at our
> conference in Nashville...)
>
>
>
> Trust us
> Take this box and stuff it
>
> By ROBERT C. KOEHLER
> Tribune Media Services
>
> March 16, 2006
>
> Something fundamental about who we are as a nation is dribbling away,
> it seems, without alarm or even debate. We torture prisoners - it's out
> in the open, a done deal. We're fighting an unnecessary war that, well,
> yes, was launched on a lie, but too late now; we're in, we can't get out.
> And our neighbor's phone is being tapped.
>
> But the worry that trumps all others is the state of this proud,
> imperfect democracy. We may be surrendering our power to change the
> national direction or demand that government be responsive to us. My
> fellow Americans, our voting machines don't work, at least not all the
> time. The mechanism of our democracy is in chaos, and almost everyone is
> going along with it.
>
> Thanks to the allegedly well-intentioned, but disastrous, Help America
> Vote Act, the country is shifting, county by county, to electronic voting
> machines, which are not only glitch-prone on a spectacular scale (e.g.,
> 100,000 phantom votes were recorded in Tarrant County, Texas, during the
> state's primary last week), but work, like God, in mysterious ways, which
> we're not supposed to question. The results they give us are all too
> often unverifiable.
>
> And here's the clincher: The process isn't even public anymore.
>
> "The question is, how can a state essentially outsource the most public
> act? They've outsourced voting to private companies and (the states) have
> no role to play."
>
> Meet Ion Sancho, election supervisor of Leon County, Fla., outspoken
> public servant and small-d democrat. He oversees the voting process in
> his bailiwick and is part of the national infrastructure of democracy.
> Those of us not in the know assume that impartial professionals like
> Sancho are the norm, but if they were, there'd be no reason to call him a
> hero - and his job wouldn't be in jeopardy.
>
> The forces of big money and big government don't like Sancho and have
> ganged up against him because he speaks his mind and because he
> decertified the Diebold optical-scan voting machines his county had
> purchased after they failed a security test - a "hostile hack," as
> bulldog blogger Brad Friedman called it - in December.
>
> In that test, Finnish security expert Harri Hursti, whom Sancho called
> in to give the machines a true challenge, was able to flip the results of
> a small demo election using a generic memory card, leaving no trace of
> tampering. He had no password, merely the sort of machine access most
> poll workers have. The test proved that Diebold's optical-scan machines,
> contrary to what the company had claimed to election officials across the
> country, were vulnerable to insider fraud.
>
> Sancho voided Diebold's contract and publicized the results, which, as
> Friedman, who has covered national election-fraud issues relentlessly,
> put it, "had earthquake-like repercussions across the entire electoral
> system in the United States." For instance, the state of California,
> reacting to Sancho's warning, conducted its own test of Diebold machines
> and corroborated his findings. Other experts also support Sancho.
>
> Yet Sancho is persona non grata in his own state. Not only has Diebold
> itself refused to do further business with Leon County as long as Sancho
> is election supervisor (refused, that is, either to correct the security
> flaws Sancho found or sell him different machines, or even return his
> phone calls), but the other two voting machine companies certified in
> Florida, ES&S and Sequoia, have also refused to do business with him.
>
> And the state of Florida is blaming Sancho! Secretary of State Sue
> Cobb, a Jeb Bush appointee, has demanded the county return $564,421 in
> HAVA money because Sancho missed a deadline "for - you guessed it -
> obtaining new machines," in the words of Miami Herald columnist Fred
> Grimm. Sancho "may be a hero in California," writes Grimm, "but messing
> with monied interests makes him a pariah in Florida."
>
> Sancho told me: "The Diebold company has embarked on a program of
> vilification abetted by Florida officials. There's no reason why I'm
> blacklisted except that I won't keep my mouth shut. . . . We are being
> illegally blackballed by a private company and that blackballing has the
> potential to disenfranchise the voters in my jurisdiction."
>
> Sancho is in the way. Too bad for him. He went with the optical-scan
> technology in the first place because, he said, unlike touch-screen
> voting, it has a paper ballot. "There's a tremendous overdependence in
> our industry on vendors. This technology allowed me to be independent
> from vendors."
>
> The problem is, there's an anti-democratic force rampaging across the
> country that wants just the opposite: privately conducted,
> secrecy-shrouded elections. The state of Florida even has a bizarre law
> outlawing manual recounts of election results. This removes all chance of
> public scrutiny from the process.
>
> I humbly submit that this is nuts, and that if we don't scream out at
> the top of our lungs we're going to lose our democracy. What we're
> witnessing, I fear - and what isolated watchdogs like Sancho are warning
> us about, but cannot prevent all by themselves - is democracy's
> transition to expensive charade.
>
> As the power of the vote leaks away, the hissing sound I hear are the
> words "Trust us, trust us."

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A realization hit me today. I was wondering why the USA invaded Afghanistan? Well Bin Laden is dead as all thinking people realize and Arabs had nothing to do with September 11. But the real reason the USA has troops in Afghanistan is heroine. The bad guys killing our kids in the military in Iraq have to get paid. The USA is in Afghanistan to make sure poppies and thus heroine make it to market. The bad guys pushing civil war in Iraq and killing our troops in Iraq are being paid though the sale of heroine produced in Afghanistan. USA troops are keeping the flow of heroine from Afghanistan to market. When the USA stamps out poppy plants in Afghanistan we are stamping out heroine going to finance good guys, not bad guys. How do we know this? Because it has only been since the USA invaded Afghanistan that poppies have been planted in Afghanistan.