The Fix Is In

[kate...@gmail.com]

Our founders knew very well the dangers of restricting a free press,
which is one of the reasons they specifically protected the right to a
free press in the very first article of the Bill of Rights. Perhaps it
would be a good idea to review that article carefully at this point in
history, since virtually every provision of the Bill of Rights has
been compromised in the last seven years:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of
speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to
assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The phrase "Congress shall make no law" is very interesting, because
Congress really hasn't passed any law abridging the freedom of the
press (although a law recently passed surely does restrict your right
to petition the government for redress!). What has happened to our
press is that the Executive Branch routinely threatens to withhold
access to the White House and its various press conferences for those
who will not play ball. This threat, which is economic in its
implication, combined with knowledge of an administration that clearly
does not hesitate to ruin or kill those who dare to oppose it, has
completely cowed the major media into submission.

Lest anyone take issue with my last sentence, allow me to point out
that no one really knows how many of Valerie Plame's assets have been
killed since her "outing" by the government, but certainly her career
was destroyed, and there are nameless stars on the wall at Langley
suggesting that some, at least, of her people were killed. Soon after
9/11, Tom Daschle dared to object to the provisions of the Patriot
Act, and promptly received a letter containing Ames-strain anthrax
developed at USAMRIID - all while the White House staff quietly and
secretly took their antibiotics. We will never know for certain how
Senator Paul Wellstone died, but certainly many of us guess that his
"accident" was no accident at all. The list is endless. Do your own
research.

Of course, we tend to expect our journalists to have the courage to
stand up to this kind of pressure, because they have had it
historically. Unfortunately, that appears to be too much to ask of
today's journalists.

Something very interesting has just happened that illustrates my
point.

There have been numerous reports since 2002 concerning the
vulnerability of electronic voting machines to hacking and vote fraud.
For those of you unfamiliar with the subject, let me refer you to
http://www.blackboxvoting.org for some serious reading.

Let's put ourselves in the shoes of the neoconservatives for a moment.
Whatever you may think of them, or of the conspicuous lack of brain
power possessed by their Figurehead in Chief, most of the
neoconservative cabal currently running our government are not stupid
men. They like playing with a rigged deck, so they want "their"
candidate to be running on both sides of the 2008 presidential
election. Those annointed candidates appear to be Hillary Clinton and
John McCain. In this way, the neoconservatives can point to a free and
fair final election and have no concerns about accusations of vote
fraud in the actual election. They know that, historically speaking,
most Americans don't pay a lot of attention to primaries. They've
learned that important lesson from the last two presidential
elections.

If you were paying attention to the news, you also know that Barack
Obama was leading Hillary Clinton by double digits in the days leading
up to the New Hampshire primary. Mike Huckabee appeared to be leading
the GOP candidates, but not surprisingly given the libertarian makeup
of the New Hampshire population, Ron Paul was doing very well also.
Paul appeared to be a pretty good bet for third place.

Surprise! Hillary Clinton and John McCain won the primary, casting
doubt upon the polls cited before the election.

Those pollsters are not stupid men, either, and they clearly publish
their margin for error. My bet was already on the polls having been -
within said margin of error - more or less correct. It appears I was
right!

Marcello Foa, who is a highly competent and respected journalist
throughout Europe, recently reported in the Milan publication Il
Giornale that an analysis of the New Hampshire hand counted ballots
does not tally with the electronic results. When ballots were counted
by hand in the Democratic race, every candidate except for Hillary
Clinton made substantial gains. The hand counted results in the
Republican race showed that Ron Paul should, indeed, have finished in
third place.

I'd like to make three points here:

1. A competent and respected journalist such as Marcello Foa does not
make that sort of claim without proof to back it up.

2. This means that smoking gun evidence of blatant vote fraud in the
largest nation in the free world exists.

3. The mainstream U.S. media has not even covered this story!

A lot of things have happened since George W. Bush took office. We've
experienced the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history (whomever you
consider those terrorists to be). Our leaders have lied and cooked
intelligence to take us into a war without end. Our Bill of Rights has
all but completely disappeared. All of these things are frightening, I
admit.

To me, however, the most frightening thing of all is the absolutely
deafening silence I hear from the U.S. media.