Saturday, January 12, 2008

What If Bill O'Reilly Really Were On the Supreme Court?

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy
If I’m on the Supreme Court, as I should be, I say what is the down side of having somebody prove who they are [when they come to vote]?

--Bill O'Reilly, Quoted on Think Progress, emphasis mine, EC

If Billo were on the Supreme Court, he might harass Ruth Badar Ginsburg as he, in fact, harassed a Fox producer:
"So anyway I'd be rubbing your big boobs and getting your nipples really hard, kinda' kissing your neck from behind...and then I would take the other hand with the falafel thing and I'd just put it on your p***y but you'd have to do it really light, just kind of a tease business..." --as quoted in a sexual harassment suit filed against him by a Fox News producer, 2004 (Source)

OCTOBER 13--Hours after Bill O'Reilly accused her of a multimillion dollar shakedown attempt, a female Fox News producer fired back at the TV star today, filing a lawsuit claiming that he subjected her to repeated instances of sexual harassment and spoke often, and explicitly, to her about phone sex, vibrators, threesomes, masturbation, the loss of his virginity, and sexual fantasies. Below you'll find a copy of Andrea Mackris's complaint, an incredible page-turner that quotes O'Reilly, 55, on all sorts of lewd matters. Based on the extensive quotations cited in the complaint, it appears a safe bet that Mackris, 33, recorded some of O'Reilly's more steamy soliloquies. For example, we direct you to his Caribbean shower fantasies. While we suggest reading the entire document, TSG will point you to interesting sections on a Thailand sex show, Al Franken, and the climax of one August 2004 phone conversation. (22 pages)
Here's a link to the lawsuit. The Fox liar network apparently "settled out of court" --Fox-speak for they paid her to shut up!
"And guys, if you exploit a girl, it will come back to get you. That's called 'karma.'" --in his book, "The O'Reilly Factor For Kids," 2004 (Source)
If Billo ever got SCOTUS, you could count on him to write one or two word decisions: ridiculous, SHUT UP!!!

For case law, Billo could not be expected to cite anything more challenging than Perry Mason or Judge Judy. Justice Billo will dispatch free speech: AN ATTACK ON ME BY THE LOONY LEFT! But it doesn't get any loonier than Billo Blowhard, the loudmouth that proved mankind evolved from simpler forms of life. Eat your heart out, Kansas school boards! Billo proves Darwin. Billo is the aggressive ape from which Bush evolved. There's your proof!

If Billo somehow gets on the high court, he will address what he must surely believes are flaws in our judicial system that confines justices to the law --statutes, case law and precedent! A Justice Billo will open things up a little. He will cite anything --probably comic books or worse: his own FAUX Network! A better source are instances of his own stupidity, many of them documented by Media Matters, Billo's favorite website.
During the December 13 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, host Bill O'Reilly questioned the decision by Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards to have actor/director Tim Robbins travel with him on the campaign trail, saying," Tim Robbins is such a radical guy. Why would John Edwards use him? I don't get it." He then played an excerpt from Robbins' December 12 speech in Iowa City, Iowa, in which Robbins said, "What if, instead of 24/7 coverage of the most recent pop star's fall from grace, we were to see 24/7 reporting of veterans returning from Iraq?" In response, Fox News contributor Jane Hall said Robbins' "criticism of the media ... is valid," to which O'Reilly replied: "But Von Ribbentrop in the Nazi hierarchy made valid points, Jane."

Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop was indicted for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity by the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal. Ribbentrop was found guilty on all counts and executed. The tribunal found that Ribbentrop had "participated in aggressive plans against Czechoslovakia"; "played a particularly significant role in the diplomatic activity which led up to the attack on Poland"; was aware of or helped plan attacks against other countries, "urged the Italians to put into effect a ruthless occupation policy in Yugoslavia and Greece," and "played an important part in Hitler's 'final solution' of the Jewish question." The tribunal concluded that Ribbentrop "was in sympathy with all the main tenets of the National Socialist creed." O'Reilly did not cite any "valid points" made by Ribbentrop.

--Media Matters

Justice Billo will cite the Bible and specifically the book of "Revelations" which he thinks was written: "WHAT --FIVE THOUSAND YEARS AGO??"

Until Justice Billo assumes the high court, we'll just have to content ourselves with Justice Scalia's absurdities which pale compared to Justice Billo. Years ago, I denounced Antonin Scalia's backward thinking, his proclivity to mistake premises for conclusions, his fondness for the circulus en probando fallacy.
Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote "to count first and rule upon legality afterwards is not a recipe for producing election results that have the public acceptance democratic stability requires."

--CNN Transcripts, December 11, 2000, Supreme Court Bush v. Gore

It matters not to Scalia that since 5th Century B.C.E.. the citizens of Athens dared to count all the votes BEFORE putting leaders in office. Unless my profs lied to me, that's the way elections are supposed to work. In a Brave New World, however, computers have made vote theft at lot easier, more efficient, more...uh...well more "white collar".

In 1948, poor Luis Salas of central Texas, whom I met and interviewed about his role in the historic "election" of LBJ to the US Senate, had to resort to digging up the names of dead people and writing them in by hand on a paper tab sheet. It was dirty work, but somebody had to do it. There was an election to steal!
"If Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.'" –FOX News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, after San Francisco voted to ban military recruiters from city schools, Nov. 8, 2005 (Source) (Read more stupid Bill O'Reilly quotes)
As a justice of the Supreme Court, Billo should be required to apologize prior to his confirmation for how he lied to the nation about Bushco:
"If the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it's clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and I will not trust the Bush Administration again, all right?" -on finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, March 18, 2003 (Source
Now --if I were a judge, I would give O'Reilly a "Judge Judy" sentence. He would be ordered by the court to apologize to the Iraqi people. He would be required to go to Iraq and apologize personally, individually, to the people of that nation who have suffered over one million unnecessary deaths, murder at the hand of Billo's hero, the war criminal: George W. Bush!
You’ve got stoned slackers watching your dopey show every night and they can vote." –to "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart, Sept. 22, 2004 (Source)
Justice Billo must have been referring to his own "dopy show".

People are catching onto Billo. Following is a streaming player with several Billo "confrontations" in which his tactics --strawmen, bullying, misstating positions, loaded questions, et al --are increasingly evident. These interviews are notable in that Billo is finding it harder to get away with it. People who fight back are winning. Many guests are making Billo look like the lying idiot that he truly is.

Billo, in you and in George W. Bush, is found every prejudice, every fallacy, every pernicious, hateful lie that has undermined and militated against every good thing that was ever in any way associated with the US by anyone at any time. Billo, you are vile! You shame even the shameful Fox network!


The 'Cowboy' on Facebook

Media Conglomerates, Mergers, Concentration of Ownership, Global Issues, Updated: January 02, 2009

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Friday, January 11, 2008

Exit Polls: Obama Won New Hampshire

Corporations control America's elections with secrecy and criminal fraud. Your vote means absolutely nothing! American Democracy is dead! It's nothing less than an insidious corporate revolution, an insidious subversion by corporatist vote snatchers. In less tolerant times, such culprits might hang. Perhaps, they should today.

Once again there is an "unexplainable" and a highly improbable descrepancy between exit polling and balloting. According to New Hampshire exit polls, Barack Obama won the New Hampshire primary 39% to 35%. In every other count, the exit polls have been spot on! Once again, questions arise about the credibility of Diebold voting machine, indeed, the credibility of the electorial process itself.

Here are the exit poll results at 8:01 PM when the polls closed and here is a chart with the final tabulation.

With voting over in New Hampshire, the big network exit poll is out and according to Fox News it shows:

Democratic candidates:

Obama 39%
Clinton 34%
Edwards 18%

Republican candidates:

McCain 35%
Romney 30%
Huckabee 13%

Both races are too close to call - and it looks like both Obama and McCain have only a slim lead based on these polls.

--Guardian Unlimited, Exit polls: Obama and McCain ahead




NH: "First in the nation" (with corporate controlled secret vote counting) By Nancy Tobi 07 Jan 2008

Diebold has changed its name if not its stripes. It is now called "Premier". Premier what? Number one in criminal fraud!! How much longer are we going to put up with this before this gang of crooks is hauled before a Federal Grand Jury to testify under oath? If Antonin Scalia could get away with citing the Fourteenth Amendment as reasons to hear Bush v Gore, then a Federal Grand Jury should begin a Federal investigation of all national elections since Bush stole the White House.

NH: "First in the nation" (with corporate controlled secret vote counting)

81% of New Hampshire ballots are counted in secret by a private corporation named Diebold Election Systems (now known as "Premier"). The elections run on these machines are programmed by one company, LHS Associates, based in Methuen, MA. We know nothing about the people programming these machines, and we know even less about LHS Associates. We know even less about the secret vote counting software used to tabulate 81% of our ballots. People like to say "but we use paper ballots! They can always be counted by hand!"

But they're not. They're counted by Diebold. Only a candidate can request a hand recount, and most never do so. And a rigged election can easily become a rigged recount, as we learned in Ohio 2004, where two election officials were convicted of rigging their recount. (Is it just a funny coincidence that Diebold spokesman is named Mr. Riggall?)

We need to get the count right on election night. Right now, nobody in New Hampshire, except the programmers at LHS Associates and Diebold Election Systems, knows if we are getting it right or wrong. Our state officials and representatives know this. They learned all about it when computer security specialists Harri Hursti and Bruce Odell testified before the legislative subcommittee on e-voting in September 2007 (Hursti's testimony is shown in this video). Scientific reports about the vulnerabilities and risks with Diebold optical scanners have been available since 2003.

--NH: "First in the nation" with corporate controlled secret vote counting

As News Sophisticate mentioned in the comments section, Sen. Chuck Hagel has admitted owning voting machine company McCarthy Group". There is more information at Sourcewatch: Diebold Election Systems

If nothing is done to stop venal corporations like Diebold/Premier, American Democracy is dead! The Republic died with Bush v Gore and nothing has been done to resurrect it. We are left with a corporate dictatorship. Americans, you had been free but now you are slaves to the corporate Moloch. A revolution won't happen --sadly --because no one has the courage or the stomach for it.

See also: If your money was in a bank which had the safe guards of a "voting machine", you would be dead broke in a week!

Thursday, January 10, 2008

Bush Promises to Nuke Iran

Whether or not Bush manages to plunge the world into a new dark age may depend upon which version of the recent US/Iran confrontation is believed. So far, Bush's utter lack of credibility may be working to our advantage. One dares not think of the consequences to world peace if Bush had embarked upon this tour of the middle east with a shred of credibility, a modicum of political capital among every Middle Eastern capital but Jerusalem.

Israeli radio reports that Bush promised Israeli opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu that the United States will join Israel to nuke Iran. CNS reports the Bush administration had seriously considered the nuke option but put it on a back burner. Lydia Georgi, writing in Pakistan's Daily Times, thinks Bush is unlikely to win support outside Israel for any US military action against Iran.

It would appear, however, that the US has already tried to provoke a Gulf of Tonkin-like incident, releasing a video tape in which it is claimed that five small speed boats confronted US Navy ships in the strategic Straits of Hormuz on Sunday. Iran claims its video tape proves that its boats did not threaten US vessels in the Gulf.


Iran Version

Here is the US version:


US Version

Completely differing versions of events. Indeed, ABC News reports that voices on the recording may not have come from the Iranian speedboat. It comes down to credibility. The Bush administration has none. Bush is power mad. Someone should have told him that credibility is power! Real Texans have always known that.


Noam Chomsky

The Bush itinerary includes Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, a trip he claims is aimed at promoting peace between Israel and Palestinians. But it's what Bush calls the “aggressive ambitions” of Iran that has already trumped every other topic. The Iran version of the events in the Straits of Hormuz are credible.
Alec Russell: So is America going to bomb Iran?
Jack Straw: Iran attack would be 'nuts'

The Bush administration is planning to use nuclear weapons against Iran, to prevent it acquiring its own atomic warheads, claims an investigative writer with high-level Pentagon and intelligence contacts.

President George W Bush is said to be so alarmed by the threat of Iran's hard-line leader, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, that privately he refers to him as "the new Hitler", says Seymour Hersh, who broke the story of the Abu Ghraib Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal.

Some US military chiefs have unsuccessfully urged the White House to drop the nuclear option from its war plans, Hersh writes in The New Yorker magazine. The conviction that Mr Ahmedinejad would attack Israel or US forces in the Middle East, if Iran obtains atomic weapons, is what drives American planning for the destruction of Teheran's nuclear programme.

Hersh claims that one of the plans, presented to the White House by the Pentagon, entails the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites. One alleged target is Iran's main centrifuge plant, at Natanz, 200 miles south of Teheran.

--Philip Sherwell in Washington, Bush 'is planning nuclear strikes on Iran's secret sites'

A US intelligence report --released in December --pulled the rug from under Bush's primary pretext for war on Iran. If Bush wishes to begin a nuclear war, he will have to manufacture the pretext as Hitler faked a polish attack on German radio towers, as the US hoaxed a "Gulf of Tonkin" incident. Surely, there are some members of Bush's otherwise challenged administration who have bothered to read Goebbels and Goring. Nazi literature seems to have become Bush's Junior Woodchuck's Handbook.

An update:
Official Version of Naval Incident Starts to Unravel

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Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Princeton University Reveals How the GOP Steals Election

Unless something is done, the GOP will steal the next election as well. Unless something is done, this series of primaries means absolutely nothing. The fix is undoubtedly in. Unless something is done, the GOP will walk away with another stolen election, another GOP nincompoop will foist upon the nation his personal and vainglorious ambitions of empire. The Military/Industrial complex is licking its chops and theocrats are lining up to play Torquemada.

The following video was produced by Princeton University. It explains precisely how the votes are stolen and will be stolen again.

Princeton tested an AccuVote-TS which it obtained from a private party. The experiements were designed to determine whether the machine could be hacked under "real election practices", realistic scenarios in the real world. Princeton found the machine vulnerable to a number of "extremely serious attacks" that "undermine undermine the accuracy and credibility of the vote counts it produces." In other words, DieBold machines can be hacked and most have been.

Princeton points out that computer specialists are skeptical of Direct Recording Machines (DRE), essentially general purpose machines running specialized election software. The biggest flaw, according to Princeton, is that DREs are dependent upon the "correct and secure operation of complex software programs" In the real word, that simply does not happen. Ominously, DRE failures most likely go undetected.
Main Findings The main findings of our study are:
  1. Malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection. The malicious software can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss. We have constructed demonstration software that carries out this vote-stealing attack.

  2. Anyone who has physical access to a voting machine, or to a memory card that will later be inserted into a machine, can install said malicious software using a simple method that takes as little as one minute. In practice, poll workers and others often have unsupervised access to the machines.

  3. AccuVote-TS machines are susceptible to voting-machine viruses — computer viruses that can spread malicious software automatically and invisibly from machine to machine during normal pre-and post-election activity. We have constructed a demonstration virus that spreads in this way, installing our demonstration vote-stealing program on every machine it infects.

  4. While some of these problems can be eliminated by improving Diebold's software, others cannot be remedied without replacing the machines' hardware. Changes to election procedures would also be required to ensure security.

    ...

    Abstract This paper presents a fully independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, including its hardware and software. We obtained the machine from a private party. Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities — a voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab. Mitigating these threats will require changes to the voting machine's hardware and software and the adoption of more rigorous election procedures.

    --Ariel J. Feldman, J. Alex Halderman, and Edward W. Felten,Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine

See also: If your money was in a bank which had the safe guards of a "voting machine", you would be dead broke in a week!

An update: Iran has charged that US Navy video purporting to be Iran boats is a clumsy fake, obviously intended to provoke Iran and/or world opinion. Are we dealing with another Gulf of Tonkin incident? Sorry Bush! You are the little shit who cried wolf. I believe Iran! No one believes your sorry ass anymore! The high ground belongs to Iran --not you and your sorry, criminal administration.
Iran has called the grainy video and audio released by the Pentagon, allegedly showing Iranian Revolutionary Guard Boats confronting US warships, "fabricated" and accused America of using archive footage to stitch them up.

"The footage released by the U.S. Navy was compiled using file pictures and the audio has been fabricated," the English-language channel Press TV quoted a senior in the Revolutionary Guards as saying.

"The voices and pictures broadcast by the Pentagon about the latest incident have been fabricated so clumsily that the pictures and voices in the video are not even synchronized," added the source.

US National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley echoed President Bush's earlier description of the Iranian move as "provocative."

"This is a provocative act - not a smart thing to do, and they are going to have to take responsibility for the consequences, if they do it again," Hadley said, adding that his comments should not be seen as a threat.

On Tuesday, The Pentagon released a short video that showed Iranian speed boats nipping around US warships in the Persian Gulf, with audio of heavily-accented English threatening, "I am coming to you. ... You will explode after ... minutes." In the video, the Iranian boats appear to ignore repeated warnings from the US ships.

--"US Navy Video Is A Clumsy Fake"

Additional resources: