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Virtually the entire mainstream electronic media drank ACORN Kool-Aid this month brewed up by the Republican National Committee. Almost no one seriously challenged John McCains comical assertions that ACORN, a grassroots voter registration group, is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.
While the Republicans had the distracted media searching for links between Obama and ACORN, RNC operatives were busily completing one of the most massive voter suppression and purging efforts in American history, stealing hundreds of thousands of Democratic votes across the embattled swing states and striving to arrange chaos and endless lines at the voting booths next week.
First the facts about ACORN. Months ago, we obtained, as part of our investigation for Rolling Stone magazine, the Republicans list the GOP alleged were the very worst cases of vote and registration fraud by ACORN and similar groups. We went through the names the GOP asserted were obviously, undeniably and clearly fraudulent voter registrations.
First, there was Melissa Tais, a dubious ACORN registrant. Her two voter registration forms show, admittedly, suspiciously different signatures. Republicans suggested Melissa was part of a massive fraud to allow Democrats to vote twice.
They were wrong. Ms. Tais, a Cerrillos, New Mexico, waitress, told us she had signed one form on a table and one form holding the paper in her hand. Hence, a second, wobbly signature.
Then there was Patricia White, who Republicans claimed was a fictitious voter. When we filmed her at home in Albuquerque, she seemed real enough.
And so on, through the entire GOP list not one fraud. And these were their best cases out of the five million illegal voters who Republican leaders claim have infiltrated Americas voting rolls.
The overblown histrionics about ACORN do not surprise those of us who have been watching the RNCs election manipulation antics. For eight years White House operatives have been trying to gin up press stories about voter fraud. David Iglesias of New Mexico was one of seven U.S. Attorneys fired by the White House for their refusal to bring voter fraud prosecutions. We took over 100 complaints, from the GOP, he told us, We investigated for almost 2 years, I didnt find one prosecutable voter fraud case in the entire state of New Mexico.
Iglesias, a McCain supporter, has, for the first time, leveled a new and serious charge: Despite finding none of the 200 voters guilty, he says the White House nevertheless ordered him to illegally prosecute baseless cases against innocent citizens, just to gin up voter fraud publicity. His refusal, he says, cost him his job. They were looking for politicized for improperly politicized US attorneys to file bogus voter fraud cases.
Certainly ACORN collected some bad signatures. But despite McCains claims, now morphed into media theology, none of ACORNs actions will have any impact on any election. ACORN hired 13,000 canvassers to register new voters. A small number of these workers defrauded ACORN by handing in phony registration forms using names they had invented (e.g. Mickey Mouse), or copied from phone books. In one case ACORN canvassers used cigarettes to bribe a homeless man, now a Fox News regular, to register 17 times. None of these activities constituted voter fraud. It is no crime to register 17 times; only the final registration counts. His multiple registrations would not allow the tobacco lover to vote 17 times. Nor is there any evidence the phone book registrants will cast multiple ballots.
Finally, the removal by GOP officials of hundreds of thousands of legitimate voters from voting rolls over the past year provides ACORN with a sound rationale for obtaining new registrations, even from voters who believe they are already registered.
ACORN took pains to screen its registrations and cull out those it considered dubious. However, federal laws make it a felony for voter registration groups like ACORN to discard registrations even when it believes them fraudulent. So ACORN flagged the forms it considered doubtful and handed them in to the registry. Ironically, it was those flagged forms the fruits of ACORNs diligence that have been flogged by Republicans as their best evidence of widespread election fraud.
Voter fraud is a phantom according to Lorraine Minnite, an expert on voting crime at Columbia University. Only 24 cases of federal voter fraud have been uncovered between 2002 and 2005 despite massive government efforts devoted to uncovering evidence of a voter fraud crime wave.
The GOP is ginning up hysteria about non-existent vote fraud by Democrats in order to distract the press from its own campaign to disenfranchise millions of American voters.
The Republicans have created an obstacle course of barriers designed to suppress the vote, purge tens of thousands of Democratic voters from voting rolls, create mayhem and delay at voting venues on Election Day, and stop millions of votes from being counted this election cycle.
Jailed GOP activist Jack Abramoff and his fellow convict, Congressman Bob Ney, wrote the most sinister provisions of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) which Congress passed in 2002 creating a series of diabolically cunning new voting impediments. HAVA, for example, allows state voting officials to purge tens of thousands of voters from the polls using algorithms and voter ID requirements that disproportionately disenfranchise black, Hispanic and minority voters, and other Democratic demographics including senior citizens and young people.
In 2004, highly organized GOP tacticians helped disenfranchise no less than 2.7 million American voters. Almost a million of them were African Americans. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission has found black voters were nine times more likely to have their votes discarded than white voters and that over one-third of the million provisional ballots cast in 2004 ballots handed disproportionately to African Americans were never counted but simply thrown into dumpsters.
In a technique known as RNC operatives send millions of first class letters to black voters across the country marked do not forward. Republican operatives armed with lists then invade black precincts on Election Day to challenge those voters whose letters were returned to the RNC because the voter was not home to sign when the mail arrived. That tactic deliberately targets black voters, resurrecting Old Dixies Jim Crow procedures designed to rid the lists of black voters and create long lines in black precincts.
In this election, new HAVA mandates permit voting officials to precisely match registration form information with the voters drivers license and Social Security application. While it may sound reasonable, in practice, any change, even a dropped hyphen, is cause for eliminating the voter from the rolls. Since 2004, Colorados Republican Secretaries of State have purged one out of every five voters from the rolls. The current Secretary of State, Mike Coffman, a Republican also running for office, recently purged an additional 37,000 voters and discarded 6,400 new voter registrations overwhelmingly Democratic based upon an obscure technical mistake that Coffmans office encouraged voters to make in the first place.
The GOP campaign resulted in one in nine New Mexico Democratic voters finding their names had disappeared from voter roles during this years caucus.
Despite a recent Supreme Court decision upholding Ohios refusal to disenfranchise 200,000 legitimate voters based on this absurd demand to voter names to databases, White House operatives are still fighting to purge these names from the rolls. President George Bush last week personally asked his Attorney General Mike Mukasey to renew Republican efforts to disenfranchise these voters.
Contrary to Mr. McCains assertions, the real threat to democracy is from the GOP itself. ACORN has served as a good distraction from Republican efforts to steal the vote from hundreds of thousands of legitimate voters, a genuine threat that has received almost no media attention.
Theyre stealing your vote, but you can steal it back. Here are some steps you should take to protect your vote. First, avoid the November 4th minefield. Voters, wherever possible, should vote early and in person. Where feasible, avoid mailing in your ballot, many are rejected for flimsy reasons, and first time voters in many states must include a photocopy of ID. However, if you have a mail-in ballot, dont throw it away. Follow directions, use the correct postage (thats an error that cost a hundred thousand votes last time) and, if possible, walk it in to your elections office.
At the polling station, should you find yourself one of the 2.7 million purged, or your ID rejected, then do your best to resist a ballotone third of which are not counted. Return with proper ID, or call 1-800-OUR VOTE for legal assistance. And never just walk away discouraged. Thats just what they want you to do.
Americano top 10 >>> Read more...
While the Republicans had the distracted media searching for links between Obama and ACORN, RNC operatives were busily completing one of the most massive voter suppression and purging efforts in American history, stealing hundreds of thousands of Democratic votes across the embattled swing states and striving to arrange chaos and endless lines at the voting booths next week.
First the facts about ACORN. Months ago, we obtained, as part of our investigation for Rolling Stone magazine, the Republicans list the GOP alleged were the very worst cases of vote and registration fraud by ACORN and similar groups. We went through the names the GOP asserted were obviously, undeniably and clearly fraudulent voter registrations.
First, there was Melissa Tais, a dubious ACORN registrant. Her two voter registration forms show, admittedly, suspiciously different signatures. Republicans suggested Melissa was part of a massive fraud to allow Democrats to vote twice.
They were wrong. Ms. Tais, a Cerrillos, New Mexico, waitress, told us she had signed one form on a table and one form holding the paper in her hand. Hence, a second, wobbly signature.
Then there was Patricia White, who Republicans claimed was a fictitious voter. When we filmed her at home in Albuquerque, she seemed real enough.
And so on, through the entire GOP list not one fraud. And these were their best cases out of the five million illegal voters who Republican leaders claim have infiltrated Americas voting rolls.
The overblown histrionics about ACORN do not surprise those of us who have been watching the RNCs election manipulation antics. For eight years White House operatives have been trying to gin up press stories about voter fraud. David Iglesias of New Mexico was one of seven U.S. Attorneys fired by the White House for their refusal to bring voter fraud prosecutions. We took over 100 complaints, from the GOP, he told us, We investigated for almost 2 years, I didnt find one prosecutable voter fraud case in the entire state of New Mexico.
Iglesias, a McCain supporter, has, for the first time, leveled a new and serious charge: Despite finding none of the 200 voters guilty, he says the White House nevertheless ordered him to illegally prosecute baseless cases against innocent citizens, just to gin up voter fraud publicity. His refusal, he says, cost him his job. They were looking for politicized for improperly politicized US attorneys to file bogus voter fraud cases.
Certainly ACORN collected some bad signatures. But despite McCains claims, now morphed into media theology, none of ACORNs actions will have any impact on any election. ACORN hired 13,000 canvassers to register new voters. A small number of these workers defrauded ACORN by handing in phony registration forms using names they had invented (e.g. Mickey Mouse), or copied from phone books. In one case ACORN canvassers used cigarettes to bribe a homeless man, now a Fox News regular, to register 17 times. None of these activities constituted voter fraud. It is no crime to register 17 times; only the final registration counts. His multiple registrations would not allow the tobacco lover to vote 17 times. Nor is there any evidence the phone book registrants will cast multiple ballots.
Finally, the removal by GOP officials of hundreds of thousands of legitimate voters from voting rolls over the past year provides ACORN with a sound rationale for obtaining new registrations, even from voters who believe they are already registered.
ACORN took pains to screen its registrations and cull out those it considered dubious. However, federal laws make it a felony for voter registration groups like ACORN to discard registrations even when it believes them fraudulent. So ACORN flagged the forms it considered doubtful and handed them in to the registry. Ironically, it was those flagged forms the fruits of ACORNs diligence that have been flogged by Republicans as their best evidence of widespread election fraud.
Voter fraud is a phantom according to Lorraine Minnite, an expert on voting crime at Columbia University. Only 24 cases of federal voter fraud have been uncovered between 2002 and 2005 despite massive government efforts devoted to uncovering evidence of a voter fraud crime wave.
The GOP is ginning up hysteria about non-existent vote fraud by Democrats in order to distract the press from its own campaign to disenfranchise millions of American voters.
The Republicans have created an obstacle course of barriers designed to suppress the vote, purge tens of thousands of Democratic voters from voting rolls, create mayhem and delay at voting venues on Election Day, and stop millions of votes from being counted this election cycle.
Jailed GOP activist Jack Abramoff and his fellow convict, Congressman Bob Ney, wrote the most sinister provisions of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) which Congress passed in 2002 creating a series of diabolically cunning new voting impediments. HAVA, for example, allows state voting officials to purge tens of thousands of voters from the polls using algorithms and voter ID requirements that disproportionately disenfranchise black, Hispanic and minority voters, and other Democratic demographics including senior citizens and young people.
In 2004, highly organized GOP tacticians helped disenfranchise no less than 2.7 million American voters. Almost a million of them were African Americans. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission has found black voters were nine times more likely to have their votes discarded than white voters and that over one-third of the million provisional ballots cast in 2004 ballots handed disproportionately to African Americans were never counted but simply thrown into dumpsters.
In a technique known as RNC operatives send millions of first class letters to black voters across the country marked do not forward. Republican operatives armed with lists then invade black precincts on Election Day to challenge those voters whose letters were returned to the RNC because the voter was not home to sign when the mail arrived. That tactic deliberately targets black voters, resurrecting Old Dixies Jim Crow procedures designed to rid the lists of black voters and create long lines in black precincts.
In this election, new HAVA mandates permit voting officials to precisely match registration form information with the voters drivers license and Social Security application. While it may sound reasonable, in practice, any change, even a dropped hyphen, is cause for eliminating the voter from the rolls. Since 2004, Colorados Republican Secretaries of State have purged one out of every five voters from the rolls. The current Secretary of State, Mike Coffman, a Republican also running for office, recently purged an additional 37,000 voters and discarded 6,400 new voter registrations overwhelmingly Democratic based upon an obscure technical mistake that Coffmans office encouraged voters to make in the first place.
The GOP campaign resulted in one in nine New Mexico Democratic voters finding their names had disappeared from voter roles during this years caucus.
Despite a recent Supreme Court decision upholding Ohios refusal to disenfranchise 200,000 legitimate voters based on this absurd demand to voter names to databases, White House operatives are still fighting to purge these names from the rolls. President George Bush last week personally asked his Attorney General Mike Mukasey to renew Republican efforts to disenfranchise these voters.
Contrary to Mr. McCains assertions, the real threat to democracy is from the GOP itself. ACORN has served as a good distraction from Republican efforts to steal the vote from hundreds of thousands of legitimate voters, a genuine threat that has received almost no media attention.
Theyre stealing your vote, but you can steal it back. Here are some steps you should take to protect your vote. First, avoid the November 4th minefield. Voters, wherever possible, should vote early and in person. Where feasible, avoid mailing in your ballot, many are rejected for flimsy reasons, and first time voters in many states must include a photocopy of ID. However, if you have a mail-in ballot, dont throw it away. Follow directions, use the correct postage (thats an error that cost a hundred thousand votes last time) and, if possible, walk it in to your elections office.
At the polling station, should you find yourself one of the 2.7 million purged, or your ID rejected, then do your best to resist a ballotone third of which are not counted. Return with proper ID, or call 1-800-OUR VOTE for legal assistance. And never just walk away discouraged. Thats just what they want you to do.
Americano top 10 >>> Read more...
- Mood:Playing
- Music:Death Cab for Cutie
Has Google finally embraced RSS with their new XML
powered Sitemaps program? Well, sort of, but it seems
more like a hug than a strong impassioned embrace!
It does use XML technology which allows for the
crawling and updating of your sites web pages.
You can even include your entire web site (all urls)
with this indexing program. For anyone targeting the search
engines, especially Google, this program (still in beta)
is a MUST HAVE.
If you require timely updating of your most popular pages
Googles new Sitemaps may prove indispensable. Its a little
premature to assess the importance or impact of Googles
new program but anyone wanting to give their site a
competitive edge should be gearing up.
How it works:
There are several ways to set-up a XML Sitemap, perhaps
the easiest way is to use the open-source Generator which
you can download from Google. This is a Python file that
you can upload to your webserver and this generator
will create a sitemap from your URL lists, webserver
directories, or your access logs.
It would probably be wise to check with your hosting provider
to see if they can accommodate this Generator on your webserver.
It you have a small site there should be no problem but if your
site runs into the 1,000s of URLs or pages check to see how much
bandwidth such a system will take up. Its better to be safe
than sorry!
Once done, you have to then submit your newly generated XML Sitemap
to Google and the search engine will use this XML Sitemap to
update and index your site whenever you make changes on your site.
You will need to have a Google account.
You may also submit text files containing URLs from your web site
to be included in Google Sitemaps but these text files will have
or will be given low priority for the time being.
To get started on your own Google Sitemaps Account you can click here:
Googles Sitemaps
Whats great about it:
Besides seeing Google finally grab the RSS wildcard, it
gives you better control of how and when the search
engines update your web site pages. Perhaps, the most
important aspect for Internet Marketers, you can now assign
the importance thats given to any of your particular
pages. As most marketers know, certain pages on your
web site are more important than others; these pages
earn money, build your contact list, or direct your
sites visitors in the right direction. In other words,
you can now place more emphasis on your web sitebread and butter pages. A BIG Plus!
With Google Sitemaps you can decide the importance
placed on these pages by using the priority XML tag.
This rating system is relative, it only relates to
the pages on your own site.
Likewise, you can also indicate how frequently your
pages changes by using the changefreq XML tag. More or
less instructing Google when your page will be updated
or changed. This is a win-win situation for everyone;
Google gets the freshest content for its users and
you gain more control of the frequency of the updates
done with your site or web pages. This may have a direct
influence on the profitability of your web site.
For those who are actively marketing thru the search
engines and keywords Santa may have come a little
early this year. Of course, the jury will be out for
awhile but Google Sitemaps will probably have a
positive impact on your bottom line.
What it means for Google:
For those of us who have been following and watching
the RSS wildcard for the past couple of years, it takes
away some of the frustration and a little of the puzzlement
from Google seemingly total disregard of RSS.
RSS is not a fad, it is not a trend and its not going away.
Instead, its importance is growing. It is fast becoming
way data is moved on the web. One could even speculate that
in the very near future all web pages will have an RSS
component, perhaps a hybrid of or an embedded
XML code that will work with all browsers, search engines
and servers.
For Google to ignore the growing importance of RSS, blogging,
podcasting, broadcatching, the RSS featured Firefox browser,
MyYahoo, not to mention all those orange XML logos popping
up on most of the major sites on the web is beyond comprehension.
Why Google does not have an RSS search on its main search engine
page still seems baffling. Bringing out a homepage and not
including an RSS feature is just foolhardy (They may introduce
this feature later).
For those firmly in the RSS corner, Googles continued
disregard for RSS became more than a little frustrating
to observe. It was downright rude! Perhaps Google was waiting
to incorporate RSS in a program like this new XML Sitemaps?
Can this mean that Google has finally accepted the importance
of RSS and theyre starting to make amends? More importantly,
could there still be a few more RSS goodies in the Google Jar
left to be announced?
One can only speculate but when it comes to RSS and Google,
lets just hope this is the start of a beautiful friendship.
See more: >>> Read more...
powered Sitemaps program? Well, sort of, but it seems
more like a hug than a strong impassioned embrace!
It does use XML technology which allows for the
crawling and updating of your sites web pages.
You can even include your entire web site (all urls)
with this indexing program. For anyone targeting the search
engines, especially Google, this program (still in beta)
is a MUST HAVE.
If you require timely updating of your most popular pages
Googles new Sitemaps may prove indispensable. Its a little
premature to assess the importance or impact of Googles
new program but anyone wanting to give their site a
competitive edge should be gearing up.
How it works:
There are several ways to set-up a XML Sitemap, perhaps
the easiest way is to use the open-source Generator which
you can download from Google. This is a Python file that
you can upload to your webserver and this generator
will create a sitemap from your URL lists, webserver
directories, or your access logs.
It would probably be wise to check with your hosting provider
to see if they can accommodate this Generator on your webserver.
It you have a small site there should be no problem but if your
site runs into the 1,000s of URLs or pages check to see how much
bandwidth such a system will take up. Its better to be safe
than sorry!
Once done, you have to then submit your newly generated XML Sitemap
to Google and the search engine will use this XML Sitemap to
update and index your site whenever you make changes on your site.
You will need to have a Google account.
You may also submit text files containing URLs from your web site
to be included in Google Sitemaps but these text files will have
or will be given low priority for the time being.
To get started on your own Google Sitemaps Account you can click here:
Googles Sitemaps
Whats great about it:
Besides seeing Google finally grab the RSS wildcard, it
gives you better control of how and when the search
engines update your web site pages. Perhaps, the most
important aspect for Internet Marketers, you can now assign
the importance thats given to any of your particular
pages. As most marketers know, certain pages on your
web site are more important than others; these pages
earn money, build your contact list, or direct your
sites visitors in the right direction. In other words,
you can now place more emphasis on your web sitebread and butter pages. A BIG Plus!
With Google Sitemaps you can decide the importance
placed on these pages by using the priority XML tag.
This rating system is relative, it only relates to
the pages on your own site.
Likewise, you can also indicate how frequently your
pages changes by using the changefreq XML tag. More or
less instructing Google when your page will be updated
or changed. This is a win-win situation for everyone;
Google gets the freshest content for its users and
you gain more control of the frequency of the updates
done with your site or web pages. This may have a direct
influence on the profitability of your web site.
For those who are actively marketing thru the search
engines and keywords Santa may have come a little
early this year. Of course, the jury will be out for
awhile but Google Sitemaps will probably have a
positive impact on your bottom line.
What it means for Google:
For those of us who have been following and watching
the RSS wildcard for the past couple of years, it takes
away some of the frustration and a little of the puzzlement
from Google seemingly total disregard of RSS.
RSS is not a fad, it is not a trend and its not going away.
Instead, its importance is growing. It is fast becoming
way data is moved on the web. One could even speculate that
in the very near future all web pages will have an RSS
component, perhaps a hybrid of or an embedded
XML code that will work with all browsers, search engines
and servers.
For Google to ignore the growing importance of RSS, blogging,
podcasting, broadcatching, the RSS featured Firefox browser,
MyYahoo, not to mention all those orange XML logos popping
up on most of the major sites on the web is beyond comprehension.
Why Google does not have an RSS search on its main search engine
page still seems baffling. Bringing out a homepage and not
including an RSS feature is just foolhardy (They may introduce
this feature later).
For those firmly in the RSS corner, Googles continued
disregard for RSS became more than a little frustrating
to observe. It was downright rude! Perhaps Google was waiting
to incorporate RSS in a program like this new XML Sitemaps?
Can this mean that Google has finally accepted the importance
of RSS and theyre starting to make amends? More importantly,
could there still be a few more RSS goodies in the Google Jar
left to be announced?
One can only speculate but when it comes to RSS and Google,
lets just hope this is the start of a beautiful friendship.
See more: >>> Read more...
- Mood:rambunctious
- Music:Foo Fighters
- Mood:fun
- Music:Radiohead
I never knew that Google search can be used as calculator, currency converter or height and weight unit converter. Today Ive discovered few Google search technique and I would like to share those technique with you. Look at the few useful search technique and youll get the answer Why Google is the superior search engine?.
Read rest of this post
Popularity: 3% [.
Read more... <<< hot news
- Mood:innocent
- Music:The White Stripes
Virus outbreaks like in the past when tons of emails contained a virus, trojan or other malicious file attached are rare these days.
Distributors of these kind of mailicious codings are using other techniques to get their files on your computer. By email they try to attract your attention and get you clicking on a link to visit a web site. This web site then contains a script than will download the virus, trojan, or whatever malafide piece of code on your desktop. It is then very likely that you computer could be part of a zombie botnet.
However, virusses by email arent dead yet. During the last few weeks MX Lab has detected and intercepted emails with new virus variants. These virusses are attached to an email that mentions You have received a Hallmark E-Card or Hot Pictures and packed in a .zip or .rar archive.
Lets find out how MX Lab performs with the zero hour anti virus technolgy and why you still need a very good anti virus scanning and filtering service.
How does the zero hour anti virus of MX Lab performs?
At 20:55 - local Belgium time - MX Lab detected some emails containing a .rar archive that where intercepted by our zero hour anti virus. The emails are in the German language with subjects like Abbuchungserlaubnis, Ihr neuer Arbeitsvertrag and Tilgungvertrag.
Americano top 10 >>> anti spam solution
- Mood:
cheerful - Music:The Doors
- Mood:brash
- Music:Linkin Park
Id like to thank all my visitors and friends here who have voiced out their opinions and comments especially some of the problems they encountered here in my blog. Ive heard many complaints already regarding my anti-spam plugin and I am so sorry about that. I just changed my anti-spam plugin few minutes ago and I hope it works very well now. In case you guys and gals will be experiencing some problems here, please dont hesitate to leave me a message directly.
See more: >>> anti spam solution
- Mood:family
- Music:Muse
