Republicans Weighting the Scale To Get What They Want

Rachel Maddow discusses all the hurdles and obstacles Republicans are making law to;
A.) Try to keep President Obama off the 2012 Presidential ballot and B.) Dissuade likely Democratic voters from showing up for the Presidential election in 2012. This is another example that the Republicans can not win with their 1920 ideas so they have to "put their thumb on the scale" to tilt the election. Keep an eye on those tricky electronic voting machines as well. There's not a doubt in my mind that the right wing is working behind the scenes to pull off another 2000 or 2004. Otherwise, all these hugely unpopular policies from the new teapublican Governors in the midwest or the hugely unpopular kill social safety nets policies in DC would not be moving full steam ahead. They are NOT concerned about the voters. Heck, maybe they'll just hold back until a county doesn't go their way and have 14,000 votes miraculously appear! Thanks for the heads up Wisconsin! Check this: Programmer under oath admits computers rig elections. Also don't forget Karl Rove's IT Guru Mike Connelly's "mysterious" plane crash just before he was to testify in 2008.

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Right Wing Pulls Out Magic Vote Count Again...This Time in Wisconsin

Two days after election, mysteriously "found" votes flip Wisconsin Supreme Court race. Yesterday 14,315 uncounted votes magically appeared in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election once it was determined that Democratic challenger Kathleen Kloppenburg had beaten Conservative incumbent and Scott Walker partner, David Prosser by 204 votes. Yeah, there would've been a recount and I'm sure it would've got twisted to Prosser's side, but the Republicans didn't want to take the chance on a recount from the left, so as it currently stands, Prosser has now won by 7,399 votes --- outside of the automatic recount range. Kloppenburg would have to pay for the very costly recount and investigation herself.

Does anyone actually believe the 7,500 new GOP votes attributed to 'human error' are legitimate? Isn't it funny how these things always land in the right wing win column? Let's think about past history. Bush stole the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections via Florida and Ohio, respectively, and got away with it. In 2008 President Obama won by more than 8 million votes, but the right wing screamed voter fraud and were able to get ACORN defunded and shut down.

Here's the best part. Kathy Nickolaus, the Waukesha County Clerk who is up to her eyeballs in this scandal was a staffer for...get this...David Prosser.
This latest incident is not her first brush with political shenanigans.
Check out her past oopsie moments at Huffington Post

Daily KOS is pointing out that her excuse that she "forgot to hit save" holds no water as Microsoft Access (any version) doesn't ask you to save. When you enter data into a table, it automatically updates the underlying database. If you close the database accidentally, the data you entered (or imported, in the case of Nickolaus) remains. If you stop to take a phone call from your buddy the governor (for example), your data will still automatically save. Read more at Daily KOS

Statement from state Senate Minority Leader Mark Miller (D):

It stretches the bounds of credibility to think that over 14,300 votes were somehow "overlooked" until two days after the election.
Based on the partisan, political history of Ms. Nickolaus and the serious concerns that have been raised, by other Waukesha County officials, about the quality of her election administration and the possibility for fraud, an independent investigation of her conduct and the county's election results is not just warranted but urgently demanded to protect the integrity of our electoral system in Wisconsin.

Will the Justice Department get involved and clean this up? The right have become so brazen with vote fraud and intimidation, they seem to think they're untouchable.
But you can't blame them, it works every time.

Don't forget how a popular governor of Alabama, Dan Siegelman was framed in a crooked trial and sent to prison by the extremely corrupt Bush administration. Valerie Plame was not their only victim. The hard right plutocracy ruining this country know no bounds. Cross them and they will ruin you. These guys are in it to win it --- country be damned.
Going to Jail for Being a Democrat: How Alabama Gov. Dan Siegelman Got Roved

UPDATE: Also, check this out: Washington Monthly. Steve Benen questions what the reaction would be from Republicans, on Fox News, etc. -- if the situation were reversed. Imagine there was a close, important race and the conservative candidate eked out a narrow win, and the very next day, a Democratic donor with a sketchy election record discovered 7,000 additional votes for the liberal. What do you suppose we'd hear from the right under those circumstances?

March 19, 2003 - I Want a 'Do Over'

Right now, if you've been watching the news at all, you're probably knee deep in health care and whip counts and wondering if Speaker Pelosi will have 216 votes by Sunday. However, do you remember what happened seven years ago today? The Bush-Cheney regime launched the war in Iraq! For some reason,the majority of the media doesn't seem to care about it anymore. Quick fyi;one broadcaster hasn't forgotten and asked Nancy Pelosi about it last Thursday. The clip is below. Getting back to my point; Remember how the Bushies acted as though the 'mission' would be a cakewalk? They implied marching into Iraq to do as we please would be as easy as it was to free Kuwait twelve years earlier. A funny thing happened on the way to relabeling the oil fields for BP, Chevron, Exxon, Shell and Texaco -- the Iraqi's fought back! To this day, I find the fact that many U.S. leaders were dumbfounded that insurgency developed amazing. What do they think would happen here if another country invaded us?

Think about all our different missions or at least the one's easily remembered. First we were going there to rid Iraq of WMD (oops),  then it was to end a regime, then to develop a free Iraq, on to training the Iraqi's so they can do the fighting, and after stealing a second election, Bush decided he'd advance the ideal of democracy. Since everything was going so splendidly, we moved on to helping secure the population. I still find it ironic that many of them had 20th century services until we bombed them, now they don't even have running water in many places. Remember how another rationale was that we were going to "fight the terrorists in Iraq so that we wouldn't have to fight them here," in America. Nobody has ever explained why we couldn't keep fighting those terrorists in Afghanistan, where they were! This was arguably the worst decision any American leader has ever made. Historians will sort it out, in textbooks being cooked up by McCarthy-loving dipshits in Texas! Bush, Cheney and Rove will be smiling in approval.

Remember this famous Dubya quote while standing on an aircraft carrier: “On Thursday, I visited the USS Abraham Lincoln, now headed home after the longest carrier deployment in recent history. I delivered good news to the men and women who fought in the cause of freedom: Their mission is complete, and major combat operations in Iraq have ended.” [5/3/03] All these years later, this administration still has supporters even though every reason they used to invade and occupy Iraq has been debunked. Nothing will be learned from these grievous mistakes. The fact that the current administration refuses to investigate these crimes gives me every reason to believe it will happen again.

None of us will forget the tragedy of 9/11/01 when 3000 people died on U.S. soil. As of right now, 4385 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq and over 30,000 wounded. And then there's the fact that an estimated 30-40,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed in the fighting. Can anyone explain to me that attacking a country with no ties to that fateful day and the loss of even more lives than occured that day has justified this invasion?

An interesting article I read today: Full El Al flight took off on 9/11 from JFK to Tel Aviv