NEW PAGES:

JFK and the Moon Race

JFK and the Unspeakable
includes audio files

DOTS TO CONNECT:

• Peak Oil
• Climate Change
• 9/11
• World War IV
• Media
• Homeland Security
• Fake Elections

RELATED WEBSITES:

Global Permaculture.org
Permatopia.com

Rigged Elections:
elite selection of candidates

control of the US is too valuable for elites to let voters decide

on this page:

• requirements for free and fair elections in the USA
• an old problem: vote fraud did not start in Florida in 2000
• Redskins Football and the Presidential Selections:
  17 times in a row is not chance (an inside joke?)
  elite selection of Presidents
• why Bush Cheney were allowed to steal the 2000 election

The most important way that elections in the US are rigged is not voter disenfranchisement, touch screen voting machines or tampered software in ballot scanners, but media manipulation of public consciousness about the candidates. There's also the differences between the ostensible level of politics (the three branches of co-equal government and the other nonsense taught to us in school), and the "deep politics" of how the military industrial intelligence complex really works. It's good to focus on some of the mechanics of manipulating ballot counting, but the deeper problems are much more entrenched and would take a societal wide consciousness shift to address.

The 2008 "election" was a choice between the Rockefeller Republicans and the neo-cons, between the Council on Foreign Relations (Biden) and the American Enterprise Institute (McCain), between the old guard of foreign policy and the crazies. We need better choices than that if we are going to be able to use some of the rest of the oil for relocalization, renewable energy and "power down" strategies to mitigate the end of the age of oil.

I’m not disappointed in the Obama - Biden administration.  

They promised to oppose Single Payer health care, and they are against it now.  They promised to expand the wars on Afghanistan and Pakistan, and those conflicts are now getting worse.  

No one should be surprised that the new administration supports Bush era policies on rendition, warrantless wiretapping, increased military spending, corporate welfare for Wall Street, highway expansion, and official silence about Peak Oil.

It is encouraging that some Obama voters wonder why their team is “regime rotation” instead of regime change.  

Our political system has been on autopilot for decades, especially since November 22, 1963 when President Kennedy was removed from office for wanting to stop the Cold War.   The failure of our political system to address that crime is why the Democrats will not change imperial policies.

The Democrats and the Republicans are like two sides of a Mobius Strip -- it looks like two sides, but they are on the same side.   The “elections” resemble televised wrestling - it looks like a bruising contest, but they are fake, rigged in advance.   Good cop, bad cop.

Sarah Palin was put on McCain’s ticket to ensure that he would lose, since Wall Street wanted the Democrats this time.  

I voted for Cynthia McKinney for President.   While in Congress, she stood up to Bush on the deepest issues, and both parties joined forces to defeat her.

Kerry won in 2004: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, New Mexico, Nevada and Ohio.

Bush won because he ran against Kerry. If he ran unopposed he would have lost.
-- Mort Sahl

The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can "throw the rascals out" at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.
-- Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in our Time
(one of Bill Clinton's teachers)

Give the people a choice between a Republican and a Democrat who talks like a Republican and they'll choose the Republican every time.
-- Harry S. Truman

Corrupted by wealth and power, your government is like a restaurant with only one dish. They've got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters on the other side. But no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen.
-- Huey Long

It is my belief that since the JFK assassination the secret government, the CIA and the [Military Industrial Complex], have been running the show. They have not allowed anyone to become president, from either party, that was not under their control.
-- Bruce Gagnon, Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space http://space4peace.blogspot.com/2008/07/jfks-conversion-from-war.html

I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.
-- Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State under Richard Nixon, about Chile prior to the CIA overthrow of the democratically elected government of socialist President Salvadore Allende in 1973

The neocons are the Lone Gunmen of Iraq. They’re the patsies who'll eventually take the fall for its failure, which will actually mean success to the real players who’ve allowed them the liberty to play their hand. Like Oswald, these patsies aren't innocents, but neither should perfect blame be laid at their feet. And like Oswald, when their heads are offered to the public the public will be expected to sigh with relief that the beast has been slain and all is right again in the land.
-- Jeff Wells, The Lone Conmen, December 13, 2005
http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2005/12/lone-conmen_13.html

"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, pull back the curtains, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater."
-- Frank Zappa

As the global elite rapidly attempt to ditch the neo-cons and their psychotic plans, it is obvious that the neo-cons cannot succeed. The question does remain: How much destruction will come to bear before failure is undeniably clear?
-- Michael Kane, The Global Elite Abandon The Neo-cons, August 9th 2006
www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/080906_global_elite.shtml

The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they’re an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They’ve got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying - lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else.
But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. You know what they want? Obedient workers - people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they’re coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club.
-- George Carlin

 

• impeachment of Cheney and Bush -- and prosecution at the International Criminal Court for war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere (threatening war crimes in Iran and Syria is a crime)
• a "truth and reconciliation" style investigation of 9/11 (similar to the commission that documented South Africa's crimes after apartheid), US foreign policies, and the plutocracy / kleptocracy that controls our country
• abolition of electronic ballot counting machines owned by Republicans -- the solution is paper ballots counted by hand
• media reform to break up giant propaganda monopolies that are the most important ways that election campaigns are tampered with

For future "selections," assuming that this ritual will be maintained to preserve the illusion of democracy, it is incumbent upon progressive Democrats, Greens, Republicans with consciences, and others to focus on the myriad ways that elections are not free and fair: electronic voting machines that are made by Republicans, the role of the secret government (CIA, etc) and other related issues in addition to campaign finance reform. Otherwise, the Presidential sElections will be farces, not worthy of being considered "democratic."

1960: both sides tampered with votes in Illinois.

1964: the election was tampered with by the coup in Dallas (1963/11/22).

1968: the election was tampered with by the killings of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and by Nixon's sabotage of the Vietnam peace negotiations.

1972: the Watergate scandal damaged democracy.

1976: the Carter campaign was in part an effort of the "Trilateral Commission" (a quasi-official transnational entity of elites).

1980: Carter's "Friendly Fascism" was sabotaged by the "October Surprise". ("On October 19, 1980, Bush was dealing with Khomeini") In most countries, that would have been called a coup d'etat.

1984: Reagan's re-election campaign was a "cake walk" over Mondale.

1988: Dukakis appeared to get "cold feet" (understandable) and chose to stay silent about Bush's crimes as Vice President. Iran-Contra and the October Surprise were not part of the campaign issues.

1992: Clinton was clearly the elite's choice. Clinton put the happy face on fascism and got a lot of the Reagan-Bush agenda passed -- NAFTA, GATT, WTO, gutting health, safety and environmental laws, abolition of welfare, doubling prison complex, etc. "Homeland Security" was started toward the end of Clinton's second term (around the time of the phony impeachment). Clinton had been involved in Iran-Contra while governor of Arkansas (much of the cocaine used to fund the contra war was flown into Mena, Ark.), and therefore was compromised and couldn't prosecute Bush for his crimes. See the book "Barry and the Boys" by former NBC investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker for more on this (www.barryandtheboys.com)

1996: Dole seemed to understand that his campaign was a token gesture - entertaining for him (and profitable), but not a serious effort to defeat Clinton.

2000: the whole world saw George W. Bush was not actually the winner. While vote fraud was not limited to Florida, that state became famous as the center for the election tampering.

2002: several elections - especially the Georgia Senate and Governor races - were flipped by electronic ballot machines. The plane crash of Senator Wellstone also was a factor in the shift of the Senate to the Republicans.

2004: Kerry won the election, but electronic ballot machines and voter suppression flipped several states in the Electoral College and shifted a few million votes to Bush.

2006: vote fraud was present in many Congressional races, but not enough to prevent the Democrats from taking both houses of Congress

The Loyal Opposition?

One reason why the Democrats have been ineffectual in recent decades is that some of their best candidates were taken down in manufactured scandals (October Surprise, 1980), by lone gunmen (JFK, RFK, etc), plane crashes (Wellstone), or by the refusal of their national party to support them if they dare to criticize the secret government (Cynthia McKinney).

Redskins Football and the Presidential Selections:
17 times in a row is not chance (an inside joke?)

www.snopes.com/politics/ballot/redskins.asp

Winning Tradition
Claim: The outcome of Washington Redskins home football games has correctly predicted the winner of every U.S. presidential election since 1936.
Status: Not any more.
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2004]
FOOTBALL + ELECTION
Did you know....??
The Washington Redskins have proved to be a time-tested election predictor. In the previous 15 elections, if the Washington Redskins have lost their last home game prior to the election, the incumbent party has lost the White House. When they have won, the incumbent has stayed in power. ....
Origins: Our desire to understand and assert some control over the world around us is often manifested by our attempts to find predictive signs that enable us to prognosticate events — evenwhen there is no seeming connection between predictor and event. ...
A recent item of this ilk maintains that the results of the last game played at home by the NFL's Washington Redskins (a football team based in the national capital, Washington, D.C.) before the U.S. presidential elections has accurately foretold the winner of the last fifteen of those political contests, going back to 1944. If the Redskins win their last home game before the election, the party that occupies the White House continues to hold it; if the Redskins lose that last home game, the challenging party's candidate unseats the incumbent president. While we don't presume there is anything more than a random correlation between these factors, it is the case that the pattern held true even longer than claimed, stretching back over seventeen presidential elections since 1936 ...

probability of this outcome (1936 through 2000) occurring due to chance
0.5^17 = .0000076 = .00076%

The football presidential prediction system did not work in 2004, since elites were divided

In 2000 the elites above the political parties were united on Bush "winning" regardless of what the vote count was, since the forces behind Bush had a plan to respond to the approaching petroleum peak and the forces behind Gore did not (9/11, Iraq War, USA PATRIOT act, etc). In 2004 the elites were more split, and the elite faction that wanted the good cops now seem to be triumphant (especially with the 2006 Congressional elections).

The point is that like sports, elections can be "fixed," too. Control of the United States government is the biggest prize in world history, the idea that those who own the country would "let the people decide" is wonderfully naive and innocent but unlikely to be the reality.

The power elite have a twisted, mean sense of humor, and the Redskins Presidential Prediction System is probably one of its many manifestations.

A side note: the word "Redskins" is an antiquated, racist term that long ago should have been replaced with something less pejorative. No professional sports team in the US chooses racist stereotypes for other ethnic minority groups.

2004: Redskins lose, Kerry won, Bush stole the game

October 31, 2004: Redskins lose to Green Bay Packers in Wisconsin (the only community owned football team in the US)

The October 2004 lunar eclipse over North America was the night that the Boston Red Sox won the World Series in Busch Stadium. For those who have read about rigging of "sports" events, it seemed like an inside joke - Boston beating Bush under the full moon eclipse. While Kerry did win the real contest (not baseball), he wasn't allowed to become President by the secret, actual government. Hopefully, future historians (if we survive) will be able to fully describe all of the behind-the-scenes discussions, negotiations and threats that kept the Kerry campaign from protesting about vote fraud that flipped the election from Kerry to Bush.

http://prorev.com/2007/09/from-our-overstocked-archives-football.html

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2007
FROM OUR OVERSTOCKED ARCHIVES: FOOTBALL

.... it may serve the nation to some extent by sublimating violence that could be expressed in more dangerous forms. Football is part of the pornography of violence and, if we accept the liberal sociologists' view of such matters, it is perhaps wisest to let the Battle of America be won on the playing fields of RFK Stadium.

I say perhaps. The evidence is cloudy. We managed to engage in the most stupid war of our history while at the peak of arousal over professional football. And we are regressing into the state-contrived violence of capital punishment, SWAT squads, and massive subsidization of foreign and domestic police state activities apparently unappeased by the bruises of the NFL. But then, who knows what even more grizzly avocations we might find for ourselves and our nation were it not for the ritualistic release of our lust for battle on Sunday afternoons (and Monday evenings and Saturday afternoons and. . . )

"College football is a game which would be much more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students, and even more interesting if the trustees played. There would be a great increase in broken arms, legs, and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the loss to humanity."
-- H. L. Mencken

Elite selection of the "winner" in Mexico

an excerpt from former CIA agent Phil Agee's book "CIA Diary" (1975) on how Mexican elites picked a President years before the actual "election" (Agee was at the US embassy in Mexico ...)

www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/CIA_Diary_Agee.html

"The other day a RYBAT cable arrived from Mexico City showing how the system works there. The Chief of Station advised that Luis Echeverria, the Minister of Government (internal security), told him he has just been secretly selected as the next Mexican President. Echeverria is now the famous tapado (covered one) whom the top inner circle of the ruling party, the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI), select well in advance to be the next president. Although Echeverria said it in a somewhat discreet manner, the Chief of Station has no doubt that he was intentionally being let in on the secret -- even though the elections won't be held until 1970.
"The information in the cable is extremely sensitive, not so much because it's a secret but because presidential succession in Mexico is supposedly a decision made by a broad representation within the PRI. For years leaders of the PRI have been denying that presidential succession is determined secretly by the incumbent, ex-presidents, and a few other PRI leaders -- they even have a nominating convention and all the appearances of mass participation. The Mexico branch Reports Office sent a "blue stripe" report (very limited distribution) over to the White House and the State Department on Echeverria's good news."
-- October 25, 1966

It seems that George W. Bush's selection as President is analogous to that of Echeverria's - he was picked well in advance of the 2000 election. That could explain the lackluster performance by Al Gore during the campaign, and Gore's willingness -- at the end -- to let the victory be stolen from him (he knew those who own the country wanted Shrub, not Gore). However, Shrub had to steal the election in full view of the whole world, he didn't get to actually "win" the "election" as planned. While ballot stuffing and other forms of election tampering have probably always existed as long as there have been elections, the 2000 election was blatant enough - and the outcome close enough - that the fraud was widely seen.

an excerpt from Crossing the Rubicon by Michael Ruppert

The why and the how

It is my belief that sometime during the period between late 1998 and early 2000, as certain elites became aware of the pending calamity of Peak Oil, they looked at the first highly confidential exploration and drilling results from the Caspian Basin and shuddered. The economy had already been milked close to collapse, and the Caspian results could not be kept secret forever. The data would surely come out, and what would happen to the markets then? What if some of the major oil companies had been inflating Caspian numbers and hyping up hopes of a bonanza in order to pump their stock value? What if all the inflated reserve estimates revealed themselves to be bogus all at once?

A major economic collapse was imminent in the fall of 2001. I issued the first of only two economic bulletins from FTW, warning of an imminent market collapse, on September 9th. 1 The only other economic alert I ever issued came just before the massive collapse of the Dow Jones in 2002. Remember that? The one where your 401(k) got wiped out? The one that wiped out trillions of dollars in shareholder equity?

It is likely that some of those early Caspian drilling reports came from companies like ExxonMobil, where Condoleezza Rice sat on the board. She was an expert on Kazakhstan. The elites began to grasp that the hoped for Caspian reserves would not even offer a short reprieve from the onslaught of Peak Oil. Through declassified CIA reports we know that the CIA was aware that US oil production had peaked in 1970 and that the Agency was tracking Soviet oil production in the hopes of predicting a Russian peak in 1977. 2 The CIA is Wall Street. Even if the oil had been there, it could not be monetized, because there was no safe route or pipeline to get it out. Alarms started going off.

It was time for the major players to cash out, and that's what some 20 giant corporations from Enron to WorldCom, to Merck, to Halliburton did, as those in the know pumped and dumped their stocks, sucking the wealth out of pension funds, small investors, and mutual funds from 2000 to 2002. For the most part only the smaller investors and funds were hurt. The people on top cashed out and moved "their" money elsewhere.

Dick Cheney and the neocons stepped up with a plan. That was probably more than Al Gore and the neoliberals had to offer in light of the emergency now building. Any plan was better than no plan. Obviously, the first objective for Dick Cheney and the neocons had been to secure control of the White House in the 2000 election so that the rest of the plan could be implemented if necessary. That is why I noted in a January 2001 FTW essay titled "Empire," that the Bush cabinet was a war cabinet and that a major conflict was coming.

Their next task was to find out how much time there was before things started collapsing behind high energy prices and dwindling supply. How bad was it really? Who could say? The oil books were as cooked as the Enron books. How much oil was there really? Where was it? Who owned it? How long before the wheels started coming off? It was time to find all of it out accurately and quickly, but in secret. As the election of 2000 passed, the Caspian results grew continually more disappointing.

Summation: Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury 573

This would explain the urgency with which the Bush administration convened the National Energy Policy Development Group -- under Dick Cheney -- immediately after taking office in January. What do we do now? That was the bottom line. I believe that this was where the basic motive for 9/11 was fully articulated, understood, and accepted. Even though preparations for the attacks had been underway for years, the moment of truth about whether to execute them did not arrive until Cheney's group had a hard look at the numbers. This would explain why the administration fought all the way to the US Supreme Court to hide those records, and why Dick Cheney felt it necessary to take Justice Antonin Scalia duck hunting in a desperate effort to keep the records secret.

Scalia and the other "Supremes" delivered for him. On July 2, 2004, in a little noticed 7-2 ruling, the Supreme Court upheld the right of the administration to keep the NEPDG's records secret from the American people. I was not at all surprised. Nothing surprised me after the Supreme Court's ruling in the 2000 election.

After the NEPDG concluded its work in late April 2001, I think an irrevocable decision had been made to cross the Rubicon, that bloody line between an ailing republic and the empire that irreversibly supervened. In May 2001 President Bush placed Dick Cheney in charge of all planning for a terror attack, effectively giving him complete control over FEMA, the military, everything. In June 2001 the NORAD scramble protocols that had worked efficiently since 1976 were rewritten to take most decision-making power out of the hands of Air Force field commanders. Although minor exceptions in those protocols still allowed commanders to act on their own in certain cases, as General Arnold did, the change itself provided deniability for elements of the confusion that Dick Cheney was going to deliberately engineer and control.

From their perspective, the Republican neocons were faced with a choice of massive panic and collapse on the financial markets; a loss of public faith in the political system; and the loss of most of their own power and wealth if the truth were known.

To borrow a metaphor from Professor Peter Dale Scott, both the neolibs and the neocons were players at a very lucrative crap game. Though they often played viciously against each other, their prime objective was to keep the game going at all costs. Whenever the game was threatened -- as is the case with 9/11 -- they quickly closed ranks to protect it while the turf over which they continued to fight among themselves grew smaller and smaller and the contests more heated and bloody.

Within their own mindset and within the parameters of an economic and governmental system that functioned (as it continues to function) in the mode of organized crime -- incapable of transparency, riddled with corruption and cooked books, based upon the destruction of life for the sake of net profits and supremacy -- these men, led by Dick Cheney, chose what they thought was their only logical option. I believe it seemed to them the "right" thing to do; after all, it was only a few thousand lives. Other rulers have made similar choices in the past. Butas all empires learn, once the river is crossed there is no turning back. In front of that decision there lay a continuum of ever more vicious bloodletting, decline, and collapse.

The pie was shrinking, and any political diversity remaining in the system was heading for extinction as rapidly as are thousands of species on this afflicted planet. Perhaps mankind, too, is on nature's endangered species list, as we ironically and half-heartedly lament the white rhino and the California condor, the Bengal tiger and the black bear.

The imminent energy crisis was going to be both apocalyptic and unavoidable, and it was going to arrive sooner than expected. Like any "well-planned" government operation, the planning and initial preparations for what became 9/11 had begun in the Clinton administration as a contingency plan. That's when the 19 so-called hijackers (and/or their handlers) began establishing their legends. But the Caspian news would account for the absolutely unfathomable number of mistakes that were made in both the plan's execution and the subsequent cover-up. It was a rush job. Quickly, any number of classified or once-classified contingency plans for a staged attack on the US -- like Operation Northwoods -- came down off the shelf. As Brzezinski's Grand Chessboard shows, the need for such an event had already been acknowledged in 1997 -- conveniently, just as al Qaeda and the Taliban were emerging as world and regional players. Operation Northwoods, declassified in the late 1990s, had been planned in 1962.

Since the end of the cold war there had been plenty of time to put a new potential enemy in place, and September 11 th was not a new idea.

As Zbigniew Brzezinski had written in 1997, the "immediate" task was to develop and simultaneously control a "direct external threat" to manufacture an attack "like a new Pearl Harbor." That required a credible (at least in the public mind) and well-developed enemy. The need for the same kind of attack was mentioned by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in its September 2000 report Rebuilding America's Defenses. Such an attack would then provide a pretext for massive sequential military intervention to secure the energy supplies of the Middle

East and the lesser (but terribly important) oil-bearing regions including West Africa, Venezuela, Colombia, certain portions of the Southwest Pacific, and any other region with smaller but more readily accessible reserves. The essential thing would be that terrorists or their "allies" must conveniently turn up in each needed area, on schedule.

No problem! That's what the CIA, Mossad, MI6, and every other major intelligence agency does for a living.

While the Supreme Court received much publicity for its notorious Bush v. Gore ruling regarding the rigged 2000 Presidential Election, the Supreme Court did not actually select George Bush as Resident of the White House. That decision was actually made by the US Congress on January 6, 2001, when they performed the Ratification of the "Certificates of Ascertainment" in the Electoral College. The rules state that one Senator and one Representative are needed to begin a debate on the legitimacy of any State's slate of Electors - and while about two dozen Members of the Congressional Black Caucus argued that the Florida Electors were picked fraudulently (for many reasons, including the deliberate disenfranchisement of African-American citizens), no Senator supported them. Not one. This was particularly perverse, since on January 6, the new Senate had already been sworn in - and the balance was 50 Democrats, 50 Republicans, and Vice President Al Gore presiding as President of the Senate (and tie-breaker, if need be). In other words, a Democratic controlled Senate voted 100 to zero to confirm George Bush as President! Perhaps future historians will reveal what behind the scenes machinations occurred to enable the loser of the election to be selected with Democratic complicity: bribes, threats, the de facto merging of the two parties, the probable selection of Bush as President by the nation's elites long before the actual election ...

"Homeland Security" as a term started under Clinton I, not Bush II.

Edward Herman co-authored a book nearly two decades ago titled "Demostration Elections" about phony elections in US client states (El Salvador, Vietnam, etc). These rituals were intended to legitimize US military support for the dictatorships under the guise of helping our democratic allies. Perhaps a sequel could be written about the US - since we do not have legitimate elections in our own country.

For future "elections," assuming that this ritual will be maintained to preserve the illusion of democracy, it is incumbent upon progressive Democrats (now just another Third Party), Greens, Republicans with consciences, compassionate Libertarians and independents to focus on unity beyond the political parties, which ignore the myriad ways that elections are not free and fair: electronic voting machines that are made by Republicans, the role of the secret government (CIA, etc) and other related issues in addition to campaign finance reform.

Bush's confirmation by Congress as winner of the Electoral College -- despite blatant vote fraud -- was the logical extension of his poor scholastic record in regular college (where he was not allowed to flunk out due to his family ties). Bush may have gotten C's at Yale (because he wasn't allowed to be flunked) but he got an A from the Electoral College (a stolen grade, not earned fairly).