MAN GIVEN CRACK COCAINE TO REGISTER VOTERS ARRESTED IN OHIO

Mon Oct 18 2004 13:26:03 ET

October 18, 2004

The Defiance County Sheriff's Office arrested Chad Staton, age 22, of Stratton Ave., Defiance, on a charge of False Registration, in Violation of Section 3599.11 of the Ohio Revised Code, a felony of the fifth degree.

The SheriffÕs Office alleges that Staton filled out over 100 voter registration forms that were fictitious. Staton was to be paid for each registration form that he could get citizens to fill out. However, Staton himself filled out the registrations and returned them to the woman who hired him from Toledo, Ohio. Deputies allege that Staton was paid crack cocaine for the falsified registrations.

Defiance Deputies along with Toledo Police Department detectives conducted a search warrant of a residence on Woodland in Toledo, believed to be the home of the woman who hired Staton to solicit voter registration. Officers confiscated drug paraphernalia along with voter registration forms from the home. The occupant of the home, Georgianne Pitts, age 41, advised law enforcement, along with Ohio B.C.I.&I., that she had been recruited by Thaddeus J. Jackson, II, of Cleveland, to obtain voter registrations. Pitts admitted to paying Staton crack cocaine for the registrations in lieu of money.

A business card provided by Pitts indicated that Jackson is the Assistant NVF Ohio Director of the NAACP National Voter Fund.

The initial complaint received by the Sheriff's Office came from the Defiance County Board of Elections. The Board had received the 100 plus registration forms from the Cuyahoga Board of Elections that had been submitted to the Cuyahoga Board by the NAACP National Voter Fund.

I can't believe the GOP would stoop to such measures just to register voters.

October 25, 2004

It Is The Wolves In The White House Who Are Preying Upon Democracy,
And Gorging On Its Carcass

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

Here's the crucial difference between the GOP theft of the election in
2000 and their efforts to steal the 2004 White House campaign.

In 2000, they were outside the government trying to steal their way
in, with Florida as ground zero in the mugging of democracy.

In 2004, they ARE the government: controlling the legislative,
executive and judicial branches.

They have appointed enough federal judges, combined with past right
wing appointees in the Reagan and Bush I administrations, so that any
election initiative that they support or oppose will by upheld or
struck down by an ideologically driven right wing judge somewhere
along the appellate route. Their moles are in place and ready to do
what they were appointed to the bench for: to protect the Bush regime
and the interests of the Republican Party and its fundamentalist
supporters over the rights of Americans to choose their government.

It is like trying to win a football game when all the referees work
FOR the opposing team.

If you are voting in a state with a Republican Secretary of State and
a Republican Governor -- such as Florida and Ohio -- you are voting in
an environment where the Bush Cartel is using its surrogates to try
and suppress every Democratic vote that it can.

Already, through a variety of schemes, including working to ensure
that provisional votes are not counted, felon purges, the organized
dumping of Democratic registration forms, improper registration of
Democrats (to ensure that their right to vote will be denied when
challenged by a "rent-a-thug" poll watcher), to mysterious phone calls
to Democratic voters telling them to vote in the wrong precinct, to
the collection of absentee ballot requests for Dems that never show up
at the election office, to the illegal registration of students and
naturalized citizens as Republicans -- and including many, many more
GOP dirty tricks -- the Republican Party has nationalized their
Democratic voter suppression activity, using the multiple strategies
that they tried out in Florida -- and many, many more new ones. Most
of them are actions that are punishable as felonies.

But nothing will be as disgraceful an assault on democracy as the
hiring of 3,600 "rent a Republican thugs" -- at $100 a day -- to
intentionally intimidate minority and other Democratic voters from
exercising their democratic and constitutional right by creating chaos
and a menacing environment through challenging voters in Democratic
(primarily minority) districts in Ohio. Such an onslaught of
challenges on election day has the intent of tying up polling booths
through lengthy challenges (a process that was successful in dooming
the ill-fated voter recount in Florida in 2000 even before the Supreme
Court stepped in), thus forcing voters to abandon unfathomable waits
as each voter is challenged, requiring a lengthy review process of
each individual's right to vote. Secondly, the very presence of
hostile GOP thugs -- and the boastful public promotion of this
strategy by the Republican Party of Ohio (at the behest of Karl Rove,
you can be sure) -- is meant to keep fearful minority views from
coming to the voting booths in Ohio at all. This is Jim Crow redux.

Such an effort, among a multitude of voter suppression tactics adopted
by the male Katherine Harris of Ohio, Secretary of State Ken
Blackwell, a right wing Bush puppet (he's even foamingly at the mouth
anti-gay a la Rick "bestiality" Santorum), can impact tens of
thousands of votes to the detriment of John Kerry in what as shaping
up as the pivotal state of the election. Current projections indicate
that Bush cannot win the election without winning Ohio, where he is
currently behind in the polls.

That is why Blackwell -- like Katherine Harris, a Bush state campaign
co-chair -- has gone to such lengths as requiring that voter
registration forms would only be accepted on paper with a certain
weight (which he only announced shortly before the registration
deadline), until he was forced to stop implementing the requirement.

The refusal to honor provisional ballots in Ohio cast in a different
precinct, first struck down and then upheld by a federal appeals
court, could result in the loss of tens of thousands of Kerry votes.
Although the justice department had no standing in the case, John
"Bush owns my butt" Ashcroft filed an amicus brief on a similar
provisional voting case in Michigan, even though the federal
government was not a party to the suit. He was signaling to Republican
office holders throughout the U.S. that the Bush Cartel was going to
do everything possible to squash hundreds of thousands of provisional
votes, and that they should assist in anyway they could. That was his
message in the Michigan case. So you can see that this is an organized
effort of disenfranchisement, involving every level of the Bush Cartel
and their hired "consultants."

With all the right wing judges now sitting on the federal bench, not
to mention the 5-4 "Bush at any price, democracy be damned" majority
on the Supreme Court, it is only a matter of time before any appeal
that favors democracy and voting rights is struck down in favor of
Bush by some judicial ideologue who takes orders from the Federalist
Society and the Bush Administration.

It should not be forgotten that William Rehnquist, the Chief Justice
of the Supreme Court and one of the felonious five of 2000, got his
start in right wing Republican politics by serving as a "poll watcher"
in Arizona and aggressively challenging the rights of minorities to
vote as a means of disenfranchisement. (This was something that
Rehnquist committed perjury about in his confirmation hearings, by the
way. But the Democrats, when the truth emerged, were forgiving, as
always, and didn't put up a stink about our Chief Justice being found
out to have lied under oath.)

So even before most of the country votes on November 2, it is likely
that John Kerry will have been denied thousands upon thousands of
votes, well in excess of one or two hundred thousand possibly, due to
a national GOP strategy of voter suppression, intimidation and dirty
tricks, using multiple strategies.

If this is the kind of democracy that Bush is having our soldiers die
for, it is only further proof that he is a fraud. In his mind, a
democracy is the exercise of voting by white Christians who want to
turn America into a theocracy. The votes of minorities and Democrats
are to be discounted as much as possible because they do not represent
votes of "saved Christians" who are attempting to impose their faith
and morality upon a nation they consider "fallen from God."

The denial of voting rights as a national strategy is not just a
return to the days of Jim Crow, it is an indication that the Bush
Cartel has a different perspective on democracy than what is
guaranteed under our Constitution. It is the right to vote based on
one's faith and party affiliation. It is the structuring of a state
apparatus aimed at stifling democracy as we know it and replacing it
more with something that is a cross between Franco's fascism and
Stalin's Soviet style of rule.

In a story in the Boston Globe, it was revealed that White House Chief
of Staff Andrew Card recently told a gathering of Maine Bush
supporters that the man in the White House regards Americans as
10-year-olds who need a strong father figure to lead them in this time
of peril. That is the model upon which a fascist leader rules, not the
model of Constitutional democracy upon which our nation is founded.

The pre-election voter suppression currently being carried out by Rove
and company is an attempt to further erode our democracy, as the Bush
Cartel has begun the dismantling of the democratic process ever since
it first hijacked the election in 2000.

The Bush Family knows that Jeb Bush will carry Florida for Bush no
matter what. He has already succeeded in using multiple tactics to
suppress Democratic voters, particularly minorities, including
minority voter intimidation in Orlando using state police and the
second round of a felon's purge that was allegedly halted, but not
really stopped by the individual Republican-run counties. As Tom DeLay
has done in the House of Representatives several times in the past
four years, Jeb will use a variety of means to make sure that his
candidate (in the House it was Bush-backed bills) "wins" even if by
one vote. If push comes to shove, there are always the Diebold
electronic voting machines. Jeb has allowed Diebold to keep its
software counting system "proprietary," meaning that the votes in
Florida and wherever electronic voting machines are used (there are
two other pro-Republican companies supplying such machines) for the
counting of our votes has been "privatized." Republican-affiliated
companies are counting the votes of America, and we don't have the
right to know how they are counting them.

And don't forget that it was the CEO of Diebold, which is ironically
located in the Buckeye State, who pledged that he would do everything
possible to carry Ohio for Bush.

We take him at his word.

We trust the Kerry campaign, which has said that it is prepared to
take on all legal challenges, has listened closely to that pledge. It
is a pledge of allegiance to the Bush Cartel, not to America.

The institutional integrity of our democracy is at stake in this election.

Having once gotten away with the theft of the voting process, the Bush
Cartel has had four years to plan its second national robbery, now
operating from inside the government itself. They don't just have Jeb
to do the dirty work for them; they have the entire national
government, including the Department of (In) Justice.

Iraqis should take note that when Bush talks about freedom and
democracy, he is using code words for a rigged election.

That is what democracy means to the Bushes: winning at all costs, the
voters be damned.

What they have done in the pre-election period is to literally make
Democratic votes vanish before they can even be cast. That is what
they did with the infamous felon's list in Florida in 2000. Now, their
system of disenfranchisement is much more multi-pronged and elaborate.

And now, like a cancer upon our Constitution, they have spread the
disease throughout the nation.

If Kerry wins, Karl Rove plans to cry fraud at the polls, and then
shop around for a judge who agrees with him that the Democrats stole
the election.

If you think that is brazen hypocrisy, just remember Rove doesn't give
a damn.

He knows that Nino Scalia will be camped out at the Supreme Court
willing to rescue Bush from defeat, using whatever illogical partisan
argument is necessary to get the dirty deed accomplished.

After all, the Bush Cartel, their corporate cronies, and the
theocratic right own our government, don't they?

If they didn't, they might ironically argue, then how did they come to
power? They weren't elected in 2000; that's for sure.

They run elections by a different set of rules. The voting is just an
inconvenience to them. Their challenge is to come up with foolproof
ways to rig the election.

Let's just hope that their plans have a fatal flaw, such as the will
of the people triumphing over the treachery of the Bush thugs.

It's the only thing that can bring an end to an administration that
has betrayed the American Revolution, our Constitution, and the right
of one-person, one vote.

On September 11th, 2001, more than 3,000 people were horrifically
murdered by terrorists as the "leaders" of this nation ignored
warnings of an impending strike. It was an assault upon the United States.

But it is the wolves in the White House who are preying upon
democracy, and gorging on its carcass.