|
Banned
|
"Fixing" Non-Exsitent Problems, Does it only SEEM Corporate Media Is Promoting It?
Quote:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washing...d-report_x.htm
Report refutes fraud at poll sites
Updated 10/11/2006 12:32 PM ET
TWO SIDES TO THE DEBATE
The debate over voting fraud has raged since the disputed 2000 presidential election:
• Republicans argue that voting by illegal immigrants and others cancels out legal votes. With ID laws, "illegals will realize the gig is up," says Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite, R-Fla.
• Democrats contend that fraud allegations are used to justify restrictions that suppress voting by poor and ethnic minorities. Illegal immigrants "are sneaking across the border for a job, not to vote," says Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif.
By Richard Wolf, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — At a time when many states are instituting new requirements for voter registration and identification, a preliminary report to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission has found little evidence of the type of polling-place fraud those measures seek to stop.....
<i>host: Even with the above reporting pervasive in the last year, the WaPo refused to balance it's own editorial and a George Will column's opinion, with that of uniquely qaulified former civil servants at the DOJ, concerning this important appointment to the FEC:</i>
|
Quote:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/061477.php
12.19.07
Their op-ed, by the way, was rejected by the Washington Post – after the paper ran an <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/06/AR2007120602116.html">editorial</a> urging the Senate to approve von Spakovsky (“a flawed FEC is better than no FEC at all”) and a <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/10/AR2007121001559.html">George Will column</a> that, beyond urging von Spakovsky’s confirmation, attacked the former Department officials who’d opposed it. They respond to Will here as well.
http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/specialg...t_be_confirmed
Von Spakovsky Should Not Be Confirmed
J. Gerald Hebert and Joseph Rich's picture
By J. Gerald Hebert and Joseph Rich | bio
<i>(Because the Washington Post refused to publish this piece rebutting this George Will column, we're publishing it here in full. If you're interested in background on Spakovsky, check out the TPMmuckraker archives. - ag)</i>
Doomsday scenarios of an unregulated 2008 election are being threatened in an attempt to force through the confirmation of a Federal Election Commission (FEC) nominee, Hans von Spakovsky, who is deeply embroiled in the scandals over the politicization of the Department of Justice (DOJ). But, what is forgotten in these scenarios is that it is von Spakovsky’s shameful record of minority vote suppression and partisan abuse of his office while at DOJ that has caused several Democratic Senators to put a hold on confirmation.
We are former career attorneys in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division who spent a combined 58 years there. Since the confirmation hearings concerning the nomination of Hans von Spakovsky to the Federal Election Commission last June, we have vigorously opposed his nomination. While he was at the Civil Rights Division, von Spakovsky played a central role in injecting partisan political factors into decision-making on enforcement matters and the hiring process, and made repeated efforts to intimidate career staff. Moreover, he was the point person for undermining the Civil Rights Division’s mandate to protect voting rights.
The shameful record compiled by von Spakovsky was detailed in two letters (available here and here) sent to the Senate Rules Committee earlier this year by six former voting section staff members who were under von Spakovsky’s supervision while at DOJ. Those letters not only cited grossly political actions by von Spakovsky, they also noted numerous other abuses, including an obvious conflict of interest when von Spakovsky refused to disqualify himself from reviewing the Georgia voter ID law after he published anonymously a law review article arguing in favor of such laws.
There are a variety of ways to resolve the current impasse over the von Spakovsky nomination whose case for confirmation cannot stand on the merits. The threat of an FEC shutdown is greatly exaggerated and certainly no reason to call upon the Senate to ‘hold its nose’ and confirm von Spakovsky as an FEC Commissioner.....
|
Background:
Quote:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/200...printable=true
Poll Position
Is the Justice Department poised to stop voter fraud-or to keep voters from voting?
by Jeffrey Toobin September 20, 2004
...One of the more controversial parts of the new law requires, in most circumstances, voters who have registered by mail to provide their driver’s license or Social Security numbers, and to produce an official photo I.D. at the polls, or a utility bill. Hans A. von Spakovsky, a counsel to Acosta and the main Justice Department interpreter of hava, wrote to Judith A. Armold, an assistant attorney general in Maryland, that the Justice Department believed states must “verify” the Social Security numbers that people submit on their registration forms. For most states, this requirement won’t apply until 2006, but it may be a major hurdle for both the states and newly registered voters. “What D.O.J. is saying is clearly contrary to the statute in our view,” Armold says.
Von Spakovsky, a longtime activist in the voting-integrity cause, has emerged as the Administration’s chief operative on voting rights. Before going to Washington, he was a lawyer in private practice and a Republican appointee to the Fulton County Registration and Election Board, which runs elections in Atlanta. He belonged to the Federalist Society, a prominent organization of conservative lawyers, and had also joined the board of advisers of a lesser-known group called the Voting Integrity Project.
The V.I.P. was founded by Deborah Phillips, a former county official of the Virginia Republican Party, as an organization devoted principally to fighting voting fraud and promoting voter education. In 1997, von Spakovsky wrote an article for the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a conservative research group, that called for an aggressive campaign to “purge” the election rolls of felons. Within months of that article’s publication, the V.I.P. helped put von Spakovsky’s idea into action. Phillips met with the company that designed the process for the removal of alleged felons from the voting rolls in Florida, a process that led, notoriously, to the mistaken disenfranchisement of thousands of voters, most of them Democratic, before the 2000 election. (This year, Florida again tried to purge its voting rolls of felons, but the method was found to be so riddled with errors that it had to be abandoned.) During the thirty-six-day recount in Florida, von Spakovsky worked there as a volunteer for the Bush campaign. After the Inauguration, he was hired as an attorney in the Voting Section and was soon promoted to be counsel to the Assistant Attorney General, in what is known as the “front office” of the Civil Rights Division. In that position, von Spakovsky, who is forty-five years old, has become an important voice in the Voting Section. (Von Spakovsky, citing Justice Department policy, has also declined repeated requests to be interviewed.)
In a recent speech at Georgetown University, von Spakovsky suggested that voting integrity will remain a focus for the Justice Department, and that voter access might best be left to volunteers. “Frankly, the best thing that can happen is when both parties and candidates have observers in every single polling place, wherever the votes are collected and tabulated, because that helps make sure that nothing happens that shouldn’t happen, that the votes are counted properly, and that there is transparency to maintain public confidence in elections,” he said. “Not enough people volunteer to be poll-watchers. They ought to do that so that there are poll-watchers everywhere in the country throughout the whole election process.” The Bush-Cheney campaign has announced plans to place lawyers on call for as many as thirty thousand precincts on Election Day, to monitor for vote fraud. Democratic lawyers also plan to be out in force.
Since Ashcroft took office, traditional enforcement of the Voting Rights Act has declined. The Voting Section has all but stopped filing lawsuits against communities alleged to have engaged in discrimination against minority voters. “D.O.J. is a very bureaucratic institution,” Jon Greenbaum, the former Voting Section lawyer, said, “and it’s hard to get cases filed under any Administration, but we were filing cases in the Clinton years.” As even civil-rights advocates acknowledge, there are fewer vote-discrimination cases to bring than there have been in the past. The Justice Department’s Web site says that “several lawsuits of this nature are filed every year,” but since Bush was sworn in the Voting Section has filed just one contested racial vote-discrimination case, in rural Colorado, which it lost. Justice Department sources say the Voting Section is also considering whether to sue a Mississippi locality that has an African-American majority. Such a lawsuit would be the first use of a key section of the Voting Rights Act to protect the rights of white voters.
The main business of the Voting Section is still passing judgment on legislative redistricting in areas that have a history of discrimination. Under Ashcroft, its actions have consistently favored Republicans—for instance, in Georgia, where the department challenged the Democrats’ gerrymander, and in Mississippi, where the Voting Section stalled the redistricting process for so long that a pro-Republican redistricting plan went into effect by default....
|
Another great and costly to our country, example:
Quote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/in...4a05d8&ei=5070
May 26, 2004
FROM THE EDITORS
The Times and Iraq
Over the last year this newspaper has shone the bright light of hindsight on decisions that led the United States into Iraq. We have examined the failings of American and allied intelligence, especially on the issue of Iraq's weapons and possible Iraqi connections to international terrorists. We have studied the allegations of official gullibility and hype. It is past time we turned the same light on ourselves.
In doing so — reviewing hundreds of articles written during the prelude to war and into the early stages of the occupation — we found an enormous amount of journalism that we are proud of. In most cases, what we reported was an accurate reflection of the state of our knowledge at the time, much of it painstakingly extracted from intelligence agencies that were themselves dependent on sketchy information. And where those articles included incomplete information or pointed in a wrong direction, they were later overtaken by more and stronger information. That is how news coverage normally unfolds.
<h3>But we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged.</h3> Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge.
The problematic articles varied in authorship and subject matter, but many shared a common feature. They depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on "regime change" in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate in recent weeks. (The most prominent of the anti-Saddam campaigners, Ahmad Chalabi, has been named as an occasional source in Times articles since at least 1991, and has introduced reporters to other exiles. He became a favorite of hard-liners within the Bush administration and a paid broker of information from Iraqi exiles, until his payments were cut off last week.) Complicating matters for journalists, the accounts of these exiles were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq. Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news organizations — in particular, this one.
Some critics of our coverage during that time have focused blame on individual reporters. Our examination, however, indicates that the problem was more complicated. Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all.
On Oct. 26 and Nov. 8, 2001, for example, Page 1 articles cited Iraqi defectors who described a secret Iraqi camp where Islamic terrorists were trained and biological weapons produced. These accounts have never been independently verified.
On Dec. 20, 2001, another front-page article began, "An Iraqi defector who described himself as a civil engineer said he personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas and under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as a year ago." Knight Ridder Newspapers reported last week that American officials took that defector — his name is Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri — to Iraq earlier this year to point out the sites where he claimed to have worked, and that the officials failed to find evidence of their use for weapons programs. It is still possible that chemical or biological weapons will be unearthed in Iraq, but in this case it looks as if we, along with the administration, were taken in. And until now we have not reported that to our readers.
On Sept. 8, 2002, the lead article of the paper was headlined "U.S. Says Hussein Intensified Quest for A-Bomb Parts." That report concerned the aluminum tubes that the administration advertised insistently as components for the manufacture of nuclear weapons fuel. The claim came not from defectors but from the best American intelligence sources available at the time. Still, it should have been presented more cautiously. There were hints that the usefulness of the tubes in making nuclear fuel was not a sure thing, but the hints were buried deep, 1,700 words into a 3,600-word article. <h3>Administration officials were allowed to hold forth at length on why this evidence of Iraq's nuclear intentions demanded that Saddam Hussein be dislodged from power:</h3> "The first sign of a `smoking gun,' they argue, may be a mushroom cloud."
Five days later, The Times reporters learned that the tubes were in fact a subject of debate among intelligence agencies. The misgivings appeared deep in an article on Page A13, under a headline that gave no inkling that we were revising our earlier view ("White House Lists Iraq Steps to Build Banned Weapons"). The Times gave voice to skeptics of the tubes on Jan. 9, when the key piece of evidence was challenged by the International Atomic Energy Agency. That challenge was reported on Page A10; it might well have belonged on Page A1.
On April 21, 2003, as American weapons-hunters followed American troops into Iraq, another front-page article declared, "Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert." It began this way: "A scientist who claims to have worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program for more than a decade has told an American military team that Iraq destroyed chemical weapons and biological warfare equipment only days before the war began, members of the team said."
The informant also claimed that Iraq had sent unconventional weapons to Syria and had been cooperating with Al Qaeda — two claims that were then, and remain, highly controversial. But the tone of the article suggested that this Iraqi "scientist" — who in a later article described himself as an official of military intelligence — had provided the justification the Americans had been seeking for the invasion.
The Times never followed up on the veracity of this source or the attempts to verify his claims.
A sample of the coverage, including the articles mentioned here, is online at nytimes.com/critique. Readers will also find there a detailed discussion written for The New York Review of Books last month by Michael Gordon, military affairs correspondent of The Times, about the aluminum tubes report. Responding to the review's critique of Iraq coverage, his statement could serve as a primer on the complexities of such intelligence reporting.
We consider the story of Iraq's weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation, to be unfinished business. And we fully intend to continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight.
|
It is costing all of us. The penchant of the present presidential administration to focus on problems which don't exist or are distorted into importance no supported by facts, is exposed, time and again, yet the major news outlets in the US keep falling for it, or fully supporting it.
Why do so many here believe that corporate media is too liberal. How many times do they have to be exposed sucking the c**k oi their corporate political sympathies and priorities before that belief wanes, at all? |