Greg Palast offers a sobering dose of reality about this election:
It's November 5 and the nation is in shock. Media blame it on the "Bradley effect": Americans supposedly turned into Klansmen inside the voting booth, and Barack Obama turned up with 6 million votes less than calculated from the exit polls. Florida came in for McCain and so did Indiana. Colorado, despite the Democrats' Rocky Mountain high after the Denver convention, stayed surprisingly Red. New Mexico, a state where Anglos are a minority, went McCain by 300 votes, as did Virginia.
Investigative journalist Greg Palast and voting rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have partnered up to create the "Steal Back Your Vote!" guide. In an interview with Truthout, Palast describes the ways votes are being stolen ahead of the 2008 election and gives suggestions on how Americans can ensure that their vote gets counted.
Before taking questions, Barack reminded the crowd of the speech Bobby Kennedy gave in Indianapolis, right after the death of Martin Luther King, nearly forty years ago...
Some of you were alive when this speech was given... He was in a crowd mostly of African Americans. And he delivered the news that Dr. King had been shot and killed. And he said, at that moment of anguish, he said, we've got a choice... in taking the rage and bitterness and disappointment and letting it fester and dividing us further, so that we no longer see each other as Americans, but we see each other as separate and apart and at odds with each other. Or we can take a different path that says we have different stories, but we have common dreams and common hopes. And we can decide to walk down this road together. And remake America once again. And, you know, I think about those words often, especially in the last several weeks - because this campaign started on the basis that we are one America. As I said in my speech at the convention in 2004, there is no black America, or white America, or Asian America, or Latino America. There is the United States of America.
But I noticed over the last several weeks that the forces of division have started to raise their ugly heads again. And I’m not here to cast blame or point fingers because everybody, you know, senses that there's been this shift...
We’ve got a lot of pent-up anger and bitterness and misunderstanding. But what I continue to believe in is that this country wants to move beyond these kinds of divisions. That this country wants something different. And so –
The crowd interrupted the speech and began to chant: "Yes we can! Yes we can!" Barack continued:
I just want to say to everybody here that as somebody who was born into a diverse family, as somebody who has little pieces of America all in me, I will not allow us to lose this moment, where we cannot forget about our past and not ignore the very real forces of racial inequality and gender inequality and the other things that divide us.
We have to come together. That’s what this campaign is about. That’s why you are here. That’s why we're going to win this election. That’s how we're going to change the country.
"Rolling Stone Endorses Obama: The tides of history are rising higher and faster these days. Read them right and ride them, or be crushed. And then along comes Barack Obama, with the kinds of gifts that appear in politics but once every few generations. There is a sense of dignity, even majesty, about him, and underneath that ease lies a resolute discipline. It's not just that he is eloquent — with that ability to speak both to you and to speak for you — it's that he has a quality of thinking and intellectual and emotional honesty that is extraordinary...."
NEW YORK — Voting rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called for prison time for the new US Attorney for Arkansas, Timothy Griffin and investigation of Griffin’s former boss, Karl Rove, chief political advisor to President Bush.
“Timothy Griffin,” said Kennedy,”who is the new US attorney in Arkansas, was actually the mastermind behind the voter fraud efforts by the Bush Administration to disenfranchise over a million voters through ‘caging’ techniques - which are illegal.”
[Hear Kennedy on Griffin, Rove and ‘caging lists’ below or here]
Kennedy based his demand on the revelations by BBC reporter Greg Palast in the new edition of his book, “Armed Madhouse.” On one page of the book, Palast reproduces a copy of a confidential Bush-Cheney campaign email, dated August 26, 2004, in which Griffin directs Republican operatives to use the ‘caging’ lists.
This is one of the emails subpoenaed by Congress but supposedly “lost” by Rove’s office. Palast obtained 500 of these, fifty with ‘caging’ lists attached.
‘Caging’ lists are “absolutely illegal” under the Voting Rights Act, noted Kennedy on his Air America program, Ring of Fire. The 1965 law makes it a felony crime to challenge voters when race is a factor in the targeting. African-American voters comprised the bulk of the 70,000 voters ‘caged’ in a single state, Florida.
Palast wrote in his book, “Here’s how the scheme worked. The Bush campaign mailed out letters,” particularly targeting African-American soldiers sent overseas. When the letters sent to the home addresses of the soldiers came back “undeliverable” because the servicemen were in Baghdad or elsewhere, the Republican Party would, “challenge the voter’s registration and thereby prevent their absentee ballots being counted.”
The Republicans successfully challenged “at least one million” votes of minority voters in the 2004 election.
Kennedy, a voting rights attorney, fumed, “What he [Griffin] did was absolutely illegal and he should be in jail. Instead [Griffin] was rewarded with the US Attorney’s office.”
“They [Griffin, Rove and their confederates at the RNC] knew it was illegal.”
Kennedy has called on the Senate and House Judiciary Committees to expand their investigations of the firing of US Attorneys to include a probe of their replacements, especially Griffin, as well as Rove’s knowledge of the caging operation.
In preparation for just such an investigation, Kyle Sampson, former aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, wrote a confidential email, dated December 19, 2006 outlining a strategy to stall Congress’ from questioning the propriety of the Griffin appointment. “We should gum this to death,” wrote Sampson, “Ask the senators to give Tim a chance . . . then we can tell them we’ll look for other candidates, ask them for recommendations, evaluate the recommendations, interview their candidates, and otherwise run out the clock. All of this should be done in ‘good faith,’ of course.”
Sampson has since resigned.
Palast said, “Just as Rove is known as ‘Bush’s brain,’ Griffin is ‘Rove’s Brain.’ I’m flattered by his ‘review.’”
Palast first reported on the caging list operation for BBC Television’s premier current affairs show, Newsnight, in 2004. In a February 7, 2007 email obtained by subpoena from Rove’s office, Griffin boasted that, “No [US] national media picked up” the BBC story. Griffin attached an excerpt of Armed Madhouse.
Griffin sent his remarks to Monica Goodling, Senior Counsel to Attorney General Gonzales, who has since resigned and invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than answer Congressional questions.
Griffin and Rove refused several requests from Palast and BBC to respond to charges of illegal, racial ‘caging’ of voters. However, a Republican spokeswoman, while admitting the lists could be used to challenge soldiers’ votes, said that was ‘not the purpose’ for gathering the lists.
********** Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, ARMED MADHOUSE: From Baghdad to New Orleans — Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House GONE WILD.
To see Palast’s reports for BBC, obtain more information on Armed Madhouse or the prosecutor firing scandal, or to request an interview with Palast, go to www.GregPalast.com.
Hear Kennedy on Griffin, Rove and on Palast’s book — “a masterpiece,” says RFK: download this recent segment of “Ring of Fire” at www.GregPalast.com. Palast will return to speak with Kennedy and his Air America co-host, attorney Mike Papantonio, this weekend. Check Air America listings.
