"Household Names" by Stereolab (Fan Made and better than a lot of professional vids)

"The End" by the New Doors (Impressive vocals here...)

Eclectic Playlist

June 5 through June 8 Posts

June 8

New one from Warren Ellis which reflects our times.

June 6

From Tom Moody's underrated weblog. Still hoping he'll do a music video for that so so band Curved Air. I sense an Andy Warhol of gif animation potential... Tom could be the Andy Warhol of gif animation videos.

Rob Newman's History of Oil (tip of the hat to American Samizdat)

June 5

I am permalinking Mark Crispin Miller.

Best counter to the Rolling Stone piece: from known stolen election debunker "Man Joo of the Faaar East!"

However, he is quickly counter destroyed, eviscerated, digested and excreted by Mark Crispin Miller and Bob Fitrakis.

Look: the reason why I believe the stolen election theory is that the writers are badasses. These guys aren't lightweights. They don't tie their shoes without exhaustive airtight sourcing. You give me Greg Palast, Bob Fitrakis and Mark Crispin Miller and I'll give you the best newspaper in the United States. None of these guys work for the American corporate media which tells you everything that is wrong with the American corporate media.

"Long as You're Living" Claudia Acuna

"Girl From Ipanema" Astrud Gilberto

Transhumanist Beat Playlist One

"Technology" by Wax Poetic Feat: Norah Jones

"Purple Elephants' Wax Poetic Feat. Norah Jones

"Doing My Thing" by Spartha Swa

How To Steal an Election

"Catch the Sun" The Doves

Tuck Andress "Europa"

George Carlin on Religion

Why Voter Fraud Hasn't Got More Traction

June 2

By the way, one reason the voter fraud story hasn't gotten better traction is that the Big Three of Left Blogity Blog circles--Kos, Atrios and Calpundit--simply haven't acknowledged the story. In fact, Kos and Chris Bowers (MYDD) are hostile to the issue and both Atrios and Calpundit have ignored the story as they whistle through the graveyard. (At the time I write this they have. 3 pm eastern time.)

They keep scratchin' their heads wonderin' why the techniques used to steal two presidential elections would get people so upset. (Read the comments section.) I responded at MYDD. I would have responded at Kos but I got banned there because of my "What Hesh Said" post.

You're Way Off Here on this point.. (none / 0)

Well, the reason this issue rockets to the top at DKOS is that if the vote is compromised then nothing else that we're working on makes much sense! Plus, the Republicans act like squirrely vote stealers! Of course its important. Actually, try to do something more complicated in Philly: audit the vote. Go ahead I dares you. I double dares you. You actually probably can't be sure that you won in any district that used a voting machine that doesn't leave a trail.

By the way, it wasn't just some crazy statistician that smelled a rat with the exit polls (smaller discrepancies turned over the Ukraine vote by the way) it was a whole team of stat guys, plus Kathy Dopp, plus four books, plus America Votes, plus Greg Palast's new book...this stuff is well researched and generally unrebuted by the right...! Smell a rat why doncha...


by pshropshire on Fri Jun 02, 2006 at 06:04:27 AM EST


Re: Demand Election Reform, But Only If You Mean I (none / 0)


By the way, I don't think becoming a committeeman means too much if the GOP can "disappear" about 300000 thousand votes like they did in Ohio. And: please rebut that charge if you will. No name calling. No insults about us weak minded people who can't see through that hack Greg Pallast...probably one of the greatest investigative reporters of our time, who of course works for the BBC.

I think the answer, quite frankly, lies outside of nice DLC political moves. We need to do what the masses did when they tried to depose Chavez, or what the Paris kids did when they tried to turn their employment status at will or what thousands of latin American immigrants did when they were threatened with being turned into felons...Massive demostratations. Worker's strikes. And they need to be big...of course, they can't be big if we insist that there's not a problem with mostly black people having their vote disenfranchised....

The huge story of the day is that a national media publication finally breaks the voting fraud story. The publication is Rolling Stone and the writer is Robert Kennedy and its well documented.

Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush -- and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in ''tinfoil hats,'' while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ''conspiracy theories,''(1) and The New York Times declared that ''there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.''(2)

But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots -- or received them too late to vote(4) -- after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)

The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.(11)

Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. ''We didn't have one election for president in 2004,'' says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. ''We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.''

But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn't even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)

''It was terrible,'' says Sen. Christopher Dodd, who helped craft reforms in 2002 that were supposed to prevent such electoral abuses. ''People waiting in line for twelve hours to cast their ballots, people not being allowed to vote because they were in the wrong precinct -- it was an outrage. In Ohio, you had a secretary of state who was determined to guarantee a Republican outcome. I'm terribly disheartened.''

Indeed, the extent of the GOP's effort to rig the vote shocked even the most experienced observers of American elections. ''Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,'' Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me. ''You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb.''

Read the whole thing as they say.

Toth Passes Away (may 25- 30)

May 30

I actually think Come On Let's Go is Broadcast's best tune. And someone went out and made a vid for Black Cat, off of their new album. "Curiouser and curiouser.." ..not at all related to Kool Thing.

May 29

Legendary comics artist Alex Toth passed away. Complete info here.

And in honor of Memorial Day: This Link. Related: Our drugged up troops. Here's an excerpt:

Former biology undergraduate Rorla Monere began taking sleeping pills to dull the pain and fear after witnessing the kidnapping of a close friend who was thrown into a car and later raped; a suicide car bomb left another of Monere’s close friends in a wheelchair. Afraid to go out, Monere stays at home, terrified that someone will storm the house.

“The pills don’t have any effect anymore,” she told NPR’s “Morning Edition,” “because I take so many of them. I just want my day to finish. I spend it alone. … My wish is to die, to be free and rest. Better than this slaughter.”

Some U.S. soldiers know how she feels. In a May 2 letter to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) wrote, “Last year’s suicide rate was the highest since 1993. Eighty-three Army soldiers on active duty committed suicide, 25 while deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan—a 24 percent increase over the prior year. I find it simply astonishing that the sheer magnitude of the mental health crisis facing our Armed Forces does not compel you to action.”

Go USA.

May 25

From Tom Moody's underrated weblog... Yes you will look into the spinning spinning animation and check out his site...

Greg Palast's "Armed Madhouse"

More audio excerpts from Greg Palast's new and very depressing book. One has Ed Asner reading from the film Network and the other is by Brad (from Bradblog).

Another stunning tune called "Airborne" by Jaga Jazzist. Here's a documentary about them if you're interested. Just a great band that I've never seen on any of my music channels.

Trail of Dead's "Mistakes and Regrets"