I admit that I was already suspicious when the story of John Mark Karr being extradited from Bangkok for the murder of Jon Benet Ramsey broke just after a federal judge says the Bush administration is breaking the law with the warrantless wiretapping program and stole the news cycle. [Here's a transcript of what CNN was reporting that day.]

So yesterday (July 9th) we had some bad Democrats voting with Republicans to make the same program(s) perfectly legal, which of course SHOULD put that into the headlines.

Surprise - Breaking News in the Jon Benet case!

So I started poking around about Mary Lacy (formerly Keenan) - the Colorado District Attorney who brought us both of these stories with such interesting timing.  I haven't found a smoking gun yet - and it's possible that this is just coincidental - but follow me below for some interesting ties to Mary Lacy.

The 60 Minutes piece on Don Siegelman just aired and it is sure to make Rove and the Bush criminal enterprise nervous.  It focused on the polititization of the Justice Department.  It didn't mention the questionable tactics of the election (the stealing of it by the Republican-only electoral board).  It didn't mention the gag order preventing from talking with the media. And it didn't mention that the story freaked out CBS's Board of Directors so much that they wanted to pull the story.

A Kucinch press release via BradBlog:

Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, the most outspoken advocate in the Presidential field and in Congress for election integrity, paper-ballot elections, and campaign finance reform, has sent a letter to the New Hampshire Secretary of State asking for a recount of Tuesday’s election because of "unexplained disparities between hand-counted ballots and machine-counted ballots."

I am considering a project to raise money for progressives in the general election, and I want to make sure that I'm not breaking any FEC laws in the process.

I would like to put together a compilation CD of songs about this criminal administration and offer the MP3s for free after a user donates on an Act Blue page.

Does anyone know if there are any legal issues I need to worry about with this plan?  I wasn't sure if offering the songs for free is some type of in-kind donation to the candidates or anything.  Thanks for your advice.

Politico is reporting that the Democratic leadership in the house have postponed for "several weeks" the vote on contempt citations for Josh Bolten and Harriet Miers.

But the slowdown, approved by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her top lieutenants, is also stirring objections among Democrats.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) said he is uncomfortable with the delay and worries the House will be seen as toothless unless it moves quickly to hold top officials in contempt for failing to provide documents and testimony in congressional probes.

WikiScanner got quite a bit of press shortly after it's launch.  However, one of the features - the ability to look up changes by page title - was not made available right away.  This feature is still disabled on the page, but you can now use this feature by putting the name of the page you want to look up in this URL:

http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/...

For example, this URL shows the changes to the Sibel Edmonds page:

http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/...

I received a mailing from a candidate for State Senator in Illinois, Matt Murphy.  The solicitation I received came with a pamphlet that on the front page says, "HELP STOP Unwanted Telephone and Mail Solicitations."  The pamphlet starts with a Q&A with such questions as, "How can I end unwanted telemarketing calls?"  The solution according to the propaganda is to sign up with the "Mail Preference Service," which is described as "another consumer service sponsored by The Direct Marketing Association."  Well, who is this Direct Marketing Assocication and how are they trying to take the next election?  That and more below the fold.

Warning: The headline is purely speculation.  I have no proof of this whatsoever.

That being said, I just saw this article on Huffington Post that states:

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton ordered the reporters to cooperate with Steven J. Hatfill, who accused the Justice Department and FBI of violating the federal Privacy Act by giving the media information about the FBI's investigation of him.

The reporters named in the opinion are Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman of Newsweek, Allan Lengel of The Washington Post, Toni Locy, formerly of USA Today, and James Stewart, formerly of CBS News.

That made we wonder if it might be that Rove is about to be named as the leaker.  More below the fold.

I'm not exactly sure what possesses me to buy the Trib.  I grew up in the Northwest suburbs of Chicago, so like the Cubs, the Tribune is standard fare in this area.  I've known for a while that they've been biased toward the conservatives, but habits are hard to break.  But I will be breaking this habit and buying the Sun-Times from now on.


The push over the cliff for me was today's issue which contained two headlines that articulate their bias and disregard for the facts.


Here's the main headline on today's front page:

Domestic wiretaps ruled OK

It was diaried earlier today by Kagro X that the appellate court threw out the ACLU case regarding the illegal wiretapping.  I also saw on Raw Story (it's not on the site now) that the ACLU was considering their options and might appeal to the Supreme Court.


How is it decided if SCOTUS is going to take the case?  Is that up to Chief Justice Roberts alone, or can any of the members request that the case be taken on?


Sorry for the short diary, but this is a very important case and I hate to see it disappear from the front page so quickly (and I don't know the answer to my question).

I just went to Raw Story and saw the sensational headline, "Wife of Michael Moore kidnapped" followed by:

Filmamaker's wife, along with 11 others, abducted by Ethiopian rebels.

However, if they actually READ the story, they'd find this:

One of those kidnapped was Rossanna Moore, the Italian-born wife of Michael Moore, director of the British Council in Ethiopia, according to a diplomat who also spoke on condition of anonymity.</ </p>

Wrong guy, idiots!

Since Raw doesn't deserve to profit from the traffic to their site from this wreckless sensationalism, here's a link to the article they linked to on ABC News.

Black Box Voting is reporting that Victoria Lovegren, of election reform organization Ohio Vigilance, has been informed that she may be charged tomorrow by the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections for "obstruction of business" for requesting that the county report the results of Tuesday's election on a precint by precint basis.

Cuyahoga County is filing criminal charges against me because I asked some volunteers for the Vote Count Protection Project to call some of the Election Day Technicians, and ask them if they would be willing to write down some of the Voting Unit election results on a data-collection form, to used for vote-count verification purposes.

We were doing this because Blackwell's directive on 11/1 said that we could not add any more "Observers" to the list of observers, so we could not get "inside access."

We were doing this because Cuyahoga County was NOT going to post results for the public to see.

Black Box Voting is reporting a newly discovered security venerability with Sequoia voting machines that allows you to vote as many times as you like simply by pressing a button!

Complete instructions below!

UPDATE: Apparently I need to make it clear that I (we) don't condone stealing elections. I thought that went without saying, but apparently not. I think it's important that people know how insecure these machines are. That's all.

Washington Post is reporting that Abramoff's buddy former General Services Administration and the White House budget office tool, David Safavan has been sentenced to 18 months in prison.  

David Safavian, the former chief of staff for the General Services Administration, was sentenced on obstruction and concealment charges for lying to investigators about his relationship with Abramoff.

Ouch - that's gotta hurt the GOP coming out this close to the election!

Link

Brad Blog had a story yesterday that I hadn't seen diaried on Daily Kos, and I think it deserves some attention.

When American soldiers vote in the upcoming election, they will be using a brand new, untested internet voting system.

IVAS was announced to the public only last month (September), and has been designed and built only over the last several months, an extremely short time for a system of this complexity and importance. The current system has never been used in a public election before (not even in a primary), and has not been subject to any publicly available external security examination. The technical specifications have not been made publicly available.

Washington Post is reporting (buried on their site) that three computer disks containing the source code for Diebold electronic voting machines were delivered anonymously to Cheryl C. Kagan, a former Maryland legislator.

The disks delivered to Kagan's office bear labels indicating that they hold "source code" -- the instructions that constitute the core of a software program -- for Diebold's Ballot Station and Global Election Management System (GEMS) programs. The former guides the operation of the company's touch-screen voting machines; the latter is in part a tabulation program used to tally votes after an election.

Brad Blog is reporting that Robert Kennedy Jr. has filed the first of his anticipated lawsuits against voting machine companies.

During the interview, he gave several new details on the federal fraud suits now being filed, which include several whistleblower plaintiffs whose stories were originally reported here at The BRAD BLOG, as mentioned last week in a quick item here, with some fresh details of our own. Pap reported last night that the "dream team of lawyers" they've assembled to take on these evil, irresponsible, anti-American companies includes a bunch of those who took on the tobacco companies in a successful quarter billion dollar suit -- so they're not likely easily intimidated, we'd think.

More below.

Black Box Voting today released a supplemental report on their study of Diebold touch-screen election machines, and it describes several troubling discoveries.

Perhaps most troubling is another backdoor, which is triggered simply by having a file with a certain name on the memory card:

The start-up program for the ballot station is looking for the existence of [redacted] on the memory card. The file itself can be empty, because the found file, based on the name alone, is a trigger for alternative execution of a general purpose file management utility program instead of the ballot station, therefore enabling access to Operating System. This back door has also been documented in [redacted]:

Of course once you have access to the operating system directly, you can modify files at will (e.g. votes).

More below.