January 10, 2008. MediaTakeOut.com is hearing some disturbing chatter going around that Hillary Clinton may have rigged the New Hampshire primary vote. According to growing reports on both Democratic and Republican blogs, Hillary’s surprising victory may have been caused by voter fraud.
Of course the mainstream media isn’t trying to touch this story with a 10 foot pole. But we’re not the mainstream media. And besides, while we’re not quite sure we believe it, this is the kind of story that needs to be put out there.
PRIMARY CONCERNS
By Robert C. Koehler
Tribune Media ServicesAs the breathless sports coverage of the presidential primaries bursts around me this morning, I’m doing my best to resist surrendering to the contrived drama about “comeback kids” and the flying shrapnel of numbers and hold onto my troubled skepticism about the electoral process, or at least most of it.
First of all, before we get too enthusiastic about feminist solidarity or wax knowingly about New Hampshire Democrats’ traditional soft-heartedness toward the Clinton family, let’s ponder yet again the possibility of tainted results, which is such an unfun prospect most of the media can’t bear to remember that all the problems we’ve had with electronic voting machines — and Diebold machines in particular, which dominate New Hampshire polling places — remain unsolved.
Did the Hillary campaign really defy the pollsters? She had been trailing Barack Obama by 13 percentage points, 42 to 29, in a recent Zogby poll, as election watchdog Brad Friedman pointed out. And the weekend’s “rapturous packed rallies for Mr. Obama,” as the New York Times put it, “suggested Mrs. Clinton was in dire shape.”
So when she emerged from the Tuesday primary with an 8,000-vote and 3-percentage-point victory over Obama, perhaps — considering the notorious unreliability, not to mention hackability, of Diebold machines — the media might have hoisted a few red flags in the coverage, rather than immediately chalk the results up to Clinton’s tears and voter unpredictability. (Oh, if only more reporters considered red flags patriotic.)
The fact is, whatever actually happened in New Hampshire voting booths on Tuesday, our elections are horrifically insecure. For instance, Bev Harris, of the highly respected voting watchdog organization Black Box Voting, recently wrote that the Diebold 1.94w optical scan machines used in some 55 percent of New Hampshire precincts (representing more than 80 percent of the state’s voters) are “the exact same make, model and version hacked in the Black Box Voting project in Leon County (Florida)” a few years ago. They haven’t been upgraded; the security problems haven’t been fixed.
National, or at least media, denial about this situation doesn’t say much for the strength of our democracy.
And there’s more. The political blog Prescue showed the difference between hand counted and machine counted votes.
By Percentage:
Method Hillary Clinton Barack Obama
Diebold Machines 53.23% 46.77%
Hand Count 47.47% 52.53%By Votes
Method Hillary Clinton Barack Obama
Diebold Machines 82860 72807
Hand Count 18898 20912By Number of Municipalities Won
Method Hillary Clinton Barack Obama
Diebold Machines 54 33
Hand Count 43 77About 81% of the votes will be “counted” by the Diebold machines.
CONSPIRACY?? New Reports Suggest That Hillary May Have Actually LOST The New Hampshire Primary!!!! – MediaTakeOut.com\
January 10, 2008 · Leave a Comment
Categories: GENERAL
Will subprime spark an arson boom? – Jan. 10, 2008
January 10, 2008 · Leave a Comment
Will foreclosures spark an arson boom?
As homeowners get more desperate, the insurance industry is bracing for an increase in arson.
By Jon Birger, senior writerNEW YORK (Fortune) — Faced with foreclosure on her Russellville, Indiana home, Christina Snyder allegedly concocted the kind of plan that now has insurance executives on edge.
According to the county prosecutor, the 31-year-old Snyder allegedly offered to pay a neighbor $5,000 to help her burn down her house and make it look like a botched rape attempt – all in order to claim $80,000 in insurance money. Snyder wanted the neighbor to bind her hands in duct tape, write “whore” on her shirt, and then help her escape once the blaze was set, the prosecutor says. The neighbor demurred, instead reporting Snyder to police.
With the national foreclosure rate zooming and the real estate market in a two-year funk, the insurance industry fears more homeowners will see arson as a way out of their financial woes. A recent report by the industry-funded Coalition Against Insurance Fraud notes that with “untold thousands of homeowners struggling with ballooning subprime mortgage payments, fraud fighters are watching closely for a spike in arsons by desperate homeowners who can no longer afford their home payments.”
History indicates such a spike is coming. “When the economy is down, we see an increase in fraud,” says Dennis Schulkins, a claim consultant in State Farm’s Special Investigative Unit.
It may already be happening. Allstate (ALL, Fortune 500) spokesman Mike Siemienas says his company has seen an increase nationally in arsons among homes in foreclosure. In California, the state¹s insurance division reports that the number of questionable residential fires in 2007 increased 76 percent over 2006.
National arson statistics for 2007 aren’t yet available, but Federal Bureau of Investigation crime data shows there was a significant uptick – 4 percent – in suburban arson in 2006, when the real estate downtown began to take hold. The arson increase in 2006 marked a change from the prior three years when suburban arson fell 3 percent, 5 percent and 6 percent, respectively. Says Dennis Jay, the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud’s executive director, “It’s a growing problem.” To top of page
Categories: GENERAL
City Council Passes Bill for Recycling of Plastic Bags – New York Times
January 10, 2008 · Leave a Comment
City Council Passes Bill for Recycling of Plastic Bags
By ANNE BARNARD
Published: January 10, 2008The stash under the sink grows inexorably: bags from Duane Reade and D’Agostino, bags from Home Depot and the health food store. Wadded up, stuffed one inside the other, they explode out of the cabinet as you wonder how you’ll ever get around to using all of them.
If you’re one of the many New Yorkers who worry about throwing away plastic bags but seem only to acquire more and more, then help is on the way.
The City Council on Wednesday overwhelmingly passed a bill requiring large stores and retail chains to collect and recycle plastic bags they give to shoppers. New York is by far the largest American city to enact so broad a measure to limit the environmental impact of the bags. Altogether, each year the country is estimated to use 86 billion bags, which end up blowing down city streets, or tangled in the stomachs of whales and sea turtles, or buried in landfills where, environmental organizations say, they persist for as long as 1,000 years.
Source: City Council Passes Bill for Recycling of Plastic Bags – New York Times.
Ron Paul Votes Not Counted In New Hampshire District
January 10, 2008 · Leave a Comment
| Ron Paul Votes Not Counted In New Hampshire District Vote fraud confirmed, Clinton reversed mammoth pre-polling deficit to beat Obama, Diebold machines aid Giuliani, Romney |
RELATED: New Hampshire District Admits Ron Paul Vote Skew
Major allegations of vote fraud in New Hampshire are circulating after Hillary Clinton reversed a mammoth pre-polling deficit to defeat Barack Obama with the aid of Diebold electronic voting machines, while confirmed votes for Ron Paul in the Sutton district were not even counted.
According to a voter in Sutton, New Hampshire, three of her family members voted for Ron Paul, yet when she checked the voting map on the Politico website, the total votes for Ron Paul were zero.
With 100% of precincts now reporting, the map still says zero votes for Ron Paul as you can see below.
(Article continues below)
It’s not as if Sutton had a handful of voters like some other districts – a total of 386 people voted yet we are led to believe that not one voted for Ron Paul? Judging by the Iowa results, around 10% of residents would be expected to vote for the Congressman, returning a total of around 38 votes in this district. Let’s be ultra-conservative and say just 5% support Paul – he’d still get 19 votes – but he got absolutely none whatsoever. Is there something wrong with this picture?
Greenville also tallied 144 votes yet not one for Congressman Paul.
Anyone else in Sutton who voted for Ron Paul needs to go public immediately with the charge of vote fraud and make it known that they were cheated out of their right to vote.
Diebold voting machines also did Congressman Paul no favors last night – compared to hand counted ballots Giuliani gained just short of 0.5% from electronic voting whereas Paul lost over 2%, which was the difference between finishing 4th and 5th, as this graph documents.
Mitt Romney profited the most from the Diebold swing, he received 7% more votes compared to hand counted ballots.
In the Democratic race the Diebold voting machines clearly swung the primary in Hillary Clinton’s favor at the expense of Barack Obama, who had a commanding lead over the New York Senator going into the contest.
Zogby polling numbers had Obama leading Clinton by a whopping 42/29 per cent, yet Clinton eventually took the primary by three per cent.
“If I was Barack Obama, I’d certainly not have conceded this election this quickly,” writes The Brad Blog. “I’m not quite sure what he was thinking. And as far as offering an indication of whether he understands how these systems work, and the necessity of making sure that votes are counted, and counted accurately, it does not offer a great deal of confidence at this hour.”
“While I have no evidence at this time — let me repeat, no evidence at this time — of chicanery, what we do know is that chicanery, with this particular voting system, is not particularly difficult. Particularly when one private company — and a less-than-respectable one at that, as I detailed in the previous post — runs the entire process.”
Categories: GENERAL
