The country is ready to choose a person who best represents us as our president. We watch debates, take part in opinion polls, we write checks, and litter our yards with signs telling the whole world that we are involved. There are many people who base their whole lives on politics. Some let it mingle in their religion, others use it for job opportunities and others use their politics to demonstrate their moral code. These same people let their politics divide a united republic, creating a silent war where scandal after scandal is reported which in turn creates chaos and anger, argument, and frivolous witch hunts meant to create a poor image of our chosen leaders. In Washington, it seems that every age old cliché applies from the pot calling the kettle black to people in glass houses should not throw stones and whether you be Democrat or Republican, you still are at fault for allowing the evil to seep in and devour our struggling democracy, little by little. After the promises are made and the honey moon is over, its always business as usual. Its still the same old divide and conquer, bully and threaten, provide for the communal paranoia and make more laws when the frightened sheep demand them. It is a popularity contest where we choose a new face who will allegedly bring integrity back to country that is embarrassed by its current President. So it goes, as the Who song says, Meet the New boss, same as the old Boss.Nothing seems to change and there are some people with enough logic to realize it is time for soul searching. It is time to speak the truth. It is time to say enough. If you must vote, take a look at what you are voting for. It has always been the mistake of Americans to vote for the lesser of two evils. If you are one of those who have settled for LESS and are apathetic to EVIL then you deserve what you ask for. Taxation, healthcare, and foreign policy are the three trigger phrases that have been dug up every election and you fall for it each time! What about poverty, tyranny, abuse, torture, drug wars, overcrowded prisons, broken homes, equality, future innovations, taking away our jobs and internet law? Where are the candidates speaking to these issues? Where are the political heroes who can slay dragons that are lurking to devour our Constitution? The democratic process is on its last legs. It is an easy call, and we will all be white knuckling the process on November 8th, because no matter what happens, nearly 50 percent of the population is going to hate the outcome of this election and of course, if the other candidate doesnt win, they will scream election fraud. We can safely say that practically nobody in the country today is acting on blind faith with regard to the election process and the slim minority that are, do not know what is in store as they still cling on to the ideals that they learned in grade school about free elections and the democratic process. The conspiracy known as voter fraud is a running theme now that the suggestion has once again crept into what I call the theater for ugly people. According to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, more than half of American voters believe the system US political parties use to pick their candidates for the White House is rigged and more than two-thirds of the American public want to see this process changed and theyre not wrong in feeling this way. A joint study from Harvard University and the University of Sydney found that the United States ranked last in electoral integrity among all established Western democracies. This was a report from two years ago. The straw man argument is that there is an attempt underway for Russia to take control of our election process and throw the election. It is one of the biggest conspiracy red herrings to emerge in order to distract and coerce us into believing that foreign interests are undermining our election when the malfeasance and manipulation is happening at home. Just a few days before the second presidential debate, the United States government officially accused Russia of a hacking campaign that allegedly was interfering with our election. This caught the attention of the Department of Homeland Security. They issued a joint statement with the Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper that said, the recent hacked email disclosures, are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, only Russias senior-most officials could have authorized these activities. The statement issued no specifics as to who was doing the hacking; there were no technical details only a statement that further fomented the notion of a major Kremlin Conspiracy against Hillary Clinton. The statement declaratively stated that only Democratic servers were hacked, which we can only surmise means that Russia is all cozy with Donald Trump and wants to hand the election to him. - - - Updated - - - Despite the certainty with which the US government has accused Russia of trying to influence the election by hacking into secured email servers, the FBI maintains there is no evidence the Russians or anyone else accessed Clinton unsecured, unencrypted email server laden with actual classified materials. Last month, an opinion editorial piece ran in the Washington Post that once again was spinning the Russian Conspiracy but with a different twist – Anne Applebaum speculated in her piece that the Russians were rigging the election in Hillary Clinton’s favor in order to frame her: “On or before Election Day, Russian hackers will seek to break into the US voting system. The Russians attempt to throw the election. They might try to get Trump elected. Alternatively – and this would, of course, be even more devastating – they might try to rig the election for Clinton, perhaps leaving a trail of evidence designed to connect the rigging operation to Clinton’s campaign. Once revealed, the result will be media hysteria, hearings, legal challenges, mass rallies, a constitutional crisis – followed by confusion, chaos and an undermining of the office of the presidency. Trump might emerge from the process as president after all. He will then go on, as promised at so many rallies, to ‘lock her up,’ and of course to open a broad relation with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the only foreign leader he seems to truly admire.” When you realize that the suggestion of Russian hacking our election sounds more like a piece of Hollywood fiction, and bad fiction at that, you begin to understand just how desperate the élite can be in hiding the fact that the election is rigged – but it can be blamed on a favorite villain, Russia. Would you believe that Russia wants to risk Cyberwar and likely an even bigger confrontation with the United States to thwart the election process? We don’t know if we believe it, but the current administration wants you to believe it, and we can speculate the reason they do is because yes, there is fraudulent activity going and it is most certainly an inside job. The replacement of news with propaganda is distorting very important issues and leading people in the wrong direction. The biggest casualty in a war such as this is truth, and so it is the act of disinformation that throws in a little bit of truth and makes obfuscation the rule rather than the exception. Needless to say, the inside job of fraudulent activity in this election is being conducted by minions in both parties. When Donald Trump claimed, “the election’s going to be rigged,” the media ate it up and then through the wet and mildewy conspiracy towel at Trump saying he now was spinning conspiracy theory. Well, Trump is speaking about a problem that has plagued our election process for an estimated 25 years. Last summer, gonzo journalist Greg Palast wrote an expose for Rolling Stone, saying there has been an effort to disenfranchise certain voters and remove them from voting lists which makes the election data a sham. Palast says there is a tool that is used to allegedly eliminate people from voting twice, but it is not accurate and eliminates voters with similar names to convicted felons and most of the time, African Americans are eliminated from voting. Election officials in more than two dozen states have compiled lists of citizens whom they allege could be registered in more than one state, thus, potentially able to cast multiple ballots – and eligible to be purged from the voter rolls. The data is processed through a system called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program and according to Palast’s article in Rolling Stone, the Crosscheck list disproportionately threatens solid Democratic constituencies: young, black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters – with some of the biggest possible purges underway in Ohio and North Carolina, two crucial swing states with tight Senate races. Palast has also made a movie about his investigation called “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.” The film raises the question, “is the spin of voter fraud a fraud in order to create methods of eliminating people from voting?” It appears to be a useful tool in the Trump camp to revoke voting rights by claiming to eliminate those who vote twice, and in the case of the Clinton camp it’s a tool to implicate Russia in a major conspiracy that would be reason to court a war with them if she is elected. Those in the election business are using the potential of fraud as a weapon of mass hysteria. Palast appears to be saying that the response to the potential is greatly out of proportion with the likelihood of it happening and so people suffer in the process and the election is flawed and fraudulent by the actions taken by those putting on the show. - - - Updated - - - It is analogous to the idea that maniacs are out there poisoning Halloween candy and handing it out randomly to kids. The fact is that there was a report of a murder of an eight-year-old child named Timothy Marc O’Bryan at the hands of his father, Ronald Clark O’Bryan, in Houston, Texas who gave his child a cyanide laced pixie stick on Halloween and that case has generated a hysteria, as if this happens all the time. The potential of this happening is what we fear, and so many neighborhoods have shunned trick or treating, schools hold carnivals where they give safe treats, and airports have volunteered the x-ray machines to investigate candy. These incidents are few and far between, and the question is whether or not the threat of poisoned candy is enough to ruin for everyone. It may be a flawed analogy, but what the film shows is that voter fraud has always been suspected and it has happened in the past – and now the tools that are used to protect us from it are creating an atmosphere of negligence and a purging of votes. When voting precincts no longer use written ballots, when checks and balance are not used at the ballot places to confirm identity, when vote registrations are accepted by mail without proper confirmation of someone’s citizenship other than a signature, when ballots are sent in by mail, when ballots are still mailed to dead people or to voters who have left for another state years ago, when ballots remain in the mail system until the “day after” the election, when bags of mail “are forgotten” in the post office and not counted, when ballots are “enhanced” for computer counting, or the vote is eliminated by “double marking”, when military ballots arrive too late to be counted, when people can be paid off to look the other way and purge legal voters using tools to allegedly expose voter malfeasance, and, when you can actually make a long list of how fraud can all go down – you really don’t need a Russian conspiracy to show that something is not right with the election process in America. October 27, 2016
