Speaking of Propaganda Reports
They’re doing it with voting rights reports, too (hat tip bmaz).
Because my approach to election issues tends to be more closely alignedwith Democrats, I was paired with a Republican co-author. To furtherremove any taint of partisanship, my co-author and I convened abipartisan working group to help us. We spent a year doing research andconsulting with leaders in the field to produce a draft report. Whathappened next seems inexplicable. After submitting the draft in July2006, we were barred by the commission’s staff from having anythingmore to do with it.
What was the problem? In all the time we were doing our research anddrafting the report, neither the staff nor the commissioners, who werecontinually advised of our activities and the substance of our work,raised any concerns about the direction we were going or the researchfindings.
Yet, after sitting on the draft for six months, the EACpublicly released a report — citing it as based on work by me and myco-author — that completely stood our own work on its head.
The author, Tova Andrea Wang, ties the manipulation of the report to the corruption at DOJ.
We also raised questions about the way the Justice Departmentwas handling complaints of fraud and intimidation. The commissionexcised all references to the department that might be construed ascritical — or that Justice officials later took issue with.
[snip]
What was behind the strange handling of our report? It’s stillunclear, but it is worth noting that during the time the commission washolding our draft, claims about voter fraud and efforts to advance thecause of strict voter identification laws were at a fever pitch inCongress and the states. And it has been reported that some U.S.attorneys were being fired because they failed to pursue weaklysupported voter fraud cases with sufficient zeal.
Not a surprise, really. BushCo took the HAVA and used it as an opportunity to roll back voting rights. And the manipulation of this report is just one step in that process.
Well, my favorite part was one of the prime malefactors at the DOJ central to the scrubbing of the report was none other than our favorite Hans von Spakovski. Anybody that lets him even near the FEC should be drawn and quartered on sight.
I read this article this morning and hit the roof. I have been practically weeping over the damage done to DOJ, but now fuckinga round with Congressional Research Service.
And let me tell you (and DiFi) something else from my view as an attoney with years of election monitoring experience–
The Election Asssistance Commision is a total freaking disaster and is a danger to the electoral process.
DiFi has some crazy assed bill to make EAC permannet–so they can continue to screw things up.
STop her !!! plaese
The thought occurred to me the other day that this administration found a way around the concepts of free speech and any allegations of censorship. They simply took over the media for the messages! That is apparent in this instance, in others, and in the traditional media — virtually everywhere! True free speech gets relegated to the back pages, and the administration can put forth whatever message it wants without fear of the censorship issue — particularly with the war going on.
Amazing what a creative ideologue can do by selectively picking over the objects in a report, huh? Kind of makes you think they could even summarize a Trip Report that said ’No’ to say ’Yes,’ too, huh?
I get the feeling that these line-unit Reports, based on the facts, are getting leaked right before they disappear into the Kingdom Cloud. Once these things get into the hands of the Loyalists, they follow a whole ’nuther protocol that routinely includes shape-shifting the facts and bending the ’truth’ into a remarkable resemblence of their own propagandistic talking points.
In an Authoritarian sub-culture –
side note: Authoritarian is where the bowl of fried chicken is passed down the pecking order, and you get to pick from what is left when it gets to you, before handing it over to the next lowest guy. Totalitarian is where the Top Guy takes his piece, and then tells everyone else which piece they’ll be getting.
– that functions as a Totalitarian system, nobody wants to bring ’bad news’ – ie, anything contrary to the Boss’s Opinion – to the Boss’s attention. Bad. Low survival rates.
The Bush Kingdom seems to have such an extreme case of this going on that, quite possibly, Bush is in a Bubble of his own bloviated worldview echoing back at him from every little minion.
It’s probably also true, to our great detriment, that Cheney is the only one ’entrusted,’ by his own design, to approach the boy King about changing his mind.
It’s not hard to imagine that all this Report ’Massaging’ is an industrialized process amongst the Bushies, who successively pass the ’bad news’ through a ’healing process’ before it gets deemed presentable for the Deciderer, by the Regent.
But, now, all the people at the table are looking at each other with fresh eyes, as if they’re waking-up from a dream called ’the way we’ve always done it.’
The nightmare of a Pyrrhic ’victory of the Surge’ is not what Cheney wants either the Boss, or US, to read in any ’piece of paper’ Report.
It’s not hard to imagine that all this Report ’Massaging’ is an industrialized process amongst the Bushies, who successively pass the ’bad news’ through a ’healing process’ before it gets deemed presentable for the Deciderer, by the Regent.
A process such that ’full of sh*t’ becomes ’fine perfume’? (remembering an old joke ….)
sojourner: all is not lost; in the nick-of-time the internet came of age. Without the WWW, this country would already be irretrievably lost. If the juggernaut of communications and technology had not come to the aid of the more common man (us), we would only know what they wanted us to know.
The kernel of truth to the â€conservative†manifesto that private industry can do better than Government saved our asses: the internet structure was designed and built before the populous-control-forces within the government could figure out how to limit and control it. It’s too late (this may be why they are working on the internet II when internet I is only at ~5% of capacity).
Case-in-point: difficulty in tracing â€bad guys†using cell phones? Require GPS in every cell phone and claim it’s for 911 calls, then try to keep the public from using the feature that they are forced to pay for. I’ll bet the biggest use so far of that feature is police keeping track of the movements of their wives and girlfriends, or just people they don’t like.
Shouldn’t the suppressed draft of this report come under the â€report liberation review process†outlined by ew earlier this morning? Getting the documents etc. released is one thing, but shouldn’t we be able to see the actual report somehow, especially now that the confidentiality order has been waived?
JohnJ–I think about that all the time, the arrival of the internet and blogosphere coming at a critical moment. Very strange thing.
I have come to the conclusion that DiFi’s actual voting record is best explained by the concept that Dick Cheney is holding her firstborn at gunpoint. Either that or she’s actually a Republican. Her votes are startlingly at odds with her occasional liberal-sounding speeches.
Appreciation to bmz and ew for the link to WaPo Wang mild article revealing pretty much what was already available several months ago in the press. However, it is interesting to read Wang’s own WaPo statement today that the prior gag order on her freely discussing her research was very silencing. Early summer 2007 EAC’s legal person wrote Wang an ostensible release on EAC’s behalf, but close reading of that missive shows she remains limited in stridency. Maybe the contract she was under resembles a defense industry contract containing a stricture which would ban her organization from further bidding on RFPs for EAC if she were to violate the gag clause. A visit to her organization’s website shows it is exceedingly cautious, as if polity is encouraged only if nonpartisan. I think likely several TNH visitors would have read Wang’s comments in early spring 2007 when the EAC suppression scandal was more fresh in the news, e.g., regarding her assessment of the Iglesias listing on the US attorney purge list, as his investigations proved voter fraud to be noncriminally prosecutable in all instances his research group found. Winding the timeclock even farther back into early summer 2006, there was an ivy league Republican campus with a contract to contribute to the research EAC was compiling, as well: the northeast central NJ institution which usually is in competition with Alito’s alma mater. At that time in 2006, the political science team who obtained the EAC datagathering contract published some interesting raw data; consider, e.g., this appendix with succinct summaries, at least one page for each state, describing the process of migration to HAVA mechanisms of compliance; most of the Eagleton Institute’s findings, the Rutgers EI 2006report linkpage, corroborate what Wang’s heretofore suppressed statements say, but the Eagleton data is raw, even when elaborated as text; it is great reading though, for its particularity. The picture I obtain reading some of that document is the perennial tug of binary polities, Republicans v Democrats, each stating their own case in a way to fit the law, or retard implementation of the law to preserve advantage, or criticize implementation for its introduction of new flaws like massive disqualification of voters whose names are typographically irregular. Here are some relevant but dated articles, JG at VotersUnite and DTokaji at OH State there. For the curious, looking at recent developments, check this ruling issued this week about the AZ rollout of voter ID and the HAVA mandated voter database; to me it looks like Dixie kultcha; the case was remanded from Scotus, so voterID looks like it is going to rule the roost in AZ 2008, though one legal pundit already has observed the AZ court decision seems to avert its gaze from the underlying merits of the complaint. Back to the caucus.
Do we still have that Electoral College thingy? LOL…..geezus…I say we just vote at the ATM when we are at the bank anyway and have the banks count our public vote…LOL…just a crazy thought from someone that grew up in the 70’s. LOL wink wink
If I party-fouled a few threads back, I apologize. I aimed at stimulating insight, and may have hit insensitivity instead.
Wasn’t one of Bushco’s very first peices of legislation to de-regulate the media and allow large corporations to own media entities and make large conglomerates. It’s really hard not to put on the tin foil hat here. It seems too well planned and executed. So harmless it seemed at the time. With each grasp of power just small enough to prevent warning lights but opening doors to more power, each step of the way.
It’s creepy.
Of course, I do believe the bloggerworld was all abuzz about the corporate media changes but no one else seemed to note the change.
Let’s face it. They have a plan to grab power, grow power and keep power. We’ve got a team that wont even use all the tools (within the rules) at their disposal.
@John LoPresti: We all appreciate the relevant information, but please, use paragraph breaks. It’s almost impossible to make it through your comment.
Nell, was in a hurry today; I had archived a lot of research I did on EAC based a consulting job years ago I performed related to CA’s PRA et seq., so the remark above actually seemed best smooshed into a sole paragraph, and maybe that way somewhat unsearchengineable to bots. Regards to TNH. Back to the datamine. JL
joel hanes — DiFi is not a Republican, she is an authoritarian. She is convinced that important people with money that she is acquainted with know best. And the rest of us should just let them rule.
She has not twigged to the fact that even she is not part of our current rulers’ ruling class. Occasionally she suspects something is amiss — but she’s really more concerned about what the rabble might do.
DiFi fits into the oversight of FEC, and, as ew has observed, has a penchant for popping pressing questions to unsuspecting witnesses. The slightly acerbic tone of the allusion to US attorneys purged while investigating civil corruption was a heartening bit of rhetoric from DiFi; though, it is fair to say the spectrum she serves de facto includes all the republicans in the state she is representing, and the moderates in her own party. There could be some interesting challenges in coming senatorial races there. On the EAC side, I wonder how close the scrutiny of that new equi-partisan oversight entity would be in a matter like the current discussion of why KY might be using uncertified voting machines? Several other states have vote machine and even chad problems that might keep EAC up at nite, too.
Ring of Fire had a good interview a couple of weeks / months ago about the lady that was appointed to the EAC – something to the extent that she was conficted and or ran out of town / state because of illegal activites. I will go back and try and find the segment. Pap was talking about it.