[Update: with minor edits towards clarity - luaptifer]

This is incredible.

The Day the S.E.C. Changed the Game steps backward to the date, April 28, 2004, on which SEC gave the OK for the five banks that have precipitated the current spiral of the global financial crisis to begin their own financial risk monitoring programs rather than continuing to use the objective models then restraining all other banks from 'overdoing it'.

Quite to the point... thanks, luaptifer! - cho

They came to office riding the Energy Policy shock treatement, embedded lobbyists throughout government, deregulated their cronies, politicized Justice, politicized prosecution, politicized Federal technology networks, chased the wrong terrorist to the wrong country and there created thousands of new terrorists, let the right terrorist go, reinstated national debt as an institution, serialized crisis, and now they want taxpayers to mortgage the future by offloading billions of dollars worth of 'toxic' mortgage debt which may in fact be perfectly safe, then leave the Treasury with zero percent savings but expatriate Haliburton with no-bid billions for years.

A hundred years is a long time.

It will probably be only part of a lifetime for Kelsie and her sister who weren't born when they laid the plans of a war for the New American Century.

A smart kid can see real far into the future and Kelsie doesn't need to grow up to understand she wants no part of that vision.

[...with permission, from http://mx.youtube.com/watch?v=vndUiYS_HRA]

Newly recorded interview made shortly before filing of Stephen Spoonamore's affidavit in Ohio testimony last week.

"I'm a lifelong member of the GOP, I'm a Republican. And the problem is that some members of my party seem to have gotten it into their heads, 'we'll control the voting machines and that means we'll own the genie'." [Click image for video]

Roger Stone is the longtime dirty-trickster who knocked the socks off of Eliot Spitzer in a scandal of high-priced trysts that forced resignation of the NY Governor earlier this year.

With a Republican pedigree stretching to Watergate, Stone needed little inducement more than Spitzer's capital "D" affiliation.

But, as the nation's taxpayers await the terms of our extortion by the Bush Administration's 'exempt from oversight' bankers' club under a plan -- including full immunity -- led by Henry Paulson, it's time to consider the political assassination of another White House enemy for the SOP it was.

Bumped and promoted by GH. Originally posted 2008-09-19 21:23:43 -0500.

John Spinelli reports from COLUMBUS, OHIO Can Obama Win and Lose Ohio at the Same Time?: Believing Republican cyber-operatives could heist the 2008 election in replay of 2004, Ohio attorneys filed affidavits from two experts in the fields of data security and academic voting research. They hope to convince the court to lift a stay on their case and subpoena Karl Rove and Mike Connell, a long-time IT handyman. 

Read Can Obama Win and Lose Ohio at the Same Time? ! We've got 46 days.

organically homegrown from grassroots, by luaptifer and cho

While the City fled in terror, true heroes struggled to get to where half a thousand of them ended up giving their lives trying to make the rest of us safe. Seven years later, the morning's crystal clear beauty was the metaphor of authentic American spirit. That spirit is there in the photo below, no matter what charred edifice is in the foreground, and it adrenalized the hundreds of first responders and volunteers in their final acts, acts of true heroic community service.

After seven paradoxical years, most Americans solemnly honored the service of both dead and surviving emergency responders on September 11th, 2008. But just one week before, that spirit was betrayed by desperate politicians attempting to tarnish an opponent, but, instead, trashed the fundamental backbone of an America which rushes to help those in need.

"What in God's name is a community organizer? I don't even know if that's a job."

bumped by roxy and then carol. This bears further discussion. Come on folks, be creative. Luaptifer has a great idea here. Originally published 2008-09-06 09:05:00 -1000(Hawaii time)

This week, the RNC showed its animosity to folks who'd dare to take it upon ourselves and make unity for a cause.

Remember? We did that.

Bumped. -- GH Originally posted 2008-09-07 13:11:07 -0500.

Now that taxpayers are about to pick up the tab on another megabillion dollar problem of the Bush Administration, I have some questions. Note: this commentary began its life just moments ago as a comment on Taxpayers picking up the tab again
---

Ever since I've known of this office, I've wondered if they have actually done any oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

What do they do?

And how'd Mike Connell get the job of running their website back in 1999?

Does George W. Bush get some sort of inside information from this arrangement? Connell has been Bush's IT guru for more than two decades now.

It became a GovTech Solutions website after he created the company to launder NewMedia Communications as a 'non-partisan' company while he ran GeorgeWBush.com and RNC.org, and it still runs as a GovTech Solutions client today.

You can see some of the pages under development as google captured them using this link:

Google - "inurl:govtechsolutions.com"

You also can see that www.ofheo.gov runs from the IP address right next door to govtechsolutions.com on Smartechcorp's address space:

http://www.robtex.com/dns/www.ofheo.gov.html

http://www.robtex.com/dns/govtechsolutions.com.html

and they're all in the same block of IP address that runs Connell's technomania.com (though robtex has not apparently updated its cnet data lately)

http://www.robtex.com/cnet/64.203.97.html

Since taxpayers are now going to pick up the tab for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and we've been picking up the tab for OFHEO, I just wonder if there is any significance to the fact that we've also been paying Mike Connell's companies to do the web and database work that runs http://www.ofheo.gov?

What does OFHEO do, anyhow? Just wondering, ya know?

Posted on behalf of and at the request of luaptifer by GreyHawk.

The following video was posted on the Velvet Revolution site on 27 August 2008.

It documents Stephen Spoonamore's confrontation of the Maryland Board of Elections with an unredacted version of the "Risk Assessment Report" of Diebold's electronic voting systems as commissioned by the state of Maryland from the Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC) in 2003." as reported on Brad Blog 11/5/06. Those who commissioned the report were provided only a 40 page redact and limited to 'borrowing' a copy of the full 200 page document, Diebold considered it such sensitive material.

_____

"Computer cyber security expert Stephen Spoonamore got a copy of the 197-page unredacted report which listed hundreds of serious problems, and he released that report to us.

Well, Spoonamore did more than that – he took the report to the Maryland Board of Elections and confronted them with it at a public meeting. He told them that if he were handed such a report in the private sector, he would "shut down the system and open a fraud investigation." The elections officials expressed shock that they had not ever seen the same unredacted report. And when the meeting was over, Spoonamore, with a concealed microphone, personally confronted the officials. And what did one of them say to him –that him having the report was "a security risk." Following the confrontation, Spoonamore was contacted by law enforcement officials who demanded to know how he got the report. We can say now that the report came from a high official in the Executive Branch who wanted to expose Diebold."

_____

I'm catching up on some history of the electronic voting machine story and, as a result, coming to realize the potential for these machines to profoundly undermine the integrity of this November's election.

Take a read of Bradblog's 'THE PENTAGON PAPERS OF E-VOTING' while understanding that machines like this are found in most of these United States. This report doesn't touch upon the recently revealed defects found in all lines of Diebold / Premier systems since their production began.