Show Details for February 24th, 2008

This week’s guest

– WILLIAM HARTUNG on redefining American security; also, examining US military spending

With the primary campaigns having barreled into Texas and three other states, what vital issues are still going unaddressed? Monitor co-host Pokey Anderson welcomes our guest tonight, military spending expert WILLIAM HARTUNG.

Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have committed themselves to increasing the size of the armed forces by tens of thousands of troops. Republicans John McCain and Mike Huckabee are looking to spend even more than their Democratic counterparts.

In his recent article, “Avoiding the Toughness Trap,” Bill Hartung writes:

A progressive defense policy must begin with a fundamental redefinition of what constitutes security. Security should involve protection against all threats to human life, whether they emanate from terrorism, the spread of nuclear weapons, environmental degradation, outbreaks of disease or entrenched poverty and hunger. This means that many of the most dangerous threats we face are not amenable to military solutions.

… [T]he door is open for a thoroughgoing debate on the future of US security policy that goes beyond the urgent question of how to get out of Iraq. So far, mainstream Democrats have failed to seize this historic moment. The political underpinning of this failure of imagination comes from Democratic consultants, pollsters and think tanks, who argue that the party’s candidates need to project an image of toughness to overcome the “security gap” that has existed in public perceptions of Republicans versus Democrats since the end of the Vietnam War. … Rather than projecting a posture of toughness, what is needed is an effective plan for defending the United States and its allies.

So, we’ll look at redefining security. And, we’ll also utilize Bill’s expertise on the US military budget, and look at the new Bush spending proposal, which includes an increase for next year of 5% for ongoing, non-war-related military expenditures while cutting domestic programs.

According to Chalmers Johnson, “The Department of Defense’s planned expenditures for fiscal year 2008 are larger than all other nations’ military budgets combined. The supplementary budget to pay for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not part of the official defense budget, is itself larger than the combined military budgets of Russia and China.” Aside from ongoing military expenses, the Iraq war alone has thus far cost $522 billion, calculates the National Priorities Project.

Bill Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation. He is the author of How Much Are You Making on the War Daddy?–A Quick and Dirty Guide to War Profiteering in the Bush Administration (Nation Books). He was also a contributor to Terrornomics (Ashgate Press). His articles on the arms trade and the economics of defense spending have appeared in The New York Times, Newsday, The Nation, the Christian Science Monitor, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, World Policy Journal and numerous other publications.

ARTICLE:
Avoiding the Toughness Trap
by William D. Hartung
November 19, 2007 issue
The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071119/hartung

RELATED ARTICLES:
What Do the Pentagon’s Numbers Really Mean?
by Winslow Wheeler of the Straus Military Reform Project
Center for Defense Information.
February 4, 2008
http://www.cdi.org/program/document.cfm?DocumentID=4199&StartRow=1&ListRows=10&appendURL=&Orderby=D.DateLastUpdated&ProgramID=37&from_page=index.cfm

The Dubious Priorities of the President’s FY 2009 Budget
By Robert Greenstein, James R. Horney, and Richard Kogan
February 7, 2008
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
http://www.cbpp.org/2-4-08bud2.htm

QUOTE from the article just above:

“The top 1 percent of households — those with incomes exceeding $450,000 a year — would receive more than $1 trillion in tax cuts over the next ten years [in the new Bush budget].

Households with annual incomes over $1 million would get an even larger tax cut: more than $150,000 a year, on average. This group’s … combined tax cuts would exceed the entire amount that the federal government spends on elementary and secondary education, as well as the entire amount that it devotes to medical care for the nation’s veterans.”

http://www.newamerica.net/issues

Show Details for February 17th, 2008

This week’s Guest:

 – National Lawyers Guild President MARJORIE COHN

    on our Cowboy Republic

 

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– National Lawyers Guild President MARJORIE COHN on our Cowboy Republic

 

Law professor MARJORIE COHN is a frequent legal analyst on The Monitor. She and Monitor co-host Mark Bebawi will discuss her book, “Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law.”

 

Last week Marjorie and Mark discussed using intelligence gained through torture; the recent CIA admission it used waterboarding on three prisoners; the investigation of the destruction of several hundred hours of videotapes depicting interrogations; and the stop-go-stop congressional debate on retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies, for cooperating with the federal government in surveillance on citizens.

Professor Cohn is the President of the National Lawyers Guild, and is a professor of law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, where she teaches criminal law and procedure, evidence, and international human rights law.

 

She lectures throughout the world on international human rights and US foreign policy. Professor Cohn has written columns for the Los Angeles Daily Journal and the San Francisco Daily Journal, is a news consultant for CBS News, and a legal analyst for Court TV. She has provided legal and political commentary on BBC, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, NPR, Truthout, and Pacifica Radio.

She is co-author of the book “Cameras in the Courtroom: Television and the Pursuit of Justice.” She was a legal observer in Iran on behalf of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, and she has participated in delegations to Cuba, China and Yugoslavia. She has lived in Mexico and is fluent in Spanish.

WEBSITE:
http://marjoriecohn.com

 

“Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law”

The six ways:

• illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq;
• the policy of torture;
• war crimes;
• Guantanamo’s kangaroo courts;
• unconstitutional laws; and
• the unlawful surveillance of American citizens.

Show Details for February 10th, 2008

This week’s Guests:

 – MARJORIE COHN on Current Constitutional Issues

– Diving Deep into the Mystery of Florida’s Lost 100,000 Votes, with SUSAN PYNCHON and KITTY GARBER

 

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<> 6:00 pm CDT  – Headlines

 

– MARJORIE COHN on Current Constitutional Issues

 

Law professor MARJORIE COHN is a frequent legal analyst on The Monitor. She and Monitor co-host Mark Bebawi will discuss current Constitutional  issues.  Among the topics: using intelligence gained through torture; the recent CIA admission it used waterboarding on three prisoners; the investigation of the destruction of several hundred hours of videotapes depicting interrogations; and the stop-go-stop congressional debate on retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies, for cooperating with the federal government in surveillance on citizens.

Professor Cohn is the President of the National Lawyers Guild, and is a professor of law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, where she teaches criminal law and procedure, evidence, and international human rights law.

Her recent book is entitled “Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law.”

She lectures throughout the world on international human rights and US foreign policy. Professor Cohn has written columns for the Los Angeles Daily Journal and the San Francisco Daily Journal, is a news consultant for CBS News, and a legal analyst for Court TV. She has provided legal and political commentary on BBC, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, NPR, Truthout, and Pacifica Radio.

She is co-author of the book “Cameras in the Courtroom: Television and the Pursuit of Justice.” She was a legal observer in Iran on behalf of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, and she has participated in delegations to Cuba, China and Yugoslavia. She has lived in Mexico and is fluent in Spanish.

WEBSITE:
http://marjoriecohn.com

BOOK:
“Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law”
The six ways: illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq; the policy of
torture; war crimes; Guantanamo’s kangaroo courts; unconstitutional laws; and the
unlawful surveillance of American citizens.

 

 

– Diving Deep into the Mystery of Florida’s Lost 100,000 Votes, with SUSAN PYNCHON and KITTY GARBER

Sarasota’s iVotronic Voting Machines – Give These Things a Proper Burial!

Monitor co-host Pokey Anderson’s guests are SUSAN PYNCHON and KITTY GARBER.  Susan is executive director and founder of Florida Fair Elections Coalition and Florida Fair Elections Center.  Before moving to Florida, Susan was a reporter in Kennebunk, Maine, where she did environmental and investigative reporting.

Kitty is research director and co-founder of the groups.  She worked at a Washington, D.C. think tank previously, as a writer and editor on national policy issues for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

They spent a year writing a highly-documented investigation, “Sarasota’s Vanished Votes,” just released.  The mystery: What happened to some 18,000 votes in the tightly-contested congressional race for — ironically — the seat Katherine Harris vacated in 2006?

SUSAN PYNCHON and KITTY GARBER have examined boxes of records, 30,000 emails, pages of voting results, countless public records requests.  They looked at anomalies in six other Florida counties as well, trying to understand what actually happened.  They found more than they were looking for — not just 18,000 votes were missing.  They found 100,000 missing votes across Florida in the November 2006 election, somehow disappeared, vaporized, after voters used these same ES&S iVotronic electronic voting machines.

In the Sarasota area race, 15% of the ballots cast in Sarasota County on the iVotronic electronic voting machines (a total of 17,846 ballots) showed no vote for either candidate. This was many times the expected 1% to 3% who don’t vote in a high-profile election. The race was decided by a mere 369 votes, favoring Republican Vern Buchanan over Democrat Christine Jennings. Two lawsuits and a congressional/GAO investigation ensued, but Buchanan was seated in Congress.

Pynchon and Garber write: “There is no question that the 2006 contest for the U.S. Congressional District 13 seat in Sarasota was a failed election, where thousands of voters who thought they had cast a vote in this race did not have their votes counted.”

But wait. There’s more!

“What we uncovered in our investigation is shocking: The iVotronic voting
system failed to count over 100,000 votes in various races across the state of
Florida in the November 2006 election. Furthermore, we have completely
refuted the theories that substantial numbers of voters intentionally withheld
their votes in the CD-13 race or that so-called “poor ballot design” was
responsible for the uncounted votes. By process of elimination, the only
remaining possible cause of the high undervotes is the catastrophic failure of the
iVotronic voting system. … [W]e found a badly designed, shoddily-built, poorly maintained,
aging voting system in a state of critical breakdown.

…In Charlotte, Lee and Sumter counties, astronomically high
undervotes occurred in the attorney general’s race, ranging from an almost
incomprehensible 20-25%—meaning that the votes of one in four voters were
not counted in the AG race in these counties.”  — “Sarasota’s Vanished Votes”

INVESTIGATION:
“Sarasota’s Vanished Votes:
An Investigation into the Cause of Uncounted Votes
in the 2006 Congressional District 13 Race
in Sarasota County, Florida”
January 2008
by Susan Pynchon and Kitty Garber
Florida Fair Elections Center
http://www.floridafairelections.org/CenterReports.htm#VanishingVotes

WEBSITE:

http://www.floridafairelections.org

Show Details for February 3rd, 2008

This Week’s Guests & Commentary:

 –  SUSAN PYNCHON, on what happened in the NH Primary recount

 –  Commentary by KEITH OLBERMANN on Bush and surveillance

 –  Sportswriter DAVE ZIRIN casts a critical eye at sports culture

 

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ANNOUNCEMENT: Deadline to register to vote for the Texas primary is Monday!
Houston Votes is a coalition of groups working to register the estimated 1 million eligible people in Harris County who are not registered to vote.  Tomorrow, February 4 is the last day to register for those who want to be able to vote in Texas’ primary election in March.  Options (1) Go to the website for a list of places, or how to get registered:  http://www.houstonvotes.org .  (2) Or, go here to download your own form, and mail with a postmark by Monday, to be registered in Harris County: http://www.hcvoter.com/voter/voterapp/acquirevoterapp.asp .  (3) Or, take yourself to The Breakfast Klub, a restaurant in Midtown, right on the Metrorail.  3711 Travis, 7 am to 7 pm on Monday.  Houston Votes will help you register.  (4) Or, go to WalMart at 9460 W. Sam Houston Toll between Beechnut and Bissonnet, and Houston Votes will help you register, 10 am to 10 pm Monday.

 

– Susan Pynchon, on what happened in the NH Primary recount

PHOTO by Black Box Voting, compiled at BradBlog.com

 

As the nation turns its eye toward Super Tuesday, The Monitor continues to examine what happened in New Hampshire.

 

Previously (January 13), Monitor co-host Pokey Anderson and guest Dori Smith looked into the little-known private vendor that supplies voting equipment in New England; LHS Associates. LHS provides Diebold optical scan machines that count over 80% of New Hampshire’s votes. LHS has unfettered access to voting machines before elections; they program the memory cards, and they take custody of them after the election. Sometimes, LHS even replaces memory cards DURING an election. Memory cards are the crucial brains of the scanning/counting machine. 

Today, we will play an interview with SUSAN PYNCHON.  Susan founded Florida Fair Elections Coalition, but she recently travelled from sunny Florida to snowy New Hampshire to observe the recounts there, after their early, crucial presidential primary.  This interview was generously shared with us by Mary Ann Gould, who hosts Voice of the Voters, a show in the Philadelphia area. 

Susan Pynchon:

“I really never dreamed that I’d see what I saw in NH when it came to election integrity. … We couldn’t help but wonder if that [NH] election isn’t actually being run by organized crime. … There was event after event … I think if people follow along with these different videos [at BlackBoxVoting.org], it will become pretty clear that SOMEthing is going on in New Hampshire that is not a pretty picture at all.”

In NH, Susan and other observers saw transported ballots in beat-up cardboard boxes that had been slit open.  Election officials were pointing to “seals” as preserving the safety of the boxes, but those so-called seals, the observers discovered, were actually more like Post-it notes or Saran Wrap — they could be peeled off and replaced, with no trace. Susan says that LHS picks up the memory cards right after the election and erases them.  All of this points to a chain of custody of ballots that looks more like Swiss cheese than a secure election.

PHOTO by Black Box Voting

“Butch” and “Hoppy” pick up ballots from 230 locations in NH and bring them to one central location.  These two sped up to 75 mph on windy, snowy NH roads while being followed by election integrity observers.

Thanks again, to Mary Ann Gould of PA, Susan Pynchon of FL, Dori Smith of CT, Brad Friedman of CA, and Bev Harris of WA for their work.

 

WEBSITES and MORE INFO:

 

PREVIOUS MONITOR COVERAGE OF NH:
“Who Counts in New Hampshire?
And, are Diebold memory cards forgetful?”
Pokey Anderson interviews Dori Smith
Aired January 13, 2008, The Monitor, http://themonitor.wordpress.com
KPFT Radio, Houston
Transcript:   http://www.votersunite.org/info/WhoCountsNH.asp
Audio: http://archive.kpft.org — go to The Monitor for 1-13-08, then hit DOWNLOAD to play.

 

Black Box Voting — www.BlackBoxVoting.org

Florida Fair Elections — www.FloridaFairElections.org

Mary Ann Gould – “Voice of the Voters” radio show – www.CoalitionforVotingIntegrity.org

 

BradBlog coverage of NH- Portal to many NH stories: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5538
Notably:
(Butch & Hoppy) + Post-It Notes = NH’s Chain of Custody
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5586 (originally published at BlackBoxVoting.org)

New Hampshire 2008 Primary Analysis by Election Defense Alliance
http://www.electiondefensealliance.org/new_hampshire_2008_primary_analysis

 

 

– MEDIA COMMENTARY: Keith Olbermann discusses surveillance, telecoms, and the Bush administration.

Congress is discussing whether to give retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies who have secretly cooperated with government surveillance efforts.  In this prerecorded commentary, Keith Olbermann aims his own special brand of shock and awe at Bush administration surveillance and secrecy.

 

– Sportswriter Dave Zirin casts a critical eye at sports culture

Photo by Jared Rodriguez

Monitor co-host Mark Bebawi interviews sportswriter Dave Zirin about corporatism and militarism in sports, specifically the NFL.

They will take a look at the SuperBowl half-time sponsor, Bridgestone/Firestone, and its exploitative labor practices in Liberia. Other topics include Pat Tillman, and also how sports culture has changed since the days of  Muhammed Ali.

Dave Zirin was Press Action’s 2005 and 2006 Sportswriter of the Year, has been called “an icon in the world of progressive sports” and Robert Lipsyte says he is “the best young sportswriter in the United States.” He is a regular contributor to the Nation Magazine, and a regular op-ed writer for the Los Angeles Times.

His book “Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics, and Promise of Sports” has been called “the sports primer for our time.” Sports Illustrated wrote that Terrordome is “a provocative, sometimes chilling, look at sports and society right now.”

He is a weekly television commentator [via satellite] for The Score, Canada’s number one 24-hour sports network.  He has also been on numerous national radio programs including National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation; Air America and The Laura Flanders Show; Radio Nation with Marc Cooper; ESPN radio; Stars and Stripes Radio; Pacifica’s Hard Knock Radio, and many others.  He is also the Thursday morning sports voice on Pacifica station WBAI’s award winning “Wake Up Call.”

Dave is also working on “A People’s History of Sports in the United States,” part of Howard Zinn’s People’s History series for the New Press.

ARTICLES:
“Super Bowl Slavery”
By Dave Zirin
http://www.edgeofsports.com/2008-01-22-311/index.html

“Pat Tillman, Our Hero”
By Dave Zirin
The Nation
Oct. 6, 2005
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051024/zirin

BOOKS:
Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics, and Promise of Sports

What’s My Name, Fool?  Sports and Resistance in the United States