Tuesday, July 24: The Peter B. Collins Show as Guest Hosted by Brad…

35 Comments on “Tuesday, July 24: The Peter B. Collins Show as Guest Hosted by Brad…”

1. Brad, Can we her a few words from Des ?

2. Breaking News

   In the this can’t be true department, Weird Al G wrote a memo giving The Dick’s Office unfettered access to the Department of Justice Just Us. Check this:

   He then pointed to a May 4, 2006 memorandum signed by Gonzales which showed that the Office of the Vice President had been granted parallel privileges with the Executive Office of the President on communicating directly with the Justice Department’s staff on criminal and civil matters.

   “What – on earth – business does the Office of the Vice President have in the internal workings of the Department of Justice with respect to criminal investigations, civil investigations, and ongoing matters?” the Senator asked.

   (Raw Story, emphasis added). Did they call to find out who was going to do what to bushies for example?

3. I’ll try JoJ. She’s very shy, ya know! But I’ll work on her! 🙂 (I know that’s the only actual reason ya tune in)

4. We (that is me & the mouse in my pocket) think of her as the First Lady here !

5. Don’t fall for it Des!

6. Leonard Piazza is the dude who threw me out of “his” courthouse in the summer of 2005 for asking too many hard questions of the vendors at the Luzerne County Voting Machine Expo.

   http://www.votepa.us/new…7-21-05_LuzerneExpo.html

   Ha Ha Ha. Maybe he should have asked some hard questions himself before he spent the taxpayer’s money on an unverifiable, highly vendor-dependent system.

   Marybeth
   http://www.VotePA.us

7. WHATN IS HAPPENING IN
   Contra Costa County registrar’S THINKING

   Mr. Weir brings up an important question and concern, “What’s the problem the secretary is trying to resolve?” asked Stephen Weir, the Contra Costa County registrar and president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials. “Show me where the systems have actually been hacked and where votes have been changed. There’s no evidence of it. It’s theoretical. I get that. But we shouldn’t be discussing theoretical this close to an election.”
   I would like to give one possible response. The central goal and problem is to get an accurate election result. We know from various current history accounts the machines have not given good results, i.e. Sarasota, Florida congressional election where thousands of votes appear not to have been counted, The over count problem where many PEOPLES votes were not recorded. Even the Voting machine company’s reengineers have said, in public statements, the loosing candidate most likely should have won. Getting the correct vote totals not only requires, as Mr. Weir indicates, looking in to actual reported hacking and other sorts of stealing, but also in to the theoretical possibilities which may not have been discovered but could still be going on in an insidious way. Correct voting outcomes requires looking into the possible unobserved problems not only the actually observed problems. Not looking into the possible is very bad security, it helps cover up the crimes of the not yet discovered thief. This is a serious logical flaw, one I would not expect from a professional voting official and public employee.

   Thank you and all the best to everyone everywhere
   jimmyf

8. Sattelite uplink from San Francisco to Denver has gone down…”We’ve never seen it before” says Brian, producer in San Francisco… PLEASE STAND BY!

9. Sounds of silence…..

10. Silence on KRXA on the actual radio (not internet), too.

11. Now I can hear you again.

12. We did ask the tough questions MaryBeth…

    http://citizensvoice.com/site/index.cfm?newsid=16306329&BRD=2259&PAG=461&dept_id=455154&rfi=8

    http://citizensvoice.com/site/index.cfm?newsid=16322565&BRD=2259&PAG=461&dept_id=455154&rfi=8

    I think you should consider the fact that county is on the record supporting a paper trail, and I also think you should try to place yourself in the position of people who had to ask the tough questions from the positions of a decision makers all of whom under the pressures we were under at the time.

13. Technical difficulties???? Now we have Peter B….

14. Stream and broadcast now coming from the archives, I think.

15. That’s what it sounds like. Did the KKK come back with their dynamite?

16. They’re back.

17. Mary Mapes! You’ve got Mary Mapes?! Wow.

    Okay, I confess. I spent months in 2005 researching what happened to Dan Rather. I would have finished, and written something up, but the story kept growing.

    And I was suddenly interrupted by the Carter Baker Panel, ACVR, etc. and felt like I desperately had to focus on election theft.

    And the rest is history.

    But that summer, at the first Cindy Sheehan vigil, The Salt Lake Tribune captured the most outrageous photo of me at the moment when, as I spoke about getting the real news, I declared passionately, “Dan Rather was right!”

    Whatever mistakes were made, he was right. Bush ducked out of his already plush Air National Guard gig and was AWOL – a spoiled selfish arrogant brat. And since then, he and his folk have lied, and sent others to their deaths. Grrrrrrrr.

    Digging into the story, I found Rather’s magnificent confrontive interview of Daddy in 1988, as well as a quote from Cheney about how Daddy Bush holds a grudge.

    I also discovered that the man who ran the investigatory panel set up by CBS, Richard Thornburgh, who of course was Daddy’s AG, has spent a lot of his time and energy at the Justice Department reclassifying documents as secret and covering for the antics of Neil and George W.

    Then there’s Bill Burkett, Rather’s source, a man who was desperate to have the public hear about what he’d seen and what a corrupt man George W. Bush was.

    Not only was Burkett THE WITNESS to Bush’s National Guard files being cleansed, but his story was told by James Moore in his Bush’s War for Re-Election, released in early 2004, and Moore is also the co-author with Wayne Slater of Bush’s Brain, the book revealing the kind of fiend that Karl Rove has always been.

    Burkett was contacted after appearing with Moore, and memos were handed off in a non-trackable way. Burkett did nothing with them for months, until the swift-boating began.

    It was a set up! And Bush/Rove got to take so many down.

    I just want Mary to know, and Dan, that they’ve got a passionate, obnoxiously outspoken supporter here in li’l ol’ Salt Lake.

    I’m on hold now Brad – talk to me!

18. Hummm… How ironic this happen just after the transmitter story.

    99 – maybe they took out the dish this time . . .

19. Sounds Load & Clear !

20. We’re back!

21. Brad,

    Check your email. I just mailed you the above-mentioned ever-so-flattering photo from the Salt Lake Tribune. When I hit that peak moment, I certainly heard the cameras click.

    Yeah.

22. fox lies is up to it’s Chyron Trick Lie again.

    FOX NEWS labels Arlen Specter a Democrat!

23. Discussion of the 2002 Alabama gubernatorial election is certainly relevant to tonight’s show:

    Recent investigation:

    http://baldwincountynow.com/articles/2007/07/24/local_news/doc469fbb5bd2a7f444039407.txt

24. 😉 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confesses to blowing the KRXA transmitter in the 70’s . . .

25. Leonard, I’m pretty sure that PA Election Directors and County Commissioners did not ask the hard questions, at least as a group. In the end, the strongest available choice was optical scan, which would have offered long-range lower costs with far less high-maintenance “help” needed from the vendor, in addition to a true, voter-marked, voter-verified paper ballot. Even with all those advantages, only 13 PA counties bought optical scan. 54 of our most populous counties ended up on 100% paperless, high-maintenance DREs and now the chickens are starting to come home to roost.

    I attended meeting after meeting in numerous PA counties where ES&S met with commissioners and the public — the BS was so thick you needed hip waders. Everything the vendors did and said was designed to steer you guys away from their optical scan systems and onto the higher profit-margin DREs. And a lot of you bought it.

    Yes, there was pressure at the time, perhaps I even contributed to it with my Kuznik v. Westmoreland lawsuit (we sincerely wanted an answer to that Constitutional question we raised in the suit), but still more due diligence as to long term effects could and should have been done. Citizens in many PA counties begged for someone to look at the long-range costs of all this — and were promptly ignored or even laughed at.

    To those 54 counties that took the vendors’ bait and and went with the high-profit-margin DRE systems, I would say if you think the vendors are gouging you now, wait ’til the touchscreens start to fail, perhaps in as soon as four or five years from now or even less. Planned obsolescence is obviously part of these voting machine corporations’ profit plans. Too bad so few of you saw it coming.

    Marybeth
    http://www.VotePA.us

    … Leonard Piazza said on 7/24/2007 @ 3:28 pm PT…

    We did ask the tough questions MaryBeth…

    [snip]

    I think you should consider the fact that county is on the record supporting a paper trail, and I also think you should try to place yourself in the position of people who had to ask the tough questions from the positions of a decision makers all of whom under the pressures we were under at the time.

26. http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/071907J.shtml

    Jason Leopold’s piece…

27. Ignorance has nothing to do with intellect …

28. To follow up on what I spoke about regarding Bush 1’s Attorney General, Dick Thornburgh, who ran the panel that investigated CBS’s National Guard story, here is a section from the an article in the March/April 1993 Columbia Journal Review by Russ W. Baker, “IRAQGATE, The Big One That (Almost) Got Away, Who Chased it — and Who Didn’t”

    ARMING SADDAM

    The United States and its European allies have laws and policies designed to prevent arms and military technology from getting into the hands of developing countries, especially where there is a likelihood of their reckless deployment. If these controls were aimed at anyone, certainly they were aimed at the highly repressive, swaggering Iraqi regime, with its history of threatening both its neighbors and its citizens.

    Still, when Saddam went to war against Iran, becoming the world’s chief practitioner of chemical warfare, U.S. realpolitikers dubbed him the lesser of two evils, and the one less likely to disrupt the oil flow. The essence of Iraqgate is that secret efforts to support him became the order of the day, both during his long war with Iran and afterward.

    Much of what Saddam received from the West was not arms per se, but so-called dual-use technology — ultra sophisticated computers, armored ambulances, helicopters, chemicals, and the like, with potential civilian uses as well as military applications. We’ve learned by now that a vast network of companies, based in the U.S. and abroad, eagerly fed the Iraqi war machine right up until August 1990, when Saddam invaded Kuwait.

    And we’ve learned that the obscure Atlanta branch of Italy’s largest bank, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro [BBT Note: a client of Baker Botts, the law firm of notorious Bush consigliere James Baker III], relying partially on U.S. taxpayer-guaranteed loans, funneled $ 5 billion to Iraq from 1985 to 1989. Some government-backed loans were supposed to be for agricultural purposes, but were used to facilitate the purchase of stronger stuff than wheat. Federal Reserve and Agriculture department memos warned of suspected abuses by Iraq, which apparently took advantage of the loans to free up funds for munitions. U.S. taxpayers have been left holding the bag for what looks like $ 2 billion in defaulted loans to Iraq.

    All of this was not yet clear in August 1989, when FBI agents raided U.S. branches of BNL, hitting the jackpot in Atlanta. The branch manager in that city, Christopher Drogoul, was charged with making unauthorized, clandestine, and illegal loans to Iraq — some of which, according to the indictment, were used to purchase arms and weapons technology. Yet three months after the raid, White House officials went right on backing Saddam, approving $ 1 billion more in U.S. government loan guarantees for farm exports to Iraq, even though it was becoming clear that the country was beating plowshares into swords.

    At the time, inquiring minds wondered whether Drogoul could possibly have acted alone in such a mammoth operation, as the U.S. government alleged. Was there a formal, secret plan to arm Iraq? And did the U.S. government engage in a massive coverup when evidence of such a plan began to emerge?

    In fact, we now know that in February 1990, then Attorney General Dick Thornburgh blocked U.S. investigators from traveling to Rome and Istanbul to pursue the case. And that the lead investigator lacked the basic financial know-how to handle such an investigation, and made an extraordinarily feeble effort to get to the bottom of things. More damningly, we know know that mid-level staffers at the commerce department altered Iraqi export licenses to obscure the exported materials’ military function — before sending the documents on to Congress, which was investigating the affair.

    Eventually, it would turn out that elements of the U.S. government almost certainly knew that Drogoul was funneling U.S.-backed loans — intended for the purchase of agricultural products, machinery, trucks, and other U.S. goods — into dual-use technology and outright military technology. And that the British government was fully aware of the operations of Matrix Churchill, a British firm with an Ohio branch, which was not only at the center of the Iraqi procurement network but was also funded by BNL Atlanta. (Precision equipment supplied by Matrix Churchill was reportedly a target this January when the Western allies renewed their attack on Iraq).

    It would later be alleged by bank executives that the Italian government, long a close U.S. ally as well as BNL’s ultimate owner, had knowledge of BNL’s loan diversions. It looked to some like an international coalition. As New York Times columnist William Safire argued last December 7, “Iraqgate is uniquely horrendous: a scandal about the systematic abuse of power by misguided leaders of three democratic nations to secretly finance the arms buildup of a dictator.”

    Safire had been on the case since 1989, turning out slashing op-ed pieces. But readers of the Times’s news pages must have wondered where Safire’s body-blows were coming from, since the news columns contained almost nothing about Iraqgate for the longest time.

    In addition, this from Webster Tarpley’s George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography

    The old imperialist idea of Theodore Roosevelt was quickly revived by the Bush administration during 1989. Through a series of actions by Attorney General Richard Thornburgh, the U.S. Supreme Court, and CIA Director William Webster, the Bush regime arrogated to itself a sweeping carte blanche for extraterritorial interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states, all in open defiance of the norms of international law.

    These illegal innovations can be summarized under the heading of the “Thornburgh Doctrine.”

    The Federal Bureau of Investigation arrogated to itself the “right” to search premises outside of U.S. territory and to arrest and kidnap foreign citizens outside of U.S. jurisdiction, all without the concurrence of the judicial process of the other countries whose territory was thus subject to violation.

    U.S. armed forces were endowed with the “right” to take police measures against civilians.

    The CIA demanded that an Executive Order prohibiting the participation of U.S. government officials and military personnel in the assassination of foreign political leaders, which had been issued by President Ford in October 1976, be rescinded.

    There is every indication that this presidential ban on assassinations of foreign officials and politicians, which had been promulgated in response to the Church and Pike Committees’ investigations of CIA abuses, has indeed been abrogated.

    To round out this lawless package, an opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court issued on February 28, 1990 permitted U.S. officials abroad to arrest (or kidnap) and search foreign citizens without regard to the laws or policy of the foreign nation subject to this interference.

    Through these actions, the Bush regime effectively staked its claim to universal extraterritorial jurisdiction, the classic posture of an empire seeking to assert universal police power. The Bush regime aspired to the status of a world power “legibus solutus,” a superpower exempted from all legal restrictions.

    Isn’t history astonishing? No wonder they had to get rid of Rather. He had an historical perspective.

    And while you can see him on “Rather Reports” – Comcast refuses to include HDnet on its schedule. And the show does not podcast. There are, however, transcripts. And suddenly, they are making some of the episodes available to watch online.

29. I think the background reason Rather might have been deep-sixed is because he covered the collapse of WTC 7 and he probably was going to try to investigate it (like a real journalist.) This speculation and a fair amount of wimmin’s intuition but I can not watch the replay of his CBS coverage of the 9/11 fraud’s smoking gun without hearing it in his voice….that “this is just not right”.

    But they needed another reason to get rid of him, since they couldn’t draw direct attention to the 9/11 fraud.

30. What blather…. I’m sorry. The guy STILL doesn’t get it. Have they drugged them all?

31. You are not being too hard on them. The concept is dirt simple, and there aren’t any good reasons not to get them.

    Oh, Desi fell for it. Watch out!

32. Well Done !

33. I think touchstones is right Brad, it’s like a science fiction movie, you touch the stone and it knows what you are thinking, automatically choosing your vote for you
    I’m keeping it, I like it

34. Thanks, guys! Hope you enjoyed the show as much as I enjoyed bringin’ it to ya!

    Back again tomorrow, but must get outta the studio.

    PEACE!

35. …or the literal definition, a reference point against which other things can be evaluated.

    This works too as we know that DRE’s are horseshit, so we have a reference point where not to go in the future. 😉

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