• Is the Republican Party's criminal machine starting to become unraveled?
• Look at the federal attorneys who kept their jobs, not those who lost them.
• Video of Don Siegelman on the theft of his election.
• Guest: Senator Chris Dodd, presidential candidate, who filibustered FISA yesterday.
• Last night the House passed an omnibus spending bill.
• Guest: Lawrence Mitchell. Author, "The Speculation Economy: How Finance Triumphed over Industry".

Topics, guests, upcoming events, quotes, links to articles, audio clips, books & bumper music.

Tuesday 18 December '07 National show

• Question: is the Republican Party's criminal machine starting to become unraveled?
• Article: Judge orders WH to reveal Christian leader visits.
  "Earlier today, a federal judge ordered the Secret Service to “disclose records of visits by nine prominent conservative Christian leaders to the White House and Vice President Dick Cheney’s residence.” U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth wrote that “The most that can be said is the Secret Service acts as if the White House has legal control over these records. Upon closer inspection, however, even this proposition seems suspect.” Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington have been seeking the records since the fall of 2006."
• At the time of Monica Lewinski, visitor logs were public, subject to FOIA requests. Bush declared them presidential records, and therefore not public. A judge disagreed yesterday. The Bush Administration will probably appeal and run out the clock. Great first step.
• Chris Dodd stood up to the Republicans and roll-over Democrats, Harry Reid was ignoring his hold. There were 2 FISA bills. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s version was brought to the floor yesterday and it included retroactive immunity for the telecommunications companies. After a day of filibustering, Harry Reid withdrew it until January. The other from the Justice Committee does not include immunity. Support Chris Dodd.
• Look at the federal attorneys who kept their jobs, not those who lost them. Larisa Alexandrova and Harper's magazine have been reporting on it. Don Siegelman was speaking out on election fraud. There's an old videotape of that now out.
• Video/article: Siegelman speaks! Ex-gov calls '02 election "stolen" by the White House! Mark Crispin Miller. Video from Sept. 13, 2004.

  "I do know that during my term as Governor I never saw Bill Pryor, the Republican Attorney General, do anything outside of Alabama Law, except to allow the early certification of the results that swung the election from me to my Republican opponent...

  What was disappointing was after the polls had closed, after midnight when the poll workers - the Democratic poll workers and the Republican poll workers - and representatives of the media had gone home, the election officials, all of whom are Republicans, got together and recounted the votes. In that process I lost some 6,700 votes - enough to swing the election from me to my Republican opponent. Poll workers should have been present during that process. And secondly, the results should not have been certified the next day...

  After we had made an official request for a hand count of the ballots in Baldwin County, and after the Attorney General, and the Republican District Attorney had said they would put anyone in jail who attempted a hand recount, the votes were suddenly rushed to Montgomery, certified by the Republican Secretary of State, which put us at a disadvantage: under Alabama law, anyone who wants to challenge the election must show that there were enough legal votes not counted, or illegal votes cast to make a difference in the outcome. Well, the person challenging the election should have been my Republican opponent because the votes that should have been certified on 12 noon on Friday following the election should have been that first vote which was publicly counted in front of poll watchers...

  When this election was stolen, there's no other real kind or sugar-coated way to say it, I was faced with a difficult choice, because it was a close election, we had won by what we thought was around 3,000 votes, and we ended up losing by, I think, 1,500 votes. It would have been difficult for me to have challenged the outcome of that election. One, because they were denying me a hand recount. Secondly, even if we were to have ultimately gotten a recount from a Republican Federal Judge, very doubtful, from a Republican Circuit Judge, very doubtful, from a Republican-dominated State Supreme Court, uh, we have one Democrat on the court, very doubtful, after what the United States Supreme Court had just done to Al Gore, I looked at the possibility of winning a legal challenge, and thought, even if I were to win by any stretch of the imagination, if I could have won, then I was afraid that people would have looked at me and said, "Ah, you know, Siegelman stole the election", because it was so close. So I decided to walk away from that, thinking that, you know, it's best to come back and fight another day...

  I think some of my Republican friends here thought, 'Well, if he's coming back here to fight another day, let's see if we can't make that fight a little more difficult for him'...

  The Chronology really is this: on Tuesday night the election officials throughout the State had made their tabulations and had announced their results publicly, that Don Siegelman had won the election. After midnight in one county 6,700 votes were switched. By the way, when they changed the vote, when they recounted the votes, in Baldwin county, it was odd that the only person who lost votes was me. It didn't affect a single other race; not one vote changed that night from the original count to the final count, based on the recount that was done after midnight after the polling officials had gone.

  Now, one would expect that if there was some kind of computer glitch or some kind of computer programming error, that it might have affected more than one race, but it further raised suspicions about vote stealing when the votes came back and were certified, and the only person who lost votes was Don Siegelman, the Democrat, and the only person who gained votes was Bob Riley, the Republican...

  The next day we woke up. Well, let me say this, I went to sleep thinking I'd won. I woke, was awoken by my staff about 4:30 in the morning and saying, 'there's been a second count of the votes since we went to bed, the second count shows you losing the election by 1,500 votes'. The next morning we scrambled, demanded a hand recount. Later that day, on Wednesday, the Republicans, contrary to State Law, certified the results. Bob Riley, oddly enough, the Republican Candidate was the one who made the "official" announcement of the certification of the results from Baldwin County at a Press Conference on Wednesday morning at about 11 O'clock...

  Bob Riley, my Republican opponent, the evening of the election, after the official results were announced that showed that I was the winner in Baldwin County, and before anybody knew that there was anything wrong with the votes in Baldwin County, made the statement publicly over State television that something was wrong with the votes in Baldwin County and they were going to get to the bottom of it. That alerted our campaign team that we should be watching Baldwin County, because we knew that the Republicans were doing something there. But we didn't have access to the Courthouse; they had locked the doors, they had thrown everybody out, everybody had gone home. So who actually from Bob Riley's camp directed people to get in there and to do another recount, whether he made the phone call or one of his staffers made the phone call, but what we do know is that someone in the Sheriff's Office ran the ballots, ran the new tabulation...

  From our understanding of how electronic voting machines work and how computers work, that it would be virtually impossible to produce two different results using the same data; that some human being had to come in and do something to manipulate those returns...

  There should not have been a recount. That was an unofficial recount. The official results, the way Alabama law works is that the precincts report to the county. There are poll watchers there, representing each party and the news media, the election officials of the county: the sheriff, the probate judge and circuit clerk, who in this case were all Republicans, they, that night, they announced the official results for Baldwin County. Those results should have been the results that were certified some time after noon on Friday following the election."

• Bumper Music: Talk to me, Stevie Nicks, Fleetwood Mac.
• The US attorney who prosecuted political prisoner Don Siegelman, Mrs Canary, was the wife of William Canary who was running the campaign of Bob Riley (R), Don Siegelman's opponent. She kept her job. Bob Riley's campaign manager was also working with and advise by Karl Rove. Bill Pryor certified the results who was then awarded a recess appointment federal judgeship. Siegelman was convicted of giving a volunteer job on a hospital board to a campaign donor.
• Bumper Music: Once In A Lifetime, Keith Urban.
• Guest: Senator Chris Dodd, presidential candidate, who yesterday filibustered the version of the FISA bill that included retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies. He opposed the Military Commissions Act a year ago, which went forward, and promised himself that next time that something came up that affected the constitution, he would fight, so he came back and filibustered. There have been no court orders of eavesdropping on Americans for 5 years. Mark Klein was the whistle blower. Quest refused without a court order. AT&T helped write FISA, so they were not innocent. He cares about the Constitution. They spent 11 hours on the floor. Harry Reid agreed on the issue, and did nothing to stop Dodd; going to the other bill would have been against the regular order, though Leahy was prepared to offer it. Thanks for 600,000 emails over a few days. Keep an eye on it, let them know how much you care. Retroactive immunity would be a dreadful precedent. It's not over with; it will come up again in January.
• Bumper Music: Chipmunks Roasting On an Open Fire, the Bob Rivers Show.
• Article: The changing of the guards: Bay Minette, election night.
  "Glynn Wilson, a former Christian Science Monitor correspondent who now publishes and writes for his news site locustfork.net, posted a piece in June stating that Dan Gans - Riley’s chief of staff during the would-be governor’s time as a U.S. Representative for Alabama’s 3rd District – electronically changed the results, giving a razor thin edge to Riley, who went on to win the state by 3,120 votes."
• Article: The permanent Republican majority: Daughter of jailed governor sees White House hand in her father's fall, Larisa Alexandrova.
• Clip:
  "Now many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome. Good government. They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." Paul Weyrich (mp3).
• Some CIA agents are saying that Zubaydah's information was less credible after he was waterboarded.
• Last night the House passed an omnibus spending bill. The White House says it has cut all funding for a new nuclear warhead. It is not the president's budget. Chairman Obey said, "The omnibus bill is totally inadequate to meet the long- term investment needs of the country, but it is a whole lot better than the country would have had without a Democratic Congress. This is the best we can get given the fact that we do not have a White House that wants to put money anywhere but Iraq."
• Bumper Music: Gunslinger, John Fogerty.
• Article: ExxonMobil’s Alabama Paydirt.
• Bumper Music: Speed of Sound, Coldplay.
• Bumper Music: Bells Will Be Ringing, Bon Jovi (video).
• Upcoming Event: Jan 07 - 08 Manchester, NH. Show "Live" from the radio row at the NH Primary.
• "J'accuse!" letter by Émile Zola in the Dreyfuss affair.
• Guest: Lawrence Mitchell. Author, "The Speculation Economy: How Finance Triumphed over Industry". Charter mongering. Lots of corporations incorporated in Delaware. Morganization of companies. Transparency: only Warren Buffet gets it. 1940s modern finance theory. Derivatives, futures, hedge funds. Finance divorced from reality, now and then. We need an industrial policy. They only believe in the free market until they lose, then scream to the Fed.
• Bumper Music: Suddenly I See , KT Tunstall.
• Quote: "Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws". John Adams.
• Some interesting statistics, including on companies sold to finance trade deficit, sent by listener Thom. Sources included the US Census Bureau, Institute for Policy Studies, inflationdata.com, 1960sflashback.com, New York Times online archives. Tom posted them here.
• Bumper Music: Do Ya, Electric Light Orchestra.
• Health care is a right. Unionization is a right.
• Article: Scrooge & Marley, Inc. -- The True Conservative Agenda by Thom Hartmann, June 18, 2004.
• Middle class rant.
• Quote: "An old English judge once said: 'Necessitous men are not free men.'" Franklin D. Roosevelt 27 June 1936, "A Rendezvous With Destiny", Speech to the Democratic National Convention, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
• Video: The American Voting System: HACKED. Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org and Howard Dean. Transcript (more than half way down).
• Ellen Ratner of Talk Radio News. She was in New Hampshire, preparing for the primaries radio row in January that Thom will be attending. McCain is said to be going to be the winner with Lieberman's help. With 40% undecided, the polls don't mean much. Oprah had 6,000, but 30% of the audience left after she spoke. Hillary has a much better organization. Ads for Hillary. Romney not doing well. Rudy pulled money back. The weather is a factor; snow against Democrats because Republicans drive 4x4s. The primary is 3 weeks from today. There are a lot of push poll calls, but with local flavor, micro targeting.