Wally found this article from The Free Press. It's from June 3rd, Bob Fitrakis' "Deep Throats and Stolen Votes." Here's an excerpt:
The Executive Committee of the Hocking County Democratic Party met behind closed doors at a Logan, Ohio senior center on Thursday, May 26 to discuss the forced resignation of Eaton by the Hocking County BOE.
Sources within the Democratic Party told the Free Press that a majority of the Executive Committee members were backers of Eaton and confronted Democratic BOE members Gerald Robinette and Susan Hughes who had voted to fire Eaton. Eaton made national news during the Ohio presidential recount when she swore in an affidavit that Michael Barbarian, a Triad technician, had removed a hard drive from the BOE's main vote tabulator and replaced it with another.
She further alleged that Barbarian offered a "cheat sheet" so that the computer tally would match a small random hand count of votes.
Under Ohio law, if 3% of the votes match the certified total, the remaining 97% of the votes do not have to be hand recounted. Eaton claimed that she suspected that Barbarian was doing this in other counties as well. Triad is responsible for counting 41 of Ohio’s 88 counties. "Bottom line is, it was against the law for him to come in there and take the hard drive off. We had not even had the official count yet and he had the hard drive off with all the votes on it," Eaton explained.
Regina Prater, the Chairperson of the Hocking County Democratic Party, refused to comment on what went on during the Executive Committee meeting, but she did tell the Free Press, "Susan Hughes is going to see the Secretary of State and I’m going to make an appointment to try to get ahold of the Attorney General and have an appointment with him. We'll have another meeting June the 9th and this will come to a head."
I meant to highlight Tom Hayden's appearence on Democracy Now! Friday on Friday. But it's one of those "always running behind the times" ("Just Like This Train," written by Joni Mitchell, on Court & Spark) so we'll do it now. But this, though it's a great section of the interview, isn't what I was intending to highlight. From "New Bolivian President Sworn in After Weeks of Mass Rebellion" (which is watch, listen or read):
TOM HAYDEN: The head of the U.S. Southern Command testified before Congress along those very lines that Jim has indicated that it could become a narco state. So, they are trying to paint it. Everything is on the line here. You have an Indian-led revolutionary movement that is unprecedented. You have Evo Morales, the head of the Coca Growers' Union. The United States has eradicated, I think, 40,000 hectares of cocoa, down to about 5,000 acres now. There's no program to really support all of those indigenous people. You have the collapse of the negotiations over gas and oil. You have these big multinational corporations on the run. You have the failure, the naked failure of what were originally the Clinton policies -- originally the Bush policies, then the Clinton policies, then the Bush policies which are still going on. The Congress is still debating whether these policies should be applied to Central America. The CAFTA vote is still coming up. You have the F.T.A.A., the expansion to all of Latin America at stake here. So much is at stake in Bolivia. It could be just a caretaker government, a band-aid temporarily. This new guy is thought of as another Mesa, kind of a moderate compared to the Vaca Diez, that could have been a coup last night. But where is the leadership on these issues? Where's the leadership from the Democratic and Republican Parties? We got them into this mess with our fine abstractions about free trade, and before that, 600 years of suppressing Indians. So, when are we going to start making things right?
Natalie e-mails this from Luke ("syria did it"):
* i was watching lehrer and they pointed to this story "in the nytimes": "U.S. Accuses Syria of Meddling in Lebanon: Syria has not fully withdrawn its intelligence forces from neighboring Lebanon and is interfering with elections there, perhaps even organizing political assassinations, the Bush administration alleged Friday." and they showed the paper and the headline on the screen and also the nytimes masthead. it kinda stuck out a bit like these things do, so i had a quick look and the article is actually an AP article. surely the lehrer team knows the difference. the article is the usual AP propaganda - but 2 questions: a) why did lehrer try to borrow the remnants of the nyt's credibility (there are over 100 outlets that have carried the AP story according to a search on the title at news.google) b) why is the egadministration ramping up the story now?
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