WILL KEN BLACKWELL FIND THE WAYS TO STEAL OHIO 2006 AS HE DID IN 2004? BY BOB FITRAKIS AND HARVEY WASSERMAN

Theoconia is commentary. This is the first and probably the only time I'll reprint in full, an article by someone else, but I think it's important and needs wide distribution.

I'll have a new Theoconia of my own up in a couple days.


Will Ken Blackwell find the ways to steal Ohio 2006 as he did in 2004?
by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
October 25, 2006
Columbus Free Press, October 25, 2006

All photos by Marley Greiner

The man who stole Ohio for George W. Bush in 2004 is now trying to steal it for himself in 2006. The question is: who will stop him, and will he also affect the balance of power in the U.S. Congress?

As election day approaches, Blackwell's dirty tricks sink ever deeper.

Blackwell is now using "push polls" made infamous by Karl Rove. True to form, child molestation charges are front and center. He has also escalated the mass disenfranchisement of Ohio voters, trashing the ballots of some ten percent of absentee voters. He has eliminated the state-wide ballot initiative meant to save workers rights and wages. He's even tried to strike the Democratic gubernatorial nominee from the ballot altogether. All of which could affect not only his race for governor, but key U.S. Senate and House races as well.

Blackwell is using Rove's notoriously deceptive push poll device to spread an unsubstantiated smear against his Democratic gubernatorial opponent, Ted Strickland. Push polls were rendered infamous when Rove used them in South Carolina to falsely suggest that Senator John McCain had fathered a mixed-race child. Often the impact of push polls is magnified by callers to talk shows that spread additional street rumors, as in the lie that McCain impregnated a black hooker. The reality in McCain's case: he had adopted a child from one of Mother Teresa's orphanages and prominently displayed her in his campaign literature.

In Strickland's case, the Free Press has obtained a statement from Barbara Mooney of Fremont, Ohio describing in detail the phone call she received from the Blackwell for Governor campaign. On October 23, Mooney picked up the phone and heard: "This is a 45-second survey. Please answer yes or no."

Then came: "If you knew Ted Strickland had hired a child molester would you still vote for him?"

The electronic voice continued: "Are you going to vote for Ted Strickland?" and "Are you going to vote for Ken Blackwell?"

Mooney answered yes for Strickland, so the next question was "Are you black or white?" followed by "If you knew Ted Strickland had hired a child molester who had gone on to a playground and exposed himself to them, would you vote for him?"

A yes answer prompted: "Are you a Democrat?" and "Are you a Republican?"

The push poll then asked: "How old are you?" and "Are you male or female?"

The push poll then ended, identifying the Blackwell campaign as the party responsible for the "survey."

On Tuesday morning, October 24, the Columbus Dispatch confirmed Blackwell is using this push poll in Ohio. It reported that a former Strickland aide had committed a misdemeanor for public indecency, but his record had been expunged. There is no evidence Strickland knew of the expunged charge when the aide was later hired.

At the final Oct. 16 Ohio gubernatorial debate, freshly scrubbed Republicans swarmed outside the Channel 10 studio in Columbus, chanting for Blackwell. Members of the Ohio State University campus-based young Republicans and fundamentalists gloated that Strickland's "child molester" scandal would elect Blackwell. In the televised debate, Blackwell tried to link Strickland to the North American Man-Boy Love Society.

The next day, The Dispatch revealed that when he was treasurer of Ohio, Blackwell had on his payroll a felon convicted of cocaine possession. The Dispatch said that when Blackwell learned of the conviction, he kept the felon on staff. Three months after leaving the treasurer's office, this same former Blackwell employee was sent to prison for four years for sexually abusing a young girl.

Blackwell attained national notoriety after serving as state co-chair of the Bush-Cheney Re-election Committee while also, as Ohio Secretary of State, running the dubious vote count that gave Bush a second White House term.

This year Blackwell will count the votes in his own race for governor, in the crucial U.S. Senate race between GOP incumbant Mike DeWine versus Congressman Sherrod Brown, and in a number of cricital House races hotly contested for the first time in years.

As he does so, Blackwell is conducting the largest purge of voter rolls since the apartheid nightmare of the post-Reconstruction Jim Crow south.

Since 2000, under Blackwell's supervision, Boards of Elections in Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland and Toledo have eliminated some 500,000 voters from their registration rolls. Nearly all are in heavily Democratic urban areas. In a state where some 5.6 million people voted for president in 2004, this represents nearly 10% of the electorate. George W. Bush's alleged majority in Ohio 2004 was roughly 118,000 votes.

Skeptics claim Ohio's 88 county boards of elections are bi-partisan, because each has two Democrats and two Republicans. But all appointments, and all tie votes, are controlled by the Republican Secretary of State, meaning that all decisions by all Ohio BOEs are actually controlled by Blackwell.

Blackwell is now imposing restrictive voter ID requirements aimed at crippling his opponents. Passed by the Republican legislature, these strictures aim to eliminate from the 2006 vote count tens of thousands of mostly poor and black-and thus mostly Democratic-voters who cannot or will not obtain the required identification cards.

The Free Press has further learned that even at this early date, some ten percent of absentee votes are being trashed by Blackwell's BOEs. Ohio's new "no-fault" rule allows anyone to vote absentee for this election, so absentee voting is estimated to increase 20-30%. Many Ohioans are opting for the absentee ballots to avoid electronic voting machines, which are notoriously vulnerable to tampering.

But Democratic sources in the Ohio Board of Elections have confirmed to the Free Press that about 10% of the absentee ballots cast so far are being rejected because of a technicality involving obscure driver's license numbers demanded on the ballot. Ohio driver's licenses contain two separate numbers: an eleven-digit number above the photo, and a much smaller eight character license number that begins with two alpha-numeric characters, followed by six numbers. It is the eight-character license number the BOEs demand on the absentee ballot. But many Ohio voters don't know that, and are using the wrong number---and thus having their ballot invalidated. Absentee ballots cast in Ohio tend to be overwhelmingly Democratic.

This absentee vote purge echoes another Blackwell dirty trick: the 2004 trashing of thousands of provisional ballots on which voters had not included their birth date. There was no statutory requirement to include the birth date, and thousands of provisional voters (and election officials) were never informed of Blackwell's special requirement. But he thus eliminated large numbers of mostly Democratic provisional ballots, benefitting Bush---a service he is now repeating for his own benefit with the absentees.

Blackwell has also attempted to eliminate his Democratic rival from the ballot outright. Seizing on a residency technicality, Blackwell's attack has elicited widespread scorn, including a lead editorial in the New York Times. Thus far, Blackwell has lost a series of court battles. The Columbus Dispatch has reported that the woman who originally filed the complaint---allegedly a Democrat who supports Blackwell---has asked that it be withdrawn. It remains to be seen if Blackwell has defnitively given up the effort.

The GOP has already eliminated a statewide referendum on worker rights. Issue One would have rejected parts of the Ohio legislature's vicious anti-labor Senate Bill 7, and was expected to draw pro-worker voters to the polls. But Blackwell disqualified thousands of signatures from the ballot petition, then sabotaged attempts to bring in more. On October 20 the GOP-dominated Ohio Supreme Court killed Issue One altogether. Fittingly, it will appear on many Ohio ballots, but will not count.

Overall, Blackwell currently trails Strickland by 20 points and more in state polls. Ohio Democrats have begun to crow that Blackwell's defeat is a done deal, just as they celebrated John Kerry's "victory" in 2004.

But Blackwell's push polls, voter elimination campaigns and ballot attacks cannot be underestimated. At very least, they could tip the balance in the state's hard-fought U.S. Senate and Congressional races, any one of which could help determine whether the Democrats re-take control of the Congress. Local pundits are already talking about a last-minute shift toward the Republicans, and bracing for thousands of alleged fundamentalist voters who will supposedly swarm the polls at the last minute.

In-depth studies of the 2004 ballots now cast serious doubt on the actual existence of such alleged voters, then or now. But unless Americans truly committed to tangible democracy are careful, J. Kenneth Blackwell just might find the ways to steal Ohio 2006, as he did in 2004.

--
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman are co-authors, with Steve Rosenfeld, of WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO?, just released by The New Press. They are of counsel and a plaintiff in the King-Lincoln lawsuit that has preserved the Ohio 2004 ballots. Fitrakis is an independent candidate for governor of Ohio, endorsed by the Green Party. Wasserman is author of SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED PLANET, A.D. 2030, available via www.solartopia.org.

THEY CAME. THEY SAW. THEY ????? WORLD CAN'T WAIT BUZZES PARSLEY

Last weekend (July 30-August 1) the World Can't Wait: Drive Out the Bush Regime magic bus tour hit Columbus with a laundry list of places and people to picket, protest, and pontificate on.

Sunday morning, WCW staged a drive-by protest of Rod Parsley’s World Harvest Church. On Monday, there were three protests: a counter-demo against the anti-illegal immigration Paul Revere Riders rally at the Statehouse; a “spy on the spy” action at Ohio Homeland Security; and a protest against Ken Blackwell at the Secretary of State‘s office downtown featuring (excuse the mixed metaphors) a verbal ass kicking by Free Press publisher and Green Party gubernatorial candidate Bob Fitrakis (and here) with music by Ukulele Man and Victoria Parks. Tuesday a small group picketed The Pregnancy Decision Health Center, a so-called "pregnancy crisis center" franchise operated by Heartbeat International near the OSU campus. There were also some smaller spur-of-the-moment actions. During a lunch break on Monday local activist Connie Harris and a friend decided just for fun to park near the Ohio Republican Party headquarters downtown with a couple of anti-Bush signs duct-taped to their car. Within five minutes the police showed up to "investigate,"the ill-mannered ladies.

For three days I tagged along with WCW, ostensibly to document and cover its actions. I may write something about it for the Columbus Free Press, but after a week of thinking on it, I'm at a loss as to what to say for "official" publication other than a few sentences of straight reporting on each event.

Full disclosure: I am no fan of WCW, having watched some of its leadership last May in Philadelphia purposefully distort the content and meaning of the Teen Mania Battle Cry event (see "Teen Mania: Lift the Banner" in the Free Press (hard copy only; article not yet on the FP site or here) at its protest and later over the Internet to fit its own membership-building agenda. This is not a criticism of well-intentioned WCW supporters and rank-and- file members, but simply a statement on what I, a seven-year observer of of Teen Mania Ministeres, witnessed. WWC could not get TTM right. In fact, I'm not sure it ever intended to. I was, therefore, leery that it could get--even if it wanted to-- Parsley and his minions--or anything else--right either.

What follows are my impressions and some pictures of the Parsley drive-by. In the next few days I will publish separate blogs on other events of the week. None of these pieces are intended to be definitive or objective accounts, but simply personal opinion sketches.

All photos by the author.

*****

“But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao
You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow”

bounced around my head as we drove up and down and around and over Gender Road and back late Sunday morning. One (or at least, I) can't move too far from the thought that WCW is the invention of the cultish Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) (and here ) the gadfly of what passes for much of “progressive” politics in the US today. How an obscure state-snuggling, issue-squatting leftie group, with little credibility outside of the head of its founder, longtime expat Bob Avakian and his followers, has organized the physical presence of a critical part of the anti-war/anti-Bush movement is the US today (is there a difference?) is a subject to ponder at some later date. That RCP's latest eogtistical attempt to repolarlize to radicalize has been embraced, apparently without a background check, by such a wide spectrum of the reality-based, who in less perilous times would regard the RCP/WCW as a mid-20th century Maoist joke--Gore Vidal, Mark Crispin Miller, Daniel Ellsberg, Janis Karpinski, Grace Paley, and even Wavy Gravy and anarchists-- illustrates the sad state of current organized Bush opposition

But to get back to Sunday morning…

about 50, mosty local or Ohio World Can’t Wait members and friends gathered by the Goodale Park gazebo making protest signs and speeches. A good portion were young. Very young. A few had traveled across the country on the WCW bus. Two Columbus cops on bikes looked on boredly. The mood was festive. It’s not every day that Rod Parsley and his church get a public wupping.

Bush Step Down!
No Fascist Theocracy!
End the Neocon Culture of Death!
No slavery in Any Form!
World Can't Wait--Drive Out the Bush Regime!
"The Bible taken literally is a horror"--bobavakian.net

Despite the outward fun, the pre-event was predictably strident and mostly humorless. It was no pig-nic. Parlsey and his congregation, which includes a substantial number of African Amercians, were denounced as “christian fascists” without any explanation of what that meant much less any idea of who attends the church. The number of African American WCWers in Goodale Park could be counted on less than one hand.

Ponderous and serious speeches were read about Jesus and numerous Bush infractions of human decency. A young woman read a poem denouncing capitalism, corporatism, consumerism, pop music and fashion that sounded remarkably similar to Teen Mania’s Teenage Bill of Rights. A lighter moment came with the arrival of Jesus who is not amused by the Bush administration or Rod Parsley.

WCA, unlike many other lefties, are clock conscious. At exactly 11:30 after a rousing fist-waving salute to the people, the WCW caravan set off for World Harvest. A similar trip to Ohio Restoration Project and Patriot Pastor Russell Johnson’s Fairfield Christian Church in Lancaster was put on hold due to logistics but mainly due to the cost of gas. "Progressives" don't believe in war chests but wonder why Republicans keep winning.

We arrived at the target about 25 minutes later, just in time for church to let out. The lock and load Parsleyites were, metaphorically speaking, dressed to over-kill. About 8 police cruisers, a land rover, a few motorcycle cops, and a police tow truck sat at the ready, along with WHC security and what I believe were a crew of World Harvest Media Men in Black videotaping the drive-bys (below left). There were a couple of easily ID'ed undercover cops, too. Although WCW could not enter private property (the parking lot, that is, or beyond), I heard secondhand, but can't verify, that a space had been set aside where protesters could park and protest closer to the church. reportedy the same space reserved two years ago for Flip Benham and Operation Save America's "friendly" Parsley pickets. I did not see any such space used. WCW apparently preferred a road loop and the after-service traffic jam to get its message across, whatever it was.

Like Bush, WCW doesn't do nuance. “Get out of Iraq!“ “Rod Parsley is a liar!” “Rod Parsley is a thief!” “Rod Parsley condones torture!” “Rod Parsley is a racist!” I began to feel like I'd missed something. Is it the Parsley Regime or Bush Regime that WCW wants to run out of Dodge? Some of the congregants stood in the parking lot wearing WTF expressions. Later, except for one “go to hell” from a passing car, Parslelyite response ran the gamut of “Jesus loves you” to “I’m praying for you.” The WHC Media Men in Black recorded it all for later broadcast on Reformation Ohio Jumbotrons or big screen church services. The Arlington Group (and here), RNC fundraisers, and Ken Blackwell, none of who do nuance either, will find the drive-by helpful. “This is the face of (fill-in-in-the blank): Liberals. Democrats. Homosexuals. Baby Killers. Women's Libbers, Pagans. Hedoninsts, Islamofascists. The Unsaved. Evolutionists. Lesbians. Nancy Boys. Embryo Flushers. The End Days. Anarchists in the streets.

KA-CHING!

What was the point of this Sunday morning fire hosing at World Harvest? What was the strategic thinking? What was the focus? The goal? Who, in fact, saw any of this outside of church members, cops, and neighbors? Sunday morning is dead air, but there was no press coverage that I saw. (Had the press even been alerted?) Did drive-by sloganeering on Gender Road have any meaning other than personal-is-political therapy for "progressives" or signing on a few new WCW members?

Connie Harris, who is not a WCW member but supports the anti-Bush movement says that the drive-by was about “getting the message out.” Fair enough. But what message?

Later a WCWer told me that Ohio was chosen as a target due to the convergence of issues here and the Blackwell candidacy and its ramifications. Again, fair enough. But, what was the purpose? Especially since the RCP disavows the electorial process.

The current christo-political situation in Ohio is complex and layered. WCW in "attacking" Parsley showed little understanding of theoconic history, context and lanaguage in general, and Parsley in particiular. While driving around shouting meaningless insults may have felt good, it did nothing to further the WCW's so-called goal of driving out the Bush regime. Instead, World Can't Wait legitimized rank-and-file fears, girded the opposition, and demonstrated the irrelevancy of 20th century protest strategies.


As an oppositional researcher documenting and writing about Biblical Ohio I was mainly interested in WCW strategies and motives and catching the reaction of the theoconic and Bushite recipients of WCW's drop-ins. The Gender Road action and reaction were predictable. The drive-by let the Progressive Gang vent and feel good about themselves. The Parsley Gang continued to operate from their safe spaces and feel good about themselves. Both groups fed off of each other's self-induced panic to build message and membersip, The theraputic pathologies,--the yin and the yang of Progressives and Regressives engaged seamlessly with nary a feather fuffled nor a sensibility rippled. When the dust bunnies scampered back into their holes it was business as usual.

When agit-props meet who is whose useful idiot?

NEXT; The Paul Revere Riders