WHO is really trying to kill us?

The answer lies in the question.

Journalist Files Charges against WHO and UN for Bioterrorism and Intent to Commit Mass Murder

an alternative economic strategy

I like this idea.

Florida Biochemist designs a citrus tree with THC

In the summer of 1984, 10th-grader Irwin Nanofsky and a friend were driving down the Apalachee Parkway on the way home from baseball practice when they were pulled over by a police officer for a minor traffic infraction.

After Nanofsky produced his driver’s license the police officer asked permission to search the vehicle. In less than two minutes, the officer found a homemade pipe underneath the passenger’s seat of the Ford Aerostar belonging to the teenage driver’s parents. The minivan was seized, and the two youths were taken into custody on suspicion of drug possession.

Illegal possession of drug paraphernalia ranks second only to open container violations on the crime blotter of this Florida college town. And yet the routine arrest of 16 year-old Nanofsky and the seizure of his family’s minivan would inspire one of the most controversial drug-related scientific discoveries of the century.

Meet Hugo Nanofsky, biochemist, Florida State University tenured professor, and the parental authority who posted bail for Irwin Nanofsky the night of July 8, 1984. The elder Nanofsky wasn’t pleased that his son had been arrested for possession of drug paraphernalia, and he became livid when Tallahassee police informed him that the Aerostar minivan would be permanently remanded to police custody.

Over the course of the next three weeks, Nanofsky penned dozens of irate letters to the local police chief, the Tallahassee City Council, the State District Attorney and, finally, even to area newspapers. But it was all to no avail.

Under advisement of the family lawyer, Irwin Nanofsky pled guilty to possession of drug paraphernalia in order to receive a suspended sentence and have his juvenile court record sealed. But in doing so, the family minivan became “an accessory to the crime.” According to Florida State law, it also became the property of the Tallahassee Police Department Drug Task Force. In time, the adult Nanofsky would learn that there was nothing he could do legally to wrest the vehicle from the hands of the state.

It was in the fall of 1984 that the John Chapman Professor of Biochemistry at Florida State University, now driving to work behind the wheel of a used Pontiac Bonneville, first set on a pet project that he hoped would “dissolve irrational legislation with a solid dose of reason.” Nanofsky knew he would never get his family’s car back, but he had plans to make sure that no one else would be pulled through the gears of what he considers a Kafka-esque drug enforcement bureaucracy.

“It’s quite simple, really,” Nanofsky explains, “I wanted to combine Citrus sinesis with Delta 9-tetrahydrocannabinol.” In layman’s terms, the respected college professor proposed to grow oranges that would contain THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. Fourteen years later, that project is complete, and Nanofsky has succeeded where his letter writing campaign of yore failed: he has the undivided attention of the nation’s top drug enforcement agencies, political figures, and media outlets.

The turning point in the Nanofsky saga came when the straight-laced professor posted a message to Internet newsgroups announcing that he was offering “cannabis-equivalent orange tree seeds” at no cost via the U.S. mail. Several weeks later, U.S. Justice Department officials showed up at the mailing address used in the Internet announcement: a tiny office on the second floor of the Dittmer Laboratory of Chemistry building on the FSU campus. There they would wait for another 40 minutes before Prof. Nanofsky finished delivering a lecture to graduate students on his recent research into the “cis-trans photoisomerization of olefins.”

“I knew it was only a matter of time before someone sent me more than just a self-addressed stamped envelope,” Nanofsky quips, “but I was surprised to see Janet Reno’s special assistant at my door.” After a series of closed door discussions, Nanofsky agreed to cease distribution of the THC-orange seeds until the legal status of the possibly narcotic plant species is established.

Much to the chagrin of authorities, the effort to regulate Nanofsky’s invention may be too little too late. Several hundred packets containing 40 to 50 seeds each have already been sent to those who’ve requested them, and Nanofsky is not obliged to produce his mailing records. Under current law, no crime has been committed and it is unlikely that charges will be brought against the fruit’s inventor.

Now it is federal authorities who must confront the nation’s unwieldy body of inconsistent drug laws. According to a source at the Drug Enforcement Agency, it may be months if not years before all the issues involved are sorted out, leaving a gaping hole in U.S. drug policy in the meantime. At the heart of the confusion is the fact that THC now naturally occurs in a new species of citrus fruit.

As policy analysts and hemp advocates alike have been quick to point out, the apparent legality (for now) of Nanofsky’s “pot orange” may render debates over the legalization of marijuana moot. In fact, Florida’s top law enforcement officials admit that even if the cultivation of Nanofsky’s orange were to be outlawed, it would be exceedingly difficult to identify the presence of outlawed fruit among the state’s largest agricultural crop.

Amidst all of the hubbub surrounding his father’s experiment, Irwin Nanofsky exudes calm indifference. Now 30-years-old and a successful environmental photographer, the younger Nanofsky can’t understand what all of the fuss is about. “My dad’s a chemist. He makes polymers. I doubt it ever crossed his mind that as a result of his work tomorrow’s kids will be able to get high off of half an orange.”

Biochem 101: How to design a Cannabis-equivalent citrus plant

Step One:
Biochemically isolate all the required enzymes for the production of THC.

Step Two:
Perform N-terminal sequencing on isolated enzymes, design degenerate PCR (polymerase chain reaction) primers and amplify the genes.

Step Three:
Clone genes into an agrobacterial vector by introducing the desired piece of DNA into a plasmid containing a transfer or T-DNA. The mixture is transformed into Agrobacterium tumefaciens, a gram negative bacterium.

Step Four:
Use the Agrobacterium tumefaciens to infect citrus plants after wounding. The transfer DNA will proceed to host cells by a mechanism similar to conjugation. The DNA is randomly integrated into the host genome and will be inherited.

Any reports of it in the wild?

western medicine and finances both doomed to fail

(NaturalNews) Here at NaturalNews, we've been publicly predicting the fall of Western Medicine for nearly five years. During that time, we've also covered the increasingly precarious financial situation, warning readers in 2005 and 2006 about the impending housing bubble crash and the implications for the entire financial system.

In covering these two topics (western medicine and western finance), I've come to recognize many strong parallels between the two. This article explores the common threads of deception that characterize these two powerful institutions.

#1 They're both based on fraud and deception
Both Western Finance and Western Medicine are fundamentally based on fraud. The fraud of Western Finance is that you can create money from nothing and everybody can get rich by selling each other fictitious financial instruments that have no connection to reality. The fraud of Western Medicine is that everybody can get healthy by taking fictitious patented chemicals (pharmaceuticals) rather than addressing fundamental issues of nutrition, exercise and exposure to consumer chemicals.

Western Finance's fraud is committed by high-brow academics who contrive complicated derivative financial instruments that are then presented to the investment community as things of real value (which they are not). Western Medicine's fraud is committed by high-ego medical researchers who selectively massage clinical trial data to create fictitious "scientific" results that are then presented to the FDA as fact. The FDA then "approves" such drugs which are sold to the public as medicines that treat "disease" (which are also fictitious, by the way; being voted into existence by a panel of experts who benefit from such disease definitions).

Both the financial instruments and FDA-approved medications are fraudulent to begin with, and they offer nothing of real, lasting value to anyone. They're both sold simply for momentary profits, without any regard for the health or the wealth of the People.

#2 When problems arise, they both treat symptoms rather than solving the causes
The $700 billion financial bailout created in Washington is a classic example of Western Medicine's "treat the symptoms" mentality. Rather than address the root cause of the problem (the Fed's control over the money supply and the very structure of fractional-reserve banking), politicians seem satisfied to rig up a series of financial bandages that allow them to pretend the problem has been solved.

In Western Medicine, this "treat the symptoms" approach is the de facto treatment philosophy taught in medical school: Ignore the real cause, don't bother educating patients about diet or exercise, and simply prescribe pharmaceuticals to mask the problem for as long as possible.

In both cases, the patient inevitably gets sicker: The financial situation festers and grows like an unchecked cancer tumor, and while stop-gap measures can create the illusion of a healthy patient, these actions inevitably contribute to far greater crisis down the road, where the patient eventually crashes and dies.

The financial sickness now infecting banks, lenders and insurance companies across the globe is an unchecked pandemic of infectious debt. But rather than addressing the cause of the infections, the financial industry seems satisfied to refinance the disease carriers so they can rise up, coughing and sputtering as they pass along the disease to anyone within breathing distance.

#3 They both enrich powerful corporations while impoverishing the People
The key agenda of both the financial and health industries is to enrich wealthy corporations at the expense of the public. In Western Finance, this is being done by privatizing the financial gains while socializing the financial losses. In other words, all the profits go to the wealthy elite while all the losses are passed along to taxpayers (this is the fundamental point of the $700 billion bailout, of course).

In Western Medicine, virtually every regulatory policy in effect today is constructed to enrich corporations. The FDA's censorship of true health claims on nutritional supplements, the FTC's crackdown on anti-cancer herbal remedies, the DEA's raids on medical marijuana... these campaigns are all conducted solely to protect the profits of the pharmaceutical companies at the expense of public health.

Think about it: Monopoly pricing on pharmaceuticals sold in the USA is enforced by the FDA and FTC. Approvals of drugs based on outright fraudulent science is openly granted by the FDA. Raids against vitamin companies, supplement companies and natural product retailers are organized and conducted by both the FTC and FDA, two regulatory bodies that engage in outright extortion, threatening natural health companies with bankruptcy and criminal charges if they don't pay outrageous fines based on fabricated accusations of things like "linking to a scientific journal from your website" (which is now a crime in the U.S. if you sell nutritional products).

These are all the actions of governmental tyrants who act solely as Big Business street thugs, wiping out the competition to protect the profits of their (mob) bosses.

#4 They're both based on arrogance and the worship of money
Arrogance runs high in Western Medicine, where clever men at the top of the pharmaceutical companies think they've outsmarted mother nature by brainwashing consumers into thinking the human body is born with deficiencies of patented synthetic chemicals. This same arrogance is woven directly into the fabric of Wall Street, where greed-based financial players convince themselves they're so brilliant that the mere idea of how to make money is now recorded as a bankable asset on the balance sheets (that's the Enron style of accounting, which has now infected all of Wall Street).

The arrogance in both these industries is astounding. Neither Western Finance nor Western Medicine believes there is such a thing as a reality that shall ever hold them accountable. They don't believe in gold, or real food, or cause and effect. Things are things because they say they are, and nothing is subject to economic reality, scientific scrutiny or real-world common sense.

These two industries have been living in the Twilight Zone for so long, they've completely lost touch with reality. In fact, they no longer have any familiarity with reality. Doctors, for example, have no knowledge of nutrition or superfoods. They are nutritionally illiterate the day they graduate from medical school. Similarly, bankers are almost universally ignorant of the basic laws of economics. Few understand how fractional-reserve banking really works, nor do they grasp the correlations between increases in the money supply and inflation.

Bankers and doctors, it could be accurately stated, have almost no knowledge about the very things over which they have been granted authority.

(For the record, yes I know there are many exceptions to this. Lots of well-educated bankers and doctors break out of the box of ignorance by learning, on their own, those things not taught to them in the land of academia.)

#5 They both seek instant profits at the expense of future generations
Western financial institutions are famous for their focus on the next fiscal quarter. If it doesn't create a profit in the next 90 days, it's not considered a worthwhile investment. This "instant profit" mentality inevitably leads to an abandonment of virtues like saving money or honoring future generations. Instead of leaving our children with equity, the United States of America (and its financial co-conspirators) have burdened future generations with an impossible debt burden.

Pharmaceutical companies think much the same way. Rather than uplifting the health of the nation with sound prenatal nutrition policies (and infant health programs based on disease prevention), it seeks to vaccinate and medicate every living being with a never-ending parade of high-profit pharmaceuticals... from birth to death. There is no attention paid to the environmental effects of flushing all those drugs down the drain (pharmaceuticals are now found in the drinking water of over 50 American cities), nor is there any attempt to actually prevent cancer (or other diseases) in any way whatsoever.

Instead, Western Medicine prefers to wait until people get sick so it can cash in on their disease. Similarly, Western Finance prefers to hide its problems, expanding its debt base until it gets too big to fail, at which point someone has to come along and bail it out.

Neither industry operates with any degree of accountability.

#6 Both are run by unindicted criminals
If I break into your house and steal your wallet, I would be considered a criminal. But when Congress breaks into your finances and steals your life savings, they consider themselves to be heroes!

Make no mistake: Both the Western Finance and Western Medical industries are run by unindicted criminals who steal, lie, and deceive their way to the greatest profits possible. Drug companies routinely bury studies they don't want you to see, and FDA leaders routinely stack their decision boards with "experts" who maintain direct financial ties to the companies selling the pharmaceuticals they're voting to approve.

Meanwhile, top bankers are shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars in favors to Washington politicians in order to avoid any reduction in their multi-million dollar salaries, even while the financial institutions they led are about to be bailed out by taxpayer money. What all this has in common is that the top CEOs, politicians and regulatory decision makers are unindicted criminals who are guilty of various crimes against the People: Theft, conspiracy, racketeering and much more.

If these people were held up to the same laws applied to you and me, they'd all be arrested and spend their lives in prison (or worse).

#7 Both are doomed to collapse
The final parallel between Western Finance and Western Medicine? They're both doomed to collapse.

That very idea was considered absolutely loony just 30 days ago. But I've stuck to this prediction for five years: Western medicine is doomed to collapse. And now, all of a sudden, more people are waking up and seeing their fictional world crumbling around them. The near-collapse of the global financial system, it seems, has rudely awakened a few people who were sleepwalking through life, intoxicated by visions of free riches, free pharmaceuticals and life in the land of zero accountability.

Reality, though, is a stubborn thing. You can daydream all you want, but the laws of economics cannot be violated any more so than the laws of human physiology. When there's a poison in the system (biologically or financially speaking), something must be done to eliminate the poison and bolster the health of the patient. Sadly, Washington remains in the business of denying the problem, which makes it all the more difficult to try to solve it.

Interestingly, the collapse of Western Finance is inevitably linked to the collapse of Western Medicine. How so? Because Big Pharma is almost entirely dependent on the government to protect and feed itself. Without Big Government creating an artificial monopoly market where competing natural products are censored or outlawed, Big Pharma could not compete!

Nobody would buy arthritis drugs if they knew cherry extracts or potent fish oils could solve the problem more safely and affordably. No one would buy high-profit cholesterol drugs if they learned the truth about red yeast rice, aged garlic or policosanol.

Big Pharma is entirely dependent on the government to prop up its business, and when the U.S. government goes operationally bankrupt (which is coming), Big Pharma may suddenly find itself competing in a free marketplace where it no longer has the tools of oppression, censorship and tyranny to bludgeon the competition into irrelevancy. When Big Government goes, Big Pharma will follow, and the collapse of Western Finance is thus a precursor to the collapse of Western Medicine.

Both institutions, of course, will attempt to claw their way back to power, even as they are crumbling. They won't go without a fight, and they may be able to put in place clever tactics that delay their demise by years. But in the end, no nation has a future when its finance -- and its medicine -- are based on fraud.

Think about that. It's a powerful realization. The U.S. simply cannot continue the way it's running today. With 50% of the population on pharmaceuticals, and children being drugged with Speed (ADHD drugs), and mandatory vaccines poisoning (and killing) young girls, there is no future unless something changes.

With junk foods and energy drinks intoxicating our youth, and dangerous chemicals running rampant through the personal care product industry, and foods being irradiated to destroy their nutritional content, there is no future.

With banks stealing money from the working taxpayers, and $10 trillion national debt knocking on our door, and the government taking ownership of more than 50% of the national economy, there is no future!

The real world will be a shock to many
The end of these systems is now in sight. They are crumbling under their own arrogance and stupidity, revealing a society based on self-righteous deception and global scandal. Everything we thought was real turns out to be fabricated: The money, the medicine, the economy, the law... it's all being revealed for what it is: A Matrix of enslavement, designed to keep the People believing they live in a free society, even as their health and wealth are stolen from them by the sinister few who wield political power.

Western Finance will fall, and Western Medicine will soon end its reign of terror over the people. We will live to see the end of the FDA as we know it; the end of the AMA, the cancer industry and the dominance of the drug companies. We may lose our savings and we may even lose our nation, but we will not lose the one thing that matters most in this cold, dark universe: Our sense of connection with life, nature and each other.

Because when all the fictions fall apart, and the facade of the American Empire crumbles like the twin towers on 9/11, when it's all said and done, we still have one thing we can count on: Mother Nature.

Nature will still be there. The trees, the gardens, the herbs... these things are real. The water, the oceans, the honeybees... these are the things that bring us real wealth.

Wealth is not a collection of digits in a computer. It isn't a promise printed on green paper money. Real wealth is a garden that feeds you, a river that hydrates you, and a system of medicine that nourishes and supports you. Real wealth is a day with sunshine, a night under the stars and a life lived with purpose.

Real wealth is not fleeting, nor subject to cascading collapse. It is as real as the morning dew on a cabbage plant, or the sweet taste of fresh blueberry juice, or the buzz of ten thousand honeybees pollinating an orchard.

These are the things Western society has forgotten, and in that forgetfulness, it has suffered a dangerous, multi-generational amnesia ... a disease of delusion, if you will, that is about to collide head-on with reality.

The awakening will be rude. Some will embrace reality and thrive in the Next Society. Others will deny reality and suffer.

As we watch all of this unfold, I invite you to join me in the real world; to eat real food, to experience real (natural) medicine and to make real, lasting contributions to the future of life on Earth. As fictional constructs fall to the ground around us, we are all being granted front-row seats to one of the most amazing transformations in the history of life on Earth: We are about to watch one civilization end, and another civilization emerge from the ruin.

We are, indeed, watching history unfold before our eyes. And you know what? We are all fortunate enough to participate in it! Don't miss this. Stay confident. Help those you can, and prepare yourself for the transition. The next few years are going to be the most interesting we'll see in our lifetimes.

Stay informed about more financial news by joining my Mindful Wealth Email List (free):
http://www.naturalnews.com/MindfulWealt...

Technical comments: While the outcome of Western Finance and Western Medicine are not in doubt, the timing of their demise is uncertain. The financial system could break and collapse in weeks, or it could possibly limp along in a severe recession for decades (a la Japan, circa 1989), depending on the actions of foreign central banks and the Federal Reserve.

Western Medicine will likely take many years to unravel and be replaced by a new system based on reality. But a collapse of the U.S. government would accelerate that shift by taking the FDA out of the equation. Without the FDA to enforce Big Pharma's monopolistic, racketeering practices, natural products would quickly take over the free market and Big Pharma would quickly shrink. Remember this: FDA employees are only one paycheck away from complete disloyalty. The entire U.S. government is held together by a long supply line of fragile paychecks. The whole system could unravel in less than 30 days if foreign nations stop buying U.S. debt.

About the author: Mike Adams is a consumer health advocate with a passion for teaching people how to improve their health He is a prolific writer and has published thousands of articles, interviews, reports and consumer guides, reaching millions of readers with information that is saving lives and improving personal health around the world. Adams is an independent journalist with strong ethics who does not get paid to write articles about any product or company. In 2007, Adams launched EcoLEDs, a manufacturer of mercury-free, energy-efficient LED lighting products that save electricity and help prevent global warming. He also founded an environmentally-friendly online retailer called BetterLifeGoods.com that uses retail profits to help support consumer advocacy programs. He's also a noted technology pioneer and founded a software company in 1993 that developed the HTML email newsletter software currently powering the NaturalNews subscriptions. Adams is currently the executive director of the Consumer Wellness Center, a 501(c)3 non-profit, and regularly pursues cycling, nature photography, Capoeira and Pilates.

america

have you seen this?

It made me chuckle.

According to snopes, this is for real.

is there a future?

Food shortages, fuel costs, global warming..I keep asking people, how do get ourselves out of this mess? No one can give me an answer. Back in the depression era, we went to war. Won't work this time now will it?

We are facing the biggest challenge we've ever experienced in our lifetime. How to survive. Wall Street may be in denial about this not being a recession (or maybe by now they've changed their minds about that), but I gotta say, this here recession ain't going away anytime soon...probably not in my lifetime anyhow. Unless of course, enough of the population dies off from starvation and we can learn from our greed to become sustainable. Tough lesson, but that may be exactly what it will take and what is most likely to happen.

Anyhow, enough of my rant, read Mike's article highlighted below. He may come across at times as a little extreme, but he is usually right on about the points he makes. And let's face it, things aren't getting any better. If you think they are you're living in a bubble.


The Biofuels Scam, Food Shortages and the Coming Collapse of the Human Population

HPV vaccine a fraud

The Great HPV Vaccine Hoax Exposed

My mom always advised me to question everything you hear and at least half of what you see. Good advice.

It seems the pharmaceutical companies and the FDA have hoodwinked the public again by promoting a vaccine that does more harm than good. (Remember the swine flu vaccine?) Seems the HPV vaccine does nothing to prevent cervical cancer, but instead puts young women at a higher risk for it. The FDA has know for nearly five years that the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) was not linked to cervical cancer.

Not only is the vaccine not affective in regard to cancer prevention, the side affects can be serious and even fatal. Link

the end of the world as we know it: Get Ready

HOW the NeoCons Stole Freedom: Blackstone, China, and the end of the world as we know it: Get Ready

I've said for a long, long time that we, as a nation of people, need to wake and take note of what is going on. Unfortunately there are many out there who have been and are complacent enough to think that big brother only has our best interests at heart. Gee, wouldn't that be sweet? We have been consistently manipulated and fed a diet of lies and deceit that should leave a sour taste in all our mouths. I really hate sounding like a doomsday theorist, but it's become quite apparent that the time is upon us when we must make serious changes if we are to survive what is around the bend or else, be led like sheep to the slaughter.

56 Ohio Counties Violate Federal Law

In Violation of Federal Law, Ohio's 2004 Presidential Election Records Are Destroyed or Missing

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet
Posted on July 30, 2007, Printed on August 1, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/58328/

Two-thirds of Ohio counties have destroyed or lost their 2004 presidential ballots and related election records, according to letters from county election officials to the Ohio Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner.

The lost records violate Ohio law, which states federal election records must be kept for 22 months after Election Day, and a U.S. District Court order issued last September that the 2004 ballots be preserved while the court hears a civil rights lawsuit alleging voter suppression of African-American voters in Columbus.

The destruction of the election records also frustrates efforts by the media and historians to determine the accuracy of Ohio's 2004 vote count, because in county after county the key evidence needed to understand vote count anomalies apparently no longer exists.

"The extent of the destruction of records is consistent with the covering up of the fraud that we believe occurred in the presidential election," said Cliff Arnebeck, a Columbus attorney representing the King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association, which filed voter suppression suit. "We're in the process of addressing where to go from here with the Ohio Attorney General's office."

"On the one hand, people will now say you can't prove the fraud," he said, "but the rule of law says that when evidence is destroyed it creates a presumption that the people who destroyed evidence did so because it would have proved the contention of the other side."

Brunner's office confirmed the 2004 ballots were missing, but declined to comment.

"Because this case is still pending, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner is unable to comment on this," said Jeff Ortega, a spokesperson. "Ultimately, whether the boards of elections are in violation of a federal court order is a matter for the court to decide."

The missing presidential election records were discovered this past spring by Brunner, a Democrat and former judge who was elected Secretary of State in 2006. Her predecessor, Republican J. Kenneth Blackwell, was sued in August 2006 by a Columbus community organization that alleged the former Secretary of State and other "unnamed" officials "selectively and discriminatorily designed and implemented procedures for the allocation of voting machines in a manner to create a shortage for certain urban precincts where large numbers of African-Americans resided," according to the complaint.

Under federal and Ohio law, all ballots and election records from federal races must be preserved for 22 months after Election Day, which fell on Sept. 2, 2006. While election integrity activists and reporters from a Columbus website, FreePress.org, had sought the ballots and other election records soon after the presidential election, Blackwell would not allow county boards to release the ballots, citing court challenges to the 2004 results and a 2005 suit from the League of Women Voters alleging the state was not following the newest federal election law, the Help America Vote Act. By spring 2006, after the League's lawyers stipulated they were not challenging the 2004 election results, some counties began to release their 2004 election records. Scrutiny of those records raised questions about the conduct of the election and some county vote totals.

On Aug. 23, 2006, lawyers for the King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association notified the Secretary of State's office of their voter suppression suit. The following day Blackwell's office sent letters to all 88 of Ohio's county Boards of Election, notifying them of the suit. It is customary for public officials to preserve potential evidence when notified of pending litigation. Blackwell negotiated with opposing attorneys and agree to send a directive to election boards saying the ballots should be retained. Ian Urbina, a New York Times reporter working on the story, reported that Blackwell said he would be creating a process whereby county election officials could eventually review and dispose of the 2004 ballots.

On Sept. 11, 2006, U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley ordered the election boards "to preserve all ballots from the 2004 Presidential election, on paper and in any other format, including electronic data, unless and until such time otherwise instructed by this Court."

Two months after Marbley's order, Blackwell lost the race for governor to Democrat Ted Strickland and Brunner was elected Secretary of State. During the following winter and spring, Brunner and the state's attorneys began negotiating a settlement for the voter suppression suit, according to lawyers involved in those talks. Part of that agreement, which has not yet been brought before the federal district court, was the creation of a statewide repository of the 2004 presidential ballots. When conducting an inventory and attempting to collect those records, Brunner's office learned that seven counties had no ballots to turn over and 56 counties only had partial records from the 2004 vote.

"This is not just a violation of a 22-month ballot retention law. It is a violation of a court order," Arnebeck said. "Blackwell told the New York Times that he would create a clearance procedure before destroying any ballots. The combination of Blackwell's directive and my letter should have been enough to give the counties notice."

What happened to the 2004 ballots

The presidential ballots and election records were lost, misplaced, damaged by water, taken to landfills -- all apparently by mistake, due to miscommunications, or because the local election administrators were not aware of the state ballot preservation law or the federal court order, according to letters to Brunner's office from the various county election boards.

"Our staff unintentionally discarded boxes containing Ballot Pages as requested in (Brunner's) Directive 2007-07 due to unclear and misinterpreted instructions," wrote Butler County Board of Election Director Betty McGary and Deputy Director Lynn Kinkaid in a May 9 memo. "Several boxes containing all the wire-bound ballot pages were discarded into a Rumpke dumpster. The dumpster would have been emptied into the local landfill."

"The Hamilton County (Cincinnati) Board of Elections was unable to transfer the unvoted precinct ballots and soiled precinct ballots," wrote John Williams, Hamilton County Director of Elections on May 16, 2007. "To the best if my knowledge, the above ballots were inadvertently shredded between January 19th and 26th of '06 in an effort to make room for the new Hart voting system."

"No one could remember the disposition of said ballots," wrote Mike Keeley, of Clermont County's Board of Elections on May 10, 2007, referring to the "unvoted" or unused ballots from the 2004 presidential election.

Since the 2004 election, a handful of media organizations, civil rights groups, attorneys, historians and authors have been investigating how the president won in Ohio by 118,775 votes. These inquiries have had two primary focuses: examining Republican-led voter suppression tactics and problems with the vote count, suggesting vote count fraud.

The partisan voter suppression tactics have been easier to document. Before the election, Blackwell, who was co-chair of the state's Bush-Cheney campaign, issued numerous administrative orders that fueled an extreme partisan climate. One of the most notable came as Ohio was seeing large voter registration drives in mid-2004. Blackwell issued an order, which he later rescinded under pressure, saying only voter registrations on 80-pound paper would be accepted and processed. At the time, Republican Gov. Robert Taft told reporters that directive could disenfranchise 100,000 voters. The state Republican Party also threatened to send thousands of poll challengers to local precincts, to ensure only properly registered voter exercised that right.

On Election Day in many Ohio cities, the turnout -- or voter accommodation rate -- in these traditional Democratic strongholds was markedly lower than in nearby suburbs, where Republicans have tended to be the majority. In Columbus, the King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association sued saying African-American voters in Franklin County were disenfranchised because urban precincts received fewer voting machines per capita than the whiter, wealthier suburbs. They noted urban precincts had many more voting machines during the spring primary.

Ohio's Secretary of State and Attorney General are engaged in settlement talks in the neighborhood association suit, suggesting the voter suppression claims have merit. In contrast, the case for Republican vote count fraud in the rural areas has been much harder to prove, even as the certified vote count is problematic in some counties.

Compared to Ohio's Democratic urban core, turnout in the Republican districts was higher than the 2000 election. Moreover, in a handful of counties there were vote count anomalies that made post-election observers question whether Bush's vote was padded. The most notable example is more than 10,000 voters from several Bible belt counties who voted for Bush and voted in favor of gay marriage, if the results are true. In a dozen rural counties, virtually unknown Democrats at the bottom of the ballot received more votes that Kerry, an oddity in a presidential year.

Reporters associated with FreePress.org and Arnebeck's legal team hoped the court order preserving the 2004 ballots would enable them to investigate how these results occurred. Depending on the ballot type and vote-counting machine used, they have theories about how Bush's vote could have been inflated. But because many of these rural counties apparently have destroyed the very 2004 election records that would clarify what happened, it is now virtually impossible to determine what happened.

In Warren County, where county election officials said on Election Day that the FBI had declared a homeland security alert -- which they later retracted -- ballots were diverted to a warehouse before counting. The local media was not allowed to observe the vote count. According to a letter from the Warren County Board of Election to Brunner's office, the election board cannot find 22,000 unused ballots from the election.

"The missing records reveal where the fraud occurred," said Arnebeck. "You take as an example, Warren County. It is well documented that there was a phony homeland security alert and that was the excuse for excluding the public and the press from observing what was going on during Election Day. So the missing unused ballots would suggest that ballots were remade to fit the desired result."

"The same situation occurred in Clermont County," he said. "We have sworn affidavits from people who saw white stickers placed over the Kerry-Edward ovals in this optical scan county," he said, referring to one way of masking a would-be Kerry vote, because optical-scan machines read ink marks on paper ballots. "So the missing unused ballots would suggest they were used to remake ballots to reflect the desired vote for Bush."

Many rural Ohio counties did not have vote count problems, Arnebeck said. But enough did have significant problems that called for further investigation.

"The Attorney General says the rural counties all say human error was to blame (for the missing ballots)," he said. "There are some counties where ballots are missing and we don't believe anything was wrong with the vote count. But there are others where that human error covers up what we think was vote count fraud."

Another big category of votes that will never be explained are the nearly 129,000 ballots that were rejected by voting machines and not counted. Many of these 2004 ballots -- a mix of computer punch cards, paper ballots to be marked by ink and electronic votes -- are among the incomplete 2004 election records. One post-election analysis found 94,000 of these ballots come from Democratic-majority precincts, and estimated these that ballots could have cost Kerry an additional 26,000 votes.

Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet.org and co-author of What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election, with Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman (The New Press, 2006).

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
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