Submitted by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
If you’ve never heard of King Lincoln v. Blackwell, don’t be too surprised. Project Censored calls the outsourcing of the 2004 Presidential elections in Ohio “one of the most censored stories in the world.” Originally filed on August 31, 2006 in Ohio, King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell is an ongoing civil case to decide if the the Ohio Secretary of State at the time, Kenneth Blackwell, violated the Civil Rights Act (42 USC §§ 1983 and 1984) and the 1st, 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution by conspiring to “deprive and continue to deprive Ohioans of their right to vote and have, in fact, deprived and continue to deprive Ohioans of their right to vote by, in a selective and discriminatory manner, unfairly allocate election resources (such as voting machines), institute a system of provisional ballots, purge voter registrations, and broke the bi-partisan chain of custody ballots”. The vote at the heart of the issue is the 2004 Presidential election where, in defiance of exit poll data, there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush.
New filings include a revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell died shortly after giving his deposition in a small plane crash that is described as “suspicious”*. In life, Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and their personal minister of propaganda, Karl Rove. Connell ran a private IT firm called GovTech that created the controversial electronic voting system that Ohio used during the election. GovTech’s system transferred Ohio’s vote count late on election night to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by a company called SmarTech. That is when the alleged vote shift happened that led to Bush’s unexpected victory.
The filing also contains a copy of the contract signed between Kenneth Blackwell and GovTech Solutions as well as a graphic architectural map of the Secretary of State’s election night server layout system. In a possible indication that the system was designed with fraud in mind, the contracts and maps had never been made public until this filing. The lead attorney on the case, Cliff Arnebeck, consulted with IT security expert Stephen Spoonamore about the network setup. Specifically, Arnebeck asked Spoonamore whether or not SmarTech had the ability to alter the results of the election. “Yes. They would have had data input capacities. The system might have been set up to log which source generated the data but probably did not,” Spoonamore responded, further explaining that SmarTech would have had “full access and could change things when and if they want.”
Spoonamore went on to conclude that “SmarTech was a man in the middle. In my opinion they were not designed as a mirror, they were designed specifically to be a man in the middle.” For those of you not computer savvy, a mirror site is like a back back-up. It works when the main computer system fails. In contrast, a “man in the middle” is a deliberate computer hacking setup (and a violation of U.S. wiretapping statutes) in which a third party sits in between computer transmissions where they can illegally alter or steal the data. In an even more revealing statement by Spoonamore during the course of the e-mails with Arnebeck, he claims that he confronted then-Secretary of State Blackwell at a secretary of state IT conference in Boston. Blackwell’s response? “Blackwell freaked and refused to speak to me when I confronted him about it long before I met you,” Spoonamore wrote to Arnebeck. In a previously submitted affidavit, Spoonamore testified, “The SmarTech system was set up precisely as a King Pin computer used in criminal acts against banking or credit card processes and had the needed level of access to both county tabulators and Secretary of State computers to allow whoever was running SmarTech computers to decide the output of the county tabulators under its control,” and that “…the architecture further confirms how this election was stolen.
Contrary to any contention that SmarTech’s servers operated simply as mirrors and that a system failure was behind the transfer of data to the Republican partisan firm, the late Michael Connell swore under oath that, “To the best of my knowledge, it was not a fail-over case scenario – or it was not a failover situation.” This is also confirmed by Bob Magnan, the state IT specialist for then Secretary of State Blackwell during the 2004 election. Magnan further claims that the control of the system was in the hands of private contractors at the time. Magnan was unexpectedly sent home at 9 p.m. on election night.
For those of you already suspect of electronic voting and the election of 2004, these new revelations are a smoking gun and a road map to how the election in Ohio was rigged in favor of George W. Bush. King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell may be a civil case, but this newly introduced evidence merits a criminal investigation by the Department of Justice.
What do you think?
Source: TruthOut.org
* Commenter Otteray Scribe did the heavy lifting on locating more information about the crash, which as it turns out, is not very suspicious at all. His detailed and thorough post of the NTSB report is here. Thanks for the assist, Otteray Scribe!
~Submitted by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
kderosa,
I’ll speak for myself.
The source of the story are the pleadings.
The article isn’t about the plaintiffs credibility. They had standing and their credibility isn’t at issue, only their ability to meet the burden of proof to back their claim. The article is about the evidence being introduced to the trial. The trial is a matter of public record.
If you, like camelriders, want to try to distract from that evidence by attacking the news outlet or, as in your case, directly attacking the plaintiffs and their counsel, that only speaks your desire to distract people from considering the evidence.
Which of course raises the question of why you, allegedly an office of the courts, would want to keep evidence from being considered?
It couldn’t possibly be a political or paid political stance.
Rafflaw asks:
**********************************
The trim tab is a small secondary control mounted on the trailing edge of control surfaces. In small airplanes, usually the only moveable trim tab is on the elevator/ The elevator is the control on the horizontal tail that makes the nose move up and down. The purpose is to relieve stick pressure as the weight and balance of the plane changes. Properly trimmed, a plane can be flown straight and level hands off. The tab can only be moved a few degrees up and down, so if the loads are too great, it is said you have run out of trim. The most I ever ran into was about a hundred pounds of pressure on the control yoke with the trim control against the stop. I had to ask the pilot in the right seat to grab the controls to help me with the tremendous stick load until we could get it back on the ground.
A humorous instructional video from the UK:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PA5Pf9h2Vk
This is undoubtedly way more than you wanted to know, but is the shortest explanation I could come up with.
@GeneH, filing a report from an untrustworthy source in a U.S. District Court doesn’t convert it into a trustworthy source. Also, the fact that it is a public record doesn’t change anything either.
The real objection is that an untrustworthy source is really an ad hominem, alogical fallacy. Why don’t you make that objection or are you too concerned you’d lose that arrow in your rhetorical quiver, since you shoot it so often.
The problem with this report is the source is a filing made in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio Eastern Division.
Oh, wait. That’s not a problem at all. That’s a public record.
now that’s funny
The problem with this report is the source, which cannot be trusted. I have no doubt there is voter fraud occurring, as well all do, but when a story comes from a biased left-wing source, one must ignore it and move on, and truthout.org has proven themselves to be a biased left-wing site.
http://www.intellectualconservative.com/article2596.html
The timing of the crash was very interesting and I agree with Gene that the investigation seemed a little weird, but I am no expert when it comes to crashes and investigations. OS, you have that field sewed up. Well done.
OS,
See that’s the difference between you and I.
You got a lot more experience…
Temperature drops 3.75 degrees Fahrenheit for every thousand feet up. There does not have to be freezing precipitation, and quite often there is not. Water can stay in liquid form below 32 degrees Fahrenheit if in cloud or fog form, but the instant it is disturbed, it turns to solid form and sticks to whatever disturbs it. It is common to have a layer of icing, with a warmer layer both below and above it. That is why pilots are told to climb when ice is first encountered in order to get above the freezing layer.
Frozen precipitation in the form of snow or sleet tends to NOT stick to airplanes because it is already in solid form and cannot stick.
OS,
That is where my thinking was heading..
If for some reason he was down to a partial panel… WOWWW
You gotta pretty sharp and fast.
That is a great point about the vacuum gauge. I honestly hardly ever
look at it. (except at run up). Even if he was scanning with the size of vacuum gauge and everything else that was going on he might not or probably would not have a noticed an abnormality, and (I am guessing) was getting all kinds of wrong indications.
I hate to second guess a professional accident investigation but I have a million questions, thoughts and ideas.
Gene H,
The accident investigation leaves some unsettled thoughts with me as well.
I can not say specifically that any of the investigation team did anything
incorrect or inappropriate, but, the witness that saw the aircraft crash did not report any freezing precipitation at the time of the crash. The tower said they did not have any reports of freezing precipitation in the area at the time that N9299N initially contacted them. The Tower at that time would have told N9299N that they were experiencing freezing precip or they physically looked out the window and saw it (in other words too new to be in the latest report from the Met office).
1. That does not mean that there was no freezing precip. But, if there was no one reported it.
2. It also doesn’t mean there wasn’t any freezing precip where the aircraft actually was slightly prior to the crash.
Bud, he was a low time pilot. It is not clear from the report if he was even current on instruments. It is damn hard to hit the localizer on the button when you are in ordinary IFR, let alone in some serious shit with probable icing problems.
Based on my own experience way back when I was still in a learning mode, I suspect he just got behind the airplane. It was way further down the glide path than his eyes and mind were telling him. The work load must have been overwhelming at that point, especially if he was down to partial panel. That can sneak up on even an experienced pilot. It takes a ton of practice on the simulator to even recognize when you have lost vacuum, especially if you forget to include the vacuum gauge in your scan. Loss of vacuum or pitot pressure is insidious and easy to misread.
Gene, I cannot quibble with that. However, in a high profile crash, investigators try to get the remains of the aircraft removed to a secure hangar as soon as bodies are removed and all the photos and measurements taken. There is always the problem of looters in any crash, not to mention further damage by wind and the elements. The weather was awful, so I do not see it as unusual the plane was put on a truck and hauled off to a secure hangar fairly quickly.
You can bet his personal effects were scoured thoroughly. If he had any USB drives or diskettes on him, they probably sprouted legs. The NTSB guys probably do not care about stuff like that. They would have been looking for logbooks, medicine bottles, and medical certificates in his personal effects.
OS,
He just about missed the state.
Remember we spoke of the ice on the pitot tube and static source earlier???
Is it possible that the ice had played a greater role in giving him false readings for heading and VSI, and altitude. Even before he may have known or detected it?
I mean it’s wild that ATC had to tell him that he was that far from the localizer… The ILS would indicate how far off he was, but for some reason he either didn’t believe it or maybe trust it?
OS,
I still have to go with the crash itself wasn’t very suspect. The way they handled the investigation was though. It’s almost as if they were looking for something he had with him more than they were attempting to cover evidence of any messing with the plane.
Bud, thank you for the kind words.
Do you realize that as far off the glide slope he had gotten, he would have missed, not only the runway, but the entire airport?
OS,
Your response to Richard Charnin is based on facts, logic, and extensive
experience.
I wish I could relate the facts as directly and fairly as you have.
It is truly a pleasure to read to writings.
Explanation: IMC = Instrument Meteorological Conditions
Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) apply for intentional flight into IMC.
Richard Charnin:
I am not a conspiracy theorist and I think all the wild-assed theories in the world will not make facts go away. A low time pilot with questionable instrument experience decides to get an abbreviated weather briefing, then take off into IMC with known icing conditions. He was off the glide slope by a mile and a half on a precision approach. Missing a glide slope by that much tells the experienced pilot he was disoriented and was going to have to make a missed approach and go around. Missing the approach by that much will get you failed on the flight test for an instrument rating. He was in icing conditions with failing aircraft performance, not to mention being in a situation above his skill level. He died as a result.
Collins died from a combination of errors in judgement on his part. I have been flying airplanes since I took my first lesson in 1950. I have several ratings, including multi-engine and instrument. I looked at the weather for that night and even with my experience, I would NEVER have taken off to make that flight, not even in the twin-engine airplane I used to own. And that airplane had deicing boots on the propellers and an autopilot.
I agree there was election fraud, but it is chasing shadows to blame Collins’ crash on anyone but him. As I said above, I suspect there were many who breathed a great sigh of relief when the news of his death was announced. Spend the energy, time and money on catching the bad guys rather than imagining something that did not happen.
Otteray Scribe:
Your defense of the official story is admirable. But the story is not about ICE. It’s about Election Fraud. You could have just linked to your source and spared us the bandwidth. If your goal was to misdirect away from the real story, you succeeded. But surely that was not your intent, yes? This story won’t go away.