White House Tries to Define Contraception As Abortion
By Cristina Page, RH Reality CheckPosted on July 16, 2008

In a spectacular act of complicity with the religious right, the Department of Health and Human Services Monday released a proposal that allows any federal grant recipient to obstruct a woman's access to contraception. In order to do this, the Department is attempting to redefine many forms of contraception, the birth control 40 percent of Americans use, as abortion. Doing so protects extremists under the Weldon and Church amendments. Those laws prohibit federal grant recipients from requiring employees to help provide or refer for abortion services. The "Definitions" section of the HHS proposal states,

Abortion: An abortion is the termination of a pregnancy. There are two commonly
held views on the question of when a pregnancy begins. Some consider a pregnancy
to begin at conception (that is, the fertilization of the egg by the sperm),
while others consider it to begin with implantation (when the embryo implants in
the lining of the uterus). A 2001 Zogby International American Values poll
revealed that 49 percent of Americans believe that human life begins at
conception. Presumably many who hold this belief think that any action that
destroys human life after conception is the termination of a pregnancy, and so
would be included in their definition of the term "abortion." Those who believe
pregnancy begins at implantation believe the term "abortion" only includes the
destruction of a human being after it has implanted in the lining of the uterus.

Media Coverage of Obama and McCain:
"Nuts" or a "Disgrace"?By Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America
Posted on July 17, 2008, Printed on July 17, 2008

Journalism, by nature, is not difficult. It really isn't. Most of the key attributes for solid reporting and editing come naturally to most people; fairness, hard work, and -- most important -- common sense.

News judgment, for instance, consists mostly of editors and producers using common sense to determine, based on the limited resources at hand, which breaking events and stories should be covered, and which ones can be set aside as less important.

During the slow summer months of a presidential campaign, that judgment and that common sense is usually even easier to put into practice because, traditionally, so little happens on the campaign trail with the candidates that what ought to be covered becomes self-evident.
Yet the Beltway press corps has become so borderline dysfunctional that even the simplest tasks, such as selecting which stories to cover -- such as using common sense -- now escape most of the major players at the mainstream news organizations.

From Andi Novick:

Friends,

Software-driven Optical Scanners or DREs are no way to run a democratic election. In 50% Percent of Sequoia Voting Machines Flawed Kim Zetter reports on NY's statewide failure rate of Sequoia's optical scanners, the ones most NY counties are using as Ballot Marking Devices only for 2008 but will be used to count all our votes in 2009, unless we stop them. (See also NY Loves Its Levers as New Systems Fail.)

New Yorkers are now discovering what the rest of the country has always known: software driven systems are unreliable. New York could have known; the evidence is there for the reading. Notwithstanding such hard evidence exposing the "crap" that voting vendors have sold across the nation, New York continues to proceed with Eyes Wide Shut. We must and should provide accessible voting devices for those with special needs enabling everyone to vote independently. But we must not permit these flawed, unreliable and vulnerable-to-undetectable-tampering optical scanners to be used to count our vote.

New Yorkers are privileged to be the only state with a secure, transparent, reliable lever voting system. Why would we abandon our trustworthy theft-deterring lever voting system for theft-enabling, defective optical scanners? Join with the rest of New York VOTERS who will be asking the state court for a ruling that forcing us to vote on concealed, undetectably mutable optical scanners violates our constitutional right to a reliable, open, electoral process, as we have enjoyed for so many decades with our current lever voting system. Go to http://re-mediaetc.blogspot.com/ and we'll keep you informed of how you can participate and support the lawsuit to save our secure lever voting system.

To see close up and personal, why is it so important that we preserve the only secure voting system left in America, come see what has happened across the nation where every state has privatized and computerized their elections. Huge opening in NYC, August 1st through 7th - STEALING AMERICA, Vote by Vote is a "must see" film which will be appearing in movie theatres across America, beginning with its New York City premiere on Friday, August 1.
Eight-minute trailer for STEALING AMERICA: stealingamericathemovie.org
andi novickRe-Media Transparency Coalition http://re-mediaetc.blogspot.com/Northeast Citizens for Responsible Media (Re-Media)

Here is an amazing editorial from the Naperville Sun in DuPage County, Illinois.
The piece itself, and the grass-roots furor that prompted it, make clear that it is
not the American people who refuse to face the facts about election fraud. It's our
thoroughly corrupt political establishment: i.e., both parties and the media (the
corporate and left/liberal press).

This column is especially significant because it comes from DuPage County, a
longtime hotbed of Republican election theft. (Those who want to know more
should Jean Kaczmarek's great essay, "The Fate of Tammy Duckworth," in
Loser Take All.) Clearly lots of people there have had enough of it.

MCM

Election commission is challenged to explain voting machine accuracy
By Bill Mego, Naperville Sun
July 17, 2008

"With all the mechanical improvements they have in the way of adding machines, and counting machines, they can't seem to invent anything to take the place of the old Political mode of counting - two for me and one for you. More people have been elected between Sundown and Sunup, than ever were elected between Sunup and Sundown." Indeed, when Will Rogers wrote that, we could not mechanize vote fraud. But now that we have things like Premier/ Diebold touch screen voting machines, votes can be stolen whether it's night or day.

Of course, it's not the machine that steals them.

Diebold machines are, as our election commission proclaims, fairly accurate. And we do not, in fact, know that any votes have ever been stolen electronically in DuPage County. All we know is that they have been stolen in other places and that, if they were to be stolen here, the design of the machines guarantees that the theft would be absolutely undetectable.

WEEK 2: Million Dollar Programmer

Click Here to Watch the Clint Curtis Video

"Mr. Curtis," said the questioner at the U.S. House Judiciary Committee proceedings, "are there programs that can be used to secretly fix elections?"

And so begins the story of Clint Curtis - computer programmer, Floridian, Republican - who was asked by the company he worked for to create a vote-rigging software prototype that he assumed would be used to try and "catch" would-be fraudsters. It was a standard "opposition research" assignment - or so he was told. The truth, of course, was something completely different and weaves into a tangled web the 2000 Presidential Election debacle, a now-sitting U.S. Congressman, and the number one threat to our national security - electronic voting.

Clint's story doesn't end with his resignation from his former company. Nor does it end with the offer of one million dollars to simply go away.

No, Clint Curtis' story ends with his taping up his hands, putting on his gloves, and a-bobbing and a-weaving right straight into that big ol' boxing ring that sits smack in the middle of the political arena.

And because he grew up thinking you're supposed to do the right thing regardless of party affiliation, Clint is still fighting to this day.

Clint Curtis knows that there are secret software programs that can be used to fix elections. How? Because he built one. And he also believes that there are people who will use these programs to try and fix elections. Why? Because he blew the whistle on one. Lastly, Clint understands that the number one threat to our democracy is electronic voting machines. Where? All over the country.

(Photo: Clint Curtis Testifies. Say it, Brother!)

Click Here to Watch The Clint Curtis Video