Greg Palast is promoting some plain old tinfoil hattery about rural NM.  I posted a (little noticed) diary yesterday.  It was a detailed analysis of one precinct in northern New Mexico.  There's persistent rumors of a big voter purge in NM, and Palast is one of the most high visibility proponents of that idea.  So I decided to look at the numbers.  And I don't see any problems in the precinct I looked at.  Someone linked to Greg Palast in the comments:

In swing state New Mexico, HALF of the Democrats of Mora, a dirt poor and overwhelmingly Hispanic county, found their registrations disappeared this year, courtesy of a Republican voting contractor.

This article isn't dated, but I find zero evidence of voters missing from the rolls in Mora County, New Mexico.  We've got plenty of problems in New Mexico, don't get me wrong.  But this just doesn't look like one of them.  Check it out.

Edit: Thanks everyone who recommended this diary. It's very important we remain diligent about our voting process. The only way to deter fraud is to let it be known that we are constantly watching and to be vocal when we find something fishy.

I understand this isn't a "Diary" per say, but it is incredibly important we get this out in front of as many people as possible and I am willing to sacrafice my daily diary to do that.

Basically the one and only Greg Palast has teamed up with Robert F. Kennedy to investigate several cases on voter purges taking place right now all over the United States but most notably in the West/Southwest area. He's asking all of us to donate whatever we can to get his documentary about this produced and on the air. You can read the details below I will be quoting extensively from Palast's article since he wants the word to be spread on this.

Yesterday I noticed a piece on Raw Story ("Talk host to Obama: Preempt swift boating") http://rawstory.com/... in which GoLeft TV’s Mike Papantonio describes what he believes will be an impending swift boat attack on Barack Obama.   Papantonio fears Democrats will do what we did when Kerry was ruthlessly attacked in 2004.  Very little.

Naturally the guy behind the forthcoming smear campaign is none other than former U.S. Attorney and Rove minion, Tim Griffin.  Griffin is no small time player in the Bush world of low life fear and smear.   According to the article:

Griffin, the McCain campaign's Director of Research, brings his experience from his time as Deputy Research Director for President Bush's 2000 run. He would also serve as a legal advisor for the "Bush-Cheney 2000 Florida Recount Team" during the battle that would culminate in Bush being awarded the presidency by the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore. Griffin would later work as aide to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove from September 2005 to September 2006.

Tim Griffin, a protege of Karl Rove, has been hired by the RNC for opposition research.  According to TPM,
his role will be to dig into Barack Obama's past for damaging information to use against him in the general election (Griffin is credited with finding material to "swiftboat" John Kerry).

This may very well be true, but there are no doubt many operatives doing the same type of digging.  Another possibility is that Griffin is being brought on to do whet he did in 2004: shepherd the RNC's vote suppression works.  Combined with GOP plans to appoint former RNC lawyer Caroline Hunter to the Federal Elections Commission, and I think we are witnessing the birth of another GOP vote suppression scheme for 2008.

The Title got you, didn't it? Good, it got me too when I first saw it.

Quickly, do you know what Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Greg Palast have in common? Yeah! They both said these words, but why ask God to zero in His Divine damnation against Pennsylvania? (Gasp!!!)

al Jazeera and AP are reporting that the government of Vojislav Kostunica collapsed when a united stand against E.U. membership could not be reached.  HuffPo also posted up the AP story.

Greg Palast has uncovered that Chimpy may have lied again; this time about Hugo Chavez sending 300 million dollars to FARC, the rebel group in Colombia.  You have to read this to appreciate how desperate Colombian President Uribe, and George Bush must be.  As Greg says, it's a "phantasmagoria."  It's got dirty bombs, WMDs and all the goodies.  Why it even has Israeli advisors.  Oh my.

Let's jump....

Greg Palast was on the KUNM call-in show this morning, and I got to listen to about half of it before I had to leave the car.  He is here investigating the funky primary results (I hereby request that it be referred to as the 'funky' primary, mostly because I like to say 'funky.')

Palast had some pretty disturbing things to say before I had to leave about the proportion of provisional ballots in upstate counties, and about the disappearance of names from the voter rolls.

"The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes." - Stanley Kubrick

This diary is about how the new President of Ecuador is telling the United States and its corporate cronies, including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and Chevron/Texaco, to take a hike, despite a former populist President of Ecuador having been assassinated for trying exactly the same thing.

There's that nice Chevron ad again, well . . . .

Here's a nice Chevron story that dates back to at least 1972, when Texaco (since acquired by Chevron) started drilling in the home of the indigenous Cofan tribe in Ecuador.

The Cofan tribe is still pursuing justice and the clean-up of oil residue polluting their land and water, now via a $12 billion lawsuit against Chevron.

As recently reported for the BBC by Greg Palast -- you can see the video here

The Cofan’s leader, Emergildo Criollo, tells Palast that when Texaco Oil, now part of Chevron, came to the village in 1972, it obtained permission to drill by offering the Indians candy and cheese. The indigenous folk threw the funny-selling cheese into the jungle.

Criollo says his three-year son died from oil contamination after, "He went swimming, then began vomiting blood."

Last night I was listening to Air America's off hour show, Clout, and Greg Palast was guest host again.  They have been bringing on the various candidates to talk about why they want be President.  They are given a time slot and they bring on whomever they wish will represent them well.  This week was the Edwards team.

I received an e-mail from Greg Palast this morning. I have not seen mention of it made yet, so I am pasting the last portion of the e-mail here below. Someday this story might make the headlines, if O.J. lays low, and Lindsay Lohan gets sober, and Janet Jackson's dresses stay secure. I appreciate Greg Palast's efforts. His website is here.

Just as the extreme U.S. political conditions that dragged on and on, more than 35 years ago, inspired me then, to refuse to recognize the authority of, or to cooperate with, in any way....the selective service administration, political conditions today influence me to refuse to support or to cooperate with the "moderate", centrist stances of leading democratic party presidential candidates. I fouled a number of years of my life as a direct consequence of the stance that I took against the military industrial complex. I believe that again we live in a time when we must take personal risks to achieve political and socio-economic reforms. I think that, in the 1930's, one democratic political leader did just that...Huey Long... but the credit for the reforms that were achieved, went instead to FDR, the Hillary or the Obama of his day... We didn't create the anti-American, greedy, radical agenda carried out by the richest and most powerful among us, but we are suffering from the effects of their US economy killing and dollar destroying plan, just the same.....

George Orwell lives!

No – wait.  Greg Palast’s latest literary missile Armed Madhouse confirms – we are actually living in - Orwell’s satirical version of the world.  Worse even.  We’re living in ground hog day come again ground hog year 1984. In my recent interview with the famed subversive and prominent "speaker of truth to power" Mr. Palast reminded me that his first gig was to take over writing George Orwell’s old column on the London Observer.  

Palast is a worthy successor, constantly pointing to government actions that are truly Orwellian.  Perhaps the strongest evidence that Palast does speak "truth" is the trouble the "masters of the madhouse" will take to sideline him. You won’t be seeing Anderson Cooper blowing kisses to Greg Palast anytime soon.  You are seeing Palast’s work increasingly rated in the company of other latter day saints of subversion – Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore – even Al Gore!  

Palast’s irreverent style crackled throughout my time with him.   Here is a flavour of Orwell’s legacy:  

Mr. Greg Palast sent me the note below on Monday, August 20, 2007.  

It has taken me this long to check back and post it now.  

Greg Palast has written an article describing how many of the poorer districts of New Orleans are even now not repaired. Worse, housing projects that were either not damaged at all, or minimally damaged, have been locked against previous tenants.  Black water soldiers are guarding the projects.

Ms. Patricia Thomas was kept from her home .. And sometime between Greg Palast's interview with her and the writing of his article, Ms. Thomas died..  She survived Katrina, but not the neglect she suffered afterwards.

Melissa Rossi Enron error:  Greg Palast withdraws his endorsement of her book

He told me to post this message.  

This is my first message.  

I hope I figured out how to do it correctly.  

Thank you.  

I came across an excellent article in truthout titled: Exclusive | Emails Detail RNC Voter Suppression in Five States. So I came here to see if anyone wrote about it. They did, but much to my dismay most of these diaires got little attention, and not one of them made the recommended list.

After reading Greg Palast's Armed Madhouse and knowing that he had come across those emails which proved that the RNC was caging voters and that is one of the illegal tactics that they used to steal the last two elections and after also reading diaries here which did make the recommended list asking when Palast was going to deliver the goods and get those emails out to the Congress and the press, why isn't anyone paying attention now that he has? This has the potential to finally take Karl Rove and his minion Tim Griffin down, and the story is huge!

Sorry to have kept this diary so short originally.  Didn't realize the etiquette for diaries...didn't mean for it to be a 'hit and run' piece.  Regardless, it is a 17 minute piece from a PBS special with Greg Palast (who uncovered the RNC voter caging lists) and it is critical that everyone watch this and educate themselves on, not only caging techniques, but the fact that this is a republican tactic admittedly used in in the 1980 election.  When caught, Republicans were forced to sign a document claiming they would never do this again...only to do it again in 2004 and attempting to do in 2008.  See below...