NBC un-plugs Kucinich from Presidential debate Print E-mail

Re-writes criteria to exclude candidate with ’dissenting’ positions

Less than 44 hours after NBC sent a congratulatory note and an invitation to Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich to participate in the Jan. 15 Democratic Presidential debate in Las Vegas, the network notified the campaign this morning it was changing it announced criteria, rescinding its invitation, and excluding Kucinich from the debate.

While searching for videos of the student walkout protest of the Martin Lee Anderson Bay County boot camp manslaughter vedict, I ran across this old video of the March 2nd 2004 March on Tallahassee by local film maker and former Tallahassee IMCista Ian Weir.

Kucinich campaign is awaiting ABC News explanations for its actions

The Kucinich campaign is still awaiting an official response from ABC News about the unexplained – some have charged "inexplicable" - way in which the network has handled its post-debate online coverage of Ohio Congressman and Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich over the past few days.

Among the "outrages" that have energized tens of thousands of Kucinich supporters - and even non-supporters - thousands of whom have flooded the ABC News website and other online news sites with comments of protest:

• * Congressman Kucinich was apparently deliberately cropped out of a "Politics Page" photo of the candidates.
• * Sometime Monday afternoon, after Congressman Kucinich took a commanding lead in ABC's own on-line "Who won the Democratic debate" survey, the survey was dropped from prominence on the website.
• * ABC News has not officially reported the results of its online survey.
• * After the results of that survey showed Congressman Kucinich winning handily, ABC News, sometime Monday afternoon, replaced the original survey with a second survey asking "Who is winning the Democratic debate?"
• * During the early voting Monday afternoon and evening, U.S. Senator Barack Obama was in the lead. By sometime late Monday or early Tuesday morning, Congressman Kucinich regained the lead by a wide margin in this second survey.
• * Sometime Tuesday morning, ABC News apparently dropped the second survey from prominence or killed it entirely.
• * AND, as every viewer of the nationally televised Sunday Presidential forum is aware, Congressman Kucinich was not given an opportunity to answer a question from moderator George Stephanopoulos until 28 minutes into the program.

The campaign submitted objections and inquiries to ABC News representatives on Monday and Tuesday. ABC News representatives have failed to respond - or even acknowledge - those objections and inquiries.

Stayed tuned for further details.

Comment by TNJP - You can let ABC and ABC's This Week know how you feel by dropping them a line at thisweek@abc.com or politicalunit@abcnews.com

State: Florida Voting Machines Can Be Hacked By Marc Caputo Tuesday 31 July 2007
Tallahassee - Reversing an unofficial policy of denial, the Florida Secretary of State's office has conducted an elections study that confirmed Tuesday what a maverick voting chief discovered nearly two years ago: Insider computer hackers can change votes without a trace on Diebold optical-scan machines.

The study by Florida State University found that, despite recent software fixes, an "adversary" could use a pre-programmed computer card to swap one candidate's votes for another or create a "ballot-stuffing attack" that multiplies votes for a candidate or issue....

Files show talks on 'vote caging' - Discussions with elections chief were prior to '04 election By J. Taylor Rushing, Capital Bureau Chief 7/7/2007
TALLAHASSEE - Internal city memos show the issue of Republican "vote caging" efforts in Jacksonville's African-American neighborhoods was discussed in the weeks before the 2004 election, contradicting recent claims by former Duval County Republican leader Mike Hightower - the Bush-Cheney campaign's local chairman at the time.

"Caging" is a longtime voter suppression practice by which political parties collect undeliverable or unreturned mail and use it to develop "challenge lists" on Election Day....

"MARCH 12, 2007: THE EDGE's host Augi Schmitz interviews Kitty Garber and Susan Pynchon of the Florida Fair Elections Coalition...

If you wanna try and keep score, Slate has an excellent expose' on the various Bushnik and RepubliCon scandals. An amusing interactive flash presentation and much more thorough text version laying out quite a few (if not most) of the myriad scandals dragging down the CrippledChimp and the moribund GOPers...

Bushies Behaving Badly - A guide to GOP scandals By Holly Allen, Christopher Beam, and Torie Bosch Friday, May 11, 2007
Paul Wolfowitz in the World Bank With Nepotism
The World Bank president and "Iraq war architect" allegedly helped his girlfriend get a generous salary package and promotion when she transferred to the State Department. Wolfowitz said an ethics panel approved the deal, but the panel denies it. An investigative committee found that the deal was a conflict of interest. (He apparently helped her career in the past, too.) Wolfowitz critics also allege that he used his position at the bank to promote a conservative agenda on family planning and global warming...

House Admin Committee Unanimously Votes to Dismiss 4 of 5 Federally Contested 2006 House Elections 5/8/2007
Hundreds of Sworn Voter Affidavits Collected by Curtis Campaign, Suggesting Inaccurate Counts on Electronic Voting Machines in FL-24 Race Against Feeney, Disregarded as 'Not Enough Evidence'... But Without Access to the Machines or Source Code What Other Evidence Could There Be?
In addition to voting Rep. Rush Holt's dangerous Election Reform bill out of committee today (see this late Tuesday story for details), the U.S. House Administration Committee on Tuesday also unanimously voted to dismiss four of the five U.S. House races from last November which had been challenged in Congress under the Federal Contested Elections Act....

PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 3 May 2007
Contact:

Susan Pynchon, Cell: 386-804-3131
Pamela Haengel, Cell: 727-244-9064
Kindra Muntz, Cell: 941-266-8278
Dan McCrea, Cell: 305-984-2900

FLORIDA MOVES TO PAPER BALLOTS!

FLORIDA VOTERS COALITION CONGRATULATES GOVERNOR CRIST AND THE FLORIDA LEGISLATURE FOR ENDING PAPERLESS VOTING.

TALLAHASSEE: In a historic vote, the Florida House today unanimously passed CS/HB 537, already passed in the Senate, that provides almost all voters paper ballots in time for the 2008 Presidential election, and bans paperless DREs outright by 2012. The bill now goes to the Governor where he’s sure to sign it since it’s his initiative....

Clint Curtis (FL) Needs Your Help Today! House Admin Comm Is Ready To Dismiss Congressional Challenge

Dear PDA Members, Friends and Allies in Florida,

Thanks to your efforts Florida is on its way to having paper ballots, will you help us make history again?

The U.S. House Administration Committee is getting ready to dismiss Clint Curtis's Congressional Challenge for the last election results in FL Congressional District 24!

Please email or call the committee members and ask them to investigate the facts and not to summarily dismiss the case tell them to fund an independent investigation into the Congressional election results in FL CD24. (Read the letter below for backgound.)...

This one's swirlin' down the memory hole.... He blames his staff, again, as in previous scandals. Article fails to mention his co-chair status of the RNC, oops...

U.S. Sen. Martinez violated election law in 2004 with oversized donations, audit finds By Mark K. Matthews Posted April 19 2007
WASHINGTON · Sen. Mel Martinez repeatedly violated federal election law during his 2004 campaign, including accepting donations that exceeded legal limits, a new audit shows.

The Florida Republican's campaign also failed to report enough information about its donors almost half of the time, according to a survey that was part of a broad Federal Election Commission investigation released Wednesday...