Media Struggles To Whitewash Clinton Vote Fraud Suspicions

Professor offers new excuse - claims Hillary overturned a 13 point deficit because her name was higher on the ballot

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Thursday, January 10, 2008

The media has gone into overdrive trying to whitewash Hillary Clinton's inexplicable defeat of Barack Obama in the New Hampshire primary and sideline questions about vote fraud, with the latest excuse being that Clinton's name appeared above Obama's on the ballot paper.

In reality, Clinton's reversal of a 10-13 point pre-polling deficit to Obama is highly suspicious and smacks of vote fraud, especially considering the fact that the New York Senator gained a crucial 7% swing thanks to provably vulnerable Diebold electronic voting machines.

In addition, the head polling clerk of the town of Sutton was forced to admit that they completely failed to count 31 votes for Republican candidate Ron Paul, initially reporting his final tally as zero.

The only mention in the establishment press of potential vote fraud in relation to the Clinton/Obama discrepancy fraud came on CNN at around 5:06am the morning after the primary.

"All the pollsters are unlikely to have made the same mistake so what could have happened? Something must have happened," remarks CNN's political analyst Bill Schneider.

Hillary's show of staged emotion is cited as a potential reason for the change, but at the time it happened almost all pundits were in uniform agreement that Clinton tearing up only harmed her chances because it made her appear weak. Some even likened it to the infamous Dean scream, which mothballed Howard Dean's success in 2004.

Another excuse is that voters experienced a sudden bout of involuntary racism when they entered the polling booth and refused to vote for Obama, a black man. On the face of it this is patently absurd. New Hampshire isn't South Carolina or Mississippi, it's an urbane part of the country which includes a huge swathe of Independents - not normally noted for their racist sentiment. In addition, Obama swept Iowa which is packed full of evangelical phony Christians and other groups more closely associated with racist sentiment.

Schneider reluctantly moves on to the third and only plausible explanation - vote fraud.

But now the establishment have dreamed up a new excuse to stop people asking questions about the whole fiasco - Hillary Clinton won because her name was higher up on the ballot paper!

"Without a doubt, a big source of the discrepancy between the pre-election surveys and the election outcome in New Hampshire is the order of candidates' names on the ballot and in the surveys," says Stanford University professor Jon Krosnick. "Our analysis of all recent primaries in New Hampshire showed that there was always a big primacy effect -- big name, big-vote-getting candidates got 3 percent or more votes more when listed first on the ballot than when listed last."

Research does show that this has a minor impact of increasing a candidate's numbers, but only by a maximum average of about 2% - Hillary had to overturn a mammoth deficit of 10-13% (Zogby had Obama leading her 42/29 per cent before the primary.

However, with Barack Obama showing little interest in contesting the decision, it appears that no proper investigation of what happened will take place and Hillary will roll into Michigan safe in the knowledge that, as the anointed Neo-Con establishment candidate, she has the full support of crooked Diebold voting machines in her bid to steal the nomination even though a growing number of Democrats are rejecting her pro-war, big government underpinnings.

AT&T and Other ISPs May Be Getting Ready to Filter

Brad Stone
NY Times
Thursday January 10, 2008

For the past fifteen years, Internet service providers have acted - to use an old cliche - as wide-open information super-highways, letting data flow uninterrupted and unimpeded between users and the Internet.

But ISPs may be about to embrace a new metaphor: traffic cop.
At a small panel discussion about digital piracy here at NBC’s booth on the Consumer Electronics Show floor, representatives from NBC, Microsoft, several digital filtering companies and telecom giant AT&T said the time was right to start filtering for copyrighted content at the network level.

Such filtering for pirated material already occurs on sites like YouTube and Microsoft’s Soapbox, and on some university networks.

Network-level filtering means your Internet service provider – Comcast, AT&T, EarthLink, or whoever you send that monthly check to – could soon start sniffing your digital packets, looking for material that infringes on someone’s copyright.

“What we are already doing to address piracy hasn’t been working. There’s no secret there,” said James Cicconi, senior vice president, external & legal affairs for AT&T.

Mr. Cicconi said that AT&T has been talking to technology companies, and members of the MPAA and RIAA, for the last six months about implementing digital fingerprinting techniques on the network level.

“We are very interested in a technology based solution and we think a network-based solution is the optimal way to approach this,” he said. “We recognize we are not there yet but there are a lot of promising technologies. But we are having an open discussion with a number of content companies, including NBC Universal, to try to explore various technologies that are out there.”

Internet civil rights organizations oppose network-level filtering, arguing that it amounts to Big Brother monitoring of free speech, and that such filtering could block the use of material that may fall under fair-use legal provisions — uses like parody, which enrich our culture.

Full article here.

Iran Accuses U.S. of Faking Persian Gulf Video

United States Navy, via Getty Images

The United States Navy released this photograph of a speedboat suspected of being from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Navy maneuvering near three Navy warships on Sunday in the Strait of Hormuz. The United States has said five armed Iranian speedboats confronted the warships.

TEHRAN (New York Times)— Iran’s Revolutionary Guard accused the United States on Wednesday of fabricating a video showing Iranian speedboats confronting United States Navy warships in the Persian Gulf over the weekend, according to a report carried by the semiofficial Fars news agency and state-run television.

“Images released by the U.S. Department of Defense about the Navy vessels were made from file pictures, and the audio was fabricated,” an unnamed Revolutionary Guard official said, according to Fars, which has close links to the Revolutionary Guard. It was the first time Iran had commented on the video that the Pentagon released Tuesday.

The audio includes a statement that says, “I am coming to you,” and adds, “You will explode after a few minutes.” The voice was recorded from the internationally recognized channel for ship-to-ship communications, Navy officials have said.

The Pentagon immediately dismissed the assertion that the video, which shows Iranian speedboats maneuvering around and among the Navy warships, had been fabricated. Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said Iran’s “allegation is absurd, factually incorrect and reflects the lack of seriousness with which they take this serious incident.”

Naval and Pentagon officials have said that the video and audio were recorded separately, then combined. On Wednesday, Pentagon officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak officially, said they were still trying to determine if the transmission came from the speedboats or elsewhere.

The unnamed Revolutionary Guard official quoted in the Iranian news media asserted that the video of the speedboats had been released to coincide with a trip by President Bush to the Middle East and “was in line with a project of the Western media to create fear.” The official said the sounds and images on the video did not go together, adding, “It is very clear that they are fake.”

The Fars news agency had said that the confrontation had been fabricated to present Iran as a threat to its neighbors before Mr. Bush’s trip so he could justify United States forces in the gulf.

The episode was initially described Monday by American officials who said it took place Sunday in the Strait of Hormuz.

They said five armed Iranian speedboats approached three United States Navy warships in international waters, then maneuvered aggressively as a radio threat was issued that the American ships would be blown up. No shots were fired. The video runs slightly more than four minutes and, Pentagon officials said, was shot from the bridge of the guided-missile destroyer Hopper.

The audio includes a heavily accented voice warning in English that the Navy warships would explode. However, the recording carries no ambient noise — the sounds of a motor, the sea or wind — that would be expected if the broadcast had been made from one of the five small boats that sped around the three-ship American convoy.

Pentagon officials said they could not rule out that the broadcast might have come from shore, or from another ship nearby, although it might have come from one of the five fast boats with a high-quality radio system.

The Revolutionary Guards arrested 15 British sailors in Persian Gulf waters last year and accused them of entering Iranian waters. They were kept in a secret location for two weeks before they were released in April. Their boats were seized by Iranian authorities and have not been returned. A Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Wednesday that Iran was willing to return the boats but that British authorities had not followed up, the official IRNA news agency reported.

Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington.