Blog Spotlight: Folding Star of A Winding Road on The Count Every Vote Act and Negroponte

Usually, we tell you about the entry we highlight but this week, we're trying something different. We asked Folding Star (of A Winding Road) to write a few words about this entry we wanted to highlight. What goes into selecting what to blog on?

Folding Star: I logged on last Thursday to write about the lack ofa nomination from Bush for the new post of Director of National Intelligence. Senator Rockefeller of WestVirginia, who is on the DINO side of the spectrum more often than not, had raised the issue the day before in Committee and I felt it needed addressing. As soon asI got online, I saw the headline announcing that Bush had nominated John Negroponte. I'm sure the timing of this, the very day after Rockefeller scathingly pointed out the lack of action on Bush's part, was merely a coincidence!
At any rate, Negroponte isn't someone who should be confirmed to ANY position by the United States Senate, given his dark history in Honduras. But as we've seen time and again, the majority of the Senate seems willing to look the other way on the most grievous human rights violations where this man is concerned.
This time will be no different, apparently, as Senator Rockefeller has already come forward to comment that 'People grow and change over 20 years'. This comment, in this context, marks Rockefeller out strongly for a place in the DINO Hall of Shame.
While I was working on the post about Negroponte's nomination and feeling outraged and disgusted, the news about the new election reform bill, the Count Every Vote Act, came out and I was at least able to balance out the post with something I was very happy about. After all, it's not every day I get to write about being thrilled over something the Senate Democrats are doing! Though this Act doesn't go nearly as far as we need to go, it is a huge step and something to be excited over and to stand strongly in support of.


A Long Awaited Bill and an Insulting Nomination

Another day with much to talk about.

First of all, the Count Every Vote Act is finally underway. If you missed the news, Senators Boxer, Kerry, and Clinton, along with Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio, announced this new legislation, co-sponsored by Senators Clinton and Boxer, which would do the following:

-Make Election Day a Federal Holiday to give more people the opportunity to vote
- Require a verified paper trail for electronic voting machines
-Require uniform standards for Provisional Ballots
- Allow Ex-Felons to vote
- Provide $500 million to states to bring their voting systems and equipment up to date.

And it would require that all of this be done in time for the 2006 election.

We now have a job to do, my friends. Each and every one of us needs to let our members in Congress, in both the House and the Senate, know how strongly we support this legislation. There needs to be an outpouring of progressive voices on this issue.

Remember, our voices joined together to help convince Senator Boxer that she should sign on to the objection being raised by House members over the Ohio Electoral vote. Thousands of people signed that petition.

Now we have to make sure Congress knows we want this bill to pass.

It doesn't go as far as electoral reform needs to go, it's true. But it goes much farther than anything I've seen in recent times and we've got to do everything we can to make sure it passes without being totally stripped of meaning by the Republicans and the DINOs in Congress who'd like to water it down.

So far, I know of one online petition you can sign in support, and it's at the Friends of Hillary website. This is a website devoted to Re-electing Hillary Clinton to the Senate in 2006. Whatever your feelings about the junior Senator from New York, signing the petition in support of this VERY important bill does not commit you to supporting her in any way, now or in the future. Please take the time to sign it.

I suggest you not only sign the petition but that you also directly email or call each of your Senators and your member of Congress, to let them know you're in strong support of the Count Every Vote Act and all of it's provisions. It's so important that we support this Bill strongly from day one all the way through to it's conclusion.

I'll keep an eye out for other online petitions you can sign in support, and if you happen to come across one that I don't know about, please drop me an email and let me know so that it can be highlighted here.

I'd recently begun to wonder if all those speeches on January 6th about the need for electoral reform were going to come to nothing where most of the Senate Dems were concerned. I expected that Senator Boxer would come through with a bill, though. And I'm glad to see Senator Clinton as a co-sponsor. Though the media will (and already is) making much of this being about a potential Clinton Presidential campaign in 2008, the fact is that the Senator from New York falls on the centrist portion of the spectrum where Democrats in the Senate are concerned and her co-sponsorship could mean broader support within the party itself.

This will be a battle, there's no doubt of that. The last thing that the conservatives in Congress want is a bill that's going to make it easier for more people to vote! They will fight this. How easy it is for them to do so depends on us, though. They won't want to do anything that flies in the face of strong public opinion, lest they endanger their own re-election chances.

So make yourself heard today, tomorrow, and often and we can get this bill passed! There is a lot of support out there, on both sides of the political spectrum, for electoral reform in this country.

Now, on to the darker news of the day.

Yesterday, CIA Director Porter Goss and several others, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee about what they say is the very real danger that terrorist groups are still plotting against the United States and may soon move to the use of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons in future attacks.

Now, we all know that there's one thing that the current Administration is great at: playing the fear card. They've played it many times for political gain in the past and will no doubt continue to try and do so in the next four years.

This could well be more of the same. Keep the people scared, and they'll do whatever you tell them will keep them safe, which is invariably voting Republican! Ugh.

So, on the one hand, we need to recognize that there is a good chance that what we saw before the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday was more of the same. After all, Bush is pushing for huge increases in Military spending as well as the renewal of portions of the Patriot Act that expire this year, and these dire warnings could be paving the way for an easier course through Congress for these two wishes dear to Bush's heart.

We also need to recognize, though, that we do live in a world in which many people have cause to hate the United States. Many more now, in fact, than had cause to hate us before Bush and co's dirty Iraq war, which could serve as a How To course on creating terrorists.

We've been attacked before, and Bush has made it much more likely that we will be attacked again.

In light of this, Senator Rockefeller raised a very important question yesterday- if all of these dire warnings are true, why hasn't Bush nominated a Director of National Intelligence?

The junior Senator from West Virginia called this 'unacceptable' and he was very right. The US Congress pushed the legislation through late last year to create the new post, which the President had from the beginning been opposed to. And ever since then, Bush had been silent on nominating someone to fill it.

Talk about weak on National Security! Yet, somehow, the Bushies have yet to have that very real charge stick to them. They can label a decorated war hero as weak and have it stick, with the help of the media. But this group of people who avoided serving in a war themselves, yet rush to send others to die in wars they've created, are able to come off looking tough on these issues when the record says otherwise. They think by talking tough, they don't need to back it up with any real actions that make our country safer. And of course, so far they've been right, thanks to a lap dog media that deals not in facts but in myths.

At any rate, the charge clearly got to the Bushies, who just one day later have rushed out the announcement of their nominee. Do they think we'll forget the valid point that they've waited MONTHS to nominate someone just because they rush to do so the day after a Senator points it out?

But, this isn't the worst of it. The man they've nominated is an affront to all decent human beings. I'm talking about John Negroponte, the man who, when he was our Ambassador to Honduras during Ronald Reagan's first term in office, is alleged to have looked the other way and allowed CIA trained death squads to murder and torture countless people. As has happened far too often, the US looked the other way on human rights violations because the regime responsible for them was beneficial to the United States in other ways.

Negroponte has claimed that he didn't believe such death squads existed, in spite of evidence to the contrary which suggests he knew full well what was going on. As Senator Dodd of Connecticut said at the time of Negroponte's confirmation as our Ambassador to the UN in 2001,"Based upon the Committee's review of State Department and CIA documents, it would seem that Ambassador Negroponte knew far more about government perpetuated human rights abuses than he chose to share with the committee in 1989 or in Embassy contributions at the time to annual State Department Human Rights reports."

Negroponte was confirmed by a voice vote in 2001, just days after 9/11, to be our Ambassador to the United Nations. This means that, unlike with a roll call vote, there is no record of who voted for or against the confirmation. At the time, Senator Harkin of Iowa did rise to state his objection to the confirmation and have entered into the record news articles from the Baltimore Sun and the Los Angeles Times going into Negroponte's time in Honduras and the discrepancy between what he said and reported at the time and what was actually going on. Senator Harkin also noted for the record that had there been a roll call vote, he would have voted No on the confirmation. You can read these articles and Senator Harkin's comments in the official Congressional record.

In his latest confirmation, just last May, Negroponte was confirmed overwhelmingly by the Senate in spite of his dire history. The vote was 95 to 3, with only 3 Democratic Senators, Dayton of Minnesota, Durbin of Illinois, and Harkin of Iowa, voting against his appointment as Ambassador to Iraq. One Democratic Senator, John Kerry of Massachusetts, wasn't present to vote, but every other Democratic Senator serving in the last Congress voted to confirm this man to represent our country in Iraq.

This fact makes it all but certain that, barring new evidence or testimony against Ambassador Negroponte, he'll be handily confirmed by the Senate to be our first Director of National Intelligence.

There needs to be serious debate on this nominee and a serious look at his record, but he's been confirmed by the Senate time and again and I fear that this time will be no different.

Senator Rockefeller's words yesterday clearly pushed Bush to do something he'd be dragging his feet on, but his own form of revenge has been to nominate someone he knows will be a controversial nominee. Perhaps he hopes to paint anyone who objects as weak on National Security? That is, after all, the way the Bushies operate.