The Bonehead Compendium

Volume 87, The Voter Fraud Narrative: A Tale Told by a Partisan Idiot

ken@boneheadcompendium.com (Kenneth Anderson) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 18:40:21 -0500

To the paper's credit, two editorials appeared in the Wall Street Journal today, arguing various facets of fraud in America's electoral system. New York University media professor, Mark Crispin Miller, delivers an intellectually honest and fact-based indictment of Republican vote suppression effort in our current epoch. Hans von Spakovsky, a politically tainted GOP operative accused by senior Justice Department colleagues of blocking investigations of voting rights violations, delivers a fatuous and rigorously dishonest presentation of "voter fraud," employing innuendo, irrelevant historical artifact and logical fallacy.

While Spakovsky's article wends a tale of voting fraud through the ages, his argument for restrictive voting laws is based both on known voter fraud cases from decades or centuries ago, an...

Volume 86: The False Narrative of "Voter Fraud"

ken@boneheadcompendium.com (Kenneth Anderson) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 18:33:58 -0500

[Published at OpEd News, Update below]

Mere weeks before the crucial presidential election, the Republican party and their various agencies have uncorked a wide spread effort to save the failing campaign of John McCain. Critical swing states that are now seen drifting toward Obama have been targeted with outright and likely illegal voter roll purges, or, in states where the GOP is not completely in command of the election apparatus, specious lawsuits have been filed that demand voter registration verification against unreliable databases in order to exact large-scale purges of voter rolls. Despite...

Vol. 85: Circus Maximus: the clown car of American politics

ken@boneheadcompendium.com (Kenneth Anderson) — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 14:25:41 -0500

Endlessly mundane and always uninformative, the moribund struggle for party nominations in what we so disrespectfully still call the "presidential campaign" inhabit a realm of such vacuous inanity, a casual observer can palpably sense malignant tumors of ennui forming within. While would-be Republican candidates spar for the GOP nomination by appealing to brain stem functions (that is, when they're not extolling us with tales of their heavenly devotion), Democrats carry themselves at only a marginally elevated level. This is not to say that there are not candidates — on both sides — who would like to raise the bar and address actual issues and policy, but those are shunned by our craven and cack-handed media mavens, who never seem to tire of their perceived role as king-maker in what has become — for the world's "greatest democracy" — an embarrassing spectacle of the most base and primitive dimensions. I suspect if media moguls could get R...

Vol 84: The Iraq Oil Law: In Pursuit of Happiness

ken@boneheadcompendium.com (Kenneth Anderson) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 13:51:19 -0400

As follow-on to The Long Game, this is a summary the current state of things surrounding the disposition of the Iraq Oil Law and, not entirely obliquely, the privatization efforts that have been required of Iraq. This was prompted, as stated earlier, by a comment from Mentarch in which he asks,

But how could this even remotely be profitable, when any employees ("foreigners") sent over there gets a target painted on their back the moment they land in Iraq?

The extant chaos and violence that rocks the country is indeed an impediment to extracting Iraqi oil wealth. The petroleum infrastructure in Iraq has suffered almost daily sabotage and attacks while A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

-- Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler,
USMC,
War is a Racket

If it has not already done so [Ed. to date, it has not], the Iraqi parliament is expected to pass a new National Oil Law. This is probably not something many Americans have heard much about and generally most US media outlets have portrayed the law as a good and necessary thing. The law appears designed to reinvigorate the dilapidated oil industry in a country with vast oil wealth but which has been punished by wars and sanctions for decades. ...