Happy RoboCon Election Fraud Budget Day

Lucky scheduling break for the Cons, eh? - getting Election Canada's Marc Mayrand to testify on 2011 election fraud on the same day they released the 2012 budget.

"We are free to choose our future," Flaherty said in his budget speech. "We have made our choice."


Election Fraud : Calling it "absolutely outrageous" and " totally unacceptable in a modern democracy", Elections Canada Marc Mayrand told the PROCommittee EC is investigating 800 specific complaints of electoral phone fraud in 200 ridings across ten provinces and one territory. 250 files open right now including 70 out of the 7,000 complaints in Guelph.

2012 Budget : Elections Canada budget to be cut by $7.5 million a year.


Election Fraud  : CBC's Terry Milewski : Misleading robocalls went to voters ID'd as non-Tories
2012 Budget : CBC budget cut by 10%


Well I guess that'll learn 'em.


The budget features "streamlining" environmental review processes, plus gives $8 million to the Canadian Revenue Agency to target registered charities that are "too overtly political", translation : "opposition from environmental groups to the massive Northern Gateway oil sands pipeline."
New RevCan money will investigate "the extent to which these are funded by foreign sources." 

But foreign tarsands-to-tanker funding from China is still a-ok, even at the cost of Canadian jobs ... 


PetroChina bids to help build $5.5-billion Northern Gateway pipeline


"Chinese investment in Canada’s energy sector could move to a new level if PetroChina wins a bid to build the controversial Northern Gateway oil sands pipeline.
The largest of China’s three state-controlled oil companies has expressed an interest in building the $5.5-billion project across the northern Canadian Rockies and is considering purchasing an equity stake, said Pat Daniel, president and CEO of proponent Enbridge Inc.
[W]ith a workforce of almost two million and cheaper labour costs than its North American counterparts, the Chinese company stands a good chance of presenting a competitive bid."


Well so much for Pipeline Steve's Canadian 'jobs, jobs, jobs' angle in that case. Also :


WSJ : Canada To Allow Wealth Funds To Invest In Its Financial Institutions

"The Canadian government said Thursday it plans to introduce legislation to allow foreign and domestic sovereign-wealth funds to invest in Canadian financial institutions."

So. After somehow being the apparent beneficiary of massive election fraud in which they gained a majority government, The Harper Economy™, as Pogge says, "is primarily based on ripping anything that might be of value out of the ground and shipping it out of the country as quickly as possible."
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Tracking the BC ConservaLiberals

Dave and RossK are tracking the incestuous links between the federal Cons and the BC provincial Libs.

Dave traces the Vancouver web development company Backbone Technology setting up websites for the federal Cons in 2004, the Olympics, the BC Libs and the BC government, and scoring a secret bid on the BC HST info site. Handy, that.
RossK is looking at the possibility the BC Libs are a mere subsidiary of the FedCons and asks "Who was the first FedCon operative hired by Christy Clark?", noting a DComm left Steve to reappear in Christy's government 3 months later in July 2011.


So who was the first BC FedConLib? Here's one from April 2011.
Dimitri Pantazopoulos became Christie Clark's principal secretary on April 4, 2011, in charge of "Long-term policy and priorities and Intergovernmental Relations" after doing polling and voter tracking for her BC Liberal leadership race.
A former Reform Party policy advisor, he was introduced to Clark four months earlier by another Reform Party policy advisor and Harper strategist Ken Boessenkool, who quit as Clark's campaign manager after Steve asked senior members from the national Con campaign team to "refrain from taking formal positions in the B.C. leadership race".
Boessenkool, a former Enbridge lobbyist, eventually joined Clark's team as her chief of staff last month.

 Clark explains :

"The role of the principal secretary is a policy adviser, helping us navigate some of the policy waters that sometimes can get difficult -thinking about the long-term vision for government, helping set some of that agenda," she said.

Prior to becoming Clark's principal secretary, Pantazopoulos was founder and president of Praxicus Public Strategies for 11 years, where he led public opinion research as Steve's official "Pollster of Record", and more recently polled for TO Mayor Rob Ford. And previous to that :

Mr. Pantazopoulos served as a Washington, (D.C.) Partner with Market Strategies, Inc., an influential Republican public opinion research and consulting firm based in Livonia, Michigan. 

Surprising how often, no matter where you start with these guys, it leads back to Republican flacksters.


Christy Clark's latest Harper acquisition is recent PMO press secretary Sara MacIntyre, who introduced Steve's inimitable media-repression tactics to BC this month with her appointment as Clark's media handler less than one month after leaving Steve's employ.

“She's taken the Harper media plan and brought it to B.C.” said CTV's Robert Fife.

Go, Reform.
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Election 41 minus RoboCon = No Con Majority

http://unfuckwithable.ca/post/19662621518 :

"This is how the 41st general election should’ve turned out if we didn’t have numerous voting irregularities and without the effects of robocalling [source] in each of the affected ridings."

Measuring the impact of alleged "robocalls" in the 2011 Canadian election

h/t  Holly Stick in comments for both links
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Emma the Embryo and the RoboCon

Emma the Embryo channels Fern Hill and DeBeauxOs at DAMMIT JANET! :

"Emma is the potential everyhuman being.

She is prochoice because gestation is a procreative process.
She's a pragmatist because pregnancy is not *motherhood*.
She believes that every child should be wanted and welcomed, and every mother willing and supported."

Choice Joyce on Motion 312 , coming up for HoC debate in April :

"Attention supporters! We need to help out Stephen Woodworth because the poor guy lacks imagination. He couldn't even think of a title for his motion! Let's help him out by naming his motion for him. Please email your clever, funny, or subversive titles to info@arcc-cdac.ca. We'll pick the best one and go public with it!"

Joyce Arthur

Executive Director, 

Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada (ARCC) 

joycearthur@shaw.ca    www.arcc-cdac.ca

Hmmm ... Woodie's Zygote and Pony Show ? 

Or Emma's fave : The 'If a Fetus is a Person Then a Woman Isn't' Motion

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RoboCon Time Capsule

Seen from today, one of the more startling aspects of the RoboCon live and automated calls story is just how much we already knew about how widespread it was nine months ago.
How did we come to forget/accept all this? The depressing election results appear to have swept it all away.

May1, 2011 CBC : "....voters are being told to go to the wrong polling stations — some up to an hour away from their homes" in Winnipeg-South Centre and Kitchener-Waterloo.

May 2, 2011 Media Co-op : 

"Residents from Prince George, BC, to St. John's, NL, are reporting receiving calls informing them that their local polling stations have been closed or have been moved.
According to the CBC, Elections Canada was first contacted about the issue on Saturday. Since then, people from across the country have been reporting such calls, many saying they are receiving automated "robo-calls."  

... Guelph, Toronto, Ottawa, Edmonton &  Prince George." 

May 2, 2011  CBC : 

"Elections Canada has reports from at least 3 provinces (Ontario, Manitoba, and BC) of misleading phone calls, claiming to be from Elections Canada. They tell voters to go to other polling stations than the ones listed on their voter information cards, "due to high turnout." 

CBC News has done some digging and when they called the 1-800 number left on the message, they got a recording saying the number was out of service. But CBC News traced a caller ID to an unlisted Montreal area code. It rang through to a pre-recorded message that said, 

"Pierre?? (Inaudible) Uh oh. There's no room to record messages. Please hang up and try your call again later. Bye." 

May 2, 2011 The Star  "Elections Canada receptionist Adele McAlpina said she had received about 100 complaints by mid-morning." From one district.

May 6, 2011 London Free Press
London Lib MP reports calls from people saying the polls had been moved.

"His campaign office received complaints about the calls that "call display" features showed originated in Florida and the Dakotas, he said"

May 11 2011 CBC posted a recording of robocall purporting to be from Elections Canada about a bogus polling station change in Guelph. They also reported live harassment calls made in the middle of the night targeting "Oakville, St. Catharines, Haldimand-Norfolk, Simcoe Grey, Guelph, Eglinton-Lawrence, St. Paul's and Mississauga East-Cooksville. The calls were also made in Egmont, P.E.I., and St. Boniface, Man".

May 22, 2011 G&M :

Bogus phone messages that mislead voters about their polling stations have caused widespread disruptions in at least two provinces: Ontario and B.C. The false messages appear to be clustered primarily in ridings where close races are anticipated, meaning a small swing in voting preferences could mean the margin between victory and defeat. 

 Elections Canada returning officer said he received hundreds of complaints about it.

There are scads more of these news stories from the time of the last election. Note they contain peoples' names and statements and the many ridings they live in - thus making the Con strategy of calling it "a few mistakes" and trying to contain it to just Guelph more than a little ridiculous. 

Bonus : Yesterday, an anonymous commenter linked to what MP Garth Turner had to say about the Cons' CIMS voter database back in October 2007 : Someone is watching you

"Conservatives were required to use the system to not only track a constituent's allegiance to the party, but also to collect personal information about constituents that might come to light when the constituent contacted the parliamentarian.
"Any time a constituent is engaged with a member of Parliament, they get zapped into the database," Turner said. "It's unethical and it's a shocking misuse of data." 

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RoboConduct unbecoming

Shorter CBC : They call you up and ask what party you support; if not a Con supporter, you get a frowny face entered next to your name on the Cons voter identification system CIMS, and a callback later advising you your polling station has been moved to wherever - a mall, a real estate office. 
CBC's Terry Milewski tracked this in 31 ridings clear across the country.

Former Tory MP Inky Mark, maverick that he is, confirmed how the smileyface/frownyface CIMS system works, adding that he opted out of it because :

"the party had control over the entire, nationwide database. An MP and his staff were at the mercy of headquarters, Mark says, because they had the power to allocate and revoke database passwords." 

Unfuckablewith discovers CISM is "designed explicitly" to be integrated with "a feature to perform robocalls on a nationwide level". He has a working draft up on security flaws in the CIMS and LiberaList, with the most interesting bits so far redacted while he thinks them through : 

"A shocking amount of personal information is stored on these servers and can be recalled for use in individual campaign offices and on Parliament Hill via a secure VPN connection to the main Conservative Party servers.  While this leaves the system vulnerable to [redacted], the greater issue is that in the process of establishing this VPN connection, the data [redacted], and thus, outside of the control of Canadian authorities." 

"the data ___ and thus outside the control of Canadian authorities" ???
The data is what?  Stored in the fridge? Stored on servers at some US voter- ID/townhall company? 

Which reminds me : Con MP Julian Fantino, Associate Minister of F-35s, is outraged, outraged, that three former board members of his Guelph electoral district association have alleged a second undeclared campaign bank account of $300,000+, which Elections Canada does not allow :

Fantino : 

“I am grateful to the people of Vaughan for their support of our honorable and ethical election campaigns. The disgraceful accusations from these individuals is false.”

Fantino’s fundraising co-chair Sam Ciccolini immediately replaced former board member Richard Lorello as a Director after Lorello quit over the alleged secret account. Ciccolini is Director and Chair of the Audit Committee at Italian Canadian Savings & Credit Union, home of the same alleged secret account :

"There was no wrongdoing, there was no impropriety, and there were zero allegations of wrongdoing during the elections. They talk about a second account; there was no second account," said Ciccolini on Tuesday."

*cough* Michael Harris, iPolitics :

"Then there is this evidence of a second account from Sam Ciccolini himself. In an e-mail dated April 29, 2011 to former Director Richard Lorello and Frank Domenichiello, who was president of the Vaughan Conservative EDA, Mr. Ciccolini stated that, “The reason we still have the second account still open is that Mirella [Chiapetta][secretary to Julian Fantino] felt that it would be best to have the TD bank account as they have been good to us and there were some transactions – checks that have yet to clear and at some point we would close it. I do not remember any vote taken on it, could be wrong….”  These comments were made on April 29 during the General Election, and according to Mr. Ciccolini, there still seem to be two bank accounts."

404 Systems Error published the docs a couple of weeks ago.

As noted in the CBC clip above, Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand announced today that he now has "over 700 Canadians from across the country" who allege "specific circumstances" of fraudulent or improper calls and he would be pleased to appear before committee (that would be PROC) to discuss it. 

Ha! PROC going in camera in 3  ... 2 ... 1

One a lighter note, among all the 'RoboCon is no-biggie' editorials flourishing in our media comes this amusing one from a former Con candidate: The great robocall scandal is a fraud.

Spending more than a minute talking to a voter is a Liberal plot, she says, all this fuss about fraud is just Pierre Poutine, and even if it wasn't :

"Out of a list of say, 1,000 phone numbers of supposed opposition supporters that you would get off a voters’ list, probably half are wrong."  

So again - no biggie. Apart from the fact voters' lists don't have phone numbers.
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h/t to Anon in comments for Vaughan Weekly link

Update - really rolling now :  Dave, RossK, and Dawg dig deeper : 
Dave : Toto I don't think we're in Guelph anymore and More pretty dots More evidence
RossK : Real/Not Robocall ... The number on Lori Bruce's phone
Dr. Dawg : Roboscam : Abuse of constituents.
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#TellAntiChoiceMPsEverything

Stephen Woodworth, MP
House of Commons

Dear Sir :

Thank you for your recent expression of interest in my uterus.
Unfortunately we have no openings at this time commensurate with your job skills. However we would be pleased to keep your application on file and review it at a future date in the event the world falls into a fucking time warp and we wind up back in the '50s.

Sincerely,
Alison@Creekside

PS We are delighted to discover #TellAntiChoiceMPsEverything, a twitter and FB account dedicated to keeping you apprised of all the latest details of ladybits. Please accept the following submission :

Dear Woody et al
I'm going through a bit of a dry spell at the moment if you know what I mean and I know you do!
But rather than using that disgusting estrogen replacement gunk, I find a little dab of vanilla ice cream from time to time works just as well, and everybody just loves it!
Yours in uteriety,
Alison
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RoboCon : Republican edition

The Cons' somewhat belated talking points about their use of the US voter contact firm Front Porch Strategies in the last election have been all about only using them for townhalls :

U.S. phone firm was just for town halls, say MPs 

"Jim Ross [Front Porch's Canadian liaison and Con MP Rick Dykstra's former campaign manager] said telephone town halls were about the only service the company provided in Canada. As for other calls, “Rick got all his live calling from Canada just like all the other (Tory) candidates.”   

and  "Del Mastro stressed that the U.S. company wasn’t hired to do any telemarketing or solicit votes. Front Porch Strategies was hired to host an April 7 telephone town hall on its server, he said, and was booked through its Canadian affiliate and paid in Canadian dollars." 

Yet here is Front Porch Strategies President Matthew Parker sitting in the campaign offices of Con MP Julian Fantino with a phone to his ear, a pencil in his hand, and a paper with the header "Election Day is Monday May 2nd - You Can Vote Now" in front of him.

Photo caption from FPS :
"Matt lending a hand for MP Fantino here in the greater Toronto area (GTA)"

What? 

Foreigners interfering in a Canadian election?

Ok, maybe Matt Parker and his business partner PJ Wenzel flew up from Ohio just that one time to do a little campaigning for Fantino, now the Assistant Minister of Defence, on their day off. Let's go to twitter :







So how did all this front lines taking over business get started?

Sorry - wrong one. That's one of their other causes - overturning Roe vs Wade in the US for the fetus fetishi.

Is this it?

Nope, not that one either.              
Ok, here we go :

You mean effective communications like this?

Perhaps the Cons require another presentation from their Republican friends on "effective constituent communications" because their current credibility on RoboCon communications is right in the toilet.

Why Nobody Believes the Conservative Talking Points on the RoboCon Scandal.

Meanwhile in other RoboCon news in just the last day :

Dawg : "The Speaker of the House of Commons is now ruling opposition questions about Roboscam out of order. ... And what should be front-page news barely gets a mention in the corporate media—it’s as though the Parliamentary Press Gallery is on an extended sleepover with Rob Anders."

CBC : Three former Conservative organizers want Elections Canada to look into how money was collected and spent in Fantino's campaign. They allege a second secret bank account of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Pogge does a round-up including a link to a great editorial on the above CBC story, and also notes that although the Elections Canada investigation into harassment phone calls in Eglinton (Volpe's riding) was closed last May, now that over 2700 ballots of last minute unregistered voters with no or bogus addresses have turned up in the same riding, perhaps someone could take a mo to look into that please.

Dave unravels the stuffing of ballot boxes , plus the strategic targeting of voters over 60 for phone calls telling them to go the wrong or non-existent polling station : “Every single person I’ve contacted has been (born) between 1947 and 1949,” said one unidentified Elections Canada employee."

And to cap it all off with a huge dollop of irony, Stephen Maher of Postmedia, who along with Glen McGregor of the Citizen broke the robocalls story in the first place, was reportedly thrown out of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy conference party last night. (h/t Ian by e)

Just one day in the media half-life of RoboCon.
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Arghhh Update : Or, had I known, I could have skipped doing the first part of this post and just linked to this ongoing and continuously updated version : The View From the Front Porch Looking North
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One month later : RoboCon Republican edition update
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Manning Centre for Building Conservatism 2012

The Manning Centre For Building Democracy 2012, billed as a "Conservative Family Reunion", kicks off its 3-day getting Conservatives elected convention today. 

At left is the first graduating class of the Manning Centre's Executive Program in Political Management at the Future Leaders Series dinner in 2007.

At their 2008 convention, a campaign activism session for young organizers was jointly held by RMG  Responsive Marketing Group CEO Michael Davis; Richard Ciano, eventual co-founder of Campaign Research Inc with Nick Kouvalis, and now President of the Con Party of Ontario; and Mark Spiro of Crestview Public Affairs and the Cons' 2007-2011 election Target Seat Management Unit.

RMG CEO, future Campaign Research founder, and Steve's election target seat guy.
Small world, huh?

*Update from Beijing York in comments : Then the following year they gave RMG CEO Michael Davis their Pyramid Award for his GOTV and voter ID work*

"Preston Manning presented RMG with the Manning Centre Pyramid Award for Political Technology, recognizing RMG's role in helping to build the conservative movement in Canada. Since its inception, RMG has raised more than $75 million for right of centre causes in Canada, and helped to elect hundreds of 'right of centre' politicians at municipal, provincial and national levels."

Kouvalis and Ciano are back at the Manning Conference again this year - full three day schedule and roster of speakers here - despite being under industry investigation for their alleged misleading phone campaign against Lib MP Irwin Cotler. BC Premier Christy Clark will give the opening remarks tomorrow morning.

Three days ago, John Fryer, a member of the Order of Canada and an adjunct professor at UVic, wrote a letter to the G&M criticizing a local Manning Centre campaign manager training session he attended in 2010, organized by Campaign Research founder Ciano. 

Fryer : "Instructors made it clear that robo-calling and voter suppression were an acceptable and normal part of winning political campaigns."

Vancouver Observer has more background on the session from Fryer, plus a reaction from Campaign Research.

And here's a post I wrote in 2008 about the founding members of the Preston Manning Institute for Building Democracy.

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Friday night update : Preston Manning condemns robocalls
Mr. Manning condemned the idea of campaigns using robo-calls to harass voters or divert them to the wrong polls.

“I've spent my life trying to get people to participate more in the political system and trying to vote more,” he told reporters on the sidelines of a conservative conference sponsored by his Manning Centre for Building Democracy.
“And the fact that there would be people out trying to work in the opposite direction is deplorable.”

and then they threw Stephen Maher, the reporter who broke the robocalls story along with Glen McGregor, out of the Manning Centre conference party.

Killer post from RossK.  Killer. Also Dave.
Go Beijing York! whose comments are usually better than my posts.
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It was Mr. Creosote on the Front Porch with a chequebook

Poor old Mr Creosote.
Steve sent his parliamentary secretary out into the House two days in a row last week to claim the Libs spent "millions of dollars" in the last election hiring a foreign voter telemarketing company with offices in North Dakota - which turned out not to be the case.

Then he put in a bizarre appearance on CBC to insist the Con Party only ever uses Canadian firms but deflected questions about their use by individual Con MPs.

Now of course it turns out to be Mr Creosote and 13 other Cons who hired an anti-choice US Republican voter contact firm, Front Porch Strategies, which made thousands of calls from Ohio in the last election and prints gushy editorials on their website about Steve : “the most powerful conservative leader in the Americas.”
Here Front Porch boasts of their success in the last Canadian election  :

“In May’s federal elections, Front Porch Strategies won all 14 of their races.”

with the help of Con MP Rick Dykstra's campaign manager Jim Ross, who also works for Front Porch as the Canadian liaison.

Today in the House the Mr Creosote got the job of demanding that the Libs release all records of calls made on their behalf during the last election, but stated the Cons have no intention of doing likewise. His reasoning?  

 “No, because obviously our party is not behind the calls. We know that." 

Meanwhile, Guy Giorno, Con campaign boss and former Steve chief of staff, condemns the recent voter suppression techniques as a “despicable, reprehensible practice,” and says he really hopes Elections Canada can get to the bottom of this problem in Guelph. 
Um, so we're back to just Guelph again, Guy? 
We hope EC can get to the bottom of it too, even though they will have to manage it without the additional investigative powers Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand requested to do the job but was denied in a secret vote by the majority of Cons on the PROC parliamentary committee a week ago.

NaPo quotes Giorno yesterday :

Tory staff couldn’t make ‘despicable’ robocalls without party knowing: campaign boss

Sigh. The plausible deniability defence again.
Once more with feeling ...

Aaron Lee Wudrick, now a Campaign Research Inc employee and campaign manager to Con MP Peter Braid (K-W), speaking about the effectiveness of dirty tricks in Con campus orgs in 2009  :

Don't think that the Party doesn't like that, because they do. They're things that will help the Party, but it looks like it's an organically-grown organization and it just stimulated from the grassroots spontaneously. They love that stuff. And they don't have to bear the burden of having any of it attached to their name."

Update : Briony Penn : I was the first robocalls victim
Yeah, we remember that one around here.
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RoboConfetti : WWMD?

Right now the Cons are "reviewing tapes of every call made by the Responsive Marketing Group call centre in Thunder Bay in the last election before Elections Canada investigators arrive next week," reports CBC, before adding the Cons deny it.

Presumably Steve would be in search of exactly where to place his own 18 minutes of tape hiss or RoboConfetti.

So after four decades of simply adding the suffix -gate onto the scandal du jour - from cleavagegate to gazebogate - Canada finally gets to watch Steve watergate the question : What Would Milhous Do?

On Tuesday Steve pledged to get to the bottom of the lone, single, solitary, isolated, rogue robocalling incident, but by yesterday - with thousands of voters reporting electoral fraud clear across the country - their new story is that it's all just a case of "Liberal and NDP sleaze", a giant RoboConspiracy!

AssMin of National Defence Julian Fantino, who is aghast his name cropped up in the Guelph burner phone logs search warrants at Item #39, is going with the "smear campaign" story, while in-and-out scandal alumnus and the Cons' campaign chair emeritus during the last election, Senator Doug Finley, nails the argument for Con Party innocence : 

“This is the whole point : the central campaign does not know because they had absolutely no idea it was happening.”

Thank you, Senator Finley, for that moment of lucid RoboContemplation.

Speaking of in-and-out shenanigans, here's the new robocalling edition. Quebec Con candidate Bertin-Denis told Le Devoir and two radio stations yesterday that $15,000.01 was funneled into his riding and right back out again in the last election, ostensibly for local RMG poll research that he never saw.
Really? A Con candidate said that?
Oh wait, he has since mysteriously recanted that accusation - a RoboConcaving.

More RoboContenders. Last Friday, after being fingered by Sun TV for complicity in the Guelph robocall shenanigans, Con parliamentary staffer Michael Sona quit his job. Two days later DefMin Airshow MacKay announced "the party doesn't need to investigate any further" because : 

"I think they've identified the individual that was involved in this," he said.

But I guess the God of the Rescue Helicopter Taxi Service wasn't listening because by Tuesday Mr. Sona was publicly protesting his innocence and expressing his hope the real guilty party would be caught. 

In QP yesterday the Cons sent out Mr Creosote to accuse the Libs of sabotaging their own ridings by using a North Dakota automated calling firm :

“These calls were made on behalf of the Liberal party,” Del Mastro said.
“I see that they used this company quite a bit. It seems that they were robodialing quite a number of people on behalf of the Liberal party.”

Unfortunately for Mr Creosote, it was immediately pointed out he had confused the name of a US firm with the completely unrelated but identically named Canadian one used by the Libs, but no matter : Corporate Television Vehicle ran with it anyway.  RoboComplicity.

Still, you can see why the Cons instinctively turned to their the-Libs-do-it-too defence. 
However clownish, it was a pre-emptive strike to protect their robodialing ReformAlliance/Mike Harris/Republican buddies at RMG, which worked on 97 individual Conservative candidate campaigns in the last election after a 2010 merger with Xentel under IMarketing Solutions Group :

Conservative call centre company has checkered legal history in U.S. 

The company that handles the Conservative Party’s computerized voter-identification system and powerful fundraising machine has a checkered legal history in the United States, where it operates call centres that have repeatedly been the subject of lawsuits and complaints over its telemarketing practices.

Longtime key Conservative organizer Stewart Braddick is listed on RMG’s web site as director of the company’s Focused Direct Response program. Braddick is also listed as director, Focused Direct Response, for the American company Target Outreach Inc., which works for Republican campaigns.

The Cons think they are playing us for suckers. They think we're all rubes, that we won't get it, that we'll put up with their imported Rovian Republican tactics. So - are we rubes? Are we going to let them get away with it this time?

Last word on this goes to Nixon Watergate dirty trickster Donald Segretti, yesterday.
His assessment? : "Worse than Watergate."

“We never tried to do something that would, at the end of the day, take away the right of somebody to vote,” he said. “That goes beyond a prank. It’s just wrong, on many levels.” 

Their dirty tricks campaign, Mr. Segretti claimed, was designed to disrupt the Democrats, not hoodwink voters."

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