crossposted from ePluribus Media

You all may remember Roxy's mother's problems voting in the 2004 Presidential election, as quoted here Voter Fraud and Fired U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton.

My mother ... bless her heart ... turns 98 years young today.  To the best of my knowledge she has never missed voting in an election.  I grew up with the mantra -- "if you don't vote, don't bitch."  She has lived in the same district for the last 82 years, and in the 2004 election she ran afoul of the Montana's new voter ID law.

Mom has never had a driver's license -- or any state issued photo ID -- and when she got to the polls they asked her for ID.  She didn't have ID, but determined to vote, she made the person that drove her to the polls take her home to get a piece of mail. (The elections folks would accept her social security card, but would not accept her medical insurance ID or her baptismal certificate).  There are only 753 (maybe less now) people in the little town where she lives.  The poll workers all knew her, her name was on the voting register ... yet, the "two men in suits" insisted she provide ID to vote.  

Well, apparently, the tactic of conjuring the false specter of Voter Fraud in order to suppress the vote is still "full steam ahead."

Yesterday's Helena Independent Record in its article Under federal pressure, secretary of state changes voter verification lets us know that the crew in the Civil Rights Divison, Voting Section are still hard at work keeping us safe from little old ladies who have voted in the same district for 82 years.

For latest from the Independent Record, jump below the fold.

Ed Buckham, Thomas D. DeLay's former Chief of Staff, "with a huge initial contract that DeLay secured from Enron. (The group also paid DeLay's wife a salary for several years).

---------------------------------------

Anyone interested in trying to connect the dots among the cronies -- Delay, Enron, GOPUSA (Jeff Gannon's outfit) and that little thing called the California energy crisis?

Grab your shovels and your picks, the ePluribus Media researchers received some very interesting data and  can use help.  On a tip from the Moon of Alabama folks, they've got access to a treasure trove of emails among Enron and GOPUSA, "employer" of our old friend Jeff Gannon.   As just one tantalizing tidbit, all the key GOPUSA-ers had Enron email addresses, how convenient is that? Right now some of the ePMedia folk are combing through and collating what they find.

Kfred's starting pulling together the data that links Abramoff, Reed and Delay here:

ENRON FILES: Abramoff? Reed? Delay?? Yes.  

WanderIndiana's been tracking the interesting connections between Enron and GOPUSA -- more than just the convenient email address "connection" at:

Help Us Dig Through Enron Email: GOPUSA

As kfred noted in her Cheers and Jeers post:

Anyway - Cheers to someone putting all of the Enron emails sucked up by the government onto the web in a searchable form.
Cheers to the fact it was legally obtained, by court order, approved by a judge, unlike some data sucking that has been done by a certain guy who has jaw twitches and stands behind a podium and goes "heh heh"

If you want some brain exercises or just plain fun, check the preliminary results of our playing in this candy store, Join US!

Former U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said yesterday that the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq might not have occurred if the United States had known there were no weapons of mass destruction in the country, Agence France-Presse reported (see GSN, Dec. 5).

link: Architect Of Iraq War Wolfowitz: Maybe No War If We Had Known There Were No WMDs...

Guess it's time to start singing the old Pete Seger song, "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" and the fool says to push on.



Lyrics below the fold.

So a small party of about 6 neighbors huddled in the Autumn cold, looking through his telescope as well as his 70X binoculars on a tripod.

Photo linked to on the NASA site: Above: a Taurid fireball photographed Oct. 28, 2005, by Hiroyuki Iida of Toyama, Japan.

Bored with these guys yet?

The good news then is that we think we have found all but 2 or 3 of the statues.  That means this is the penultima frog marching commentary.  

Quick Background for those who are new to my quest: Tired of waiting for any of the criminals to be "frog marched" out of the White House, we have been following another type of frog march -- the march of frog statues honoring the not-yet-famous frog bridge in Willimantic.    We have been in a hunt to find each one.

Okay, okay.  So it's been a tough week.

Good enough reason for the Better Half to initiate  another search.  And sure enough, the town of Willimantic complied and "hopped" out a September podful of the fiberglass statues.

Reader Frog is stationed outside the library.  Notice the literary frogs painted on his spool.

In the seven or eight months since the Gannon Diaries first appeared on Dkos, I have thought a lot about the success of SusanG in those diaries, and how her model has been an inspiration that I see at work everywhere on the internet in these trying days after Katrina.

She asked a question and invited the Kossacks to help her.  "Who is this guy?" she asked. "Any one care to join me in finding out?" she invited.   They did, we did, and we found out - Jeff Gannon was James Guckert.

Here is the link for that update in case you can't read the threat level on the screen grab:
August 27, 2005

Many interesting things to be found in those updates, but something jumped out.  Notice the Homeland Security Threat Level: YELLOW (Elevated) -- What?  Only elevated?  For a potential Category 4-5 Hurricane??

Out of curiosity, I went looking:

    Sunday August 28, 2005 = Yellow
     Monday August 29, 2005 = Yellow
     (landfall)
    Tuesday August 30, 2005 = Yellow
Wednesday August 31, 2005 = Yellow
      Thursday Sept 2, 2005   = Yellow
             Friday Sept 2, 2005 = Yellow
       Saturday Sept 3, 2005 = Yellow
         Sunday Sept 4, 2005 = Yellow

Some questions below:

This commentary attempts to make of a small offering of art as a brief respite from all the horrific news from the gulf coast.

Quick Background: Tired of waiting for any of the criminals to be "frog marched" out of the White House, we have been following another type of frog march -- the march of frog statues honoring the not yet famous frog bridge in Willimantic. The frog statues are part of the 2005 Frog Leap festivities. We have been in a hunt to find each one.

These are the latest finds for anyone who is not bored with our quest. The earlier frogs are in this commentary Frog Marching. And the first ones are in a diary at Booman Frog Marching for Booman.

This Doctor Frog is stationed inside the lobby of the hospital, and we wouldn't have found it had it not been for a story in the newspaper. So I can't really claim to have "discovered" him.

(Disclaimer #1: I have no connection with the frogfest. Disclaimer #2: I have made up my own names for the frogs, just to identify them.) More below.

Hope it isn't rude to do so; I have included Kay Shepherd's show notes below.

The frog march that we are really anxious to see -- the frog march of Karl Rove out of the White House -- may take many more months.

In the meantime, I and the Better Half have been tracking a more local frog march, the "frog march" to Willimantic.

The frogs in this march are obviously not Rove (though someone did point out an odd resemblance, especially in the chin area). These are artists' renditions of the Not-Yet-Famous Frog Bridge of Willimantic.

Now, Willimantic is about as poor as an old run down mill town in New England can be. But it's got its frogs.

And until the real thing with Rove happens, we have been making do by tracking down the statues.

Photos compliments of Better Half.

More photos below.

One of the four frogs of the Frog Bridge

By my count, there were a little over 100 who showed up to stand on the corner across from the Frog Bridge.

More photos below the fold.

Okay... short version:

I have been waiting for Frog Marching all summer -- but not just the "Rove out of the White House" variety.

I have also been patiently waiting for the artists' frogs to come to Willimantic.  Finally, a few have started to show up.

And this revolutionary frog (below) alludes to the real story of the "not at all famous" frog battle of Willimantic.

Nathan Hale

All the good photos above are compliments of the Better Half, from whom I stole them.

This week's The New Yorker (not apparently on line yet) has a Comment, Name Calling by George Packer, that pretty much telegraphs  what the GOP package is that they will be use to sell Americans just in time for the 2006 elections.

"The President's chief of staff, Andrew Card, once said of the war planning for Iraq, 'You don't introduce new products in August,' but the rebranding of the war formerly known as the G.W.O.T has all the earmarks of a full-blown summer marketing campaign.  What's going on here?"

No surprises... Packer speculates... the pull out of American Troops from Iraq.

"It seems likely that the Administration will begin to withdraw American forces from Iraq early next year, well ahead of the midterm elections in November -- regardless of the realities."

Hope ya'll don't mind my using my maiden diary writing here at Booman as a "cut and paste" of their Monitor's finding... which is basically an increasing gender gap.  It also seems, that women who supported W in 2004 are defecting.  

Key grafs from the email are below the flip: