GOP 2004 Vote Tamper Wizard Wasted in Plane Wreck After Threats from Rove
GOP vote tampering stormtrooper Mike Connell died in a suspicious plan wreck Friday, after giving a deposition on Nov. 3 related to a civil suit on vote tampering in Ohio during the 2004 presidential election and, according to some reports, enduring threats from Karl Rove that he must take the fall for rigging the election results.
Akron, Ohio residents who witnessed the crash told investigators and media they heard Connell’s single engine plane approaching the residential neighborhood where it crashed, in an apparent attempt to make an emergency landing. One neighbor said they could hear the plane’s engine cutting on and off before the flaming crash.
Connell was at the center of a very intriguing confluence of politics and technology related decisions made by Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell and the RNC before the 2004 elections. Connell’s technology companies built the Ohio State’s official 2004 election night reporting website which gave Rove and RNC a direct conduit to results of the 2004 general election returns likely well before the Ohio state government. Connell’s companies had been in the employ of the RNC and Bush for years, building websites for Bush campaigns – as well as the infamous Swift Boat Veterans for Truth group that attacked Democratic candidate John Kerry’s Vietnam war record during the run-up to the 2004 elections.
Rove made the mistake of having Connell know how all the pieces of the covert campaign program worked, rather than compartmentalizing the actors involved and keeping the business end of the scheme in executive hands. The Ohio 2004 vote tampering program, however, required network engineering skills and data integration and processing expertise to make it work and, for that, he had to trust Connell to see how the parts fit to get the result Rove required: an Ohio vote count that put Bush plausibly ahead.
The problem for Rove now, is how to make this all look like an accident with a number of very motivated parties watching it unfold in real time, namely the Ohio attorneys pressing the case against Ken Blackwell and company and Connell’s survivors. RoveCo’s last years have been marked by reckless (even by RNC standards) overreaching. Hopefully, this will be the one that brings that criminal cabal down. What say you, Stinquers? Will Rove and his patrons get away with this one, too?
I still don’t think Wellstone’s plane crash was an accident….
@SanFranLefty: What would be the advantage of taking him out?
@FlyingChainSaw: He was a vocal opponent of the Iraq War and at the time the Dems controlled the Senate 50-49. Norm “Neiman Marcus” Coleman filled his seat. There was never a good explanation of why that plane crashed…
And speaking of Norm Coleman, I think the Stinque alternative inauguration should feature Senator Stuart Smalley giving a Daily Affirmation instead of all that invocating and benedictating shite.
Here is the history of Abaco, from which I have just returned, it should be a story that makes you think. Abaco was never really settled until after the American revolutionary war, when it was settled by die hard royalists who didn’t want to stay in the US after we won the war. The settlers were Americans who could not stand the way things were going in the US, and went off and colonized an island paradise. They are proud of it, natives will mention that they come from royalist families. It never had a slave-labor plantation economy like most caribean islands, and there is no lingering class divide resulting from that, no large, poor population, desperately poor and unhappy and resentful of the rich visitors. Native islanders seem pretty color-blind, and everyone, everyone is just friendly. Its very small and remote and quiet and there are few asshole tourists, just some sportfishing trash (its a subculture of its own, rich rednecks killing fishies).
@Pedonator: Did he win?> Wow!
@Promnight:
Franken will have to gives thanks to the Lizard People!
Welcome back.
Welcome back. You have a lot of catching up to do. Hedge funds and auto companies were nationalized in your absence, and a Ponzi scheme to surpass all Ponzi schemes fucked over a lot of rich people and charities.
And I look forward to taking a vacation that isn’t part of a work trip by 2011.
Hey, I figured out the difference between Rick Warren and the Rev Phelps. Phelps has the balls to hold up a fucking sign that says “God Hates Fags” and doesn’t make a pretense of loving anything. Not all nazis shrieked like Streicher; many just chuckled quietly as vacationers to Bergen-Belsen were stuffed into the rail cars.
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