Just a reminder from 2004 of who the Republicans are, and what they are capable of doing to gain, or hold on to, power.

Karl Rove and George Bush patting each other on the back for fucking over the American people.

Courtesy of Truthout:

A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush.

The filing also includes the revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio's vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by SmarTech. That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush's unexpected victory. Connell died a month and a half after giving this deposition in a suspicious small plane crash.

Additionally, the filing contains the contract signed between then-Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell and Connell's company, GovTech Solutions. Also included that contract a graphic architectural map of the Secretary of State's election night server layout system. 

Cliff Arnebeck, lead attorney in the King Lincoln case, exchanged emails with IT security expert Stephen Spoonamore. Arnebeck asked Spoonamore whether or not SmarTech had the capability to "input data" and thus alter the results of Ohio's 2004 election. Spoonamore responded: "Yes. They would have had data input capacities. The system might have been set up to log which source generated the data but probably did not."

Spoonamore explained that "they [SmarTech] have full access and could change things when and if they want."

Arnebeck specifically asked "Could this be done using whatever bypass techniques Connell developed for the web hosting function." Spoonamore replied "Yes."

This is the kind of thing to keep in mind when you are hearing the Teabaggers talk about "taking their country back."

The GOP are the ones who rigged not one, but TWO, elections and took the choice away from the voters.  It was the Republicans who lied to the American people in order to start an unnecessary war in Iraq. And it was the Republicans who put this economy into the tailspin that we are still trying to recover from today.

So exactly WHICH party is the one that stole this country away from its people?

And our President is supposed to negotiate with these unscrupulous bastards?