Phantom Fightback – Fake Narrative Prepared 61

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UPDATE: Dermot Murnaghan has tweeted it wasn’t him. Quite possible it was another Sky correspondent, as I have no idea what he looks like. There was a caption up with Murnaghan’s name on it at the time. It was whoever was reporting for Sky from Edinburgh just after 13.10 today.

Just after 13.10 Dermot Murnaghan on Sky News, speaking in Edinburgh, told us that the success of “Labour’s fightback” in Scotland was due to Gordon Brown, Labour’s “most vocal campaigner alongside Jim Murphy of course.” He had been speaking at a lot of rallies and visiting a lot of constituencies, wooing voters back to Labour.

I had to play it back to make sure I had heard it correctly. There is absolutely no evidence for the success of the Brown “fightback”, despite the frantic promotion efforts of the corporate media. Was Murnaghan just wittering, or was he seeding a narrative to prepare the ground for a counter-intuitive result once the thousands of fake postal ballots get mixed in?

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61 thoughts on “Phantom Fightback – Fake Narrative Prepared”

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  • lysias

    A quite recent (2012) book that discusses the evidence that the 2004 U.S. presidential election was stolen is Craig Unger’s Boss Rove. He includes later evidence like, for example, the highly suspicious “accidental” death of the GOP computer expert that happened after earlier books like Mark Crispin Miller’s Fooled Again and Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss’s Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?: Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count were written.

  • Ba'al Zevul

    According to the Electoral Commission’s analysis of the local elections in 2008, nearly 60 per cent of postal voters were “encouraged” to vote because they could do so by mail. This could be one way of improving the meagre turnout figures in our elections.

    I am wondering what incentive postal voting could offer over physical voting for the vast majority of people with easy access to a polling station. Perhaps there is a case for a postal vote for the (registered) disabled and those living more than a mile or two away, added to a legal obligation to vote, but the present system is asking for fraud.

    Even Farage recognises this:

    http://www.lbc.co.uk/farage-fumes-at-fraud-and-intimidation-in-postal-votes-99240

    And let us not forget which verucca on the foot of the body politic introduced the scheme.

  • Robert Crawford

    This election reminds me of a remark I heard about World Championship Boxing in America.

    You need to knock your opponent out to get a “draw”.

    True or false? I don’t know.

  • Habbabkuk (la vita è bella)

    “…He includes later evidence like, for example, the highly suspicious “accidental” death of the GOP computer expert..”

    ___________________

    That’s straying into Trowbridge territory.

    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    I love the way some posters, when their links have been shown not to back up what they were claiming on here, swiftly and effortlessly move on to citing books which they say back up their claims.

    A good tactic, in the sense that it’s easier for doubters to read a link than it is to read entire books.

  • Habbabkuk (la vita è bella)

    Craig

    “Habbabkuk

    Do you live under a rock?

    You’re learning, Craig.”

    ____________________

    In case you don’t know whom that was from:

    Ba’al Zevul,

    “Chez Komodo”,

    Mount Olympus,

    Greece.

  • lysias

    Michael Connell:

    Michael Louis Connell (November 30, 1963 – December 19, 2008) was a high-level Republican consultant who was subpoenaed in a case regarding alleged tampering with the 2004 U.S. Presidential election and a case involving thousands of missing emails pertaining to the political firing of U.S. Attorneys. Connell was killed when the plane he was flying crashed on December 19, 2008.

    . . .

    Request for protection[edit]

    In July 2008, the lead attorney in the King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association v. Blackwell case, Cliff Arnebeck, sent a letter [3] to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey seeking protection for Connell as a witness in the case, saying he had been threatened. Arnebeck wrote, “We have been confidentially informed by a source we believe to be credible that Karl Rove has threatened Michael Connell, a principal witness we have identified in our King Lincoln case in federal court in Columbus, Ohio, that if he does not agree to ‘take the fall’ for election fraud in Ohio, his wife Heather will be prosecuted for supposed lobby law violations.” [4] Arnebeck claims that months later, his source called back and warned that Connell’s life was in danger.[5]

    He was served with a subpoena in Ohio on September 22, 2008,[6] in a case alleging that vote-tampering during the 2004 presidential election resulted in civil rights violations. Connell, president of GovTech Solutions and New Media Communications, was a website designer and IT professional and created a website for Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell that presented the results of the 2004 election in real time as they were tabulated. At the time, Blackwell was also chairman of the Bush-Cheney 2004 reelection effort in Ohio. Connell refused to testify or to produce documents relating to the system used in the 2004 and 2006 elections, lawyers said.[7]

    Death[edit]

    At about 6 p.m. on December 19, 2008, Connell was killed, at the age of 45,[1] in the crash of a single-engine 1997 Piper Saratoga private airplane, which he was flying, which occurred in Lake Township, between 2.5 and 3 miles short of the runway at the Akron-Canton Airport near Akron, Ohio. Connell was alone in the plane and had been returning from the College Park Airport in Maryland, near Washington, D.C..[8] The plane crashed on its final approach to the airport’s main runway, between two houses, one of which was vacant. Connell had flown the plane from the Akron-Canton Airport to the College Park Airport on December 18, 2008 and, according to the Stark County, Ohio coroner, Connell had on his person a receipt for a breakfast he had purchased in Washington, D.C. on December 19, 2008.

    On December 31, 2008 it was reported that air traffic controllers had noted prior to the crash that Connell was off course, that they had been in communication with him regarding this, and that he had been trying to get back on course at the time of the crash. There were reported to have been no signs of mechanical problems with the plane.[9]

    The National Transportation Safety Board published its final report into the accident that killed Connell on January 28, 2010. The board concluded that Connell had lost control of the aircraft as a result of disorientation while turning in cloud. During a pre-flight briefing Connell had commented that he wanted to return to Akron before the weather “went from bad to worse”. Several other pilots in the vicinity had reported severe icing at the time of the crash; Connell’s aircraft was not equipped or approved to fly in icing conditions.[10] A January 2010 article in Maxim Magazine speculated that because Connell possessed knowledge which, if revealed, would be damaging to high-level Republicans, his death may have been the result of sabotage of his aircraft,[11] particularly as his cell-phone was never recovered.[12] Project Censored, a small non-profit organization, has called for a Federal criminal investigation; and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has called the case “more serious than Watergate.” [13]

  • muttley79

    The latest poll has the SNP at 48 per cent. Therefore, anything the great clunking fist has said or done has apparently had absolutely no affect whatsoever.

  • lysias

    One thing that Unger’s book mentions that the Wikipedia piece on Michael Connell does not mention is that Connell was a devout Catholic (the original reason for his starting to work with the Republicans, because of the abortion issue) who, according to friends, had started to exhibit qualms of conscience about things that he had been made to do.

    By the way, anyone who wants can look up books that I cite on Amazon and read editorial summaries and readers’ reviews.

  • glenn

    Here you go, Habbabkuk:

    http://www.gregpalast.com/apartheid-ballot-counting-in-america-greg-palast-on-democracy-now/#more-1263

    Here’s an extract:

    George Bush was declared victor today by the Secretary of State of Florida, who — uh, Mr. Blacksick — and of, excuse me, I said Florida. You know, Florida of the North. I was just in Columbus — you know, New Kiev, Ohio, two days ago, so I get confused. Mr. Blackwell, certified the election today. It’s very convenient for him because he’s both chairman of the republican campaign and the person in charge of the vote count, so he’s wearing two hats. That’s OK, because I hear he has two heads — I’ll have to investigate. He certified the vote, but not all the votes.

    93,000 votes were tossed on the floor, never counted. We’re not talking ‘re-count’ here, we’re talking NEVER count. These 93,000 votes are called, “spoiled” in Ohio. Another 155,000 votes are called provisional. More absentee ballots were tossed. Yet, supposedly George Bush won by 119,000. Folks, now what’s going on here? Whose votes were not counted that were twice the Bush margin of victory?

    Were the votes ‘spoiled’ randomly? Well, not exactly. Overwhelmingly the votes not counted — NOT COUNTED –were cast in African American precincts. These are very Black votes. I use the term ‘overwhelmingly,’ those votes cast into the machines but not counted for technical reasons. When I say ‘overwhelmingly Black votes,’ that is not my phrase. That’s from Dr. Mark Salling of Cleveland State University who’s been investigating this for the ACLU. The statisticians and demographers say it’s overwhelmingly Black votes which are not counted.

    There’s plenty more, like this:
    http://www.gregpalast.com/kerry-won-rnheres-the-facts/
    (Extract):


    So what’s going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, “Who did you vote for?” Unfortunately, they don’t ask the crucial, question, “Was your vote counted?” The voters don’t know.

    Here’s why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. [See, “An Election Spoiled Rotten,” November 1.

    There’s plenty more where that came from.

  • craig Post author

    Habbabkuk

    I have answered the question of whether the referendum count was rigged, repeatedly, as you perfectly well know.

  • Habbabkuk (la vita è bella)

    Craig

    I’m sure you have (and have some vague recollection that you did) but for the life of me cannot remember what you said. Can you remind me – very succintly – whether you think the referendum result was rigged or not (by voting and/or counting irregularities)? What you think of Ms Sturgeon’s reported rejection of that view (cf the link provided by Lysias)would also interest me.

  • Habbabkuk (la vita è bella)

    Glenn

    Thanks for that. I have a lot of time for Greg Palast.

    But it does seem to me that the US Presidential election allegations, if true, prove merely that ballot rigging can occur but do not of themselves support the claims that the Scottish referendum results were rigged or that tomorrow’s general election results in Scotland will be.

    Is that not a fair point?

  • lysias

    Something else that the U.S. presidential election allegations, if true, prove is how discrepancies with exit polls can be brazenly ignored.

  • lysias

    After the 2004 U.S. presidential election, Democratic candidate John Kerry very quickly conceded despite the strong arguments that the election had been stolen, and after that Democratic Party operatives were dismissive of any such claims. It was left to the Green Party and the Libertarian Party to litigate the results in Ohio. We are left to speculate what may have motivated Kerry and the Democratic Party to do this.

  • Habbabkuk (la vita è bella)

    “We are left to speculate what may have motivated Kerry and the Democratic Party to do this.”

    ________________

    Have you reached any conclusions after your speculation?

    You have a tendency to put up and then shut up in the face of questioning.

    Is that what one would expect from an Oxford Greatsman with higher degrees?

    Bowra was right.

  • glenn

    Habbabkuk: Glad you like Greg Palast, I know you were a bit down on books earlier, but his “Armed Madhouse” is an excellent read. I do intend to get another couple of his, but am a bit bogged down at the moment – behind by a shelf’s worth at least.

    “But it does seem to me that the US Presidential election allegations, if true, prove merely that ballot rigging can occur but do not of themselves support the claims that the Scottish referendum results were rigged or that tomorrow’s general election results in Scotland will be.

    Is that not a fair point?”

    That is a fair point. It was also a fair point, earlier, that interested parties could commission their own exit polls – independently run, of course. A strong democracy would want to commission such exit polls itself, I would have hoped.

    But why do you suppose that postal ballots are mixed in – actually, physically, mixed in? The boxes are unsealed, dumped into the hoppers, and stirred around just to make sure. I saw this happen with my own eyes. What do you imagine the benefit to the democratic process to be, in undertaking such a practice? The detriment seems blatantly obvious.

  • Becky Cohen

    @DaveHansell: “The whiff of corruption seems to be hanging over these islands like a pea souper smog from the 1950’s.”

    What a brilliant, evocative analogy, Dave. Back in the Cold War days, who was it that once said that Britain is “the most secretive country west of the Urals”?

  • Habbabkuk (la vita è bella)

    Glenn

    Re the end of yours : I honestly don’t know. But why does this shock you so much?
    I’m also not so sure that I see the “obvious” detriment.

  • Habbabkuk (la vita è bella)

    Glenn

    Don’t take my questions – and my challenges (never answered, of course) to the likes of Lysias as meaning I find the current disposition for postal voting a good thing. I share the view of several on here that postal voting should be restricted to where there are medical and similar reasons.

    I do not know why the current system was introduced by one of the Blair govts but I suspect it was just seen as a cheap way of cosying up to people and not introduced in order to encourage electoral fraud – after all, NuLabout was riding high in the polls at the time.

  • fred

    “Can you remind me – very succintly – whether you think the referendum result was rigged or not (by voting and/or counting irregularities)? What you think of Ms Sturgeon’s reported rejection of that view (cf the link provided by Lysias)would also interest me.”

    As a SNP member Craig must “accept that no member shall within or outwith the parliament publicly criticise a group decision, policy or another member of the group”.

  • craig Post author

    Habbabkuk

    As I have said, I do not think there was sufficient cheating to influence the result. Had they needed to do more, they would have…

  • Habbabkuk (la vita è bella)

    Craig

    Thank you. I now recall that you did say what is in your first sentence. But are you quite sure the second sentence is not an afterthought…?

    The saying “se non è vero, è ben’ trovato” comes to mind. Shame on me for the thought! 🙂

  • S Paterson

    The SNP is deemed to be a threat to the State. The ‘State’ will do everything in its power to curtail its activities including rigging votes. It’s not rocket science.

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