Robert Kennedy Jr.
Biography and Quotes

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He has worked on several political campaigns including the presidential campaigns of Edward M. Kennedy in 1980, Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004.

http://www.robertfkennedyjr.com/about.html

Speaking to several hundred environmental writers and scientists gathered in Pittsburgh for the Society of Environmental Journalists' annual convention, Kennedy also lambasted George W. Bush, charging the president has "eviscerated 30 years of environmental laws."

The fiery lawyer lamented that his children can't eat the fish they catch because of mercury contamination. He said a recent test revealed the mercury levels in his own body were three times levels deemed safe for humans. "I was told a woman with my mercury level would bear children with cognitive brain damage," Kennedy said.

Kennedy pointed to administration moves to drop pending litigation against power plants as soon as Bush took office, its efforts to gut new regulations on coal burning power plants and its decision to discard regulations on mercury emissions as just a few of the ways the White House has responded to industry rather than the health and welfare of the public.

Kennedy: Bush weak on nature
By Debra Erdley TRIBUNE-REVIEW Friday, October 22, 2004
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_264660.html

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is blaming Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, along with President Bush, for causing Hurricane Katrina.

"As Hurricane Katrina dismantles Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, it’s worth recalling the central role that Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour played in derailing the Kyoto Protocol and kiboshing President Bush’s iron-clad campaign promise to regulate CO2," Kennedy blogged Tuesday on HuffingtonPost.com.

Because of Bush and Barbour's CO2 folly, said Kennedy: "Now we are all learning what it’s like to reap the whirlwind of fossil fuel dependence which Barbour and his cronies have encouraged."

RFK Jr.: Bush, Barbour to Blame for Katrina Tuesday,
Aug. 30, 2005 10:51 p.m. EDT
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/8/30/230457.shtml

Now Robert F. Kennedy Jr., senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, has sent out a letter shrilly warning that "the Bush White House is quietly putting radical new policies in place that will let its corporate cronies poison our air, foul our water and devastate our wildlands for decades to come.”

The letter accuses the Bush administration of wanting to "speed up oil and gas drilling in some of America’s most sensitive and irreplaceable ecosystems,” and "open all 155 of our national forests to logging.”

Kennedy charges that the White House is allowing corporations to "strangle our democracy,” and even ties his children’s asthma to oil company interests.

"Three of my kids – and millions of others – already struggle to breath on bad air days because they suffer from asthma. Should our children suffer even more to improve ExxonMobil’s bottom line?”

Kennedys See 'Poison' in Bush Policies
Monday, Sept. 26, 2005 1:28 p.m. EDT
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/9/26/134625.shtml

The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.

But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004 -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.

In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn?t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.

Republicans in Ohio also worked to deny the vote to citizens who had served jail time for felonies. Although rehabilitated prisoners are entitled to vote in Ohio, election officials in Cincinnati demanded that former convicts get a judge to sign off before they could register to vote.(83) In case they didn't get the message, Republican operatives turned to intimidation. According to the Conyers report, a team of twenty-five GOP volunteers calling themselves the Mighty Texas Strike Force holed up at the Holiday Inn in Columbus a day before the election, around the corner from the headquarters of the Ohio Republican Party -- which paid for their hotel rooms. The men were overheard by a hotel worker ''using pay phones to make intimidating calls to likely voters'' and threatening former convicts with jail time if they tried to cast ballots.

A five-month analysis of the Ohio vote conducted by the Democratic National Committee concluded in June 2005 that three percent of all Ohio voters who showed up to vote on Election Day were forced to leave without casting a ballot. That's more than 174,000 voters. ''The vast majority of this lost vote,'' concluded the Conyers report, ''was concentrated in urban, minority and Democratic-leaning areas.'' Statewide, African-Americans waited an average of fifty-two minutes to vote, compared to only eighteen minutes for whites.

In addition to altering individual ballots, evidence suggests that Republicans tampered with the software used to tabulate votes. In Auglaize County, where Kerry lost not only to Connally but to two other defeated Democratic judicial candidates, voters cast their ballots on touch-screen machines. (187) Two weeks before the election, an employee of ES&S, the company that manufactures the machines, was observed by a local election official making an unauthorized log-in to the central computer used to compile election results. (188) In Miami County, after 100 percent of precincts had already reported their official results, an additional 18,615 votes were inexplicably added to the final tally. The last-minute alteration awarded 12,000 of the votes to Bush, boosting his margin of victory in the county by nearly 6,000.

The issue of what happened in 2004 is not an academic one. For the second election in a row, the president of the United States was selected not by the uncontested will of the people but under a cloud of dirty tricks. Given the scope of the GOP machinations, we simply cannot be certain that the right man now occupies the Oval Office -- which means, in effect, that we have been deprived of our faith in democracy itself.

Was the 2004 Election Stolen? Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House. BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen

In the June 15 issue of Rolling Stone, under the headline "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?” Kennedy writes: "A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004 -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.”

But the Cleveland Plain Dealer – regarded as anything but a conservative newspaper – headlines a June 18 article: "Rest assured, we checked out Election 2004 thoroughly,” and states: "There was no shortage of mistakes made in vote counting. There were voters who should have been registered but weren’t, polling places with lines that were too long and without enough voting machines, and decisions from [Secretary of State Ken] Blackwell that appeared to be partisan.

"All these mistakes and misjudgments took votes from both candidates, but probably more from Kerry. But they didn’t add up to nearly enough votes to swing Ohio from Bush to Kerry. "The mistakes were … bipartisan in nature and not a result of Republican chicanery.”

The Plain Dealer article by Ted Diadiun points to several instances when Kennedy "ignored” the facts, including:

"In his online footnotes, Kennedy refers no less than a half-dozen times to a five-month-long post-election investigation commissioned by the Democratic National Committee called ‘Democracy at Risk.’

"Somehow he never gets around to quoting the DNC investigative team’s conclusion that ‘The statistical study of precinct-level data does not suggest the occurrence of widespread fraud that systemically misallocated votes from Kerry to Bush.”

The newspaper also notes: "Kennedy saw conspiracy in a Franklin County foul-up that resulted in far too few voting machines at a polling place in a heavily black area that would presumably vote mainly for Kerry.

"But he didn’t tell his readers that the chairman of the Franklin County elections board, who oversaw the county’s voting machine allocation, was a black man who also chairs the county Democratic Party. Not a likely candidate to steal votes for Bush.”

Plain Dealer Metro Editor Jean Dubail said this about the Kennedy article: "My first reaction after reading the thing was how little actual news there was in it.”

Carl Weiser, government and public affairs editor for the Cincinnati Enquirer, expressed similar sentiments: "I read it and nothing in there was really new. The folks who know Ohio elections best checked into it and found there was no conspiracy.”

The Plain Dealer concludes: "The less somebody knows about the 2004 Ohio election and the farther away from Ohio he is, the more likely he is to find merit in that Rolling Stone piece. And since our audience is right here in Northeast Ohio, I’m sure that most of you have already figured out that it’s nonsense.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 2004 Voter Theft Theory Debunked
Monday, June 19, 2006 10:27 a.m. EDT
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/6/19/102912.shtml