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Karl Rove's IT Guru Dies In Small Plane Crash
A dozen readers have submitted the story of the death in a plane crash of Mike Connell, Karl Rove's IT adviser, the man who set up and ran the gwb43.com mail server, and an important figure in GOP tech circles since 1997. The closest thing to straight reporting to be found in a mainstream media outlet is a piece from KDKA in Pittsburgh giving a detailed backgrounder on Connell's work for Rove, two generations of the Bush family, and many GOP congressmen and committees. CBSNews.com is now mirroring the KDKA reporting. Almost all the early media coverage comes from the left and some of it is frankly conspiratorial. Among the milder pieces (although it could not be called balanced) is this interview with Mark Crispin Miller, NYU professor and author of two books about the 2004 election in Ohio. Connell was compelled to testify on the day before the US election in a lawsuit involving Ohio election irregularities in 2004. Connell, an experienced pilot, died on Sunday when his plane crashed two miles short of the runway of Akron-Canton Airport in Ohio.
Yes, and a guy associated with the billion-dollar ponzi scheme also committed suicide... or, well... he was found with his wrists cut and had bled to death... the cause and nature of death has yet to be determined precisely.
As the Republican dynasty comes to an end, I think we will see more of this. Not to say that Democrats are clean and clear -- there were a number of "interesting deaths" surrounding the Clintons as well. I believe there is a lot of ugly truth associated with the rule of the U.S.A... we will never ever know the truth. Depresses me sometimes.
I've had access to all kinds of confidential stuff, stuff that would probably be important to all kinds of different people. From sealed court records to nuclear power plant documents to (currently) all the inside numbers of a major insurance something-or-other. (I have no idea what my company does, just that they're a big player in insurance and have lots of numbers that need taking care of, which is what I do)
Anyways, I can't make heads or tails of 99% of any of the confidential stuff I have or have had access to. Even if I could the vast majority of it is extremely boring. So I'm sure I've had my hands on some juicy stuff here and there, but I had no idea. I'm sure this guy was in a similar position. The data he was herding was probably boring enough that he probably long ago quit caring about the contents, and even if he was reading a 'smoking gun' regarding some sort of conspiracy he may have never known it.
Balance is when you get the facts without a ration of sanctimonious bullshit opinion.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I don't see any reason to believe there's a conspiracy here, but there's a point here you're missing. If there were a conspiracy, any incriminating emails, faxes or other documents would be extremely obvious to them. And, of course, it would only be natural for them to expect that anybody else who saw them would realize how important they were. Add to that the lack of understanding of what IT people really do that you can expect from your typical politician (I'm not being snide, here, just pointing out that IT expertise isn't part of a politician's job skills.) and you can see why any hypothetical conspirators would be worried about what he knew. Still, when all's said and done, going from that to the idea that he was murdered is a bit of a stretch. After all, I've not heard that there were any signs that he was considering spilling any beans, and as long as he kept his mouth shut, he wasn't exactly a threat to anybody.
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Does anyone really think this was an accident?
Not to go all Paul Wellstone on everyone, but rawstory is reporting that "45-year-old Republican operative and experienced pilot had been warned not to fly his plane in the days before the crash."
From PRNewsWire:
Alternet reports the following exchange on Amy Goodman's program Democracy Now:
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Yes, everyone should understand that the POTUS has no real power to change the economy. But at the same time I can think of many things that Bush and all elected officials in power did that contributed to this downturn. The POTUS should have the confidence of the public, in this regard Bush is a total failure. President D Roosevelt is credited with ending the Great Depression but there is great debate whether he actually did. What he did do was be a leader in which Americans trust. Obama is probably going to follow this mold, he's already talking about an extended period of financial downturn. Anyone expecting that Obama is going to turn things around in his first term is probably unrealistic.
Yes, but when there's someone on them who has information that could expose a lot of fraud by powerful people, you have to entertain the possibility that it wasn't merely coincidence that this particular person died.
Airplanes crash, people have heart attacks, and good samaritans really do pick up hitchhiking transvetite prostitutes out of the goodness of their hearts. Doesn't mean that the version of the story you're told is how it really happened.
Start a happiness pandemic
Fuck you right wing wannabe scientists.
true fact: only the left has scientists now
I can't see any positive way to spin this.
"In his grave," seems to be working well enough for the administration.
Helluva retirement plan.
-FL
RTFA. His friends were warning him that his plane could be sabotaged, and he'd already cancelled some flights for fear that this might happen. He DID know too much, and had access to the missing emails that Rove desparately wanted to remain lost forever. And Connell is likely one of the only IT staff with the knowledge and ability to recover that mailstore. Not saying that this couldn't possibly be an accident, just that it's pretty damned suspicious, that's all.
You do realize that it is but two small steps from being glad that someone has died, to actively wishing others just like him dead, then seeking to actually make that happen...
The guy had his ideology, you have yours, I have mine - they are all faulty and they are all wrong in the balance of things. Neither one is a reason to wish or be glad that a human being died.
(...and seriously: "exploit the public"? "abuse its institutions"? Every frickin' politician on the planet does that... what makes him any different?)
(bring on the troll mods, I know they're coming).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Actually, there are way too FEW banks today, as is evidenced by the rhetoric that they are all "too big to fail." Between 1929 and 1923, *thousands* of banks failed. We've had less than 30 banks fail this year. Banks in operation in 1929 - 25,568 Banks in operation in 1933 - 14,771 We're being told that any single one of the big banks failing will plunge us into a similar depression.
I live near Akron Canton airport. This happened maybe 15 miles from my house.
Most of the land around Akron and North Canton is farmland. There is a sizable Amish and Mennonite population in that area. It's a lot of cleared land and cornfields around AC.
If you were to run out of gas on approach there are dozens of places to set down a single engine airplane. It's mostly cornfields.
That was the part that first struck me about this story. If you knew you wouldn't make the airport...you'd have to be pretty damn unlucky to not find a decent place to set down. With any luck you might even manage an old county access road and salvage the plane.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
When I talked with Cliff and Bob the day after the first deposition a few months ago, they reported that Mike Connell tried to avoid answering their questions.
They were looking forward to subsequent depositions in order to get better information.
We all had similar observations about Connell's situation: It seemed very very dangerous to him, and we were concerned for his safety. We were hoping to get better information more quickly in order to limit the amount of time during which Mr. Connell would be under threat.
This plane crash comes as no surprise to any of us.
Living in Columbus, we in the election protection community have witnessed several activities firsthand that give us pause.
We have, for instance, photographic records of some of the punchcard ballots in the 2004 election, before they were destroyed in direct violation of a court order as well as the orders of the new secretary of state.
Connell: "Karl help me out!
Rove: "Done and done. Now here's your new papers and just stay out of sight...."
Hey, you think your house is cool?
As someone who lives in Ar I can tell you that "arkancide" is something we seem to have every couple of years. Of course pulling that is quite easy when he have state medical examiners like the one we had in the 90's that were willing to testify that a guy who was shot,stabbed,choked,had his genitals mutilated,and finally thrown off a bridge committed suicide, or my personal favorite, a couple of teens that went hunting in the most corrupt county in AR(and I am guessing stumbled upon something they weren't supposed to see) who supposed died of "marijuana intoxication" by passing out conveniently side by side on a train track. Of course they said the train engineer must have been "hallucinating" when he said that the boys not only didn't move despite the train shaking the tracks and the horn blaring, but that the boys were covered in a bloody police tarp BEFORE they were hit.
So while I personally thought Clinton was a great president and didn't give a shit if he screwed college babes on the white house lawn as long as he kept the economy rolling, trying to blame him for a few "arkancides" when he have so much police corruption here is kinda unlikely. The cops here have a hell of a lot more to hide than old Slick Willie did and are a hell of a lot nastier when they feel threatened. So if someone pulled an "arkancide" while Clinton was prez I'd have to cast my suspicion on the ones that still pull that trick,the cops.
And as for this guy, is it really so hard to believe someone would shut up the snitch? Hell if I had 1/20th of the money this guy was dealing with and you were threatening to snitch me out I wouldn't have any problem jury rigging your plane. Is it so hard to believe that someone with potentially 100s of millions wouldn't do the same? While I am not saying he was hit, I would be looking hard at that crash and especially at anyone who had access to it before the flight. Because I just can't picture a pilot with that much flight experience making such a rookie mistake as running out of gas. I know a light pilot and have hung out with him and his friends and if anything they go the other way and figure in too much fuel, figuring it is always better to have fuel left over than come up short.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
My father's best friend was a big shot technical manager with AT&T Long Lines in the 60s. He was working on November 22nd, 1963 when major portions of the national phone system were "locked down".
This person was present in the long lines operation center when Johnson's first call came through from Air Force One immediately after he was sworn in.
The operator motioned for him to listen in. Johnson was giving his first executive order after becoming president. He was asking to be patched through.
What do you think the nature of the call was? A call to the joint chiefs to declare DEFCON 4? A call to the FBI to launch an investigation? A call to Hubert Humphrey to offer him the vice-presidency?
Nope - Johnson called NASA to order the relocation of NASA's space program command center from Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia to Houston, Texas.
Think about it - if Johnson had no idea of the details behind the assassination of his predecessor, he would declare a high security alert.
If he DID have an idea, well, it would be logical to start consolidating power and influence. This was a decision worth many millions of dollars and thousands of jobs to the state of Texas.
This story was told directly to me on the 40th anniversary of the assassination by the man who overheard the conversation.
Ask Me About... The 80's!
"Today, there are plenty of banks, and way too many bankers."
So you are suggesting we need some form of natural selection to winnow our crop of bankers, some sort of Malthusian correction for over population of bankers, with wrist slashing being a form of self selection versus natural selection? Seems a little harsh but greedy and incompetent bankers do seem to be threatening the survival of our species so it might be an appropriate response.
If you read Galbraith's "The Great Crash" it does discount the urban legend that there were rampant suicides in 1929. There were a couple high profile suicides directly related to the crash, that drew a lot of press, but there weren't really a lot of people jumping out of windows on Wall Street.
Thomas Friedman, who I usually find kind of overblown and breathless, has a pretty good opinion piece on the New York Times today. He cites a potentially fatal flaw in America's economy, the best and brightest are being drawn to financial engineering instead of real engineering. The end result is we specialized in manufacturing money instead of manufacturing products to sell. Making money the new fashioned way instead of the old fashioned way which seems to be the root cause of our collapsing economy.
News networks seem to be extremely fond of running stock footage showing money being printed lately. I think it indicates the dominate manufacturing industry in America now will have left is printing money. Welcome to the United States of Zimbabwe.
As best I recall FDR took us off the gold standard during the last depression, since it freed him to print money to get the U.S. out of the depression. Having taken the first step on that slippery slope, I think we will soon be seeing the consequence of an unbrindled fiat currency with irresponsible politicians and Fed bankers manufacturing staggering sums of monopoly money, and throwing it out of helicopters over Wall Street.
As a person who avoids debt, and avoided the stock market bubble and crash, I fear my wealth will soon be destroyed by hyperinflation, by a scheme to bail out incompetent bankers who gamed the system, and got rich pocketing their ill gotten gains. While I behaved responsibly I fear my wealth will be destroyed as New York and Washington bail out bankers and borrowers who behaved irresponsibly using a fiat currency as the new financial weapon of mass destruction. I'm desperately trying to figure out where I can put my money where it will be safe and not wiped out by hyperinflation. Gold would be the traditional place but that doesn't seem safe either these days. Everyone is rushing to U.S. Treasuries as a safe half haven but how can they be safe when the U.S. dollar is turning in to Monopoly money.
@de_machina
If he knew he was sitting on secrets; knew (or suspected) people were out to get him; and was a geek:
Where's the killswitch server? You know, the server sitting quietly somewhere that needs you to login once a week or so or it automatically dumps all that incriminating material onto a website and emails a few news outlets.
This is why I believe that fraud should be treated as one of the worst offenses in our society. Why is it if I put on a mask and grab a gun and rob a bank without killing anyone is it punished more than someone who steals magnitudes more money, leading to suicides, bankruptcies, and a lack of trust in the markets.
I'm pretty conservative when it comes to business, and I'd like to see SarbOx repealed or at least have a ton of fixup done to it to reduce the huge burden it imposes, and would generally like to see government leave business to make us all wealthier, but there MUST BE RISK to crime to offset the benefits.
It's the same reason I support the castle doctrine. Stealing and looting should be a risky business, at least riskier than being employed in a job like ice crab fishing where the rewards are somewhat similar. If I put a sign on my door that says I shoot to kill intruders, and I won't do a bit of time in jail, then hopefully that will at least limit people to stealing stuff on the outside of my home. If we put a piece of paper in front of a hedge fund manager that says if they commit outright fraud then they will never see the light of day again maybe we would reduce fraud some.