why bush's ownership & taxation reform plans will fail. it goes against every business model ever conceived. what he wants to do is tax those who work their asses off, while rewarding those that let money do the work.

we are not at that point in world relations to make this work. nice idea, but it can not work at this time.

bartcop has a thread that's interesting.

OHIO strikes again!

In a letter dated Oct. 21, Ken Nuss, former deputy director of the Auglaize County Board of Elections, claimed that Joe McGinnis, a former employee of Election Systems and Software (ES&S), the company that provides the voting system in Auglaize County, was on the main computer that is used to create the ballot and compile election results, which would go against election protocol. Nuss claimed in the letter that McGinnis was allowed to use the computer the weekend of Oct. 16.

Nuss, who resigned from his job Oct. 21 after being suspended for a day, was responsible for overseeing the computerized programming of election software, according to his job description. His resignation is effective Nov. 11.

SLASHDOT

Mihg writes "Try searching Google Images for abu ghraib, lynndie england, or Lynndie's boyfriend charles graner and note how you don't get any pictures of US soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners of war. Now try it with some of their competitors, like AltaVista, Lycos, or Yahoo!. Google used to be able to find them, as is discussed in this AnandTech forum thread." I'm guesing that this is another case of our administration confusing "National Security" with "Politically Undesirable".

motherjones is uberfabulous:

Norquist calls it the "Leave-Us-Alone Coalition," a grouping of gun owners, the Christian right, homeschoolers, libertarians, and business leaders that he has almost single-handedly managed to unite. The common vision: an America in which the rich will be taxed at the same rates as the poor, where capital is freed from government constraints, where government services are turned over to the free market, where the minimum wage is repealed, unions are made irrelevant, and law-abiding citizens can pack handguns in every state and town. "My ideal citizen is the self-employed, homeschooling, IRA-owning guy with a concealed-carry permit," says Norquist. "Because that person doesn't need the goddamn government for anything."

Few in American politics are as blunt about their plans. "If the American people really want to know what George W. Bush is up to, the best place to look is the candor of Grover Norquist," says Ralph G. Neas, president of People for the American Way. Norquist is not above equating tax collection with a street mugging, or suggesting that arguments for higher taxes on rich people echo the ones Nazis used to justify their targeting of Jews. "Bipartisanship is another name for date rape," he told a reporter in May, borrowing a phrase from former House Majority Leader Dick Armey. He likes to say he wants to shrink the size of government in half over the next 25 years "to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

the scariest line of the day (and there are indeed too many to remember):

The church has been awakened to its responsibility to keep this nation the way God intended it to be.

what better way to effectuate a perfect coup, than by using untraceable, proprietary coded vote counters?

whenever i need to point out the hypocrisy of the new league of biblethumpers, all i have to do is point to the superbowl of 2003. remember that? when janet had that costume malfunction, and the evangelicals saw the chance to get the natives riled up in a frenzy? their screaming bloody hell over a tit, and how were they going to explain it to the millions of children who were glued to the television.

i have one question: how did you explain erectile dysfunction lasting more than 4 hours? although my bets are that they wouldn't know anything about such things, they no doubt would have tried to justify their tit-anger by saying commercials aren't the same thing.

the thing that gives me the edge is that i know what goes on behind closed doors. homosexuals will have knowledge that some will be working to hide. homosexuals know all too well the hypocritical personalities some have. homosexuals naturally see both sides (and by virtue, have better compromising abilities) especially when they're still living in the closet.

yet, the christian reich will have you believe that that's evil. that they can say God loves them more with a straight face is truly amusing.

from COMMON DREAMS

When I spoke with Jeff Fisher this morning (Saturday, November 06, 2004), the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District said he was waiting for the FBI to show up. Fisher has evidence, he says, not only that the Florida election was hacked, but of who hacked it and how. And not just this year, he said, but that these same people had previously hacked the Democratic primary race in 2002 so that Jeb Bush would not have to run against Janet Reno, who presented a real threat to Jeb, but instead against Bill McBride, who Jeb beat.

"It was practice for a national effort," Fisher told me.

And some believe evidence is accumulating that the national effort happened on November 2, 2004.

The State of Florida, for example, publishes a county-by-county record of votes cast and people registered to vote by party affiliation. Net denizen Kathy Dopp compiled the official state information into a table, available at http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm, and noticed something startling.

Also See:

Florida Secretary of State Presidential Results by County 11/02/2004 (.pdf)
Florida Secretary of State County Registration by Party 2/9/2004 (.pdf)

While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking – the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.

In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.

In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.

The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.

Yet in the touch-screen counties, where investigators may have been more vigorously looking for such anomalies, high percentages of registered Democrats generally equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry. (I had earlier reported that county size was a variable – this turns out not to be the case. Just the use of touch-screens versus optical scanners.)

More visual analysis of the results can be seen at http://us together.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm. Note the trend line – the only variable that determines a swing toward Bush was the use of optical scan machines.

One possible explanation for this is the "Dixiecrat" theory, that in Florida white voters (particularly the rural ones) have been registered as Democrats for years, but voting Republican since Reagan. Looking at the 2000 statistics, also available on Dopp's site, there are similar anomalies, although the trends are not as strong as in 2004. But some suggest the 2000 election may have been questionable in Florida, too.

One of the people involved in Dopp's analysis noted that it may be possible to determine the validity of the "rural Democrat" theory by comparing Florida's white rural counties to those of Pennsylvania, another swing state but one that went for Kerry, as the exit polls there predicted. Interestingly, the Pennsylvania analysis, available at http://ustogether.org/election04/PA_vote_patt.htm, doesn't show the same kind of swings as does Florida, lending credence to the possibility of problems in Florida.

Even more significantly, Dopp had first run the analysis while filtering out smaller (rural) counties, and still found that the only variable that accounted for a swing toward Republican voting was the use of optical-scan machines, whereas counties with touch-screen machines generally didn't swing - regardless of size.

Others offer similar insights, based on other data. A professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, noted that in Florida the vote to raise the minimum wage was approved by 72%, although Kerry got 48%. "The correlation between voting for the minimum wage increase and voting for Kerry isn't likely to be perfect," he noted, "but one would normally expect that the gap - of 1.5 million votes - to be far smaller than it was."

While all of this may or may not be evidence of vote tampering, it again brings the nation back to the question of why several states using electronic voting machines or scanners programmed by private, for-profit corporations and often connected to modems produced votes inconsistent with exit poll numbers.

Those exit poll results have been a problem for reporters ever since Election Day.

Election night, I'd been doing live election coverage for WDEV, one of the radio stations that carries my syndicated show, and, just after midnight, during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted the AP report.

But then the computers reported something different. In several pivotal states.

Conservatives see a conspiracy here: They think the exit polls were rigged.

Dick Morris, the infamous political consultant to the first Clinton campaign who became a Republican consultant and Fox News regular, wrote an article for The Hill, the publication read by every political junkie in Washington, DC, in which he made a couple of brilliant points.

"Exit Polls are almost never wrong," Morris wrote. "They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state."

He added: "So, according to ABC-TVs exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points."

Yet a few hours after the exit polls were showing a clear Kerry sweep, as the computerized vote numbers began to come in from the various states the election was called for Bush.

How could this happen?

On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real "counting" is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.

That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.

"In a voting system," Harris explained to Dean on national television, "you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once?"

Dean nodded in rhetorical agreement, and Harris continued. "What surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's just a regular computer."

"So," Dean said, "anybody who can hack into a PC can hack into a central tabulator?"

Harris nodded affirmation, and pointed out how Diebold uses a program called GEMS, which fills the screen of the PC and effectively turns it into the central tabulator system. "This is the official program that the County Supervisor sees," she said, pointing to a PC that was sitting between them loaded with Diebold's software.

Bev then had Dean open the GEMS program to see the results of a test election. They went to the screen titled "Election Summary Report" and waited a moment while the PC "adds up all the votes from all the various precincts," and then saw that in this faux election Howard Dean had 1000 votes, Lex Luthor had 500, and Tiger Woods had none. Dean was winning.

"Of course, you can't tamper with this software," Harris noted. Diebold wrote a pretty good program.

But, it's running on a Windows PC.

So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB" which, Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep the votes." Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled "Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like Excel.

In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.

"Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let's give 100 votes to Tiger."

They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software "the legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the progress of your election."

As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said, "And you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.

Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds."

On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv.) And they had left no tracks whatsoever, Harris said, noting that it would be nearly impossible for the election software – or a County election official - to know that the vote database had been altered.

Which brings us back to Morris and those pesky exit polls that had Karen Hughes telling George W. Bush that he'd lost the election in a landslide.

Morris's conspiracy theory is that the exit polls "were sabotage" to cause people in the western states to not bother voting for Bush, since the networks would call the election based on the exit polls for Kerry. But the networks didn't do that, and had never intended to.

According to congressional candidate Fisher, it makes far more sense that the exit polls were right - they weren't done on Diebold PCs - and that the vote itself was hacked.

And not only for the presidential candidate - Jeff Fisher thinks this hit him and pretty much every other Democratic candidate for national office in the most-hacked swing states.

So far, the only national "mainstream" media to come close to this story was Keith Olbermann on his show Friday night, November 5th, when he noted that it was curious that all the voting machine irregularities so far uncovered seem to favor Bush. In the meantime, the Washington Post and other media are now going through single-bullet-theory-like contortions to explain how the exit polls had failed.

But I agree with Fox's Dick Morris on this one, at least in large part. Wrapping up his story for The Hill, Morris wrote in his final paragraph, "This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play."

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann .com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."

from attenuation:

Wow, what can I say, in the past 24 hours over 540,000+ people have visited this page, and I will probably have to take it down soon due to bandwidth issues. I originally posted this to a few friends on a forum, using information from a list just like this created after the 2000 election. The list was carried by the St. Petersburg Times and the Economist, amongst others. The IQ data was originally attributed to the book "IQ and the Wealth of Nations", though I checked and couldn't find them in the current edition, I posted saying such at the bottom of the table. The tests and data were said to have been administered via the Raven's APT, and The Test Agency, one of the UK's leading publishers and distributors of psychometric tests.

I have recently been emailed by someone claiming to have seen a retraction many issues later on the behalf of the Economist Magazine. The Economist could not independently verify the IQ data and the retraction can be found here. I have yet to find any other retractions from the St. Petersburg Times or other publications. Here you can find a report correlating IQ and income, and their relation to how people voted in the 2004 election. This IQ data is based on SAT/ACT test scores. Here you can see the correlation between percentage of college graduates in a state and whom they voted for in the 2000 election.

I think matching census data to the results of the election reveals some very interesting things. For instance, there is a direct correlation that has been pointed out by the Boston Globe between the divorce rate per state, and who they voted for, as it turns out, the higher the percentage of people voting for Bush, the higher the divorce rate. That is very interesting considering many people voted based on 'morality'.

I am glad that so many people are so interested in IQ, statistical correlations, and their relation to politics. I believe such correlations are increasingly interesting as some candidates this year funneled more money into biased advertising and partisan propaganda than has ever been attempted in the history of the world.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP-CNN) -- An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said.

Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.
Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct, Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told The Columbus Dispatch.

State and county election officials did not immediately respond to requests by The Associated Press for more details about the voting system and its vendor, and whether the error, if repeated elsewhere in Ohio, could have affected the outcome.

Bush won the state by more than 136,000 votes, according to unofficial results, and Kerry conceded the election on Wednesday after acknowledging that 155,000 provisional ballots yet to be counted in Ohio would not change the result. (Full Ohio results)

The Secretary of State's Office said Friday it could not revise Bush's total until the county reported the error.

The Ohio glitch is among a handful of computer troubles that have emerged since Tuesday's elections. (Touchscreen voting troubles reported)

In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because officials mistakenly believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. And in San Francisco, a malfunction with custom voting software could delay efforts to declare the winners of four races for county supervisor.

In the Ohio precinct in question, the votes are recorded onto a cartridge. On one of the three machines at that precinct, a malfunction occurred in the recording process, Damschroder said. He could not explain how the malfunction occurred.

Damschroder said people who had seen poll results on the election board's Web site called to point out the discrepancy. The error would have been discovered when the official count for the election is performed later this month, he said.

The reader also recorded zero votes in a county commissioner race on the machine.
Workers checked the cartridge against memory banks in the voting machine and each showed that 115 people voted for Bush on that machine. With the other machines, the total for Bush in the precinct added up to 365 votes.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a glitch occurred with software designed for the city's new "ranked-choice voting," in which voters list their top three choices for municipal offices. If no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes outright, voters' second and third-place preferences are then distributed among candidates who weren't eliminated in the first round. (E-vote goes smoothly, but experts skeptical)

When the San Francisco Department of Elections tried a test run on Wednesday of the program that does the redistribution, some of the votes didn't get counted and skewed the results, director John Arntz said.

"All the information is there," Arntz said. "It's just not arriving the way it was supposed to."
A technician from the Omaha, Neb. company that designed the software, Election Systems & Software Inc., was working to diagnose and fix the problem.

the washington dispatch has some interesting information

no WONder the media is silent about any aberrations. its as if there were NONE. and ya know what? they were wrong on iraq. they were wrong on the 'exit polls', which in essence, they were indeed correct, only that they throught they were playing rove's game, and now we find the utter gall of these corpmedia types in ignoring the reality of this election.

According to the official election results posted on the Palm Beach County election website, 542,835 ballots were cast for a presidential candidate while only 454,427 voters turned out for the election (including absentee). This leaves a discrepancy of 88,408 votes cast for the presidential candidates.

Palm Beach County's supervisor of elections is Theresa LePore who is known for the 2000 Presidential Election and the notorious "butterfly ballot" that caused confusion among seniors and other Floridians.

Other election oddities occurred throughout Florida with some counties registering a 400% increase in expected voter turnout among Republicans while Democrats supposedly experienced a -60% decline in expected support within certain counties. The 50+ counties experiencing the high percentage fluctuations in expected turnout used optical scan voting machines on November 2nd.

Vote discrepancies were also found in Gahanna, Ohio which gave an extra 4,000 votes to President Bush. The error was explained away by Franklin County administrators as a "glitch" in the electronic voting system.

Developing. . .

moral values malarky - i knew it!

cbs is running a story (hopefully in primetime too) about how the media is manipulating the populace at the joy of the reich-wing.

Let’s try to snuff this election’s new Big Theory before it becomes Conventional Wisdom, although it’s probably too late.

The subject matter is "moral values." The theory is this: Kerry lost because he was very unpopular with people who believe moral values are the most important issues. This group of values voters is growing and Democrats are doomed until they can win them over.

The evidence comes from one exit poll question: Which issue mattered most in deciding how you voted for president? Here are the results (see link above)

Analysts and commentators have been stunned that moral issues would trump the other biggies. From this single result, where moral values trounced economy/jobs by a whole two percentage points, both gloaters and mourners have extrapolated a fatal flaw in the Democratic Party and all it encompasses. An industry of values voter literature has mushroomed in just the few days since the election. It’s misguided.

While the nexus of issues boiled into the words "moral values" certainly were a big factor in this election, it’s being exaggerated partly because of the oddities of the poll itself and partly because the Big Theory conforms with what Republican strategists want you to believe.

First, the poll: If the poll had been worded or constructed only slightly differently, moral values would not have been the top issue. We’re building a worldview out of a small, odd vista.

If, for example, one of the issues on the list was a combined "terrorism and Iraq," it would have been the top concern of 34 percent of the electorate and nobody would be talking about moral values.

If "taxes, jobs and the economy" was on the list as one item instead of two, it would have been the topper at 25 percent.

If, say, abortion rights, gay marriage and moral values were all on the list separately, the numbers would be very different.

Who knows what the exit poll would have found if "truth in government" were an option. Polls are fickle.

As for the notion that that the legion of values voters is exploding, I don’t see it.

America, if the trend continues, is headed towards a one-party rule.

when a country has only one party that rules what is supposed to be the most diverse populace on the planet, there's reason for increased concern about liberty, justice, and the American way.

Go to HERE

Page 23
Gahanna 1-B
4,258 - Bush
260 - Kerry

But suprisingly enough there is not a SINGLE place you can find these 4,000 voters reappear.

Not on page 23 with the senate race
Not on page 90 for county commissioner
Not on page 129 for Sheriff, County Recorder, Treasurer, Engineer, Corner, Board of Ed, or supreme court justice.
Not on page 168
Not on page 207

Drum roll please!!!
Prop 1 on page 285. Gay Unions. The wonderful hate clause that every Bush zombie is voting for. WOW! Those 4,000 voters didn't vote for this either? Crazy crazy!

Now a little more detective work.

http://www.gahanna.org/community/profile/default.asp
The City of Gahanna website.

33,000 estimated population
29% 18 or younger.
Leaves 20,130 people elligible to vote (except I missed the 18 year olds here)

Now back to the other document and go to page 23. Add up the totals in each Gahanna district.

Gahanna 1 - 8192
Gahanna 2 - 4143
Gahanna 3 - 4210
Gahanna 4 - 4191
Grand total: 20,736

Now that's what I call voter turn out! They did better than 100% I obviously needed their secrets so we can use their voter turn out methods in 2008. (haha)

So I decided to give them a phone call and see what was up! Mayors office didn't really want to talk to me. So I decided to lie and say I was with the press. The city councilman I talked to told me they have about 70% voter registration, but no, no where near 100%.

70% voter registration sounds reasonable. So that means out of 20,130 elligeable aged voters 14,091 are registered.

Wow.. that's 47% more voters than possible registered voters.. Interesting huh?

He could tell at this point that I wasn't with the press. I don't know how to "pretend" to be with the press. I just wanted to talk with someone. I asked if they have electronic voting machines but he hung up on me.

Basically, I'm so far from a conspiracy theorist and would normally laugh at the notion that someone would cheat in an election like this. Apparently I was just nieve. How many other votes are slipped in here or there. Someplace unnoticable.

This was an obvious flaw.. but how about the not so obvious?

It truly sickens me. Turns my stomach.

EOM

from the nytimes:

The new $10 million polling system used by many news organizations to predict the outcome of the presidential race had a number of problems that led to the early erroneous impression that John Kerry was heading for victory, according to a report prepared by the system's architects.

The report, written by Joe Lenski and Warren Mitofsky and obtained by The New York Times, details systemic glitches that skewed the data in ways of which several news organizations, who paid tens of thousands of dollars for the service, were not aware.

In some cases, the report said, survey takers could not get close enough to the polls to collect adequate samples of voters opinion. They were often stopped by legal barriers devised to keep people electioneering - not necessarily bona fide poll canvassers - away from voters.

The report also theorized that the poll results more frequently overstated support for Mr. Kerry than for President Bush because the Democratic nominee's supporters were more open to pollsters. Whatever the case, according to the report, the surveys had the biggest partisan skew since at least 1988, the earliest election the report tracked.

from thehill:

This is, dear Watson, elementary.

Next to the forged documents that sent CBS on a jihad against Bush’s National Guard service and the planned “60 Minutes” ambush over the so-called missing explosives two days before the polls opened, the possibility of biased exit polling, deliberately manipulated to try to chill the Bush turnout, must be seriously considered.

At the very least, the exit pollsters should have to explain, in public, how they were so wrong. Since their polls, if biased or cooked, represented an attempt to use the public airwaves to reduce voter turnout, they should have to explain their errors in a very public and perhaps official forum.

This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play.

read it and weep.

The hackers posted some 13,000 pages of internal documents on various web sites – documents that were pounced on by Harris and others. A desperate Diebold went to court to stop this "wholesale reproduction" of company material. By November of last year, the Associated Press reported that Diebold had sent cease-and-desist letters to programmers and students at two dozen universities, including the University of California at Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The letters were ignored by at least one group of students at Swarthmore College, who vowed an "electronic civil disobedience" campaign.

Equally troubling, of course, is the fact that the touch-screen systems Diebold, ES&S, and the other companies have on the market now aren’t designed to generate a polling place paper trail. While ES&S says it is open to providing voter receipts, and has even designed a prototype machine that does so, the company isn’t going to roll that prototype into production until state and federal elections officials make it mandatory.

Lawmakers in Congress and the Ohio legislature are scrambling to do just that. In Ohio, State Sen. Teresa Fedor of Toledo has proposed a bill requiring a "voter verified paper audit trail" for all elections in the state. Congressman Rush Holt of New Jersey is pushing a similar measure in Washington. But the efforts are being fought by Republicans in both places. In Ohio, Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell has already signed $100 million in agreements to purchase voting machines. The bulk of the purchases would go to Diebold and ES&S, and Blackwell insists there is no need for paper receipts. Considering the political opposition and the companies’ wait-and-see approach, it’s almost certain that voters using touch-screen machines in November will walk away from their polling places without ever seeing a printed record of their choices.

At a trade fair held recently here in Columbus, a wide range of companies seeking to fill that void demonstrated technologies that could easily and cheaply provide paper receipts for ballots. One such product, called TruVote, provides two separate voting receipts. The first is shown under plexiglass, and displays the choices made by a vote on the touch screen. This copy falls into a lockbox after the voter approves it. The second is provided to the voter. TruVote is already attracting fans, among them Brooks Thomas, Tennessee's Coordinator of Elections. "I've not seen anything that compares to [the] TruVote validation system." Georgia's Assistant Secretary of State, Terrell L. Slayton, Jr., calls the device is the "perfect solution." But Blackwell argues the campaign for a paper ballot trail for Ohio is an attempt to "derail" reform. He says he'll comply with the demand only if Congress mandates it.

Meanwhile, in Upper Arlington, a ‘lower profile' Wally O'Dell and his wife recently petitioned the city to get permission to serve liquor at future fundraisers and political gatherings.

Twin-Cities.com has a story warning us about the upcoming battle in Fallujah.

The number of dead and wounded from the expected battle to retake insurgent-controlled Fallujah probably will reach levels not seen since Vietnam, a senior surgeon at the Marine camp outside Fallujah said Thursday.

i'm sick and tired of hearing republicans beat their monkey chests demanding that America gave bush a mandate, simply because bush received more votes than any other president in history (like, hello? when you have a record turnout of voters, that's bound to happen), but lets not forget: 55 million people voted against bush, also the most that has ever voted against a winning candidate in history.

but lets look at how europe's treating what happened on tuesday:

"How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?" the liberal Daily Mirror asked in a Page One headline. Inside, several pages of coverage were headed "U.S. election disaster."

The Independent bore the front-page headline "Four more years" on a black page with grim pictures including a hooded Iraqi prisoner and an orange-clad detainee at Guantanamo Bay.

The left-leaning Guardian led its features section with a black page bearing the tiny words, "Oh, God." Inside a story described how Bush's victory "catapaulted liberal Britain into collective depression."

Across Europe, many newspapers expressed dismay at the prospect of another term for Bush, a president often regarded as inflexible and unilateralist.

"Oops — they did it again," Germany's left-leaning Tageszeitung newspaper said in a front-page English headline. The cover of the Swiss newsmagazine Facts called Bush's re-election "Europe's Nightmare." "Victory for the hothead: how far will he go?" asked another Swiss weekly, L'Hebdo.

A few British papers welcomed the U.S. election result. "The world is a safer place with George W. Bush back in the Oval Office," the tabloid Sun said in an editorial.

All agreed the result reflected a sea-change in U.S. politics, a victory for neo-conservatives and the religious right.

"March of the Moral Majority" said the conservative Daily Mail, above a photo of Bush with his wife and daughters. "America's moral majority sweeps Bush back into the White House," The Daily Telegraph said.

The Times said Europe "must come to terms, not only with Mr. Bush, but with the nation that has elected him. This is a president who really can speak for America."

YAHOO

this could explain how florida got flushed. from a post on DU:

Okay, here's the story from Florida

I worked in the campaign..you have no idea how many volunteers REALLY
WORKED . worked our buns off.

We didn't have exit polls in places where they should have been.

Broward County including Hispanics went 85% for Kerry

Palm Beach County despite Rabbis and Ministers telling their congregations to vote for BUsh went heavily black, Haitian and Jewish
for Kerry - and I mean heavily.

I was poll watcher at a mostly Haitian site where there were threee precincts and 8 machines.

one machine was broken slowing down voting in that precinct to 2 1/2 hour wait.

And leaving 7 machines for three districts.

Inside poll watcher came out to tell me that in his district, 800 people, everyone standing on line was holding or at the machines using the blue color DEM palm ticket I had given them outside. He was thrilled.

the week before I had handed out about 1500 of these palm tickets in
a Jewish area. They came and asked for them.

Every Haitian or African American that went into vote stopped and took a DEM voting/palm ticket at the polls....I'd say about 2500 to 2700 for the entire three districts.We had to photocopy more because we didn't have enough for the demand.

During early voting which started OCt 18, when you heard there were 3 hour waits, there was and more; I handed out the same palm tickets in Palm Beach. 99% of the people going into those polls - hundreds and hundreds, stopped and took the dem palm ticket from me. Hardly any republicans in either place.

Again there, Theresa Le Poore only placed 12 machines for voters by the thousands and 4 were broken.

Electronic machines, no paper trail.

Early voting in several counties in North Florida also went Kerry (unusual).

60,000 ballots lost in post office. Voting day, thousands arrived at the PO to be sent to absentee voters. Of course they would never arrive in time for voting. These were for shut ins, out of staters etc.

Theresa LePore threw out 14,000 applications for voting early on.

We took Palm Beach County by a landslide. But there was one very very suspicious thing. I was assigned to a "targeted" area. Targeted because it's targeted by the repugnants to stop the black people from voting...

Where at the early voting republican poll watchers had been outside harrassing Kerry poll watchers....ON VOTING DAY THERE WERE NO REPUBLICAN POLL WORKERS OUTSIDE THE TARGETED AREAS. I mentioned this to others, wondering what was up. It was highly unusual that not one was there.

Polls stayed open til 7 and as I mentioned it was one wonderful stream of people of color voting, and voting, and young black hip hop guys too, who you wouldn't think would. They did.
you tell me what happened.

At 6 PM with one hour to go of voting, the word was FIRST passed down to us that the electronic machines were not always recording what the people were voting and to be sure to tell them to check the final summary page, showing your choices. A little late, eh what?

Better yet, ask Bev Harriss " Black Box Voting" what happened.

But worst of all Kerry didn't wait for all the military and absentee ballots to be counted - he should have waited 11 days. He was only 2 electoral votes behind the bastid.

Didn't want to divide the country anymore???????

Bullshit. It couldnt be any more divided. He needed to fight for us,
but he did the exact same thing Gore did. Layed down and rolled over.

What are the Gestapo threatening them with? blackmail ? Harm to Family? Doesn't make sense.

He said he would fight and he didn't . He said he had 10,000 lawyers (and believe me, a lot of them were down here, and he didnt use them
to mount legal challenges.

IMHO Voting is now a sham. Democracy in this country is over.


I'm renewing my passport.

i'm sick. the stench is killing me. and i'm 800 miles away from toledo.

ok, 171-112 bush. c'mon God, you promised.

and weeeeeeeere OFF!

i predict a kerry win. and i'll even go out on the limb and say by a landslide - or, over 10pts.

i don't see a lot of concern, much less any attention, to the issue of what it'll be like once kerry is inaugurated. i mean, c'mon. i have only heard one other person even suggest a possibility of letting george have this one, so it will finally piss the democrats off enough to actually stand the fuck up and do something about this criminal enterprise to steal America. but still, nobody's talking about what it'll be like on january 21, 2005.

probably the most funniest thing i've heard yet on the campaign trail. george w. bush says:

"The American people are very wise. They're able to detect whether somebody is trying to fool them or not."

videos of fahrenheit 9/11 & more

notice how whenever the republicons get caught with their hand in the cookie jar, they always find a way of blaming the democrats for making the cookies?

there's all this talk about bush and his repeatedly whining about being president is 'hard work' and it just makes me laugh. the man wouldn't know hard work if it bit him on the ass. take a look at his record in TANG. he's a privileged fart who smells of pompous pussy.

when a man can tell a story
and not utter a word
that is power. pure unadulterated power.

lets see if i got this right now.

republicans cheat.
democrats bitch.
republicans blame democrats for turning off voters with their bitching.

how does that work??

top 10 articles in nytimes tells it all.

1. Top 10 Articles

1) Without a Doubt
By RON SUSKIND
Published: October 17, 2004

2) Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq
By JAMES GLANZ, WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER
Published: October 25, 2004


3) Editorial: John Kerry for President
Published: October 17, 2004


4) The O'Reilly Factor for Lesbians
By FRANK RICH
Published: October 24, 2004


5) The Strategy to Secure Iraq Did Not Foresee a 2nd War
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
Published: October 19, 2004


6) Poll Shows Tie; Concerns Cited on Both Rivals
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JANET ELDER
Published: October 19, 2004


7) After Terror, a Secret Rewriting of Military Law
By TIM GOLDEN
Published: October 24, 2004


8) Op-Ed: Checking the Facts, in Advance
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: October 12, 2004


9) Big G.O.P. Bid to Challenge Voters at Polls in Key State
By MICHAEL MOSS
Published: October 23, 2004


10) Growing Up With Mom and Mom
By SUSAN DOMINUS
Published: October 24, 2004

it's not that all machines DO do it
it's the fact ... the very SCARY fact that some machines CAN do it.

reich-wingers are using the democrat's record in congress as weapons. don't they realize that they control congress and are responsible for getting anything done?

isn't using scare tactics backfiring on the GOPher boys? think about it now. they're asking for votes from scared republicans.

democrats aren't the ones who are scared shitless and need a baffoon running around the country making promises to keep us all safe, especially after failing to do so on 9/11.

bush is at the fairgrounds here in town. the local station is carrying the event live. i have my 4 tickets to go sitting right here.

i'm so glad i didn't go. having to sit in a crowd of dummies for more than an hour is more than i can take.

who in their right mind can really believe with such unwavering certainty that we are preventing another terrorist attack in the United States by bombing fallujah.

i mean, with a straight face no less - which means, they really have no doubt - these people will paint a picture that is so absurd, that it becomes believable.

the power of religion.

i'm surprised more people, bloggers especially, haven't come out with a 'what will happen after january 20th' when john kerry is inaugurated. i've seen some suppositions injected into stories on the issues, but nothing like a floor-map of what the changes will bring.

something is getting a whole lotta attention from corners i would never have dreamed of. the new york times' magazine has a piece that, in the words of buzzflash:

Reveals an Administration on a Radical, Extremist Runaway Train that Endangers America and the World

but will things like this curb the support for bush?
sadly, i doubt it.

if any media types out there that had the power to make their network a God send, they would step up to the plate, and balance out sinclair's decision to air whatever it is they're lying about again, with a commercial-free (moveon paid?) airing of fahrenheit 9/11. that, in my eyes, and i watch a helluva lot of television, would make them kings of the road.

the problem with republicons is that everything's a mission to them. democrats however, win wars because they don't see them as missions.

today's NYT (from Slate's Today's Papers) has a story about the stepped up assaults in Iraq with a quote:

"The Americans are just arresting whomever is in front of them at the mosques," said another cleric. "They're behaving in a strange manner."

well DUH! our election day is only weeks away.

if terrorism isn't a law enforcement issue, then why did they enact the sweeping patriot act?

note to john kerry: honesty will get you 20 points.

here we go... got so wrapped up in this new Mac G4 client brought over... God i gotta get me one!

i wish crossfire could see my blog. they would know that the right-wing stand-in for tucker carlson, a woman who is some flak for capital gang, continues to spew out karl's talking points, never venturing far into her own assessment, and makes about as much sense as a doily on a coffee table without a book.

she neglects to say that john kerry first doesn't see the same intelligence that the president sees, with all his caveats. the senate is sold a bill of goods that the administration wants them to see. so when kerry 'supported' the war, he was supporting the 'war' on the intelligence WITHOUT THE CAVEATS. why is it so hard for people to understand this? because you have media shoving a completely different set of syllables down our throats, and unless joe Q. public digs into the indymedia, foreign press, and other sources - like blogs, he pretty much knows what the media is spoon feeding them. and who's spoon feeding the media these days? you got it. the administration.

the media in this country has lost every ounce of credibility they had only just a few years ago. how did that happen? because the republicons couldn't allow them to ignore what they wanted to have put out. they wanted only their message posted, and anything else would be destined to the librul-bias trashcan. it's that simple.

i'm only sorry that the real old school republicans are caught up in this civil war going on in their party. the neocons vs the republicans. one is nothing like the other. and the problem with republicans is that they believe in loyalty so much that they'll sacrifice the right way, for the wrong way simply because the neocons have been able to make the issues about loyalty, not substance. the my way or no way. with us or against us. black and white. republicans didnt' have much color in their previous incarnations, but they had a lot more than the ungrey black & white neocons are serving up.

ok, clothes have to get out, i wish i could write more. and i will.

doesn't anybody get it yet? here the reich-wing is bashing the u.n. (the oil-for-food program i guess has been exposed to be rampant with corruption), and obviously forgetting that WE ARE PART OF THE U.N.

by their own logic, such bashing is un-American and un-patriotic.

pete williams on msnbc, fact checking. 1st up, cheney. the connection. and there is the proof he lied. 2nd up, halliburton. edwards' charge about how they got the contracts. "20 billion, 7.5 billion to halliburton.", oh, it's the no-bid contact. 'more like nobody else 'could bid'... so it wasn't really no-bid.. 3rd up, casualties in iraq. williams' response: how each man uses the available stats from iraq.