“I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 when it was uploaded. Will someone please explain this so that I have the information to give the auditor instead of standing here "looking dumb".” [source: http://chroot.net/s/lists/support.w3archive/200101/msg00068.html ]

“4K Smart cards which had never been previously programmed are being recognized by the Card Manager as manager cards. When a virgin card from CardLogix is inserted into a Spyrus (have tried CM-0-2-9 and CM-1-1-1) the prompt "Upgrade Mgr Card?" is displayed. Pressing the ENTER key creates a valid manager card. This happens in Admin mode and Election mode.” [source: http://chroot.net/s/lists/bugtrack.w3arch

"U.S. News has learned that a document prepared by Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, at almost exactly the same time as the State of the Union address omitted any reference to Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium from Niger. The chronology of events is puzzling - even to insiders: On Saturday, January 25, just three days before the address, officials gathered in the White House Situation Room to vet intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs and its links to terrorism. Libby made the presentation. After several hours, Libby summarized the conclusions of the meeting and turned them into a written case for war against Saddam.
Libby's document was sent to Secretary of State Colin Powell; it was intended as the 'script' for his presentation to the United Nations on February 5. The puzzler: The charge that Iraq sought uranium from Niger was not in Libby's paper. Why not? 'The agency had so discredited it,' says one participant, 'they didn't want to bring it up.'"

Tenet, Walpole, Chalabi, Luti, Joseph, Hadley, Libby. All these roads lead directly to Dick Cheney, but he's created such a cloud of confusion that we will probably never be able definitively to pin the lies on him.

Hadley added that "Condi wants it clearly understood that she feels a personal responsibility for not recognizing the potential problem presented by those 16 words," but in the context of his remarks it was clear this was merely a gracious gesture. (She was traveling, Bartlett told reporters, and therefore unavailable to elaborate.)

Why wouldn't Tenet let go of Hadley's lapel?
Because, Chatterbox submits, Tenet knew (or perhaps just guessed) that someone else would try to overrule Hadley and put the yellowcake howler back in. Was that someone else Cheney or Libby?

In Alabama, a severe fiscal crisis is forcing some of these changes, Ms. Davis acknowledged. "We've cut spending on prisons so far that our prison system now looks like a third world country," she said. Some prisons are so crowded they are operating at almost double their capacity.

"The fiscal crisis has brought together the folks who think sentences are too long with the folks who are perfectly happy with the sentences but think prison is costing too much," Mr. Boerner said.

The answer is clear enough: the fewer of these images we see, someone hopes, the less likely we'll realize the story that goes with them. Certainly the new plot they tell is simple enough: what began as a war at a time of our choosing has become a war at the time of the enemy's choosing.

"It's outrageous," he said. "Not only does Mr. O'Dell want the contract to provide every voting machine in the nation for the next election - he wants to 'deliver' the election to Mr. Bush. There are enough conflicts in this story to fill an ethics manual."

Other Diebold executives have contributed to President Bush's re-election campaign. According to data reported to the Federal Election Commission, 11 executives have added a total of $22,000 to the president's campaign coffers this year. No money from Diebold or its executives has gone to Democratic presidential candidates this year.

David L. Dill, a computer science professor at Stanford, said: "If I was a programmer at one of these companies and I wanted to steal an election, it would be very easy. I could put something in the software that would be impossible for people to detect, and it would change the votes from one party to another. And you could do it so it's not going to show up statistically as an anomaly.''

"We know from Enron and WorldCom that when accounting is weak, crooks have been known to take over," Professor Jones said. "If vulnerabilities exist in any voting system for a long enough time, someone's going to exploit it."

Mr. Rumsfeld thought the war could showcase his transformation of the military to be leaner and more agile. Paul Wolfowitz thought the war could showcase his transformation of Iraq into a democracy. Dick Cheney thought the war could showcase his transformation of America into a dominatrix superpower. Karl Rove thought the war could showcase his transformation of W. into conquering hero. And Mr. Bush thought the war could showcase his transformation from family black sheep into historic white hat.

Although the intelligence that provided the threat warnings was not detailed, the fact that the warnings came just before the bombing indicates that the Central Intelligence Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies are receiving fairly accurate advanced information about the activities of operatives inside Saudi Arabia.

However, Pascal Lamy, EU trade commissioner, last week warned that if the US did not drop the steel tariffs, retaliation of up to $2.2bn of punitive duties on US goods would be "a racing certainty in mid-December". These would target exports such as citrus fruit and Harley Davidson motorcycles that are produced in key electoral districts.

"It is quite clear to me that al Qaeda wants to take down the royal family and the government of Saudi Arabia," U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told Al Arabiya television


Such problems leave scientists feeling that compliance is simply impossible. "Every single lab involved in select agents has violated the regulations somehow," says one. "The FBI can come in and find you out of compliance whenever it chooses."