"If there has been one shining light in the past six dark years of the reign of the Boy King, it is how Henry Waxman has remained indefatigable in his pursuit to expose the kleptocratic abuses in DC. The article by Rajiv Chandrasekaran in the Washington Post last week about Mr. Ole 60 Grit Jim O’Beirne and the CPA in Iraq opened a lot of people’s eyes, and Waxman is now requesting information and calling for the rug to be pulled back on all the war profiteering cockroaches"
"The governor of Maryland is calling for the state to scrap its electronic voting system and revert to paper ballots for the November elections. Governor Robert Ehrlich said such a move was needed because of technical glitches that occurred during last week's primary election. The Baltimore Sun reports the governor wants to stop using electronic voting machines built by Diebold because they repeatedly crashed. Local election officials are still counting thousands of paper provisional ballots used by voters last week when the check-in machines failed. In the 4th Congressional District poll workers are still trying to determine who won the race between incumbent Congressman Albert Wynn and challenger Donna Edwards."
"Here in this country, another former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has spoken out against President Bush's plan to redefine parts of the Geneva Conventions. On Wednesday Gen. Hugh Shelton said it would be an egregious mistake for the country to water down its obligations to upholding the Geneva Conventions. So far five former chairm of the Joints Chief of Staff - including General Colin Powell - have publicly objected to the president's efforts."
"Alberto Gonzales Forced to Retract Comments On Maher Arar In an update to a story we've been following closely, U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has been forced to back away from comments he made about U.S. involvement in the case of Maher Arar. Arar is the Canadian citizen who the U.S. abducted and sent to a Syrian prison where he was tortured. On Monday the Canadian government exonerated Arar and criticized the U.S. role. At a news conference the next day Gonzales said "We were not responsible for his removal to Syria. I'm not aware that he was tortured.'' On Wednesday, a Justice Department spokesperson said Gonzales had misspoken. The spokesperson said the attorney general forgot that at the time of Arar's deportation, such matters were still handled by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which was part of the Department of Justice.
Re: voting: I'm constantly amazed to see how complex the process can be made into. At least the Diebold machines seemed to be easy to use, but all these paper ballot punching machines, optical counters... WTF? I mean, do these people use PDAs to count single digit numbers too?
Here (in the promised land of hi-tech), one gets a small folded piece of paper at voting place. Enter booth, write in the number of your candidate with A PENCIL, fold the paper and drop it into ballot box. Time spent: 10 seconds (max), and accurate national results (99+% manually counted) are ready hour or two after voting places are closed.
No wonder they get into all that trouble when they require people to use monster machines that look like a mutant sons of phone exchange switchboard and Spinning Jenny.
(Sorry about the rant, but I just read my 100th post saying "Scrap Diebold? You want to go back to butterfly ballots?")
Yup, yup, yup. Not only was the butterfly ballot absurd, it was illegal under Florida law. Did you happen to notice anyone being prosecuted for manipulating votes by using that device?
3 comments:
Re: voting: I'm constantly amazed to see how complex the process can be made into. At least the Diebold machines seemed to be easy to use, but all these paper ballot punching machines, optical counters... WTF? I mean, do these people use PDAs to count single digit numbers too?
Here (in the promised land of hi-tech), one gets a small folded piece of paper at voting place. Enter booth, write in the number of your candidate with A PENCIL, fold the paper and drop it into ballot box. Time spent: 10 seconds (max), and accurate national results (99+% manually counted) are ready hour or two after voting places are closed.
No wonder they get into all that trouble when they require people to use monster machines that look like a mutant sons of phone exchange switchboard and Spinning Jenny.
(Sorry about the rant, but I just read my 100th post saying "Scrap Diebold? You want to go back to butterfly ballots?")
teemu - i'm with you. there's only one country in the world that purports to be a proper democracy that can't count votes.
(mind you, the butterfly thing was equally absurd.)
Luke: "the butterfly thing was equally absurd"
Yup, yup, yup. Not only was the butterfly ballot absurd, it was illegal under Florida law. Did you happen to notice anyone being prosecuted for manipulating votes by using that device?
. . . No??
Hm. Neither did I.
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