United States: towering democracy

* radley balko apparently saved corey maye's life. that aint nuthin, for a blogger (less significantly - balko has done a lot of good work in the katz case that i tried breaking open. the story is still there ready for anyone to take it up. as i've said repeatedly, there's bloggy superdom in that story, ripe for the picking)

* brad has your election stuff, as always

* more from amy:

"AMY GOODMAN: Andrew Gumbel, why would a Brit like you be interested or care so much about the voting machines of the United States?

ANDREW GUMBEL: I think because, you know, the United States has this reputation for being this towering democracy, and when you come here and see what it looks like in practice, it's really shocking. And the other thing is, I don't think most Americans until relatively recently had the slightest notion of how appallingly badly the system was run. And, you know, I’ve been in other parts of the world and been interested in pro-democracy movements. You come here and see this going on, and it just was something that I was drawn to, and no one else was writing about it that much, so I gave it a chance.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you see any hope, in terms of this being improved?

ANDREW GUMBEL: I do, because I think people are becoming educated very fast. You have incredible energy among activist groups around the country on a very local level, sometimes at county level, sometimes at state level, and they are absolutely passionate about this. I was in Tennessee not so long ago, where there's a group in Nashville that is absolutely on top of this. And they have come to understand that it's not about blaming the Republicans in the state. It's about getting ordinary Republican voters and ordinary Democratic voters together and to say to each other, ‘We need a fair system for the sake of all of us,’ and that kind of shift of thinking is now going on, and I find that very encouraging."