The Verified Voting Foundation, in their weekly newsletter, reports that over 85% of the voters in Pennsylvania won’t be able to register their votes in a verifiable form. Paperless, electronic voting has become the norm in Pennsylvania despite a state law that requires manually recounting a sample of ballots cast in elections. 32% of registered voters in the state will have the opportunity to vote only on ES&S iVotronic touch screen machines. According to the report these machines have been described as “too risky to use in elections.” A report issued by the State of Ohio says of them: “Anyone with access to a machine can re-calibrate the touchscreen to affect how the machine records votes.” Another 31% will use Shouptronic push button machines and 10% more have access only to Diebold/Premier TSx touch screen equipment. Relatively few--1.2 million out of the total 8.3 million registered voters--will have access to optically scanned paper ballots.

Clinton may take California, but Obama scored the Grateful Dead.

Aren Gunderson, a biology graduate student at UAF, auditioned for the latest season of Survivor and secured a spot! But he declined the invitation because the show's time commitment would mess up his field season studying marmots. His commitment to science is commendable.

Read the story by Ned Rozell at the Alaska Report.

Not quite, but....

"Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires — the constant switching and pivoting — energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we're supposed to be concentrating on... studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy."

Hat tip Slashdot. Read the whole article at The Atlantic.

by David Michael Green http://www.smirkingchimp.com/node/11783

I am outraged at how the administration polarized the country in the wake of one of the greatest traumas it had ever experienced. Let us leave aside the ample evidence demonstrating that the Bush team was asleep at the wheel before 9/11 - or perhaps far, far worse - a set of facts which is noteworthy in part because progressives did not use them to attack the president and score cheap but easy political points. But the administration did precisely that. It is disgusting - and it fills me with anger - how they used a national security crisis to win partisan political contests. How they scheduled a vote on the Iraq war resolution right before the midterm elections of 2002, thus politicizing the gravest decision a country can make by forcing Democrats to choose between voting their conscience and campaign accusations of being soft on national security.

It boils my blood that these chickenhawks - almost none of whom showed up for duty in Vietnam when it was their turn - could dare to accuse Max Cleland of being weak on national security, a guy who gave three of his four limbs to that very cause on the battlefields of Southeast Asia. How could they run ads morphing his face into Saddam's or bin Laden's, when his opponent - of course - took Vietnam deferments, just like Cheney and Ashcroft and the rest? And how could they accuse him of being weak on national defense because he opposed the bureaucratic reshuffling to create the Homeland Security Department, when Bush himself had also opposed it? That is, before Rove politicized it by inserting union-busting language applying to tens of thousands of civil servants covered by the act

by George Lakoff, Marc Ettlinger and Sam Ferguson (c)The Rockridge Institute, 2006 (We invite the free distribution of this piece)

Progressives have fallen into a trap. Emboldened by President Bush’s plummeting approval ratings, progressives increasingly point to Bush's "failures" and label him and his administration as incompetent. For example, Nancy Pelosi said “The situation in Iraq and the reckless economic policies in the United States speak to one issue for me, and that is the competence of our leader." Self-satisfying as this criticism may be, it misses the bigger point. Bush’s disasters — Katrina, the Iraq War, the budget deficit — are not so much a testament to his incompetence or a failure of execution. Rather, they are the natural, even inevitable result of his conservative governing philosophy. It is conservatism itself, carried out according to plan, that is at fault. Bush will not be running again, but other conservatives will. His governing philosophy is theirs as well. We should be putting the onus where it belongs, on all conservative office holders and candidates who would lead us off the same cliff.

From Prison Planet -- by Paul Watson -- Thursday November 8, 2007

On October 23, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 1955, the "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007" by a landslide vote of 404 to 6. The bill has been referred to the Senate where it awaits scrutiny from the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

According to supporters, the measure will play an important role in helping government and law enforcement officials understand and prevent domestic terrorism. In a speech on the House floor advocating passage of the bill, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) -- the coauthor and initial sponsor of the measure -- warned that the next time the U.S. faces a terrorist threat, "my assumption is that many who attack us will already be here, and some will be US citizens." To prevent that attack, she said, the new "legislation will help the nation develop a better understanding of the forces that lead to homegrown terrorism, and the steps we can take to stop it."

Critics of the measure allege that it is a thinly veiled and dangerous attempt to criminalize dissent. Such concern is based on the bill’s vague and open-ended language that, critics say, could be used by the government to trample basic rights to free speech and assembly and turn legitimate dissent into thought crimes.

By George Arnold -- Arkansas Democrat Gazette -- November 25, 2007

Ann Wright came to Fayetteville the day after the Big Flour Scare. It was only fitting.

Ms. Wright is a retired U. S. Army colonel and an ex-diplomat. After the start of the war with Iraq, she resigned from government service to register her disapproval of the war. With almost 30 years in the military and another 16 years of diplomatic service, you’d think she’d earned the right to dissent. Instead, she now finds herself on an international watch list because of misdemeanor arrests during anti-war protests. She discovered she’d been put on the watch list when she went to Canada last month to speak about of course —“ watch lists and how people find themselves on these lists and are detained. ” In Canada, on her way to meet with friendly members of the Canadian parliament, she was detained and promptly put on a flight back to the United States. She’s been banned from returning to Canada for at least a year.

By Jim Holt London Review of Books

Iraq is ‘unwinnable’, a ‘quagmire’, a ‘fiasco’: so goes the received opinion. But there is good reason to think that, from the Bush-Cheney perspective, it is none of these things. Indeed, the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’.

Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.

An arrogant attitude only adds fuel to the criticism. By Rod Nordland and Mark Hosenball | NEWSWEEK

Oct 15, 2007 Issue

The colonel was furious. "Can you believe it? They actually drew their weapons on U.S. soldiers." He was describing a 2006 car accident, in which an SUV full of Blackwater operatives had crashed into a U.S. Army Humvee on a street in Baghdad's Green Zone. The colonel, who was involved in a follow-up investigation and spoke on the condition he not be named, said the Blackwater guards disarmed the U.S. Army soldiers and made them lie on the ground at gunpoint until they could disentangle the SUV. His account was confirmed by the head of another private security company. Asked to address this and other allegations in this story, Blackwater spokesperson Anne Tyrrell said, "This type of gossip has led to many soap operas in the press."

The rest of the story here . . . .

Experience them for yourself.

Federal agents are looking into U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens' role in the ongoing investigation into the remodeling of his Girdwood home, according to two law enforcement officials familiar with the probe. ... Three contractors who worked on the remodeling project said the FBI asked them to turn over their records from the job, the Anchorage Daily News reported Tuesday. One also said he testified about the project before a federal grand jury in December.

The remodeling work in summer and fall 2000 more than doubled the size of the house, a four-bedroom structure that is Stevens' official residence in Alaska.

Read on...

In the book, DeLay criticizes Gingrich for, among other things, conducting an affair with a Capitol Hill employee during the 1998 impeachment trial of Bill Clinton. (The woman later became Gingrich's third wife.) "Yes, I don't think that Newt could set a high moral standard, a high moral tone, during that moment," DeLay said. "You can't do that if you're keeping secrets about your own adulterous affairs." He added that the impeachment trial was another of his "proudest moments." The difference between his own adultery and Gingrich's, he said, "is that I was no longer committing adultery by that time, the impeachment trial. There's a big difference." He added, "Also, I had returned to Christ and repented my sins by that time."

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War Without End The New York Times | Editorial Sunday 27 May 2007

Never mind how badly the war is going in Iraq. President Bush has been swaggering around like a victorious general because he cowed a wobbly coalition of Democrats into dropping their attempt to impose a time limit on his disastrous misadventure. 

By week's end, Mr. Bush was acting as though that bit of parliamentary strong-arming had left him free to ignore not just the Democrats, but also the vast majority of Americans, who want him to stop chasing illusions of victory and concentrate on how to stop the sacrifice of young Americans' lives.

Read the full article

WASHINGTON, May 9 - The 2007 state legislative season has been the most productive in the history of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) rights movement and, as a result, for the first time more than half the U.S. population will live in jurisdictions that outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, according to an analysis of Census data and current laws released today by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. In addition, nearly 40 percent of the population will now live in jurisdictions that protect Transgender people from discrimination - a sevenfold increase since 2000, and one-fifth of all Americans will live in states that offer same-sex couples broad rights under state law, more than an eightfold increase since 2004. The Task Force said the 2006 elections and years of dogged work at the grassroots level were responsible for the surge in legislation.

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