During the past several years I've had the growing suspicion that the neo-cons seem bent not so much on world domination, as they are on returning the world to the era of bipolar geopolitics.

Bipolarity during the Cold War was very good to the neo-cons' raison d'etre, the military-industrial complex. As long as there was an H-bomb-equipped Soviet Union, there was a blank check for the Pentagon and its coterie of defense contractors. Recognize the pattern?

And who gets to be the new USSR? A couple years ago my money was on Syria, but now it looks like Iran is going to be doing Evil Empire duty. For despite the IAEA's finding of no Iranian nuclear weapons program, the Bushies continue to make dark allegations to the contrary. I don't know about you, but when I consider that in recent history the IAEA has always been right, and the Bushies always wrong, it sure looks like Iran is getting railroaded.

A world in which the West is forever on guard against the... Middle East. Dubya is probably thinking "Hey, we were really good at it for 40 years, why not go back to what we're good at?" All we need is for NATO to fall in line, and get China to stay out of it.

Articles:
Powell: Iran seeking The Bomb
IAEA finds no Iran nuke program
Powell's evidence unverified

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My friends, if you've managed to avoid clicking on other sections of this website, then you might not know the term Personal Rapid Transit. If you fall into this demographic, today brings a new opportunity from Salon.com to learn about the next big thing in mass transit. Writer Priya Jain uses the pod-transit system depicted in Pixar's The Incredibles as a starting point for introducing the very real technology that could be serving your city today—if only lawmakers and transit agencies could kick their addiction to mega-bucks transit projects.

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Because Blackboxvoting.org servers seem to be under regular attack, I am going to excerpt sections of their Nov. 16 account on Volusia County, Florida:

TUESDAY NOV 16 2004: Volusia County on lockdown
Friday Black Box Voting investigators Andy Stephenson and Kathleen Wynne popped in to ask for some records. They were rebuffed by an elections official named Denise. Bev Harris called on the cell phone... and told Volusia County Elections Supervisor Deanie Lowe that Black Box Voting would be in to pick up the Nov. 2 Freedom of Information request, or would file for a hand recount. "No, Bev, please don't do that!" Lowe exclaimed...
      Monday Bev, Andy and Kathleen came in with a film crew and asked for the FOIA request. Deanie Lowe gave it over with a smile, but Harris noticed that one item, the polling place tapes, were not copies of the real ones, but instead were new printouts, done on Nov. 15, and not signed by anyone.
      Harris asked to see the real ones, and they said for "privacy" reasons they can't make copies of the signed ones. She insisted on at least viewing them... They said the real ones were in the County Elections warehouse. It was quittin' time and an arrangment was made to come back this morning to review them.
...
      Kathleen Wynne and Bev Harris showed up at the warehouse at 8:15 Tuesday morning, Nov. 16. There was [county employee] Lana Hires' especially gruff, yet surprised. She ordered them out. Well, they couldn't see why because there she was, with a couple other people, handling the original poll tapes. You know, the ones with the signatures on them. Harris and Wynne stepped out and Volusia County officials promptly shut the door.
      There was a trash bag on the porch outside the door. Harris looked into it and what do you know, but there were poll tapes in there. They came out and glared at Harris and Wynne, who drove away a small bit, and then videotaped the license plates of the two vehicles marked 'City Council' member. Others came out to glare and soon all doors were slammed.
      So, Harris and Wynne went and parked behind a bus to see what they would do next. They pulled out some large pylons, which blocked the door. Harris decided to go look at the garbage some more while Wynne videotaped. A man who identified himself as "Pete" came out and Harris immediately wrote a public records request for the contents of the garbage bag, which also contained ballots -- real ones, but not filled out.
      A brief tug of war occurred, tearing the garbage bag open. Harris and Wynne then looked through it, as Pete looked on. He was quite friendly.
...
      Black Box Voting began to compare the special printouts given in the FOIA request with the signed polling tapes from election night. Lo and behold, some were missing. By this time, Black Box Voting investigator Andy Stephenson had joined the group at Volusia County. Some polling place tapes didn't match. In fact, in one location, precinct 215, an African-American precinct, the votes were off by hundreds, in favor of George W. Bush and other Republicans.
      Hmm. Which was right? The polling tape Volusia gave to Black Box Voting, specially printed on Nov. 15, without signatures, or the ones with signatures, printed on Nov. 2, with up to 8 signatures per tape?
      Well, then it became even more interesting. A Volusia employee boxed up some items from an office containing Lana Hires' desk, which appeared to contain -- you guessed it -- polling place tapes. The employee took them to the back of the building and disappeared.
      Then, Ellen B., a voting integrity advocate from Broward County, Florida, and Susan, from Volusia, decided now would be a good time to go through the trash at the elections office. Lo and behold, they found all kinds of memos and some polling place tapes, fresh from Volusia elections office.
      So, Black Box Voting compared these with the Nov. 2 signed ones and the "special' ones from Nov. 15 given, unsigned, finding several of the MISSING poll tapes. There they were: In the garbage.
      So, Wynne went to the car and got the polling place tapes she had pulled from the warehouse garbage. My my my. There were not only discrepancies, but a polling place tape that was signed by six officials.
      This was a bit disturbing, since the employees there had said that bag was destined for the shredder.
      By now, a county lawyer had appeared on the scene, suddenly threatening to charge Black Box Voting extra for the time spent looking at the real stuff Volusia had withheld earlier. Other lawyers appeared, phoned, people had meetings, Lana glowered at everyone, and someone shut the door in the office holding the GEMS server.
      Black Box Voting investigator Andy Stephenson then went to get the Diebold "GEMS" central server locked down. He also got the memory cards locked down and secured, much to the dismay of Lana. They were scattered around unsecured in any way before that.
      Everyone agreed to convene tomorrow morning, to further audit, discuss the hand count that Black Box Voting will require of Volusia County, and of course, it is time to talk about contesting the election in Volusia.

Thom Hartmann article: "Stinking Evidence"

Government looking at military draft lists

The Selective Service System (SSS) and the U.S. Department of Education now are gearing up to compare their computer records, to make sure all men between the ages of 18 and 25 who are required to register for a military draft have done so.
      The SSS and the education department will begin comparing their lists on Jan. 1, 2005, according to a memo authored by Jack Martin, acting Selective Service director.
      While similar record checks have been done periodically for the past 10 years, Martin's memo is dated Oct. 28, just a few days before the Nov. 2 presidential election... Source

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Obesity is the new Thin.

More commonly known as 'The War of Northern Aggression.'

KKK: a neighborhood block watch program.

'Nucular' is OK too.

Art Bell says the moon landing was fake.

NASCAR is the world's most popular spectator sport, if you factor out areas outside the southern U.S.

Genetics is a theory, therefore cousins can marry.

Bike news: Jason Harrington at Princeton Tec informs us that the Corona Bike white-LED cycling light will be released in February of '05. Jason also says the cord will be 54 inches long, meaning that the battery pack can be stowed in one's rear trunk bag. A small photo has been posted.

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Where are the hackers in the vote fraud debate? Whether you want to call it Votergate or Evotegate, the voting anomalies in (mostly) Florida and Ohio are so far of interest only to a relatively narrow subset of hardcore liberals, bloggers and their readerships.

My guess is that an overwhelming number of Americans don't see a problem, or are willing to give the system the benefit of the doubt, because the election results seem plausible. 51% to 48%—nothing seems wrong there. What they aren't ready to consider—and the mainstream media is close-mouthed about raising it—is that those of us who see the possibility of fraud think that it happened in a targeted way, and just enough to swing the election to Bush. Because a landslide would have been suspicious (like exit polls always being "wrong" in favor of Kerry), and fraud probably easier to detect.

This is where the hackers come in. My analogy is Microsoft Windows: how secure would Windows be if there were no hackers? It would be incredibly unsecure, full of more security holes than there are now. But Microsoft would know about them; if they wanted to, they could quietly use these backdoors to track users' browsing habits and inform Microsoft's own business strategies. Maybe even install software that makes competing company's services run slower. A sweet deal, as long as no one found out (as long as your source code was secret).

I and many others are convinced this is what's happening with our votes: Diebold, ES&S and other touchscreen systems are being fixed by those who know, insiders or former insiders, in order to subtley manipulate election results.

What we need are hackers who have no motivation to keep their actions quiet, hackers to rip the cloak of legitimacy off of voting technology, in order to make the technology stronger. Take the Presidential race. What if on the evening of Nov. 2 Peter Jennings had been sitting in front of a U.S. map with 50 states green for Ralph Nader? Or if in the next Seattle mayoral race incumbent Greg Nickels were to be defeated by perennial write-in Mickey Mouse? And by a margin of 83,000 votes to 1?

It would be obvious something was wrong (although the Mouse would make a better mayor). There would be outcries, demands for hack-proof security, Congressional investigations, and the voting machine companies would be forced to make sure the security of their systems is beyond reproach.

So come on you patriots, get hacking! And if Alberto Gonzales asks, I don't know you.

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   helpamericarecount.org
   Nader requests recount in New Hampshire
   "Incredible" Bush tallies
   6 House members now onboard GAO request

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For those wanting to take action about what is increasingly looking like another stolen election, see the following announcement. The key is that only a candidate can have a cause of action to call for a recount: we know Bush won't; it's looking like Kerry won't. That leaves Ralph:

 Urgent action to force recount in 34 states, GAO asked to investigate

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Yesterday I wrote that something smells. Well something does smell, and SURPRISE, it smells like elephants.

The drumbeat began to be heard Wednesday, floating over the postelection rubble. Buzzflash, citing Black Box Voting, voiced concerns over use of technology to rig the vote. Black Box reported Nov. 1 that Diebold's GEMS system can be hacked over modems with ease, and that it may have happened for real in Seattle on the day of the September primary. Then Joseph Cannon followed with a series of pointed questions that act as a roadmap for investigation into vote fraud.

And now a concise report comes in about Ohio and New Mexico, courtesy of the BBC's Greg Palast. Here's why the exit polls didn't match the official counts:

Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.

So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, "Who did you vote for?" Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters don't know.

Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded...
...
The election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something called "spoilage." Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded...
...
And not all votes spoil equally. Most of those votes, say every official report, come from African-American and minority precincts. (To learn more, click here.)

...Expert statisticians investigating spoilage for the government calculated that 54 percent of the ballots thrown in the dumpster were cast by black folks. (To read the report from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, click here.)

...Florida is terribly typical. The majority of ballots thrown out (there will be nearly 2 million tossed out from Tuesday's election) will have been cast by African American and other minority citizens.

So here we go again. Or, here we don't go again. Because unlike last time, Democrats aren't even asking Ohio to count these cards with the not-quite-punched holes (called "undervotes" in the voting biz). Nor are they demanding we look at the "overvotes" where voter intent may be discerned.
...
Exactly how many [Ohio] votes were lost to spoilage this time? Blackwell's office, notably, won't say, though the law requires it be reported. Hmm. But we know that last time, the total of Ohio votes discarded reached a democracy-damaging 1.96 percent. The machines produced their typical loss—that's 110,000 votes—overwhelmingly Democratic.

First and foremost, Kerry was had by chads. But the Democrat wasn't punched out by punch cards alone. There were also the 'challenges.' That's a polite word for the Republican Party of Ohio's use of an old Ku Klux Klan technique: the attempt to block thousands of voters of color at the polls. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida, the GOP laid plans for poll workers to ambush citizens under arcane laws—almost never used—allowing party-designated poll watchers to finger individual voters and demand they be denied a ballot...

In the end, the challenges were not overwhelming, but they were there. Many apparently resulted in voters getting these funky "provisional" ballots—a kind of voting placebo—which may or may not be counted. Blackwell estimates there were 175,000; Democrats say 250,000. Pick your number. But as challenges were aimed at minorities, no one doubts these are, again, overwhelmingly Democratic. Count them up, add in the spoiled punch cards (easy to tally with the human eye in a recount), and the totals begin to match the exit polls; and, golly, you've got yourself a new president. Remember, Bush won by 136,483 votes in Ohio.

CNN said George Bush took New Mexico by 11,620 votes...

New Mexico reported in the last race a spoilage rate of 2.68 percent, votes lost almost entirely in Hispanic, Native American and poor precincts—Democratic turf. From Tuesday's vote, assuming the same ballot-loss rate, we can expect to see 18,000 ballots in the spoilage bin.

Spoilage has a very Democratic look in New Mexico. Hispanic voters in the Enchanted State, who voted more than two to one for Kerry, are five times as likely to have their vote spoil as a white voter. Counting these uncounted votes would easily overtake the Bush 'plurality.'

Already, the election-bending effects of spoilage are popping up in the election stats, exactly where we'd expect them: in heavily Hispanic areas controlled by Republican elections officials. Chaves County, in the "Little Texas" area of New Mexico, has a 44 percent Hispanic population, plus African Americans and Native Americans, yet George Bush "won" there 68 percent to 31 percent.

I spoke with Chaves' Republican county clerk before the election, and he told me that this huge spoilage rate among Hispanics simply indicated that such people simply can't make up their minds on the choice of candidate for president. Oddly, these brown people drive across the desert to register their indecision in a voting booth.

Now, let's add in the effect on the New Mexico tally of provisional ballots.

"They were handing them out like candy," Albuquerque journalist Renee Blake reported of provisional ballots. About 20,000 were given out. Who got them?

Santiago Juarez who ran the "Faithful Citizenship" program for the Catholic Archdiocese in New Mexico, told me that "his" voters, poor Hispanics, whom he identified as solid Kerry supporters, were handed the iffy provisional ballots. Hispanics were given provisional ballots, rather than the countable kind "almost religiously," he said, at polling stations when there was the least question about a voter's identification. Some voters, Santiago said, were simply turned away.
...
...Despite the Democratic Party's pledge, the leadership this time gave in to racial disenfranchisement once again. Why? No doubt, the Democrats know darn well that counting all the spoiled and provisional ballots will require the cooperation of Ohio's Secretary of State, Blackwell. He will ultimately decide which spoiled and provisional ballots get tallied... Also, Democratic leadership knows darn well the media would punish the party for demanding a full count. Source

In short: Bush was declared the winner after votes were suppressed AND BEFORE all the votes were counted. Kerry needs to retract his concession and wait for the count of absentees, provisionals and military ballots. But I'm not holding my breath.

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Before we begin a discussion of where we are and where we go from here, let's first assign blame for how we got here: Damn you Terry McAuliffe, you incompetent loser. You took Bush's bad economy, a fraudulent war and a military quagmire and turned it into a Democratic cow pie. You are a two-time loser, you scum. You blew 2000 by failing to counter Rove in Florida, and now you've failed again in 2004. Are you happy now that you brought your party man Kerry to the fore? Are you happy you allowed Sharpton to stick pins in Howard Dean and did nothing as Dean was allowed to twist in the wind? Now that fear of terrorism has proven to be the trump card in the counted vote, are you happy that you got rid of Dean, the most fervent anti-war candidate—who also had the most effective anti-war message? Are you happy Kerry has conceded rather than fighting for Ohio? Weren't you the one who said you can't win the Presidency by selling fear to the American people? Well Bush wasn't selling fear, he was giving it away for free. You loser; I hope your resignation and ritual suicide happens before the day is out. Ah; but that would mean you have honor. Well you're not going to have Social Security to support you in your old age, choke on it.

Now then: something smells. Anywhere from 150,000 to 175,000 provisional ballots remain in Ohio, meaning Kerry would still have a chance there—Republicans were challenging voters, not Democrats. If counted, the vast majority of those provisionals go to Kerry.
      Iowa and New Mexico are still out.
      Then there's Florida. How could the exit polls be wrong by such a huge margin, AND in the wrong direction? Maybe the touchscreen voting machines explain it: yesterday afternoon a woman interviewed on CNN said she voted for Kerry and Castor, but the machine told her she had voted for Bush and Martinez. I recall the 2000 story from Florida, in which a mysterious memory card contained 16,022 negative Gore votes (that's 16,022 with a minus sign in front of it). I take comfort that Blackbox Voting is going to get to the bottom of it (since Terry McAuliffe won't).

Finally: until Bush's house comes crashing down, Nixonianly, from the weight of his own scandals, we must remember that Bush's apparent victory changes nothing. He lied about WMD and Iraq's connection to terrorism. He's mismanaged the war and let Osama remain free. He's set a record federal deficit. He's lost millions of jobs. Millions have lost health insurance. He's underfunded No Child Left Behind. He was AWOL from the Guard.

The progressive side is still in the right.

And Mr. President? 51% is not a mandate, no matter how fast it's spinning. But I wouldn't expect a C student like you to know that.

The Ohio Margin:

   Article: Seattle central vote computer may have been hacked in primary Dialing into Diebold e-vote systems is easy
   Article: "The numbers were nonsensical so we knew there were problems"
   Article: Exit poll data changed after the fact

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What are you reading this for? Get out and vote!

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