Charlie Crist, Florida's new Republican governor, will win points with voters across the nation for his recent proposal to abandon touch-screen voting machines. Florida's repudiation of the widely mistrusted machines could hasten an across-the-board abandonment — and thereby renew Americans' faith in the integrity of the vote.

Ever since the presidential election of 2000, Florida has been the poster child for controversial ballot counts. After the dispute was resolved, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, providing funds to replace outdated voting equipment.

Florida used its share to mothball the punch-card machines that had caused so many problems. But in many large counties, it replaced them with touch-screen systems that leave no paper trail. The drawbacks of these machines were dramatically illustrated last fall by a close congressional race in Sarasota, where 18,000 votes went unrecorded. The losing candidate, Democrat Christine Jennings, is pressing a challenge in court.

As war wages on in the Middle East, there's a heated battle on Capitol Hill over which political party's proposals to continue the war are more PRO-TROOP.  There's a raging debate over exactly what set of futile recommendations to the dictator living in the Vice President's mansion on Massachusetts Avenue amounts to the greatest PRO or ANTI TROOP agenda.

Leading contestants are:

1.-a Republican proposal to give Cheney and Bush another $93 billion off the books for the war, no questions asked.

2.-a Democratic proposal to give Cheney and Bush another $93 billion off the books for the war but reauthorize the war with new lies in place of the old ones and/or ask the President to issue a public statement whenever he sends troops to Iraq without proper equipment or training, but not actually DO anything if the President chooses not to make such a public statement.

The New York Times and CBS News recently polled the US public:
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/national/03022007_poll.pdf

After a long list of questions that confused any distinction between health care and health coverage, the New York Times/CBS asked:

"Do you think it would be fair or unfair for the government in Washington to require all Americans to participate in a national health care plan, funded by taxpayers?"

By 48 to 43 percent, respondents said: unfair.  But a strong majority had already said they thought it was very important for the government to cover everyone, even if it meant raising taxes.  What was seen as unfair here, for some people, was almost certainly the national health care plan, which sounds like something more than a national health coverage plan.  In fact it sounds like Walter Reed Hospital.

The New York Times article reporting on the poll quoted one respondent who obviously thought national health care, not just coverage, was being discussed:

Department of Energy Research Shows Technology Does Not Reduce Risks of Nuclear Proliferation and Terrorism

Background

The Bush administration requested $250 million in its fiscal 2007 budget as a first installment for a program to "reprocess" spent fuel from nuclear power reactors. Spent fuel is intensely radioactive, and reprocessing is a complex chemical operation that separates plutonium from those elements in spent fuel that make it highly radioactive. At that point the plutonium can be used to make new reactor fuel or nuclear weapons. For this reason, there has been a long-standing concern that reprocessing facilities anywhere would be potential sources for terrorists seeking the materials required to make nuclear weapons, and that such facilities could ease the path for nations beginning nuclear weapons programs. These concerns led the United States to abandon its reprocessing program in the 1970s.

Americans frustrated with the Democratic congressional leaders for dithering over Iraq should never forget who actually drove us into the Iraqi quagmire. Even those Democrats who voted for the president's war resolution in 2002 did so only after the president repeatedly promised -- with the deepest insincerity -- that he would only invade Iraq as a "last resort."

            Responsibility for that lie and many others rests squarely with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who have spent nearly four years, thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars to create catastrophe. Today every policy alternative, including a phased withdrawal, is likely to impose costly consequences on us, on the Iraqis and on the world.

            So perhaps the Democrats deserve more than a month or two to determine how best to extricate our troops from that complex and perilous trap.