Reason for the season

Letter to the Dispatch: The election

In its 5/22 editorial on absentee voting, the Dispatch declared that long lines were the biggest problem "in what turned out to be a clean election in this state."

Sonoma State University's "Project Censored" in its spring newsletter said for one to say the election was honest he would have to ignore the ease with which electronic totals can be changed without a trace; suppress the fact that Diebold, Sequoia and ES&S--the major manufacturers of touch screen voting machines and central tabulators--are owned and run by Bush Republicans, who have made no secret of their partisan intentions; deny the value of exit polls which were "mistaken" only in the swing states; and ignore the bald chicanery of the Bush supporters who ran the central polling station in Warren County, Oh., forcing out the press and poll monitors so they could count the vote in secret.

Orr thinks machines make voting simpler, more secure

The county famous for its ironic phrase: "Vote early, vote often" may have to look for a new tag line this year.

Cook County Clerk David Orr, who spoke to Palatine Township residents, is confident the security and uses of the county's new electronic voting machines will preserve the integrity of the election process.

"Cook County has the longest and most complicated ballots in the nation," Orr said. "Probably because we have all sorts of different units of government and retention of judges."

Two people living next door to each other might have different state representatives, live in different park districts, or have different school districts, Orr said, so there are multiple ballot styles -- as many as eight or nine in one precinct.

Orr said electronic vote machines would cut down the complexity of knowing which voter gets which ballot style.

Diebold Inc. in a tailspin after resignation of CEO and filing of a class action fraud lawsuit

VelvetRevolution.us, a coalition of more than 130 progressive organizations dedicated to transparent elections, reported today that its efforts to hold Diebold Inc. accountable for improper and unethical conduct is getting traction.  On Monday, longtime Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell resigned effective immediately after an acrimonious board meeting.  On Tuesday, a massive class action lawsuit was filed in United States District Court in Ohio against the firm and eight current and former executives for securities fraud, concealment, and insider trading.

Diebold’s stock has fallen more than 30% this year after well publicized troubles with the company’s voting machines and revelations by insiders that the company has severe structural problems.  One of those insiders, ‘Dieb-Throat,’ has compared Diebold to Enron, and he fully expects it to collapse under the weight of all the coming investigations and problems.  In fact, he believes that the new CEO, Thomas Swidarski, will not last long because he is one of the officials in the lawsuit who allegedly engaged in insider trading. 

Diebold hack proven in county test!

Due to contractual non-performance and security design issues, Leon County (Florida) supervisor of elections Ion Sancho told Black Box Voting that he will never again use Diebold in an election. He has requested funds to replace the Diebold system from the county. He will issue a formal announcement to this effect shortly.

Finnish security expert Harri Hursti proved that Diebold lied to Secretaries of State across the nation when Diebold claimed votes could not be changed on the memory card.

A test election was run in Leon County today with a total of eight ballots - six ballots voted "no" on a ballot question as to whether Diebold voting machines can be hacked or not. Two ballots, cast by Dr. Herbert Thompson and by Harri Hursti voted "yes" indicating a belief that the Diebold machines could be hacked.

At the beginning of the test election the memory card programmed by Harri Hursti was inserted into an Optical Scan Diebold voting machine. A "zero report" was run indicating zero votes on the memory card. In fact, however, Hursti had pre-loaded the memory card with plus and minus votes.

A statement by Leonard Peltier

Aho my relations,

Colin Powell: Still craven after all these years

At the end of November, newspapers across the United States and beyond told readers about sensational new statements by a former top assistant to Colin Powell when he was secretary of state. After interviewing Lawrence Wilkerson, the Associated Press reported he “said that wrongheaded ideas for the handling of foreign detainees after Sept. 11 arose from a coterie of White House and Pentagon aides who argued that ‘the president of the United States is all-powerful,’ and that the Geneva Conventions were irrelevant.”

AP added: “Wilkerson blamed Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and like-minded aides. Wilkerson said that Cheney must have sincerely believed that Iraq could be a spawning ground for new terror assaults, because ‘otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard.’”

Such strong words are headline grabbers when they come from someone widely assumed to be speaking Powell’s mind. And as a Powell surrogate, Wilkerson is certainly on a tear this week, speaking some truth about power. But there are a few big problems with his zeal to

Hidden in plane sight: U.S. media dodging air war in Iraq

The U.S. government is waging an air war in Iraq. “In recent months, the tempo of American bombing seems to have increased,” Seymour Hersh reported in the Dec. 5 edition of The New Yorker. “Most of the targets appear to be in the hostile, predominantly Sunni provinces that surround Baghdad and along the Syrian border.”

Hersh added: “As yet, neither Congress nor the public has engaged in a significant discussion or debate about the air war.”

Here’s a big reason why: Major U.S. news outlets are dodging the extent of the Pentagon’s bombardment from the air, an avoidance all the more egregious because any drawdown of U.S. troop levels in Iraq is very likely to be accompanied by a step-up of the air war.

So, according to the LexisNexis media database, how often has the phrase “air war” appeared in The New York Times this year with reference to the current U.S. military effort in Iraq?

As of early December, the answer is: Zero.

And how often has the phrase “air war” appeared in The Washington Post in 2005?

The answer: Zero.

Puzzle

Panic attack

Five shots rang out in the name of homeland security and suddenly a nervous, Costa Rica-born U.S. citizen lay dead on a jetway at Miami International Airport - tragic collateral damage in a war that seems less rational with each passing day.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesman later tried to fob off last week's shooting by two air marshals of 44-year-old Rigoberto Alpizar, who was unarmed and suffered from bipolar disorder, as a "textbook response" to the threat of terrorism. If that's true, God help us all. It looked more like a flailing, messy overreaction to nothing much and, at the same time, a signal to the American public that, when real terrorists don't present themselves, we're more than willing to wage war on ourselves.

Americans - certainly Americans of color - may well have more to fear from domestic security forces than al-Qaida.

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