Remember this? "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." ?

Those are George Bush's famous 16 words from his 2003 State of the Union address, delivered less than two months before he sent troops into war in Iraq.

They were false. Three years later Americans are still demanding answers on the manipulation of intelligence by an administration eager to start a war.

Americans have a lot of questions that went unanswered tonight. When George Bush delivered his State of the Union address, he had a big megaphone and the world's attention. He had the opportunity to regain some degree of credibility with the American people -- more than half of whom disapprove of his performance as president. But he failed to answer the real questions ordinary Americans have about the state of our union:

I was one of ten people present at the "hack" of the Leon County, Florida voting system, which took place on Tuesday, December 13, 2005 around 4:30 in the afternoon at the county elections warehouse. Leon County's voting system is the Diebold Accu-Vote OS 1.94w (optical scan).

?The Leon County Supervisor of Elections, Ion Sancho, authorized a "test" of his Diebold voting system to see if election results could be altered using only a memory card. Harri Hursti (photo at right), a computer programmer from Finland, who has been working with Black Box Voting, facilitated the test and it has come to be known as the "Harri Hursti Hack."

Following is a description of that hack and its significance for our nation, which I hope will correct much of the misinformation circulating regarding this event.

The Hack

To select which voting machine to use for the test, Ion drew a serial number of one voting machine from a container holding all the serial numbers of all the Leon County machines.

Over the past few months, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has been questioning witnesses in the CIA leak case about the origins of the disputed Niger documents referenced in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address, according to several current and former State Department officials who have testified in the case.

The State Department officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because some of the information they discussed is still classified, indicated that the White House had substantial motive for revealing undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to reporters.

They said the questions Fitzgerald asked them about the Niger documents suggested to them that the special prosecutor was putting together a timeline. They said they believe Fitzgerald wants to show the grand jury how some people in the Bush administration may have conspired to retaliate against former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, an outspoken critic of the administration's pre-war Iraq intelligence.

In mid-January, the Associated Press published a report on the controversy currently brewing between America's religious right and families headed by gay parents. The issue? Whose children should be allowed to participate in the White House's annual Easter Egg Roll this April? The Family Pride Coalition invited its members to attend and numerous religious fundamentalist groups sprang into action. Even the White House has weighed in.

'Will the president take any measures to prevent these activists from using this non-political event as a way to push their agenda on the rest of us?' White House spokesman Scott McClellan's response to the pool reporter's question included, '.I've seen a couple of reports about it; I don't know how extensive that reporting has been. But this has been a family event for a long time and the president always looks forward to this event. we'll talk about it as we get closer.'

He had his day. Now let's drag him out of sainthood and back into controversy and relevance.

Martin Luther King has more to give us in the 21st century than a three-day weekend. Just read the speeches that haven't been chiseled in stone yet.

"This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers."

The public accolades ladled upon this fallen leader embalm him in sentimentality, in some glass case in the pantheon of national heroes, next to Washington, Lincoln, Elvis, et al. Then once a year we cherry-pick a memorable phrase here or there ("I have a dream" comes to mind for some reason), as though the words are frozen in history, part of a time when there was struggle and disagreement and prejudice.