AUSTIN, Texas -- Whilst the punditry wanders weak and weary in the deep fogs of the "moral values debate," what say we pay some attention to what is going on, eh?

According to Newsday, "The White House has ordered the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama bin Ladin ..."

Bad Nooz. In the first place, the concept of "purge" has not hitherto played much part in our history, and now is no time to start. Considerable pains have been taken to protect the civil service from partisan pressure for extremely good reasons.

"Disloyalty to Bush," or any president, is not the same as disloyalty to the country. In fact, in the intelligence biz, opposing the White House is sometimes the highest form of loyalty to country, since when we fight without good intelligence, we fight blind.

Well, this is a good point about the media spin.

Regardless of how much control the Bush family has over the glossy magazines, (Barbara Pierce Bush's father owns the interlocking directorate glossies of the Eat Coast) it's true that the NYT is usually not as easily controllable, though the Washington Post was somewhat reined in in the years after Watergate by vindictive pro-Republican corporate advertisers and is now much more soft-spoken about GOP misdeeds.

However, even though the Bushs don't own the _Times_, they have succeeded in getting their spin machine in place there and in the OH papers, as well as the NH papers, as these recount proceedings begin. Meanwhile, NV papers and TV are a little more free-wheeling, while the FL papers, facing possible audits of some county computers, are cringing, fearing they're again going to have to defy their corporate advertisers and, to an extent, their OWNERS.

WASHINGTON, D.C., Nov. 19 -- The situation was somewhat surreal.  At yesterday's press conference in The Governor's House Hotel, representatives of the 'Election Verification Project', a coalition of technologists, voting rights and legal organizations, seemed strangely out of touch with reality and their own past concerns, as they promoted a plan that leaves voting machines firmly entrenched in the election process. 

Public doubt continues to grow over the 2004 election results.  That doubt is rooted in suspicions surrounding the use of voting machines, suspicions that these very groups helped to cultivate.

Contradictory claims abounded. Kim Alexander, of The California Voter Foundation, sang the praises of touchscreen machines, despite the mayhem she admits their use caused in this year's election. "Problems were reported with all vendors and across most of the states that use e-voting. Electronic voting machines lost votes in North Carolina, miscounted votes in Ohio, and broke down in New Orleans, causing long lines and shut-downs at polling places, " she said. 

Ohio’s 2004 presidential vote will be challenged as soon as next week in the state Supreme Court, a coalition of public-interest lawyers announced Friday.

The lawyers have taken sworn testimony from hundreds of people in hearings in Columbus and Cincinnati, and will use excerpts as well as documents obtained from county election officials and Election Day exit polls to make a case that thousands of votes were incorrectly counted or not counted on Election Day.

“The objective is to get to the truth,” said Columbus Ohio lawyer Cliff Arnebeck, coordinator of the Ohio Honest Elections Campaign. “What’s critically important, whether it’s President Bush or Sen. Kerry, whoever’s been elected actually elected, is to know you won by an honest election. So it’s in the interest of both sides as American citizens to know the truth and have this answered.”