Thank you for your article on the paperless machines. Here is how I think they got us all to use them.

Can you imagine a senario where defective paper ballots in Florida were manufactured on purpose to confound and confuse the public over the results of an election? I have been voting for over 30 years on punch -card machines and have never heard of such problems. I suppose there had been some here and there, but never a problem large enough to appear on national news. When you think about it logically, how is it possible that a blunt-pointed awl could not pierce a pre-scored blank on a ballot? The answer is simply that the ballots were made so that the chads would hang. They were not scored thoroughly. To accomplish this would require simply the use of dull tools and insufficient pressure in the production of those ballots. Before this is released, (perhaps thousands have already looked into this) it would be interesting to obtain some of those unused ballots and compare them with ballots from other states, and ballots from previous administrations in Florida. I wonder who purchased those ballots and

Dreadful news -- the worst. All the 9/11 nuts have relocated to Stolen Election. My inbox is awash. People who have spent the last three years sending me screeds establishing to their own satisfaction that George Bush personally ordered the attacks on the Trade Towers and that Dick Cheney vectored the planes in are now pummeling me with data on the time people spent online waiting to vote in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, and how the Diebold machines are all jimmied.

            As usual, the nuts think that conspiracies of inconceivable complexity worked at 100 percent efficiency, that Murphy's Law was once again in suspense, and that 10,000 co-conspirators are all going to keep their mouths shut.

The conflict in Iraq has become a holy war. In both directions.

On the surface, the most prominent headline on the New York Times front page Nov. 10 was simply matter-of-fact: "In Taking Fallujah Mosque, Victory by the Inch." Yet it's not mere happenstance that American forces have bombed many of Fallujah's mosques.

For public consumption, U.S. military officers -- like their civilian bosses and American journalists -- usually discuss this war in secular, even antiseptic terms. When the Times quoted Marine battalion commander Gary Brandl in another front-page story, on Nov. 6, the lieutenant colonel sounded straightforward: "We are going to rid the city of insurgents. If they do fight, we will kill them."

However, on the same day, the Associated Press reported that the same Lt. Col. Brandl said: "The enemy has got a face. He's called Satan. He's in Fallujah, and we're going to destroy him."

That statement by Brandl -- an officer with 800 soldiers under his command -- caused a bit of stir in some Internet circles. But mainstream U.S. media outlets scarcely noted his holy-warrior declaration. Most news

Hi and thanks for all your work.  I noticed one of the 12 ways Bush stole the election was Diebold.  I just want to put my two cents in that this is the number one issue for progressives until we get it fixed.  We simply must, must get the vote back out from corporate hands.  It must be a transparent process.   Call me a whiney liberal, but I cannot believe this is happening.  If Democratic leaning corporations had control of the voting machines, the whole media would be up in arms, and everyone would be saying Kerry is an illegitimate president.

Thanks for listening to me rant.  We absolutely must make this priority #1.  The exit polls were right.

The election is over, the results are well-known,
the will of the people has clearly been shown.
Let's dump all our quarrels and show by our deeds,
that we'll give our leader the help that he needs.
So let's get together, let bitterness pass,
I'll hug your elephant; you kiss my ass.