Spin of the Day

MoveOn.org: Democracy in Action FREEDOM AND SECURITY: a speech by the winner of the 2000 presidential election.

Vote count marred by computer woes 5,352 Indiana voters equals 144,000 computer votes.

Analysis of an Electronic Voting System

FrontPage - Diebold-CD Wiki "The only possible motive I can see for disabling some of the security mechanisms and features in their system is to be able to rig elections."

Salon.com News | Osama University? On Oct. 21, the House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill that could require university international studies departments to show more support for American foreign policy or risk their federal funding.

The Yale Herald - Nov 7, 2003 - Jerry's phat ('cause of all the ice cream): "He is currently embarking on the Pants on Fire campaign in which, to highlight what he claims are the lies President George W. Bush, DC '68, has told the country, he drags a 12-foot statue of Bush with flaming pants behind his motorcycle on various trails around the country."

POLITICS-U.S.: Feith is the Answer "(V)irtually everything that has gone wrong in Iraq -- especially those matters that Congress is either investigating or is poised to probe -- is linked directly to his office. ''All roads lead to Feith,'' noted one knowledgeable administration official this week."

A PDF of the original report finding fault with electronic voting machines. Abstract:
Recent election problems have sparked great interest in managing the election process through the
use of electronic voting systems. While computer scientists, for the most part, have been warning of
the perils of such action, vendors have forged ahead with their products, claiming increased security and
reliability. Many municipalities have adopted electronic systems, and the number of deployed systems is
rising. For these new computerized voting systems, neither source code nor the results of any third-party
certification analyses have been available for the general population to study, because vendors claim that
secrecy is a necessary requirement to keep their systems secure. Recently, however, the source code
purporting to be the software for a voting system from a major manufacturer appeared on the Internet.
This manufacturer’s systems were used in Georgia’s state-wide elections in 2002, and the company just
announced that the state of Maryland awarded them an order valued at up to $55.6 million to deliver
touch screen voting systems.1
This unique opportunity for independent scientific analysis of voting system source code demonstrates
the fallacy of the closed-source argument for such a critical system. Our analysis shows that
this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts.
We highlight several issues including unauthorized privilege escalation, incorrect use of cryptography,
vulnerabilities to network threats, and poor software development processes. For example, common voters,
without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms
within the voting terminal. Furthermore, we show that even the most serious of our outsider attacks
could have been discovered without the source code. In the face of such attacks, the usual worries about
insider threats are not the only concerns; outsiders can do the damage. That said, we demonstrate that
the insider threat is also quite considerable. We conclude that, as a society, we must carefully consider
the risks inherent in electronic voting, as it places our very democracy at risk.

Why War? Features Here's a link blogger dot com appears to allow.

: What Diebold doesn't want you to know about their voting machines: they subtract votes. "I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 [votes] when it was uploaded."

Apparently Blogger dot com doesn't want you to know either as they won't allow the link to be published.

The New York Review of Books: Strictly Business

CBS News | Sounds Of Silence | October 31, 2003 17:11:09: "Kean has complained for several weeks about executive branch foot-dragging and has suggested the administration may be trying to run out the clock on the committee's mandate, which expires in May.

Kean's not the only one who's upset. Other Republican members of the committee, including former Sen. Slade Gorton, a stalwart conservative, have echoed his complaints. And, given that the commission's mandate is to determine how the attacks happened and to make recommendations about stopping another one, these complaints are serious business.

Any lack of cooperation from the White House is troubling, but one key point of contention is especially disturbing: whether the commission will have access to daily intelligence briefings given to the president in the weeks before September 11, 2001. Particularly in light of revelations that at least one of these reports indicated that al Qaeda was planning to hijack U.S. airliners"

Yahoo! News - Groups Question Voting Machines' Accuracy: "'The vendors ... they're going to tell you it's perfect and wonderful. (But) there are a lot of issues out there that haven't been answered. It's a scary thing.' "

Yahoo! News - Top Israeli Officer Says Tactics Are Backfiring: "Israel's senior military commander told columnists for three leading newspapers this week that Israel's military tactics against the Palestinian population were too repressive and were fomenting explosive levels of 'hatred and terrorism' that might become impossible to control."

Windfalls of War - The Center for Public Integrity

Christian Aid reports: "billions of dollars of oil money that has already been transferred to the US-controlled Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) has effectively disappeared into a financial black hole"

Why is Bush avoiding the Australian media? Don't ask - National - smh.com.au: Denied access to Bush, "Australian media will learn of events [in Canberra] from news reports filed in the US."

Curtains Ordered for Media Coverage of Returning Coffins (washingtonpost.com): " Since the end of the Vietnam War, presidents have worried that their military actions would lose support once the public glimpsed the remains of U.S. soldiers arriving at air bases in flag-draped caskets. To this problem, the Bush administration has found a simple solution: It has ended the public dissemination of such images by banning news coverage and photography of dead soldiers' homecomings on all military bases. "

News: " 'It is a tragedy that US soldiers have killed so many civilians in Baghdad. But it is really incredible that the US military does not even count these deaths....Right now soldiers feel they can pull the trigger without coming under review.'"

KR Washington Bureau | 10/17/2003 | Bush's `dream team' plagued by infighting, backstabbing: "But after nearly three years in office, Bush's dream team is beset by infighting, backstabbing and maneuvering on major foreign policy issues involving North Korea, Syria, Iran and postwar Iraq. The result has been paralysis, inconsistency and a zigzagging U.S. policy that confuses lawmakers on Capitol Hill and disturbs America's friends, allies and would-be partners.
It has hampered U.S. policies in the Middle East, where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to rage, caused anxiety in Asia, where the administration's refusal to deal directly with North Korea has dismayed allies, and has seriously soured relations with some North Atlantic Treaty Organization members, say U.S. and foreign officials. "

'The Lies of George W. Bush' by David Corn: "Bush has lied his way through most serious policy matters "

Watchdog blasts US, Israel for treatment of media. 21/10/2003. ABC News Online: "Out of 164 countries surveyed by RSF, the United States ranked 31st for its respect for freedom of expression at home, and 135th for its behaviour beyond its borders."

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | The new Great Game: "'I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian,' said Dick Cheney in a speech to oil industrialists in 1998."

Battle brewing over Ohio slots - newarkadvocate.com: "'What really bothers me about the whole arrangement is how patently unfair the arrangement is to the taxpayer of Ohio,' Hooke said. 'It's designed to enrich a handful of racetrack owners.' "

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Families seek truth over Israeli deaths: "The Corries had been told the report was secret until they found that the Israeli government was covertly distributing it among members of the US Congress to prevent an independent investigation. "

And He's Head of Intelligence? His dissembling gets almost comic over another one of his comments. Boykin routinely told audiences that God elevated George W. Bush to the presidency. “Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him,” he would say. “I tell you this morning that he’s in the White House because God put him there.” Boykin now explains that he believes God routinely decides American elections and has done the same thing for “Bill Clinton and other presidents.” This is surely the first time a conservative evangelical has argued that Clinton’s election was caused by divine intervention.

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | The return of Arabophobia: "'I read TE Lawrence before I came here,' a British officer was quoted in the Mail on Sunday. 'A century ago he recognised dishonesty was inherent in Arab society. Today is the same. They do nothing for love and nothing at all if they can help it.'
The attitudes of the officer, shocking though they are, only mirror those of the people who sent him to war. Scratch a neo-con and you find an Arabophobe. Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, has berated Arabs on the 'need to change their behaviour'. Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defence for policy, has talked of Israel's 'moral superiority' over its neighbours. And the veteran foreign policy hawk Richard Perle, when asked about the fears Egyptians had of the Iraq war provoking an Arab backlash, replied: 'Egyptians can barely govern their own country, we don't need advice on how to govern ours.' "

News: "The vote count was not conducted by state elections officials, but by the private company that sold Georgia the voting machines in the first place, under a strict trade-secrecy contract that made it not only difficult but actually illegal - on pain of stiff criminal penalties - for the state to touch the equipment or examine the proprietary software to ensure the machines worked properly."

BlackBoxVoting.org

The Unofficial Paul Krugman Web Page: "What we have here is a form of looting"

FirstEnergy customers lose chance to save billions in electricity costs: "The office charged with protecting Ohio utility consumers has destroyed a closely guarded consultant's report that might have saved billions of dollars for customers in FirstEnergy electric territory."

Another day, another impending war, another uranium trading lie. Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | CIA and Pentagon split over uranium intrigue

News: "[T]wo out of three genetically modified crops in the tests may damage the environment."

washingtonpost.com: Spending On Iraq Sets Off Gold Rush Dyncorp mercs get $20,000 per month. Compare that to US military pay.

YellowTimes.org - ''Our newest savior: General Wesley Clark'': The Washington Post reported that during the Kosovo bombing campaign, Clark "would rise out of his seat and slap the table. 'I've got to get the maximum violence out of this campaign -- now!''"

Two years after the US invasion, Afghanis facing unprecedented terror and abuse (by Zafar Bangash) - Media Monitors Network (MMN)
: "A joke making the rounds of Kabul's cafes these days goes something like this: 'What is worse than being ruled by the Taliban? Being liberated by the Americans!'"

Moscow prepared to stage pre-emptive strikes - www.smh.com.au: "the Kremlin has made it clear it is prepared to use pre-emptive strikes against perceived threats and will continue to mobilise Russia's vast nuclear arsenal to deter a new generation of low-level instability on its borders. "

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Theatre of war: "More than 320 US troops have died since America invaded Iraq, but hundreds more have been injured in the line of duty, many so seriously that they will be disabled for life....Major Gordon Olsen is an orthopaedic specialist.... 'Before I came over, watching the news I was rah-rah and here we go,' he says. 'Now I am just thinking, this needs to stop and go away. When talking to my wife at home, you know, people just hear about a few casualties a day and it doesn't sound like a big deal. But when you see a 19-year-old kid with his leg barely hanging on, that one alone is a big deal.' "

Many soldiers, same letter / Front Page -The Olympian: "'When I told him he wrote such a good letter, he said: 'What letter?' '"

Study refutes Limbaugh's take on media: "Love him or hate him, he was wrong"

Philly.com - "The Region's Home Page": SOP for the GOP "Serious questions arise when the Democratic mayor of the fifth-largest city in the country discovers, just weeks before a close election, that senior Bush administration officials approved a plan to bug his office"

US 'empire' and its limits | csmonitor.com: "Since the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, the US has deposed five regimes - roughly one every three years, notes Andrew Krepinevich, director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. 'We are in the business of regime change,' he says."

Ex-EPA Officials Question Clean Air Suits (washingtonpost.com): "The utility industry, which contributed $4.8 million to the Bush campaign and other GOP committees in 2000, argued that existing rules have discouraged investment and expansion of energy sources. Under the revised rules announced in August, older plants will not have to install pollution controls"

Bush taps DeWitt for inner circle: "'We're not sure qualities for appointment to the board include being a rich guy, financial supporter and close friend of the president,' said Eric Miller, senior defense investigator for the Project on Government Oversight.
'You need independence on this board. How can you be independent if you're one of the president's largest contributors?' he said."

U.S. May Expand Access To Endangered Species (washingtonpost.com): The best government money can buy. "Safari Club International gave $274,000 to candidates during the 2000 election cycle, 86 percent of it to Republicans. It also spent $5,445 printing bumper stickers for the Bush presidential campaign. Monson has made a variety of contributions himself, including $1,000 to the Bush for President campaign. "

KR Washington Bureau | 10/10/2003 | Leak of CIA officers leaves trail of damage: "the leak by Bush administration officials of that CIA officer's identity may have damaged U.S. national security to a much greater extent than generally realized"

Forbes.com: Princeton student sued over paper on CD copying Use the shift key, go to jail.

Yahoo! News - Israel Demands Withdrawal of Food Report: "Palestinians had been 'reduced to begging' by Israeli security measures.
'There is a permanent, grave violation of the right to food by the occupying forces. There is a catastrophic humanitarian situation, and really it is absurd,' he said at the time.
'Markets don't function, peasants don't go to the field, and they are humiliated in a very, very shocking way.' "

TownHall.com: Conservative Columnists: Robert Novak: [writing in 2001] "Disclosing confidential sources is unthinkable for a reporter seeking to probe behind the scenes in official Washington, but the circumstances here are obviously extraordinary....[W]hy break a reporter's responsibility to keep his sources secret? I wrestled with this question for months and finally decided that my experience with Hanssen contributes to the portrait of this most contradictory of all spies. Furthermore, to be honest to my readers, I must reveal it. "

The New York Times: Politics: "Thirteen months before the 2004 election, a solid majority of Americans say the country is seriously on the wrong track." And the survey polled 41% more Bush voters than Gore voters. [Click on "Poll Watch" link for a .pdf of results]

Yahoo! News - Bill For Iraq Reconstruction Goes Up, Up, Up: "In 2004 alone, Iraq will need some $9.3 billion in areas such as water and education, according to a World Bank statement released Friday. The U.S. assessment says the biggest expense, $8 billion, would go for refurbishing Iraqi oil facilities, while the second biggest expense, $5 billion, would be for police and security. "

Philly.com - "The Region's Home Page": "The Bush administration has also been a factor in persistent confusion." Resarch shows most misinformed watch Fox news.

Charlotte.com - Your Guide to Charlotte Ballenger's wife also agreed with him that the GOP-controlled House's 1995 decision to restrict the money spent on members of Congress and their spouses had helped turn Washington into "a lousy place to live. ...It used to be you'd get invitations to the symphony or the theater ... I don't think you should get $1,000 trips to the Bahamas (from lobbyists). But I don't see where a dinner or a theater ticket is that bad. We had friends who are lobbyists."

Yahoo! News - US congressman blames marriage collapse on Muslim neighbors: "Congressman Ballenger's bizarre comments demonstrate the sheer lunacy of his political and religious views,' said Arsalan Iftikhar, CAIR's director of legal affairs. 'Ballenger's statements are a perfect example of Islamophobic hysteria at the highest levels of government"

Recount procedures questioned in California election Computerized voting machines are easily hacked to change votes or add votes, and make recounts impossible. The manufacturer contributes heavily to the GOP.

Yahoo! News - U.S. Slashes Military Aid to Friendly Nations: "This is the first sanction in U.S. diplomatic history targeted exclusively at democracies,'"

Does A Felon Rove The White House? "one of the clearest cases of documentable criminal conduct and blatant lies by an administration since Watergate and the Iran-Contra scandal"

Al-Ahram Weekly | Opinion | Inconclusive evidence: " The US version, then, turns Al-Qa'eda into a clone of a Cold War secret service, recruiting without moral vetting and acting without claiming its deeds, even when it mounts its biggest ever operation. This account contrasts sharply with all we know about the nature of Bin Laden and those close to him, and about the group they lead"

Who's next in Iraq profiteering.

FBI opens criminal investigation of Bush staff in CIA leak: "When the president boarded Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base outside of Washington, he walked up the steps and waved -- and not a single camera followed. He looked momentarily perplexed. All lenses were trained on Rove at the bottom of the steps."

VOANews.com: "condemn the wall as an unlawful act of annexation"

Washington Insiders' New Firm Consults on Contracts in Iraq: "a decision by the Governing Council of Iraq to allow foreign companies to establish 100 percent ownership of businesses in Iraq, an unusual arrangement in the Mideast, had added to the attractiveness of the market."

Bush Aides Say They'll Cooperate With Probe Into Intelligence Leak (washingtonpost.com): " those who expose the names of intelligence sources are 'the most insidious of traitors.'"

Bush Administration Is Focus of Inquiry (washingtonpost.com): "The intentional disclosure of a covert operative's identity is a violation of federal law. ...two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife."

CIA seeks probe of White House

USATODAY.com - It's TGIF for the White House when it has bad news: "the Bush administration has a pattern of announcing controversial or unfavorable news as the weekend begins.
To attract little attention, the strategy makes sense. Friday night's network news broadcasts are the least-watched of the workweek. Saturday newspapers are the week's least-read editions"

KnoxNews: Politics: "Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., chairman of the committee, countered with a critique of the scientific underpinnings of climate change, calling global warming 'perhaps the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American public.'"

Yahoo! News - Largest U.S. Coffee Co. Agrees to Pay Farmers a Fair Price But only on one of their many lines of coffee. Try this instead: www.peacecoffee.com

New Zealand News - World - Family accuse Government of toying with Kelly's life: "widespread dissent among senior members of the intelligence community over the dossier was suppressed"

Winona Daily News - News: "this is a far cry from what we were told even six months ago about what the cost of rebuilding Iraq "

Even on Wall Street, It Seems, the Fine Print Goes Unread

BW Online | September 12, 2003 | Team Bush's Clueless New Math: "President's Bush's Sept. 7 address to the nation on the Iraqi occupation made one thing perfectly clear: Fiscal policy is a mess."

The Unofficial Paul Krugman Web Page: "Exploiting the Atrocity"

Bush Cites 9/11 On All Manner Of Questions (washingtonpost.com): "Bush uses terrorism as a refuge when he is uncertain about an answer or in trouble on an issue."

Yahoo! News - Job Market Weak Despite Growth Signs: "the very good news we had on consumer spending for the months of July and August will not last unless employment growth returns"

Yahoo! News - World Remembers Sept. 11, Questions U.S. Response: "No bells toll for the victims of unbelievable Israeli savagery"

ESPN.com - Page2 - The Bush League "Something is dangerously wrong in any country where a monumentally-Failed backwoods politician can scare our national TV networks so totally that they will give him anything he wants."

Mercury News | 09/10/2003 | Santa Cruz urges probe into Bush impeachment: "Did false or misleading information exaggerate the threat posed by Iraq, and was this part of a conscious effort to mislead the American public?"

US Trade with Saudi Arabia "surged" since 9/11 "Two years after Sept. 11, the US has reported a 61 percent surge in bilateral trade with the Kingdom"

Ex-Envoy Criticizes Bush's Postwar Policy (washingtonpost.com) "we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice"

The Observer | International | Farah tried to plead with the US troops but she was killed anyway: "Whatever happened here was one-sided, a wall of fire unleashed at a building packed with sleeping families."

Yahoo! News - Report Rips Chemical Disarmament Program: "Under an international treaty, the United States was supposed to have destroyed 45 percent of its stockpile of 31,280 tons of mustard gas, sarin and other chemical weapons by next April. This week, the Pentagon announced it would seek a delay until December 2007"

Yahoo! News - Vets Urge Bush on Disabled Benefits Rule: "535,000 veterans are losing some of their retirement under the policy"

Unprepared for Peace in Iraq (washingtonpost.com)

Abandoned weaponry litters Iraq / U.S. faulted for not securing Hussein-era munitions: "the United States, in its haste to dismantle Saddam Hussein's rule, has left thousands of pounds of munitions unguarded and accessible to looters and criminals."

Yahoo! News - White House threw up wall to block energy information: report: "The result is not just bad decisions on energy, but a rejection of the principles of open government and public accountability."

GAO Investigators: Cheney Stifled Energy Probe (washingtonpost.com): "This report is a sad chronicle of the efforts of the office of the vice president to hide its activities from the American people"

Report says limited cooperation thwarts a full review of Cheney's energy task force: "Investigators said none of the main federal agencies involved in the task force gave a complete accounting"

nbc4columbus.com - News - Voinovich Won't Return Donations From Jailed Executive

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Gary Younge: God help America

Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | PM deeply involved in outing of Kelly: "The documents reveal an obsessiveness at the heart of government "

Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting: The National Media Watch Group Journalists Find "Calm" When Only Palestinians Die

Roy's Rock "the Constitution says that government will not establish a state religion, and by sanctioning Protestant Christianity as Alabama’s religion, he’s left everybody else out of the loop"

Yahoo! News - Experts Doubt U.S. Claim on Iraqi Drones: "Despite the Bush administration's public assertions, these unmanned aerial vehicles weren't designed to dispense biological or chemical weapons. "

Low-income students failing - lancastereaglegazette.com: "There's a pretty direct correlation between school performance and family income. Certainly, many people don't want to hear that, and certainly our politicians don't want to hear that."

Sunday Herald: "the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad were bombed is because the UN has been taken over by the US and turned into a 'dark joke' and a 'malignant force'"

When is Enough Enough? US Voters turn against Bush

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity: Insults to Intelligence

Yahoo! News - Ala. Judge Relents on Monument: "'This case has been about politics all along,' she said. 'Now he gets to point the finger at the other eight justices.'"