Salon is running an interview with Bev Harris, a writer who has spent a great deal of time investigating the electronic voting industry for her upcoming book, “Black Box Voting.” In the course of her investigation, she uncovered confidential memos that Diebold has attempted to copyright rather than disavow; this is most disturbing, since they describe a level of security I wouldn’t use for Nogators, let along our country’s voting systems.

Oh yes: these things are already being used in 37 states. This has got to stop. Any voting system MUST be both tamper resistant and auditable; Diebold offers no features in either department, and is aggressively attempting to avoid doing so. Moreover, there’s an utter lack of security in their product that they know about, but refuse to fix. People need to know this.

The Sacramento Bee is running a long piece on the erosion of our personal freedoms and civil liberties at the hands of Ashcroft, et. al., since 9/11. The news isn’t good. (via Electrolite)

The Bush folks have been suggesting that their critics were engaging in “revisionist history” in some of their complaints about the WMD search, the threat of Iraq, etc. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian McPherson explores what this means in his September column from the American Historial Association’s journal, Perspectives. (via Electrolite)

Former US Senator Max Cleland has a scathing editorial in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the quagmire that could be Iraq. Cleland was hounded from office by a chickenhawk Republican for being “soft on the military.” It should be noted that Cleland knows Vietnam rather well, since he lost two legs and an arm there.

“Now hold on a minute, Mr. Gator Man! Who the hell is this Cincinnati person?”

Well, I’ll tell you. Actually, I’ll just point you at this article, and all will be revealed. Therein you will find this bit as a footnote, which provides a convenient rundown of the generals in our history who have sought or achieved the Oval Office:

The president generals are George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Franklin Pierce, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, and Dwight Eisenhower. Unlike the other six, who were famed for their battlefield achievements, Pierce, Hayes, Garfield, and Harrison were not known for their military records. Generals who have lost general elections include Lewis Cass, Winfield Scott, George McClellan, and Winfield S. Hancock. Douglas MacArthur and Al Haig are among the generals who planned presidential runs but never got close to the November ballot.

Everybody, I reckon, knows about the 9th Circuit’s ruling halting the California recall, and how their ruling cites Bush v. Gore. Slate’s running this commentary, which is pretty darn funny without being terribly partisan either way.

Joey deVilla (aka Accordian Guy) has an excellent rundown of what’s going on in lay terms. Read this.

The voting machine fight is heating up. This time, the IEEE committee charged with creating the standard has become badly politicized, and is working to create a situation where actual performance metrics — you know, like on accountability and auditability — aren’t part of the picture. Diebold, et. al., badly want these standards in place quickly, and with a minimum amount of fuss — but if we get machines without adequate safeguards, fair elections will become a thing of the past. These firms are also lobbying to have the mechanisms of their electronic voting machines labeled trade secrets, which means “trust us; it works just fine.” Does this strike you as a good idea?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a petition. Go there, read, and sign if you agree. You can read more about this via this BoingBoing post and this post from JWZ’s livejournal; both link to other stories as well.

This is important, people. Pay attention.

Dick Cheney, who insisted he’d sever all connections with Halliburton upon taking office, has done no such thing. He earns more from their payroll than he does from the Treasury, and holds nearly half a million stock options to boot.

Let’s see: we impeached the last guy who lied about sex; what will we do with a guy who lies about money and influence?

Heretofore widely admired low-cost, big-seat carrier JetBlue has apparently been passing the full travel histories of many of its fliers on to a private security firm as part of the CAPPS II program, and then denying it after the fact.

This sensitive travel data was then turned-over to a private security contractor for analysis, the results of which were presented at a security conference earlier this year and then posted on the Internet.

If you fly JetBlue, please stop if you believe privacy is something worth preserving.

Supply Side Jesus

Yup, it’s true, despite the fact that many Americans believe otherwise. Where might they have gotten that idea, I wonder? From the endless War-on-Terror rhetoric coming from 1600 Pennsylvania? From Bush’s own nebulous, bait-and-switch cassus belli where Iraq was concerned? Naah. Couldn’t be that. It also couldn’t be that such obfuscation was deliberate, and designed to distract pretty much everyone from the fact that the overwhelming majority of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi, and that Saudi money underwrote the whole operation, right?

Right?

A bit of bombastic Flash, courtesy of the folks at Spacetaker.org. Don’t forget what Harris did in Florida.

Retired Army Gen. Wes Clark is gathering his political team in Arkansas, presumably to prepare for an announcement. I think we’ve got a good chance of getting rid of Bush’s team in ’04 already; with Clark in the field, though, those chances look a lot better to me.

Ashcroft dismisses anti-PATRIOT protests as “hysteria.” If you read this piece carefully, you’ll note that he says “[we] don’t care what you read,” with the implication being “but we get to know anyway,” or, in other words “trust me.”

No thanks, John. Especially not when you say things like

“The hysteria is ridiculous. Our job is not,” Ashcroft said.

Apparently, some folks are playing the Star Wars Imperial March (1.5M mp3) whenever Ashcroft appears publically. I love those guys.

This may be why Ashcroft is no longer talking to print journalists (who presumably tend to ask hard questions), and has been speaking in support of PATRIOT only in front of very specific groups.

In any case, his DOJ has been given seminars to local law enforcement on how they may use the USA PATRIOT act to prosecute drug crimes as terrorist acts, which can presumably produce lots of good law-and-order press for reelection time. Before PATRIOT, making crystal meth was merely a silly, stupid thing to do; now, it’s terrorism! (more)

I know I post about this all the time, but dammit, it’s important. Another weblog has a fine rundown of a recent Nightline segment wherein Ted Koppel examines PATRIOT and questions its supporters and critics. Frankly, it’s some astounding stuff. The blog author, Lisa Rein, has some trouble with punctuation and spelling in her transcripts, but she’s also providing some fine clips from the show. Please take a few minutes and read, if nothing else, the transcript of Barbara Comstock’s defense of the act, and note — as Koppel does — how she seems to keep forgetting that those “terrorists” she mentions are actually only “suspected terrorists;” none have sat for any trial.

Koppel closes with this, which is as clear an evisceration of Ashcroft’s DOJ as any I’ve seen:

The men who drafted our constitution, who framed our civil rights and protected our various freedoms under the law would, I suspect, retch at some of the bone headed, self-serving, misinterpretations of their intentions that they so often use these days to undermine the very freedoms they pretend to safeguard. The miracle of American Law is not that it protects popular speech, or the privacy of the powerful, or the homes of the priviledged, but rather, that the least among us, those with the fewest defenses thoses suspected of the worst crimes, the most despised in our midst, are presumed innocent until proven guilty. That remains as revolutionary a concept now as it was in the 1780s. It makes protecting the country against terrorism excruciatingly difficult, but we cannot arbitrarily suspend the rights of one catagory of suspects without endangering all the others.

Food for thought, kids. Remember, too, that on this past 9/11, our president was insisting that PATRIOT didn’t go far enough.

This commentary — by a member of Parliament, no less — from The Guardian, a British newspaper, says nothing we haven’t seen before, but it does say it all at once, and very clearly. Why journalists on this side of the pond aren’t also saying this is beyond me, especially since the PNAC documents are widely avaiable, and the events of the last two years match PNAC’s goals awfully closely. Even if you don’t agree with his points, at least consider his comments.