As we get closer to November, expect the controversy surrounding electronic voting to intensify, particularly with stories like this one from Riverside, CA to fuel the fire, to say nothing of the ongoing controversy from our brother Jeb’s sunshine state, where a rule preventing manual recounts is being challenged.

Last night, Illinois state senator and US Senatorial candidate Barack Obama delivered a rousing keynote at the Democratic National Convention. He’s a serious rising political star, and appears to be the real deal. The New Yorker did a profile on Obama back in May which is well worth your time. In the meantime, here’s a bit of the speech:

Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue States: red states for Republicans, blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states.

We’ve been busy this week, and at night we’re busy watching the DNC speeches, which have been pretty damned fine (where was THAT Al Gore 4 years ago?). President Carter came out swinging, which is great — what’s the GOP going to respond with? “Uh, that Nobel-prize-winning guy who founded Habitat for Humanity? Completely full of shit!” Right.

One of our favorite moments came during President Clinton’s speech:

For the first time ever when America was on a war footing, there were two huge tax cuts, nearly half of which went to the top one percent. I’m in that group now for the first time in my life. When I was in office, the Republicans were pretty mean to me. [Laughter] When I left and made money, I became part of the most important group in the world to them. At first I thought I should send them a thank you note — until I realized they were sending you the bill. They protected my tax cuts while:

• Withholding promised funding for the Leave No Child Behind Act, leaving over 2 million children behind
• Cutting 140,000 unemployed workers out of job training
• 100,000 working families out of child care assistance
• 300,000 poor children out of after school programs
• Raising out of pocket healthcare costs to veterans
• Weakening or reversing important environmental advances for clean air and the preservation of our forests.

Everyone had to sacrifice except the wealthiest Americans, who wanted to do their part but were asked only to expend the energy necessary to open the envelopes containing our tax cuts. If you agree with these choices, you should vote to return them to the White House and Congress. If not, take a look at John Kerry, John Edwards and the Democrats. Quoted at Slacktivist

If it weren’t for term limits, this man would still be president.

Atrios’ proxy gave us the heads-up on this letter written by Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill to her Bush/Cheney counterpart Ken Mehlman, apparently partially in response to GOP whining about the recent NYC Kerry/Edwards fundraiser.

Dear Ken: Over the past several months, allies of the President have questioned John Kerry’s patriotism while your staff has criticized his service in Vietnam. Republicans and their allies have gone so far as to launch attacks against his wife and your campaign has run $80 million in negative ads that have been called baseless, misleading and unfair by several independent observers. Considering that the President has failed to even come close to keeping his promise to change the tone in Washington, we find your outrage over and paparazzi-like obsession with a fund-raising event to be misplaced. The fact is that the nation has a greater interest in seeing several documents made public relating to the President’s performance in office and personal veracity that the White House has steadfastly refused to release. As such, we will not consider your request until the Bush campaign and White House make public the documents/materials listed below:

• Military records: Any copies of the President’s military records that would actually prove he fulfilled the terms of his military service. For that matter, it would be comforting to the American people if the campaign or the White House could produce more than just a single person to verify that the President was in Alabama when said he was there. Many Americans find it odd that only one person out of an entire squadron can recall seeing Mr. Bush.
• Halliburton: All correspondence between the Defense Department and the White House regarding the no-bid contracts that have gone to the Vice-President’s former company. Some material has already been made public. Why not take a campaign issue off the table by making all of these materials public so the voters can see how Halliburton has benefited from Mr. Cheney serving as Vice-President?
• The Cheney Energy Task Force: For an Administration that claims to hate lawsuits, it’s ironic that the Bush White House is taking up the Courts’ time to keep the fact that Ken Lay and Enron wrote its energy policy in secret behind closed doors. Please release the documents so that the country can learn what lobbyists and special interests wrote the White House energy policy.
• Medicare Bill: Please release all White House correspondence between the pharmaceutical industry and the Administration regarding the Medicare Bill, which gave billions to some of the President’s biggest donors. In addition, please provide all written materials that directed the Medicare actuary to withhold information from Congress about the actual cost of the bill.
• Prison Abuse Documents: A few weeks ago, the White House released a selected number of documents regarding the White House’s involvement in laying the legal foundation for the interrogation methods that were used in Iraq. Please release the remaining documents.

We also wanted to wish you a happy anniversary. As we are sure you and the attorneys representing the President, Vice-President and other White House officials are aware, today marks one year since Administration sources leaked the identity of a covert CIA agent to Bob Novak in an effort to retaliate against a critic of the Administration. In light of the fact that the Administration began gutting the laws protecting the nation’s forests yesterday, we hope you will accept the paper on which this letter is written as an anniversary gift. (The one year anniversary is known as the “paper anniversary.”) Sincerely,
Mary Beth Cahill
Campaign Manager

The ACLU has a lovely and funny little animation about the dangers of surveillance nation. Pizza, anyone?

Once again, Slacktivist posts a winner. This time around, it’s all about Leviticus, the Old Testament book that Fundies tend to use to justify their homophobia. Of course, they conveniently overlook all the other prohibitions of Leviticus, such as — and I’m not kidding — eating shellfish. Why is this?

Fred explains, but the bullet is this: in Acts — an epistolary book after the Gospels in the New Testament — there’s an oft-quoted story about Peter getting a vision wherein God shows him that all food is okay. It’s no surprise that Fundies take this on its face and gleefully eat ham, lobster, etc., while conveniently missing the story’s greater context and message. I’m paraphrasing here, so go read the post.

Turns out, this year’s Florida felon list — the one that took a lawsuit to disclose — has some pretty suspicious problems, too. Check it out.

Adam Felber points out the inherent contradiction in the Administration’s message(s).

Murdoch’s New York Post ran an editorial on 12 July insisting that there is no evidence anyone was actually disenfranchised in Florida in 2000 as a result of the overbroad felon list. MediaMatters.org shows this to be a lie.

We like Mykeru.com a lot. This time, he provides a bit of commentary on Bush’s snub of the NAACP:

Bush to NAACP: Fuck you, porch monkeys
Yeah, you think that’s a little bit hyperbolic? Maybe you think the choice of language conflates between Bush and Cheney, which is easy to do if you’re the sort of person who always got Shari Lewis and Lambchop mixed up. But for a president who claims again and again that he’s a uniter, not a divider, despite loads of evidence to the contrary and the dead bodies to prove it, Bush’s reaction to the NAACP, where he is content to be the first president in 70 years to fail to address this, the country’s largest and most august civil right’s organization, is puzzling.

There is, of course, more.

They’ve been sued in California under a whistleblower statute.

One of the plaintiffs? Bev Harris. We love her.

Fred Clark does it again. We like the way he thinks.

It does not affect your daily life very much if your neighbor marries a box turtle. But that does not mean it is right. . . . Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife. Cornyn, advocating a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage in a speech Thursday to the Heritage Foundation.

Via the Washington Post.

Homeland Security officials are looking into ways they can postpone the November election in the event of a terrorist attack on or near Election Day. (More coverage at Yahoo.)

Specifically, they have requested that such emergency power be granted to the newly created U. S. Election Assistance Commission, chaired by New Jersey preacher DeForest B. Soaries, Jr. More analysis at Agonist and Atrios, both of whom sum it up nicely. The biggest point is this, from Agonist, who first quotes Newsweek’s coverage: quoting and then commenting on Newsweek’s coverage:

The prospect that Al Qaeda might seek to disrupt the U.S. election was a major factor behind last week’s terror warning by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge. Ridge and other counterterrorism officials concede they have no intel about any specific plots. But the success of March’s Madrid railway bombings in influencing the Spanish elections–as well as intercepted “chatter” among Qaeda operatives–has led analysts to conclude “they want to interfere with the elections,” says one official.Newsweek

And then says

They’re gnashing their teeth over the “success” of the Madrid Bombings in influencing the elections. You bet they are. However, nowhere does Newsweek mention, that with all these warnings, they haven’t raised the threat level. Hmmmm . . . Makes you wonder: you think they might be a bit worried about their poll numbers?Agonist

This sort of thing reminds me of what Teresa Nielsen Hayden had to say (her line is the first comment, but read the entry, too) a while back: “I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist.” Pay attention. The democracy you save may be your own.