Ohio's Diebold Debacle: New machines call election results into question

Massive Election Day irregularities are emerging in reports from all over Ohio after the introduction of Diebold's electronic voting in nearly half of the Buckeye State’s counties. A recently released report by the non-partisan General Accountability Office warned of such problems with electronic voting machines.

E-voting machine disasters

Prior to the 2005 election, electronic voting machines from Diebold and other Republican voting machine manufacturers were newly installed in 41 of Ohio’s 88 counties. The Dayton Daily News reported that in Montgomery County, for example, “Some machines began registering votes for the wrong item when voters touched the screen correctly. Those machines had lost their calibration during shipping or installation and had to be recalibrated. . . .”

Steve Harsman, the Director of the Montgomery County Board of Elections (BOE), told the Daily News that the recalibration could be done on site, but poll workers had never performed the task before.

The city of Carlisle, Ohio announced on November 22 that it is contesting the results of the November 8 general election as a result

Poll shock

One of the most wildly inaccurate pre-election polls in memory, which was off by over 40 points on some predictions, may prove to be deadly accurate as an indicator of the problems we face as a nation with our voting process - and democracy itself.

But you won't learn this by reading the Columbus Dispatch, the newspaper that conducted the poll just prior to Ohio's Nov. 8 election. The paper's public affairs editor conceded to me that the poll results the Dispatch wrote about, wrongly indicating massive public support for several proposed constitutional amendments, were, in essence, the journalistic equivalent of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.

"Much like the American space program, both our triumphs and our shortcomings are out there for all to see," Darrel Rowland said in an e-mail. Unlike NASA, however, which did manage to find that faulty O-ring, the newspaper's powers that be don't seem particularly interested in learning how their big public flop occurred. "We'll certainly double-check the poll mechanics," he said, "but see no reason to discontinue a methodology that's proven accurate for decades."

Drowning the hard questions: A Nova special

Since Bill Moyers retired, I watch PBS pretty rarely. I remembered why when I saw the NOVA special on New Orleans, "The Storm that Drowned a City." It gave some useful chronology, but in an hour-long program on the genesis and history of the storm, they avoided raising even the possibility that the Bush administration may have contributed to the disaster.

I waited and waited for discussion of global warming's potential role in fueling Katrina's ferocity. Finally, near the end, this science-focused show spent maybe a minute quoting a scientist suggesting a possible link, and then quickly undermined his words by having the prime expert they kept coming back to dismiss the connection. They didn't even try to link Katrina to the broader pattern of global climate change-related disasters, like increases in tornadoes, floods, droughts, and forest fires. (A year before Katrina, Swiss the world's second largest reinsurance company, warned of a potential $150 billion annual toll from these kinds of disasters). The NOVA show just kept repeating the same loop of scientists saying, we dodged the bullet before, but it's headed for us now.

The Mazruiana collection revisited

Ali A Mazrui debating the African condition
An annotated and select thematic bibliography, 1962-2003
Compiled by Abdul Samed Bemath
Published by Africa Institute of South Africa & New Dawn Press, Inc.
ISBN 1 932705 37 6 

A year ago, in a citation on Ali A Mazrui’s nomination as 100  Greatest Africans of all times by New African Magazine he is profiled as representing a positive image of Africa and its people.

A month ago Mazrui was yet again nominated as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in the world. The honour this time was bestowed by an American journal Foreign Policy, published by the Carnegie Endowment.

Who is this man about whom the late Palestinian academic Edward Said observed in his classic Culture and Imperialism: “Here at last was an African on prime-time television, in the West, daring to accuse the West of what it had done, thus reopening a file considered closed.”?

He is undoubtedly a Global African and as this continent’s most respected contemporary scholar of repute is widely acclaimed as its foremost thinker and writer.

How pre-war Iraq intel was cooked

Democrats leading the charge into the second phase of a bipartisan investigation into pre-war Iraq intelligence have said this week that they will spend the next month or so working with Pentagon officials who last week agreed to probe a top secret spy shop once headed by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith that many longtime CIA and FBI officials and other intelligence analysts believe was responsible for providing the Bush administration with bogus intelligence used to justify war with Iraq.

When the probe is complete, which aides to Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) - both of whom are aggressively working to collect pre-war intelligence documents that undercut administration's claims that Iraq posed a grave threat to national security - said will likely be in early 2006, there could be some sort of "public reprimand" brought against lower-level administration officials who work or worked at the Defense Department, the National Security Council, and in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, for "cherry-picking" questionable intelligence on Iraq and using it to win public support for the war.

Let's make lemonade this Thanksgiving

AUSTIN, Texas -- Since the political world ranges from poor to icky these days, you may think we are gratitudinally challenged this Thanksgiving. But a mere soupcon of sunny optimism goes a long way toward getting us to dwell on how lucky we are. We are abundantly blessed with lemons. Let us make lemonade.

I am grateful for the extraordinary number of readers who sent along their ideas on How to Fix All This. The ideas ranged from the sublime to the practical, from the universal and global to the price of milk. The country is teeming with good ideas, all of which we need.

I was particularly intrigued by this thought from peace activist Gen Van Cleve: It's 2009 and the Bush people are gone, leaving in their wake fury, suspicion, distrust -- basically, our name is mud, whether we've left Iraq by then or not. Most of the rest of the world considers us: A) insane, B) imperialist and C) morons. What to do?

Thanksgiving and more taking

When Thanksgiving arrives, the media coverage is mostly predictable. Feature stories tell of turkeys and food drives for the needy. We hear about why some people, famous and unknown, say they feel thankful. And, of course, holiday advertising campaigns launch via TV, radio and print outlets.

Like our own responses to Thanksgiving, the repeated media messages are apt to be contradictory. Answers to basic questions run the gamut: How much time and money should we spend on the holiday dinner compared to helping the less fortunate? Is this really the time to count our blessings -- or yield to ads that tell us how satisfied we’ll be after buying the latest brand-new products and services?

Under the surface, some familiar media themes are at cross purposes this time of year. Holiday celebrations that speak to the need for compassion and spiritual connection are frequently marked by efforts and expenditures that point in opposite directions. Within the media echo chambers, a lot of the wallpaper is the color of money.

In its unadorned state, the idea of being thankful is on a collision

Darwin dogma downed

T Huffman begins well, but lies his head off at the end.

Anyone who tells you intelligent design (ID) is poor science or creationist religion is out to deceive you.

You can't get the truth from any major media and certainly this commie news rag is not out to help steer you straight. This is one debate that requires getting to the sources and checking out what they say for themselves.

We are not, scientifically speaking, accidental occurrences. The probability is so small as to require nearly infinite universes. That leave the option we are manufactured goods.

Under evolutionist theology, scientific laws are broken. The second law of thermodynamics says entropy increases. Nothing in your experience ever falls upstairs in terms of functional complexity. Inert matter never shakes itself into highly complex functional forms one day and then sparks itself to life the next.

CIA’s “Torture Taxi” in the spotlight

Ft. Benning, GA – Sitting in a Georgia motel Saturday night, Kathy Kelly talked through a bad phone connection and a worse head cold to recount the previous day’s activities where she and 13 others were arrested at an airstrip outside Raleigh, North Carolina. 

The tiny Johnson County Airport is home to Aero Contractors Corp., a firm described by the New York Times as “a major domestic hub of the Central Intelligence Agency's secret air service,” that shuttles prisoners abroad for interrogation and suspected torture.  The Times reports Aero was founded in 1979 by the chief pilot for Air America, a CIA “front” in Vietnam. 

In addition to Kelly, those arrested Friday included residents of a Raleigh Catholic Worker house and members of Stop Torture Now, a project of the Center for Theology and Social Analysis in St. Louis, Missouri.  Protesters walked onto company property and lowered the flags to half-mast before being arrested. 

Friday night Congress: what was that?

During the middle of the day on Friday, I spent an hour or two on a conference call with activists and congressional staffers discussing next steps to end the war.  We planned, among other things, to organize support for Congressman John Murtha's bill, H.J.Res. 73, which he introduced on Friday.  The bill resolves that:

"The deployment of United States forces in Iraq, by direction of Congress, is hereby terminated and the forces involved are to be redeployed at the earliest practicable date.  A quick-reaction U.S. force and an over-the-horizon presence of U.S. Marines shall be deployed in the region. The United States of America shall pursue security and stability in Iraq through diplomacy."

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