The potential firing of Ohio whistleblower Sherole Eaton, Deputy Director of the Hocking County Board of Elections, has re-fired bitter controversy over the stolen 2004 presidential election.

And newly released documents confirming a pre-election threat by Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell against election board  officials has added to the mix, as has the dismissal of Blackwell's highly publicized sanction attempt against attorneys who challenged the election outcome.

A paid Hocking County Election Board staff official, Eaton gained national notoriety when she blew the whistle on a Triad vote count technician. The technician swapped-out a hard drive in the tabulating computer located at the Board of Elections office before a statewide recount could be completed. According to a December 3, 2004 affidavit sworn by Eaton, the Triad technician "advised" the Hocking County Board of Elections' Republican Director Lisa Schwartze on how to "post a 'cheat sheet'" to make the recount match the officially reported election total. Advocates of the recount complain that the unexplained intrusion by the technician compromised the integrity of the vote count.

omeone needs to supply Senate Democrats with a dictionary-perhaps even a thesaurus. They need to learn the difference between compromise and surrender.

Six so-called moderate Democrats and a half dozen Republicans of the same alleged reasonableness have formed a group with the charming moniker “The Gang of 12”. They have come up with a wonderful idea: the Democrats will allow up and down votes (absolutely guaranteed confirmations) of the five most conservative, ferociously reactionary judicial nominees, out of the seven resubmitted by President Bush. The other two would remain “on hold”. On hold does not mean never to be voted upon. It simply means that these nominees will have to wait a while longer until the Democrats figure out a way to give Il Duce all that he wants, without completely alienating those who have voted against this American Caesar repeatedly and in the sincere belief that the national Democratic Party opposes him as much as they do. A belief obviously belied by the evidence.

A collection of 69 oral histories related to the May 4, 1970 shootings at Kent State University has been added to OhioLINK's Digital Media Center (DMC). The oral histories include many eyewitness accounts of the event and its aftermath, contributed by people who were students, faculty members, and City of Kent residents at the time, as well as an account by an Ohio National Guardsman. This is the sixth collection to be added to the Historic & Archival Digital Media database (http://worlddmc.ohiolink.edu/
History/Login), which is freely available to anyone worldwide via the Internet.

The Kent State May 4 Oral Histories are available as audio files. Apple's free QuickTime player is required to listen to the files. A written transcript is also available for most of the oral histories. Click on the "full record" link to view the transcript.

The "May 4 Oral History Project" was started in 1990 to preserve personal histories of and individual reactions to the shootings on the Kent State University campus in 1970. The collection is maintained and was contributed

If the Republicans really believe our top federal judges deserve an up-and-down vote, and that the filibuster is an unfair relic, there's an easy solution: Propose a rules change that will end it-in 2015.

I'd still support keeping the filibuster as way to protect minority rights. But its history has been pretty mixed. If the shift were voted in now but deferred for ten years, it would be hard for anyone to argue that it was being changed for narrow political advantage. The Republican push might even look like principle, instead of yet another raw power play along the lines of Tom DeLay's mid-census midnight Congressional redistricting. If they can sunset the phasing in of tax cuts to make them easier to pass, why not sunrise this fundamental shift in how the Senate has done business for 200 years?

Would the Republicans accept this deal if offered full Democratic support? Would they offer an alternative to grabbing everything they can the moment they hold the reins of power? I doubt it. But it would be a great way to highlight their real priorities.

Paul Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While, named