WASHINGTON, D.C., Nov. 19 -- The situation was somewhat surreal.  At yesterday's press conference in The Governor's House Hotel, representatives of the 'Election Verification Project', a coalition of technologists, voting rights and legal organizations, seemed strangely out of touch with reality and their own past concerns, as they promoted a plan that leaves voting machines firmly entrenched in the election process. 

Public doubt continues to grow over the 2004 election results.  That doubt is rooted in suspicions surrounding the use of voting machines, suspicions that these very groups helped to cultivate.

Contradictory claims abounded. Kim Alexander, of The California Voter Foundation, sang the praises of touchscreen machines, despite the mayhem she admits their use caused in this year's election. "Problems were reported with all vendors and across most of the states that use e-voting. Electronic voting machines lost votes in North Carolina, miscounted votes in Ohio, and broke down in New Orleans, causing long lines and shut-downs at polling places, " she said. 

Ohio’s 2004 presidential vote will be challenged as soon as next week in the state Supreme Court, a coalition of public-interest lawyers announced Friday.

The lawyers have taken sworn testimony from hundreds of people in hearings in Columbus and Cincinnati, and will use excerpts as well as documents obtained from county election officials and Election Day exit polls to make a case that thousands of votes were incorrectly counted or not counted on Election Day.

“The objective is to get to the truth,” said Columbus Ohio lawyer Cliff Arnebeck, coordinator of the Ohio Honest Elections Campaign. “What’s critically important, whether it’s President Bush or Sen. Kerry, whoever’s been elected actually elected, is to know you won by an honest election. So it’s in the interest of both sides as American citizens to know the truth and have this answered.”

What is inspiring people throughout the United States to consider emigrating to places like Canada and Sweden is the fact that more Americans than not support what Bush is doing throughout the world, and to people and their rights right here at home. We are totally disheartened not because Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their fellow travelers have gotten away with their crimes. We are depressed because, in the eyes of a majority of Americans, no crime has been committed.

We are not expatriating ourselves because George W. Bush is the President of the United States, but because, for all intents and purposes, George W. Bush is the people of the United States, and they are he in their essential radicalism and lack of character. We do not, in other words, view the Bush Administration as the political version of Frankenstein. We see it as Night of the Living Dead. There are millions of Bushes abroad in the land tonight.  

Ohio attorney and prisoner-rights activist Alice Lynd was held in contempt of court and sentenced to jail to Friday until she agrees to testify about an inmate's purported confession to her that he killed an inmate during the Lucasville prison riot in 1993.

In an emotional hearing before Scioto County Common Pleas Judge William T. Marshall in Portsmouth, Ohio, Lynd, 74, refused to testify about what an inmate she referred to only as "Mr. X" told her about the murder because it would violate attorney-client privilege.

Prosecutors argued that Lynd was not the inmate's attorney and that attorney-client privilege did not apply. Judge Marshall agreed, and sentenced Lynd to jail. He offered to stay the sentence while Lynd's attorney sought a stay from the appeals court if she agreed to testify if the appeals court upheld his ruling. Lynd said she could not, in good conscience, testify about what "Mr. X" told her without his permission under any circumstances.

Dear Editor:

I am a "rinky-dinky non-credible person" from Utah, barely even a bug. Nobody believes me because I am a sky-blue petunia in an onion patch of rabid Republicans. I committed the unpardonable sin in my neck of the woods and I voted for John Kerry. However, I'm glad that I did.

Once upon a time I was a Republican and I was ready to leap off any high-rise building for my cause -- a Right-wingy-dingy fundamentalist world. I even almost started hating the very place that brought my family together in the first place -- Yellowstone National Park. I, as an at the time only child, was raised for nearly a month on the ground in Yellowstone by two protective parents, but that's another story for another time.

When I was in college, after my freshman year, Mom and Dad were rotten, I thought, because "Mom and Dad were stupid Democrats" and I thought that I knew so much more than they did. I was ready to disown them and in fact, some kids I went to college with were ready to revolt against their more sane Democratic parents because the "hate Democrats" attitude had arrived on campus. Please do