Melting Paint Stripping Sex Robots and then some

Video suggesting what Earth would look like if all the ice melted.

Remembering what Republicans would like to forget about Reagan.

Gut-punching article on the mass incarceration of blacks and what it has done to the family.

Trumpets across Jakarta?

Having to follow ALL the rules not to get raped.

Why day dreaming, science fiction, and libraries are necessary.

Paint-stripping chemicals like methylene chloride are deadly.  Fatal.  Fatally deadly.  Deadly fatal.

Would sex robots help misogynists stay out of the dating pool?

Mathematician suing to get Kansas election records because suspicions of election fraud.

From sex to bombs...

Interesting take on the latest sex scandal.

Lee Atwater's Southern Strategy.

McCain is still sore he isn't president.

Run away, run away!!

The perils of being a woman online.

Did Anonymous save the election by blocking Rove's hacking minions?

Verdun, France has a Forbidden Forest filled with 12 million unexploded bombs from WWI.

Have the Romneys already purchased the Oval Office?

Corrected link.  Petition to Eric Holder to investigate Tagg Romney's ownership of Ohio's voting machines.

Update 10/21: More on the Romney ownership of electronic voting companies.

This is Tagg Romney who would like to take a swing at Obama.

Let the auto companies go bankrupt... but let Romney make a ton ... several tons of money from it first.

Why does Romney lie so much?  Blatantly lie?  Obviously lie?

Republican voter registration fraud.

Because Karl Rove was involved...

It's not a conspiracy theory... New Court Filing Reveals How the 2004 Ohio Presidential Election Was Hacked

A new filing in the King Lincoln Bronzeville v. Blackwell case includes a copy of the Ohio Secretary of State election production system configuration that was in use in Ohio's 2004 presidential election when there was a sudden and unexpected shift in votes for George W. Bush. The filing also includes the revealing deposition of the late Michael Connell. Connell served as the IT guru for the Bush family and Karl Rove. Connell ran the private IT firm GovTech that created the controversial system that transferred Ohio's vote count late on election night 2004 to a partisan Republican server site in Chattanooga, Tennessee owned by SmarTech. That is when the vote shift happened, not predicted by the exit polls, that led to Bush's unexpected victory. Connell died a month and a half after giving this deposition in a suspicious small plane crash.

It's amazing how Republicans yell about non-existent voter fraud and point fingers when they are doing weird shenanigans to block Ron Paul supporters from getting delegates in some states and a voice at the convention. Projection anyone?

One really good way to ruin your Saturday?

Read these articles...

What If the Tea Party Wins?

The 11 craziest things in Rick Perry’s ‘Fed Up’ manifesto

8 Facts That Prove the Tea Party Is Ignorant of the U.S. Constitution

‘Cut Budgets to Kill Jobs’ – And 4 More GOP Schemes to Rig the 2012 Election

11 Reasons Why the Unemployment Crisis Is Even Worse Than You Think

Between Race and Reason: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

Vote. Tell your friends to vote. Get your family to the polls. Just vote.

Rolling Stone:

The GOP War on Voting: In a campaign supported by the Koch brothers, Republicans are working to prevent millions of Democrats from voting next year

And: Talking Points Memo: Legal Battles Loom In Fight Over Voter ID Laws

So much joy

Gays finally able to get married.

So much sorrow. Norway.

So many lies.

So much stupidity.

So much fraud.

So much of everything.

De-Diebolding the elections?

Did you hear? Diebold is set to sell its voting machine division to Election Systems & Software – creating a company that would produce nearly three-quarters of our country's voting machine systems.

Please join us in calling on the Justice Department's Antitrust Division to investigate!

One company dominating the voting machine market means it will be more difficult for election officials to negotiate for voting systems on limited budgets, and raises serious concerns about reliability and election fraud issues.

Take action today!

Will the election in Pennsylvania actually reflect the votes?

House GOP Leaders and White House Deliver Blow to Verifiable Election

After a year of consideration, the House today unexpectedly failed to pass in a streamlined process a bill that would have authorized funding for states to replace paperless electronic voting machines in time for the presidential election in November.

"Our voting systems are in shambles, and seven months before we choose our next president, the White House and House Republican leaders today delivered a blow to secure elections and the ability to conduct meaningful recounts," said Common Cause President Bob Edgar. "The United States is spending billions of dollars to build democracy overseas, yet our own Congress turned its back on the workings of our own democracy."

At stake is Emergency Assistance for Secure Elections Act of 2008. The bill had been placed on the House "suspension" calendar, meaning it needed two-thirds support to pass. Democrats and Republicans last week had reached agreement and passage was expected today.

Then the White House at the eleventh hour issued a statement urging the House to vote against the bill. And, in an unexpected move, Rep. Vern Ehlers (R-MI), the ranking member of the House Administration Committee, and Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO), the minority whip, also came out against the bill.

Gee... could it be that if all the votes actually are counted, Republicans lose? Is that why they resort to all those illegal activities like ... oh, preventing people from actually voting as in caging, phone blocking, mocking women voters, losing voters' ballots, failures in programming and protection of the electronic voter machines, preventing recounts, declaring there was Democratic voter fraud when there was none (it's called projection)?

Remember what Paul Krugman said about Republicans:

The Republican Party’s adherence to an outdated ideology leaves it with big problems. It can’t offer domestic policies that respond to the public’s real needs. So how can it win elections?

The answer, for a while, was a combination of distraction and disenfranchisement.

Do you really think the Republicans are going to let the Democrats get their way this time?

Will they make sure it will be Hillary that runs against McCain because she might lose?

Remember what Greg Palast said:

BuzzFlash: You’re having incredible success with the new expanded paperback edition of Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans -- Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild. Of course, the electronic voting machines and how they function is a very significant issue, but your specialty has really been how the Bush/Rove GOP political machine keeps persons who are likely to vote Democratic or Independent from voting.

Greg Palast: Yes. People ask me: Are they going to steal the 2008 election? No, they’ve already stolen the 2008 election. We still have a chance of swiping it back, but the reason I’ve expanded and put out the new edition of Armed Madhouse is to tell you how they will steal in 2008, and what to do about it.

Just a heads up. Just because they've gutted the Treasury, ruined the economy, sunk us neck-deep into the quagmire of two un-winnable wars, destroyed the Constitution.. even with all that, these Republicans who hate government still think they should govern.

And they will continue to steal elections to prove it.

Update at Bradblog:

This Tuesday's crucial contest will be primarily run on 100% faith-based, Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen or push-button) e-voting machines across the state. There will be no way to determine after the election whether the computers have accurately recorded, or not, the intent of those voters who voted on them. As VerifiedVoting.org summarizes the crucial contest, it "will be essentially unrecountable, unverifiable, and unauditable."

crossposted at SteveAudio

Almost too true to be funny

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

To celebrate Super Tuesday

And for those who are voting today:

Compiled by Nancy Tobi of Election Defense Alliance; this video shows testimony to the NH legislature on what it costs to purchase access, by security expert Harri Hursti, and rebuttals by John Silvestro of LHS Associates, the firm that programs memory cards for all of New England.

All your votes are belong to us

Literally.

"A comprehensive study of electronic voting systems (PDF) by vendors ES&S, Hart InterCivic and Premier (formerly Diebold) found that 'all of the studied systems possess critical security failures that render their technical controls insufficient to guarantee a trustworthy election'. In particular, they note all systems provide insufficiently protection against threats from election insiders, do not follow well-known security practices, and have 'deeply flawed software maintenance' practices." Some of these machines are the ones California testers found fault with last week.

Update 12/19: Steve Bates of The Yellow Doggerel Democrat in comments mentioned that Colorado is addressing this problem:

DENVER (AP) — Colorado's secretary of state has declared many of the state's electronic voting machines to be unreliable, but said Tuesday that some of them could still be used in November if a software patch was installed.

Other machines that failed could be replaced with equipment certified for use in other states, Secretary of State Mike Coffman said.

Coffman met with a task force of state lawmakers to discuss what Colorado should do the day after he decertified three of the four voting equipment manufacturers allowed in the state, affecting six of Colorado's 10 most populous counties.

Accidentally on purpose

You bastards!

Two-thirds of Ohio counties have destroyed or lost their 2004 presidential ballots and related election records, according to letters from county election officials to the Ohio Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner.

The lost records violate Ohio law, which states federal election records must be kept for 22 months after Election Day, and a U.S. District Court order issued last September that the 2004 ballots be preserved while the court hears a civil rights lawsuit alleging voter suppression of African-American voters in Columbus.

The destruction of the election records also frustrates efforts by the media and historians to determine the accuracy of Ohio's 2004 vote count, because in county after county the key evidence needed to understand vote count anomalies apparently no longer exists.

"The extent of the destruction of records is consistent with the covering up of the fraud that we believe occurred in the presidential election," said Cliff Arnebeck, a Columbus attorney representing the King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association, which filed voter suppression suit. "We're in the process of addressing where to go from here with the Ohio Attorney General's office."

"On the one hand, people will now say you can't prove the fraud," he said, "but the rule of law says that when evidence is destroyed it creates a presumption that the people who destroyed evidence did so because it would have proved the contention of the other side."

Greg Palast says Rove may have already stolen the 2008 elections

But we may be able to stop it:

BuzzFlash: You’re having incredible success with the new expanded paperback edition of Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans -- Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild. Of course, the electronic voting machines and how they function is a very significant issue, but your specialty has really been how the Bush/Rove GOP political machine keeps persons who are likely to vote Democratic or Independent from voting.

Greg Palast: Yes. People ask me: Are they going to steal the 2008 election? No, they’ve already stolen the 2008 election. We still have a chance of swiping it back, but the reason I’ve expanded and put out the new edition of Armed Madhouse is to tell you how they will steal in 2008, and what to do about it. That’s one of the main new things. Plus a special chapter on New Orleans and my bust down there.

Of course, I was very flattered that the first review of the new edition of Armed Madhouse was written by Karl Rove and the Rove-bots -- it was subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee -- I can’t make this up. On February 7th, the Rove team, which had been writing several e-mails screaming about Armed Madhouse and "that British reporter," Greg Palast, were gloating that no U.S. media had picked up my stories. And they had a .pdf file attached. Of course, the reason my book was subpoenaed is that it has to do with the US prosecutor firings. The prosecutor firings were 100% about influencing elections -- not about loyalty to Bush, which is what The New York Times wrote. The administration team couldn’t tolerate appointees who wouldn’t go along with crime. In the book I present the evidence that Karl Rove directed a guy named Tim Griffin to target suppressing the votes of African American students, homeless men, and soldiers.

Some French are not happy with the votes

Because of the e-voting machines. Well... I guess they haven't been paying attention then:

It's not as if there haven't been enough warnings that e-voting machines have some kinks to work out, but apparently every new country that makes use of the machines figures that all the problems have been worked out. Unfortunately, one by one, they're discovering that's not the case. The latest is France. lavi d writes in to let us know that the election held over the weekend in France was the first that made use of e-voting machines, and it's being described as a "catastrophe" -- though mostly by those who didn't win. So far, there haven't been reports of the machines having errors, but apparently many of the machines malfunctioned while the ones that worked weren't at all easy to use. Of course, the nature of the problems isn't clearly explained -- suggesting that it may just an easy scapegoat for politicians or voters unhappy with the results of the election. Still, you would think that with so much attention placed on problems with e-voting machines over the last few years, election officials and e-voting companies would go out of their way to make the process as smooth as possible.

Kerry did win Ohio after all....

As two BOE workers go to jail. Why won't the county prosecutor let us pursue other cases in Ohio?

After the recent convictions of two Cuyahoga County Board of Election (BOE) workers for felony recount tampering, Republican County Prosecutor Robert Batchelor is stonewalling efforts to investigate similar well-documented charges in Coshocton County, Ohio.

The Cuyahoga County Board of Elections’ third-ranking employee and an assistant manager were each convicted of a felony count of negligent misconduct and a misdemeanor count of failing to perform their duties during the 2004 recount. The convictions stemmed from the secret pre-counting of precincts prior to the lawfully required open recount. The convicted election workers only allowed the pre-counted precincts that matched the official results to be used in the recount. This caused the special prosecutor to tell the jury that the election recount was “rigged” in Cuyahoga.

Testimony and eyewitness reports document similar activity in several Ohio counties regarding the illegal rigging of the 2004 recount.

The Green and Libertarian parties brought the Ohio 2004 recount after Democratic hopeful John Kerry conceded with nearly a quarter of million votes uncounted in the state. Under Ohio law, county boards of elections must set a “time and place fixed for making a recount” and “in the presence of all witnesses [who may] may be in attendance, shall open the sealed containers containing the ballots to be recounted and shall recount them.” The sealed ballot containers are to be opened in front of BOE officials and recount candidates may “attend and witness the recount and may have any person whom the candidate designates attend and witness the recount,” under ORC 3515.03.

It is illegal to secretly pre-count recount ballots. The BOE can’t do a pre-count of ballots for whatever reason, secretly, after the certified vote goes to the state and after there has been a mandate for a statewide recount.

What happened in Coshocton County before the 2004 recount also appears to be a clear violation of Ohio law and could be damning for the Coshocton County BOE.