Author Archives: bob harris

New Linkage

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Not between Cheney, Rove, Libby, and, I dunno, Aeshma Daeva, the great fiend of ancient Persian myth.  I’m hoping the whole story of how a multi-millennia-old Iranian demon from the Avesta manipulated the Vice President’s office will be in the indictments tomorrow.

Oh, wait.  That was Ahmed Chalabi.  I get them confused sometimes.  Anyway.

Just pointing you again to the Center For Inquiry West and their performance space, the Steve Allen Theatre, with links permanently added down the left.

This might not seem germane to Harriet Miers and Karl Rove and so on.  But the Center For Inquiry is devoted to rational thought and the fight against lunatic theocracy, largely because it often leads to grand human disaster.

So, um, if you look around… it’s pretty darn germane.

Plus, they do stuff in the theatre space that makes me laugh.  So there’s that.

GOP Senator courageously standing on unprinciple

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Missed this a couple of days ago… faced with the prospect that the
U.S. Congress might just decide that New Orleans (and America) needs
Interstate 10 just a teensy bit more than this town —

— needs a bridge comparable to the Golden Gate, Alaska’s brilliant
Senator Ted Stevens (R-Pork), actually announced that if Ketchikan
doesn’t get the bridge a lot of people there don’t even want, he would stamp his feetsies and resign in a huff.

So, um, that would be a two-fer.

Original post on the subject, with more details and a diagram of the proposed bridge here.

And for a look at the relative porkiness of various senators on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, go here and scroll down.  Stevens wins!

GAO: electronic voting machines are pure fraud-bait, not to mention total crap

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Well, they didn’t use those exact words.  But that’s the gist.

The following should horrify any American who gives a damn about any remnant of actual democracy.

The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office,
the investigative arm of Congress charged with examining what the hell
is actually going on with our tax dollars, has issued a 107-page report confirming, among much else:

Some electronic voting systems did not
encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, thus making it possible to
alter them without detection.

It is easy to alter a file defining how a ballot appears, making it
possible for someone to vote for one candidate and actually be recorded
as voting for an entirely different candidate.

Falsifying election results [was possible] without leaving any evidence of such an action by using altered memory cards.

Access to the voting network was easily compromised because not all
digital recording electronic voting systems (DREs) had supervisory
functions password-protected, so access to one machine provided access
to the whole network.

Supervisory across to the voting network was also compromised by
repeated use of the same user IDs combined with easily guessed
passwords.

The locks protecting access to the system were easily picked and keys were simple to copy.

The above is from this Kos post by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI).  There’s more.  Go read.

While the report and Rep. Conyers are careful not to call any
particular election into question (cough cough OHIO cough), it is
absolutely clear that the use of these machines must end.

“Every ad break features ads for companies that make no products I can buy”

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Have a look at this Kos diary.

If you want to know why the "news" media couldn’t be bothered to report
enough actual news to prevent an elective war based on lies that were
plainly nonsensical at the time — and why, 2.5 years, tens of
thousands of deaths, and hundreds of billions of dollars later, they’re
still strugging to burp up the obvious — that diary explains a big part of it.

Personal experience with same issues: when my radio commentaries were syndicated, one of the reasons we didn’t get on more stations was because
Program Directors were cowed by ownership (often ClearChannel) and
afraid some liberal might piss off advertisers, especially in the hysterical post 9-11 climate.  Never mind the awards I’d won, or that in over a thousand commentaries, I never once had to retract
anything in a single broadcast.  The question wasn’t quality, accuracy, even entertainment value; it was avoiding any risk of
displeasing advertisers and ownership.

Matter of fact, I got canned from the biggest news station in Los Angeles specifically because
I was talking about stories the rest of the "news" didn’t, even though
the new boss who canned me didn’t have the guts or honesty to admit it
to my face.  (He’d grumbled at me for years, but when the day came, he said they were "cutting back all their features,"
although they a) kept every moralistic right-winger who would never
dream of criticizing corporate influence and b) replaced me
specifically with the unpointed musings of a Ted Baxterish TV anchorman
with remarkably little to say.)

I mention this a) because obviously, yeah, it still bugs me when I’m reminded of it, and b) much more to personally vouch, from direct
experience, for the only bias that matters in media.  It is real.  This is how this stuff
works.  (Incidentally, management denials of any such bias are almost
always sincere; they have drunk the Kool-Aid, they deeply believe what
they do actually accomplishes something, and that’s a big part of why
they succeed.)

These are businesses, after all.  You are not the media’s customer; you are
their product.  Their only customers are the advertisers.  That is all
that matters.

It’s right in front of our faces, all the time.  Jon gets it right here, too, as I mentioned yesterday.

The anonymous Kos writer isn’t perfect, but he gets the gist absolutely correct.