Will be the new reason for slightly infrequent blogging here. My back popped late Saturday night and so right now I’m moving a bit like an arthritic panda.
No worries; it does this sometimes, and I’ll be fine. Just saying. A little slow here.
GAO: electronic voting machines are pure fraud-bait, not to mention total crap
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.
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.
Friday pudublogging: Hudu, Mardu and mea culpa edition
If you scroll down a bit or just click here, you’ll learn the tale of the Hutia Conga (aka the Hudu), Cuban spymaster of the tiny almost-ungulate world.
The tricky little beastie is so unlikely — seemingly part bunny, part pudu, and part kangaroo — that several emailers actually
claimed I’d been deceived, and that the photo is a composite of
multiple creatures. Not so; the snapshot is a frame-grab from a Quicktime movie emailed by a reader using the code name "Richard." In the video, taken in the course of highly-secret activities, you must believe, the Hudu pictured and several
others hop about, masticate, and generally behave in expected bunnyroo
pudurodent fashion.
Adorable, in other words.
But the photo does not, in fact, depict what an authentic Hutia Conga
looks like, found on a Czech server. (I could show you myself, but I’d be endangering you by doing so. Oh, you can click if you wish, and learn the Hudu’s secret identity, but all the risks are your own, my friend. I wash my hands of it.)
Instead, what we see pictured below is a Mara, (aka the
Patagonian Cavy, aka the Mardu). Here’s another photo of a completely
different Mara, courtesty the Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake City:
So the original post was not, in fact, a Hutia Conga.
It was a Hutia Conga cleverly disguised as a Mara.
No wonder Cuban intelligence thinks they make great spies.
This post, incidentally, will self-destruct.
Not right away.
Accidental Actual Job-Doing: The Surest Sign That The Monkey King Is Off His Game
 At what point will we know the White House’s troubles are irreversible? |
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| Any necessary government function shows evidence of long-term planning for the general welfare | ||||
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| CNN develops special frog-march theme music | ||||
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| Cheney and Rove hit the escape pods and launch into deep space | ||||
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| Bush starts clearing brush in the Situation Room | ||||
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This just in: Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH), already a multi-millionaire, just won $853,492 in a Powerball drawing.
Life is SO not fair.
What jumps out at me is that the guy claims that he plays "sporadically," and yet he admits the night he won he played four sheets of tickets.
And then there’s this:
Will he keep any for himself?
"Oh yes," he said. "The majority I will use personally."
Which is his right, of course. But, um, let me search for the word: URRRRGH.
What sort of other frustratingly unfair events can we expect?
New poll at left.
Iraq war may have happened partly because not enough Iran-Contra guys were behind bars
Sounds crazy at first, I know.
But remember that the forged Niger documents are at the heart of Joe Wilson’s trip, George W. Bush’s false Iraq-is-gonna-get-nukes claim in the 2003 State Of The Union address, Joe Wilson’s op-ed, and the Plame leak which may bring down half the administration.
As Patrick Fitzgerald himself has reportedly grokked, the forged Niger documents — and their signal path from questionable sources in Italy through the U.S. administration all the way to Bush himself — are a real key to who pushed the war and why.
And it’s beginning to look a lot like the documents might just be the handiwork of some of the war-profiteering fanatics who gave us Iran-Contra.
Supposedly, history repeats itself first as tragedy, the second time as farce.
I’m still waiting for the farce part here.