electronic voting, political patterns, weblog discovery

A great collection of links and good thoughts from Dave Pollard on voting system integrity - today's news of course being security lapses with Sequoia Technology's voting software - Dan Gillmor:

It continues to astonish me that we're letting our most fundamental duty in a democracy -- voting -- turn into a system that's just begging to be rigged in a way that can't be audited. Why are we so blind?

Much good stuff on Dave Pollard's weblog including his next post, on the dynamics of continued support for deservedly beleaguered presidents:

I remember the way Republicans also supported...Richard Nixon. When Watergate hit, they rallied 'round the beleaguered president and stuck with him until it became clear that he was a liability to their own political careers rather than an asset, and then they deserted him in droves.
...There was hardly a peep from Republicans against Nixon until mid-1973, when popular support for Nixon plunged below 50%. By that time at least two dozen senior members of the Administration had been jailed or fired...

brevity

Busy busy busy does it best.

found via bbb, this written by Kurt Vonnegut:

Let us start our Republic with a chain of drug stores, a chain of grocery stores, a chain of gas chambers, and a national game. After that we can write our Constitution.

On Diebold -
If eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, we are way behind on the rent and eviction is nigh. Sure wish the media thought this was worth covering. Dan Gillmor has more.

yes.

This is beyond cool - Abigail's dream of 1995 is realized in 2003

a bumper sticker I'd like to see

Minds are like parachutes - they only function when they offer some resistance to the prevailing winds.

It'd probably fit on a Yukon. Right next to "I'm changing the climate, ask me how".