Current Events

In July, two White House officials, in retaliation for former ambassador Joseph Wilson’s criticism of Bush’s false WMD info, revealed that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, is a CIA operative. To reveal something like this is illegal and a breach of national security. Apparently these two officials called six different reporters for different papers to illegally leaking the information; it was eventually printed by syndicated columnist Robert Novak. See the Washington Post story, and the New York Times story on this.

U.N. says “no money or troops for you” after Bush goes to them on his knees begging for help. Hmm. I wonder why?

Excerpts from Dean’s speech At Copley Square in Boston:

Odigo, the instant messaging service, says that two of its workers received messages two hours before the Twin Towers attack on September 11 predicting the attack would happen, and the company has been cooperating with Israeli and American law enforcement, including the FBI, in trying to find the original sender of the message predicting the attack.

Salon has an excellent article that covers a great deal more about the flaws in the electronic voting system. It’s a subscription article, but well worth the one day subscription. There’s also a free to read article about the investigator who found many of these flaws. In addition to being notoriously easy to hack, there’s also the problem that a leading owner/manufacturer or voting equipment is a GOP fundraiser who promised to deliver the state of Ohio to Bush next year.

Fark photo-contest: create your own Anti-Drug ad. This one’s getting my vote.
“Would you like to end up like this man? Sure you’ll get to be President…
… but imagine living life with a single digit IQ. This is what Cocaine can do to you.
DUBYA… my anti-drug”

Bush has to back-track and deny all the claims he made about a connection between 9/11 and Sadaam Hussein, without actually admitting that he made all those claims. Also, the Republicans are made that the California recall has been delayed, but the delay was based on the Supreme Court’s decision in the 2000 election — you know, the decision that put Bush in office.

The IEEE has written a draft electronic voting machine standard, and there are some concerns about that standard, and how it doesn’t necessarily solve the problems of electronic voting. Also, there is some concern that certain vendors are hoping to create a standard that locks out smaller or independent voting machine vendors. Read more about this here, or a synopsis is more layman’s terms here.