Stalking women, drought, voting fraud, and guns.

Ben Carson's view of women.  Stalking is not romantic.

How to understand and end California's drought.

Lion cub learning how to swim.

Dealing with the radiation fears about Fukushima.

Have self-compassion.

Kansas voting is manipulated.

President Obama is a class act.  Dealing with Native Americans.

Understanding China's economic slowdown.

Ideas for dealing with oceans filled with plastic.

Stating the obvious: The States With The Most Gun Laws See The Fewest Gun-Related Deaths

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.

This is worrisome....

Exit Polls Canceled In 19 States

Update... there is no voter fraud, so Republicans will MAKE voter fraud happen: Sproul Says GOP Had Him Disguise Involvement in Voter Registration Scandal

Because voters might vote Democratic...

The Daily Show
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Vote Rigging in Wisconsin?

And every other election in the US?

If vote-rigging prospers, none may call it vote-rigging. It simply becomes the new norm. Once again, the universal laws of statistics apply only outside U.S. borders. The recall vote in Wisconsin produced another significant 7% discrepancy between the unadjusted exit poll and the so-called "recorded vote." In actual social science, this level of discrepancy, with the results being so far outside the expected margin of error would not be accepted.

Sunday, Sunday...

Martin Bashir calls out the GOP.

Bryan of Why Now? deals with the Florida voting rumpus.

Ladies do not need to talk about lady problems.  Let men do it for you.

Paul Krugman, European rock star.

Catholic hospital says no meds to HIV man.  Steve Bates predicted this asinine move.

Via Marcellina of the Practice Room, Das Rad (with English subtitles):

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

Nice of you to notice

Most electronic voting systems can be hacked, CIA expert says.

So where the hell have you guys been the last eight years?

Up is down, far is near

The presidential race is tight. Tight. Squeaky tight. So tight that cheating at the electronic voting machines will tip the campaign to McCain. So tight that scaring off Democratic voters in swing states will tip the campaign to McCain. So tight that dropping voters off poll sheets, placing police at the voting booths, swamping the airwaves and flyers with misinformation will tip the campaign to McCain.

All McCain has to do is hang tight.

GOP nominee John McCain said Sunday that the presidential race will be close by Election Day despite a bevy of polls showing him significantly behind Democrat Barack Obama.

“We’re doing fine,” Sen. McCain (Ariz.) said on NBC’s “Meet the Press”. “We have closed in the last week... You’ll be up very, very late on election night.”

No, no, no! It's supposed to be DEMOCRATS who cheat at voting!

SACRAMENTO -- The owner of a firm that the California Republican Party hired to register tens of thousands of voters this year was arrested in Ontario late last night on suspicion of voter registration fraud.

State and local investigators allege that Mark Jacoby fraudulently registered himself to vote at a childhood California address where he no longer lives so he would appear to meet the legal requirement that signature gatherers be eligible to vote in California.

Jacoby's arrest by state investigators and the Ontario Police Department comes after dozens of voters said they were duped into registering as Republicans by his firm, Young Political Majors, or YPM. The voters said YPM tricked them by saying they were signing a petition to toughen penalties against child molesters. The firm was paid $7 to $12 for every Californian it registered as a member of the GOP.

Since it worked so well the last few times...

It's going to be used to explain how Obama's election and presidency are a sham:

Let's be clear about what this is. These are random stories about fake vote registrations. The Drudges and Fox scoundrels of the world seem to think that if someone fills out a voter registration card for Mickey Mouse, that Mickey Mouse might show up and cast a vote they're not entitled to cast. It doesn't and there is zero evidence of any voter fraud or anything that would make voter fraud more likely. The level of lying, bad faith or at best ignorance of the people making these claims is really beyond imagining. This isn't vote fraud. There's no evidence of vote fraud. Nothing. This is an effort of a losing political party to a) lay the groundwork for challenging their defeat at the polls b) lay the groundwork to pass laws to make it harder for poor people and minorities to vote.

And in the 2004 election:

The Republicans making these claims argued that these problems with registration cards were opening the coming election up to widespread vote fraud. Logically, this makes no sense. And, more importantly, all evidence shows this has never happened, certainly not in any widespread sense. Every person who claims otherwise is either ignorant or speaking in bad faith.

Nonetheless, CNN and other national news outlets and especially local media outlets, either out of ignorance or bad faith, ran hard with these stories -- just as CNN is doing now.

After the election, there was a lot of pressure from Republicans in states like Nevada, Washington, New Mexico, etc. (not surprisingly, all key swing states) to have local US Attorneys prosecute these cases. The word came down from Washington, DC, particularly the political office at the White House that this was a top priority. And the local US Attorneys launched into it.

But there was a problem. Most of these were ethical prosecutors. And when they looked into it there just wasn't anything there. Most of the stories weren't even true. And those that were, were obviously isolated and in most cases not done with malice. The number of people who could actually be prosecuted could be counted on one hand. Local Republicans got angry; Karl Rove got angry. And the US Attorneys got fired.

That's the real story of the US Attorney firing scandal. And what we're seeing today is textbook -- exactly the same as what we saw in 2004 and 2006. It's a scam. And the very recent history should be enough for news networks like CNN and others not to let themselves become complicit in this disgrace.

Republicans lose if everyone votes. Democrats win if everyone votes. Guess what the Republicans will do?

Voter purge happening right now.

Brad Blog quotes the CBS news: CBS News: New Study Details Massive Voter Roll Purges Underway in At Least 19 States

...the brief coverage from tonight's Evening News notes 10,000 voters purged in Mississippi, 21,000 in Louisiana and "to top it off, another new study discovered 19 states are ignoring federal law (the National Voter Registration Act), banning systematic purges within 90 days of a federal election."

Among those 19, are a number of battleground states. The report lists: Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Delware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Masachusetts, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Texas and Washington, as places where massive purges have recently taken place.

CBS ends by noting that their New Jersey voter has now been restored to the rolls, but they warn, "come Election Day, don't count on thousands of others being as fortunate"...

The only way Republicans can possibly win is by cheating. Hang on to your hats, it's going to get really ugly from now on out. And if Obama wins, the shit will hit the fan.

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

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.

California's disguised petitions

If you sign petitions, read every page where you put your signature.

Susie of Suburban Guerrilla:

I should note that the clipboard is arranged such that a rubber band holding the petitions to the cardboard is positioned on the top of the page, across the actual ballot language in question - thus, partially hiding the text of the ballot initiatives on pages 2-4 unless you actually stop and pull down the top of the page.

I agreed to sign the cancer initiative, but the comment about signing four times raised a red flag, because I’m familiar with the structure of ballot petitions, so I paused before signing and looked at the other initiatives. However, I’m absolutely sure that most of the people signing, young college students on a rush to get their lunches and off to class, did not take this step.

What they are doing is getting people to sign for ballot initiatives without their knowledge or informed consent, using young peoples’ desire to do a good thing and their lack of familiarity with the legal paperwork of initiative petitions. If this is not illegal it is certainly deeply unethical. The moment I realized what was going on, I told the petitioners that they shouldn’t be telling people to sign for ballot initiatives they’re not aware of. Immediately after, I called the school newspaper, the Daily Nexus, the Courage Campaign, the Santa Barbara Democratic Central Committee, and the California Democratic Party.

Perhaps if you see this happening, tell the petition collectors that even though they are being paid by the signature or by the hour, you're going to report them for obtaining signatures under false pretenses. Would this work? Sadly ... there is no law to protect us from voters being absolute dumbshits.

Read each petition that you sign.

Update 11/16: More links.

Florida, where men are men, women are women

And votes don't count...

Sinfonian of Blast Off! says Diebold has been okayed for Florida elections:

Truth be told, I'm not even all that concerned about the speed with which the certification occurred. What really bothers me is that a wingnut Secretary of State certified a wingnut voting machine manufacturer.

We need to keep a wary eye on Diebold. Florida isn't exactly known for its accurate elections, you know? Diebold certainly won't improve the situation.

And Eli of Multi Medium reviews Dan Rather's broadcast about electronic voting fraud:

Dan Rather is at it with the inconvenient truths again:

…[T]his week’s edition of ”Dan Rather Reports” explores… the very paper from which punch-card ballots were made, and glaring shortcuts in how certain touch-screen voting machines were produced.

”Our story is not that the election would have turned out differently in 2000 if certain things hadn’t happened. No one can know that,” Rather said Monday. But his eight-month investigation has ”dug down vertically as deep as we were capable of doing” to probe the brewing problems — including on-camera interviews with workers who had a front-row seat.

The hourlong news program premieres Tuesday at 8 p.m. EDT on cable’s HDNet channel, with subsequent re-airings and streaming online video.

Rather’s report begins with the current congressional bid by Democrat Christine Jennings, who lost her 2006 race by 369 votes in Florida’s Sarasota County, where touch-screen machines showed 18,000 ballots with no candidate selected in that race.

Electronic voting... is what will keep Republicans in power...

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."

Do they have to spell it out for us?

What will it take to wrest our country back from these neocon thugs? John Amato of Crooks and Liars explains who Weyrich is:

Paul Weyrich, father of the right-wing movement and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, Moral Majority and various other groups tells his flock that he doesn’t want people to vote. That’s why the GOP is obsessed with voter fraud—only they want to disenfranchise voters because as Weyrich said back in the ’80’s…the more voters there are—the less of a chance the wingers have in any election.

Then he quotes him:

Weyrich: “Now many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome — good government. They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.

You can't get any more clear than that.

Distraction and disenfranchisement

The only way Republicans can win elections now. Paul Krugman:

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.

Basically: Terror alerts and voter fraud. What kind of convenient attack will they accidentally allow to happen before election day this time?