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Voting Machine Issues, Confusion Compounded Delays Faced by Untold Thousands of Voters This Fall

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During early voting and on Election Day, the Election Protection Coalition, which had a volunteer staff of 10,000 lawyers, received calls via a national hotline, 1-866-OURVOTE. The calls were notated, categorized and posted on OurVoteLive.org. Of 86,000 calls received this fall, about 1,900 --- or 2.2 percent --- were about the machines. Two-thirds were registration and polling place inquiries.

There were 1,700 incidents after eliminating duplicates, Hall said. These calls generally did not involve problems encountered later Tuesday night during the vote count, he said in an e-mail. In contrast, the Democratic National Committee's election protection team monitoring machine issues, including the count, recorded "thousands" of incidents, a volunteer on that team said.

The most common voter hotline complaints were "about broken machinery, long lines, long waits to vote and reports of emergency ballots being used instead of the normal mode of voting," Hall said. "However, there are some interesting features from these reports."
Machine breakdowns and electronic poll book bottlenecks --- where voters check in before voting --- lead to many delays, Hall said. He cited a report from Atlanta where all 15 voting machines in a polling place had stopped working, and a New York City report of one poll book for hundreds of voters. A shortage of e-poll book laptops was reported in Georgia, while in Maryland poll workers could not get their electronic voting systems up and running, he said, citing typical complaints.
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...I predict that the consuming crisis will be the detention and torture program that we continue to operate at Guantanamo Bay and around the world. The following points are not opinions but simple widely-reported facts.

(1) America holds thousands, if not tens of thousands, of muslims or suspected muslims at various sites around the world. The list includes Bagram air base in Afghanistan, prisons in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and the ‘black site’ prisons that have almost certainly not all been dismantled.

(2) Most of our detainees are innocent; some minority is genuinely dangerous. This was true for Abu Ghraib, it remains true in Guantanamo.

(3) Torture produces lies – innocent people confess and many of those with with secrets to hide will spill the secret along with any other plausible lie that might please the torturers. In 2004, while John Kerry fruitlessly tried to unseat president Bush, homeland security kept Americans awake at night chasing equally fruitless threats around New York City and elsewhere. The threats seemed like a capricious gimmick to keep the president in office, and there was some of that, but the alerts had a basis in actual prisoner accounts. These revelations came from the same origin as the supposedly solid ‘confessions’ on which most of our military commissions are based – they are the desperate words of a person trying to make the abuse stop.

(4) Given (3), we have no way of knowing which of our prisoners were ever dangerous, other than a small number of detainees whose name were on a confirmed list when we arrested them.ANd it gets worse

Some pundits think that we should wait and see what Obama does with the Bush-era torture regime; in my opinion that attitude is dangerously wrong. America’s credibility hangs by a rapidly fraying thread. Saving it will depend on relentless pressure from prominent pundits, preferably voices much more prominent than Glenn Greenwald, to pull up the rocks and expose the entire regime to disinfecting sunlight.
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We cannot justify holding on to virtually any of our detainees without charging them in a legitimate court. However, as the Hamdi case illustrates, fairly charging tortured and illegally kept detainees is essentially the same as freeing them. Then the liberated detainees can file lawsuits. If the new government shows a few scruples about using the State Secrets card more honorably then, like the pending suit by Maher Arar, an innocent Canadian tortured for a year in Syria, the civil suits alone could be catastrophic.

We already know that discovery will uncover prosecutable crimes in practically every case. Ergo, prepare for the greatest fletchering ever seen by man. If levied honestly, damages could collectively rank in legal history with the tobacco settlement. I do not have the training to guess how much one year of a life is worth, or five years. If those five years included relentless abuse that left you physically scarred and psychologically damaged, how much would you ask for?MORE

The operative questions becomes this: if neither the CIA nor the Joint Chiefs of Staff had existed when Osama bin Laden launched his attack, if Congress had not created the Department of Defense or the National Security Council back in 1947, would the United States find itself in any worse shape than it is? That is, if President Bush had had to rely upon the institutions that existed through World War II - a modest State Department for diplomacy and two small cabinet agencies to manage military affairs - would he have bollixed up Iraq any more than he has? To frame the question more broadly: When considering the national security state as it has evolved and grown over the past six decades, what exactly has been the value added. And if the answer is none - if, indeed, the return on investment has been essentially negative - then perhaps the time has come to consider dismantling an apparatus that demonstrably serves no useful purpose.

Those words appear on P. 101 of The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism by Andrew J. Bacevich, West Point Grad, professor of history and international relations at Boston University, and one of the most cogent critics of the nation in which we live.

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Crediting the United States with a "great liberating tradition" distorts the past and obscures the actual motive force behind American politics and U. S. foreign policy. It transforms history into a morality tale, thereby providing a rationale for dodging serious moral analysis. To insist that the liberation of others has never been more than an ancillary motive of U.S. policy is not cynicism, it is a prerequisite to self-understanding.

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Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.MORE

They are one of the world's greatest and most precious natural resources, yet are entirely hidden. Now, for the first time, a high-resolution map shows where underground aquifers store vast amounts of water.
The map of "blue gold" (pdf format, 4 MB) is the result of nearly a decade of sometimes difficult talks between neighbouring governments, mediated by UNESCO. The hope is that it will help pave the way to an international law to govern how water is shared around the world.
Aquifers are underground layers of rocks or sediments from which water can be extracted - normally by drilling boreholes or digging wells. They hold 100 times the volume of freshwater that flows down rivers and streams around the world at any time.
What the UNESCO map reveals is just how many aquifers cross international borders. So far, the organisation has identified 273 trans-boundary aquifers: 68 in the Americas, 38 in Africa, 155 in Eastern and Western Europe and 12 in Asia.
Each trans-boundary aquifer holds the potential for international conflict - if two countries share an aquifer, pumping in one country will affect its neighbour's water supply.MORE

I want to be clear that I do not expect, or even want, Barack Obama to govern as I would govern. However, if I were president-elect, I would be planning quite an operation on inauguration day. As soon as I was sworn in, I would demand that Robert Mueller submit his resignation. Then I would instruct the FBI to lock down FBI Headquarters, the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency offices, the executive suites at the CIA, the National Security Agency's offices, the National Intelligence Agency's offices, and management's offices at the Department of Justice. I would tell them to put yellow police tape around all of these buildings and offices, and I would treat each as a crime scene. I'd have them preserve evidence from every safe, every email cache, every hard-drive. And then I would prosecute every violation to the fullest extent of the law.

Apparently Bernanke, that wonderful bipartisan soul who is so competent and wonderful that everyone in the village thinks Obama should leave him in charge is refusing to identify who got almost 2 trillion dollars of Fed cash. Bloomberg News is suing to find out. Personally I really, really, really want to know. What exactly is Bernanke hiding? Who got the money he doesn't want us to know got the money?
This is money that was loaned in exchange for "collateral", by which we mean "trash no one else but the Fed would buy for anything but cents on the dollar". Barney Frank, embarrassing himself yet again, claims the Fed should keep its clap shut because if people know how bad it is, well, there might be a run. I think Barney's missing the point, as long as people don't know how bad it is, they won't trust anyone who might be borrowing large amounts of money from the Fed with crap collateral, because they don't know how bad it is and they suspect it's really really really bad. As in 10 cents on the dollar bad.
More to the point, that 2 trillion is taxpayer money, and taxpayers have a right to know what sweetheart deals Bernanke's been giving out, and who's been getting what. This whole "this information is too scary for citizens to know" schtick is so Bush regime. I thought we were moving into a new era of openness? Perhaps Barney should get with the program?MORE

That's what "free trade" deals are about: limiting by treaty the policy space in which lawmakers can operate. As such, both of the presidential candidates are boxed into a cage of their respective parties' creation. It's the dirty secret of the 2008 campaign.

Recently, AlterNet asked Van Jones, founder of Green For All and author of The Green Collar Economy, about this issue, and he responded with defiance. "I want the WTO to tell us we can't do this," he said, "because then we won't have a WTO. I want the free traders to stand up in front of the world and explain to Americans why some people are going to tell you that you can't have clean energy and you can't have your home retrofitted (with American-made products) because it is more efficient for it to be made in Asia or Germany, that you can't bring Detroit back to build wind turbines. I want the free traders to defend having an overseas body to declare this agenda illegal. I want that fight."

It's a fight that might finally help achieve public awareness about what "free trade" really means. When most people hear the word "trade," they picture ships filled with goods crisscrossing the world's oceans. But the reality is that "free trade" is simply a well-tested euphemism for agreements between governments that limit their ability to intervene in the private sector, ostensibly to unleash the awesome "power of the free market."
They don't just cover trade between countries, but also a host of issues that most ordinary people would consider to be purely domestic matters, as long as they have some tenuous connection with international commerce, no matter how far removed.
Activists from across the developing world have been trying for years to call attention to that reality but have largely been ignored by a media and political establishment devoted to promoting the so-called "Washington Consensus."

Now, with Americans hungry for new approaches to the economy, health care, energy policy and a host of other issues, the "free trade" deals advanced by both Democrats and Republicans over the past 30 years may very well come back to haunt them.
According to a report by the watchdog group Public Citizen (PDF), "Many WTO rules have little or nothing to do with international trade," but every WTO country is still "required to 'ensure the conformity of its laws, regulations and administrative procedures'" with the WTO's orthodoxy. Failing to do so is not a meaningless act of diplomatic defiance; the WTO has an enforcement arm. As the report explains:

Domestic policies that extend beyond the WTO constraints are subject to challenge by other WTO signatory countries -- often at the behest of their affected industries -- before WTO tribunals. Of the 137 cases decided to date at the WTO, challenges to domestic laws have been successful nearly 90 percent of the time, with countries moving to alter their laws as ordered except in a single instance, where a country instead chose to pay indefinite trade sanctions to keep its policy in place.

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Consider Obama's plan, "New Energy for America" (PDF). At its heart is a proposal to "invest in a clean energy economy" and "create 5 million new green jobs, good jobs that cannot be outsourced." But most can be. While installing new solar panels would be a job that would stay in the United States, building those solar panels would not be. According to the WTO's Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures, any financial contribution by a government to the private sector that would give a preference to "domestic over imported goods," either by law "or in fact," is a no-no. Article 5 of that agreement allows a WTO challenge to "any subsidy (tax credit, funding for R&D, and other[s] ...) deemed to ... carry a benefit that has the effect of causing serious prejudice" against goods or services provided by another country. There was an exception for "environmental upgrades," but it expired in 2000.

When it comes to the government, "Buy American" is itself WTO illegal. Obama promises to "help nurture America's success in clean technology manufacturing by establishing a federal investment program to help manufacturing centers modernize" by using federal funds to provide the "critical up-front capital" to modernize "manufacturing facilities to produce new advanced clean technologies." It wouldn't stand a chance if challenged.

Right-wing pundit Robert Novak climbed aboard the bandwagon, writing today that neither the large Democratic gains nor Obama’s sweeping popular and electoral vote margins were proof of a mandate:

The first Democratic Electoral College landslide in decades did not result in a tight race for control of Congress. […]
[Obama] may have opened the door to enactment of the long-deferred liberal agenda, but he neither received a broad mandate from the public nor the needed large congressional majorities.

Novak dismissed Democratic congressional gains, noting that they “fell several votes short of the 60-vote filibuster-proof Senate.” However, in 2004 — as President Bush crowed about his “political capital” — Novak didn’t hesitate to agree that Bush’s comparatively narrow victory was proof of a conservative mandate, in a CNN interview just days after the election:

Q: Bob Novak, is 51 percent of the vote really a mandate?
NOVAK: Of course it is. It’s a 3.5 million vote margin. But the people who are saying that it isn’t a mandate are the same people who were predicting that John Kerry would win. … So the people who say there’s not a mandate want the president, now that he’s won, to say, Oh, we’re going to accept the liberalism that the — that the voters rejected. But Mark, this is a conservative country, and it showed it on last Tuesday. [11/06/04]

As of now, Obama’s popular vote margin stands at 7,401,289 — more than twice Bush’s 2004 vote margin — and Obama has netted 63 more electoral votes than Bush in 2004. In his column, Novak dismissed the Democratic Senate gains this year, even though they have netted five seats for a total of 56, with three more seats potentially up for grabs. By contrast, the conservatives’ so-called 2004 “mandate” netted only four new seats for a total of 55.