(1) There have indeed been "whistleblowers": (a) a programmer who insists they tried to hire him to develop vote rigging systems, (b) someone at Diebold who says that they know of patches being applied when they weren't supposed to have been. You can look this stuff up, if you haven't seen it yet.
(2) If we had better than that, we'd be talking about criminal convictions, and we're not.
(3) It's completely ridiculous to hold everything up to that standard of evidence.
You can't get the evidence without an investigation, and if you require the evidence before you begin to investigate, then you've got a neat catch-22.
(4) The notion that every conspiracy must fall apart instantly is by no means proven. In particular,
I'd expect that the instability of a conspiracy would be proportional to the number of conspirators -- the difficultly with DREs is that they at least hypothetically allow wholesale fraud with a relatively small group of "insiders".
(By the way: that persistant discrepancy of the usual "conventional" fraud.)
Sorry, some dropped words there. I was going for: (By the way: that persistant discrepancy might be taken as evidence of the usual "conventional" fraud.)
Surely more than one person knows how they're rigging the elections. None of those people ever get disenchanted, greedy, or feel guilty? Just think of the wealth, fame, and status the whistleblower on that scandal would get.
There have been "whistleblowers", they're just not getting much press.
Another thing that gets tiresome is the idea that anyone who discusses a "conspiracy" is
supposed to have inside knowledge of every details. The "conspiracy theorists" talk that way,
actual conspiracies aren't run that way.
One more question: who planned 9/11?
Still another thing that gets tiresome, the "you're just a nut like those truthies" smear.
Sorry, the truthies seem like nuts to me too. At this point I'm supposed to accuse you of
"being in denial just like-- ", but I'm not up for constructing a rhetorical analogy at the moment.
In fact, according to the Edison-Mitofsky report, they have shown a consistent discrepancy favoring the Democrats in every presidential election since 1988....
Yes, I know, a persistant small discrepancy, but in 2004, it got larger, and shows the various funny patterns I've been discussing, very much as though the Republicans were using DREs to rig an election.
As for physical evidence in the Ukraine election: that's excellent -- though for some reasons the physical evidence got ignored in the Ohio irregularities didn't it? -- the trouble with DREs is that they allow wholesale, undetectable fraud. There is no way it can be detected without paying close attention to polling discrepancies: trying to sweep them under the rug with a "It can't happen here" is extremely dangerous.
(By the way: that persistant discrepancy of the usual "conventional" fraud.)
recumbents are nice for setting speed records, while the classic diamond frame is much better if you're cycling around the city and want to avoid getting hit by cars.
Is this your experience talking, or is it just the usual slander about recombents being "hard to see" or some such?
Riding around with your center of gravity jacked up and pushed forward, the way most of us do on diamon frames, seems really ridiculous to me. The brakes on our bikes all suck, in my opinion: why do they suck? Because if they didn't we'd fly over the handlebars when trying to stop short.
Yes, it's obvious, with the constant daily barrage by the
media telling us how fucked up this country is and how fucked up
Iraq is and how angry we are all supposed to be, how could any of
us vote for Republicans?
Ha, ha, ha. It's the liberal media again.
Heh. Heh.
Something you are missing is that a large number of people in
this country see our economy booming, we see the RECORD
unemployment and the booming housing sector.
Hm, well maybe war really is good for the economy. Let's see,
casualties this month are pushing 100, for how long can we
continue to ritually sacrifice 100 servicemen every month?
Maybe we should bring back the draft.
We are smart enough to understand how oil is traded on
commodities markets and we aren't freaking out when prices
fluctuate.
Ah, you mean the way they hit the ceiling to maintain the oil
companies record profits, and then dive back down just in time
for the election?
Yet, in favor of the polls, you ignore the fact that the majority
of this country on the moderate to conservative side.
And you're sweeping under the rug that the Bush regime has taken
the Republican party way far to the right, it's just been taking
the moderates a little while to notice this.
Post election polls in 2004 showed that the people who actually
voted for Bush were remarkably ignorant about his actual
positions -- e.g. they figure he must be in favor of the Kyoto
agreement, because it only makes sense that he'd be trying to
work on the global warming problem.
It's an intellectually vapid and ridiculous notion that polling
data should be the deciding factor in an election and not the
actual votes cast.
Strangely enough, in 2004, everyone was overjoyed at the way exit
polls were used to expose a corrupt election in the Ukraine.
And in the same year, everyone ignored that the pattern of
exit-poll discrepancies in Bush's rather dirty win.
Pretty amazing. One might even say "Orwellian".
Speaking of dirt: have you seen any of the video of the the
2004 elections in Ohio? Democratic districts were shorted on
voting machines so badly that people were lined up down the hall,
up the stairs out the door and around the block, in the middle of
a cold, rainey night. I've never seen or heard of anything like
that in the United States before. Truly amazing.
Exit polls are not a good means of tracking election outcomes,
They certainly aren't "good", they're just one of the only things
that we have (or rather "had" because the NEP is not going to be
releasing "uncorrected" data ever again, it was too embarrassing
in 2004). If exit polls are so terrible, how is it that everyone
is happy with the way they were used to expose a corrupt election
in the Ukraine?
Anyone who seriously wants to understand the issues with the 2004
exit polls really needs to read the Freeman and Bliefuss book:
Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?
* They suffer from bad sampling, because the voters can opt
out, and only those willing to participate do so
This was a popular explanation proposed for the 2004 exit-poll
discrepancies, the "reluctant bush responder" hypothesis...
it is, for example, what the polling companies Edison & Mitofsky
claimed probably explained the discrepancies: Freeman and
Bleifuss analyze their own data very carefully and throughly
show that this just doesn't work. They demonstrate that if
anything the bias went in the other direction, Democrats were
a little reluctant to talk to the exit-pollsters.
* There are time-of-day differences among voting blocs
That was a nice try that came up early in the process:
Republicans work for a living, and vote late after they
get off work (Democrats you see, are lazy bums living on
welfare): The trouble is the data just doesn't show it:
there was not shift
* Exit polls by their nature lack the stringent controls that the voting booths have
You're not paying attention: DRE machines such as Diebold's enable, wholesale
election corruption techniques which makes any
"stringent controls" entirely besides the point.
Given that accusation, how do you check? How can you have
any confidence in an election result?
Looking for polling discrepancies is one of the few things that
we've got at the moment.
But the main reason exit polls are useless at best is that in an
uncorrupt system they are unneeded, while in a corrupt system
they will be ignored.
This kind of simple-minded binary logic appeals to computer
geeks, but real world systems are rarely so pristine.
We know things are dirty, we have reason to think they're dirtier
than they've ever been: there's no reason to give up hope, and
assume the country is so corrupt there's no way it can climb
out of the toliet.
What really bothers me is that many votes will probably get tossed, including valid votes, which is absurd.
Yeah, this is a big problem, but it's by no means the biggest problem we've been seeing of late.
What you're talking about is essentially "normal" fraud (talk about pathetic), it isn't the "wholesale" variety
that has become possible with the likes of Diebold and ES&S in the game.
Apparently we have no threshold for calling an entire election invalid and redoing it, which is pathetic.
Well, we do, sort of. For example, in 2004, Barbara Boxer -- in a rare display of "spine" on the part of the Democrats -- actually stood up in the Senate and tried to get the Senate to debate the election irregularities in Ohio before just rubber stamping the election. The thing is that party loyalties evidentally trump everything else these days, and the Republican majority just jammed the process; they ignored the evidence, complained about "sour grapes", and broke out their rubber stamp.
It's a similar problem with, say, the impeachment process as a check on Presidential power. It can't possibly work unless you have a split in control between congress and the executive branch.
1) Why is there only suspected fraud on the part of the Republican Party? I'm totally serious here - are the Democrats too stupid to cheat themselves?
Because that's what the evidence shows. There was a very
peculiar, statistically significant bias in the exit-poll
discrepancies, that nearly always favored the Republicans; and it
correlated with a number of interesting parameters like "the
presence of Republican governors". What does that sound like to
you?
2) If the Democratic Party seriously believed cheating had
occured, why didn't they make a really big deal of it?
Wouldn't they stand to gain by convincing people that the
election was rigged?
Read some of Mark Crispin Miller's stuff, if you want to hear
from someone who thinks he can read the minds of Democratic
politicians. Myself, I'm more worried about what the Republicans
actually did, than in what the Democrats thought they were
doing.
3) Why isn't the Democratic Party pushing harder for an end to
Diebold voting machines? Who'd want to use them if they
thought that doing so was in their worst interests?
Some Democrats are, e.g Debra Bowen, who is up for the Secretary
of State office in California.
If there was vote fraud already, why hasn't someone confessed
Well you see Son, this is not a Perry Mason episode, and in the
real world bad guys have lawyers who tell them to never admit
anything.
or been caught?
Why isn't Bush in jail for shredding the Constitution?
Because his party is in power, and it's politically impossible
for him to be impeached until his party is out of power.
Repeat that for Ken Blackwell, the Secretary of State in Ohio,
and so on.
Surely everyone at Diebold can't honestly favor the Republican
Party
The boss does though, and the boss hired a bunch of people with
felony fraud convictions who are perhaps not as fine, upright,
and principled as yourself.
Also there have been a few whistle-blowers floating around,
the media just hasn't paid much attention to them.
If the Democrats win the House and/or Senate in a few
weeks, will you think that THOSE elections are fraudulent? Or is
it only fraudulent when Republicans win?
Ah, it appears I've been talking to a shill. Oh well, those are
the breaks.
Here's the way to know if the election is hacked:
Republicans do well - wholesale voter fraud, machines were manipulated, etc.
Democrats do well - most open and transparent election in years; the people have spoken.
I look forward to reading the post-election commentary, no matter who does well.
Well the way it goes with me is that if the Democrats win really big, I'm stuck revising my model of the world, because I think the Republicans will be able to at least rig two of the three close Senate races in order to retain control of the Senate. If the Democrats don't win at least the House, then you'll find me raving that the problem is even worse than I thought it was: look at the clear difference between the pre-election polls and the official result, how could they be more blatant, etc.
So it appears that I don't quite fit into this cyncial quip, maybe you should try another one.
Furthermore, in precincts with voting machines that were repaired within two weeks of the election, Rossi had a touch screen advantage in 56 out of 58 (96.6 percent). The average margin for Rossi at these polling places was 11.58 percent more favorable than the absentee votes, and averaged 10.8 percent more than Gregoire on Election Day. [...] This raises serious questions as to whether the machines requiring repairs were tampered with to improperly assign votes to Rossi.
By the way, if you're wondering what I deleted there from the quote, it was this sentence:
However, the Republicans countered this by stating that among 90 precincts with no reported machine problems, 44 had touch screen vote counts more favorable to Rossi than the paper ballots from the same precinct, while 46 had a touch screen count that favored Gregoire.
It makes absolutely no sense in the context of that passage, and reading it over and over again, I still can't figure out how it's supposed to "counter" the assertion that there was evidence indicating possible fraud with the tampered machines. Politics on the internet, you got to love it, eh?
Yes that Washington State election is an interesting case, alright. It looks an awful lot like an attempt by the Republicans to steal an election that didn't quite work, which should be an inspiration to us all, in this
troubled electoral season.
PBS but as it's government it's controlled by government wich is currently run by Bush. There are others but these are the major media organizations that broadcast over the airwaves.
PBS is pretty famous for taking "underwriting" money from oil companies and so on, which is one of the reasons it's programming is so tremendously bland. (The smoking gun on this, for me, is the excellent 80s show "The Sandbaggers" -- you could find it on obscure little UHF stations, but PBS wouldn't touch it.)
But then, I guess that Bill Moyers is back on PBS now, and I gather he's gunning for Elephant...
I agree that this is perhaps THE most pressing issue right now for Americans,
Correct. So could we actually talk about it, instead of going off into odd digressions
about whether it's okay to reveal the tricks the bad guys know already?
Modern "liberals" LOVE big government and taxes that redistribute the wealth to the poorer parts of
the public WITHOUT regards to WHY most of the poor public is in their situation.
Yeah, and modern conservatives thankfully only engage in massive deficet spending for really important purposes, like getting American soldiers killed for obscure reasons in bizarre military adventures.
(Can you guys like check the calendar or something? It's not 1980 any more.
Time for some new rhetoric.)
and did you notice that the regions that the Republicans pulled their upsets in during the last elections were the ones that had Diebold machines?),
Proof please.
Also, how many upsets did not have diabold machines.
Finally any dem upsets, mapped the same way.
Do that and if it looks like proof I'll believe you.
It's actually really striking: there was a pattern of "surprising" results that correlates with the use of electronic voting machines; with the presence of Republican governors, and so on. Where-ever Bush really needed it, he got an upset.
(Note: Ohio appears to have been stolen also, but with more conventional tactics engineered by a Republican Secretary of State with a lot of balls and no shame.)
I agree that this is perhaps THE most pressing issue right now for Americans, but is it really ethical to distribute this kind of information? At what point do you take responsibility for what you post, and NOT diseminate information that, in the wrong hands, will cause what you are trying to prevent?
Sure it's ethical, try actually reading the article: the "How To" phrasing is more rhetorical than anything else.
The author is just explaining what's know about various DRE exploits, he's not going into enough detail to tell
someone how to really do it. And anyway, the guys who you don't want to know this already know it, they had these
systems built and have pushed them into use in spite of widespread complaints about their fallibility.
The real question is where do we go from here? If you know that American elections are suspect, what do you do next?
The best answer I've got at the moment is to hope that the vote rigging machinery is not that perfect,
and that it can only steal a relatively close election. Then there's at least a chance that we can vote the current bastards out, and try to fix the problems working "within the system" as it were. On the congressional
level, we can push for the Paper Ballot Act of 2006, and on the state level we can try to elect people to the "Secretary of State" office who will push for sane proceedures.
Note: if you live in California, you've got to vote for Debra Bowen for Secretary of State.
History lesson: Democrat was Sos, he disallowed Diebold; Democrat chased out of office, Republican appointee then allows Diebold; now we have a Democratic candidate running for SoS, and strangely enough she understands the
importances of paper trails for election integrity.
I am so FRUSTRATED by people on either side claiming matter-of-factly that the OTHER guys are the immoral, illegal ones while ignoring the crimes of their own
And I'm getting pretty sick of the "politicians are all the same" argument. That used to be true:
the Bush regime is something new on the scene.
Though what would be really nifty is to figure out a way of using an electrochemical effect to suppress corrosion... how hard could it be to nickle-plate a "disposable" razor? Hm.
Pure nickel is quite soft, so even though it would give you corrosion resistance, it wouldn't hold an edge well at all.
Are you sure? My bet would be that a really thin layer of nickle on steel would be more durable
than pure nickle.
Doing it well requires a bit more work. Fortunately, we have this cool system that lets people like you and me learn about ways people have already invented for dealing with problems like this. For example, you could read through one of Gillette's patents [freepatentsonline.com] on the subject.
Oh wait: actually showing that a patent could be a useful resource doesn't quite fit with the slashdot "all patents are evil" groupthink. Forget I mentioned it!:-)
The "groupthink" is that software patents are evil, and certainly unnecessary and counterproductive,
and if you seriously don't get that point you should say so, and I or someone else will happily attempt to beat it into your head again.
There are, however, some features of the patent system in general that are at best problematic, in particular the bit about triple damages for knowing infringement. Knowing about patents is potentially dangerous... you should probably consult a lawyer before you go around reading them.
And in any case, the theory that I'm following at the moment is that razor blade manufactures have an incentive to avoid perfecting their razor blades: you make more money selling replacements, than trying to charge for a high-quality one-off. The hope is that you might discover that there's some simple material treatement that
they don't bother to do because they'd rather sabotage the product.
Do you mean retro-cool as in a Huffy with a banana seat, or a penny-farthing?
Well, have you ever tried riding a penny-farthing? When you turn the steering
wheel, the wheel rim tries to push your foot off of the pedal.
Some technical advances really are advances, and not just silly fads.
(I just wish recumbant bicycles would catch on, but that's seeming like
a forelorn hope.)
I use single-bladed Bic disposables myself, which are great except that you have to keep track of how sharp they are and adjust your shaving style accordingly.
I too use just a single bladed Bic for shaving. But the things are cheap enough that I just use one twice and then toss it out. If I can't remember how many times I've used one, I'll toss it. Life is too short to spend time worrying about my razor.
As a resident of San Francisco, I am now honor-bound to begin ranting about how you are self-centered scum without any trace of environmental consciousness -- but I'm actually a little sloppy about this sort of thing, because I don't really know if old Bic's piling up in landfills really has any significant environmental impact.
Really, I mess around with things like re-using disposible items in a spirit of experiment, to see how difficult it really is to do it if you try to think your way through it -- it is true that it's probably not worth my time to worry about this (better to spend a half hour working and donate the money to the Nature Conservancy, eh?), but there's a certain amount of fun in solving the puzzle, and if I make some grand discovery, I can pass on the information and hope to give other people the benefit of my experience.
Also, I've tended to find that there are conveinience benefits to working out re-use strategies. For example,
I find that a one liter plastic soda bottle (if it contained something relatively neutral like club soda or a lemon-lime soda) makes a much better water bottle for bicycling than the ones they sell for the purpose
(which taste absolutely terrible). Note: reportedly you need to clean and let dry these sorts of bottles
a little more often than the ultra-plasticizer flavor bottles.
Oh and by the way, back on the subject of razors: I don't actually like the Bic razors when they're sharp.
I think they work better when they're slightly used, but not yet tremendously dull. Supposedly, it's not really good
for your skin to use super-sharp razor blades.
Mind you, the destruction of his hands is to a great extent his own fault: Ctrl-Alt-Esc-two-handed-combos, anyone?
Look man: emacs users are not the only people who have repetitive stress injuries.
The main reason Stallman trashed his hands is that he's a pioneer he's one
of the first hackers -- no one knew about RSI problems when he was getting started.
Also, he's probably pounded out 100 times more code than you or I are going to manage
in our lifetimes put together.
(All of this said, it's adviseable to get a really good keyboard if you're an emacs abuser -- don't use one of those stupid
things with the CNTRL below the Shift. Myself, I like the Kinesis contoured models, but even just using xmodmap or whatever
to turn the Caps Lock key into something useful is a big help.)
Slashdot Mirror
(2) If we had better than that, we'd be talking about criminal convictions, and we're not.
(3) It's completely ridiculous to hold everything up to that standard of evidence. You can't get the evidence without an investigation, and if you require the evidence before you begin to investigate, then you've got a neat catch-22.
(4) The notion that every conspiracy must fall apart instantly is by no means proven. In particular, I'd expect that the instability of a conspiracy would be proportional to the number of conspirators -- the difficultly with DREs is that they at least hypothetically allow wholesale fraud with a relatively small group of "insiders".
Sorry, some dropped words there. I was going for: (By the way: that persistant discrepancy might be taken as evidence of the usual "conventional" fraud.)
They're not, we're talking about it.
There have been "whistleblowers", they're just not getting much press.
Another thing that gets tiresome is the idea that anyone who discusses a "conspiracy" is supposed to have inside knowledge of every details. The "conspiracy theorists" talk that way, actual conspiracies aren't run that way.
Still another thing that gets tiresome, the "you're just a nut like those truthies" smear.Sorry, the truthies seem like nuts to me too. At this point I'm supposed to accuse you of "being in denial just like-- ", but I'm not up for constructing a rhetorical analogy at the moment.
Yes, I know, a persistant small discrepancy, but in 2004, it got larger, and shows the various funny patterns I've been discussing, very much as though the Republicans were using DREs to rig an election.
As for physical evidence in the Ukraine election: that's excellent -- though for some reasons the physical evidence got ignored in the Ohio irregularities didn't it? -- the trouble with DREs is that they allow wholesale, undetectable fraud. There is no way it can be detected without paying close attention to polling discrepancies: trying to sweep them under the rug with a "It can't happen here" is extremely dangerous.
(By the way: that persistant discrepancy of the usual "conventional" fraud.)
We're not the only ones: This Time, It's Not the Economy
Ha, ha, ha. It's the liberal media again. Heh. Heh.
Hm, well maybe war really is good for the economy. Let's see, casualties this month are pushing 100, for how long can we continue to ritually sacrifice 100 servicemen every month? Maybe we should bring back the draft.
Ah, you mean the way they hit the ceiling to maintain the oil companies record profits, and then dive back down just in time for the election?
Post election polls in 2004 showed that the people who actually voted for Bush were remarkably ignorant about his actual positions -- e.g. they figure he must be in favor of the Kyoto agreement, because it only makes sense that he'd be trying to work on the global warming problem.
Strangely enough, in 2004, everyone was overjoyed at the way exit polls were used to expose a corrupt election in the Ukraine. And in the same year, everyone ignored that the pattern of exit-poll discrepancies in Bush's rather dirty win. Pretty amazing. One might even say "Orwellian".
Speaking of dirt: have you seen any of the video of the the 2004 elections in Ohio? Democratic districts were shorted on voting machines so badly that people were lined up down the hall, up the stairs out the door and around the block, in the middle of a cold, rainey night. I've never seen or heard of anything like that in the United States before. Truly amazing.
They certainly aren't "good", they're just one of the only things that we have (or rather "had" because the NEP is not going to be releasing "uncorrected" data ever again, it was too embarrassing in 2004). If exit polls are so terrible, how is it that everyone is happy with the way they were used to expose a corrupt election in the Ukraine?
Anyone who seriously wants to understand the issues with the 2004 exit polls really needs to read the Freeman and Bliefuss book: Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?
This was a popular explanation proposed for the 2004 exit-poll discrepancies, the "reluctant bush responder" hypothesis... it is, for example, what the polling companies Edison & Mitofsky claimed probably explained the discrepancies: Freeman and Bleifuss analyze their own data very carefully and throughly show that this just doesn't work. They demonstrate that if anything the bias went in the other direction, Democrats were a little reluctant to talk to the exit-pollsters.
That was a nice try that came up early in the process: Republicans work for a living, and vote late after they get off work (Democrats you see, are lazy bums living on welfare): The trouble is the data just doesn't show it: there was not shift
You're not paying attention: DRE machines such as Diebold's enable, wholesale election corruption techniques which makes any "stringent controls" entirely besides the point.
Given that accusation, how do you check? How can you have any confidence in an election result?
Looking for polling discrepancies is one of the few things that we've got at the moment.
This kind of simple-minded binary logic appeals to computer geeks, but real world systems are rarely so pristine.We know things are dirty, we have reason to think they're dirtier than they've ever been: there's no reason to give up hope, and assume the country is so corrupt there's no way it can climb out of the toliet.
It's a similar problem with, say, the impeachment process as a check on Presidential power. It can't possibly work unless you have a split in control between congress and the executive branch.
Yeah, that's how they won the last two presidential elections. Oh, wait.
Because that's what the evidence shows. There was a very peculiar, statistically significant bias in the exit-poll discrepancies, that nearly always favored the Republicans; and it correlated with a number of interesting parameters like "the presence of Republican governors". What does that sound like to you?
Read some of Mark Crispin Miller's stuff, if you want to hear from someone who thinks he can read the minds of Democratic politicians. Myself, I'm more worried about what the Republicans actually did, than in what the Democrats thought they were doing.
Some Democrats are, e.g Debra Bowen, who is up for the Secretary of State office in California.
Well you see Son, this is not a Perry Mason episode, and in the real world bad guys have lawyers who tell them to never admit anything.
Why isn't Bush in jail for shredding the Constitution? Because his party is in power, and it's politically impossible for him to be impeached until his party is out of power.
Repeat that for Ken Blackwell, the Secretary of State in Ohio, and so on.
The boss does though, and the boss hired a bunch of people with felony fraud convictions who are perhaps not as fine, upright, and principled as yourself.
Also there have been a few whistle-blowers floating around, the media just hasn't paid much attention to them.
Ah, it appears I've been talking to a shill. Oh well, those are the breaks.
So it appears that I don't quite fit into this cyncial quip, maybe you should try another one.
By the way, if you're wondering what I deleted there from the quote, it was this sentence:
It makes absolutely no sense in the context of that passage, and reading it over and over again, I still can't figure out how it's supposed to "counter" the assertion that there was evidence indicating possible fraud with the tampered machines. Politics on the internet, you got to love it, eh?Yes that Washington State election is an interesting case, alright. It looks an awful lot like an attempt by the Republicans to steal an election that didn't quite work, which should be an inspiration to us all, in this troubled electoral season.
PBS is pretty famous for taking "underwriting" money from oil companies and so on, which is one of the reasons it's programming is so tremendously bland. (The smoking gun on this, for me, is the excellent 80s show "The Sandbaggers" -- you could find it on obscure little UHF stations, but PBS wouldn't touch it.)
But then, I guess that Bill Moyers is back on PBS now, and I gather he's gunning for Elephant...
Correct. So could we actually talk about it, instead of going off into odd digressions about whether it's okay to reveal the tricks the bad guys know already?
Yeah, and modern conservatives thankfully only engage in massive deficet spending for really important purposes, like getting American soldiers killed for obscure reasons in bizarre military adventures.
(Can you guys like check the calendar or something? It's not 1980 any more. Time for some new rhetoric.)
It's actually really striking: there was a pattern of "surprising" results that correlates with the use of electronic voting machines; with the presence of Republican governors, and so on. Where-ever Bush really needed it, he got an upset.
(Note: Ohio appears to have been stolen also, but with more conventional tactics engineered by a Republican Secretary of State with a lot of balls and no shame.)
The real question is where do we go from here? If you know that American elections are suspect, what do you do next?
The best answer I've got at the moment is to hope that the vote rigging machinery is not that perfect, and that it can only steal a relatively close election. Then there's at least a chance that we can vote the current bastards out, and try to fix the problems working "within the system" as it were. On the congressional level, we can push for the Paper Ballot Act of 2006, and on the state level we can try to elect people to the "Secretary of State" office who will push for sane proceedures.
Note: if you live in California, you've got to vote for Debra Bowen for Secretary of State. History lesson: Democrat was Sos, he disallowed Diebold; Democrat chased out of office, Republican appointee then allows Diebold; now we have a Democratic candidate running for SoS, and strangely enough she understands the importances of paper trails for election integrity.
And I'm getting pretty sick of the "politicians are all the same" argument. That used to be true: the Bush regime is something new on the scene.
There are, however, some features of the patent system in general that are at best problematic, in particular the bit about triple damages for knowing infringement. Knowing about patents is potentially dangerous... you should probably consult a lawyer before you go around reading them.
And in any case, the theory that I'm following at the moment is that razor blade manufactures have an incentive to avoid perfecting their razor blades: you make more money selling replacements, than trying to charge for a high-quality one-off. The hope is that you might discover that there's some simple material treatement that they don't bother to do because they'd rather sabotage the product.
Well, have you ever tried riding a penny-farthing? When you turn the steering wheel, the wheel rim tries to push your foot off of the pedal.
Some technical advances really are advances, and not just silly fads. (I just wish recumbant bicycles would catch on, but that's seeming like a forelorn hope.)
Really, I mess around with things like re-using disposible items in a spirit of experiment, to see how difficult it really is to do it if you try to think your way through it -- it is true that it's probably not worth my time to worry about this (better to spend a half hour working and donate the money to the Nature Conservancy, eh?), but there's a certain amount of fun in solving the puzzle, and if I make some grand discovery, I can pass on the information and hope to give other people the benefit of my experience.
Also, I've tended to find that there are conveinience benefits to working out re-use strategies. For example, I find that a one liter plastic soda bottle (if it contained something relatively neutral like club soda or a lemon-lime soda) makes a much better water bottle for bicycling than the ones they sell for the purpose (which taste absolutely terrible). Note: reportedly you need to clean and let dry these sorts of bottles a little more often than the ultra-plasticizer flavor bottles.
Oh and by the way, back on the subject of razors: I don't actually like the Bic razors when they're sharp. I think they work better when they're slightly used, but not yet tremendously dull. Supposedly, it's not really good for your skin to use super-sharp razor blades.
(All of this said, it's adviseable to get a really good keyboard if you're an emacs abuser -- don't use one of those stupid things with the CNTRL below the Shift. Myself, I like the Kinesis contoured models, but even just using xmodmap or whatever to turn the Caps Lock key into something useful is a big help.)