No U.S. media outlet has reported this because we just don't care that much about Canadian politics. Also, perhaps the American media doesn't have sources as good as Captain's Quarters have, and they just don't have the story. I don't see any evidence which supports your hypothesis that American MSM is not running the story because of "ethics". And if they were, I would suggest that they were more trying to protect their business interests in Canada rather than to honor some "ethical" obligation.
And why do you suggest that it is somehow unethical for an American blogger to honor American ethics, rather than Canadian ethics, in running the story?
Yes, you can select an impartial jury even after widespread publicity. Most reasonable people are entirely able to set aside what they've heard before and form an opinion based on the facts presented to them in open court.
As for the temporary nature of the ban, in Canada the ruling party can call a general election any time they like. Suppose they were to call one for a few weeks from now, before the "month or two" you suggest has expired. They win reelection (for a term of up to another 5 years), and only after that does the full extent of their corruption come out. That's just one of the dangers of even temporary censorship.
One might instead ask what's more important... the right of a single individual to a fair trial or the right of the public to have timely information about corrupt behavior by their elected official?
These issues are not unknown here in the U.S., and we almost always have managed to find untainted juries, or juries of sensible people who can obey the law and leave any prior knowledge of the case at the courthouse door. In the final resort, the accused's right to a fair trial can be protected by dismissing the charges against him, as happened with Ollie North (whose immunized Congressional testimony was released to the public).
Candian rules for Canadians, American rules for Americans.
Canada is certainly not the only country in the world to curtail the freedom of speech purportedly in order to protect a defendant's right to a fair trial. And if Canadians want to have that rule, that's fine. But to try to impose such rules on American citizens for publishing something in America, that's just wrong. That's trying to impose Canadian laws on us. And to try to prohibit Canadians from simply linking to an American website is just stupid.
It's always easy to find some justification to "balance" competing rights in order to limit freedom of speech. But it is far too subject to abuse. Canadians also have a right to know what their government is doing, don't they? And if there has been corruption, Canadians should have a right to know that before an election, shouldn't they? How do you know the judge who issued the ban isn't sympathetic with the ruling party, trying to limit the public damage?
According to Captain's Quarters, there is some movement among the ruling party in Canada to call a snap election before all the facts can come out. The judicial ban on publishing the testimony would then prevent Canadians from casting informed votes.
Free speech is free speech. No ifs, ands, or buts, in my view.
Then this is really not a question of "phishing" as a new type of spyware, trojan horse, or virus. It's a different mode of attack, with different means already in place to protect them. If a computer intruder can get enough access to your system to monkey with the DNS cache or the HOSTS file, what's stopping them from using that very same access to install a keystroke logger or other spyware? Is there something magical about these new phishing e-mails which allow them to take over the DNS cache by means other than the means also used to install spyware?
That's not true. The simplest rule to avoid Phishers is easy and infallible. DON'T CLICK ON THE LINK IN THE E-MAIL! Just take an extra second and a half to open your browser and either type in the address or (if you just need to click) click on the "Favorites" or "Bookmark" entry for your bank, Paypal, or wherever.
If you do this, you will not be taken in by a phishing exploit, ever.
Fair enough, I was being deliberately inflamatory to make a point.
Actually, I agree completely with you that voting machines are easier to use and therefore better at recording some kind of valid vote from everybody who comes in. Certainly the butterfly ballot was nobody's fault but the designer's. Here in Louisiana, we've used mechanical voting machines for years and years with no problems. (No problems related specifically to the machines recording accurate vote tallies, that is -- plenty of electoral shenanigans otherwise.)
Phrased more neutrally (and more charitably), the larger point is that we have, as a society, decided that we should try to count every possible vote, whether the voter has done a good or a poor job of marking his intentions on the ballot. And that's another reason why the paper ballots used elsewhere won't work here any more.
Somebody please mod the AC parent up for calling attention to the serious practical problems of increased complexity. He knows that if this passes in this form, then a few years from now, some polling places in the poor part of town somewhere will not be able to fix the printer quickly, and then a bunch of the citizens in that poor part of town won't be able to vote, or will leave because the line is too long, and there will be a huge hue-and-cry about the election being stolen and these poor people being disenfranchised because of the technical glitches.
AC, don't forget that the law prohibits thermal paper, so you must also have enough INK on hand, and hope it doesn't clog up or run out.
But since the regulation isn't published anywhere, how could he know it existed, much less complain about it, until the government officials who had been told about it tried to enforce it on him?
Please actually read the article. I am a supporter, in general, of the Bush administration and former Attorney General Ashcroft, but I profoundly disagree with the government on this one.
If you read the article, or the other posts, you would see that the problem here is that the goverment (eventually) admitted that yes, there was a written security regulation on ID requirements, but then refused to show that regulation even in court. This is most definitely NOT about some smart-ass insisting that the security guard be able to cite chapter and verse of the law. This is deliberate government policy to refuse to reveal to the public or the courts regulations which it is enforcing.
It's not a matter of not being able to travel by plane without ID. I don't have a problem with law or federal regulation requiring airline passengers to show ID before boarding.
But I do have a problem with the government (and this was the government acting, through TSA) according to rules that it won't show you, that the public has never had an opportunity to comment on before being imposed. Those security directives are indeed "law" for all intents and purposes, at least to the people in the air terminals and airplanes. They are "law" because they absolutely control how government law enforcement personnel will deal with you and what those personnel will and will not allow you to do on their turf.
But unlike actual laws, these security directives were written in secret, and you find out what they are only by running afoul of them. And you, as a citizen in our democratic government, have no way to seek redress of your grievances from the government, because you can't point to some piece of paper saying what you can and cannot do; you are left with vague stories about what some guy at the airport, who may or may not have been a government oficial, told you.
Now, I am in favor of keeping most security procedures secret. I don't want to know the exact criteria by which passengers are selected for more intensive searches; that information could help terrorists figure out how to avoid extra scrutiny. But a rule like this affects all members of the travelling public immediately and directly, and (if it is in fact a rule) there is no reason not to publicize it, along with the citation to the authority by which the rule was promulgated by the TSA or the FAA.
I say "if it is in fact a rule" because the other problem with secret directives like this is that the public has no way of knowing whether it is really a rule or something just made up by some arrogant security guard. We are a government of laws, not men. The rules cannot be just whatever orders come out of the mouth of the policeman. But without knowing what the rules are, we don't know whether the policeman (TSA security guard) is really doing their job or just having a spot of fun or acting out an ego trip.
That's not nitpicky at all, actually. I'm embarassed I didn't catch it myself. If I were representing a voting machine manufacturer (I'm a lawyer), I would send out the lobbyists to fix this provision in committee, because I would have no way to advise my client how to comply with it.
Because of a previous job, I am very familiar with background checking requirements. All the ones I'm familiar with (here in the Great State of Louisiana) do in fact include restrictions which prohibit certain people from getting the job or the license for which the background check is performed. Indeed, the only purpose of those background checks is to determine whether the individual applicant meets the specific criteria set forth in those laws.
Not only does the bill not tell us what should be done with the background checks, it doesn't tell us what type of checks should be conducted. Would simply getting a credit report be sufficient? (Probably not, since it is illegal to use a negative credit report in a hiring decision.) Or would you need a background check as extensive as those done for security clearances? The bill doesn't say, which means no matter what decision the company made about them, somebody would sue or seek regulatory action against them.
What part of the Constitution? Try the Fifth and the Fourteenth Amendments, which say that no person shall "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" by the federal government or any state. With due process of law, conversely, those rights can be taken away - by execution, imprisonment, or denial of the right to vote.
Note to grandparent poster: A felon is not an "it". Most felons have some kind of humanity left in them, regardless of their crimes. Few are truly so psychopathic as to be considered monsters.
The public interest is for a hand-counted vote, observed by all the candidates and other independent members of the public, which in other countries is typically completed well within 24 hours of the polls closing.
That works just fine if you are only voting on one or two races at a time. But when you are voting simultaneously for city council, sheriff, county commissioner, school board, state representative, state senator, governor, U.S. Congressman, U.S. Senator, President, dog catcher, and God only knows how many referenda and initiatives, hand counts become much more logistically difficult.
Combine the multitude of races with the problems some Americans seem to have with punching holes in paper or coloring inside the lines of those little bubbles (and our willingness to coddle their problems by doing our utmost best to divine their real "intention"), and the problem as not nearly as easy as you make it sound.
We already have such caps. It's at $2,000 per federal candidate right now. Of course, Bill Gates can afford to give that amount to a lot of different candidates, unlike your average mid-west farmer, but there's little the law can (or should) do about that.
But of course Bill Gates has all that money because of his leadership of 2 very large groups of people, Microsoft employees and (much larger) Microsoft customers. Mid-west farmers also have a lot of political clout on issues because they band together and speak through the voices of those evil, pernicious lobbyists that/.ers love to hate.
* (Note - the link to Bill Gates' campaign contributions also includes donations made by his father, who has the same name and is a retired attorney.)
Why would it need to void the paper ballot? As long as each person only puts one paper ballot into the ballot box, it doesn't matter if the ballot has been voided.
They don't work that way. The machine doesn't give the paper to the person at all. From the bill (p.6 l.20): the voting machine "(iii) shall not require the voter to handle the paper;"
Now, you could set up a system which works as you suggest, where the voteing machine only prints the ballot, with a separate counting machine to scan the printouts. But that's not what Senators Clinton and Kerry are proposing (nor any of the Republicans who have introduced almost identical bills in the past).
But even if the system worked as you described, it would be very dangerous to allow the voter an oppoortunity to print out multiple ballots. What's to stop the voter from pretending to make a mistake, print out a second ballot (and a 3rd and a 4th!), then slip them all in to the ballot box together? It would be very easy to do, almost impossible to stop.
Also, keep in mind that you can't use roll paper that scrolls by for the voter to review, because then all the votes would be in order, and anybody in the future could look at the roll and the list of who voted (which in most states shows the order they came in) to see how each voter voted.
"The Repbulican majority will never let this pass"? What are you smoking? Did no Democrats in Illinois (or my own home state of Louisiana for that matter) ever steal elections? Do no Democrats use dirty tricks in primary campaigns?
Instead of your clever little signature, why don't you use some facts to back up an outlandish statement like that?
It may use the term, and call for the software source to be viewable by the public after being submitted to the "Commission", but it is certainly not "open source" as we normally use that phrase. Open source programmers aren't usually subject to background checks. And I assume they mean for this last clause here to mean the compiled binaries, but by its strict language, they'll have to print the source code in newspapers, because it can't be transferred over the internet.
As for paper ballots, the idea is good, but will it really work well in practice? The machines will have to be able to void individual paper ballots if the voter, looking through the viewplate, realizes he didn't vote the right way. All this paper handling adds a lot of mechanical complexity to the machine, making breakdowns more likely.
Here's the text of the bill calling for programmers to have background checks (p. 10):
''(i) The manufacturer shall conduct
background checks on individuals who are
programmers and developers before such
individuals work on any software used in
connection with the voting system.
''(ii) The manufacturer shall document the chain of custody for the handling
of software used in connection with voting
systems.
''(iii) The manufacturer shall ensure
that any software used in connection with
the voting system is not transferred over
the Internet.
I don't know how it works in Ohio, but here in Louisiana, our electronic voting machines print out the vote tally for each machine on-site (the voting machine itself has a thermal printer) before the memory cartridges are removed. The official results published weeks after the election are based on a review of those printouts, not the electronic tallies submitted on election night, so rigging the tallying computer would only screw things up for a few days before they got it all sorted out.
Like most government agencies, it is already expanding it's domain.
That's just not right. When the Department of Homeland Security was created, it didn't take on any new agents or anything. It was composed ENTIRELY of pre-existing government agencies such as the INS (Immigration & Naturalization Service), the Coast Guard, and yes, CUSTOMS. Policing against the importation of counterfeit goods and knock-offs has always been part of the responsibility of the Customs department. Moving it to DHS didn't fundamentally change any of its already existing jobs. So there is no "mission creep" as you allege.
So you're saying that anybody who wants to threaten somebody's life can simply say: "please, God, kill my enemy" instead of "I will kill my enemy", and it's suddenly not a threat? If somebody posted such a "prayer" about you on the internet, would you feel completely safe? What if it was by a person who always happened to "bump into" you everywhere you went?
This person was simply investigated. She wasn't arrested, thrown in jail, beaten, etc. Putting her on a no-fly list isn't going to happen, that's just a scary story put out by her attorney. The worst that will happen to her is she won't be able to ever go on the White House tour now.
The substance of the message is threatening, therefore it is a threat. The superficial grammar of it is immaterial.
Plus, it's just a disgusting, vicious, nasty message. Liberals are always ranting about conservatives being intolerant, but it is the liberals who seem to be very ready to wish other human beings dead.
It was the machine which tabulates the votes that crashed. The actual were still safely recorded, untouched, on the counter keys (basically removable memory units) from the voting machines themselves.
That's pretty racist and arrogant of you, to assume you know that Shi'ites (not "shite") in Iraq are going to vote for theocracy. In fact, Iraq has a pretty long history of fairly secular rule. Many Shi'ite leaders in Iraq, such as Ayat Allah Ali Al-Sistani, have called for a democratic, non-theocratic government, and have called for would-be theocrats such as Muqtada Al-Sadr to stop their violent attacks on Americans and their fellow Iraqis.
What we do is provide security and technical assistance while all sides work together to find a way form a government which will protect the rights of ALL Iraqis, Kurd, Shi'ite, and Sunni. It won't be easy, but it can certainly be done. To say otherwise is to say that there is no hope for pluralistic societies anywhere, that all countries must henceforth be homogenous along racial, religious, or nationalist lines. I'm not that pessimistic.
And while it is far from certain what will shake out for the Kurds, they are not unalterably opposed to being part of a federated Iraqi state, so long as they are treated as equals and given ample room to control their own affairs.
I'm glad you are able to read Saddam's mind. Did you know that Ambassador Glaspie says she did explicitly warn Saddam not to invade Kuwait? Or that the only transcripts of the meeting are based on information released by Saddam's government?
And if we were responsible for any help we gave him in the past, does that mean we should have continued to help him? Or does it mean that once we recognized our mistake, we had an obligation to the Iraqi people to help correct it?
I agree Saddam wanted to be a pan-Arab leader. Hitler wanted to be a pan-European leader. What evidence do you have that he wanted to "win the hearts" of Arabs worldwide? Was it when he insisted on staying in Kuwait even though every single Arab government in the Middle East told him to leave? Was it when his soldiers were looting Kuwait and raping their women? Maybe when he was gassing the Kurds or the Persians or draining the marshes and destroying the culture of the Marsh Arabs.
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No U.S. media outlet has reported this because we just don't care that much about Canadian politics. Also, perhaps the American media doesn't have sources as good as Captain's Quarters have, and they just don't have the story. I don't see any evidence which supports your hypothesis that American MSM is not running the story because of "ethics". And if they were, I would suggest that they were more trying to protect their business interests in Canada rather than to honor some "ethical" obligation.
And why do you suggest that it is somehow unethical for an American blogger to honor American ethics, rather than Canadian ethics, in running the story?
Yes, you can select an impartial jury even after widespread publicity. Most reasonable people are entirely able to set aside what they've heard before and form an opinion based on the facts presented to them in open court.
As for the temporary nature of the ban, in Canada the ruling party can call a general election any time they like. Suppose they were to call one for a few weeks from now, before the "month or two" you suggest has expired. They win reelection (for a term of up to another 5 years), and only after that does the full extent of their corruption come out. That's just one of the dangers of even temporary censorship.
One might instead ask what's more important... the right of a single individual to a fair trial or the right of the public to have timely information about corrupt behavior by their elected official?
These issues are not unknown here in the U.S., and we almost always have managed to find untainted juries, or juries of sensible people who can obey the law and leave any prior knowledge of the case at the courthouse door. In the final resort, the accused's right to a fair trial can be protected by dismissing the charges against him, as happened with Ollie North (whose immunized Congressional testimony was released to the public).
Candian rules for Canadians, American rules for Americans.
Canada is certainly not the only country in the world to curtail the freedom of speech purportedly in order to protect a defendant's right to a fair trial. And if Canadians want to have that rule, that's fine. But to try to impose such rules on American citizens for publishing something in America, that's just wrong. That's trying to impose Canadian laws on us. And to try to prohibit Canadians from simply linking to an American website is just stupid.
It's always easy to find some justification to "balance" competing rights in order to limit freedom of speech. But it is far too subject to abuse. Canadians also have a right to know what their government is doing, don't they? And if there has been corruption, Canadians should have a right to know that before an election, shouldn't they? How do you know the judge who issued the ban isn't sympathetic with the ruling party, trying to limit the public damage?
According to Captain's Quarters, there is some movement among the ruling party in Canada to call a snap election before all the facts can come out. The judicial ban on publishing the testimony would then prevent Canadians from casting informed votes.
Free speech is free speech. No ifs, ands, or buts, in my view.
Then this is really not a question of "phishing" as a new type of spyware, trojan horse, or virus. It's a different mode of attack, with different means already in place to protect them. If a computer intruder can get enough access to your system to monkey with the DNS cache or the HOSTS file, what's stopping them from using that very same access to install a keystroke logger or other spyware? Is there something magical about these new phishing e-mails which allow them to take over the DNS cache by means other than the means also used to install spyware?
That's not true. The simplest rule to avoid Phishers is easy and infallible. DON'T CLICK ON THE LINK IN THE E-MAIL! Just take an extra second and a half to open your browser and either type in the address or (if you just need to click) click on the "Favorites" or "Bookmark" entry for your bank, Paypal, or wherever.
If you do this, you will not be taken in by a phishing exploit, ever.
Fair enough, I was being deliberately inflamatory to make a point.
Actually, I agree completely with you that voting machines are easier to use and therefore better at recording some kind of valid vote from everybody who comes in. Certainly the butterfly ballot was nobody's fault but the designer's. Here in Louisiana, we've used mechanical voting machines for years and years with no problems. (No problems related specifically to the machines recording accurate vote tallies, that is -- plenty of electoral shenanigans otherwise.)
Phrased more neutrally (and more charitably), the larger point is that we have, as a society, decided that we should try to count every possible vote, whether the voter has done a good or a poor job of marking his intentions on the ballot. And that's another reason why the paper ballots used elsewhere won't work here any more.
Somebody please mod the AC parent up for calling attention to the serious practical problems of increased complexity. He knows that if this passes in this form, then a few years from now, some polling places in the poor part of town somewhere will not be able to fix the printer quickly, and then a bunch of the citizens in that poor part of town won't be able to vote, or will leave because the line is too long, and there will be a huge hue-and-cry about the election being stolen and these poor people being disenfranchised because of the technical glitches.
AC, don't forget that the law prohibits thermal paper, so you must also have enough INK on hand, and hope it doesn't clog up or run out.
But since the regulation isn't published anywhere, how could he know it existed, much less complain about it, until the government officials who had been told about it tried to enforce it on him?
Please actually read the article. I am a supporter, in general, of the Bush administration and former Attorney General Ashcroft, but I profoundly disagree with the government on this one.
If you read the article, or the other posts, you would see that the problem here is that the goverment (eventually) admitted that yes, there was a written security regulation on ID requirements, but then refused to show that regulation even in court. This is most definitely NOT about some smart-ass insisting that the security guard be able to cite chapter and verse of the law. This is deliberate government policy to refuse to reveal to the public or the courts regulations which it is enforcing.
It's not a matter of not being able to travel by plane without ID. I don't have a problem with law or federal regulation requiring airline passengers to show ID before boarding.
But I do have a problem with the government (and this was the government acting, through TSA) according to rules that it won't show you, that the public has never had an opportunity to comment on before being imposed. Those security directives are indeed "law" for all intents and purposes, at least to the people in the air terminals and airplanes. They are "law" because they absolutely control how government law enforcement personnel will deal with you and what those personnel will and will not allow you to do on their turf.
But unlike actual laws, these security directives were written in secret, and you find out what they are only by running afoul of them. And you, as a citizen in our democratic government, have no way to seek redress of your grievances from the government, because you can't point to some piece of paper saying what you can and cannot do; you are left with vague stories about what some guy at the airport, who may or may not have been a government oficial, told you.
Now, I am in favor of keeping most security procedures secret. I don't want to know the exact criteria by which passengers are selected for more intensive searches; that information could help terrorists figure out how to avoid extra scrutiny. But a rule like this affects all members of the travelling public immediately and directly, and (if it is in fact a rule) there is no reason not to publicize it, along with the citation to the authority by which the rule was promulgated by the TSA or the FAA.
I say "if it is in fact a rule" because the other problem with secret directives like this is that the public has no way of knowing whether it is really a rule or something just made up by some arrogant security guard. We are a government of laws, not men. The rules cannot be just whatever orders come out of the mouth of the policeman. But without knowing what the rules are, we don't know whether the policeman (TSA security guard) is really doing their job or just having a spot of fun or acting out an ego trip.
That's not nitpicky at all, actually. I'm embarassed I didn't catch it myself. If I were representing a voting machine manufacturer (I'm a lawyer), I would send out the lobbyists to fix this provision in committee, because I would have no way to advise my client how to comply with it.
Because of a previous job, I am very familiar with background checking requirements. All the ones I'm familiar with (here in the Great State of Louisiana) do in fact include restrictions which prohibit certain people from getting the job or the license for which the background check is performed. Indeed, the only purpose of those background checks is to determine whether the individual applicant meets the specific criteria set forth in those laws.
Not only does the bill not tell us what should be done with the background checks, it doesn't tell us what type of checks should be conducted. Would simply getting a credit report be sufficient? (Probably not, since it is illegal to use a negative credit report in a hiring decision.) Or would you need a background check as extensive as those done for security clearances? The bill doesn't say, which means no matter what decision the company made about them, somebody would sue or seek regulatory action against them.
What part of the Constitution? Try the Fifth and the Fourteenth Amendments, which say that no person shall "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" by the federal government or any state. With due process of law, conversely, those rights can be taken away - by execution, imprisonment, or denial of the right to vote.
Note to grandparent poster: A felon is not an "it". Most felons have some kind of humanity left in them, regardless of their crimes. Few are truly so psychopathic as to be considered monsters.
The public interest is for a hand-counted vote, observed by all the candidates and other independent members of the public, which in other countries is typically completed well within 24 hours of the polls closing.
That works just fine if you are only voting on one or two races at a time. But when you are voting simultaneously for city council, sheriff, county commissioner, school board, state representative, state senator, governor, U.S. Congressman, U.S. Senator, President, dog catcher, and God only knows how many referenda and initiatives, hand counts become much more logistically difficult.
Combine the multitude of races with the problems some Americans seem to have with punching holes in paper or coloring inside the lines of those little bubbles (and our willingness to coddle their problems by doing our utmost best to divine their real "intention"), and the problem as not nearly as easy as you make it sound.
We already have such caps. It's at $2,000 per federal candidate right now. Of course, Bill Gates can afford to give that amount to a lot of different candidates, unlike your average mid-west farmer, but there's little the law can (or should) do about that.
/.ers love to hate.
But of course Bill Gates has all that money because of his leadership of 2 very large groups of people, Microsoft employees and (much larger) Microsoft customers. Mid-west farmers also have a lot of political clout on issues because they band together and speak through the voices of those evil, pernicious lobbyists that
* (Note - the link to Bill Gates' campaign contributions also includes donations made by his father, who has the same name and is a retired attorney.)
Why would it need to void the paper ballot? As long as each person only puts one paper ballot into the ballot box, it doesn't matter if the ballot has been voided.
They don't work that way. The machine doesn't give the paper to the person at all. From the bill (p.6 l.20): the voting machine "(iii) shall not require the voter to handle the paper;"
Now, you could set up a system which works as you suggest, where the voteing machine only prints the ballot, with a separate counting machine to scan the printouts. But that's not what Senators Clinton and Kerry are proposing (nor any of the Republicans who have introduced almost identical bills in the past).
But even if the system worked as you described, it would be very dangerous to allow the voter an oppoortunity to print out multiple ballots. What's to stop the voter from pretending to make a mistake, print out a second ballot (and a 3rd and a 4th!), then slip them all in to the ballot box together? It would be very easy to do, almost impossible to stop.
Also, keep in mind that you can't use roll paper that scrolls by for the voter to review, because then all the votes would be in order, and anybody in the future could look at the roll and the list of who voted (which in most states shows the order they came in) to see how each voter voted.
"The Repbulican majority will never let this pass"? What are you smoking? Did no Democrats in Illinois (or my own home state of Louisiana for that matter) ever steal elections? Do no Democrats use dirty tricks in primary campaigns?
Instead of your clever little signature, why don't you use some facts to back up an outlandish statement like that?
As for paper ballots, the idea is good, but will it really work well in practice? The machines will have to be able to void individual paper ballots if the voter, looking through the viewplate, realizes he didn't vote the right way. All this paper handling adds a lot of mechanical complexity to the machine, making breakdowns more likely.
Here's the text of the bill calling for programmers to have background checks (p. 10):
I don't know how it works in Ohio, but here in Louisiana, our electronic voting machines print out the vote tally for each machine on-site (the voting machine itself has a thermal printer) before the memory cartridges are removed. The official results published weeks after the election are based on a review of those printouts, not the electronic tallies submitted on election night, so rigging the tallying computer would only screw things up for a few days before they got it all sorted out.
Like most government agencies, it is already expanding it's domain.
That's just not right. When the Department of Homeland Security was created, it didn't take on any new agents or anything. It was composed ENTIRELY of pre-existing government agencies such as the INS (Immigration & Naturalization Service), the Coast Guard, and yes, CUSTOMS. Policing against the importation of counterfeit goods and knock-offs has always been part of the responsibility of the Customs department. Moving it to DHS didn't fundamentally change any of its already existing jobs. So there is no "mission creep" as you allege.
So you're saying that anybody who wants to threaten somebody's life can simply say: "please, God, kill my enemy" instead of "I will kill my enemy", and it's suddenly not a threat? If somebody posted such a "prayer" about you on the internet, would you feel completely safe? What if it was by a person who always happened to "bump into" you everywhere you went?
This person was simply investigated. She wasn't arrested, thrown in jail, beaten, etc. Putting her on a no-fly list isn't going to happen, that's just a scary story put out by her attorney. The worst that will happen to her is she won't be able to ever go on the White House tour now.
The substance of the message is threatening, therefore it is a threat. The superficial grammar of it is immaterial.
Plus, it's just a disgusting, vicious, nasty message. Liberals are always ranting about conservatives being intolerant, but it is the liberals who seem to be very ready to wish other human beings dead.
It was the machine which tabulates the votes that crashed. The actual were still safely recorded, untouched, on the counter keys (basically removable memory units) from the voting machines themselves.
That's pretty racist and arrogant of you, to assume you know that Shi'ites (not "shite") in Iraq are going to vote for theocracy. In fact, Iraq has a pretty long history of fairly secular rule. Many Shi'ite leaders in Iraq, such as Ayat Allah Ali Al-Sistani, have called for a democratic, non-theocratic government, and have called for would-be theocrats such as Muqtada Al-Sadr to stop their violent attacks on Americans and their fellow Iraqis.
What we do is provide security and technical assistance while all sides work together to find a way form a government which will protect the rights of ALL Iraqis, Kurd, Shi'ite, and Sunni. It won't be easy, but it can certainly be done. To say otherwise is to say that there is no hope for pluralistic societies anywhere, that all countries must henceforth be homogenous along racial, religious, or nationalist lines. I'm not that pessimistic.
And while it is far from certain what will shake out for the Kurds, they are not unalterably opposed to being part of a federated Iraqi state, so long as they are treated as equals and given ample room to control their own affairs.
I'm glad you are able to read Saddam's mind. Did you know that Ambassador Glaspie says she did explicitly warn Saddam not to invade Kuwait? Or that the only transcripts of the meeting are based on information released by Saddam's government?
And if we were responsible for any help we gave him in the past, does that mean we should have continued to help him? Or does it mean that once we recognized our mistake, we had an obligation to the Iraqi people to help correct it?
I agree Saddam wanted to be a pan-Arab leader. Hitler wanted to be a pan-European leader. What evidence do you have that he wanted to "win the hearts" of Arabs worldwide? Was it when he insisted on staying in Kuwait even though every single Arab government in the Middle East told him to leave? Was it when his soldiers were looting Kuwait and raping their women? Maybe when he was gassing the Kurds or the Persians or draining the marshes and destroying the culture of the Marsh Arabs.
Do the Kuwaitis know that? Or the Kurds? Or the Shiites? Or the Marsh Arabs?
Is Saddam not a Hitler simply because he is not a European? Can you point to any real differences between the two?