There is such a thing as a "Libertarian Hawk", who is into the entire end-the-drug-war, gay-marriage-is-fine, gun-control-sucks-period, free-market Libertarian school of thought but ALSO believes Osama Yo Mama is a threat and ditto Saddam (in the past tense now that the idjit is in jail) and believes that pounding on Osama's followers in Iraq is better than having to do so at NYC's Times Square or similar...
Here's the difference, and why you don't understand me:
You think of nations only in terms of their governments. I think of them as individuals first, nations second. You presume that every government on earth is "legitimate" *because* they're in power; my first assumption is that a government is PROBABLY there purely because they have the most guns - that is indeed the case with at least 1/3rd of the nations seated at the UN.
A guy like Pol Pot or Saddam or Kim Jung Illin' or whatever has no more "right" to govern than the Mafia has to run New York, Chicago, New Jersey or whatever, and for the exact same reason: they're not legitimate because their "leadership" isn't derived from the basic civil rights of the governed to control their destinies.
No government has the right to violate the civil rights of it's individual citizens to the degree Saddam, or Hitler, or Pol Pot or Imperial Japan did. Once officials or leaders of a government act in that fashion, it is perfectly legal and moral to kill them as a basic humanitarian act.
IF they're a threat to other nations too and if it's not possible to take them out without going through their supporting populace first, then so be it. Long term, the casualties for that population are significantly lower than leaving them under a murderous, expansionist tyrant.
Now at present, we've got too many of such maniacs to deal with all at once. We can only deal with those that become a threat beyond their own borders - and yes, Saddam did his damnest to appear to be such a threat.
One of them (in North Korea) has become so dangerous that we can't deal with them unless there is NO other choice. That's because Clinton let 'em score nukes. Which means they've probably got a long-term future as a large glowing parking lot, which will happen the *instant* they use such nukes. (And the bombs that flatten them will probably be of Chinese origin versus American.)
My next point:
Cowardice is a crime sometimes calling for the death penalty. It happens when a population supports deranged leadership without doing something about it, either because they're too scared of him/them or they outright support their policies. It's almost always a mixture. This was the case in both Japan and Germany some years back. The population of Japan is ultimately to blame for Hiroshima - the population of Germany brought Dresden on themselves, as surely as a mugger with a baseball bat is the cause of his being shot the first time he screws up the victim selection process.
(Next you're going to turn around and ask why I don't want to shoot Bush on the same basis. Bush is NOT a murderer and is no threat to nations or populations that aren't run by homicidal lunatics.)
"Take a look around, fella, there are plenty of people who want EXACTLY THAT."
Yeah, there's a small percentage of the GOP wired that way. I'll agree that Bush has some of those tendencies. But they do NOT dominate even the GOP.
A SCOTUS pick for confirmation who was wired hard fundie wouldn't make it. Ain't no way - it would take 100% of the GOP Senators to BE hard fundie and they're nowhere close to that. *Maybe* 20 out of 55, definately less than 30 of 55, and that leaves 45 Dems making up the difference.
Nope. We've got a good situation here: the Dems are still "in it" enough to keep anything really stupid on the GOP side from going down, while the better GOP ideas are going to go through like a marble through a toddler:).
Quoting:
"Hmm, I still don't understand. Kerry wouldn't have completely banned personal arms."
Supreme Court picks, mainly. Another issue is that there's a bill in play next year that will ban lawsuits against gunmakers on the basis of "the gun worked like it was designed, guns are evil so you're toast" even if we're talking about a stolen gun.
Entire industries have been sued out of existence by crap lawsuits - small aircraft makers for example, and motorcycle helmets almost. More than half the money you spend on a bike hat is to cover legal liability for the manufacturers.
The gunmaker suits are worse.
Say somebody steals a Chevy and uses it as a bank getaway vehicle. You think the bank can sue GM? 'Course not. Or some drunk runs somebody over in a Ford - Ford pays? Hell no. But that's the basic concept behind the gunmaker lawsuits. They've been losing in droves but the gun-grabbers have realized what a small industry the gun biz is, and think they can run the whole biz into the ground with enough suits.
That's gotta end. This last election ensured it will - that bill ending the BS is as good as signed.
-----------
There ain't gonna be any "merger" of "church and state". That's idiocy. And the main one "lying about Iraq" was a certain insane sack o' shit name of Saddam.
I support Kerry's position on both abortion and gay rights...well, on the latter, I'm fully in favor of gay marriage on the same basis as anybody else, which Kerry wasn't gutsy enough to say.
BUT Bush can't do much damage on those. Not long term. The courts are going to mandate gay marriage - they can't do anything else, not after first supporting equal protection in general and then legalized gay sex last year. Abortion? Roe v. Wade ain't going anywhere...maybe a few very late term procedures are at risk.
But the reality is, those issues are DONE. Stick a fork in 'em, walk away and talk about something else.
You can't see the inherent contradiction in your position on "helping the starving/oppressed in other nations".
Go talk to people who actually do try to "help the starving" in various 3rd-world hellholes. They'll tell you universally that they are ALWAYS in danger of being shot.
Why?
Because whereever there's a bunch of people starving, some son of a bitch backed by a lot of guns and goons WANTS THEM TO STARVE. And when you try and feed them, you become that asshole's enemy.
You are arguing for the right of dictatorial assholes to determine who lives and who dies in their own nation.
Me, I think it's a crime against humanity when a murdering dictator dies of natural causes.
I think the link between asshole dictators and starvation is so DEAD OBVIOUS, that somebody oughta put together an international humanitarian relief effort all right, one composed entirely of very, VERY skilled assassins.
That would do far more good than trying to sneak pitiful amounts of food and medicine to the victims of these thugs.
"Lots of people are suffering in this world. Get off your ass, move to
those countries and do something about it."
Ummm...yeah, agreed, that's exactly what Bush just did!
Sigh.
Ok, before you freak out, you're right about the "lots of people are
suffering" bit.
WHY ARE THEY SUFFERING, Jason?
Lemme give you a hint:
The biggest mass starvation in the 20th Century (that we can prove) was
in the Ukraine, 1920s/30s. Stalin deliberately starved small
farmers as a deliberate step towards centralized farm management.
At least 10 million people died, probably more like 15mil.
Understand, these were farmers starving ON THE RICHEST FARMLAND ON
EARTH, with no drought conditions. That ONLY happened by
deliberate policy.
The second biggest (possibly THE biggest, details are still sketchy)
happened in China, when Mao decided to "revolutionize" agriculture
without having a fucking clue and while taking time out between
10yr-old boys in bed.
Cambodia's famine and mass deaths happened as deliberate gov't
policy. Pol Pot to this day holds the world record for "greatest
percentage of his own people's population killed off by a dictator" at
1/3rd. The only part we're not sure of is "how many of those
people starved versus shot/stabbed/etc.?" Best guess: about 50/50
each.
Ethiopia - same thing. Sudan right NOW - same thing - starvation
as ethnic/religious "cleansing" by deliberate policy.
Your buddy Saddam was no different - he changed water flow patterns in
Southern Iraq to induce drought in Shi'ite areas. That's in
addition to the hundreds of thousands he directly killed in death
camps.
Are you even aware that the "Ba'ath Party" of Syria and Iraq has direct
Nazi ties? I don't mean retorical, I mean "trained in Berlin,
hung out with Adolf" ties - see also:
Upshot: if people are starving, it's ALWAYS because some government in
charge is so fucked up, shooting every last one of them would be a
humanitarian act.
There's so MANY of these, more than just Sudan and North Korea right
this minute, that we can't deal with them all. Saddam, on top of
all that, was a direct threat to his neigbors (ask a Kuwaiti) and did
an amazing job of pretending to have seriously bad medicine. We
NOW know it's because he'd lost his mind and towards the end spent all
his time writing romance novels of all things...
Quote:
"I'm tired of the moral line, it is bullshit. We supported that asshole
when it behoved us."
You're right. Flat out, no question, you're absolutely
correct. We knew he was one of the last surviving Nazi evil
dictators on the planet and we made a puppet out of him.
That was wrong and it's the sort of thing Dubya has pledged to end.
But for the record, Jimmy Carter was a BIG fan of the Shah of Iran just
before that whole thing blew up...ignoring the Shah's secret police,
murders and HIS Nazi ties.
Ever met somebody from Iran who insists they're "Persian", not
"Iranian"? Ever wonder why?
"Iran" was called that by one of the Royal Family circa 1930s to suck
up to, you guessed it, Adolf Hitler. "Iran" is the local
translation of the term "Aryan".
<puke>
Quote:
"Frankly if a Christian really believes what they believe they are
telling me that they can break bread with evil but because of their
beliefs they'll be still saved in the end. It's an awfully convenient
belief system. Saddam could convert and all the Christians agnst would
be for not because he would be saved. Bush is Christian but I bet he
can't accept that last half of that "Chrisitan" truth."
You're ranting. Look at what Bush is actually doing AND saying:
no more support for dictatorial assholes.
Quote:
"I don't give a fuck what Russia or France think, I care what I think."
Yeah, the rest of the world seems unconcerned about documented reports of prisons specifically for the children of anyone suspected of anti-Saddam tendencies.
Bugs the hell out of me, but hey, that's me.
Whatever. We'll know in two to four years if it's possible to export Democracy to the middle east. If it IS possible, it'll be a hell of a breakthrough.
It sounds impossible but Imperial Japanese culture was screwed up WAY worse and we set that right.
Again: do all human beings have civil rights, or only the ones in the USofA?
As to France and the like: their leadership was profiting off of the UN Food for Oil program. They didn't want the evidence of that (and Russia's illegal arms sales) turning up. So they dismiss us as "barbarians" to cover their own crimes.
As you've correctly pointed out, the core concepts here are screwed up.
I'm not going to be able to unscrew it anytime soon. Nobody is. The fight against Diebold et al is MUCH more "winnable" than that, short term or long.
Yes, money is being taken from ALL of society to pay for schooling. Including the parents, including others.
Saying that "since others are taken from too, society can dictate to the parents what school their kids go to" only compounds the problem. (And yes, it IS a forced limit in choice; without the ability to get a refund for a service they refuse to use, most parents can't abandon the "free" service because they can't afford to.)
It also adds other problems:
1) Monopolies are seldom a good idea!
2) Government workers are usually fans of a big-government approach to society in general. That colors the politics of the school system as a whole in a liberal, socialistic fashion that not all parents are pleased with. Some are at the point of revolt. Mind you, I have no problem with parents being able to send their kids to "Che Gueverra Memorial Grade School" if they WANT to but I have a real problem with that being the sole financially practical choice!!!
3) Public schools basically can't throw the worst kids out, because there's no alternatives for them outside of juvenile hall once they get too screwball. There is NO WAY any kid of mine will ever go to public school, period, end of discussion...not given what happened to me there. (Then again, so far my only "kids" have been furry and four legged but at 39 that could still possibly change...)
Look, you may see me as "hung up on guns" and maybe there's some truth
to that. But the gun issue is a direct measure of the personal
trust of the people by politicians.
I know somebody in Alaska who owns a gun shop, and recently ran into
the state governor in line behind him at a grocery store, no bodyguards
around:).
What's remarkable about this is that since mid-2003, it's been legal to
pack a gun in Alaska concealed or open carry with NO prior government
permission ("permit") needed. They're one of only two states with
laws this cool - Vermont's been that way since 1903.
And here's the governor who gladly signed that bill hangin' out buying
munchies without a care in the world. For good reason - he's
probably strapped himself and if somebody got stupid, there's a huge
number of people around able to help out:).
Anyways.
Yeah, I may be kinda "focused" here but it really is a good "pointer"
to all civil rights issues. And if you think a Gore
administration wouldn't have gone completely gonzo on the civil rights
front, the available evidence from the Clinton era says otherwise!
"Parents are already allowed to choose which school their kids go to -- they just need to pay for it themselves. I thought you said that you're a Libertarian."
Under the current system, money is taken from parents by force (theft) to pay for a school system. If they want to use a different school system they can do so, but their money is still stolen.
Under vouchers, the money stolen from them can at least be directed in the fashion the parents choose.
Not perfect, but a damn sight better than we're at now.
Quoting:
"If you don't like the public school system then advocate for getting rid of all school subsidy completely -- public or private."
You insist that I advocate something politically impossible (at least near term) in order to marginalize my effort?
I'm not impressed. I'm libertarian all right, but that doesn't translate to "idiot" despite your fond wishes.
If you're trying to say that Bush should be blocked from office because he's openly religious, well, you're pretty deep in the minority.
Bush was a party-boy druggie until he got religion. It works like that for some people. And when it does, they get pretty serious about it. It's hard to call him a fool when it had that sort of effect on him personally...
----------
You're actually treading on an area of very core Constitutional theory here.
The people that founded the US were trying to say that basic civil rights are not "supplied by" human government. They can be respected by them, they're all too often infringed by them, but per the Founder's theory rights "come from God".
I personally think that's wrong, but not in a very dangerous way and it was the best they could do back then.
All humans have similar standards for the concept of "justice". An alternate view of where that came from is that it's an outgrowth of what we are biologically as "pack animals".
Take wolves as an obvious example. Try to take their dead caribou or whatever away from them, and you'll rapidly learn their opinion of the concept of "property rights". But it's more than that: in order to stay together as a pack to improve their hunting ability, they have to have standards of "justice" inside the pack - if a momma wolf thought her pups were in danger from the other pack members, she'd have to leave ASAP and it would all come unglued.
This tendency can get VERY advanced even in "animals". Gray whales migrate up and down the Pacific coast in pods, but not all in one lump - "scouts" consisting of pairs of younger adults (usually but not always males) rove up to 20 miles ahead, behind and to the sides of the main pack, checking for hazards and reporting back to the pod leaders with information-dense sound bursts.
All of our nearest relatives are "pack animals", and the evidence is overwhelming for the same being true of our ancestors. And in those packs can be found the basis for our ideas regarding civil rights.
Whether this (our biology) or "God" is the "supplier" of civil rights, what matters is that they can't be lawfully taken away from us by human action.
And THAT is what "big government statists" like Kerry don't understand. To Kerry, if you repeal the 2nd Amendment, we have no right to arms. Repeal the 5th Amendment, people can be forced to testify against themselves.
That scares me one HELL of a lot more than Dubya praying too often.
The other offshoot of this concept is that under the "civil rights don't come from man" line is that ALL humans anywhere on the planet have the same civil rights. It may be infringed brutally by dictators; they may have lost the ability to defend those rights by their own carelessness, but they still have those civil rights.
To Kerry, civil rights are a "nuanced gray area" when it comes to other nations and cultures.
(Yeah, it's a funky domain name, wouldn't have been my pick, but the
data is accurate.)
Here, "red states" are those that ban "street self defense" with
concealed handguns, and yellow severely restricts the practice.
Blue states have permit programs that are fairly and widely applied -
pass a background check and training and you can pack heat. Green
is the most radically pro-self-defense, where there's no permit needed
to pack, concealed or open, your choice.
Check out just how many blue (pro-self-defense) states there are.
If I'm crazy, I got one hell of a lot of company.
Sigh. OK. What's the worst they could do on the "god issue"?
Seriously?
Prayer isn't going back into the schools. "Under God" might make it's way back into the pledge...big whoop.
The only "God issue" left that has any practical impact is whether or not the gov't can fund a charitable or educational activity that's run through a church.
In other words, should donations to the Salvation Army be tax-deductable, as long as they promise not to spend those funds on outright religion?
Why not?
The other side of the same coin is private schools and vouchers. Should parents be allowed to pick which school their kids go to, even if said school is run by nuns or whatever?
Why not, as long as it isn't mandatory? The current education monopoly is a very bad joke. Care to guess the main lesson I learned in "High School"?
"Never leave the house unarmed."
Let parents decide.
Do you really think we're going to regress back to a state religion or something? Sheesh.
We don't have to worry about God. Long term, she can take care of herself.
"So, in you example, would use of the hunting rifle in the apt be considered negligent by measure of the extreem danger to bystanders?"
Yes, except that I'm ignoring the existence of specialty "frangible" rifle ammo for exactly that situation. These are expensive and uncommon but if a hunting rifle is all you have, that sort of ammo that breaks up on the first thing hit does exist. Not common, it's expensive and has to be ordered special...
Think of the gun as a computer and the ammo as software, and you can "change applications" for the task at hand. We'll ignore that for the moment and assume the most common ammo for each gun.
Note: loads that will "tame" a 44Mag down into "reasonable street defense" range are NOT uncommon, they're in every decent gun shop - 44Special hollowpoints. By the same measure, 357Magnum guns can shoot the older, milder 38special ammo more suited to bystander-dense situations. In each case, the "magnum" version has a shell stretched longer so that the hotter magnum loads can't fit into older/weaker guns like my 38Spl - but the shorter ammo fits and works in the magnums just fine.
Quoting:
"By that measure your snubbie in a reasonably public urban area carries just as much hazard to bystanders, correct?"
Not at all. The snub 38 with the best possible loads will penetrate about 10" - 12" worth of flesh tops and usually less. The danger to bystanders is less than that of modern police handgun loads in 9mm/40S&W/45ACP.
A hunting rifle in, say,.308 or 30-06 will punch through well over 48" of flesh. That's why they can stop a charging Grizzly:). The difference in hard barrier penetration is similar - the snub's loads aren't going to penetrate most exterior building walls and will be rapidly slowed even by interior walls.
But back to the snubbie or other reasonable street-defense handgun: for defensive use, it's well understood that the shooter is 100% legally, morally and financially responsible for what those rounds do, and needs to understand the concept of "backstop" - "what's behind the target if I miss?".
If it's REALLY crowded, one trick is to drop as low as you can and fire upwards, so the round can't go horizontally towards bystanders if you miss.
Police agencies find the risks acceptable compared to the known danger of being unable to defend themselves against criminals. The situation is no different for anybody else - but most folks simply ignore the risk.
One factor that's helped control bystander risks is hollowpoint ammo, which has improved a lot in the last 10 years or so. You fire a round that starts out as 38cal and on target expands to.55" or more. That slows it down fast (and leaves the target in a world of hurt). Fewer rounds are needed to drop a bad guy, so the actual risk of killing versus wounding isn't all that much higher with hollowpoints and the reduced number of rounds which are more likely to stay in-target reduces bystander risks.
---------
All of this fails to take into account how often guns of any size successfully get used for defense without actually having to go "bang". The vast majority of all muggers, rapists, etc. run like hell if they realized they've done a poor job of victim selection. These "chase offs" are extremely common - I've personally done it twice on human assailants, once on dogs (with knives, California gun law being still screwed up). Haven't had to kill or even hurt anything with a weapon yet, thank God, and I hope I never have to:).
What's reasonable is directly connected to the potential threat to innocent bystanders, and the threat potential.
In other words, for urban apartment defense, using a potent hunting rifle is crazy, it'll go through dozens of interior walls if you miss. A shotgun with one of the lighter loads (#4 shot or whatever) or a non-magnum handgun makes sense.
In an urban "street defense" gun the 44Mag would be overkill but if that's all you have available, it'll eat 44Special ammo which is much milder and as appropriate for urban defense as typical police handgun ammo.
Conversely, head out on a fishing trip into bear country and the hottest 44Mags or hotter caliber you can get make perfect sense. If all you have is the one gun, it can change jobs by changing ammo power levels...one reason I like revolvers over semi-autos, you can do that.
All of this "scales up" just fine.
It's 300 years from now, you've got your own private asteroid floating out past Ceres and you're worried about space pirates or whatever? A nuke-powered home defense system measured in megatons makes perfect sense:). It'd be insane on planet earth of course...now or then.
---
Mag capacity is a different issue and is again connected to the threat. Got a job erasing gang tags in the "hood"? As many standard-capacity handgun mags as you can easily pack makes sense.
For the record, the biggest handgun I own is a 38Spl 5-shot snubbie (2" barrel) revolver, which I consider a very good basic defensive handgun.
I know enough about unconventional warfare to want NO part of that.
Christ, that's why I got involved in this whole Diebold/voting
situation: given 15+ years of corporate-hosed elections, it'll mean
civil war. Inevitably.
The good news is, we can win this electronic voting issue and we can
win the self defense issue too!
On guns: the first thing you need to know is that the courts are
completely screwed up on the issue. The most blatant example is
the most recent decision out of the Federal 9th Circuit in Silveira -
all you need to know about THAT fiasco is here:
We need Bush to put in pro-self-defense US Supreme Court justices -
several are about to croak and with lower-court decisions that bad, the
USSC can't dodge the issue forever.
With the courts untrustworthy, so far we've have to work within the
political process.
So we've been going to each state, getting a basic right to self
defense put into law:
This is a series of maps showing how we've been kicking butt state by
state getting at a minimum the right to pack a self defense handgun
with a background check and training ("blue states" in these maps) or
in two cases since 2003, with no prior gov't permission needed to pack.
Take the blue and green states, and compare with the Bush/Kerry
red/blue maps. You'll find that wherever self defense is widely
allowed, the state went Bush. Usually...most of the exceptions
were in the midwest.
(Note: there's a mistake on the gun-rights maps. Minnesota did
indeed pass a law supporting self defense (going "blue") but their
courts immedately put a temp stop to it pending a review of how it
passed. So at present it's a "yellow state", not blue.)
In these various states where self defense is common and legal,
gun-grabber Kerry didn't go over real well. None of these states
has had a problem with their millions of armed residents.
Newspaper reports from these states (often after it's been in a year or
so) often remark on the lack of "wild west syndrome" or "blood in the
streets", and then gun control simply stops being an issue.
Gun-grabber politicians in those states are in trouble. South
Dakota is one, and booted Daschle for his gun-grabber ways in the
Senate this year.
We now hold at least 35 such states by anybody's count, over 50% of the
US population, over 50% of the electoral college votes.
You know what that means?
We've won. OK? Long term, legal self defense will become
the norm in the US in the holdout states. The sooner the Dems get
a clue and quit trying to disarm those "evil rednecks" as they
misunderstand us, the better.
I will never, ever support a politician who doesn't trust me with my
civil right to self defense.
----------------
As to how smart Bush is? See how Texas flipped from Red to Blue
in the CCW maps in 1995?
That's because Bush took office on a pro-self-defense platform.
California Field Rep and state lobbyist for the Citizen's Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (yeah, I know, long org name - see also www.ccrkba.org).
I happen to believe there's such a thing as a personal civil right to self defense. So does Bush. Kerry doesn't.
*Dean* supports that civil right - he proved it as Vermont's governor same as Bush proved it as the governor in TX. And amazingly enough, so does John Edwards, or at least that's what he claimed back when he was trying for the Dem primaries - along with hunting and sporting, he listed "self defense" as a legitimate reason for gun ownership, the only Dem to do so outright.
I would have considered voting for either Dean or Edwards. But once Kerry got the nomination, the Bush bumper stickers went on my helmet, I volunteered at the Bush phone bank, etc.
Because Kerry is an absolute enemy of the entire concept of self defense, and has proven it going back 20+ years.
Yup. That's *exactly* what this is - check the machines, check the processes, if candidate info turns up we'll report but that's not our target.
Heh. If y'all think *I* would get involved in a last ditch "save Kerry!" operation, I recently posted a pic of an old motorcycle I just partially rebuilt. Note my helmet:
Just got off the phone with Bev. She confirms that the PRARs started getting mailed *before* we had any clue at all whether Bush or Kerry was winning. Like I said, this was planned months ago (I oughta know, I helped plan it) and it's NOT about "crying foul over specific results".
We're more interested in the machines.
Let's be clear what's going on with this effort:
An "audit", when done properly, means using multiple pieces of information and matching them up to make sure the pieces fit right - and if they don't, figure out why.
We have basically three sources of info on what really happened last night for any given county:
1) Media reports;
2) Eyewitness reports from various election observers;
3) The FOIA (or state-level equivelent) data.
As just one example: media reports say that a Volusia County memory card went blotto last night. Observers saw the flurry of activity that surrounded this. There are also supposed to be "help desk trouble tickets" generated for any such malfunction, and the runaround needed to recreate the data (this was an optical scan Diebold county thank GOD!) should leave an audit trail.
So we'll be looking at this case from ALL angles. Carefully. The media report says it was a dead memory card, based on interviews with county elections officials. OK, no problem if true - with optical scan, you can go back to paper and recover, by hand if necessary.
But remember that in 2000, we *know* somebody attempted an inept hack of one of these same memory cards (PCMCIA). They duplicated a card, probably in a laptop on the way back from the field to county HQ and hacked the duplicate so it registered 16,022 negative votes for Gore and 4,000ish for Bush, in a precinct with 900-something voters tops.
Sure, it got caught and fixed, and somebody let Gore know in time for him to cancel his concession phone call - but the perpetrators were never caught and the county still has egg on it's face from this.
Speaking as a board member for Blackboxvoting.org:
This is indeed going to be a hell of a lot of data, but our resources are considerable.
We were going to do this no matter WHO won. Because it's not just about the top of the ticket: more money gets tied up in local bond measures, construction projects and the like than in the "top of ticket campaigns" in many states. Check out how much money went into the California propositions, for starters.
It's also not just about the races themselves: folks, there are legal standards for the use of electronic voting machines at both the Fed and State levels. The garbage put out by Deibold for sure and probably ES&S, Sequoia and others DO NOT meet those legal standards!
But we have to prove it. For that, we need data.
We've gotten one KEY piece already: proof that King County hacked into their audit log and destroyed three hours worth of records on election night during the WA state primaries.
The fact that they COULD (on a Diebold box) proves that the gear doesn't meet legal security standards. The remaining question is "why did they hack the log?". Two possible answers:
1) It's possible the vote tally box went massively wonky, it took 'em three hours to clean up, and they didn't want to admit it had puked so they edited the log. Still an illegal-as-hell destruction of records and the fact that it's even possible is a gross condemnation of the gear in question...
2) They actually rigged the race with some crude clueless technique that left an audit trail item - so they scrubbed the log.
------
Speaking generally, this sort of "broad net" approach to FOIAs that BBV.org is undertaking is a pain, but it's how you scoop up killer documents that blow the lid off. Go watch the mostly factual movie "Erin Brokavich" for a real-world example of this.
We have a new advantage in California - Prop59 just "supercharged" our version of the FOIA (California Public Records Act) by establishing a constitutional right to public records. That will have a positive effect on the California requests.
--------
Speaking personally, I'm pretty sure Bush won it fair overall. If I'm eventually proven wrong, I don't think it'll be in Ohio, it'll be in Florida.
Full disclosure: I'm a Libertarian-leaning Republican who supported Bush over Kerry despite reservations. But I'm also a flat-out enemy of concealed-source, zero-paper-trail voting systems.
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I can't find it in me to cry over a murderous dictator going down. You do the crying for both of us, you seem to be good at it.
The crazy SOB did his best to look like a threat. Bit of a mistake, no?
There is such a thing as a "Libertarian Hawk", who is into the entire end-the-drug-war, gay-marriage-is-fine, gun-control-sucks-period, free-market Libertarian school of thought but ALSO believes Osama Yo Mama is a threat and ditto Saddam (in the past tense now that the idjit is in jail) and believes that pounding on Osama's followers in Iraq is better than having to do so at NYC's Times Square or similar...
If you don't believe me:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fightforliberty/
The Republican Liberty Caucus (RLC) of which I'm a member follows a very similar line.
OK.
Here's the difference, and why you don't understand me:
You think of nations only in terms of their governments. I think of them as individuals first, nations second. You presume that every government on earth is "legitimate" *because* they're in power; my first assumption is that a government is PROBABLY there purely because they have the most guns - that is indeed the case with at least 1/3rd of the nations seated at the UN.
A guy like Pol Pot or Saddam or Kim Jung Illin' or whatever has no more "right" to govern than the Mafia has to run New York, Chicago, New Jersey or whatever, and for the exact same reason: they're not legitimate because their "leadership" isn't derived from the basic civil rights of the governed to control their destinies.
No government has the right to violate the civil rights of it's individual citizens to the degree Saddam, or Hitler, or Pol Pot or Imperial Japan did. Once officials or leaders of a government act in that fashion, it is perfectly legal and moral to kill them as a basic humanitarian act.
IF they're a threat to other nations too and if it's not possible to take them out without going through their supporting populace first, then so be it. Long term, the casualties for that population are significantly lower than leaving them under a murderous, expansionist tyrant.
Now at present, we've got too many of such maniacs to deal with all at once. We can only deal with those that become a threat beyond their own borders - and yes, Saddam did his damnest to appear to be such a threat.
One of them (in North Korea) has become so dangerous that we can't deal with them unless there is NO other choice. That's because Clinton let 'em score nukes. Which means they've probably got a long-term future as a large glowing parking lot, which will happen the *instant* they use such nukes. (And the bombs that flatten them will probably be of Chinese origin versus American.)
My next point:
Cowardice is a crime sometimes calling for the death penalty. It happens when a population supports deranged leadership without doing something about it, either because they're too scared of him/them or they outright support their policies. It's almost always a mixture. This was the case in both Japan and Germany some years back. The population of Japan is ultimately to blame for Hiroshima - the population of Germany brought Dresden on themselves, as surely as a mugger with a baseball bat is the cause of his being shot the first time he screws up the victim selection process.
(Next you're going to turn around and ask why I don't want to shoot Bush on the same basis. Bush is NOT a murderer and is no threat to nations or populations that aren't run by homicidal lunatics.)
Jim
Arlen is in trouble mainly because he pissed all over Dubya's PR in public, not because of his actual stance.
He could have quietly gone about his business and been head of that committee despite his pro-choice views - because they weren't the problem.
It was his loud mouth that has his butt in a sling.
Quoting:
:).
"Take a look around, fella, there are plenty of people who want EXACTLY THAT."
Yeah, there's a small percentage of the GOP wired that way. I'll agree that Bush has some of those tendencies. But they do NOT dominate even the GOP.
A SCOTUS pick for confirmation who was wired hard fundie wouldn't make it. Ain't no way - it would take 100% of the GOP Senators to BE hard fundie and they're nowhere close to that. *Maybe* 20 out of 55, definately less than 30 of 55, and that leaves 45 Dems making up the difference.
Nope. We've got a good situation here: the Dems are still "in it" enough to keep anything really stupid on the GOP side from going down, while the better GOP ideas are going to go through like a marble through a toddler
Quoting: "Hmm, I still don't understand. Kerry wouldn't have completely banned personal arms." Supreme Court picks, mainly. Another issue is that there's a bill in play next year that will ban lawsuits against gunmakers on the basis of "the gun worked like it was designed, guns are evil so you're toast" even if we're talking about a stolen gun. Entire industries have been sued out of existence by crap lawsuits - small aircraft makers for example, and motorcycle helmets almost. More than half the money you spend on a bike hat is to cover legal liability for the manufacturers. The gunmaker suits are worse. Say somebody steals a Chevy and uses it as a bank getaway vehicle. You think the bank can sue GM? 'Course not. Or some drunk runs somebody over in a Ford - Ford pays? Hell no. But that's the basic concept behind the gunmaker lawsuits. They've been losing in droves but the gun-grabbers have realized what a small industry the gun biz is, and think they can run the whole biz into the ground with enough suits. That's gotta end. This last election ensured it will - that bill ending the BS is as good as signed. ----------- There ain't gonna be any "merger" of "church and state". That's idiocy. And the main one "lying about Iraq" was a certain insane sack o' shit name of Saddam.
I support Kerry's position on both abortion and gay rights...well, on the latter, I'm fully in favor of gay marriage on the same basis as anybody else, which Kerry wasn't gutsy enough to say.
BUT Bush can't do much damage on those. Not long term. The courts are going to mandate gay marriage - they can't do anything else, not after first supporting equal protection in general and then legalized gay sex last year. Abortion? Roe v. Wade ain't going anywhere...maybe a few very late term procedures are at risk.
But the reality is, those issues are DONE. Stick a fork in 'em, walk away and talk about something else.
Guns are still up in the air.
You can't see the inherent contradiction in your position on "helping the starving/oppressed in other nations".
Go talk to people who actually do try to "help the starving" in various 3rd-world hellholes. They'll tell you universally that they are ALWAYS in danger of being shot.
Why?
Because whereever there's a bunch of people starving, some son of a bitch backed by a lot of guns and goons WANTS THEM TO STARVE. And when you try and feed them, you become that asshole's enemy.
You are arguing for the right of dictatorial assholes to determine who lives and who dies in their own nation.
Me, I think it's a crime against humanity when a murdering dictator dies of natural causes.
I think the link between asshole dictators and starvation is so DEAD OBVIOUS, that somebody oughta put together an international humanitarian relief effort all right, one composed entirely of very, VERY skilled assassins.
That would do far more good than trying to sneak pitiful amounts of food and medicine to the victims of these thugs.
Jim
Quoting:
"Lots of people are suffering in this world. Get off your ass, move to those countries and do something about it."
Ummm...yeah, agreed, that's exactly what Bush just did!
Sigh.
Ok, before you freak out, you're right about the "lots of people are suffering" bit.
WHY ARE THEY SUFFERING, Jason?
Lemme give you a hint:
The biggest mass starvation in the 20th Century (that we can prove) was in the Ukraine, 1920s/30s. Stalin deliberately starved small farmers as a deliberate step towards centralized farm management. At least 10 million people died, probably more like 15mil. Understand, these were farmers starving ON THE RICHEST FARMLAND ON EARTH, with no drought conditions. That ONLY happened by deliberate policy.
The second biggest (possibly THE biggest, details are still sketchy) happened in China, when Mao decided to "revolutionize" agriculture without having a fucking clue and while taking time out between 10yr-old boys in bed.
Cambodia's famine and mass deaths happened as deliberate gov't policy. Pol Pot to this day holds the world record for "greatest percentage of his own people's population killed off by a dictator" at 1/3rd. The only part we're not sure of is "how many of those people starved versus shot/stabbed/etc.?" Best guess: about 50/50 each.
Ethiopia - same thing. Sudan right NOW - same thing - starvation as ethnic/religious "cleansing" by deliberate policy.
Your buddy Saddam was no different - he changed water flow patterns in Southern Iraq to induce drought in Shi'ite areas. That's in addition to the hundreds of thousands he directly killed in death camps.
Are you even aware that the "Ba'ath Party" of Syria and Iraq has direct Nazi ties? I don't mean retorical, I mean "trained in Berlin, hung out with Adolf" ties - see also:
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Ba'ath%2 0Party
Upshot: if people are starving, it's ALWAYS because some government in charge is so fucked up, shooting every last one of them would be a humanitarian act.
There's so MANY of these, more than just Sudan and North Korea right this minute, that we can't deal with them all. Saddam, on top of all that, was a direct threat to his neigbors (ask a Kuwaiti) and did an amazing job of pretending to have seriously bad medicine. We NOW know it's because he'd lost his mind and towards the end spent all his time writing romance novels of all things...
Quote:
"I'm tired of the moral line, it is bullshit. We supported that asshole when it behoved us."
You're right. Flat out, no question, you're absolutely correct. We knew he was one of the last surviving Nazi evil dictators on the planet and we made a puppet out of him.
That was wrong and it's the sort of thing Dubya has pledged to end.
But for the record, Jimmy Carter was a BIG fan of the Shah of Iran just before that whole thing blew up...ignoring the Shah's secret police, murders and HIS Nazi ties.
Ever met somebody from Iran who insists they're "Persian", not "Iranian"? Ever wonder why?
"Iran" was called that by one of the Royal Family circa 1930s to suck up to, you guessed it, Adolf Hitler. "Iran" is the local translation of the term "Aryan".
<puke>
Quote:
"Frankly if a Christian really believes what they believe they are telling me that they can break bread with evil but because of their beliefs they'll be still saved in the end. It's an awfully convenient belief system. Saddam could convert and all the Christians agnst would be for not because he would be saved. Bush is Christian but I bet he can't accept that last half of that "Chrisitan" truth."
You're ranting. Look at what Bush is actually doing AND saying: no more support for dictatorial assholes.
Quote:
"I don't give a fuck what Russia or France think, I care what I think."
Good for you.
Quoting:
"We've stretched our mil
Yeah, the rest of the world seems unconcerned about documented reports of prisons specifically for the children of anyone suspected of anti-Saddam tendencies.
Bugs the hell out of me, but hey, that's me.
Whatever. We'll know in two to four years if it's possible to export Democracy to the middle east. If it IS possible, it'll be a hell of a breakthrough.
It sounds impossible but Imperial Japanese culture was screwed up WAY worse and we set that right.
Again: do all human beings have civil rights, or only the ones in the USofA?
As to France and the like: their leadership was profiting off of the UN Food for Oil program. They didn't want the evidence of that (and Russia's illegal arms sales) turning up. So they dismiss us as "barbarians" to cover their own crimes.
Pathetic.
Jim
As you've correctly pointed out, the core concepts here are screwed up.
I'm not going to be able to unscrew it anytime soon. Nobody is. The fight against Diebold et al is MUCH more "winnable" than that, short term or long.
Yes, money is being taken from ALL of society to pay for schooling. Including the parents, including others.
Saying that "since others are taken from too, society can dictate to the parents what school their kids go to" only compounds the problem. (And yes, it IS a forced limit in choice; without the ability to get a refund for a service they refuse to use, most parents can't abandon the "free" service because they can't afford to.)
It also adds other problems:
1) Monopolies are seldom a good idea!
2) Government workers are usually fans of a big-government approach to society in general. That colors the politics of the school system as a whole in a liberal, socialistic fashion that not all parents are pleased with. Some are at the point of revolt. Mind you, I have no problem with parents being able to send their kids to "Che Gueverra Memorial Grade School" if they WANT to but I have a real problem with that being the sole financially practical choice!!!
3) Public schools basically can't throw the worst kids out, because there's no alternatives for them outside of juvenile hall once they get too screwball. There is NO WAY any kid of mine will ever go to public school, period, end of discussion...not given what happened to me there. (Then again, so far my only "kids" have been furry and four legged but at 39 that could still possibly change...)
Jim
And you think Kerry would have been any better on basic civil rights?
3 11203&tid=158&tid=93&tid=103&tid=2 19
:).
:).
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/26/2
Look, you may see me as "hung up on guns" and maybe there's some truth to that. But the gun issue is a direct measure of the personal trust of the people by politicians.
I know somebody in Alaska who owns a gun shop, and recently ran into the state governor in line behind him at a grocery store, no bodyguards around
What's remarkable about this is that since mid-2003, it's been legal to pack a gun in Alaska concealed or open carry with NO prior government permission ("permit") needed. They're one of only two states with laws this cool - Vermont's been that way since 1903.
And here's the governor who gladly signed that bill hangin' out buying munchies without a care in the world. For good reason - he's probably strapped himself and if somebody got stupid, there's a huge number of people around able to help out
Anyways.
Yeah, I may be kinda "focused" here but it really is a good "pointer" to all civil rights issues. And if you think a Gore administration wouldn't have gone completely gonzo on the civil rights front, the available evidence from the Clinton era says otherwise!
Jim
Quoting:
"Parents are already allowed to choose which school their kids go to -- they just need to pay for it themselves. I thought you said that you're a Libertarian."
Under the current system, money is taken from parents by force (theft) to pay for a school system. If they want to use a different school system they can do so, but their money is still stolen.
Under vouchers, the money stolen from them can at least be directed in the fashion the parents choose.
Not perfect, but a damn sight better than we're at now.
Quoting:
"If you don't like the public school system then advocate for getting rid of all school subsidy completely -- public or private."
You insist that I advocate something politically impossible (at least near term) in order to marginalize my effort?
I'm not impressed. I'm libertarian all right, but that doesn't translate to "idiot" despite your fond wishes.
Jim
Bush supports a basic civil right that is widely popular, although you'd never know that in the more Liberal zones or from the urban-dominated media.
Yes, that's pretty damn smart.
Jim
If you're trying to say that Bush should be blocked from office because he's openly religious, well, you're pretty deep in the minority.
Bush was a party-boy druggie until he got religion. It works like that for some people. And when it does, they get pretty serious about it. It's hard to call him a fool when it had that sort of effect on him personally...
----------
You're actually treading on an area of very core Constitutional theory here.
The people that founded the US were trying to say that basic civil rights are not "supplied by" human government. They can be respected by them, they're all too often infringed by them, but per the Founder's theory rights "come from God".
I personally think that's wrong, but not in a very dangerous way and it was the best they could do back then.
All humans have similar standards for the concept of "justice". An alternate view of where that came from is that it's an outgrowth of what we are biologically as "pack animals".
Take wolves as an obvious example. Try to take their dead caribou or whatever away from them, and you'll rapidly learn their opinion of the concept of "property rights". But it's more than that: in order to stay together as a pack to improve their hunting ability, they have to have standards of "justice" inside the pack - if a momma wolf thought her pups were in danger from the other pack members, she'd have to leave ASAP and it would all come unglued.
This tendency can get VERY advanced even in "animals". Gray whales migrate up and down the Pacific coast in pods, but not all in one lump - "scouts" consisting of pairs of younger adults (usually but not always males) rove up to 20 miles ahead, behind and to the sides of the main pack, checking for hazards and reporting back to the pod leaders with information-dense sound bursts.
All of our nearest relatives are "pack animals", and the evidence is overwhelming for the same being true of our ancestors. And in those packs can be found the basis for our ideas regarding civil rights.
Whether this (our biology) or "God" is the "supplier" of civil rights, what matters is that they can't be lawfully taken away from us by human action.
And THAT is what "big government statists" like Kerry don't understand. To Kerry, if you repeal the 2nd Amendment, we have no right to arms. Repeal the 5th Amendment, people can be forced to testify against themselves.
That scares me one HELL of a lot more than Dubya praying too often.
The other offshoot of this concept is that under the "civil rights don't come from man" line is that ALL humans anywhere on the planet have the same civil rights. It may be infringed brutally by dictators; they may have lost the ability to defend those rights by their own carelessness, but they still have those civil rights.
To Kerry, civil rights are a "nuanced gray area" when it comes to other nations and cultures.
Yet another reason I voted Bush.
Jim
Thank you for summing up one of the major differences between "blue state" and "red state" world views.
So you think allowing people to defend themselves is nuts?
Take a look at these maps:
http://www.gun-nuttery.com/rtc.php
(Yeah, it's a funky domain name, wouldn't have been my pick, but the data is accurate.)
Here, "red states" are those that ban "street self defense" with concealed handguns, and yellow severely restricts the practice.
Blue states have permit programs that are fairly and widely applied - pass a background check and training and you can pack heat. Green is the most radically pro-self-defense, where there's no permit needed to pack, concealed or open, your choice.
Check out just how many blue (pro-self-defense) states there are. If I'm crazy, I got one hell of a lot of company.
Jim
Oh for...
Sigh. OK. What's the worst they could do on the "god issue"?
Seriously?
Prayer isn't going back into the schools. "Under God" might make it's way back into the pledge...big whoop.
The only "God issue" left that has any practical impact is whether or not the gov't can fund a charitable or educational activity that's run through a church.
In other words, should donations to the Salvation Army be tax-deductable, as long as they promise not to spend those funds on outright religion?
Why not?
The other side of the same coin is private schools and vouchers. Should parents be allowed to pick which school their kids go to, even if said school is run by nuns or whatever?
Why not, as long as it isn't mandatory? The current education monopoly is a very bad joke. Care to guess the main lesson I learned in "High School"?
"Never leave the house unarmed."
Let parents decide.
Do you really think we're going to regress back to a state religion or something? Sheesh.
We don't have to worry about God. Long term, she can take care of herself.
Jim
Quoting:
.308 or 30-06 will punch through well over 48" of flesh. That's why they can stop a charging Grizzly :). The difference in hard barrier penetration is similar - the snub's loads aren't going to penetrate most exterior building walls and will be rapidly slowed even by interior walls.
.55" or more. That slows it down fast (and leaves the target in a world of hurt). Fewer rounds are needed to drop a bad guy, so the actual risk of killing versus wounding isn't all that much higher with hollowpoints and the reduced number of rounds which are more likely to stay in-target reduces bystander risks.
:).
"So, in you example, would use of the hunting rifle in the apt be considered negligent by measure of the extreem danger to bystanders?"
Yes, except that I'm ignoring the existence of specialty "frangible" rifle ammo for exactly that situation. These are expensive and uncommon but if a hunting rifle is all you have, that sort of ammo that breaks up on the first thing hit does exist. Not common, it's expensive and has to be ordered special...
Think of the gun as a computer and the ammo as software, and you can "change applications" for the task at hand. We'll ignore that for the moment and assume the most common ammo for each gun.
Note: loads that will "tame" a 44Mag down into "reasonable street defense" range are NOT uncommon, they're in every decent gun shop - 44Special hollowpoints. By the same measure, 357Magnum guns can shoot the older, milder 38special ammo more suited to bystander-dense situations. In each case, the "magnum" version has a shell stretched longer so that the hotter magnum loads can't fit into older/weaker guns like my 38Spl - but the shorter ammo fits and works in the magnums just fine.
Quoting:
"By that measure your snubbie in a reasonably public urban area carries just as much hazard to bystanders, correct?"
Not at all. The snub 38 with the best possible loads will penetrate about 10" - 12" worth of flesh tops and usually less. The danger to bystanders is less than that of modern police handgun loads in 9mm/40S&W/45ACP.
A hunting rifle in, say,
But back to the snubbie or other reasonable street-defense handgun: for defensive use, it's well understood that the shooter is 100% legally, morally and financially responsible for what those rounds do, and needs to understand the concept of "backstop" - "what's behind the target if I miss?".
If it's REALLY crowded, one trick is to drop as low as you can and fire upwards, so the round can't go horizontally towards bystanders if you miss.
Police agencies find the risks acceptable compared to the known danger of being unable to defend themselves against criminals. The situation is no different for anybody else - but most folks simply ignore the risk.
One factor that's helped control bystander risks is hollowpoint ammo, which has improved a lot in the last 10 years or so. You fire a round that starts out as 38cal and on target expands to
---------
All of this fails to take into account how often guns of any size successfully get used for defense without actually having to go "bang". The vast majority of all muggers, rapists, etc. run like hell if they realized they've done a poor job of victim selection. These "chase offs" are extremely common - I've personally done it twice on human assailants, once on dogs (with knives, California gun law being still screwed up). Haven't had to kill or even hurt anything with a weapon yet, thank God, and I hope I never have to
Jim
What's reasonable is directly connected to the potential threat to innocent bystanders, and the threat potential.
:). It'd be insane on planet earth of course...now or then.
In other words, for urban apartment defense, using a potent hunting rifle is crazy, it'll go through dozens of interior walls if you miss. A shotgun with one of the lighter loads (#4 shot or whatever) or a non-magnum handgun makes sense.
In an urban "street defense" gun the 44Mag would be overkill but if that's all you have available, it'll eat 44Special ammo which is much milder and as appropriate for urban defense as typical police handgun ammo.
Conversely, head out on a fishing trip into bear country and the hottest 44Mags or hotter caliber you can get make perfect sense. If all you have is the one gun, it can change jobs by changing ammo power levels...one reason I like revolvers over semi-autos, you can do that.
All of this "scales up" just fine.
It's 300 years from now, you've got your own private asteroid floating out past Ceres and you're worried about space pirates or whatever? A nuke-powered home defense system measured in megatons makes perfect sense
---
Mag capacity is a different issue and is again connected to the threat. Got a job erasing gang tags in the "hood"? As many standard-capacity handgun mags as you can easily pack makes sense.
For the record, the biggest handgun I own is a 38Spl 5-shot snubbie (2" barrel) revolver, which I consider a very good basic defensive handgun.
Jim
Jason, I don't *want* to have to shoot it out.
I know enough about unconventional warfare to want NO part of that.
Christ, that's why I got involved in this whole Diebold/voting situation: given 15+ years of corporate-hosed elections, it'll mean civil war. Inevitably.
The good news is, we can win this electronic voting issue and we can win the self defense issue too!
On guns: the first thing you need to know is that the courts are completely screwed up on the issue. The most blatant example is the most recent decision out of the Federal 9th Circuit in Silveira - all you need to know about THAT fiasco is here:
http://www.americanminutemen.org/reinhardt.htm
We need Bush to put in pro-self-defense US Supreme Court justices - several are about to croak and with lower-court decisions that bad, the USSC can't dodge the issue forever.
With the courts untrustworthy, so far we've have to work within the political process.
So we've been going to each state, getting a basic right to self defense put into law:
http://www.gun-nuttery.com/rtc.php
This is a series of maps showing how we've been kicking butt state by state getting at a minimum the right to pack a self defense handgun with a background check and training ("blue states" in these maps) or in two cases since 2003, with no prior gov't permission needed to pack.
Take the blue and green states, and compare with the Bush/Kerry red/blue maps. You'll find that wherever self defense is widely allowed, the state went Bush. Usually...most of the exceptions were in the midwest.
(Note: there's a mistake on the gun-rights maps. Minnesota did indeed pass a law supporting self defense (going "blue") but their courts immedately put a temp stop to it pending a review of how it passed. So at present it's a "yellow state", not blue.)
In these various states where self defense is common and legal, gun-grabber Kerry didn't go over real well. None of these states has had a problem with their millions of armed residents. Newspaper reports from these states (often after it's been in a year or so) often remark on the lack of "wild west syndrome" or "blood in the streets", and then gun control simply stops being an issue.
http://www.equalccw.com/ccweffects.html
Gun-grabber politicians in those states are in trouble. South Dakota is one, and booted Daschle for his gun-grabber ways in the Senate this year.
We now hold at least 35 such states by anybody's count, over 50% of the US population, over 50% of the electoral college votes.
You know what that means?
We've won. OK? Long term, legal self defense will become the norm in the US in the holdout states. The sooner the Dems get a clue and quit trying to disarm those "evil rednecks" as they misunderstand us, the better.
I will never, ever support a politician who doesn't trust me with my civil right to self defense.
----------------
As to how smart Bush is? See how Texas flipped from Red to Blue in the CCW maps in 1995?
That's because Bush took office on a pro-self-defense platform.
He's a damned sight smarter than Kerry.
Jim
see title... :)
You forget what else I am:
California Field Rep and state lobbyist for the Citizen's Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (yeah, I know, long org name - see also www.ccrkba.org).
I happen to believe there's such a thing as a personal civil right to self defense. So does Bush. Kerry doesn't.
*Dean* supports that civil right - he proved it as Vermont's governor same as Bush proved it as the governor in TX. And amazingly enough, so does John Edwards, or at least that's what he claimed back when he was trying for the Dem primaries - along with hunting and sporting, he listed "self defense" as a legitimate reason for gun ownership, the only Dem to do so outright.
I would have considered voting for either Dean or Edwards. But once Kerry got the nomination, the Bush bumper stickers went on my helmet, I volunteered at the Bush phone bank, etc.
Because Kerry is an absolute enemy of the entire concept of self defense, and has proven it going back 20+ years.
Jim
Yup. That's *exactly* what this is - check the machines, check the processes, if candidate info turns up we'll report but that's not our target.
:)
Heh. If y'all think *I* would get involved in a last ditch "save Kerry!" operation, I recently posted a pic of an old motorcycle I just partially rebuilt. Note my helmet:
http://www.equalccw.com/bikeone.jpg
Just got off the phone with Bev. She confirms that the PRARs started getting mailed *before* we had any clue at all whether Bush or Kerry was winning. Like I said, this was planned months ago (I oughta know, I helped plan it) and it's NOT about "crying foul over specific results".
We're more interested in the machines.
Let's be clear what's going on with this effort:
An "audit", when done properly, means using multiple pieces of information and matching them up to make sure the pieces fit right - and if they don't, figure out why.
We have basically three sources of info on what really happened last night for any given county:
1) Media reports;
2) Eyewitness reports from various election observers;
3) The FOIA (or state-level equivelent) data.
As just one example: media reports say that a Volusia County memory card went blotto last night. Observers saw the flurry of activity that surrounded this. There are also supposed to be "help desk trouble tickets" generated for any such malfunction, and the runaround needed to recreate the data (this was an optical scan Diebold county thank GOD!) should leave an audit trail.
So we'll be looking at this case from ALL angles. Carefully. The media report says it was a dead memory card, based on interviews with county elections officials. OK, no problem if true - with optical scan, you can go back to paper and recover, by hand if necessary.
But remember that in 2000, we *know* somebody attempted an inept hack of one of these same memory cards (PCMCIA). They duplicated a card, probably in a laptop on the way back from the field to county HQ and hacked the duplicate so it registered 16,022 negative votes for Gore and 4,000ish for Bush, in a precinct with 900-something voters tops.
Sure, it got caught and fixed, and somebody let Gore know in time for him to cancel his concession phone call - but the perpetrators were never caught and the county still has egg on it's face from this.
Did the same morons try something similar?
Dunno. But we'll find out. Bet on it.
Jim
Speaking as a board member for Blackboxvoting.org:
This is indeed going to be a hell of a lot of data, but our resources are considerable.
We were going to do this no matter WHO won. Because it's not just about the top of the ticket: more money gets tied up in local bond measures, construction projects and the like than in the "top of ticket campaigns" in many states. Check out how much money went into the California propositions, for starters.
It's also not just about the races themselves: folks, there are legal standards for the use of electronic voting machines at both the Fed and State levels. The garbage put out by Deibold for sure and probably ES&S, Sequoia and others DO NOT meet those legal standards!
But we have to prove it. For that, we need data.
We've gotten one KEY piece already: proof that King County hacked into their audit log and destroyed three hours worth of records on election night during the WA state primaries.
The fact that they COULD (on a Diebold box) proves that the gear doesn't meet legal security standards. The remaining question is "why did they hack the log?". Two possible answers:
1) It's possible the vote tally box went massively wonky, it took 'em three hours to clean up, and they didn't want to admit it had puked so they edited the log. Still an illegal-as-hell destruction of records and the fact that it's even possible is a gross condemnation of the gear in question...
2) They actually rigged the race with some crude clueless technique that left an audit trail item - so they scrubbed the log.
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Speaking generally, this sort of "broad net" approach to FOIAs that BBV.org is undertaking is a pain, but it's how you scoop up killer documents that blow the lid off. Go watch the mostly factual movie "Erin Brokavich" for a real-world example of this.
We have a new advantage in California - Prop59 just "supercharged" our version of the FOIA (California Public Records Act) by establishing a constitutional right to public records. That will have a positive effect on the California requests.
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Speaking personally, I'm pretty sure Bush won it fair overall. If I'm eventually proven wrong, I don't think it'll be in Ohio, it'll be in Florida.
Full disclosure: I'm a Libertarian-leaning Republican who supported Bush over Kerry despite reservations. But I'm also a flat-out enemy of concealed-source, zero-paper-trail voting systems.
Jim March