Bev Harris on Diebold’s central tabulators:

By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the U.S. has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks. This program is not ‘stupidity’ or sloppiness. It was designed and tested over a series of a dozen version adjustments.

Whether you vote absentee, on touch-screens, or on paper ballot (fill in the bubble) optical scan machines, all votes are ultimately brought to the ‘mother ship,’ the central tabulator at the county which adds them all up and creates the results report. These systems are used in over 30 states and each counts up to two million votes at once. The central tabulator is far more vulnerable than the touch screen terminals. Think about it: If you were going to tamper with an election, would you rather tamper with 4,500 individual voting machines, or with just one machine, the central tabulator which receives votes from all the machines? Of course, the central tabulator is the most desirable target.

GESO Chair Mary Reynolds questions the media buzz, in light of Yale Provost Susan Hockfield’s appointment to MIT’s Presidency, about her tenure at Yale:

Hockfield was often called on to be unflappable, as Yale dealt with a $30 million deficit and a union strike last year. Facing demands from frustrated graduate students, who unsuccessfully appealed to the university to recognize their union, Hockfield came through it without losing the students’ respect, said Pasko Rakic, the neuroscience professor who recruited her to Yale. “If you give them bad news, they hate you,” he said, “but she told them, and they didn’t hate her.”

One graduate student, however, disputed the idea that Hockfield handled the issue smoothly. Mary Reynolds, a doctoral student in American studies and a leader of the graduate student union, said that Hockfield stifled dialogue between union members and administrators by denying multiple union requests for meetings. “I found that she shut down discussion and refused to speak to students in the union,” Reynolds said. “She was not a consensus builder. The administration was opposed to the union, but that shouldn’t stop her from speaking to graduate students.” Reynolds also questioned Hockfield’s commitment to family concerns, citing a meeting between members of her department and Hockfield in 2001, in which the graduate school dean was unresponsive to requests from student assistants for help with affordable day care.

Former Texas House Speaker Ben Barnes describes helping Bush dodge the bullet:

I got a young man named George W. Bush in the National Guard when I was Lt. Gov. of Texas and I’m not necessarily proud of that. But I did it. And I got a lot of other people into the National Guard because I thought that was what people should do, when you’re in office you helped a lot of rich people. And I walked through the Vietnam Memorial the other day and I looked at the names of the people that died in Vietnam and I became more ashamed of myself than I have ever been because it was the worst thing that I did was that I helped a lot of wealthy supporters and a lot of people who had family names of importance get into the National Guard and I’m very sorry about that and I’m very ashamed and I apologize to you as voters of Texas.

Neil Sheehan on what the Swift Boat Vets have missed:

The nation has yet to come to grips with what really happened in Vietnam, and Mr. Kerry’s accusers are among those who simply cannot and never will. They are driven by more than a political desire to further the fortunes of George Bush. Their remarks make clear that what they really hold against Mr. Kerry are his antiwar activities after his return and his testimony then that atrocities were being committed in Vietnam. They regard these as undermining the war effort and casting aspersions on their service. “We won the battle,” one of Mr. Kerry’s accusers, former Navy commander Adrian Lonsdale, said. “Kerry went home and lost the war for us.” The group’s second television commercial focuses on this issue, running bits of old news film of Mr. Kerry’s testimony in a 1971 Senate hearing, excerpting his remarks to twist their meaning.

By 1968, civilian deaths, the great majority from air strikes and artillery, were estimated at about 40,000 a year and seriously wounded at 85,000. The wholesale killing cheapened the value of Vietnamese life in American eyes. It created an atmosphere that fostered the massacre at My Lai hamlet on March 16, 1968, when 347 Vietnamese old men, women, boys, girls and babies were butchered. That same morning another 90 unarmed Vietnamese were slaughtered at a nearby hamlet by a second army unit…Mr. Kerry undoubtedly said some intemperate things in 1971. That is the way of youth. But he also showed the moral courage to try to persuade his fellow citizens to halt actions that were disgracing their nation.

The Labor Department is taken to task for railroading workers challenging the policies which cost them their jobs:

Texas garment workers who allege they lost their jobs because their work was moved to Mexico should have their claims for trade adjustment assistance more thoroughly investigated by the Labor Department, the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled Aug. 20 (Former Employees of Sun Apparel v. Secretary of Labor, Ct. Intl. Trade, No. 04-106, 8/20/04). Criticizing the Labor Department’s failure to initially investigate the Sun Apparel workers’ claims, the trade court said DOL should reinvestigate the claims and expand its work beyond the incomplete evidence provided by Sun Apparel’s human resources director. The court explained that although workers filed claims in Spanish and sent them to DOL for consideration, the claims were not investigated. Rather, the department focused on a certification request made by the employer, and DOL never considered the allegations made by the workers. “Due to Labor’s disregard for its statutory duty, the displaced workers’ claims were ignored for over three months while the agency completed its investigation into Sun Apparel’s petition and issued its negative determination,” Judge Jane A. Restani wrote. “The entire investigation consisted of two communications with only one individual.”

Protesters and police prepare for a showdown:

The city has created a route, agreed to by the organizers, that involves a giant U-turn for the marchers, who will travel from Union Square to Madison Square Garden and back. The organizers have asked the participants to complete the route, even though the turn downtown will take them about a mile farther from Central Park. After the march is over, the protesters will eventually be able to make their way uptown to the park, the organizers say. City officials say that there is nothing to stop people who are abiding by the law from going there – once they have moved out of the parade route’s frozen zones, which will end around 32nd Street and Fifth Avenue.

…Tomorrow’s parade will also involve a long diversion from the ultimate – if unofficial – destination. Conor Clarke, a college student who tried to reach last year’s protest, said that the city again seemed to be making matters difficult by denying a permit for Central Park, which he saw as a sensible site for the protest. “I think the city is playing hardball, in sort of a nonrational way,” he said. Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said that the gates to the park would remain open. After marchers move south on Fifth Avenue and reach 32nd Street, they will be able to leave the route and walk to Madison Avenue, Mr. Browne said. They will not be allowed to walk on the roadways. “We are not going to permit another en masse march to the park – you can’t take over the streets without a permit,” he said. “If people are walking on the sidewalk and not otherwise breaking the law, they can walk in any direction they want.”

Actually, people take over the streets without permits all the time.

Contrarian bicyclists protest Bush and take arrests:

Thousands of cyclists rode through the streets of Manhattan last night in an anti-Republican, pro-environment display of bike power that ended in more than 100 arrests by the police after the ride blocked some streets.
Despite tension over police warnings to obey traffic laws against blocking traffic and running red lights, the cyclists – numbering 5,000, the police say – did just that in a meandering course that started at Union Square and wound its way to the West Side, Central Park, Midtown and the East Village.
As of 11 p.m., Paul J. Browne, a police spokesman, said that officers were still processing people who were detained, but that he expected more than 100 people to face charges, mainly for disorderly conduct. The arrests, two days before the convention starts, seemed to herald a busy period for the police, who must patrol a stream of demonstrations large and small, several each day. The police on Thursday made 22-convention related arrests, more than three times the number during the entire Democratic National Convention in Boston.

Well, this would be a first for him:

Bush: ‘I am not going to come in second’

Speaking of regimes which harbor terrorists:

A newly declassified document obtained by the National Security Archive shows that amidst vast human rights violations by Argentina’s security forces in June 1976, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told Argentine Foreign Minister Admiral Cesar Augusto Guzzetti: “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly. But you should get back quickly to normal procedures.” Kissinger’s comment is part of a 13-page Memorandum of Conversation reporting on a June 10 meeting between Secretary Kissinger and Argentine Admiral Guzzetti in Santiago, Chile. The document was obtained by the National Security Archive’s Southern Cone Documentation Project through a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of State filed in August 2002 and appealed in February 2004.

Kerry calls for stronger consumer protection:

With promises to curb credit card fees and protect home buyers and military families from unfair lending practices, Democratic candidate John Kerry is making a pitch aimed squarely at voters’ checkbooks. “By putting in place strong consumer protections that hold lenders accountable, we can put billions of dollars back into the pockets of middle-class families struggling to make ends meet, help families climb out of debt and build a better life for their children,” Kerry said in remarks prepared for delivery Friday in Daly City, Calif. Kerry’s proposals ask financial companies to disclose more information to customers, including requiring that credit card bills display the number of months it would take a customer to pay off the balance by making the minimum monthly payments. Other proposals would block credit card companies from changing the interest rates on purchases retroactively and require them to notify customers before raising their interest rates.

If we’re turning a corner, it must be in the wrong direction:

Some 1.3 million Americans slid into poverty in 2003 as the ranks of the poor rose 4 percent to 35.9 million, with children and blacks worse off than most, the U.S. government said on Thursday in a report sure to fuel Democratic criticism of President Bush. Despite the economic recovery, the percentage of the U.S. population living in poverty rose for the third straight year to 12.5 percent — the highest since 1998 — from 12.1 percent in 2002, the Census Bureau said in its annual poverty report. The widely cited scorecard on the nation’s economy showed one-third of those in poverty were children. The number of U.S. residents without health care coverage also rose by 1.4 million last year to 45 million, the highest level since 1999, and incomes were essentially stagnant, the Census Bureau said.