astridv | (no subject)

On Making Light: Make Way for Sockpuppets

"WASHINGTON, Nov. 2 — The Pentagon is reorganizing its public affairs operation in an attempt to influence news coverage, amid internal frustration at the tone and substance of reporting on Iraq and on Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

The expanded office, which was first described by department officials in an informal press briefing on Monday, features a “rapid response unit” to react to news reports. It is also stepping up efforts to arrange appearances by department officials on talk radio and cable television, and to recruit “surrogates” who are not on the department’s payroll to defend its policies."

"Officials involved say the new effort, which was conceived by Assistant Secretary of Defense Dorrance Smith, is not primarily a response to negative coverage but rather is aimed at more aggressively challenging articles and broadcasts deemed inaccurate and at making better use of podcasts, blogs and other new outlets."
(quoted from a NY Times article ML links to, which I can't access.)

Propaganda by sockpuppet... that should go down well.

Also via Making Light: Hacking Democracy, a documentary on the vulnerability of electronic voting systems and their threat for democracy, is now showing on HBO. Should be interesting in a thoroughly depressing way.

I can't begin to describe how disconcerting I find the thought of roughly 80% of US votes collected via these machines. Particularly since Wally O'Dell, the CEO of Diebold [eta: at the time], is on the record as being "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Should we show the Diebold documentary?

Yes: 25%
No: 21%
Republican: 54%

That was from one of the post from the discussion in Slashdot (http://politics.slashdot.org/politics/06/11/02/2252227.shtml), about the same documentary over The Diebold machines. I found it funny in a morbid way

So Diebold wanted HBO to cancel the program? Just why am I not surprised.

Not that I'm undisturbed by the easy with which an unscrupulous person can hack the machines, but O'Dell is no longer the CEO of Diebold.

Ah, okay, thanks for the heads-up. I'd wondered about that but couldn't find this info. I'll edit it in, for the sake of accuracy.

Not that it changes anything about this disturbing situation...

For all the real problems, and the conspiracy-mongering from the left, it was the *Democrats* in the US who pushed the stampede to all-electronic voting because of the idiots in Florida in 2000 who were too stupid to read a paper form carefully, or be sure they fully punched the hole in the paper.

So don't get caught up in some of the hysterical conpsiracies. It was the idiots in the Congress, with Democrats leading the charge who created the possible mess.

Which sometimes I almost wonder if it isn't the fallback plan -- introduce enough screwups and throw everything into court where the lawyers instead of the people have their way.

On another factual note, about 2000, something you probably don't know, was that the Supreme Court actually made TWO decisions. The one that gets all the play was the one that stopped the endless recounts, which was a close decision. What gets deliberately and conveniently overlooked by the "we were robbed" people was that SCOTUS' *first* decision found that what the Democrats were trying to do, namely change the standarsd for counting votes to a looser one after the fact ONLY in the counties where they knew they had a majority, was total BS. And that decision was with a large majority.

If you wonder where I am politically, I say libertarian-conservative, or what is sometimes called a "classical" liberal (ie 19th Century variety).

You're right, I didn't know this though I certainly remember the Florida debacle. I'll have to take your word for it.

But at this point it doesn't matter who came up with the idea in the first place. It has been shown by now that they're not impervious to tampering, and considering that the voting process is pretty much the basis of a working democracy, they can't be entrusted with this crucial task.

If you wonder where I am politically, I say libertarian-conservative, or what is sometimes called a "classical" liberal (ie 19th Century variety).

I vote green/moderate left over here. When it comes to US politics I didn't use to bite my nails over whether the democrats or the republicans won, since to the foreign observer their politics didn't seem to differ that much. But at this moment I'm fervently hoping for a change in government, because the current administration have proven to be completely untrustworthy and are right now trying to undermine the constitution step by step. There's too much power collected on one side, it's out of balance.

(Going off on a tangent, I think that this de-facto two-party electoral system is in need of reform so votes that go to a third party aren't automatically lost. The same goes for that system of counting votes by state that disadvantages metropolitan areas which are traditionally more democrat. Yes, I realize the republicans didn't bring forth that injustice, they're just profiting from it. It can't be, though, that it's possible that the party with the highest number of absolute votes might not win because too many of their voters live in the same states. And yet no reform in sight.)

"Der Spiegel" (a highly renowned political magazine) is already reporting first problems with the machines. Link (http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,447050,00.html), unfortunately just in German, sorry.

short excerpt:

Wie ein AFP-Korrespondent aus einem mehrheitlich von Schwarzen bewohnten Viertel in East Cleveland im Bundesstaat Ohio berichtete, funktionierte dort zunächst keines der elf Geräte in einer als Wahllokal genutzten Grundschule. Erst nach zwei Stunden war die Panne behoben. Bis ein Rechtsanwalt der Beobachtergruppe "Election Protection" (Wahlschutz) auftauchte, weigerten sich die Wahlhelfer, den Wählern Papier-Stimmzettel auszuhändigen. "Weil die Maschinen streikten, haben sie die Wähler weggeschickt, obwohl sie dazu kein Recht hatten", kritisierte der Anwalt Fred Livingstone.

transl: An AFP correspondant is reporting from a mainly black area of East Cleveland in the state of Ohio that at first none of the eleven machines in the polling station set up in a primary school worked. It took two hours to fix the problem. Until a lawyer with the group "Election Protection" showed up, the advance men (?) refused to hand the voters paper ballots. "Because the machines were on strike, they sent away the voters, even though they didn't have the right to do it," criticized lawyer Fred Livingstone.

Completely unsurprising. They list a couple more cock-ups in addition to that one. I'm pretty sure that won't be all we hear. I don't trust these things further than I could throw them.

I'm not gonna watch the news tonight, I'll read it tomorrow. Last time was too nerve-wrecking.