Electronic voting — Trick or Treat

Visit uggabugga and try out the latest electronic voting ballot from Diebold.

Be sure to move your cursor as if to choose.

Best line of the day, so far

“I’m a sunny guy, so I don’t feel burdened at all,” Bush replied.

— President Bush on Good Morning America this morning responding to Charlie Gibson’s asking if he feels his job is burdensome.

I don’t get it

NewMexiKen understands why some people, especially Republicans, don’t care for John Kerry. I think they’re wrong, but I understand.

What I don’t understand is how any American could vote to give George Bush four more years to put American soldiers in harm’s way. Bush and his national security people lied about why we needed to go to war. They have incompetently managed the war. And now they are lying about their incompetence.

To me, this alone, rises above all other interests and issues. You simply cannot reward this behavior and say you support the troops.

Roswell is really in Texas anyway

On the north end of town, where the Anglos live, people lined up in large numbers Saturday at the Roswell Mall to take advantage of the early voting site there. But down on the south side, in the Hispanic neighborhood, the designated early voting venue was locked up tight — closed for the weekend.

From The Washington Post

Link via Ralph

A few people turned out …

in Philadelphia to see John Kerry and Bill Clinton.

Christopher Reeve

Christopher Reeve’s last work was a made-for-TV movie, The Brooke Ellison Story, to be shown tonight on A&E. Miss Ellison was hit by a car and left paralyzed from the neck down at the age of 11. Even so, she graduated from Harvard College in 2000. As reviewer Alessandra Stanley states,

The film…manages to be moving, not maudlin, truthful but still well told. It makes Mr. Reeves’s point better than all the mournful eulogies: with help, severely handicapped people can continue to live, love and work as well as or better than their more fortunate peers.

From the review, it sounds like better than most TV fare, and a tribute from (and to) Christopher Reeve.

Best line of the day, so far

“The president wants to determine what went wrong [with the missing explosives].

This reminds me of when I wanted to know why my Palm Pilot stopped working after I dropped it in the bath tub.”

— Josh Marshall, who goes on to say, “The thing happened more than a year ago, his administration has taken active steps to cover it up and now that the truth finally comes out, he ‘wants to determine what went wrong.’”

Yup!

While suturing a laceration on the hand of a 70-year-old Texas Rancher (whose hand had been caught in a gate while working cattle), a doctor and the old man were talking about George W. Bush being in the White House.

Then the old Texan said, “Well, ya know, G. W. Bush is a ‘post turtle.’”

Not knowing what the old man meant, the doctor asked him what a post turtle was.

The old man said, “When you’re driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that’s a post turtle.”

The old man saw a puzzled look on the doctor’s face, so he continued to explain.

“You know he didn’t get there by himself, he doesn’t belong there, he doesn’t know what to do while he’s up there, and you just want to help the poor, stupid bastard get down.”

What he said

Somehow, it’s gotten into the heads of various government gumshoes — and, worse, into the heads of some important journalism types — that popping a big story before the election is somehow “unfair,” and might “unduly influence” the outcome.

Hello?

— Charles Pierce at Altercation

Incompetent, dishonest and thieves

The top civilian contracting official for the Army Corps of Engineers, charging that the Army granted the Halliburton Company large contracts for work in Iraq and the Balkans without following rules designed to ensure competition and fair prices to the government, has called for a high-level investigation of what she described as threats to the “integrity of the federal contracting program.”

From The New York Times

Priorities

Or as the General puts it, “We didn’t have enough troops to guard both the oil ministry and the explosives bunker. One of them had to remain unguarded.”

Incompetent and dishonest

To review the essential facts, prior to the war, Iraq’s Al Qa Qaa bunker and weapons complex had roughly 350 tons of high explosives under IAEA seal. After the war, for whatever reason, the complex was either not guarded at all or inadequately guarded. And all those explosives (primarily RDX and HMX) were carted away.

What we’re talking about here isn’t just a bunch of dynamite. This encyclopedia entry says RDX “is considered the most powerful and brisant of the military high explosives.” And not 350 pounds, 350 tons.

It is apparently widely believed within the US government that those looted explosives are what in many, perhaps most, cases is being used in car bombs and suicide attacks against US troops. That is, according to TPM sources and sources quoted in this evening’s Nelson Report, where the story first broke.

One administration official told Nelson, “This is the stuff the bad guys have been using to kill our troops, so you can’t ignore the political implications of this, and you would be correct to suspect that politics, or the fear of politics, played a major role in delaying the release of this information.”

— As reported by Josh Marshall

How could any thinking person vote for these people?

History in peril?

From a review of Peter Charles Hoffer’s Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud — American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin in The Boston Globe:

American history,” he writes, “is two-faced” — split between celebratory popularizers who often value rousing narrative over scholarly rigor and academic specialists whose jargon-riddled, often dour monographs ignore the ordinary reader. Meanwhile, Hoffer accuses the American Historical Association (AHA), where he has served as an adviser on plagiarism and a member of its professional standards division, of abdicating its responsibility to enforce basic scholarly principles in both realms.

Hoffer revisits the now-familiar cases of a quartet of historians brought low by scandal in 2002: former Emory University professor Michael Bellesiles, who was accused of falsifying data in “Arming America,” his controversial 2000 study of 18th- and 19th-century gun culture; Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin, who were both found to have used material from other scholars without full attribution; and Mount Holyoke’s Joseph Ellis, who was rebuked for spinning tales of his nonexistent Vietnam combat record in classes and newspaper articles. According to Hoffer, these were not just isolated incidents but symptoms of a wider problem — one that goes far beyond the headlines to the very way history is written and consumed in America.

It’s an interesting review with comments from several prominent historians.