My Solution to Hanging Chads and Electronic Voting Machines

Ya, how hard is this? With nit-wit Secretary of States who won't count votes for Democrats in black precincts and ES&S and Diebold voting machine manufacturers being run by Republicans and donating money to Republican candidates and voting machines not including Democratic candidates full names, why is it so hard to figure out a sure fire way to vote? If punch cards don't work and voting machines can be hacked or programmed to accept or not accept certain votes, what’s wrong with providing a list of candidates in the voting booths and providing voters with a piece of paper to simply print their choices? I guess it could become a problem if the Democratic nominee for President was named McKain and the Republican candidate was named McCain but other than that, why would this be so hard? Hell, you don't even have to write the name in, you could have the option of just writing Republican or Democrat if you didn't know the candidates by name.

Why spend the money on these voting machines when you could simply supply voters with a single sheet of official paper with a blank space after each political office in contention? You could keep a record of how many voters entered the polling site and compare that to the amount of ballots cast to make sure no one voted twice. Could someone point out how this would be less reliable than the options currently on the table?

The Googles are too Liberal

I'm finding all kinds of good stuff:


He should also look up the term "diminishing returns". That is when you create terrorists faster than you can kill them.

The Internets

No Bush, they are on The Googles.

Chain Letters in Perspective

The following is a chain letter I received in my email box today. I wanted to post it word for word as it was sent to me and have included my responses to the authors points in red.

A HISTORY LESSON

This is a must read which shows how important the world situation today is to America's future. (And why you should vote Democrat in November)

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THIS IS HISTORY THAT HAS BEEN LEFT OUT OF OUR TEXTBOOKS. (As with most events that happened where people who experienced them are still alive today and could possibly dispute them.) MOST OF YOU ARE NOT OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER THAT NEARLY EVERY FAMILY IN AMERICA WAS GROSSLY AFFECTED BY WWII. MOST OF YOU DON'T REMEMBER THE RATIONING OF MEAT, SHOES, GASOLINE, AND SUGAR. NO TIRES FOR OUR AUTOMOBILES, AND A SPEED LIMIT OF 35 MILES AN HOUR ON THE ROAD. NOT TO MENTION, NO NEW AUTOMOBILES. READ THIS AND THINK ABOUT HOW WE WOULD REACT TO BEING TAKEN OVER BY FOREIGNERS IN 2006. (When were we ever taken over by foreigners?)

This is an EXCELLENT essay (you say tomato...) - well thought out and presented.
Historical Significance (Huh?)

Raymond S. Kraft is a writer living in Northern California.

Sixty-three years ago, Nazi Germany had overrun almost all of Europe and hammered England to the verge of bankruptcy and defeat, and had sunk more than four hundred British ships in their convoys between England and America for food and war materials.

At that time the US was in an isolationist, pacifist mood, and most Americans wanted nothing to do with the European or the Asian war. (Commie, anti-American, tree hugging pussies)

Then along came Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and in outrage Congress unanimously declared war on Japan, and the following day on Germany, which had not yet attacked us. (But was sinking our ships, attacking our allies and was allied with the country that just attacked us.) It was a dicey thing. We had few allies. (Well, we'll get to that.)

France was not an ally, (Yet another attempt to persuade you to buy Freedom Fries.) as the Vichy government of France quickly aligned itself with its German occupiers. Germany was certainly not an ally, (Really? Thanks for that tidbit.) as Hitler was intent on setting up a Thousand Year Reich in Europe. (He would have probably settled for a single lifetime) Japan was not an ally, (What gave that away?) as it was well on its way to owning and controlling all of Asia. Together, Japan and Germany had long-range plans of invading Canada and Mexico, as launching pads to get into the United States over our northern and southern borders, after they finished gaining control of Asia and Europe. (Umm Ok) America's only allies then were England, Ireland, Scotland, Canada, Australia, and Russia. That was about it. (He forgot to mention China, New Zealand, South Africa, Mexico, Nepal, Tonga and virtually all of the Caribbean and most of Central and South America along with the exile governments of the Free French Forces, Yugoslavia and Greece among others. But otherwise, yes, we were alone.) All of Europe, from Norway to Italy, except Russia in the East, was already under the Nazi heel. (Except for Spain, Switzerland, Portugal and Sweden)

America was certainly not prepared for war. (Apparently we didn't learn our lesson.) America had drastically downgraded most of its military forces after W.W.I and throughout the depression, so that at the outbreak of WW2, army units were training with broomsticks because they didn't have guns, and cars with "tank" painted on the doors because they didn't have real tanks. (Like our troops in Iraq today?) And a huge chunk of our navy had just been sunk or damaged at Pearl Harbor.

Britain had already gone bankrupt, saved only by the donation of $600 million in gold bullion in the Bank of England, that was actually the property of Belgium, given by Belgium to England to carry on the war when Belgium was overrun by Hitler (a little known fact). (Wow, you should work for the History Channel.) Actually, Belgium surrendered on one day, because it was unable to oppose the German invasion, and the Germans bombed Brussels into rubble the next day just to prove they could. (You mean like Panama, Lebanon, Vietnam and Iraq?) Britain had already been holding out for two years in the face of staggering slipping losses and the near-decimation of its air force in the Battle of Britain, and was saved from being overrun by Germany only because Hitler made the mistake of thinking the Brits were a relatively minor threat that could be dealt with later, and first turning his attention to Russia, at a time when England was on the verge of collapse, in the late summer of 1940.

Ironically, Russia saved America's butt by putting up a desperate fight for two years, until the US got geared up to begin hammering away at Germany. (Yahoo America!)

Russia lost something like 24 million people (Something like? Give or take a few million, what's the difference they're all commies.) in the sieges of Stalingrad and Moscow alone... 90% of them from cold and starvation, mostly civilians, but also more than a MILLION soldiers.

Had Russia surrendered, Hitler would have been able to focus his entire war effort against the Brits, then America. And the Nazis could possibly have won the war.

All of this is to illustrate that turning points in history are often dicey things. And now, we find ourselves at another one of those key moments in history.

There is a very dangerous minority in Islam (Wow, he actually refrains from calling all Muslims crazy terrorists.) that either has, or wants and may soon have, the ability to deliver small nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, almost anywhere in the world.

The Jihadis, the militant Muslims, are basically Nazis in Kaffiyahs (Well, they do both hate Jews) -- they believe that Islam, a radically conservative form of Wahhabi Islam, should own and control the Middle East first, then Europe, then the world. ("Onward Christian soldiers marching as to war"-That's my favorite Christian church hymn.) And that all who do not bow to their will of thinking should be killed, enslaved, or subjugated. (Or maybe they just don't want to their world to be ruled but Multinational corporations or Jewish and Christian based theology or be killed, enslaved, subjugated or ruled by outside forces.) as They want to finish the Holocaust, destroy Israel, and purge the world of Jews. (Or at least purge Palestine of Jews.) This is their mantra.

There is also a civil war raging in the Middle East -- for the most part not a hot war, but a war of ideas. Islam is having its Inquisition and its Reformation, but it is not known yet which will win -- the Inquisitors, or the Reformationists. (Or you could say the corrupt colonial puppet regimes set up by western governments vs. the people or just say that there are a bunch of crazies trying to hijack Islam to the dismay of ordinary Muslims.)

If the Inquisition wins, then the Wahhabis, the Jihadis, will control the Middle East, the OPEC oil, and the US, European, and Asian economies. The techno-industrial economies will be at the mercy of OPEC -- not an OPEC dominated by the educated, rational Saudis of today, (He is speaking of the ones who allow madrasas where terrorists are bred and conduct public beheadings of women who allowed themselves to be raped by a man. Ya, real rational.) but an OPEC dominated by the Jihadis. You want gas in your car? (No I want corn or hydrogen in my car.) You want heating oil next winter? (Ever hear of solar power and electricity?) You want the dollar to be worth anything? (Sure, let's keep the economy going by inventing new sources of energy and keep our jobs here in the US and become independent from foreign sources of labor and energy.) You better hope the Jihad, the Muslim Inquisition, loses, and the Islamic Reformation (AKA Puppet Regimes who sell us oil and play ball with Exxon and refuses to share their countries oil wealth with its citizens) wins.

If the Reformation movement wins, that is, the moderate Muslims who believe that Islam can respect and tolerate other religions, (Unlike a lot of Christians) and live in peace with the rest of the world, and move out of the 10th century into the 21st, (Then maybe Bush and his neo-cons will do the same) then the troubles in the Middle East will eventually fade away, and a moderate and prosperous Middle East will emerge.

We have to help the Reformation win, and to do that we have to fight the Inquisition, i.e., the Wahhabi movement, the Jihad, Al Qaeda and the Islamic terrorist movements. We have to do it somewhere. And we can't do it everywhere at once. We have created a focal point for the battle at a time and place of our choosing........in Iraq. (Actually Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahir are in Afghanistan and Al-Zarqawi was virtually a nobody outside Jordan before the US invaded Iraq and gave him a cause where he actually later adopted the name Al-Qaeda of Iraq once he started fighting us but was never really affiliated with that terrorist network which attacked us. Also, the US administration thought this would be and was over within a few months and never anticipated the steady stream of insurgents and terrorists who were created by our invasion. Fighting terrorists in Iraq was never the reason for going there. Saddam being a bad guy who was sitting on top of a fake pile of WMDs and a real pile of oil wealth was the reason. Bush said Saddam had WMD's, not that he was going to draw Al-Qaeda to Iraq so we didn't have to fight them in Vermont or where ever. We knew where they were, they were in Afghanistan, not Iraq. Ok, I knew, I'm not going to give this administration that much credit.)

Not in New York, not in London, or Paris or Berlin, but in Iraq, where we are doing two important things. (You mean besides giving Exxon, Chevron and Halliburton the most profitable year to date?)

(1) We deposed Saddam Hussein. Whether Saddam Hussein was directly involved in 9/11 or not, (Contrary to what the average Fox News subscriber thinks, he wasn't) it is undisputed that Saddam has been actively supporting the terrorist movement for decades. Saddam is a terrorist. (No, he was not technically a terrorist nor did he engage in any terrorists activities directed at the United States. Sure he supported terrorism only in the sense that he gave financial donations to the families of Palestinians whose children killed themselves in suicide bombings. Since when do we have to fight Israel's wars and solve their terrorism problem? They are not solving ours.)

Saddam is, or was, a weapon of mass detruction, (I think he means destruction) who is responsible for the deaths of probably more than a million Iraqis and two million Iranians. (Along with the other people who were weapons of mass destruction such as the Shah of Iran, Pinochet of Chile, Stalin in Russia, Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia in Guatemala all of whom we either supported or did nothing about.)

(2) We created a battle, a confrontation, a flash point, with Islamic terrorism in Iraq. (You mean a flash point for Islamic terrorists) We have focused the battle. We are killing bad people (along with plenty of innocent ones) and the ones we get there (were created by us invading Iraq in the first place) we won't have to get here. We also have a good shot (not) at creating a democratic, peaceful (trust) Iraq, which will be a catalyst for democratic change in the rest of the Middle East, and an outpost for a stabilizing American military presence in the Middle East for as long as it is needed. (That is precisely the last thing they want or need.)

World War II, the war with the German and Japanese Nazis, really began with a "whimper" in 1928. It did not begin with Pearl Harbor. It began with the Japanese invasion of China. It was a war for fourteen years before America joined it. It officially ended in 1945 -- a 17 year war -- and was followed by another decade of US occupation in Germany and Japan to get those countries reconstructed and running on their own again ... a 27 year war. (That is why Bush should have known that "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq would take more than a week. Oh wait; he was coked out of his head when they went over that part in history class.)

World War II cost the United States an amount equal to approximately a full year's GDP -- adjusted for inflation, equal to about $12 trillion dollars. W.W.II cost America more than 400,000 killed in action, and nearly 100,000 still missing in action. ( I think it's safe to say they are dead by now.)

The Iraq war has, so far, cost the US about $160 billion (annually), which is roughly what 9/11 cost New York. It has also cost about 2,200 (Later in this essay he actually says it's 200 less, both of which are wrong.) American lives, which is roughly 2/3 of the 3,000 lives that the Jihad snuffed on 9/11. But the cost of not fighting and winning W.W.II would have been unimaginably greater -- a world dominated by German and Japanese Nazism. (Actually, the Japanese weren't Nazis.)

60 minute TV shows, and 2 hour movies in which everything comes out okay. (Incomplete sentence)

The real world is not like that. It is messy, uncertain, and sometimes bloody and ugly. Always has been, and probably always will be. (So why did we have to stop Saddam from being uncertain, messy and bloody if that's just the way of the real world?)

The bottom line is that we will have to deal with Islamic (and non-Islamic) terrorism until we defeat it, whenever that is. It will not go away if we ignore it. (But if we leave them alone and quit funding Israel what reason would they have to fight?)

If the US can create a reasonably democratic and stable Iraq, (which we wont) then we have an "England" in the Middle East, a platform, from which we can work to help modernize and moderate the Middle East (Maybe they don't want to be moderated, maybe, just as you don't want them spreading their theology here, they don't want us spreading ours over there). The history of the world is the clash between the forces of relative civility and civilization, and the barbarians clamoring at the gates.(Maybe those barbarians just decided they didn't want to be Romanized or converted and decided to resist the attempt to colonize their lands forcing them to take the fight to Roman soil. It was their right to not be civilized by the Romans. The story of the conquered is written by the conquerors.) The Iraq war is merely another battle in this ancient and never-ending war. (Good, I'm glad you are starting to realize that the war in Iraq is a never-ending war. Thanks W. Bush) And now, for the first time ever, the barbarians are about to get nuclear weapons. (Are we talking about Korea or Iraq or Iran?) Unless somebody prevents them.

We have four options:

1. We can defeat the Jihad now, before it gets nuclear weapons.

2. We can fight the Jihad later, after it gets nuclear weapons (which may be as early as next year, if Iran's progress on nuclear weapons is what Iran claims it is).(Actually, Iran is still approximately 10 years away from being capable of producing a nuclear missile.)

3. We can surrender to the Jihad and accept its dominance in the Middle East, now, (Well, Islam is dominant over the Middle East but the Jihadists are a very small portion of Islam.) in Europe in the next few years or decades, and ultimately in America.

4. Or, we can stand down now, and pick up the fight later when the Jihad is more widespread and better armed, perhaps after the Jihad has dominated France and Germany (one neighborhood in Munich) and maybe most of the rest of Europe. (Ya, I just heard the Vatican was going to convert to Islam tomorrow.) It will, of course, be more dangerous, more expensive, and much bloodier.

If you oppose this war, I hope you like the idea that your children, or grandchildren, may live in an Islamic America under the Mullahs and the Sharia, an America that resembles Iran today. (Hmm, and that's somehow worse than living under a country dominated by right wing Christian dogma where women are second class citizens not allowed to choose what to do with their own body and Christian prayer and the Christian God (In God We Trust, One Nation Under God) is forced upon the entire country and they are now gaining control of the media and airwaves censoring what we see, hear and read? Sound familiar?)

The history of the world is the history of civilizational (Is that really a word?) clashes, cultural clashes. All wars are about ideas, ideas about what society and civilization should be like, and the most determined always win. (And everyone always thinks their ways are right. At least 50% of the time they are wrong.)

Those who are willing to be the most ruthless always win. The pacifists always lose, because the anti-pacifists kill them. (Look at what MLK and Gandhi were able to accomplish with non-violence compared to what the Palestinians have accomplished with violence. Who had more success?)

Remember, perspective is every thing, and America's schools teach too little history for perspective to be clear, especially in the young American mind. (Agreed, they teach too little history like how the US once armed Saddam and has had it's hands in world affairs and been controlling the fate of most of the worlds inhabitants since the end of WWII and some people are a bit tired of it.)

The Cold war lasted from about 1947 at least until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Forty-two years. Europe spent the first half of the 19th century fighting Napoleon, and from 1870 to 1945 fighting Germany. (Actually France and Napoleon III started the fighting against the Germans in the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 and that war only lasted a year. That being said, what's your point?)

World War II began in 1928, (Well, the whole world wasn't involved in 1928 so therefore "World War" II couldn't and wasn't called a world war until much later when it was clear most of the globe had been in a state of war all at the same time.) lasted 17 years, plus a ten year occupation, and the US still has troops in Germany and Japan. (And a thousand other places which have nothing to do with the Second World War.) World War II resulted in the death of more than 50 million people, maybe more than 100 million people, depending on which estimates you accept. (I'll take Fox News' estimates!)

The US has taken more than 2,000 ( Earlier you said 2,200 but its 2,736 to be exact.) killed in action in Iraq. The US took more than 4,000 killed in action on the morning of June 6, 1944, (Oh, you mean the day we were fighting almost the entire continent of Europe and one of the largest militaries the world has ever seen and not a third world desert?) the first day of the Normandy Invasion to rid Europe of Nazi Imperialism. In W.W.II the US averaged 2,000 KIA a week -- for four years. Most of the individual battles o f W.W.II lost more Americans than the entire Iraq war has done so far. (That was an entire world at war, not us at war with a desert country the size of Texas.)

But the stakes are at least as high ..... A world dominated by representative governments with civil rights, human rights, and personal freedoms (And you are saying the US represents this side? The Netherlands maybe but not the US) ... or a world dominated by a radical Islamic Wahhabi movement, by the Jihad, under the Mullahs and the Sharia (Islamic law). ( If the people choose to live under Islamic law who are we to say they can't? Christians??)

It's difficult to understand why the American left does not grasp this. (Because they can read) They favor human rights, civil rights, liberty and freedom, but evidently not for Iraqis. (However you don't favor this homosexuals, women, non-Christians or for Palestinians so what's the difference?)

"Peace Activists" always seem to demonstrate here in America, where it's safe. (Yes, thank God we didn't vote for you.)

Why don't we see Peace Activist demonstrating in Iran, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, North Korea, in the places that really need peace activism the most? (Because they don't need to. Iran, North Korea and Syria haven't been at war in over 30 years. That's more than I can say for the US.)

The liberal mentality (Shit, I thought he was going to talk about the liberal media.) is supposed to favor human rights, civil rights, democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc., but if the Jihad wins, wherever the Jihad wins, (Or the conservative Christian Right) it is the end of civil rights, human rights, democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc. Americans who oppose the "liberation" of Iraq are coming down on the side of their own worst enemy. (Liberated from whom? I don't think I am on your side as you suggest.)

I Know What Will Stop These School Shootings; Let's Give the Children Guns!

I have a question for all the NRA gun nuts who claim more guns make everyone safer. If that is your position, does that mean you favor arming all our High School children so the guys who perpetrate these school shootings will think twice about walking into a school?

Or, like rational people, do you think if all these kids had guns it would just be easier for them to shoot their classmates? Sure, maybe someone else may think twice about attacking a High School but what's to keep the High School kids from turning the guns on themselves?

That's why the more guns theory doesn't work. Iraq, Colombia, Somalia and places like that have tons of guns and they are some of the most dangerous places on earth. Look at places like Australia and most of Europe where there are hardly any guns and then compare their murder rates to the countries with all the guns.

Oh, on a side note, it seems like Republicans have taken one more cue from the church and have now started boning underage boys. Maybe it's time for the Republicans to get out of bed with the church; they seem to make for bad bedmates. No pun intended of course.