By Bev Harris
Republished from Black Box Voting

The internal logs of at least 40 Sequoia touch-screen voting machines reveal
that votes were time and date-stamped as cast two weeks before the election, sometimes in the middle of the night.
Black Box Voting successfully sued former Palm Beach County (FL) Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore
to get the audit records for the 2004 presidential election.

After investing over $7,000 and waiting nine months for the records, Black Box Voting discovered
that the voting machine logs contained approximately 100,000 errors. According to voting machine assignment logs,
Palm Beach County used 4,313 machines in the Nov. 2004 election.
During election day, 1,475 voting system calibrations were performed while the polls were open,
providing documentation to substantiate reports from citizens indicating the wrong candidate was selected when they tried to vote.
Another disturbing find…
was several dozen voting machines with votes for the Nov. 2, 2004 election cast on dates like Oct. 16, 15, 19, 13, 25, 28 2004 and one tape dated in 2010.
These machines did not contain any votes date-stamped on Nov. 2, 2004.
You can find the complete set of raw voting machine event logs for Palm Beach County here
Note that some items were not provided to us and are ommitted from the logs.
The logs rule out the possibility that these were Logic & Accuracy (L&A) test results, and verified that these results did appear in the final totals.
In addition to the date discrepancies, most had incorrect polling times, with votes appearing throughout the wee hours of the night.
These machines were L&A tested, and the L&A test activities appeared in the logs with the correct date and time.
According to the voting machine assignment log, these machines were not assigned to early voting locations.
The number of votes on each machine also corresponds with the numbers typical of polling place machines rather than early voting.
Many of these machines showed unexplained log activity after the L&A test but before Election Day.
In addition, many more machines without date anomalies showed this log activity,
which revealed someone powering up the machine, opening the program, then powering it down again.
In one instance, the date discrepancy appeared when someone accessed the machine two minutes after the L&A test was completed.
Voting machines are computers, and computers have batteries that can cause date and time discrepancies,
but it does not appear that these particular discrepancies could have been caused by battery problems.
The evidence indicates that someone accessed the computers after the L&A and before the election,
and that this access caused a change in the machine’s reporting functions, at least for date and time.
Such access would take a high degree of inside access. It is not known whether any other changes were introduced into the voting machines at this time.
As learned in the Hursti experiments, it is possible for an insider to access the machines and leave no trace,
but sometimes a hasty or clumsy access (such as forgetting to enter a correct date/time value when altering a record) will leave telltale tracks.
For another example of time discrepancies, see the Volusia County poll tapes
Approximately 4,000 votes were cast on these machines.
The vote pattern and activity pattern appears to be identical to typical patterns found on Election Day
—All votes on the discrepant machines were spread over a 12-hour period, the length of time the Florida polls are open.
A member of the Palm Beach County electronic voting technical committee asked for the names of the technicians for Palm Beach who had access
to the machines during that time, but the IT person, Jeff Darter, remained silent and never answered the question.
The Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections, Arthur Anderson, said that his staff had looked into the problem and that the votes were normal,
it’s just that the dates somehow changed.

Otheranomalies (Anomaly info)

• Card Stuck error: Occured at least 70,000 times.

The logs show that these cards were placed in the machine
(which normally “swallows” the card like old-fashioned ATM machines, holding the card inside until the voting activites are complete, then ejecting it).
The logs show that the card was authenticated, indicating that the machine believed the card was valid and had retrieved the appropriate ballot.
Just before the vote was cast, the “card stuck” error appeared.
According to Michelle Shafer, who is now the spokesperson for Sequoia Voting Systems,
a card stuck error stuck error appears “any time an activation card makes contact with the activator in the electronic voting unit and comes back out. This happens for the following reasons:
• A voter does not push the card all the way in so it comes back out
• A voter inserts the card again after having already used it to vote once…
• A voter inserts the card backwards
• The card actually gets stuck in the machine (not typical)
Previously, a Sequioa rep attributed the card stuck error to jiggling the card while it is inserted,
however that doesn’t seem to hold up since it would take a pair of tweezers and considerable manual dexterity to jiggle it.
As to putting the card in backwards or upside down, the message that normally appears is probably the “invalid card insertion” message.
Because of the high number of these errors,
and because no reports were produced indicating that any voters had reported the card popping out while they were trying to vote,
Black Box Voting recommended to Palm Beach that testing should be done to replicate the error,
making sure that the explanation holds water and that there is no adverse impact on the vote.
A member of the Committee asked whether a testing day could be set up, but Jeff Darter again sat silent, and despite some prodding,
no such testing appears to be on the horizon.

• AC Power Off Incidents

Any of us who use computers know that it is not a good idea to yank the power from your machine while you are entering mission-critical data,
especially without a backup. (The Palm Beach voting machines lack voter verified paper trails.)
Dozens of voting machines were turned off during the middle of the election while the polls were open.
Machine # 6359 in precinct 1036 was powered down 128 times during the election.
Other power-related issues included “Main Battery not charging” and “backup battery too low”.

• Unknown event messages

A handful of machines showed “unknown event” messages, apparently of different kinds.
This is an interesting error message, since the FEC guidelines frown on undefined exceptions.
What is the point of having an error message if you don’t reveal anything about what the error is?
Machine number 5875 in Precinct 1077 showed two different “unknown errors,” listing them as “unknown error 219” and “unknown error 220.”
• auto-act election info bad and “auto-act write ver fail” messages also show up in the logs, with the “election info bad” message appearing hundreds of times.
• Card encryption bad and Card read fail errors also appeared, with the encryption error message the more frequent of the two.
• Polls closed and results report messages would be expected to appear on every voting machine at the end of the voting cycle,
but these revealed problems with poll worker training and procedures at the administrative/training level.
Some logs reported one report printed, some two, three, four or five, and several not only had no results tape printed but showed no closing of the polls.
(Closing the polls tells the voting machine not to accept any more votes).
• Simulation not sim task was a message that offered no ready explanation, and another that left us wondering was the “Maint Official AT Report” error.
Call a maintenance official? Maintain an official AT report?

• SyErr 23: RC/AT Verify

and Sys Err 31: Vote Not Rec 1 imply a system error of some type, at least one of which would affect the vote.

• EEPROM failure

Now this is a message you don’t want to see on a voting machine.
It happened a couple dozen times. It is somewhat akin to seeing a “hard disk failure” message on your computer
—not a good thing at all if you are in the process of entering critical time-sensitive data.
The logs indicate that poll workers used significantly different operating procedures from one place to another.
One of the least desirable actions some poll workers were taking was to perform multiple calibrations on the machines during the day, every few hours.
Hundreds of records were simply missing, not provided at all, making it impossible to complete a formal audit.
After meeting with the authorities to determine protocols about releasing the detailed report,
Black Box Voting plans to publish a detail report giving full log details on the 40 machines accessed by an insider.

Sequoia machines – locations

Sequoia touch-screens are also used in Pinellas County (FL), Riverside, San Bernardino and Santa Clara countis (CA),
New Mexico, New Jersey, and formerly in Snohomish County (WA).

A sampling of Palm Beach precincts with votes appearing on wrong date/time

Precinct 3066 machine #8438 counted Oct. 15
Precinct 3068 machine #8490 Counted Oct. 28
Precinct 3086 machine #8316 counted Oct 14
Precinct 2132 machine #7441 counted Oct. 15
Precinct 6006 machine #7914 counted Oct. 14
Precinct 6018 machine #7877 counted Oct. 14
Precinct 4068 machine #8997 counted Oct. 16
Precinct 5142 machine #9724 counted Oct 18
Precinct 2072 machine #6848 counted Oct. 15
Precinct 4140 machine #9289 counted Oct. 17
Precinct 4084 machine #8101 counted Oct. 17

citx say..yeah..yeah but is katie holmes single yet?

you are dying.

whos crying?

before you start quilting your “Hilary for President” banner.
lets examine the development..under Billy-Boy..of the B61-11

let me state clearly..

ANYONE INVOLVED IN THE DEVELOPMENT>>>DEPLOYMENT>>>OR USE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS IS GUILTY OF CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY
this..of course..includes policy-makers..legislators and YEAH secretaries and janitors who work for “defense” contractors.

hey citx..what about YOU the taxpayer?

By Slavoj Zizek

Jack Bauer: loving father, willing torturer

The fifth season of “24,” the phenomenally successful Fox television series, premiered on January 15. Composed of 24 one-hour episodes, the show chronicles the workday of the fictitious L.A.-based Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) as it desperately attempts to thwart a catastrophic terrorist attack. (In season four, they stopped a stolen nuclear weapon from exploding above a major U.S. city.) The “real-time” nature of the series confers a strong sense of urgency, emphasized by the ticking of a digital clock and accentuated with hand-held camera shots and split-screens showing the concurrent actions of various characters.

Even the commercial breaks contribute to this sense of urgency: Before a commercial, we see an on-screen digital clock signalling it is “7:46.” When the action resumes, the digital clock reads “7:51.” The length of the break in our, the spectators’, real time is exactly equivalent to the temporal gap in the on-screen narrative, as if the events nonetheless go on as we watch commercials. This makes it seem like the ongoing action is so pressing, spilling over into the real time of the spectator, that even commercial breaks cannot interupt it.

This brings up a crucial question: What does this all-pervasive sense of urgency mean ethically? The pressure of events is so overbearing, the stakes are so high, that they necessitate a suspension of ordinary ethical concerns. After all, displaying moral qualms when the lives of millions are at stake plays into the hands of the enemy.

CTU agents act in a shadowy space outside the law, doing things that “simply have to be done” in order to save society from the terrorist threat. This includes not only torturing terrorists when they are caught, but torturing CTU members or their closest relatives when they are suspected of terrorist links. In the fourth season, among those tortured were the secretary of defense’s son-in-law and his own son (both with the secretary’s full knowledge and support), as well as a female member of CTU, wrongly suspected of passing information to the terrorists. (After the torture, when new data confirms her innocence, she is asked to return to work. And since this is an emergency and every person is needed, she accepts!) The CTU agents not only treat terrorist suspects in this way—after all, they are dealing with the “ticking bomb” situation evoked by Alan Dershowitz to justify torture in his book, Why Terrorism Works—they also treat themselves as expendable, ready to lay down their colleagues’ or their own lives if this will help prevent the terrorist act.

Special Agent Jack Bauer, played by Kiefer Sutherland, embodies this attitude at its purest. Without qualms, he tortures others and allows his superiors to put his life on the line. At the end of the fourth season, he agrees to be turned over to the People’s Republic of China as a scapegoat for a CTU covert operation that killed a Chinese diplomat. Although he knows he will be tortured and imprisoned for life, he promises not to say anything that would hurt U.S. interests. The end of the fourth season leaves Jack in a paradigmatic situation: When he is informed by the ex-president of the United States, his close ally, that someone in the government ordered his death (delivering him to the wily Chinese torturers is considered too much of a security risk), his two closest friends in CTU organize his fake death. He then disappears into nowhere, anonymous, officially non-existing.

In the “war on terror,” it is not only the terrorists but the CTU agents who become what philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls homini sacer—those who can be killed with impunity since, in the eyes of the law, their lives no longer count. While the agents continue to act on behalf of a legal power, their acts are no longer covered and constrained by the law—they operate in an empty space within the domain of the law.

It is here that we encounter the series’ fundamental ideological lie: In spite of this thoroughly ruthless attitude of self-instrumentalization, the CTU agents, especially Jack, remain “warm human beings,” caught in the usual emotional dilemmas of “normal” people. They love their wives and children, they suffer jealousy—but at a moment’s notice they are ready to sacrifice their loved ones for their mission. They are something like the psychological equivalent of decaffeinated coffee, doing all the horrible things the situation necessitates, yet without paying the subjective price for it.

Consequently, “24” cannot be simply dismissed as a pop cultural justification for the problematic methods of the United States in its war on terror. More is at stake. Recall the lesson of Franics Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now: The figure of Kurtz is not a reminder of some barbaric past, but the necessary outcome of modern Western power. Kurtz was a perfect soldier—as such, through his over-identification with the military power system, he turned into the excess that the system had to eliminate in an operation that itself imitated the ruthlessness of Kurtz, what it was ostensibly fighting against.

This is the dilemma for those in power: How to obtain Kurtz without Kurtz’s pathology? How to get people to do the necessary dirty job without turning them into monsters? SS chief Heinrich Himmler faced the same dilemma. When confronted with the task of liquidating the Jews of Europe, Himmler adopted the heroic attitude of “Somebody has to do the dirty job, so let’s do it!” It is easy to do a noble thing for one’s country, up to sacrificing one’s life for it. It is much more difficult to commit a crime for one’s country.

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt provided a precise description of how the Nazi executioners endured the horrible acts they performed. Most of them were not simply evil; they were well aware that their actions brought humiliation, suffering and death to their victims. Their way out of this predicament was that, “instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!” In this way, they were able to turn around the logic of resisting temptation: Their “ethical” effort was directed toward the task of resisting the temptation not to murder, torture and humiliate. Thus, the very violation of spontaneous ethical instincts of pity and compassion was turned into the proof of ethical grandeur: Doing one’s duty meant assuming the heavy burden of inflicting pain on others.

There was a further “ethical problem” here for Himmler: How to make sure that the SS executioners who performed these terrible acts could remain human and retain their dignity? His answer was found in the Bhagavad-Gita, a special leather-bound edition of which he always kept in his pocket. There, Krishna tells Arjuna that he should carry out his acts with an inner distance and never get fully involved in them.

Therein also resides the lie of “24”: The presumption that it is not only possible to retain human dignity in accomplishing acts of terror, but that when an honest person accomplishes such acts as a heavy duty, this confers on him an additional tragic-ethic grandeur. But what if such a distance is possible? What if we do have people who commit terrible acts as part of their job, while, in private, they remain loving husbands, good parents and caring friends? As Arendt knew, far from redeeming them, the very fact that they are able to retain their normality while committing such acts is the ultimate confirmation of their moral catastrophe.

So what about the popular and seemingly convincing reply to all these worries and hair-splitting distinctions regarding torture: “What’s all the fuss about? The United States is just openly admitting, at least tacitly, not only what it has been doing all the time, but what all other states have been doing all the time. If anything, we have less hypocrisy now.” To this, one should retort with a simple counter-question: “If this is the only thing that the statements from the U.S. government mean, why, then, are they admitting this? Why don’t they just silently go on doing it, as they did before?”

What is inherent to human speech is the irreducible gap between the enunciated content and its act of enunciation: “You say this, but why are you telling me it openly now?” For example, we all know that a polite way to say that we found a colleague’s talk stupid and boring is to say, “That was very interesting.” If instead we openly told our colleague, “That was boring and stupid,” he would be fully justified to be surprised. The act of publicly reporting on something is never neutral—it affects the reported content itself.

The same goes for the recent open admission of torture: When we hear Dick Cheney make obscene statements about the necessity of torture, we should ask: “Why are you saying it publicly?” That is, the question we must raise is: What is there about this statement that made you enunciate it? Thus, what is truly problematic about “24” is not the message it conveys, but the fact that this message is so openly stated. It is a sad indication of the deep change in our ethical and political standards.

“I’m the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry,”

this was the opening phrase of Vice-President Dick Cheney’s coersed public statement regarding the reckless drunken shooting of his hunting partner

NOTE..the grammatical distance inserted in the above phrase..he does NOT say.. “i shot Harry”

read on in the transcript and you will find this……

“I fired, and there’s Harry falling. It was, I’d have to say, one of the worst days of my life at that moment.”

“one of the worst days of my life AT THAT MOMENT”
as if..
in the NEXT moment perhaps
he was..or would be having a fine day.

CLASSIC DE-PERSONALIZATION DISORDER

just ask yourself..
how does this condition affect the governance of the United States?

or maybe YOU are in a mild disassociative state YOURSELF?

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) — Manuel Villanueva realizes he has been getting a pretty good deal since he signed up for Netflix Inc.’s online DVD rental service 2-1/2 years ago, but he still feels shortchanged.

That’s because the $17.99 monthly fee that he pays to rent up to three DVDs at a time would amount to an even bigger bargain if the company didn’t penalize him for returning his movies so quickly.

Netflix typically sends about 13 movies a month to Villanueva’s home in Warren, Michigan — down from the 18 to 22 DVDs he once received before the company’s automated system identified him as a heavy renter and began delaying his shipments to protect its profits.

The same Netflix formula also shoves Villanueva to the back of the line for the most-wanted DVDs, so the service can send those popular flicks to new subscribers and infrequent renters.

The little-known practice, called “throttling” by critics, means Netflix customers who pay the same price for the same service are often treated differently, depending on their rental patterns.

“I wouldn’t have a problem with it if they didn’t advertise ‘unlimited rentals,’ ” Villanueva said. “The fact is that they go out of their way to make sure you don’t go over whatever secret limit they have set up for your account.”

Changing the rules

Los Gatos, California-based Netflix didn’t publicly acknowledge it differentiates among customers until revising its “terms of use” in January 2005 — four months after a San Francisco subscriber filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that the company had deceptively promised one-day delivery of most DVDs.

“In determining priority for shipping and inventory allocation, we give priority to those members who receive the fewest DVDs through our service,” Netflix’s revised policy now reads. The statement specifically warns that heavy renters are more likely to encounter shipping delays and less likely to immediately be sent their top choices.

Few customers have complained about this “fairness algorithm,” according to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.

(corporate CEOs are *famous* for their honesty and integrity..not to mention..sense of fairness)

sorry Reed..you were saying…

“We have unbelievably high customer satisfaction ratings,” Hastings said during a recent interview. “Most of our customers feel like Netflix is an incredible value.”

The service’s rapid growth supports him. Netflix added nearly 1.6 million customers last year, giving it 4.2 million subscribers through December. During the final three months of 2005, just 4 percent of its customers canceled the service, the lowest rate in the company’s six-year history.

After collecting consumer opinions about the Web’s 40 largest retailers last year, Ann Arbor, Michigan, research firm ForeSeeResults rated Netflix as “the cream of the crop in customer satisfaction.”

Once considered a passing fancy, Netflix has changed the way many households rent movies and has spawned several copycats, including a mail service from Blockbuster Inc.

Netflix’s most popular rental plan lets subscribers check out up to three DVDs at a time for $17.99 a month. After watching a movie, customers return the DVD in a postage-paid envelope. Netflix then sends out the next available DVD on the customer’s online wish list.

Customers catch on

Because everyone pays a flat fee, Netflix makes more money from customers who watch only four or five DVDs a month. Customers who quickly return their movies to get more erode the company’s profit margin, because each DVD sent out and returned costs 78 cents in postage alone.

Although Netflix consistently promoted its service as the DVD equivalent of an all-you-can eat smorgasbord, some heavy renters began to suspect they were being treated differently two or three years ago.

To prove the point, one customer even set up a Web site — www.dvd-rent-test.dreamhost.com — to show that the service listed different wait times for DVDs requested by subscribers living in the same household.

Netflix’s throttling techniques also have prompted incensed customers to share their outrage in online forums such as www.hackingnetflix.com.

“Netflix isn’t well within its rights to throttle users,” complained a customer identified as “annoyed” in a posting on the site. “They say unlimited rentals. They are liars.”

Hastings said the company has no specified limit on rentals, but “`unlimited’ doesn’t mean you should expect to get 10,000 a month.”

Netflix says most subscribers check out two to 11 DVDs a month.

Growing risk

Management has acknowledged to analysts that it risks losing money on a relatively small percentage of frequent renters. And that risk has increased since Netflix reduced the price of its most popular subscription plan by $4 a month in 2004 and the U.S. Postal Service recently raised first-class mailing costs by 2 cents.

Netflix’s approach has paid off, so far. The company has been profitable in each of the past three years, a trend its management expects to continue in 2006 with projected earnings of at least $29 million on revenue of $960 million. Netflix’s stock price has more than tripled since its 2002 initial public offering.

A September 2004 lawsuit cast a spotlight on the throttling issue. The complaint, filed by Frank Chavez on behalf of all Netflix subscribers before Jan. 15, 2005, said the company had developed a sophisticated formula to slow DVD deliveries to frequent renters and ensure quicker shipments of the most popular movies to its infrequent — and most profitable — renters to keep them happy.

Netflix denied the allegations, but eventually revised its terms of use to acknowledge its different treatment of frequent renters.

Without acknowledging wrongdoing, the company agreed to provide a one-month rental upgrade and pay Chavez’s attorneys $2.5 million. But the settlement sparked protests that prompted the two sides to reconsider. A hearing on a revised settlement proposal is scheduled for Feb. 22 in San Francisco Superior Court.

Netflix subscribers such as Nathaniel Irons didn’t believe the company was purposely delaying some DVD shipments until he read the revised terms of use.

Irons, 28, of Seattle, has no plans to cancel his service because he figures he is still getting a good value from the eight movies he typically receives each month.

“My own personal experience has not been bad,” he said, “but (the throttling) is certainly annoying when it happens.”

Capt’n Crook say…..CAVEAT EMPTOR…baby!

submitted by DCM 2012

On Thursday, February 9th, 2006, President George W. Bush said that

“We now know that in October 2001, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September the 11th attacks, had already set in motion a plan to have terrorist operatives hijack an airplane using shoe bombs to breach the cockpit door and fly the plane into the tallest building on the West Coast. We believe the intended target was Liberty Tower in Los Angeles, California. Rather than use Arab hijackers as he had on September 11, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed sought out young men from Southeast Asia whom he believed would not arouse as much suspicion.” The president went on to say, “As the West Coast plot shows, in the war on terror we face a relentless and determined enemy that operates in many nations - so protecting our citizens requires unprecedented cooperation from many nations as well. By working together, we took dangerous terrorists off the streets. By working together, we stopped a catastrophic attack on our homeland.”

There is no Liberty Tower located in Los Angeles.

The photos of the building flashed around the country by an unquestioning media are of Library Tower
- and the White House later issued a correction admitting the mistake. With his entire administration at stake over the controversy of maintaining surveillance on American citizens without first obtaining court orders, it’s hard to imagine Bush making such an error - especially when the speech was so clearly designed to offset the controversy.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa denies the claim

“he say..she say?”
“the blame game?”

hey ..whateva..
some day soon..we wont need those pesky LIBRARIES anyway
everyone will be like our illiterate commander-in-chief
getting their news and information from easily “updated” digital mainframes

dont worry!
you will still have that “liberty” though

citx say……”i could have SWORN they were chasing ET with guns when I WAS a kid”

enjoy them NOW
cuz with WMDs in every laptop
and cellular phone

YOU just became the enemy

by Ray Bradbury..futurist

SOMETIME IN THE next five years, traffic all across L.A. will freeze.

The freeways that were once a fast-moving way to get from one part of the city to another will become part of a slow-moving glacier, edging down the hills to nowhere.

In recent years we’ve all experienced the beginnings of this. A trip from the Valley into Los Angeles that used to take half an hour — all of a sudden it takes an hour or two or three. Our warning system tells us something must be done before our freeways trap us in the outlying districts, unable to get to our jobs.

In recent months there has been talk of yet another subway, one that would run between downtown L.A. and Santa Monica. That would be a disaster.

A single transit line will not answer our problems; we must lay plans for a series of transportation systems that would allow us to move freely, once more, within our city.

The answer to all this is the monorail. Let me explain.

More than 40 years ago, in 1963, I attended a meeting of the L.A. County Board of Supervisors at which the Alweg Monorail company outlined a plan to construct one or more monorails crossing L.A. north, south, east and west. The company said that if it were allowed to build the system, it would give the monorails to us for free — absolutely gratis. The company would operate the system and collect the fare revenues.

It seemed a reasonable bargain to me. But at the end of a long day of discussion, the Board of Supervisors rejected Alweg Monorail.

I was stunned. I dimly saw, even at that time, the future of freeways, which would, in the end, go nowhere.

At the end of the afternoon, I asked for three minutes to testify. I took the microphone and said, “To paraphrase Winston Churchill, rarely have so many owed so little to so few.” I was conducted out of the meeting.

In a panic at what I saw as a disaster, I offered my services to the Alweg Monorail people for the next year.

During the following 12 months I lectured in almost every major area of L.A., at open forums and libraries, to tell people about the promise of the monorail. But at the end of that year nothing was done.

Forty years have passed, and more than ever we need an open discussion of our future. If we examine the history of subways, we will find how tremendously expensive and destructive they are.

They are, first of all, meant for cold climates such as Toronto, New York, London, Paris, Moscow and Tokyo. But L.A. is a Mediterranean area; our weather is sublime, and people are accustomed to traveling in the open air and enjoying the sunshine, not in closed cars under the ground.

Subways take forever to build and, because the tunnels have to be excavated, are incredibly expensive. The cost of one subway line would build 10 monorail systems.

Along the way, subway construction destroys businesses by the scores. The history of the subway from East L.A. to the Valley is a history of ruined businesses and upended lives.

The monorail is extraordinary in that it can be built elsewhere and then carried in and installed in mid-street with little confusion and no destruction of businesses. In a matter of a few months, a line could be built from Long Beach all the way along Western Avenue to the mountains with little disturbance to citizens and no threat to local businesses.

Compared to the heavy elevateds of the past, the monorail is virtually soundless. Anyone who has ridden the Disneyland or Seattle monorails knows how quietly they move.

They also have been virtually accident-free. The history of the monorail shows few collisions or fatalities.If we constructed monorails running north and south on Vermont, Western, Crenshaw and Broadway, and similar lines running east and west on Washington, Pico, Wilshire, Santa Monica and Sunset, we would have provided a proper cross section of transportation, allowing people to move anywhere in our city at any time.

There you have it. As soon as possible, we must call in one of the world’s monorail-building companies to see what could be done so that the first ones could be in position by the end of the year to help our huddled traffic masses yearning to travel freely.

The freeway is the past, the monorail is our future, above and beyond.

Let the debate begin.

Ray Bradbury
..author of Fahrenheit 451..

do YOU think its time to start listening?

YET?

such laws are FACIST.

DECLARE YOURSELF.

Jesus healed using cannabis

courtesy of Mann the disciple

In the interests of truth, the actual state of this union deserves to be displayed for all to see. This is the deal. This is how it is.

i knew that i was dying.
something in me said, go ahead, die, sleep, become
them, accept.
then something else in me said, no, save the tiniest
bit.
it needn’t be much, just a spark.
a spark can set a whole forest on
fire.
just a spark.
save it.
– Charles Bukowski

“He shall from time to time,” reads the Constitution, “give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” And so it shall be. George W. Bush will be speaking tonight from the podium in the House of Representatives. Before him will be arrayed Senators, Representatives, generals and judges. The balconies will be filled with observers, luminaries, reporters and a few so-called “special guests” whose presence will be used to reinforce some argument or another.
It shall be quite a thing to see, a show worth watching if only to observe exactly how many lies, distortions, threats, taunts and smirks can be crammed into a single speech. This will be Mr. Bush speaking, after all, and the truth is not in him. It will be in every pertinent sense a mere commercial, a television advertisement from a failing company, a whitewashing of ugly truths by a staggering CEO whose sole desire is to keep the stockholders in line for another quarter.
In the interests of truth, the actual state of this union deserves to be displayed for all to see. This is the deal. This is how it is.

The Real Economy

Since 2000, the number of Americans living in poverty has risen to nearly 37 million. More than 13 million of these are children. More than one in four American families with children make less than $30,000 a year. Look within that number and you will find 46% of African American families with children and 44% of Hispanic families with children fall below this mark. Average annual income for Americans fell once again in 2005. 46 million Americans live without health insurance.
The response to this? Vice President Cheney, three days before Christmas, cast the tie-breaking vote on a spending reduction bill that will fall most heavily on the poor, the infirm and the elderly. Funding for health care, child support, and education subsidies for low-income families has been gutted. Medicaid benefits for the poor were cut by $7 billion, and Medicare programs for the elderly were cut by $6.4 billion. Federal student-loan programs were cut by $12.7 billion.
On the very same day, the Senate passed legislation that drastically cut funding for the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. The Head Start program was hit especially hard: the cuts here eliminate some 25,000 slots for low-income children. All in all, these spending reductions are expected to save $40 billion.
Meanwhile, recently-passed tax cuts ravage the budget far more deeply than these drastic budget cuts. Two tax cuts in particular that went into effect on New Year’s Day will cost $27 billion, more than half of what the spending reductions are supposed to save. These cuts will cost more than $150 billion over the next ten years. 97% of the money from these cuts will go to households making more than $200,000 a year. Households with incomes under $100,000 will get 0.1% of these cuts.
If all of Mr. Bush’s tax cuts are stopped or allowed to expire, $750 billion will be added to the federal budget. That is more than enough to pay for the programs that have been eviscerated. It won’t happen, not with the priorities of this administration, but that is the simple math of the matter.

New Orleans Drowned in a Bathtub

The first weeks of September brought to all Americans a devastating tragedy. The city of New Orleans was all but obliterated by Hurricane Katrina when levies meant to hold back the waters failed. The failure of these levies came, in no small part, because of unprecedented budget cuts for the Army Corps of Engineers, which was tasked to keep the levies viable.
The tragedy was compounded by the utterly incompetent management of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and its head, Michael Brown, whose experience with disaster management came while he was serving as an attorney for owners of Arabian horses. In the weeks to follow, lavish promises were made by Mr. Bush. “We will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives,” he said on September 15th.
Those promises have been broken. We have gone from oaths to revive this cherished city to this: “I want to remind people in that part of the world, $85 billion is a lot,” said Bush on January 26th. Hundreds of thousands of Americans remain displaced, many holding on by the skin of their teeth in cramped trailers. Thirty million cubic yards of debris remain uncollected – the Washington Post estimated over the weekend that this was “enough to build a five-sided column more than 50 stories tall over the Pentagon.” There is not even a plan in place to begin to attack the problem. The Bush administration has left New Orleans to rot, and the next hurricane season is four months away.
Anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist once famously stated that he wanted to shrink the federal government to the size where it could be drowned in a bathtub. As evidenced by the budget cuts and tax giveaways described above, many within this government feel as Norquist does. Thanks to their actions, to the cuts in the Army Corps of Engineers budget, to the nomination of useless cronies like Brown to vital positions of civil defense, to a war in Iraq that has bled the budget further and left Louisiana without sufficient National Guard troops to help the population, it is New Orleans that has been drowned in Norquist’s bathtub. A major American city has been shattered, and nothing is done about it.
To add insult to injury, the Bush administration utterly refuses to answer any questions on the matter. Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, perhaps the most widely-known Democratic defender of Mr. Bush, is the ranking minority member on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Even Mr. Lieberman is flabbergasted by the stonewalling of the White House.
“My staff believes that DHS (the Department of Homeland Security) has engaged in a conscious strategy of slow-walking our investigation in the hope that we would run out of time to follow the investigation’s natural progression to where it leads,” Lieberman said last week. “At this point, I cannot disagree. There’s been no assertion of executive privilege, just a refusal to answer. I have been told by my staff that almost every question our staff has asked federal agency witnesses regarding conversations with or involvement of the White House has been met with a response that they could not answer on direction of the White House.”
Mark Folse, a New Orleans native, operates a blog called “Wet Bank Guide.” On Monday, Mr. Folse posted a message for Mr. Bush. “I’ve never lost the deepest allegiance I’ve ever held: to my city,” wrote Folse. “We have always known we were a people different and unique, as divided as we may seem. That sense of identity as a New Orleanian is the powerful bond that draws me on. It is the deep love of country that drives me – of my country, New Orleans and southern Louisiana. It is the irrational emotional attachment to my piece of America that leads men and women to go willingly up Bunker Hill, to follow General Pickett, to volunteer for Iraq.”
“A life of assured privilege has protected you from having to take these sorts of risks,” continued Folse, “to find the strength to get up and go into the maw of uncertainty, to risk and gamble your own and not other peoples’ lives or money. You can pledge allegiance or sing the anthem or give a stirring speech as well as any, but you know you have no allegiance except self-interest.”
“If nothing moves you except your own self-interest,” concluded Folse, “then consider this. There are hundreds of thousands of us, scattered throughout most of the United States. We are everywhere you and your party will go to campaign: Arkansas and Atlanta and Austin, Dallas and Detroit and Denver, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, Baltimore and Boston, Chicago and Charlotte. Many will remain there indefinitely, unable to go home, precisely because you have lied to them and betrayed them. We will not let you escape from the net of lies you have woven. Wherever you turn, you will find us, ready to call you out.”
The situation in New Orleans is a problem that will not go away. Men like Mark Folse will make absolutely sure of that.

“Scandal” Is Too Small a Word

The Abramoff scandal directly touches some sixty Republican congresspeople, according to campaign finance records that show where the disgraced lobbyist sent his money. Mr. Bush recently promoted the lead investigator in this case, effectively removing him from the investigation. Despite this, the hard look into Mr. Abramoff’s dealings continue. Mr. Abramoff’s plea deal has a lot of people in Washington suffering from flop-sweat.
Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into the outing of a deep-cover CIA agent by administration officials continues apace, and has already cashiered Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis Libby. According to TRUTHOUT investigative reporter Jason Leopold, Fitzgerald has “spent the past month preparing evidence he will present to a grand jury alleging that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove knowingly made false statements to FBI and Justice Department investigators and lied under oath while he was being questioned about his role in the leak of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity more than two years ago, according to sources knowledgeable about the probe.”
“Although there have not been rumblings regarding Fitzgerald’s probe into the Plame leak since he met with the grand jury hearing evidence in the case more than a month ago,” continued Leopold in his January 10th report, “the sources said that Fitzgerald has been quietly building his case against Rove and has been interviewing witnesses, in some cases for the second and third time, who have provided him with information related to Rove’s role in the leak.”
None of this will be mentioned in the State of the Union speech tonight. The Bush administration continues to stonewall these investigations with all its might – Mr. Bush has denied ever knowing Jack Abramoff, despite the existence of several pictures showing them glad-handing each other in the White House – and the Republican-controlled congress will certainly do nothing to advance the questions being asked.
In contrast, a portion of the speech will certainly be dedicated to moralistic sloganeering about values. Remember, as high-flown words about truth and justice are spoken, what the Abramoff and Plame scandals represent: a government run by thieves, stroked by swindlers, and staffed by assassins who sing of defending the nation even as they cast us down into greater danger.
And, by the way, the Enron trial started on Monday.

The Middle East

2,242 American soldiers have died in Iraq. Tens of thousands more are grievously wounded. Tens and tens of thousands of civilians are dead or maimed. Scores more simmer in rage and pick up weapons to attack American forces. American soldiers wishing to go around the Pentagon to augment their meager armor have been threatened with the revocation of death benefits for their families. A coalition of fundamentalist Shiite groups has taken over the government, the two main parts of which are notorious terrorist organizations with umbilical ties to Iran. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent to do this. There is no end in sight.
Three years ago, in another State of the Union address, Mr. Bush told the nation that Iraq was in possession of 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons (which is 1,000,000 pounds) of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent, 30,000 munitions to deliver these agents, mobile biological weapons labs, al Qaeda connections, and uranium from Niger for use in a robust nuclear weapons program. Mr. Bush will have to work very hard tonight to tell a lie as vast, dramatic and bloody as this.
Certainly, Mr. Bush will sing the praises of bringing democracy to the Middle East. It is worthwhile, however, to consider what his concept of democracy has accomplished to date. Six months ago, a radical named Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president of Iran. Thanks to the intense feelings within Iran’s populace about the US occupation of Iraq, Ahmadinejad has been able to unify his country behind the establishment of a nuclear program that frightens the rest of the world. Ahmadinejad’s election itself owes a great deal to Mr. Bush’s policies on Iraq.
Last week, the terrorist organization Hamas was overwhelmingly elected by the Palestinian people to run their government, leaving the Fatah party shocked and displaced. While the success of Hamas has much to do with Fatah’s corruption and lack of progress on several fronts, the slow radicalization of the general population in the Middle East once again can be laid at the doorstep of Mr. Bush. It has been revealed that Bush’s decision to disengage from the peace process between Israel and Palestine several years ago was a disastrous choice. Couple that with the occupation of Iraq and the torture of its citizens, and few can be surprised when the general population in the Middle East turns toward more radical elements.
Democracy is a tricky thing. The fact that people in Iraq, Iran and Palestine are afforded the opportunity to vote, instead of suffering the absolute control of a dictatorship, is arguably a good thing in the main. Yet methods matter. When the Iraqi people are given the vote by way of a ravaging war that inflames the passions of the region and enshrines a radical government, democracy becomes its own worst enemy. When that ravaging war empowers a fringe president in Iran, democracy becomes its own worst enemy.
Methods matter. Democracy does not exist in a vacuum. When it is forced upon a population at the point of a sword, that population will see the sword as the best viable option to exercise its collective will. Almost immediately, democracy will be used to elect radicals, and those radicals will dispose of democracy at the first opportunity. The radicalization of governments all across the Middle East has made the world substantially more dangerous. Mr. Bush will speak of progress tonight. The only progress being made is toward a general conflagration.
On the other hand, Exxon Mobil has posted a $32 billion profit for the last year. This stands as the largest single one-year profit in the entire history of the world. Progress indeed.

The Unitary Executive Tapping Your Phone

Mr. Bush and friends have been jumping through flaming hoops to justify the blatantly illegal policy of spying on Americans by way of the National Security Agency. Their tortured arguments in favor of this action, and their flat-footed declaration that the policy will continue, makes confetti of the Fourth Amendment.
More than that, however, it moves this nation one step closer to having an Executive Branch that supersedes all others in power and scope. Not only will Mr. Bush spy on whomever he pleases, but he will also torture whomever he pleases. Put simply, the constitutionally-required separation of powers, the checks and balances that have maintained the stability of this republic, is being destroyed. This will echo down the corridors of our history long after Mr. Bush has left his office.
On Monday afternoon, Senate Democrats failed to muster the necessary 41 votes needed to avoid cloture on the nomination of Samuel Alito. The man will be elevated to the highest court. Beyond the fact that Alito is hostile to a woman’s right to choose, hostile to privacy rights in the face of unwarranted police intrusion, and hostile to the poor and disadvantaged, there is the matter of his opinion on the powers of the Executive. In short, he agrees with Mr. Bush.

The Reign of Witches

The state of this union is not good. We are poorer, frightened, faced with the swelling ranks of enemies our leaders have created, and hell-bent to do away with the most precious aspects of our system of government. We are surveilled, propagandized, intimidated. We empower the radicals and disenfranchise the common good. We are fed swill via the television and thus convinced that what they tell us is what we already believe. We are bought, and we are paid for.
The radicals running this country have long desired to destroy the government’s ability to govern – they found things like taxes intrusive, which is amusing when one hears them now defending warrantless spying on Americans – and they are well along the path towards success. The budget is destroyed, spent on tax cuts and the Iraq occupation, while millions of Americans suffer the loss of necessary services. The one percent of the one percent is making a killing, and the rest of us are left behind.
If there is hope to be found in all this, it is in the words of Thomas Jefferson, written 208 years ago after the passage of the Sedition Act.
“A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt. If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.”