The latest poll in the Connecticut Senate race between Democrat Ned Lamont, Republican Michael Schlessinger, and right wing Lieberman for Connecticut Party nominee Joseph Lieberman shows a statistical dead heat. The Zogby poll shows Lamont just 4 percentage points behind Lieberman - within the margin of error.

Ned Lamont has been closing the distance between himself and the ex-Democrat Lieberman in the last week or two. One of the reasons is that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have been busy heaping praise on Lieberman. Bush and Cheney have been celebrating the way in which Joseph Lieberman stays the course on Iraq - no matter how the facts change.

Connecticut voters are tiring of the atmosphere of entitlement with which Lieberman has been campaigning this year. The Joementum is against the failed status quo. The Joementum is against Lieberman.

Sometimes a hundred people marching in the street can’t hold a candle to the effect of one or two people doing the right thing at the right time. Activism is all about employing leverage so that one person’s cry to the wilderness is amplified to a regionally or even nationally audible level. Bob Gelt of ProgressNowAction in Colorado, along with a single cameraman, are capturing national attention with a video in which they peacefully ask a simple question. Their simple question, from an undecided voter in Republican Representative Marilyn Musgrave’s own district, engenders no answer except for a thuggish physical response.

Musgrave (Progressive Action Score: 0, Regressive Conservative Score: 92, Oath of Office Index Score: 0) and her handlers end up looking really, really bad. Can’t they answer a simple question? Their response just embodies everything that’s wrong with the conservative antidemocratic Republican approach to governing and policy. Click on the video thumbnail to watch for yourself.

– February 13, 2008

Following up on its wildly successful campaign to persuade Americans 19-29 years old to abstain from sex, the administration of George W. Bush has begun another $50 million advertising campaign — this time to convince Americans from 30-49 years of age to refrain from engaging in sexual activity. “It hit me like a flash of light one night in bed,” relates Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the Department of Health and Human Services. “Sexually transmitted diseases are sexually transmitted, right? The only way to avoid sexually transmitted disease for sure, for real, actual, pure 100% double-dutch sure, is abstinence. Well, the next step was entirely clear.” When asked why the new abstinence policy is only targeted at those up to 49 years of age, Horn blushes slightly and asks this reporter, “you’re young, right?”

After a brief altercation in the press room and apologies on all sides, Horn explains the Bush administration’s bold new plan: “imagine a world completely without sexually transmitted disease. The only way, the only 100% for sure, double-dutch sure, way to accomplish that is for, eventually, every American to abstain from sexual activity. If we can only convince an entire generation to stop having sex, imagine what a better place the world would be.”

Here’s the latest version of the truth about Iraq from Harold Ford Jr. Congressman Ford, who is now running to represent Tennessee in the United States Senate, says that the United States needs to “chart a new course in Iraq”. What about the old course in Iraq? Well, that’s the course that Harold Ford Jr. said we should go on before, you know, back when he voted, as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, in favor of starting a war in Iraq. Back then, Harold Ford Jr. told us all that we had no choice but to invade and occupy Iraq. We can all see how far Harold Ford Jr.’s wisdom about Iraq has gotten us.

The truth is that Harold Ford Jr. is a Democrat in the style of Joseph Lieberman, which is to say that he’s just the kind of evasive right winger that Republicans love to see gain control of the Democratic Party. Like Senator Lieberman, Congressman Ford has spent the last three and half years evading the truth about Iraq, which is that he got it wrong from the start, and still hasn’t gotten it right.

Take a look at Harold Ford Jr.’s senate campaign web site, and you’ll see that he has an entire issues section devoted to “My Faith as My Guide”. But, where is the Iraq War issues section on Harold Ford Jr.’s web site? It doesn’t exist. Harold Ford Jr.’s most secure political position is to pretend that the Iraq War just isn’t happening, or that it will resolve itself all by itself. On the most important issue of the day, Harold Ford Jr. has no answers.

Harold Ford Jr. has betrayed Tennessee Democrats by siding with the Republicans on issue after issue after issue. He even voted for the infamous Military Commissions Act, which legalizes torture, ends enforcement of the Geneva Convention, and strips away the essential right of habeas corpus.

Bob Corker is no great choice, but a vote for Harold Ford, Jr. is a vote to promote a version of the Democratic Party that is not substantially different from the Republican Party. The only honest choice for true Tennessee progressives is to vote for Chris Lugo for Senate in protest and disgust with the travesty that the Tennessee Democratic Party has become.

Harold Ford Jr. theocracy update: I just found another Harold Ford Jr. video in which the aspiring theocrat comes up with this great line: “Democrats fear and love the Lord!”

Not this Democrat, Mr. Ford. You’re supposed to be running for Senator, not Ayatollah.

In the lastest poll, Harold Ford Jr. is losing to his Republican rival, 52 to 44. It’s no wonder. Harold Ford Jr. has been so busy trying to act like a Republican that he’s turned off a huge number of Tennessee Democrats, and no matter how often he pulls this tent revival schtick, the Religious Right is going to stick with the Republican Party.

If the blogosphere’s reaction to Duncan Hunter’s announcement of a prospective campaign for President is any sign, Congressman Hunter had best not bother. It’s been about 18 hours since Duncan Hunter made his 2008 presidential campaign announcement, and so far, the reaction has been mostly silence.

When I search for “Duncan Hunter for President” on Technorati or Google Blog Search, I find only four blogs using this phrase. That’s not even one percent of the number of blogs I find when I do a similar search for Barack Obama - “Barack Obama for President”.

These blogs that do support Duncan Hunter for President tend to be pretty nutty, too. I find one blog that praises Duncan Hunter for not being a phony conservative like George W. Bush. President Bush, yeah, he’s just a Hollywood liberal. Another blog loves the way that Duncan Hunter accused CNN of broadcasting enemy propaganda and working in collusion with a terrorist.

One other blog doesn’t go into details much, but merely declares, If you’re a replblican you’ve got to vote for this man. Well, thank goodness there aren’t very many replblicans out there.

And the fourth blog? It just cuts and pastes what other people have to say about the Hunter for President campaign. As Truman discovered this morning, the echo chamber of the blogosphere seems to resound most strongly with news of electoral politics. Who would have thought that we’d all go to the trouble of creating this new medium, only to have it serve so often as a mere photocopying machine for voices from the traditional media?

The BBC is reporting that, in order to gain better footing in diplomatic talks and to establish a better international reputation, the Vietnamese government has agreed to abolish the practice of imprisoning people without trial before George W. Bush comes to visit Vietnam next month.

Now, the obvious question is: Will the United States of America do the same, if Vietnam’s leader visits the USA?

Michael Orona, the American deputy director of the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, proudly declared, “Whoever is detained will have to know what they are being detained for and be given an opportunity to go to court and to meet with a lawyer - rights which were not granted before.” Orona was talking about Vietnam, not about the United States. In the United States, the President of the United States has the power to throw people into prison without putting them on trial and without allowing them to meet with a lawyer. The Military Commissions Act, which establishes the legal basis for that power, was signed into law this month by George W. Bush, with the help of some ambitious Democrats in Congress, such as Harold Ford Jr. and Sherrod Brown.

Oh, my golly. Is the human rights record of the United States of America now to be behind that of Vietnam’s?

Wave the flag, now. Faster. That’ll make it all better.

Do you think that the U.S. government funding of religious institutions is a good idea? If so, then I’m talking to you.

It has always been possible for religious organizations to receive government funding to carry out social services; the organizations just had to promise not to proselytize while using government funds, since the use of government resources to promote a religion is expressly prohibited by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. But since 2001, the Bush administration has declared through executive order that it is permissible for taxpayer-provided government funds to go to religious institutions in order to provide a mixed cocktail of social services and proselytization. Under George W. Bush, more than one out of every ten dollars given to community groups for social services goes to a program based in religion.

These religious programs not only use their government-funded connections to people to proselytize, but also freely discriminate on the basis of religion and sexual orientation in their hiring practices, even when they are hiring people on the government’s dime. Robyn Blumner provides one example of how it all works:

This reallocation of social service money from secular agencies to religiously affiliated programs has also resulted in shifting employment opportunities. But some of these new employers have a shocking job requirement - only Christians need apply.

Goldberg cited the publicly funded Firm Foundation of Bradford, Pa., as a blatant example. The group provides prison inmates with job training, something one would think any trained professional could do. Well, think again. According to Goldberg, the group posted an ad for a site manager. It said that the applicant must be “a believer in Christ and Christian Life today, sharing these ideals when the opportunity arises.” Apparently, experience and qualifications are secondary.

Some people do not know that the Salvation Army, the American branch of which received $341,440,000 from the government in fiscal year 2004, is first and foremost an evangelizing Christian religious organization:

Mission Statement: The Salvation Army, an international movement, is an evangelical part of the universal Christian Church. Its message is based on the Bible. Its ministry is motivated by the love of God. Its mission is to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ and to meet human needs in His name without discrimination.

By “without discrimination,” they mean they’ll evangelize to Christians and non-Christians alike. According to its annual report looking back on 2004, the Salvation Army brought eight and a half million people to its religious meetings on Sunday alone. In other respects, the government-funded Salvation Army is certainly an organization with discrimination. In the Bush years, the Salvation Army has revised its handbook to delete statements of non-discrimination in hiring, and explicitly argues that it is exempt as an organization from civil rights laws prohibiting discrimination in hiring. The Salvation Army has fired employees who don’t subscribe to their conservative Christianity, and others have resigned under pressure. These were people whose salaries were paid for by government funding. The Salvation Army colluded to lend the Bush Administration public support if the Bush Administration would lend it monetary support and let it discriminate against gay people in hiring on the government dime because, as one of its leaders reasoned, hiring gay people “really begins to chew away at the theological fabric of who we are.” All this discrimination is made possible by government resources, government resources which the Constitution mandates are not to be used to establish a religion.

I’m talking now to people who say this is all OK, who say that it’s acceptable for a religious organization to use government funds to set up programs that discriminate against gay people and people of the wrong religion.

If the Church of Satan got money from the government, and used that money to:

1. Promote Satanism
2. Hire only Satanists
3. Fire heterosexual people for being straight
4. Help people

Would that be OK? Would it be OK if a Muslim charity got money from the government, and used that money to:

1. Promote Sharia moral codes
2. Set up Madrassas
3. Fire women for being uncovered
4. Help people

If you can say, “Oh yes! That’s perfectly OK!” Then you and I may disagree on the value of the Constitution, but at least you’re being consistent. If you say to yourself, Oh, but dear, those are the bad religions, and Christianity is the good one, then you get it — this is about government using its resources to help establish religion, and a particular religion at that.

Consider White House Faith-Based Initiatives staffer David Kuo’s recent revelation:

Kuo also maintains that non-Christian groups were sometimes excluded from faith-based funding, even though White House officials insisted the money would be available to all.

Kuo quotes one official who rated grant applications. He told Kuo, “When I saw one of those non-Christian groups on the set I was reviewing, I just stopped looking at them and gave them a zero. A lot of us did.”

In 2004, Esther Kaplan looked into the White House Faith-Based Initiatives program:

After sifting through every grant announcement I could get my hands on from Bush’s faith-based offices, I couldn’t find a single grant issued to a religious charity that wasn’t Christian — no Jewish charities, no Muslim charities, nothing. And when I spoke with Jim Towey, director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, he confirmed that no direct federal grants from his program had gone to a non-Christian religious group. This kind of religious favoritism is exactly what the Constitution’s establishment clause was put in place to prevent.

It is fine to like religious groups. It is fine to like the nice things they do. I certainly am not advocating that anyone do away with religious organizations. But because an organization does some nice things does not mean that it also does not do some inappropriate things. And when an organization does inappropriate things using taxpayer dollars, it becomes publicly accountable for its actions. I am troubled by the inappropriate — constitutionally inappropriate — things that religious groups, disproportionately Christian religious groups. And I am troubled by our national leaders’ increasing willingness to betray citizens’ constitutional protections for a few lousy votes.

I came across this an advertisement for this book today, written by some guy named Darrell Ankarlo, entitled What Went Wrong With America. The ad consists of nothing but this book cover, which, I suppose, is supposed to be so intriguing that we’ll just click on it because we’re dying to get our hands on a copy.

The thing about book covers is that you often can judge a book by them. Those academic books published by unversity presses, for example, that feature works of abstract art having nothing really to do with the content inside, tend to be pretty abstract works of writing themselves, created just to satisfy the formal requirements of the publish-or-perish system, with content that nobody outside of a narrow field would care to read. They are abstracted from the mainstream culture, and end up being about as important as a red square painted on a canvas.

The cover of this book by Darrell Ankarlo tells me quite a bit about Mr. Ankarlo’s vision of what’s wrong with America. Whatever the content inside, it’s clear to me that what Darrell Ankarlo thinks has gone wrong with America is that Americans don’t listen enough to Darrell Ankarlo. The cover tells what the real purpose of the book is: To get Darrell Ankarlo the simulation of fame.

They don’t call it vanity press for nothing. Covers like this are humiliatingly direct in their appeal. The author is practically begging: Look at me! Listen to me! Pay attention to me! Acknowledge that I exist!

So, I’m not going to paste my picture up here or anything, but let me give you my thought about what’s gone wrong with America: Too many Americans seek fame and recognition before stopping to think about what they might do to actually earn fame and recognition.

Pose for the book cover first, like Darrell Ankarlo, with a black turtleneck to cover up the sagging neck, and then throw together some lorem ipsum text later, after you get an agent.

Yesterday, I passed along the prediction that San Diego right wing Congressman Duncan Hunter would declare his intention to run for President in 2008. By gum, just a few minutes later, wouldn’t you know that Representative Hunter went ahead and made the announcement.

Yesterday, I talked about the money that Duncan Hunter has received from Titan Corporation, a company that profits from the Iraq War and was involved in the torture in Abu Ghraib. I also talked about how Duncan Hunter not only voted for the infamous Military Commissions Act, but was also the primary sponsor of that legislation in the House of Representatives.

These two actions are certainly rotten, but does that mean that Duncan Hunter is himself a rotten politician? Could it be that, except for these two grave mistakes, Duncan Hunter has a good record in Congress?

Don’t bet on it. In our scorecard of legislation going through the House of Representatives over the last two years, Duncan Hunter gets a 0 percent progressive rating. Hunter voted to renew the powers of the President to spy against the American people through the nefarious Patriot Act. He voted against protecting the American bald eagle. He voted for a proposed amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America that would prevent people from going to court when their religious liberty is violated. He voted to give the Secretary of Homeland Security the right to overrule laws passed by Congress. Congressman Hunter even voted for a law that would take away American citizenship from babies born right here in the USA.

I have two words that sum up the political nature of Duncan Hunter: Villainous scoundrel. I know that’s a repetitive phrase, but when it comes to Duncan Hunter, a description of villainy bears repeating.

It’s quite interesting to me to see the reaction to the news that the US military was involved in the bombing of an Islamic school, a madrassa, in Pakistan. Pay attention to the language used as people describe the situation:

“80 militants have been killed in an air strike… used as a militant training camp.” say The Muslim Question and Political War Zone, copying and pasting the same text from an uncited source.

Counterterrorism blog calls the madrassa “a recruiting and training camp for Al Qaeda and the Taliban.”

Further Adventures of Indigo Red calls the 80 people who were killed “innocent terrorists”.

I’m not going to make a judgment about whether the 80 people killed in this attack were in fact terrorists, militants, members of Al Quaeda, recruits, or just a bunch of young people getting an education. I wasn’t on the ground. I don’t know.

I wonder, however, how Americans would react if Iraqis were to bomb Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University here in the United States, and then describe it the attack as against a religious school that serves as a training camp for Christian militants and source of recruits for the occupying American military.

How do these two scenarios compare? Is there a different standard?

It’s almost time for those red kettles to go up in front of grocery stores across America, and all across America, people get all rosy cheeked just thinking about doing good… forgetting about all the organizations that do as much good without making such a big show about it… without thinking about where the money that goes into the red kettle really goes to.

Among other things, the money people give to the Salvation Army goes to pay the salaries of lobbyists in Washington D.C. What, oh what, do those Salvation Army lobbyists lobby for? The Salvation Army lobbies in favor of the political agenda of the Religious Right.

There’s the time, for example, when the Salvation Army leaders met behind closed doors with the Bush White House to come up with a strategy for passing a law that would allow government-funded groups to fire people for refusing to join the religions of their bosses. Convert and praise Jesus or lose your job, the Salvation Army law said. That was a practice that the Salvation Army was already engaging in, giving religious tests to employees and telling them to take a hike if the responses were not theologically correct, taking government money all the while. The Salvation Army spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of red kettle money on that political project alone.

What else does your red kettle donation pay for? Political organizing against same-sex marriage, for one thing. The Salvation Army uses its organization to promote opposition to equal marriage rights for same sex-sex couples. The web site of the Salvation Army states, “The Salvation Army believes, therefore, that Christians whose sexual orientation is primarily or exclusively same-sex are called upon to embrace celibacy as a way of life. There is no scriptural support for same-sex unions as equal to, or as an alternative to, heterosexual marriage.” Catch that other part too - the only good homosexual is a homosexual who decides not to have sex for the rest of his or her life.

There’s also the Salvation Army’s history of rescinding benefits to same-sex domestic partners. Said the Human Rights Campaign, “We’re talking about health care, about providing health benefits, and what the Salvation Army has decided to do is prevent certain families from getting health care, and that’s just mean.” Salvation Army supporters responded to Portland’s request that it adhere to the city’s ordinance requiring organizations receiving money from the city government to provide benefits to same-sex domestic partners by sending hate mail with messages such as “You are a sick person who doesn’t deserve to be mayor.” Compassion?

Still want to put that money in the red kettle?

Consider the Salvation Army’s decision to put its religion ahead of the needs of homeless people in Wisconsin. When the Janesville City Council asked the Salvation Army to stop trying to convert people to evangelical Christianity with government money provided through the city government, the Salvation Army said no. The Salvation Army decided that it was more important to keep trying to convert people to Christianity than to help people in need, so it decided to stop work on a homeless shelter until the local government relented and allowed proselytization with government funds. A spokesman said that stopping its religious activities as part of government-funded programs that it administrates would stop the Salvation Army from fulfilling its mission “to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ”. The Salvation Army would let the homeless freeze outside in the Wisconsin winter weather rather than just stop telling people to worship Jesus.

Yes, government funds. The Salvation Army gets a huge amount of praise for helping people in need, but the truth is that a huge amount of the money that the Salvation Army spends comes directly from federal, state, and local government. We, the taxpayers of America, make the sacrifice, but the Salvation Army gets the credit with none of the oversight and accountability that ordinarily goes along with government programs. In 2005, for example, 95 percent of the Salvation Army’s budget for children services came from the federal government, and was used, among other things, to conduct an anti-gay witch hunt in which employees were told to look for signs of homosexual activity in their colleagues, and to expose those colleagues so that they could be fired.

The plain fact is that the Salvation Army would only conduct a tiny fraction of its charitable works if it did not receive billions of dollars of government money. Much of the red kettle money goes toward building and maintaining Salvation Army churches, like the ones Wrangell, Alaska; Griffin, Georgia; Thomasville, North Carolina; Gilroy, California; Kalispell, Montana; Fort Lauderdale, Florida and countless other places across the USA. When you throw your money into the red kettle, are you thinking about helping people in need or about maintaining the temple in Rochester, New York?

I’m not denying that the Salvation Army does some good things with its own resources, but most of the good work it does is with government resources that could just as easily go to other programs that don’t discriminate, don’t lobby the government, and don’t mix religion with social services. Let the Salvation Army support itself, and rely purely on private donations. If the Salvation Army wants to keep preaching a right wing agenda, then it’s long past time that it get off the government dole.

I have not played video games for some seven and a half years, which is not coincidentally the length of time I have been a parent. But last week as I shopped in the thoroughly anti-Christian Target a video game entitled Fable: the Lost Chapters caught my eye with the large text on the cover reading “For Every Choice, A Consequence.” The cover goes on to read:

Imagine a world where every choice and action determines what you become. Where you evolve in real time based on every little thing you do…. Your decisions make you a hero, villain, or anything in between.

That seemed cool enough for me to try, and so I did. But I was disappointed. Whether you turn out to be evil or good is pretty simply dependent upon whether you do clearly good things (kill evil beasts in “good quests”) or clearly bad things (kill nice people and steal). There’s no shade of gray, there’s no ambiguity about whether a course of action will prove to have good or bad effects, and little combination of good and bad in a single character in the game. And the effects of your conduct? Why, if you’re bad, you grow ugly and sport horns. If you’re good, you end up looking wholesome in a beddable Legolas sort of way. If you’re bad, nasty insects swarm around you. If you’re good, you’re followed by butterflies. If you’re bad, townspeople boo you. If you’re good, they cheer. That’s kind of cute, but it’s superficial.

Without the merely superficial differences that follow from your conduct, it’s just another one of those “hero” games with quests and skills and magic points and yawn yawn yawn. These quests and skills and magic points and so on aren’t horrid, but they aren’t special, either. If you fail in a particular attempt, you go back to the start of a quest and try again, and again, and again — until you get it right. Controls are complicated enough — Shift+O, or is that Shift+0?, to cycle through spells — that even the developers lost track of whether you should press the right control key or the right shift key to cast a spell when using a mouse… eeeeeergh. What a mess.

The graphics are awfully pretty, with lots of sweeping shots in three dimensions, and multiple sources of light in a single frame, and pauses for cinematic sweeps through landscapes. But watching pretty graphics is not the same as playing a fun game. I know the game makers love to linger over a shot, and would love to tell me about all the skill that goes into making hair move in just the right way, but I don’t buy a game for pseudo-real hair. I buy a game (ok, every eight years) to have a fun challenge motivated by the promise of irregular reward and the difficulty of an enterprise that is just slightly beyond me. I thought that this game would be different because of a motivating moral dimension — but that was a disappointing non-difference. Without that difference, Fable seemed pretty run-of-the-mill. Considering that I haven’t even played a video game for seven and a half years, I should have been relatively easy to impress. If your gaming habits are more regular, and you’re harder to impress, you may end up even more disappointed than I.

It’s nice to feel as though I still can learn something new every day. Every once in a while, though, there’s something I wish I hadn’t learned, because it chips away at my feeling of security and safety in this world where so many things I’ve taken for granted have been taken away.

Today I learned that some of these newfangled electronic voting machines use wireless technology to communicate voting information.

Hello?
What???
Excuse me?!?

Who was the schmuck that thought this would be a good idea? Think about your experience with wireless communication. When I think about mine, my head just shakes back and forth, making a wobbodeewobbodeewobbo sound. My spittle flies clear across the room in disbelief. I mean, come on! I use a laptop to wirelessly communicate with a cable modem, and the connection gets sketchy when I walk near a running dishwasher, someone turns on the TV, someone else uses a phone, or the microwave goes on to pop some popcorn or heat up somebody’s tea. I use a cordless phone and a cell phone to communicate wirelessly, and I get dropped signals and static-cursed sound all the time. If I move to the wrong space in the house, I hear some excited preacher on AM radio through the speaker. This is usually tolerable, because I can try to reload a web page again, or I can call someone over when a phone call has been dropped, or I can move away from the microwave oven until the popcorn is done popping.

In other words, when I use wireless communication on a day to day basis, I can give up, move away from the problem and try again because it’s OK for little bugs in the system to pop up. The convenience of writing a blog post while sitting in the hallway watching my kids impersonate bunnies makes those glitches worthwhile. But the legitimacy of our voting system is dependent upon the confidence of voters that every single last vote will be properly recorded and properly counted, every time, without fail, millions of times over on a single day. There’s no “do-over” with an election. Anybody who designs voting technology has got to make sure that every single last vote will be recorded and counted correctly, every time, without fail, millions of times over. In that school gym next to the loudspeaker. In the church cafeteria with the microwave in the alcove right next door. In the Masonic lodge that sits under the radio tower. Everywhere, every time, without fail.

And that’s just thinking about mistakes! What about purposeful tampering? These are wireless signals we’re talking about. Wireless signals can be intercepted — what does that do to the secret ballot? Wireless signals can be jammed, and wouldn’t it be convenient if certain polling stations in certain areas that vote certain ways just had awfully mysterious logistical problems for a few hours until someone found that device in the bush outside the window, if they found it at all? Wireless signals can also be sent from an unauthorized source, which could also prove highly convenient to certain parties.

Don’t tell me the voting machine people have every possible problem with wireless communications figured out and tamped down. I mean, think about computer viruses: legions of well-paid geniuses have been working on stamping out computer viruses for some twenty years now, and pimply high school sophomores are still cackling with glee as they unleash havoc. I imagine those with an interest in hacking elections would have more resources at their disposal than the high school sophomores.

Oh, yeah, here’s the kicker: how will we find out when there’s been a problem, if voters don’t get a receipt verifying their vote, and if there isn’t a generated paper trail to record results non-electronically? Answer: we won’t.

You all know I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I generally scoff at people who say George W. Bush was behind the attacks of September 11, 2001, and I have no patience for people who say they’ve proven that the Ohio vote in 2004 was stolen. But you don’t need to have proof that an election was stolen in order to have a corrosion of confidence in a voting system. And if people have lost confidence that the people in power were legitimately elected, then those people will lose confidence in the legitimacy of the underlying democracy. When that happens, all bets are off.

Americans deserve confidence in their voting system. The installation of machines with wireless communications and no paper trail doesn’t help.

It is expected that Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter will announce today that he is planning to run for President of the United States in 2008.

As soon as I read this, my thoughts raced back to an article I wrote 19 days ago that included some nasty information about Duncan Hunter. That information contained the two most important reasons that Duncan Hunter must never become the President of the United States:

1. Duncan Hunter was the primary sponsor of the Military Commissions Act, which has ripped away the foundations of American liberty. Check out a quick summary of the impact of the Military Commissions Act if you’re not familiar with it.

2. One of Duncan Hunter’s dominant source of funds for his political campaigns has been the Titan Corporation. As related in the documentary Iraq For Sale, the Titan Corporation was involved in the torture that took place in Abu Ghraib. This year alone, Duncan Hunter has accepted ten thousand dollars from Titan.

Duncan Hunter stands for torture and the destruction of our freedoms, through and through… and he’s the Republican equivalent of Barack Obama. That tells you quite a bit about the real moral values of the Republican Party.