November 27, 2007 archive

Muse in the Morning

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Muse in the Morning

The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

Birds Flying High, You Know How I Feel…

Lately, I find it more and more difficult to come and talk to you here.  It is hard for me to do so without saying at all times that I feel strongly that we have lost our path, are wandering further and further from it, and that our new route leads only to disaster.  And what is hardest for me is the feeling that many of us are the leaders of our departure.

The crisis before us has been well-recounted, and I do not wish to revisit all of it.  But certain things are absolute: Our constitutional rights have been repeatedly abrogated, violated, and removed by our government.  This same government, of and by the American people, has blatantly and openly committed numerous war crimes, and indeed many candidates for the highest political office in the land openly proclaim that they will continue to commit war crimes should they be elected.  This same government, having collected more taxes than any other in history and spent even more than that, also openly states that it can not and will not account for where billions of those tax dollars have gone.  This same government has led our nation into a war which has cost the lives of thousands of Americans, hundreds of thousands of civilians, and has neither success nor victory in sight, yet as every other nation allied with us is withdrawing, our government has escalated our involvement.

As bloggers, all of us have played an important role in bringing these facts to the American people, who have rightly risen in indignation which crosses all racial, social, political and economic boundaries.  We have played an essential role in highlighting how important these actions by our government, a government which we permit to act in our name based on the premise that we ourselves have formed it by contractual agreement in the Constitution, damage the most fundamental nature of what we ourselves are – a nation of free citizens forming a democratic Republic by choice.

Put simply, a United States of America where the government violates its own laws and treaties to commit war crimes, where tax revenues disappear without the people being told of its use, where the government refuses to allow citizens the right to hear evidence against them and tortures them into giving evidence against themselves is a nation with neither meaning nor significance.  In such a United States, we cease to be citizens and become serfs.

A Dem who keeps her promise

It’s nice to know that there are still Progressive Dems out there who actually do live up to their 2006 campaign promises.

Secretary of State Debra Bowen has filed suit against Election Systems & Software, Inc. (ES&S) for nearly $15 million after a four-month investigation revealed the company had repeatedly violated state law.

Bowen, who unseated incumbent Bruce McPherson in 2006 by a narrow 3% (officially), campaigned on a Progressive platform whose centerpiece called for cleaning up the California voting system.  True to her word, she is now aggressively pursuing claims of eVote fraud.

Secretary Bowen is suing ES&S for $9.72 million in penalties for selling 972 machines that contained hardware changes that were never submitted to, or reviewed by, the Secretary of State. Furthermore, she is seeking nearly $5 million to reimburse the five counties that bought the machines believing they were buying certified voting equipment.

“ES&S ignored the law over and over and over again, and it got caught,” said Bowen, the state’s top elections officer. “California law is very clear on this issue. I am not going to stand on the sidelines and watch a voting system vendor come into this state, ignore the laws, and make millions of dollars from California’s taxpayers in the process.”

Bowen claims ES&S fraudulently substituted almost a thousand rigged boxes in five northern California counties, including San Francisco County:      

The sales in question involve ES&S’s AutoMARK ballot-marking devices that 14 California counties use to comply with the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) requirement that voters with disabilities have a way to cast ballots privately and independently. Unlike direct recording electronic (DRE) devices, the AutoMARK prints a voted ballot that is counted by an optical scanner along with other paper ballots.

   In July 2007, Secretary Bowen learned that ES&S had sold AutoMARK A200s – a version of the AutoMARK A100 that had been altered without authorization from the Secretary of State – to five counties in 2006. The counties collectively spent about $5 million for the equipment: Colusa bought 20 machines, Marin bought 130, Merced bought 104, San Francisco bought 558, and Solano bought 160. Elections officials in the five counties believed they were purchasing the certified AutoMARK A100s when, in fact, they had purchased AutoMARK A200s.

Bowen has also gone after ES&S in Los Angeles, where she decertified the company’s InkaVote boxes that had been scheduled for use in February’s Presidential primary/electoral college referendum:

Both of these actions have come as a result of an an unprecedented top to bottom review of California voting systems.

This is exactly what she promised to do as Secretary of State and she is delivering in a big way. Echoing language she used on the campaign trail last year, she said in a statement (PDF):

   

California voters are entitled to have their votes counted exactly as they were cast. This top-to-bottom review is designed with one goal in mind: to ensure that California’s voters cast their ballots on voting systems that are secure, accurate, reliable, and accessible.

Thank you, Secretary Bowen, for keeping your promise.

A candle for Riley Ann

Fifteen years ago, I represented a fine young reporter who wrote a heartbreaking series of stories about a three-year-old victim of child abuse, and, later, about the fate of her younger sister.  The reason for the representation is largely irrelevant ~ it had much more to do with a vindictive prosecutor (hacked off about earlier stories my client had written) than with anything my client had written with regard to the little girl. Indeed, what my client had done with regard to the child abuse case was just shy of heroic.

During the course of that representation, I wrote an Op-Ed for the local newspaper. The reason for the piece was advocacy, of course, but it was also because the story itself had so touched my soul.  On the Sunday it was scheduled to appear, I flipped to the Op-Ed page and was so disappointed to find that it not there.  It wasn’t there because the thoughtful editor of that section of the paper had put it on the first page, as a friend I had called, in tears, so kindly pointed out.

The Great Dem/Libertarian Alliance: One Too Many Kooks and Up in Smoke!

Ahhh…it always hurts when something which seemed so promising comes crashing down around you, well…not me…but you know what I mean.  Even more so when the person who proposes the something promising seems very cavalier in bringing it down.  Oh well…let’s see the end of the Great Dem/Libertarian Alliance even before it really began!

We own Iraq: The Shock Doctrine perfected

It’s time to add another star to the flag. We’re never leaving Iraq. Ever. The Sun will go red giant in about five billion years, and we’ll still be in Iraq.

TPM Muckraker:

So it begins. After years of obfuscation and denial on the length of the U.S.’s stay in Iraq, the White House and the Maliki government have released a joint declaration of “principles” for “friendship and cooperation.” Apparently President Bush and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki signed the declaration during a morning teleconference.

As TPMM  points out, the agreement doesn’t explicitly discuss a military presence, and when it does refer to our protecting a “democratic Iraq”:

A “democratic Iraq” here means the Shiite-led Iraqi government. The current political arrangement will receive U.S. military protection against coups or any other internal subversion. That’s something the Iraqi government wants desperately: not only is it massively unpopular, even among Iraqi Shiites, but the increasing U.S.-Sunni security cooperation strikes the Shiite government — with some justification — as a recipe for a future coup.

In other words, Iraq’s “government” will remain our puppet. Should they have the temerity to attempt to do anything of which we disapprove, we can simply threaten to withdraw our protection. Needless to say, this will not be popular with most Iraqis, but when have their opinions- or lives- mattered, anyway?

When MLDB diaried this, this morning, his linked article was a little different from the one I read. Here’s what I consider key, as reported by the Associated Press:

The two senior Iraqi officials said Iraqi authorities had discussed the broad outlines of the proposal with U.S. military and diplomatic representatives. The Americans appeared generally favorable subject to negotiations on the details, which include preferential treatment for American investments, according to the Iraqi officials involved in the discussions.

As I said in MLDB’s diary:

Let’s be clear: this is Naomi Klein’s disaster capitalism. Let’s be doubly clear: we, the taxpayers, will be paying for an exclusive security force whose sole mission will be the protection of the private corporations who will own and operate Iraq.

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Pony Party: In the running for lamest pony party evah!

Good afternoon! I am a Procrastinating Pickle and this is an open thread. Have at it, kidz!

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