I finally got around to setting up my scanner, and the first things I scanned were the gifts I received from a swarm of children on voting day, 2006. Go check out that article and be sure to view the full size version of the poster.
Tag Archive for 'democracy'
Someone has created a key which opens all Diebold voting machines, using only an image of the key from the company’s own website. link
Google has not only taken a stance on Net Neutrality (and taken the right stance), they are even encouraging their users to take political action. Check it out.
Of course, it would have been nice if they did this, and deployed a widespread education campaign, many many months ago.
In fact, the conspiracy theory side of me thinks that they don’t want Net Neutrality to be maintained, but they want to go down in history as being the good guy when the battle was being fought, even though, whoops, now they are profitting from their synthetic ability to fragment a commodity market.
The Net Neutrality bill already died yesterday in the House.
Wow. Wow. Stephen Colbert somehow landed the final spot at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, and he absolutely SKEWERED the Bush administration, while standing 15 feet from Bush! You have to see it to believe it.
See the video at crooks and liars here (i think this isn’t a complete video, if anyone finds a better one let me know), and more coverage here.
UPDATE: a torrent of the full video here (thank you, helpful anonymous commenter!)
UPDATE: full length easy to watch version here.
A buddy of mine, Zack Exley, has just launched a new site: RootsPrimary
What is RootsPrimary.org?
Before Super Tuesday, before the Money Primary, and even before the MoveOn Primary, comes a Grassroots Primary among activists and volunteers who start working for candidates long before most candidates have even decided to run. In 2003-4, thanks partly to the Internet, those activists turned American politics on its head by giving a true insurgent candidate a realistic shot at the nomination.
RootsPrimary.org provides those of us who want to get involved early a transparent and democratic mechanism to demonstrate numbers and to begin building powerful organizations for our chosen candidates.
You can also sign up to be a RootsPrimary blogger when the blogging system is launched in May.
The problem that has no name–which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities–is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.
-Betty Friedan, feminism pioneer
Douglas Rushkoff wrote a very interesting essay back in August of 2005, discussing how suidicide bombing is a media virus. The media virus concept is something he discussed in a book of the same name in 1994. It offers a very interesting model of how ideas/trends/behaviors spread through a culture through media.
The essay is a quick read. Here’s an excerpt:
Media viruses … depend on our newly complexified mediaspace to exist. Like biological viruses, they have two main components: a sticky outer shell, and genetic code inside. … The virus replicates if its code can successfully interpolate itself into the confused command structure of our cell’s own code. If the virus succeeds in doing this, it turns the cell into a virus factory — the cell commits suicide in the viruses[sic] name. Early Madonna successfully challenged our faulty, confused, and unarticulated notions about female sexuality. The Rodney King tape successfully challenged the unarticulated rage at the way white cops treat black inner-city men. The viral code replicates as long as we’re unable to talk about the underlying social agenda it provokes.
Suicide bombing is a media virus with very real effects. The sticky outer shell is the event itself — a suicide bombing gets covered on the news. It’s huge news, especially if it occurs in a white western nation. Currently, it’s the fastest spreading kind of news story there is.
The code, like that of any successful media virus, challenges the unarticulated confusion over the relationship of the west to oil, Arabs, Islam, and post-colonialism. Actually, the virus fuels itself on rage going back as far as the Crusades, or certainly since the imposition of CIA-sponsored dictatorships.
When issues remain closeted, culture-wide cognitive dissonance only increases. This makes everyone susceptible to the contagion of a virus whose code can nest within this highly charged gap. For a select few cells within the cultural organism, this means becoming a suicide bomber oneself. For others, it means seeing suicide bombers around every corner — as the accidental death of a Brazilian man in London, thought to be a suicide bomber, confirms.
Samuel Alito has been nominated by President Bush to be on the Supreme Court of the United States. This is a Big Deal, because Supreme Court appointments are for the life of the justice (or until they retire).
Samuel Alito has an elaborate record of being far out of the mainstream, even (and especially) on the issue of giving the national government power over the states.
On Tuesday, the House Judiciary Committee voted along party lines to approve Alito’s nomination. Now the vote goes to the Senate, where a majority vote is needed for confirmation. There are 55 republicans in the senate, and it is expected that the vote will fall on a straight party line. The only way for the confirmation to be blocked is for the democrats to filibuster the vote.
Call your Senators NOW and demand they support a filibuster of the Alito confirmation:
1-877-851-6437
That’s the Capitol. They will say “The Capitol, how may I help you” and then you say “Could you please connect me to Mr(s). _____’s office?” It’s awesome.
Then say something like “I am from [city]. I urge you to filibuster the Alito confirmation. Supreme Court Justices serve in lifetime appointments, and the office is too important to risk confirmation of someone who has demonstrated repeatedly that he is far outside the mainstream.”
If no one picks up, leave a message.
Do this TWICE, once for each senator. NOW. 90 seconds each. (Find out who your senators are here)
And forward this page to all of your friends.
If you call I will dance for you like this:
Lots of info on the confirmation process and Alito’s judicial record here.
Info on Alito from Stories in America:
Michael Avery, President of [The Lawyers Guild], declared, “We are particularly concerned that Samuel Alito will not impose necessary limits on presidential power and insist upon the checks and balances required by the Constitution. His long membership in the Federalist Society and his writings demonstrate that he believes in the Imperial Presidency, which is unfortunately what George W. Bush has been trying to create.” Avery noted that, “Appointing such a person to the Supreme Court is a terrible risk at a time when the President is asserting an unprecedented ability to act outside the Constitution and contrary to the wishes of the other branches, as demonstrated by the illegal electronic surveillance he has admitted authorizing.” The Guild noted that, as documented by the Alliance for Justice, Alito has been extraordinarily deferential to the exercise of power by the executive branch and government officials.
update: here is a list of Senators who are against a filibuster (or undecided).
For the first time all papal documents, including encyclicals, will be governed by copyright invested in the official Vatican publishing house, the Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
Milanese publishing house that had issued an anthology containing 30 lines from Pope Benedict’s speech to the conclave that elected him and an extract from his enthronement speech is reported to have been sent a bill for €15,000 (£10,000). This was made up of 15 per cent of the cover price of each copy sold plus “legal expenses” of €3,500.
Vittorio Messori, who has co-authored works with Pope Benedict and John Paul II, said that he was “perplexed and alarmed . . . This is wholly negative and absolutely disastrous for the Vatican’s image.” A pope’s words should be available to all free of charge, he said, and to “cash in in this way surrounds the clergy with the odour of money”.
Publishers will have to negotiate a levy of between 3 per cent and 5 per cent of the cover price of any book or publication “containing the Pope’s words”. Those who infringe the copyright face legal action and a higher levy of 15 per cent.
Gov. Jim Doyle signed into law today a bill that will require that touch screen voting machines produce a verifiable paper ballot.
The bill requires that if a municipality uses an electronic voting system that consists of a voting machine, the machine must generate a complete paper ballot showing all votes cast by each elector that is visually verifiable by the elector before he or she leaves the machine.
“This is important for democracy. Voters have to be able to trust that their votes are counted,” Mike McCabe, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, said after the bill signing.
I wonder what other states have such laws?
