If terrorists flew planes into the 2 tallest buildings(Motel 6 and Hooters),here in Tempe, Az., it would once again unite us.
Without another attack, could this Red state vs. Blue state hate escalate into a second American Civil War? Is Al-Caeda waiting for us to destroy ourselves?
Posted by TIKI AL at February 8, 2006 01:18 AMOh, you can be sure of another attack. Gotta keep the fear active. Then Bush can say that because he couldn't spy on anyone without a warrant, it is our fault. Civil War will start the moment martial law is declared.
Posted by Judith at February 8, 2006 02:01 AMY'all had better start looking for ways to prepare that crow:
The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is studying 12 hours of audio recordings between Saddam Hussein and his top advisers that may provide clues to the whereabouts of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
The committee has already confirmed through the intelligence community that the recordings of Saddam’s voice are authentic, according to its chairman, Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, who would not go into detail about the nature of the conversations or their context. They were provided to his committee by a former federal prosecutor, John Loftus, who says he received them from a former American military intelligence analyst.
Mr. Loftus will make the recordings available to the public on February 17 at the annual meeting of the Intelligence Summit, of which he is president. On the organization’s Web site, Mr. Loftus is quoted as promising that the recordings “will be able to provide a few definitive answers to some very important - and controversial - weapons of mass destruction questions.” Contacted yesterday by The New York Sun, Mr. Loftus would only say that he delivered a CD of the recordings to a representative of the committee, and the following week the committee announced that it was reopening the investigation into weapons of mass destruction.
The audio recordings are part of new evidence the House intelligence committee is piecing together that has spurred Mr. Hoekstra to reopen the question of whether Iraq had the biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons American inspectors could not turn up. President Bush called off the hunt for those weapons last year and has conceded that America has yet to find evidence of the stockpiles.
Mr. Hoekstra has already met with a former Iraqi air force general, Georges Sada, who claims that Saddam used civilian airplanes to ferry chemical weapons to Syria in 2002. Mr. Hoekstra is now talking to Iraqis who Mr. Sada claims took part in the mission, and the congressman said the former air force general “should not just be discounted.” Mr. Hoekstra also said he is in touch with other people who have come forward to the committee - Iraqis and Americans - who claim that the weapons inspectors may have overlooked other key sites and evidence. He has also asked the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, to declassify some 35,000 boxes of Iraqi documents obtained in the war that have yet to be translated.
“I still believe there are key individuals who have not been debriefed and there are key sites that have never been investigated. I know there are 35,000 boxes of documents that have never been translated. I am frustrated,” Mr. Hoekstra said.
Even if Saddam Hussein stood up at his trial and confesses that he had pre war WMD and shipped it to Syria, the ass clowns of the left wouldn't believe it. These are paranoid nuts who proudly display "911 was an inside job" bumper stickers and chant a "we are not at war" mantra. The paranoid style of politics described by Richard Hofstadter in 1962 remains alive today and firmly entrenched on the left.
Posted by Couldn't Care Less About Screen Names at February 8, 2006 04:14 AMTrolls:
Don't blame us for Jr. making you guys out to be dupes. The more you talk about those imaginary WMD's, the more foolish you look. Keep on talkin' silly ones. I'm enjoying the laughs!
Save a kitten - Scroll A Troll
Posted by pessimist at February 8, 2006 05:29 AMThe grown ups are gonna have to handle this guys.
Everyone knows Sadamm had WMD. Exactly what happened to them is publically unknown, but I sincerely believe that if and when they are found, we. the public may never be told.
Iran is now threatening their attempts at getting Nukes. Now with the move on the left to intimidate any American President from acting militarily due to fear his intelligence may be wrong, I wonder what might a future president Not do because of this political harrassment from the left.
I guess Tel Aviv may have a mushroom cloud form over it before the left will admit that Iran had a bomb, but they would still find a way to say "No blood for Oil".
The grown ups have to do what is right. You children keep screaming and crying on the playground while the rest of us clean things up a bit.
Posted by carpediem at February 8, 2006 05:36 AMGa6thDem, you are being played for the dupe by these trolls, every time you respond. They already know they're idiots, that's why Rove has to pay them to troll rather than them doing it on their own. They don't care about you, Bush, the troops or ideology, they care about the paycheck. Think of it this way, when you scroll a troll, it starves. Makes it much more fun, and beautifies a thread.
Posted by iamcoyote at February 8, 2006 05:46 AMI thought I heard a dipshit around here...but then I flushed the toilet, and it was gone.
Posted by God Of War at February 8, 2006 05:57 AMVoting Irregularity
" You can have the best candidate , a winning position on issues and a vault busting campaign fund and it won't be worth the week's contents of a Port-a-Potty if you allow the other side to cheat "
G
"I Saw It Hacked"
Diebold in Florida
By SUSAN PYNCHON
I was one of ten people present at the "hack" of the Leon County, Florida voting system, which took place on Tuesday, December 13, 2005 around 4:30 in the afternoon at the county elections warehouse. Leon County's voting system is the Diebold Accu-Vote OS 1.94w (optical scan).
The Leon County Supervisor of Elections, Ion Sancho, authorized a "test" of his Diebold voting system to see if election results could be altered using only a memory card. Harri Hursti, a computer programmer from Finland facilitated the test and it has come to be known as the "Harri Hursti Hack."
What follows is my description of that hack and its significance for our nation, which I hope will correct much of the misinformation circulating regarding this event.
To select which voting machine to use for the test, Ion drew a serial number of one voting machine from a container holding all the serial numbers of all the Leon County machines.
Since the test took place at the elections warehouse, all the voting machines were already stored there and the one machine, whose serial number was selected, was located and brought into the warehouse office, where it was plugged into an electrical outlet (so it could operate!). It was not networked to any other machines. We checked the serial number of the machine against the serial number that Ion had randomly selected.
Earlier, Ion had given ONE Diebold memory card to Hursti. Bev Harris and Kathleen Wynne of Black Box Voting were also present at the test.
Harri had programmed the memory card that morning, in his hotel room, using an off-the-shelf crop scanner. I drove Harri in my car from the hotel to the warehouse. When we arrived, Harri was asked to stay outside the warehouse office where the central tabulator is located, so that there would be no question about whether he had had any access to the central tabulator. When the randomly-selected voting machine was brought into the warehouse office, all of us went into the warehouse office except Harri, whom we could see sitting in a chair on the other side of a plate glass window separating the office from the rest of the warehouse.
Ion ran a complete mock election. He had had actual paper ballots pre-printed with the following question:
"Can the votes on this Diebold system be hacked using the memory card?"
There were two possible answers: "Yes" or "No," with an oval to the left of each answer to be filled in by the voter.
Everything was conducted as in a normal election. Ion first printed a "zero tape" (a poll tape from the machine that is supposed to show that nothing has been altered before the election begins). This was the first step in the hack --the zero tape showed zero votes for both the "Yes" answer and the "No" answer, even though Harri had altered the memory card and votes had been subtracted from one answer and added to the other answer. Harri used the interpreted (executable) code to cover up the fact that he had changed the vote counters.
Then eight of us voted, filling in the oval on our paper ballot. Six of us voted "No," the election could not be hacked. Two of us voted "Yes," it could be hacked. Then, one by one, we inserted our ballots into the voting machine. Ion checked after each voter to make sure that the counter on the machine was counting properly as each ballot was inserted. So, we ended up with an accurate count of 8 ballots cast on the screen on the front of the voting machine. Then Ion placed an "ender card" in the machine to end the election and printed the poll tape.
Instead of two "Yes" votes, the poll tape showed seven "Yes" votes.
Instead of six "No" votes, the poll tape showed one "No" vote.
Harri did not just flip the votes, as he wanted to show how easy it was to change the totals completely.
At that point, Ion Sancho's technician, TJ, said, "Well, that doesn't prove anything because the printer template can be changed." (And that is true. The poll tape can be made to read anything at all, which was proved in an earlier test on a Leon County op-scan in May of 2005, when the poll-tape was made to say, at the bottom of the tape, "Is this real or is it Memorex?")
Ion responded to TJ that they were taking this to the next level and that he wanted TJ to upload the memory card to the central tabulator. TJ, who had quite apparently been talking to the Diebold reps, said he didn't want that to happen because he didn't know if Harri might have planted some kind of virus on the memory card that would infect the central tabulator. Ion then explained to TJ that, just an hour earlier, he had obtained permission from the Leon County Council to replace the Diebold system. That meant that the Leon County Diebold system would never be used in any election again, and thus Ion said it was all right to upload the memory card to the central tabulator. (The irony here, of course, is that Diebold would worry about a virus being planted on this particular memory card! What about all the thousands of people around the country who have access to memory cards...doesn't Diebold worry about one of them planting a virus? And the second irony is that ITA testing is supposed to catch these security vulnerabilities and yet Diebold claimed to be worried about a security exploitation by Harri Hursti AFTER all ITA testing had been completed).
So, TJ became convinced that it was all right to upload the memory card, which he did. And there, on the central tabulator screen, appeared the altered results: Seven "Yes" votes and one "No" vote, with absolutely no evidence that anything had been altered. It was a powerful moment and, I will admit, it had the unexpected result for me personally of causing me to break down and cry. Why did I cry? It was the last thing I thought I would do, but it happened for so many reasons. I cried because it was so clear that Diebold had been lying. I cried because there was proof, before my very eyes, that these machines were every bit as bad as we all had feared. I cried because we have been so unjustly attacked as "conspiracy theorists" and "technophobes" when Diebold knew full well that its voting system could alter election results. More than that, that Diebold planned to have a voting system that could alter results. And I cried because it suddenly hit me, like a Mack truck, that this was proof positive that our democracy is and has been, as we have all feared, truly at the mercy of unscrupulous vendors who are producing electronic voting machines that can change election results without detection.
Beyond this, however, what is the real significance of the "Harri Hursti hack?" There are several answers to that question.
First of all, the Hursti hack reveals only one vulnerability in an almost unlimited number of potential flaws or vulnerabilities in electronic voting systems (both op-scans and DREs). However, the Hursti hack is individually significant because the flaw it exposed is a planned vulnerability in the system, not something that is accidentally there. It had to be PUT there (programmed) on purpose. For Diebold to claim innocence about this would be absurd. It would be like saying you didn't know your garage had a door while you were standing there holding the garage door opener. Or, because this security vulnerability is so huge, it would more accurately be like saying you didn't know your house had a garage at all!!
Since something like 95% of computer scientists agree that electronic voting machines (op-scans and DREs) have an almost infinite number of potential flaws or vulnerabilities, the Hursti hack shows, above all, THE IMPORTANCE OF HAVING PAPER BALLOTS for an independent confirmation of machine results. The beauty of paper ballots is that they are completely independent of any machine, unlike the printer paper trail. Therefore, they provide a true independent, manual audit of machine results. Paper ballots are also the only electronic voting method that eliminates, almost completely, any question about voter intent because the ballots are voter-generated, filled in by the voter's own hand, thus eliminating the need for a voter to confirm his/her choices on any printer-issued receipt. Paper ballots are the only way to have a fail-safe election with any electronic voting machine. You must have paper ballots and you must manually audit (count) a portion or all of those ballots in every election.
The ONLY evidence in the Hursti hack that could discredit his alteration of results were the paper ballots themselves.But these ballots can only be useful if they are actually counted after an election to check against the machine count. The Hursti hack shows clearly that there must be an independent paper trail that can be manually audited to confirm (or discredit) machine results. The hack exposes a serious electronic voting flaw, but then, ironically, re-instates optical scan as the only electronic voting method that provides truly independent, manual audit capabilities.
Susan Pynchon is a member of Florida Coalition for Fair Elections, and can be reached through Vote Trust USA, where this piece originally appeared.
Posted by G at February 8, 2006 08:30 AMHow about this from BradBlog!
Posted by bbtb at February 8, 2006 08:57 AMG. I thought you should know, I scrolled past that post because it was too long. Next time, just post a link, please.
Posted by iamcoyote at February 8, 2006 08:59 AMY'all had better start looking for ways to prepare that crow:
And you ass clowns will need a 10 h.p. pressure washer and a gallon of bleach to get clean after the spooging this administration is doing to you.
G. I thought you should know, I scrolled past that post because it was too long.
I read it. Very powerful. But I concur, link it next time.
The grown ups are gonna have to handle this guys.
Like the ones in the current administration? Like you? God damn, are we fucked! I think the $1 trillion in corporate welfare THIS YEAR ALONE and no bid contracts are ample proof of that.
Posted by phidipides at February 8, 2006 09:30 AMBut paradox, please don't ever write like they do a dKos. Please!
Posted by idiosynchronic at February 7, 2006 11:54 AM
******
I'm with idio, dKos can link here, because TLC is that good!
Posted by iamcoyote at February 7, 2006 12:24 PM
******
Sorry I didn't have a chance to comment on this sooner but your both right!
I come hear to read pessimist, Steve, Mary, Marie, paradox, Duckman GR and let's not forget eRiposte. This is the best group blog out there!
Goddam it! stop it with the trolls, p-dippy!
Posted by iamcoyote at February 8, 2006 09:43 AMphidi-cent: Save our country and apple pie.
SHOVE A POLE UP A TROLL.
Posted by TIKI AL at February 8, 2006 10:03 AMTrolls are like flowers. God put them here for me to hit with the WeedEater.
Posted by phidipides at February 8, 2006 10:24 AMshove a pole up a flower? no rhymeee.
OK, Who IS church-burning, if not arsonist trolls? Lets give NSA some ideas.
Posted by TIKI AL at February 8, 2006 10:32 AMBoy, oh boy, oh boy. Let the myth making begin: "... when they [WMDs] are found [in Iraq], we. the public may never be told." All this administration has to do is find ONE [1, uno, ein] traceable WMD in Iraq and it will be able to settle the legitimacy of GWB's invasion FOREVER. Dubya's critics will be COMPLETELY SILENCED and their arguments DESTROYED. But rather than win that battle the neocons, in accordance with their much celebrated flower child give peace a chance hippy dippy peacenik temperament, will pass up the opportuny to write the history books. Yeah, right!
Posted by Paul Lucic at February 8, 2006 11:42 AMWhat was that real reason for Chalabi's visit late last year?
I said somehthing to the effect, it was needed so they could plant the evidence of WMD's. bu$hco needs to supply a defense or he will lose all validity for the upcoming elections!
From the same story:
“That is a very unusual story,” Schoomaker responded. “I have no idea why we would ever do something like that. We have issued body armor, the very best that exists in the world. Every soldier has it.
(Schoomaker is the Army Chief of Staff)
“We certainly have procedures that account for battle loss, and I just find it a highly unusual story. But we’ll certainly follow up and correct it if there’s any truth to it.”
“First Cavalry Division leadership is going to do everything to ensure this issue is brought to a conclusion that is both in line with procedures that apply to all its soldiers and in the best interest of our veterans who have served so proudly and honorably in Iraq,” Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, the division's spokesman at Fort Hood, told the Killeen Daily Herald for today’s edition.
Bleichwehl said soldiers are not held financially responsible for any equipment lost, damaged or destroyed in combat."
To me it sounds like this story will get the personal attention of the Army's top guy. I didn't say was resolved, but I am pretty sure it WILL be resolved shortly. IMHO the orginal story is not complete because it doesn't say what happened when Rebrook submitted his memo to supply. Before you whine, the supply people are not usually assigned to units but to a base, so they would have no record of his injuries or the battle damage to his gear. Yes they are anal, but that job sometimes calls for it. They might even change the procedures so this type of snafu doesn't happen again. To summarise: This is a low level Army management problem that probably doesn't rise to the level of the Secratary of Defense. As you know by reading this site, the Secratary is too busy drawing up torture plans, choosing what houses or milk factories to bomb, or just trying to divert more money to Haliburton.
Posted by at February 8, 2006 12:16 PMWrong thread Anon, dick!
Posted by bbtb at February 8, 2006 12:26 PMYeah, I'm sure those WMD will turn up. Bush has been looking for them under the Oval Office furniture.
Posted by Judith at February 8, 2006 12:26 PMYour excuses don't hold up! I guess when he hands in his memo to supply they can't see he his limb missing! So they are anal and blind!
Ft. Hood delays his outprocessing because of a $700 dollar snafu for body armor but no one realizes he lost an arm in Iraq because of a bomb!
Man, your about as funny as a one legged man in an ass kicking contest!
They could plant the "Doomsday Weapon" prop from the "Planet of the Apes" movie, and I STILL will never believe that after strumming his prune in a box for 10 years, Sadaam was somehow an "imminent threat" to us. ABSURD. Next reason for the illegal invasion, please.
Posted by TIKI AL at February 8, 2006 03:42 PMOK, Who IS church-burning, if not arsonist trolls?
Well, I don't want to point fingers...and this is only rumor until the wiretaps come in...so lets just say the driver of the van is a person...please set your far left liberal faggot decoder rings to setting X-14 for this...the driver is a person we can call Suspect #1, otherwise known as Uck-may Og-day. The person throwing the lit molotov cocktails was possibly Suspect #2, one Arp-kay Iem-day. The brains of the outfit is thought to be Suspect #3, one Ip-day It-shay.
The NSA is on their tracks, and will provide all of the information necessary for conviction as long as they don't have to talk to a judge first, who would likely never go for this silly shit in the first place.
Posted by phidipides at February 8, 2006 07:46 PMphidi-dollar(you gained social standing with that gem): I actually had a Capt. Midnight decoder ring(not the rare pig-latin edition, however).
I agree with your preliminary investigation. I am not a rat, however, in their case I would make an exception, and spill my guts to the proper authorahtahs.
Everyone living near Baptist churchs, please be on the lookout for ROVEing bands of arsonist-trolls. They drive dark SUVs with Bush-Cheney bumper stickers.
Posted by TIKI AL at February 8, 2006 08:15 PM