A Grand Illusion

And yet… a story just moved by the AP reports that Florida voting machines are still not entirely tamper-proof:

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Florida’s optical scan voting machines are still flawed, despite efforts to fix them, and they could allow poll workers to tamper with the election results, according to a government-ordered study obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.

At the request of Secretary of State Kurt Browning, a Florida State University information technology laboratory went over a list of previously discovered flaws to see whether the machines were still vulnerable to attack.

“While the vendor has fixed many of these flaws, many important vulnerabilities remain unaddressed,” the report said.

The lab found, for example, that someone with only brief access to a machine could replace a memory card with one preprogramed to read one candidate’s votes as counting for another, essentially switching the candidates and showing the loser winning in that precinct.

Let me clarify; it’s not that easy. To get to the memory card one would have to unscrew the case, which is kind of hard to do without drawing a lot of attention. But I’m not even comfortable with chances of it happening being that small. What happens when voting machines are being transported to the polling place? Are these things constantly being watched?

I hate that I’m sounding like a bad Mel Gibson movie–that narrows it down, right?–but voting is one of our most important rights; it is preservative of other rights, in fact. If something in this world needs to be absolutely tamper-proof, it’s these damn machines.

70 percent of Americans think Congress is right to investigate Alberto Gonzales. And 51 percent think the Bush administration is more corrupt than previous administrations.

Via TPM.

According to the White House, its arms deal with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel is meant to counter Iranian power in the Middle East, and that country’s desire to build a nuclear arsenal. For example, part of the deal with Saudi Arabia, for example, calls on stricter enforcement of trade restrictions with Iran.

I’m not sold by that.

Someone in the administration or the relevant departments has to understand that further arming Iran’s neighbors will only strengthen its resolve to go nuclear. A confrontation between Iran and Saudi Arabia or Egypt would never get to the point where the new weapons would make a difference. I doubt even Israel would dare attack Iran on the eve of its developing a nuclear weapon. We’ve seen how much pressure Iran can exert on Israel via Hezbollah, and it’s safe to assume their power has since grown. Beyond that, it would seem a little counter intuitive for Israel to go along with a huge arms deal with the Saudis and Egypt. Ehud Olmert even said at a cabinet meeting that Israelis “understand the need of the United States to support the Arab moderate states, and there is a need for a united front between the U.S. and us regarding Iran.” But then you read this:

Mr. Burns said that under the plan American military aid for Israel would increase to $3 billion annually over 10 years, from $2.4 billion now.

Matthew Yglesias also points to an interesting point made by Brad Plumer. The Saudi Royal family keeps “the size of the national army and air force to the barest minimum” for fear of a coupe. Have the Saudis all of the sudden decided to change this policy?

So what’s behind the arms deal?

The only answer I can up with is that it has nothing to do with Iranian power in the region as a whole, but with Iranian power in Iraq. The administration needs the Saudis’ help in Iraq, starting with collaboration with the Maliki government. It makes no sense to me that the administration needs to spend billions of dollars in military aid in order to keep Sunnis and Shiites at each other’s throats. But that does seem like a reasonable price to get them to work together.

Now Antonioni.

Kenneth Starr’s law firm gives more to Clinton than Republicans.

Not very. It can be done in about a page.

Via Ezra Klein.

Walk Score, a very cool tool that lets you type in your address and figures out the walkability of your neighborhood depending on proximity to coffee shops, grocery stores and so on, rates my apartment in Midtown Miami a 60 out of a 100. My place near Dupont Circle in DC gets a 98.

Miami has a long way to go. Maybe once they finish this, the Miami score will go up.

Via Critical Miami.

Straight talk express.

This weekend, my parents come up to DC, which they’d never visited before. I’ve spent the last couple of days showing them around. I took them to most of the cliche places: Mount Vernon, Vietnam wall, the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial… The Lincoln Memorial is by far my favorite DC monument. Like Nixon, I’ve gone in the late night and sat quietly by the huge, 19-foot statute. (And like Nixon, I may not have been sober at the time.)

Every time, I read his second inaugural address engraved on the marble wall, and try to imagine him–lanky, awkward, freakishly tall yet benign and strong–giving the speech. The end of the speech, “with malice toward none, with charity for all…”–the non-idiot’s precedent to Bush’s “uniter, not a divider” incoherence–always made me wish for many more Lincolns in our presidential future. This time around, I focused on several sentences which I probably looked over in the past because I didn’t remember ever reading them.

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.

Yes. In these times of indiscriminate religious invocation and overreach, we are in need of another Lincoln, or at the very least, we must make use of his wisdom.

Everything I’ve read of Lincoln–most recently Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals–details a humble, down-to-earth man with a strong hold on basic convictions in a world gone mad. (Again, possibly the precedent to Bush’s pretensions, though the White House communications people likely have something to do with that.) One anecdote tells of a supporter of the North telling Lincoln they should pray God is on their side, and Lincoln responding they should instead pray that they’re on God’s side.

Another has a political opponent in a Congressional race polling members of a congregation by a show of hands, or some such device, whether they’re going to heaven. When Lincoln, who was present, fails to respond, the questions turn to him and the opponent asks where Lincoln thought he was going, heaven or hell. Lincoln coolly responds, I’m going to Congress, and walks out.

Yes, let’s pray for many more Lincolns.

Max Blumenthal has the rare gift of both making you laugh and scaring the shit out of you simultaneously. Check out his latest video, “Rapture Ready” on Christians for Israel.

I know this makes it three video posts in a row, which I really don’t like doing. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever done it. But this does include all the bad things in life that must be actively mocked–fanatical Christianity, fanatical Zionism, Rick Santorum, Joseph Lieberman…

I really want to see this.

Yep. There’s a nice brouhaha going down between Rick at Stuck on the Palmetto and the fanatics over at Babalu Blog–which I don’t link to because I care about your brain cells–over Rebecca Wakefield’s interview. I don’t totally agree with Rick on Oscar Corral. I think he gives him too much credit for standing up “the goons and bullies that slink through the back alleys of Little Havana.” That is his job, and while Oscar deserves credit for other things, that is not exactly one of them.

Plus, the characterization is something of the cultural stereotype Oscar does a decent job of debunking in his reporting. I know plenty of people who live in Little Havana who find the stuff on the extremist right-wing, Cuban-American blogs and radio stations just as offensive as the rest of rational world.

I am also uncomfortable with the fact that Rebecca Wakefield runs with that whole wide-eyed reporter talking point. Oscar might think the Herald is a “fortress of truth”, but there’s a daily section in the paper called “Corrections and Clarifications” which begs to differ.

But let’s face it, compared to the egotistical, delusional nostalgia and reactionary politics that go down at Babalu, Rick’s post sounds like Cartesian logic to me.