All of the media are spinning frantically and manically on one issue tonight and you know what it is.
Moving along.
BUSH THE FATHER QUIETLY TRIED TO HAVE RUMSFELD FIRED BUT BUSH THE SON WOULDN’T HAVE IT.
According to the article, Bush, Sr. quietly worked in the background to have Rummy fired in order to save his son’s miserable failure of a presidency (sorry, but shit happens when elections are stolen), the family legacy and finally, the country. Did son W. Bush listen to his father? Nope. Instead, as a rebellious and narcissistic teenager, W. rebelled, dug in deeper, and as the ultimate “decider” kept Rummy in office. Why, may I ask, does the planet have to be involved with and crippled by a power struggle between Daddy and Son W.? Tragically, we are. LS
Excerpts:
The elder Bush's intervention was an extraordinary attempt to rescue simultaneously his son, the family legacy and the country. The current president had previously rejected entreaties from party establishment figures to revamp his administration with new appointments. There was no one left to approach him except his father. This effort to pluck George W. from his troubles is the latest episode in a recurrent drama -- from the drunken young man challenging his father to go "mano a mano" on the front lawn of the family home in Kennebunkport, Maine, to the father pulling strings to get the son into the Texas Air National Guard and helping salvage his finances from George W.'s mismanagement of Harken Energy. For the father, parental responsibility never ends. But for the son, rebellion continues. When journalist Bob Woodward asked George W. Bush if he had consulted his father before invading Iraq, he replied, "He is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to."
The former president, a practitioner of foreign policy realism, was intruding on the president's parallel reality. But the realist was trying to shake the fantasist in vain. "The president believes the talking points he's given and repeats on progress in Iraq," a Bush administration national security official told me. Bush redoubles his efforts, projects his firmness, in the conviction that the critics lack his deeper understanding of Iraq that allows him to see through the fog of war to the Green Zone as a city on a hill.
SALON.COM: “George Bush Sr. asked retired general to replace Rumsfeld” By Sidney Blumenthal”
HILIARIOUS! DELAY TELLS FELLOW GOP TO IGNORE THE PRESS AND TO “STAND ON PRINCIPLE.”
Principle a la DeLay?
I am laughing so hard it hurts. LS
From The Washington Post.com via The Huffington Post
WASHINGTON POST.COM: DELAY SAYS TO IGNORE THE PRESS AND STAND ON
“PRINCIPLE”
NOT SO FUNNY. APPARENTLY THERE WERE BIG PROBLEMS WITH THE ELECTION IN CALIFORNIA IN CONVICTED CRIMINAL DUKE CUNNINGHAM’S DISTRICT.
Brad Friedman does not decry voter fraud or election type shenanigans. He argues against the efficacy of the Diebold and other electronic voting machines that have no paper trails. The issue at stake is “propriety ownership of the source code” that companies such as Diebold refuse to reveal for a lot of BS (aka profit driven) reasons. Bottom line, these machines have been proven to be infinitely hackable and are owned by those who need a government who will do their bidding. Never forget that the former CEO of Diebold said he would deliver the 2004 election to Bush. He and Kenneth Blackwell of Ohio followed their dreams and now we have the nightmare of Bush.
If you are not suspicious or angry with this, you need to wean yourself from whatever flight from reality narcotic you are addicted to. Maybe one in this state of denial should simply turn off the TV, radio, cancel local newspaper subscriptions and read non partisan and scholarly (yeah, I know, hard and insufferably boring stuff) or go to the library. If you hate to read you could instead watch Congressional hearings on CSPAN and decide how you feel about issues for yourself. A new thought! Make your own informed decision about an issue. Gosh! For a nation of such extraordinary wealth and with so many citizens who hold college degrees, we surely have become so.... never mind…..LS
Excerpt from Brad’s Blog
The biggest concern about the race, by far, is that San Diego County uses two types of Diebold voting systems -- optical-scan and touch-screen -- both of which have not only proven to be disastrously unreliable in San Diego County and California in the past, but have also been demonstrated over the last six months to feature dozens of exceedingly well-documented and remarkable security vulnerabilities, making them extremely accessible to tampering. Especially if anyone has unsupervised physical access for more than a minute or two with them.
The voting machines used in Tuesday's election were sent home with volunteer poll workers the night before the election, according to the San Diego County Registrar of Voters office today. As well, The BRAD BLOG has received reports that in some cases, poll workers may have had the machines alone at their houses, unsupervised, for a week or even two prior to Tuesday's election....
Last February, California Sec. of State Bruce McPherson, himself, commissioned and released an independent security analysis [PDF] regarding just one aspect of both types of Diebold voting machines used in yesterday's San Diego race, after the memory cards used in those machines were found to have been extremely vulnerable to tampering. A mock election in Leon County, Florida last December revealed that tampering with the memory cards enabled the results of a mock election, run by Election Supervisor Ion Sancho, to be completely reversed.
McPherson's own report, completed by computer scientists at the University of California, looked at just that one aspect of the Diebold system's vulnerability -- the memory cards used to store vote totals and give other instructions to the voting machines -- and determined that "there is a serious flaw in the key management of the crypto code that otherwise should protect the AV-TSx from memory card attacks."
The report described a "number of security vulnerabilities" and found that the flaws on these systems could be exploited easily without the use of any passwords or cryptographic keys.
According to McPherson's report, "Anyone who has access to a memory card...and can tamper with it (i.e. modify its contents), and can have the modified cards used in a voting machine during election, can indeed modify the election results from that machine in a number of ways."
The tampering would be invisible, according to the report. "The fact that the results are incorrect cannot be detected except by a recount of the original paper ballots."
Beyond tampering with both of the Diebold AccuVote systems used in yesterday's election, McPherson's report continues to detail another family of "more serious vulnerabilities" that "go well beyond" the type of attack described above:
The Brad Blog.com June 8 Posting on Problems with Election in California
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