Florida: The Election is In Your Hands

I voted in St. Johns County, Florida, this morning, a reliably Republican area that uses optical voting machines which spit mismarked paper ballots back at voters, giving you a chance to mark up a new one and try again. Few ballots were spoiled here in 2000 and the same process is in place this year.

Much to my amazement, the "A-C" precinct worker checking my identification hesitated before giving me a ballot, challenging my signature. My penmanship has been in steady decline since I began waging war against my wrists as a code monkey in the '80s. The signature they had on file for me had to be 20 years old, which is inexplicable because I moved to Florida in 1997, so the two scribblings barely resembled each other. Fortunately, because my driver's license signature matched and my license photo looks like the deranged loner you see here on Workbench, worker "D-F" talked him into giving me my damn ballot.

I don't know what's going on here, but I'm hoping it's just an overzealous precinct worker. If Florida election supervisors are encouraging workers to pass judgment on voter signatures, this is going to be a long day.

Florida · Politics · 2004/11/02 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Google News search: "If Kerry wins", 1,450 results; "if Bush wins", 1,140 results; "if Nader wins", 1 result.

Politics · 2004/11/02 · Comment · Link

Weblogger, Love Thyself

The New York Times asked several webloggers today to identify the most important moment in the 2004 presidential campaign. I love the answer given by attorneys John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson, publishers of Power Line:

The most important event of the campaign was the exposure of documents cited by 60 Minutes in its report on President Bush's Air National Guard service as fraudulent. We participated in this exposure by asking our readers for information relevant to the documents' authenticity, and then by organizing and disseminating the information we received on topics like the typewriters of the early 1970's and arcane points of military protocol in the same era.

We posted our observations about the 60 Minutes documents on the morning of Sept. 9, the day after Dan Rather's report was broadcast. We updated the posting through the day as new information came in from readers. Within 12 hours, more than 500 other Web sites had linked to ours, millions of people were aware of the serious questions that had been raised about CBS's documents, and CBS News executives were on the defensive.

When it became clear within a few days that the documents were indeed fake, it was widely recognized that journalism had changed forever. Never again will the mainstream news media be able to dictate the flow of information to the American people.

Given three paragraphs of prime real estate in the Times op-ed section, these guys made them count, taking credit for revolutionizing politics, journalism, and typewriters of the 1970s.

Journalism · Politics · 2004/11/02 · Comment · Link

At Least the Opposition is Still Loyal

Because this is primarily a technical weblog, I know there are right-wing readers who could leap to the defense of the Bush/Cheney campaign. Pretend for a moment I'm not a hopeless yellow-dog Democrat. Help me understand the logic of demanding loyalty oaths to attend Bush rallies, even to the point of driving away and alienating supporters.

In Pennsylvania, a GOP backer was refused tickets to a rally and harassed by campaign staffers. Her offense: Getting a ride from a coworker with a Kerry/Edwards sticker on her car.

... a man wearing a Bush-Cheney T-shirt confronted [Simi] Nischal in the parking lot and told her to leave.

"He was so rude, he made me feel like a criminal," Nischal said. "I said, 'That's not fair, you are losing a supporter.' [And he said], 'We don't care about your support.' "

Nischal said onlookers cheered and laughed at her as she left the property.

In Florida, a state senator led a crowd of 2,000 waiting for President Bush to say a pledge of allegiance, but not one to the country. To Bush.

"I want you to stand, raise your right hands," and recite "the Bush Pledge," said Florida state Sen. Ken Pruitt. The assembled mass of about 2,000 in this Treasure Coast town about an hour north of West Palm Beach dutifully rose, arms aloft, and repeated after Pruitt: "I care about freedom and liberty. I care about my family. I care about my country. Because I care, I promise to work hard to re-elect, re-elect George W. Bush as president of the United States."

I can understand cultivating a healthy amount of suspicion among campaign apparatchiks to ferret out people who are only attending a rally to raise hell. But there are a lot more Americans who would eagerly attend an event to respectfully hear the president make his case, even a partisan like me. Reading Joe Dougherty's report from Bush's recent Jacksonville rally at Alltel Stadium made me wish I had been there.

How can this Dear Leader Kim Jong-il stuff possibly help Bush? If John Kerry demanded proof of my loyalty, I'd vote for Pat Paulsen.

Politics · 2004/10/29 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

Newsday columnist Ellis Hedican asks a good question: If we can trust banks to get millions of ATM transactions correct with a paper receipt every single time, why can't we trust the process of counting our votes?

A big computer somewhere in the bowels of Citibank recorded my every twitch. I am sure of it. One hundred dollars is gone from my checking account. The date, time and place of my transaction are recorded for eternity. And when the monthly statement is mailed to my apartment, every last detail will be right there in black and white. I know this from experience.

Politics · 2004/10/29 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

The Incredible Shrinking Server

I spent some time this afternoon compacting the seven Frontier databases that hold the weblogs on Buzzword.Com. Weblog publishers should see improved performance on page loads and other requests.

Also, I have added two links to the sidebar that help promote weblogs on the server: top 100 rankings and a list of recently updated weblogs. I suspect that the latter needs some more debugging. Weblogs should appear on the list within minutes of being updated.

Buzzword users: If you'd like to help bring more search engine traffic to sites in the free weblog community, add these two links to your site's blogroll. Google has been slow to restore the page rank of weblogs since the move from Weblogs.Com, so I'm looking for ways to promote active sites with more links.

To make changes to a Manila site's blogroll, log in and click the Edit button below the list of links.

Manila · 2004/10/28 · Comment · Link

Dirty, Scurrilous Lesbians

MSNBC political analyst Lawrence O'Donnell had a Howard Beale moment on Scarborough Country Friday, calling Swift Boat Veterans for Slander founder John O'Neill a lying liar who lies around a hundred times.

O'Donnell was just getting warmed up, though. Here's the transcript, picked up after O'Neill was punted and the show turned to the subject of Mary Cheney's publicly debated lesbianism:

GUEST HOST PAT BUCHANAN: ... would it not have been wise for Kerry himself, when the controversy came up over the Cheney daughter -- we were talking about it for six, seven days -- if Kerry himself had just moved, look, if anyone's taken offense, I apologize; let's move on?

LAWRENCE O'DONNELL: Yes. I now think the way that whole Cheney daughter thing played out, that that would have been the right line, that -- suggesting surprise at the offense, but if you've taken the offense, I'm sorry.

BURKMAN: Do you think it's OK that they attacked Cheney's daughter?

O'DONNELL: They didn't attack the daughter.

GOP STRATEGIST JACK BURKMAN: Well, do you think what they said is OK?

O'DONNELL: Yes.

BURKMAN: Is it?

O'DONNELL: Yes.

(CROSSTALK)

O'DONNELL: She's a lesbian and she has lesbian sex.

BURKMAN: But is appropriate to call attention, for a presidential candidate...

O'DONNELL: The reason I know that is that her father told me.

(CROSSTALK)

O'DONNELL: Her father and mother told me she's a lesbian and has lesbian sex.

(CROSSTALK)

BURKMAN: That's not the issue.

(CROSSTALK)

BURKMAN: That's not the issue. My question is, do you think it's appropriate for a person seeking the highest office in the world to raise that in a presidential debate?

O'DONNELL: Because I believe there is nothing negative about lesbianism, and I'm very much in favor of as much lesbianism as lesbians want to create in the world, and as many of lesbian Cheney family members as they want to have is all fine by me, I see nothing negative.

(CROSSTALK)

BURKMAN: I'll tell you, Pat. Even Bill Clinton and Al Gore -- Al Gore, who in the 2000 campaign use every dirty and scurrilous tactic known to man, they did not...

O'DONNELL: Dirty, scurrilous lesbians. Dirty, scurrilous lesbians.

BURKMAN: It's nothing to do with that. He did not attack the children of the candidates. Even Bill Clinton and Al Gore did not do that.

(CROSSTALK)

BUCHANAN: Let's take a look at something else.

O'DONNELL: What's the attack in the word lesbian?

In these bitterly fractious times, I think it's important to find issues in which partisans can set aside their differences and join in agreement. I stand today with O'Donnell, and ask you to stand with me, in strong support for as much lesbianism as lesbians want to create in the world.

Politics · 2004/10/27 · Comment · Link

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