Friday, July 16, 2004
More on Florida
Florida faces another debacle in the upcoming presidential election on Nov. 2, with the possibility that thousands of people will be unjustly denied the right to vote, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights heard on Thursday.
In a hearing on the illegal disenfranchisement of alleged felons in Florida, commissioners accused state officials of "extraordinary negligence" in drawing up a list of 48,000 people to be purged from voter rolls, most of them because they may once have committed a crime.
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Last weekend, Gov. Bush said the state would drop the list after newspapers pointed out it included only 61 Hispanics. Hispanics in Florida have generally supported Republicans, while blacks, who made up a disproportionate number on the list, overwhelmingly support Democrats.
After the 2000 election, it emerged that thousands of people, mostly blacks, were improperly denied the right to vote because they mistakenly appeared on a list of ex-felons. Florida is one of seven states that denies former prisoners the right to vote for life unless a clemency commission restores their rights.
This year, the state produced a new list of 48,000 people to be purged from voter rolls. The state kept the list secret until news organizations sued and a judge ordered the state to make it public.
Here's the story. Unsurprisingly, the Republican's don't want to talk about it.
posted by chris at 1:47 PM
The re-election strategy
Don't piss off the voters:
The Bush administration has decided to scale back and delay the debut of a vast airline passenger screening program until after the presidential election, federal officials said yesterday.
The decision comes after months of meetings with airline officials and lawmakers who pressed the administration to drop more controversial elements of the program, known as Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening Program, or CAPPS II.
Big disagreements about the system remain within the Department of Homeland Security itself, with some officials viewing it as a major aviation security improvement and others fearing it could alienate voters who view CAPPS II as a surveillance system that pries too far into passengers' lives, sources close to the project said.
But definately keep them afraid and worried about terrorists disrupting the elections.
posted by chris at 11:30 AM
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Thursday, July 15, 2004
Dear Sir, I seek your co-operation and assistance in the transer of fifty million US dollars from the kingdom of Nigeria....
You've heard of the Nigeria Scam? Well, the BBC reports on a guy who's scamming the scammers. Complete with pictures and everything. (via Kevin Drum.)
posted by chris at 3:31 PM
WEAK
Days before Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was to present the case for war with Iraq to the United Nations, State Department analysts found dozens of factual problems in drafts of his speech, according to new documents contained in the Senate report on intelligence failures released last week.
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Offering the first detailed look at claims that were stripped from the case for war advanced by Powell, a Jan. 31, 2003, memo cataloged 38 claims to which State Department analysts objected. In response, 28 were either removed from the draft or altered, according to the Senate report, which was released Friday and included scathing criticism of the CIA and other U.S. intelligence services.
The analysts, describing many of the claims as "weak" and assigning grades to arguments on a 5-star scale, warned Powell against making an array of allegations they deemed implausible. They also warned against including Iraqi communications intercepts they deemed ambiguous and against speculating that terrorists might "come through Baghdad and pick-up biological weapons" as if they were stocked on store shelves.
The documents underscore the extent to which administration and intelligence officials were culling a vast collection of thinly sourced claims as they sought to assemble the case for war. But the origin and full scope of some errors remain unclear because Senate investigators were denied access to a number of relevant documents, according to aides involved in the probe.
Even Colin Powell knew their rationale was shaky, as he famously threw the document in the air and said, "This is bullshit!" It was then and it is now. Despite the Bush administration's repeated efforts to change their rationale for war, they took us into Iraq on nothing more than blatant lies and intelligence twisted to their war-hungry design.
posted by chris at 12:15 PM
More ways to make sure Bush gets elected
Make it nearly impossible for the troops in Iraq and Afghanstan to vote:
Problems with military absentee ballots that clouded the 2000 election have not been fixed, jeopardizing the ability of more than 160,000 troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan to have their votes counted this fall.
Among developments that have election officials concerned:
• A $22 million pilot program to develop an Internet voting system for Americans deployed overseas was scrapped after the Pentagon concluded it would be vulnerable to hackers intent on tampering with elections.
• The Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress formerly known as the General Accounting Office, found that the system used to collect and deliver mail in Iraq, including absentee ballots, suffers from long delays and other problems.
• The Pentagon's inspector general found that a Defense Department program to ease voting by Americans overseas, including deployed troops, continues to be given low priority by field commanders. Surprise visits to 10 foreign sites found seven programs ineffective and three only partially effective. Nearly three of every five troops surveyed said they did not know their voting assistance officer.
• A Pentagon agency charged with helping servicemembers and other Americans abroad vote is more than two months late in providing information for a report by the Election Assistance Commission on how states are doing and how they can improve. "I would like to have seen it out much earlier," says Paul DeGregorio, a member of the commission, which was created to help solve voting problems.
posted by chris at 10:43 AM
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Wednesday, July 14, 2004
Defeat for Hate Amendment
The Senate voted today to block a White House-backed constitutional amendment to bar same-sex marriages, dooming its prospects for approval by Congress this year but ensuring it an emotionally-charged role during campaigns this fall.
The move to cut off debate on the bill got the support of only 48 senators -- 12 short of the 60 needed and 19 short of the two-thirds majority that it would take to amend the Constitution. Fifty senators voted against the proposal.
Republicans had hoped to win at least a simple majority in favor of proceeding with the amendment but were thwarted when six of their own colleagues joined all but three Democrats in voting to scuttle the measure without a vote on its substance. Several senators had said there would have been even more "no" votes if the showdown had occurred on substance rather than procedure.
The vote by the Republican-controlled Senate amounted to an embarrassing defeat for President Bush and conservative leaders who had pushed hard for approval of the amendment as a way of protecting traditional marriage. But Senate GOP leaders vowed to continue pushing for the amendment, hoping it will galvanize conservatives in the November election and help elect more supporters of the amendment.
Story.
posted by chris at 5:03 PM
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Tuesday, July 13, 2004
Pre-emption for everyone!
President George W. Bush said on Monday his administration would maintain its policy of pre-empting potential security threats despite growing doubts over the adequacy of US intelligence to assess such dangers.
In a speech at the Oak Ridge nuclear facility in Tennessee, Mr Bush made clear he would not rethink the approach after Friday's damning report by the Senate intelligence committee. The report concluded that the Central Intelligence Agency made serious errors in asserting that Saddam Hussein's Iraq possessed or was developing weapons of mass destruction.
While acknowledging that the report "has identified some shortcomings in our intelligence capabilities", he said that would not cause him to reconsider the approach that led the US to invade Iraq.
"America must remember the lessons of September the 11th," Mr Bush said. "We must confront serious dangers before they fully materialize."
Story. For some reason, I just get this picture in my mind of a blindfolded boy wildly swinging a heavy stick at a fuzzy WMD-esque pinata as all his friends look on and sadly shake their heads.
posted by chris at 12:54 PM
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Monday, July 12, 2004
Just smoothing over the language
In a classified National Intelligence Estimate prepared before the Iraq war, the CIA hedged its judgments about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction, pointing up the limits of its knowledge.
But in the unclassified version of the NIE — the so-called white paper cited by the Bush administration in making its case for war — those carefully qualified conclusions were turned into blunt assertions of fact, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on prewar intelligence.
The repeated elimination of qualifying language and dissenting assessments of some of the government's most knowledgeable experts gave the public an inaccurate impression of what the U.S. intelligence community believed about the threat Hussein posed to the United States, the committee said.
Dedicating a section of its 511-page report to discrepancies between the two versions of the crucial October 2002 NIE, the panel laid out numerous instances in which the unclassified version omitted key dissenting opinions about Iraqi weapons capabilities, overstated U.S. knowledge about Iraq's alleged stockpiles of weapons and, in one case, inserted threatening language into the public document that was not contained in the classified version.
Oh, there's more.
posted by chris at 10:15 PM
Baptists against Bush
The Southern Baptist Convention, a conservative denomination closely aligned with President Bush (news - web sites), said it was offended by the Bush-Cheney campaign's effort to use church rosters for campaign purposes.
"I'm appalled that the Bush-Cheney campaign would intrude on a local congregation in this way," said Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.
"The bottom line is, when a church does it, it's nonpartisan and appropriate. When a campaign does it, it's partisan and inappropriate," he said. "I suspect that this will rub a lot of pastors' fur the wrong way."
The Bush campaign defended a memo in which it sought to mobilize church members by providing church directories to the campaign, arranging for pastors to hold voter-registration drives, and talking to various religious groups about the campaign.
Other religious organizations also criticized the document as inappropriate, suggesting that it could jeopardize churches' tax-exempt status by involving them in partisan politics.
Story.
posted by chris at 10:08 PM
Because trees are just lumber waiting to be felled
The Bush administration on Monday proposed a new plan to open up national forests to more logging, confirming a draft plan published two weeks ago.
Under the plan, announced by Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman at the state Capitol, governors would have to petition the federal government to block road-building needed for logging in remote areas of national forests, including the White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire and Maine.
The rule replaces one adopted by the Clinton administration and still under challenge in federal court. It covers about 58 million of the 191 million acres of national forest nationwide.
Story.
posted by chris at 9:43 PM
Bush pushes for anti-gay marriage amendment
President Bush said yesterday that legalizing gay marriage would redefine the most fundamental institution of civilization and that a constitutional amendment is needed to protect it.
A few activist judges and local officials have taken it on themselves to change the meaning of marriage, Bush said in his weekly radio address.
From the Party that brought you intolerance, bigotry and war.
UPDATE: You can sign a MoveOn.org petition here asking the President and the Congress to not support this amendment.
posted by chris at 1:22 PM
Ensuring his re-election
U.S. officials have discussed the idea of postponing Election Day in the event of a terrorist attack on or about that day, a Homeland Security Department spokesman said Sunday.
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Newsweek said the discussions about whether the November 2 election could be postponed started with a recent letter to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge from DeForest Soaries Jr., chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
The commission was set up after the disputed 2000 presidential vote to help states deal with logistical problems in their elections.
Soaries, who was appointed by President Bush, is a former New Jersey secretary of state and senior pastor of the 7,000-member First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens in Somerset.
Newsweek reported that Soaries expressed concern that no federal agency had the authority to postpone an election and asked Ridge to ask Congress to give his commission such power.
So let me get this straight. Soaries wants Congress to give him the power to postpone the elections in which the man who appointed him is running for re-election. Can we say conflict of interest? You know, I seem to remember President Bush saying something about things being easier if this were a dictatorship.
And really, if we postpone the elections, doesn't that mean the terrorists win?
UPDATE: Kevin Drum has some reassuring words.
posted by chris at 12:48 PM
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