Quixotic it may be–but a few concerned people are launching a last-minute effort to pass emergency legislation mandating the presence and use of emergency paper ballots in the event that voters would otherwise be turned away because of voting machine failures.

The bill is far from perfect. It doesn’t specify much about how to do this.. It has a sunset clause and is designed only for the coming November 7 election (why not make it permanent?) and of course it would be a royal pain for every city and town clerk in the country, and every administrator of polling places.

Still, it’s the right thing to do. The right of people to show up and cast a vote is fundamental and crucial if we are to call ourselves a democracy.

Follow the link above to read the Act and contact your Representative by clicking here. Yes, it’s way too little and probably too late. But it’s an important first step. Remember what Margaret Mad said about a small committed group being the only thing that ever changes the world.

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The always-fascinating Romensko newsletter on journalism has a run of ethics stories in its September 8 issue, with links to the major media where the stories appear. I confess–I can’t begin to keep up with this very informative newsletter. I read it once in a while, and often quite a bit after publication.

In this one issue, it reports:
10 Miami-area journalists take government money to promote an anti-Castro message
HP has been spying on the phone records of major journos
An article about the Wall Street Journal’s policy of accepting ads on the front page–and how a recent front page bore both a story on the HP scandal and an ad from HP!

These are just three of a number of links to related stories in this roundup

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A lot of things have happened on a September 11th. I’ll talk about three of them. Two were Days of Infamy, one a Day of Honor.

September 11, 1906, one hundred years ago today. Gandhi launched his first massive civil disobedience campaign, against the Apartheid government of South Africa. Civil disobedience can be traced as far back as the Bible, but sustained and organized campaigns were new with Gandhi, as far as I know.

September 11, 1973. In a US-backed coup, the dictator Pinochet overthrew (and killed) the democratically elected President, Salvador Allende, leading to over a decade of repression, disappearances, and totalitarianism. Henry Kissinger is not a popular guy in that country.

And then, of course, September 11, 2001. It may be many years before we know the full extent of what happened on that day, who was behind it, and who allowed it to be carried out. It is almost certain that elements of the US government were at least aware, if not complicit–and the trail of bad policy stemming from that day to this is one of our modern shames.

We can only be a democracy if we promote democracy. Here and abroad.

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I think of myself as fairly aware of the various conspiracy reports around 9/11, and the clear case that we’re not being told the whole story by our government or by the mainstream media. There are so, so many irregularities, anomalies, eyewitnesses… I’m familiar with the idea that the towers were dynamited, and that Building 7 in particular would not have collapsed as it did from the aftershock of two nearby buildings being slammed by jet aircraft. I’ve also seen skepticism about what really hit the Pentagon.

But until just the other day, I’d never heard the theory that Flight 93 was not crashed by a re-hijacking of the cabin by courageous passengers, but by a US military missile. However, I happened to be in my car with the radio on, and I caught a rebroadcast of an archived interview with David Ray Griffin, on of the most respected 9/11 scholars around. He was saying, and this is new to me, that there’s strong evidence that the Pennsylvania crash was the doing of the US military.

this has huge implications about the coverup, the real reasons for 9/11, and much more.

Unfortunately it didn’t have a transcript, but I tracked down an audio of the interview.

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Why do we let these people continue to stay in office? When King George III abused his power, the colonists threw him out. Yet George II is not even a king; he just acts like one.

Today’s news reports that

United States President George W Bush finally is acknowledging that the CIA runs secret prisons overseas,

where the locals know better than to ask questions. This is outside the scope of the Constitution *and* international law. Even the Nazis got in trouble for this (ever hear of the Nuremberg trials?). These prisons, until now largely ignored by the mainstream media, are widely reported to be torture centers. Bush so far continues to deny that the US ever uses torture, but that denial strains credulity.

Again, the United States was founded in opposition to a despotic government that had overstepped its bounds. Surely, the current regime in the US has overstepped its bounds. Again.

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One year after the massive failures around Katrina, this is still worth looking at.

According to investigative reporter Greg Palast–who has broken some of the most important stories of the past few years–responsibility to develop, duplicate, distribute, and execute an evacuation plan for New Orleans rested with a shadowy, and inexperienced, firm called Innovative Emergency Management (IEM). Palast claims IEM’s major “qualification” is a solid track record of donations to Republican causes. He says this company cannot produce even a single copy of the plan that should have been in place, even though a core part of using such a plan is widely disseminate it to all the fire stations, hospitals, police unites, etc.

There was, however, a draft plan–that utterly failed to recognize that 127,000 New Orleaneans didn’t have a car. Never mind that the highways were largely unusable between traffic jams and flooding.

Now–here’s the really sad part: Dr. Ivor van Heerden, Deputy Director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, warned FEMA ahead of time. Not only did he point out the large number of carless residents, he also mapped out exactly where these folks lived. And he predicted to FEMA and to the White House that the levees would be too short.

What thanks did he get? Here’s Palast:

Dr. van Heerden offered this life-saving info to FEMA. They wouldn’t touch it. Then, a state official told him to shut up, back off or there would be consequences for van Heerden’s position. This official now works for IEM.

So I asked him what happened as a result of making no plans for those without wheels, a lot of them elderly and most of them poor.

“Fifteen-hundred of them drowned.”

A bit later in the article:

Van Heerden astonished me with the most serious charge of all. While showing me huge maps of the flooding, he told me the White House had withheld the information that, in fact, the levees were about to burst and by Tuesday at dawn the city, and more than a thousand people, would drown.

Van Heerden said, “FEMA knew on Monday at 11 o’clock that the levees had breached… They took video. By midnight on Monday the White House knew. But none of us knew

Oh, and to top the whole thing off, guess who the Bush administration chose to investigate the failed evacuation plan–IEM! It’s worse that putting the fox to guard the henhouse.

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War profiteers are at it again.The Boston Globe reports,

The estimated costs for the development of major weapons systems for the US military have doubled since September 11, 2001, with a trillion-dollar price tag for new planes, ships, and missiles that would have little direct role in the fight against insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq.

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As if the scandals involving conduct of the war and treatment of prisoners weren’t bad enough…now we find a U.S. Army Reserve officer who doesn’t just have his hand in the cookie jar…he’s sucking the contents out with a hose!

Both AP and UPI reported identical stories about Lt. Col. Bruce D. Hopfengardner and his extortion of “cash, cars, premium airline seats, jewelry, alcohol and even sexual favors” in order to throw massive contracts toward those bribing him.

He has pled guilty, as have the two men who wooed him with such “gifts” as “a white 2004 GMC Yukon Denali with a sandstone interior,” a Harley-Davidson, and a $5700 watch.

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Come on, people–what possible justification can there be for re-classifiying ancient records of how many and which kinds of nuclear weapons the US government deployed through 1971? The stuff was made public, widely reported in newspapers at the time, and is completely irrelevant to today’s security concerns.

And as a taxpayer, I can only hope this is a typo: The Department of Energy alone…

…has reported to Congress that 6,640 pages have been withdrawn from public access (at a cost of $3,313 per page)

The cost per page cited here is almost exactly half the number of pages, so I’m hoping someone garbled their statistics. Surely there are better uses for $21,998,320 than to obscure information from a public that already has access, but now has to work much harder; if you’ve never had the “pleasure” of scanning old newspapers on microfilm, I can tell you that the Web is a heck of a lot easier. These are the people that are supposed to be fiscally conservative? What can they be doing to run up three thousand dollars in expenses for every single page?

Is this just a case of Bush Administration paranoia, or is it still another instance of a more disturbing trend to take away the rights of Americans, pull down the curtain on any sort of openness in government, and make it ever-harder for journalists and researchers to do their work?

Unfortunately, I suspect the latter.

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40 percent of American consumers have no plans for a vacation over the next six months. And that makes me very sad.

In many countries, vacation is almost a divine right. Four or even six weeks of vacation is the norm, and those vacations are used. In the US, unless you’re a teacher, you’re lucky if you even get two weeks. And even then, according to the Travel Industry Association,

The average American expects his or her longest summer trip to last only six nights. And it takes three days just to begin to unwind.

One of the reasons I am self-employed is that I like vacations. I don’t have anyone paying my salary when I’m traveling, but I usually manage to get about six weeks off per year (in chunks of anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks). That recharge time is soooo important!

Fortunately, at least a few companies, including PricewaterhouseCoopers, are beginning to recognize the importance of time off. The accounting giant (with 29,000 employees) closes the company completely for 10 days around Christmas and 5 at July 4th.

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