The Incredible President Limpet

The Incredible Mister Limpet Watch

If you watch only one web-based Quicktime movie this week, make it this one. It turns out that unbeknownst to most of us, a certain very famous actor has been playing bits and pieces of Dubya’s life throughout his career. Only now, in retrospect, can the fullness of his artistic achievement be appreciated. Enjoy!

Red versus Blue Watch

Here is a really interesting page for those who enjoy maps. This takes the traditional Red State versus Blue State maps which are usually used and plays with them in a number of revealing ways to give much more information about the way the country is divided by geography and politics.

The traditional map uses bright, solid red and bright solid blue to show states carried by either party. It shows a vast, red swath with blue areas in the west, northeast, and northern midwest. Then, the authors distort the size of each state to accurately reflect the population that live there. This shows a much more even size distribution of the two colors. They also show a map where the size of a state shows the relative power in the electoral college of that state. Here, there is a slight increase in the size of the red areas.

The process is then repeated by counties. That is fascinating. Finally, the authors color each county in a range from red through purple to blue, both in a straight geographical map and in a map that reflect popluation. The results are well worth examing.

Several of the points concerning the conflating land mass with population are made even more eloquently here.

Election Theft Watch

There is an excellent article on what is really happening with electronic voting, especially in Florida, entitled “Was It Hacked?”. This article strings together a lot of the pieces not only about Flordia in 2004, but about Georgia in 2002. It also takes a harder look at the ownership and executives in the largest electronic vote counting companies. An excerpt:

Votes collected by electronic machines (and by optical scan equipment that reads traditional paper ballots) are sent via modem to a central tabulating computer, which counts the votes on Windows software. Therefore, anyone who knows how to operate an Excel spreadsheet and who is given access to the central tabulation machine can, in theory, change election totals.
On a CNBC cable TV program, Black Box Voting exec Harris showed guest host Howard Dean how to alter vote totals within 90 seconds, by entering a two-digit code in a hidden program on Diebold's election software. Harris declared, "This is not a 'bug' or accidental oversight; it is there on purpose."

A quartet of companies control the U.S. vote count. Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia and SAIC are all hard-wired into the Bush campaign and power structure. Diebold chief Walden O'Dell is a top Bush fund-raiser. According to "online anarchist community" Infoshop.org, "At Diebold, the election division is run by Bob Urosevich. Bob's brother, Todd, is a top executive at 'rival' ES&S. The brothers were originally staked by Howard Ahmanson, a member of the Council For National Policy, a right-wing steering group stacked with Bush true believers. Ahmanson is also one of the bagmen behind the extremist Christian Reconstruction Movement, which advocates the theocratic takeover of American democracy." Sequoia is owned by a partner member of the Carlyle Group, which is believed to have dictated foreign policy in both Bush administrations and has employed former President Bush for quite a while.”

Also, please check out this, in which a computer programmer hacks into a play voting database and erases his tracks. He provides step-by-step instructions for doing this (with screen shots!!), and since many of these systems are built on the execrable Microsoft Access database platform, which has no real security to speak of, this could be happening to votes all over the country and no one but the perpetrators would know. An excerpt from this site:

Would you trust your bank account balance if their systems were this easy to hack? As a result of my hands on testing, I have absolutely no faith that my vote was counted or will be in future elections where this software is used. It is simply too easy to change! Any motivated insider or hacker of moderate skill can change hundreds of thousands of votes with very little effort and almost no chance of being caught.

The best part is that if anyone tries to question the results, you can ridicule them and call them sore losers! Conspiracy theorists! But won’t this be caught in a recount? Check this out - with the new machines, YOU CAN’T DO A RECOUNT! There’s no paper trail. It’s the perfect crime.

This is the democracy we’re exporting to the rest of the world.

Watch What They Do, Not What They Say Watch

Here is a very illustrative little juxtaposition from Quiddity, showing what happens to things like Pell grants versus what the Chimpleton says about them.