Entries Tagged as 'politics'
September 26th, 2007 · 2 Comments
Some people calling themselves the “New Hampshire Justice League” just opened a store at CafePress where you can buy funny Tshirts, etc.
There are some fine choices including a cranky Democrat donkey, slogans like “Keeping the GOP honest in 2008,” and one of those no-don’t graphics with a phone in it.
For NH, GOP phone pranks don’t just mean phone-jamming. In 2006, NH voters got thousands of deceptive robo-calls that (in violation of FCC rules) gave the (false) impression that Democrats were the ones harassing them, again and again. NH was not the only state hit by this tactic.
I’ll be happy to donate my own handsome elephant graphic to the New Hampshire Justice League. By the way, I do have a birthday coming up in December, so if anybody is wondering what I would like…
Tags: New Hampshire! · politics
July 30th, 2007 · Comments Off on Giant security hole for 2008 voting
Just in: California’s test of its paperless voting machines show that all are hackable, reports Ars Technica.
The news comes less than a week after Senate Democrats declared it’s “too late” to demand paper trails for 2008.
Nonsense!
Paper-trail legislation has been creeping through Congress since Rush Holt introduced it in 2003. Holt re-introduced, citing vote irregularities in Ohio, after the 2004 Presidential election.
Despite many co-sponsors, the bill couldn’t get out of committee, thanks to Representative Bob (“Friend of Diebold”) Ney (R-Ohio), more widely known for mandating Freedom Fries.
It’s more than a year from now until November of 2008. That’s time enough for black-hat hackers to create and offer up for sale the kinds of code tricks California researchers identified–many of which require no more access than a few minutes privacy with one machine. The kind of privacy that you expect when you’re voting.
It ought to be time for the Democrats we just elected to make sure that all votes will be counted fairly in 2008. That’s much more important than investigating Gonzales.
Update: It turns out the Democrats agree–and (even before I wrote this blogpost) had already crafted a compromise bill to for secure voting in 2008.
Tags: Editorial · politics · voting
September 16th, 2004 · Comments Off on Supporting our troops, the way Democrats do it
Some of my best friends are Libertarians, so I understand the conservative critique of government social spending, also known as “handouts” and sometimes even “the public trough”.
I believe, however, that the point of such spending is not to create a subclass of entitled loafers. Even if you don’t have any sentimental urge to help people in need–most social programs benefit society as a whole, not just the folks who are getting the actual money. Some people need a temporary hand if they’re ever going to become productive citizens.
A classic example of such a program that worked was the GI Bill of Rights, which helped US veterans get back into the work force after World War II. I came across a 1945 speech by my grandfather to a bunch of bankers where he explained why this “tax and spend” program was good for taxpayers as well as for veterans:
In considering this legislation, it was estimated that before the close of the war some 15 million men and women would have been members of our armed forces, the majority of them having been recruited through Selective Service.
It was also considered that this is the youngest Army and Navy that our country has ever formed, and that millions of these men and women were under the age of twenty-one; that many more had never held a job of any sort.
It was also believed that a large segment of our defense industries, such as the manufacture of airplanes and accessories, and the building of ships could not be continued after the war, and that when demobilization took place many millions of civilian war workers would also be demobilized and would of necessity be seeking employment.
The Legion felt that the citizens of this country would agree that the veterans of this war were entitled to all the consideration which the country could give to them, but the Committee which wrote the bill also felt that a way must be devised by which returning veterans could be channeled into the civilian economy of the nation with the least disruption to the orderly flow of commerce and civilian production, so that the influx of millions of people looking for employment would not cause serious unemployment, or at least that such a condition could be minimized. It was felt that opportunities should be provided to veterans either to resume their interrupted educations or to be able to
find their niches in the communities of this country.
I hope veterans returning from the Iraq War will have the same opportunities offered to them, and I hope that a Kerry presidency will bring new hope to their communities as well.
I blogged about my grandfather “the two-shirt Democrat” before, and put the full text of my his remarks on the GI Bill here.
Tags: Editorial · My Back Pages · politics
