Day: June 10, 2005

Pissed Off Diebold Blames Elections Office for Its Failure

Trish

Diebold is puffed up and fuming about the recent successful hack by Black Box Voting on some of its Florida touch-screens. The elections supervisor in the county where the state capital is located had invited the group to see just how secure the voting machines were and now Diebold wants his head on a platter.

Tallahassee Democrat:

An attorney for the company that makes Leon County’s voting equipment told state and county officials Thursday it was “very foolish and irresponsible” for Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho to let an outside group try poking holes in vote-tabulation security systems…

In a blistering letter to Sancho, all seven county commissioners and Paul Craft, the head of voting-system certification in Hood’s elections office, [senior corporate counsel for Diebold Election Systems Inc. Michael] Lindroos said Sancho compromised the security of the system by letting Black Box Voting try to crack it. He said Sancho may have “intentionally and negligently allowed unauthorized personnel to make modifications to your system that are not discernible to you or your IT staff.

Actually, the test proved that it was already impossible to confirm that elections were being conducted reliably. That was the problem there, big boy. But Little Red (State) Glenda Hood, who presides over Florida’s elections and does whatever Jeb wants, is all about punishment – of the good guys.

An aide to Secretary of State Glenda Hood said the Division of Elections “will be contacting all appropriate parties to review this matter.”

Sancho already said he was taking the hacked machines out of commission, so whatever. Meanwhile, Diebold still hasn’t taken any responsibility and just claims the test was rigged.

“Your improper actions, Mr. Sancho, are equivalent to leaving your car unlocked, with the windows down and the keys left in the ignition, and then acting surprised when your car is stolen or the interior vandalized,” wrote Lindroos. “Other examples would be acting surprised if anomalies were discovered after you left paper ballots exposed in an unsecured area and invited individuals of questionable character to visit the room, or asked some unknown person to deliver paper ballots to a central counting location without a trusted escort.”

Well not exactly, according to Bev Harris of Black Box Voting.

Harris…said similar Diebold systems are used in about 800 cities and counties across the country, with three to five employees having access in each jurisdiction, and that the system “should send up a red flare” if a dishonest employee tries to change vote totals.

Harris said Black Box evaded security systems and changed votes without setting off any alarms in its tests.

“It took us less than a minute to replace the Diebold system with something we wrote and to hijack the whole system,” she said. “I would venture to say it doesn’t happen in Leon County, but that’s like saying nobody ever embezzles. When you have 800 jurisdictions and three to five employees with access in each, that’s like saying you’ve got 3,000 to 4,000 employees and none of them will ever try something.”

Hell, if I thought it would get rid of W. & Co. and I might give it a shot myself.

Schwarzenegger to Launch ‘Phenomenon of Anger’ Campaign Next Week

Jon Ponder

As we reported last week , an advisor to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was overheard in a phone conversation with the governor’s fat-cat donors to say that the push for a special election this fall would start with a campaign to create a “phenomenon of anger” among the state’s voters toward teachers, firemen and the state legislature. Schwarzengger’s campaign to foment hatred will begin on Monday, according to USA Today:

“I was sent by the people,” says the man who won his office in the recall election that ousted Democrat Gray Davis in 2003. “We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any longer.”

His solutions are to make it harder for teachers to get tenure, to strip legislators of the ability to draw their own districts and to give the governor vast new powers to cut spending. The results could resonate beyond California, because other states often follow its lead…

An independent public poll shows 33% of California adults support such an election. The governor himself is at 40% job approval in public polls and just above 50% in his own internal polls. Not the strongest position from which to try to upend the political processes of the nation’s largest state. But this is a celebrity with little self-doubt and even less to lose, even if the initiatives are defeated.

“What is going to happen if everything fails? Life goes on,” Schwarzenegger said during a 45-minute interview Wednesday. “What do you think, I’m worried about that? I’m only thinking of one thing: victory for the people of California. … I’ve done my trip to glorify myself, to do all my things, and to shine. I’m doing this because it gives me a chance to give something back.”

The cost to hold the special election is estimated at $80 million. California in debt for $15 billion that Schwarzenegger borrowed to resolve the budget deficit last year – a strategy he was highly critical of during his campaign to become governor.

GOP Revives Gingrich Era Efforts to ‘Kill Big Bird’

Jon Ponder

In a replay of a Gingrich era attempt to stifle open discourse and to end programs that educate poor children, the House subcommittee on Labor, Health & Human Services and Education voted to de-fund public broadcasting. According to the San Franciso Chronicle:

A House subcommittee voted Thursday to sharply reduce the federal government’s financial support for public broadcasting, including eliminating taxpayer funds that help underwrite such popular children’s educational programs as “Sesame Street” and “Arthur.”

In addition, the subcommittee acted to eliminate within two years all federal money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — which passes federal funds to public broadcasters — starting with a 25 percent reduction for next year, from $400 million to $300 million.

The move may have been pre-saged by a “Special Report” in the rightwing Unification Church-owned Washington Times last month:

Newt Gingrich famously vowed to “zero out” federal funding for public broadcasting a few weeks before becoming House speaker in 1995, but the Republicans essentially backed down when they were accused of trying to kill Big Bird…

In January, PBS declined to add to its national distribution list an episode of the children’s series “Postcards From Buster” that featured two women in a same-sex union, although some stations chose to air it anyway…

Given the advantage PBS has as a free, over-the-air service, it should do far better, according to [Tim Graham, director of analysis for the Media Research Center, a conservative group that monitors the media for examples of bias].

He cited “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” as an example. It draws about 3 million viewers a night, but it would do much better if viewers were really interested in its sober approach to news coverage, Mr. Graham said. “They see themselves as ‘spinach TV.’ We will feed you what you don’t want to watch,” he said.

Such thinking is too subjective, said Les Crystal, executive producer of “NewsHour.”

“Do we do some subjects that are spinach? Maybe. One could argue that stories we’ve done on Darfur (in Sudan) are spinach to some people but meat and potatoes to others.”

Sad to say but killing PBS and NPR is better than the other alternative – allowing the Rightwing to turn them into propaganda outlets for the government like Fox News, Clear Channel and the Washington Times.

Jesse Helms Unrepentant on Race in Upcoming Memoir

Jon Ponder

In an upcoming memoir, former North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms says it was the civil rights movement – not segregationists like himself and the Ku Klux Klan- who incited violence in the 1960’s. Helms who is 83, came to fame in the 1950’s and 1960’s as a racist editorialist on a television station in Raleigh.

CNN reports that in the book Helms says he believed:

…Voluntary racial integration would [have] come about without pressure from the federal government or from civil rights protests that he said sharpened racial antagonisms.

“We will never know how integration might have been achieved in neighborhoods across our land, because the opportunity was snatched away by outside agitators who had their own agendas to advance,” according to the uncorrected proof. “We certainly do know the price paid by the stirring of hatred, the encouragement of violence, the suspicion and distrust.”

Translation: “If the Coloreds had just stayed in their place and not been so uppity, Whites would have eventually allowed them to have better segregated schools, bathrooms and drinking fountains.”

The Charlotte Observer reports that in his book Helms deals with his long history of racial smears and playing the race card to win elections as he always done, by denying involvement:

In 1950, U.S. Sen. Frank Porter Graham faced fellow Democrat Willis Smith in a hotly contested runoff. Helms supported Smith, whose supporters were accused of using racial smears. A handbill purported to show a photo of Graham’s wife dancing with a black man. Smith won, and Helms was often accused of having a role in the tactics…

Charges of racial politics arose again in 1990 when Helms faced former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt. One Helms ad showed a pair of white hands crumpling a job rejection letter as a voice says, “You needed that job, but they had to give it to a minority.”

“There were even some charges that the ad was intended as `racist,’ but that was untrue,” Helms writes. “Minority classifications were not limited to race, and we had no more interest in a race-based vote than we did in race-based jobs. The campaign was never about Mr. Gantt being black; it was always and only about him being liberal.”

Yeah, right.

Helms is an equal opportunity hater. When it became clear he and his segregationist cabal had lost the fight against equality for African Americans, he turned his sights on the gay community, frequently advocating prison sentences for gays and lesbians.

In the book, he admits that he was wrong about AIDS, however.

Helms also was an outspoken opponent of laws to protect homosexuals from discrimination and of funding for AIDS research, but he writes in the book that his views evolved during his final years in the Senate. He cited friendships he developed with North Carolina evangelist Franklin Graham and rock singer Bono, both of whom got him involved in the fight against the AIDS epidemic in Africa.

“Until then,” Helms writes, “it had been my feeling that AIDS was a disease largely spread by reckless and voluntary sexual and drug-abusing behavior, and that it would probably be confined to those in high risk populations. I was wrong.”

Thanks to PR contributor Judy for the tip.