From The Baltimore Sun
By John Schneider

A debate over the use of electronic voting machines in Maryland generally has focused on words such as “security,” “interpretive code” and “hacking.”

The arguments tend to pit the reliability and safety of one machine against the other and compare the veracity and experience of expert vs. expert. They are earnestly written, articulately defended and, in many cases, factually accurate.

Unfortunately, they are also largely beside the point.

This isn’t surprising: There are powerful commercial and political interests vying for the upper hand, with much prestige and profit at stake. Still, the debate has been incorrectly framed, and voters are the poorer for it.

The problem is this: When discussing the integrity of any data storage, processing and retrieval system, the term “secure” is a misnomer. In the realm of computer science, there is no such standard, no such definition. One can only describe the precautions taken and the recovery plan if the system is breached.

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From The Progressive
By Barbara Ehrenreich

Here’s the news that rocked my little world this month: We got a message that a family friend, let’s call her Lorraine, who was in an ICU, barely able to breathe on her own. In the last few weeks, there’d been some mumblings about not feeling a hundred percent, but no hint of anything seriously wrong. The diagnosis came back in a couple of days: fourth-stage breast cancer, which has spread to a number of other organs, including her lungs. If you know anything at all about breast cancer staging, you know there is no fifth stage.

Lorraine has no health insurance. We didn’t know that. In fact, we’d been content to believe that her consulting business was going as well as she said it was. In her late forties now, she’s a former accountant who never could find another decent job–also a news junkie, an avid reader, and an energetic volunteer in a number of worthy causes. But it turns out she’s been struggling with the cell phone bill and the rent. A few weeks ago, unbeknownst to us, she’d moved out of her apartment and into a free room offered by one of the nonprofits she volunteers for. The cost of a mammogram–well over $100–must have been out of reach.

President Bush, in his State of the Union address, said we should each have a catastrophic health insurance policy for the big ticket items like breast cancer, plus a tax-deductible savings account for the little things, like mammograms. If we have to take personal responsibility for our doctor visits and routine care we’ll be thrifty about it–or so the thinking goes–and the nation’s medical expenditures will stop spiking like an Ebola fever.

It’s an old idea, going back at least to the Clintons, that the problem with the American health system is that we, the consumers, just consume too much. Make us mindful of the costs by raising co-payments and other out-of-pocket costs, and we’ll stop indulging in blood workups, MRIs, prostate exams, and all those other fun things.

Read more Healthcare

From Tom Paine
By David Donnelly

On Wednesday, a federal judge in Miami sentenced disgraced and convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff to 70 months in prison. Within a few hours, some 900 miles away, the U.S. Senate passed a lobbying reform bill that sentenced America to ongoing scandal. The contrast was striking. With irony thicker than a wad of bills, Abramoff began to atone, but our elected officials did not.

Before receiving his sentence for a wire fraud conviction connected to his bizarre purchase of a casino fleet in Florida, the former lobbyist told federal judge Paul C. Huck that, In the past two years, I have started the process of becoming a new man. Abramoff is cooperating with federal prosecutors on a corruption investigation that is said to involve as many as 20 federal officeholders and congressional and Bush administration employees.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, senators passed a lobbying reform bill that would do almost nothing to reel in the next Jack Abramoff or, for that matter, themselves: The Senate largely avoided curtailing the behavior of lawmakers, The Washington Post’s Jeff Birnbaum dryly reported.

But that didn’t stop some from claiming a victory. Sen. Susan Collins, R-ME, said the bill helps restore the bonds of trust with our constituents [that have been] frayed. And it didn’t stop some from using hyperbole. This is a much tougher bill than anyone would have anticipated when we started this process, declared Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa.

There’s a sign that’s now up in front of the Capitol. It says ˜Not for Sale,’ said Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn. The fine print on that sign might as well say Already bought.

Read more K Street

From The Nation
By John Nichols

While most mainstream media outlets earned the scorn that has been heaped upon them for their stenographic reporting of the Bush Administration’s prewar claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, one newspaper chain’s Washington bureau was consistently–and, it turns out, correctly–skeptical of the White House. Before the war began, Knight Ridder’s small but able team of reporters was the exception to a bad rule, producing a steady stream of now widely praised articles with headlines that referred to the “Failure to find weapons in Iraq” and “Troubling questions over justification for war in Iraq.”

But the war that might have been averted by more skeptical reporting from the rest of the media will outlast Knight Ridder. Pressed by investors who grumbled about the company’s putting too much money into journalism and returning too little profit, Knight Ridder sold out to the California-based McClatchy chain, which paid $4.5 billion and then announced it would auction off, by summer, a dozen Knight Ridder papers, including eight represented by the Newspaper Guild. The end of Knight Ridder, whose thirty-two newspapers–including the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Akron Beacon Journal and the San Jose Mercury News–had earned a combined eighty-four Pulitzer Prizes, illustrates the peril of practicing the craft of journalism in times like these. No conspiracy took Knight Ridder down; it was Wall Street’s line that profit margins of 19 or 20 percent–which the chain posted in recent years–no longer suffice.

Read more Free the Press

From Melville House Publishing

In these highly-charged political times, it is the word that dare not speak its name: impeachment. Democrats and other opponents of the President, as well as people in the media, are afraid to raise the topic for fear of being called too partisan or extreme.

But the startling revelation of the President’s warrantless wiretapping campaign may be the straw that broke the camel’s back: In the halls of Congress and on the front pages of a growing number of mainstream periodicals, impeachment is being discussed more and more openly. And many leading constitutional scholars agree: there has never been so strong a case for impeachment since Richard Nixon.

In ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT AGAINST GEORGE W. BUSH, the experts at one of our nation’s leading institutions of constitutional scholarship, the Center for Constitutional Rights, set out the legal arguments for impeachment in a clear, concise, and objective discussion. In four separate articles of impeachment detailing four separate charges “warrantless surveillance, misleading Congress on the reasons for the Iraq war, violating laws against torture, and subverting the Constitution’s separation of powers “ it is, say the CCR attorneys, a case of black letter law, with abundant evidence.

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From Tom Paine
By Senator Russ Feingold

During the Watergate hearings, then-Senator Howard Baker, a Republican, showed tremendous courage, and a deep sense of Congress’s duty to hold President Nixon accountable, when he asked that now-famous question: What did the President know and when did he know it? Baker was one of a handful of Republicans during the scandal who stood up to their party, and to the President. Today, as the President admits, even flaunts, his program to wiretap Americans on American soil without the warrants required by law, we need more courageous Republicans to stand up and check the President’s power grab.

When the President breaks the law, he must be held accountable, and that is why I have introduced a resolution to censure the President for his actions. Yet, as we face a President who thinks he is above the law, most Republicans are willing to cede enormous power to the executive branch. Their actions are not just short-sighted, they are a departure from one of the Republican Party’s defining goals: limiting government power.

Read more Checks

From Reuters News
By Gideon Long and Sue Pleming

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accepted on Friday the United States had probably made thousands of errors in Iraq but defended the overall strategy of removing Saddam Hussein. Local Muslims and anti-war activists told Rice to “Go Home” when British counterpart Jack Straw earlier led her on a tour of his home town of Blackburn in the industrial northwest, an area which rarely plays host to overseas politicians.

“Yes, I know we have made tactical errors, thousands of them,” she said in answer to a question over whether lessons had been learned since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. “I believe strongly that it was the right strategic decision, that Saddam had been a threat to the international community long enough,” she added.

Earlier, about 250 protesters gathered outside a school which Rice visited, waving placards urging her to go home and shouting as her motorcade arrived. Many of them were locals from Straw’s constituency of Blackburn, a former cotton town with a 20 percent Muslim population. Straw invited Rice to the area after he toured her home state of Alabama last year.

Protesters had already persuaded a mosque in the town to withdraw its invitation to her. “The Muslim population is very angry. She’s not welcome in Blackburn,” said Suliman, one of the demonstrators outside Pleckgate school, where Rice met young pupils. “How many lives per gallon?” asked one of the placards held aloft, in reference to the U.S. invasion of oil-rich Iraq which many Britons opposed.

Read more Mistakes

From The Times UK
By Gerard Baker

Blackburn has seen nothing like it. This weekend Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, will descend with Jack Straw, the local MP, on the northern town in one of the odder pieces of diplomatic tourism.

The visit is a gentlemanly complement to the trip Mr Straw made last November to Dr Rice’s home state of Alabama. The Secretary of State took the Foreign Secretary then on a tour of her childhood haunts. They watched a college football game and ate barbecue. They visited the church where four black girls, including one of her classmates, died in a bombing by white supremacists in 1963. Dr Rice spoke movingly about her experience as a black girl in the segregated South and how it had shaped her views.

There is, of course, something fatuously ersatz about this return visit. Blackburn is hardly to Mr Straw what Birmingham, Alabama, is to Dr Rice. Mr Straw was born in Buckhurst Hill in suburban Essex. He went to school in nearby Brentwood. It is not known if any iconic moments in the history of the struggle of middle-class white boys occurred in that vicinity.

And so Blackburn, Mr Straw’s adopted multicultural home for the last 25 years, gets to play the role of prop in the latest stage production of Condimania, the box office hit that’s sweeping the world.

Read more Condimania

From SJLendman Blog
By Stephen Lendman

The way things are today, why on earth would those in charge in Washington ever want another war or maybe two of them. Already they’re embroiled in two out-of-control debacles in the Middle East and Central Asia, and the country is leaching multi-billions we don’t have to pay for them. Despite this hopeless chaos, it looks almost certain we’re now headed for a new one with Iran and may try to “double our
displeasure” by adding still another with Venezuela to remove their twice democratically elected President
Hugo Chavez. I just learned about an “Operation Bilbao” which appears to be blueprint to overthrow the
Chavez government and likely includes in it targeted assassinations starting with the guy in charge. Do these neocrazies in Washington really think they can pull all this off - wars on four fronts. Don’t these guys have anyone around with a sense of history? Forget about morality and such. These folks have none of that. But even kids in high school learn that Hitler was doomed when he decided to wage war on two fronts. And we all know what happened to Napoleon and a few other less notables. It’s the indigestion that results from imperial overreach that historically always has had a bad ending. It’s no different now than a couple of generations ago or a couple of centuries either.

AGAIN, IT’S FOR THE OIL STUPID, AND THE THIRD AND FOURTH TARGETS ARE IRAN AND VENEZUELA. Read the rest of this entry »

From The Seattle PI
By Helen Thomas

WASHINGTON — President Bush seems to believe the news media’s coverage of the Iraq war is why many Americans fail to see that everything is coming up roses there.

That’s an old ploy: “Kill the messenger who brings the bad news.”

But it won’t work. Dispatches from that violence-ridden nation tell a different story of gory killings, kidnappings, assassinations and massacres, with no place to hide. What appears to be an incipient civil war between the Shiite and Sunni Muslim religious factions has the Pentagon and White House news spinners competing with the facts on the ground.

In a new round of speeches to bolster weakening U.S. support for the war and to give his sagging popularity polls a lift, Bush has been taking on the news media.

Read more Potshots