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November 21, 2007
A different kind of democracy
Bush More Emphatic In Backing Musharraf
President Bush yesterday offered his strongest support of embattled Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, saying the general "hasn't crossed the line" and "truly is somebody who believes in democracy."Bush spoke nearly three weeks after Musharraf declared emergency rule, sacked members of the Supreme Court and began a roundup of journalists, lawyers and human rights activists. Musharraf's government yesterday released about 3,000 political prisoners, although 2,000 remain in custody, according to the Interior Ministry.
Posted by Mike at 02:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Democratic 2008 presidential race tightens
WASHINGTON - The 2008 Democratic presidential race has tightened, with Barack Obama gaining on front-runner Hillary Clinton six weeks before the first contest, according to a national Reuters/Zogby poll released on Wednesday....Clinton led Obama 38 percent to 27 percent in the new poll, a 10-point fall from her 46 percent to 25 percent lead last month. The drop followed a month of attacks on the New York senator from her rivals and a heavily criticized performance in a late-October debate....
Clinton led Obama by at least 20 points among voters age 35 and older. Obama's strength was with younger voters, leading Clinton by more than 30 points among voters between the ages of 18 and 34.
Obama, who would be the first black president, led by 14 points among black voters. Clinton, who would be the first woman president, led by 18 points among women. They were virtually tied among men.
Posted by Mike at 02:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
November 05, 2007
Voting Out E-Voting Machines
It is hard to believe now what a darling touch-screen voting was seven years ago. After the Florida presidential vote recount debacle - which made traditional paper voting, especially the infamous "butterfly" ballots and hanging chads, look positively Third World - electronic voting was embraced as the way back from America's electoral humiliation. Some 50,000 touch-screen machines were bought in 37 states at a cost of almost a quarter of a billion dollars.
The reversal since then couldn't be more stunning - as indicated by a bill in Congress introduced this past week by Florida Senator Bill Nelson and Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, which would ban touch-screen voting (also known as direct recording electronic voting, or DRE) in federal elections starting in 2012. "We have to start setting a goal on this," Nelson tells TIME. "Voters have to feel confident that their ballot will count as intended."After the initial excitement, it didn't take long for voters to lose trust in the new system, as they increasingly deemed DRE too complex, unreliable and insecure; the only thing worse than a confusing paper trail, it turned out, was no paper trail at all. (It didn't help that the main touch-screen machine supplier, Diebold, was widely accused in 2004 of ties to the Republican Party.) Fifteen Florida counties adopted touch-screen as well, and they learned the pitfalls of it the hard way, dealing with controversies like a 2006 congressional race in the Sarasota district, where an astonishing 15% of the ballots cast registered no choice at all - in a race that was decided by a razor-thin margin of 386 votes.
As a result, Florida Republican Governor Charlie Crist moved immediately after his January inauguration to scrap e-voter machines and return the state to paper by 2008 - to what he and most voter-rights advocates call the more trustworthy optical scan system. In that method, votes are marked on a sheet (which is retained for auditing purposes) and then electronically scanned. That system got a boost late last year when the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which advises the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, issued a highly critical assessment of touch-screen in favor of optical scanning." I get a receipt when I go to the bank or get gas," Crist told TIME, urging voting methods that provide a paper trail, "so why not for the most precious thing we have, the vote?"
Posted by Mike at 10:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
November 02, 2007
Secret source of phony Iraq intel outed
WASHINGTON - The Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball," whose false tales of biological weapons labs bolstered the U.S. case for war, wasn't the prominent chemical engineer he claimed to be and invented stories to help his case for asylum in Germany, a new report says."Curveball" is Rafid Ahmed Alwan, who did study chemical engineering but made poor grades and never managed a biological weapons facility, according to CBS' "60 Minutes," which will broadcast on Sunday a report describing how Alwan became a secret intelligence source.
Although known publicly only by his code name, Curveball has been repeatedly discredited by investigations of the United States' faulty prewar intelligence and became an embarrassment to U.S. spy agencies. A presidential intelligence commission found that Curveball, who mostly told his stories to German intelligence officials who passed them on to the U.S., was a fabricator and an alcoholic.
"60 Minutes" reports that Alwan arrived at a German refugee center in 1999 and began spinning his tales of a facility making mobile biological weapons in an effort to gain asylum. The ploy apparently achieved his goal, and Alwan is assumed to be living in Germany today under an assumed name.
Although German intelligence officials warned the CIA that Curveball's claims of mobile bioweapons labs were unreliable, and U.N. inspectors determined before the war began in 2003 that parts of his story were false, the Bush administration continued to promote the existence of such mobile labs for months after the invasion, until it was widely accepted that they could not be found.
Posted by Mike at 01:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)