SIVACRACY.NET

I don't know how the case will turn out, but based on what I know about Roderick Jackson, he's awesome. He's the kind of person who makes me wish I was rich, so I could drop a generous genius grant or "Profiles in Courage" award on him. Kudos too to the National Women's Law Center. Here's why:

STATEMENT OF RODERICK JACKSON, PLAINTIFF IN JACKSON V. BIRMINGHAM BOARD OF EDUCATION, ON TITLE IX CASE BEFORE THE SUPREME COURT

Good afternoon. My name is Roderick Jackson, and I am a teacher and the Acting Head Coach of the girls’ basketball team at Ensley High School in Birmingham, Alabama. I am glad to be here to talk about my case.

But my team didn’t have it easy, and the girls were treated worse than the boys in many ways. The girls were not allowed to use the new, regulation, gym used by the boys’ team; instead, the girls had to practice and play in the old gym with its wooden backboards, bent rims and no heat. Although the boys’ team was transported to away games by bus, the girls had to make their own arrangements to travel by car when their games were scheduled at different times from the boys’ games. The girls also couldn’t get to some of the amenities available to the boys, including the ice machine. On one occasion, for example, I was forced to break into the ice machine with a screw driver to put ice on an injured player.

Money was another major problem. The girls were routinely denied any share of the money donated to the school athletics program by the City of Birmingham – of the $8,000 donated one year, for example, the girls never saw a dime. While the boys’ team was allowed to keep the money from admissions and from concession sales during their games, the girls were not. To add insult to injury, the fact that teams had to pay for their own game officials meant that not being able to keep those funds caused very serious problems.

I have a son and a daughter, and I want them both to be treated equally in their educational opportunities. I want the law that requires that, Title IX, to be enforced. And that is true for other civil rights laws too. I want to be able to do my part to ensure that my son and daughter, and the girls on my team, are treated fairly when they play sports. I hope that the Supreme Court will agree that I have the right to do that and that my school can’t punish me for speaking up. Thank you.

Click here for more information.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Diran Adebayo, Writer

Paul Miller - aka DJ Spooky, that Subliminal Kid - is an underground treasure. An African-American cultural theorist-cum-musician, his Rhythm Science (Mediaworks £7.99) is a sharp, sweetly designed little number, a manifesto for his way of looking at the world. Tracing connections between Duchamp, Debussy, the Wu Tang Clan and the everyday creativity he saw growing up in Washington DC, he shows how art and idealism can activate each other in this era of sampling and 'multiplex consciousness'. In its range of reference and its fruitful speculations, it reminds me of our own Kodwo Eshun's groundbreaking More Brilliant Than the Sun (Quartet £10) of a few years back.

Posted by Siva at 09:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is a first person account of the life of a soldier who has returned from the Iraq War, originally posted on DailyKos and re-posted here.

Nightmare #1
I am in command of a four-vehicle convoy in Iraq. We are skirting the edge of a town on our way back to our camp after having performed a mission elsewhere. My vehicles are unarmored HMMWV's mounted with a variety of machineguns. Although we are not expecting contact, we are loaded for bear.

Nightmare Continued:

If you care about the war, I think you should care about the warriors. You don't have to support the war to be decent to those who fought it. Some of them have done some really bad stuff, most of us haven't. We didn't create this mess. So I would encourage you to be careful with the "war criminal" label. Think of it as the ultimate "super troll" rating and save it for special occasions.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 06:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Colleges Can Bar Army Recruiters, by Adam Liptak in the NYT:
"Universities may bar military recruiters from their campuses without risking the loss of federal money, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday. A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, found that educational institutions have a First Amendment right to keep military recruiters off their campuses to protest the Defense Department policy of excluding gays from military service.

The appeals court said the law violated First Amendment rights of the schools in two ways. First, Judge Thomas L. Ambro wrote, the schools are entitled not to associate with groups whose policies they oppose. "Just as the Boy Scouts believed that homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the Scout Oath," Judge Ambro wrote, "the law schools believe that employment discrimination is inconsistent with their commitment to fairness and justice." Second, Judge Ambro said, the presence of military recruiters on campus forced universities to convey a message with which they disagreed. That is, he said, a form of compelled speech prohibited by the First Amendment." ....

And the homophobia of the Boy Scouts made it all possible. Had the Boy Scouts not convinced the Supreme Court that they were constitutionally permitted to be homophobic and still receive support from the government, the law schools would have had a much harder time convincing the court they had a right to bar military recruiters!

Posted by Ann Bartow at 03:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Parody of the Beatie Boys' "No Sleep 'til Brooklyn" here. It is called "No Sleep 'til Whitehouse" and has a strongly political bent. It contains a fair amount of vulgarity, so it is not really "work safe," unless you work at home!

Posted by Ann Bartow at 02:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One dystopic prediction about the future of news media, EPIC 2014, is here, produced by the "Museum of Media History."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 02:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Liberation theology, which originated among Catholic theologians in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, held that Christians should take their lead not from church doctrine or hierarchy but from the example of Jesus, especially with respect to his identification with the poor and outcast."

What would Jesus do at Harvard?
By Naomi Schaefer Riley | November 28, 2004

WALKING OUT OF Harvard's Divinity Hall on a recent afternoon, Harvey Cox's mood does not seem affected by the cold, damp weather or the deafening sounds of nearby construction. All the way back to his office, he's happily singing the much-covered reggae song "By the Rivers of Babylon." The lyrics, of course, are not entirely original. They're adapted from Psalm 137, and Cox, one of the country's most prominent theologians, has just used them in his graduate seminar on Jerusalem to demonstrate how the exiling of the Jews from the city in 587 BC echoes today as far as Rastafarian culture. The theme of exile is reiterated as Cox plays to his class the solemn Latin chants from the Maundy Thursday service, in which Catholics commemorate the Last Supper, and has students read responsively from the book of Lamentations, which Jews chant on the holiday Tisha B'Av to mourn the destruction of the Temple. By the end of two hours, a student could be forgiven for wondering if he's studying religion or practicing it.

Indeed, Cox has spent his four-decade-long academic career negotiating such delicate boundaries: between scholarship and political activism, between the commitments of faith and the norms of a secular university, between the rational study of religion and an experiential understanding of it. On that last question, Cox is adamant. "Frankly," he tells me in his office atop the main divinity school building, "I think to teach religion and the ethical significance of religious traditions and pretend that it doesn't have emotional, spiritual, and symbolic elements, is to falsify it. It's simplifying unduly what religious traditions are about.

"Of course, conveying a sense of the experience of religion in a graduate divinity school seminar is one thing. Doing it for a mixed group of undergraduates within a secular liberal-arts curriculum is quite another. But through his course "Jesus and the Moral Life," Cox brought his vision of Christianity to students of all faiths and no faith, and some with no interest in faith -- and the students it seems, couldn't get enough. For 15 years, Cox attempted to teach students how to use the Bible and texts inspired by it in order to wrestle both intellectually and emotionally with problems ranging from poverty and racial injustice to abortion, the allocation of health care, and the termination of life support.

Cox says that if he were to offer "Jesus and the Moral Life" today, he would still teach it the same way. But he does think students' reactions would be different. For example, if he were to invite students to join in with a recording of Handel's `Hallelujah Chorus,' as he once did, he wouldn't be surprised if some complained. Today, he says, "nobody quite knows where the line of separation between church and state or education and indoctrination is."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Despite being SHOCKED by the torture at Abu Graib, the United States military continues to torture detainees at Guantanamo.

From The New York Times:

Red Cross Finds Detainee Abuse in Guantánamo By NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON, Nov. 29 - The International Committee of the Red Cross has charged in confidential reports to the United States government that the American military has intentionally used psychological and sometimes physical coercion "tantamount to torture" on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The finding that the handling of prisoners detained and interrogated at Guantánamo amounted to torture came after a visit by a Red Cross inspection team that spent most of last June in Guantánamo.

The team of humanitarian workers, which included experienced medical personnel, also asserted that some doctors and other medical workers at Guantánamo were participating in planning for interrogations, in what the report called "a flagrant violation of medical ethics."

Doctors and medical personnel conveyed information about prisoners' mental health and vulnerabilities to interrogators, the report said, sometimes directly, but usually through a group called the Behavioral Science Consultation Team, or B.S.C.T. The team, known informally as Biscuit, is composed of psychologists and psychological workers who advise the interrogators, the report said.

The United States government, which received the report in July, sharply rejected its charges, administration and military officials said.

Posted by Siva at 09:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

explains how libel law continues to mess with Web expression.

Posted by Siva at 09:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jamie Galbraith writes in Salon.com:

Democracy inaction
If  U.S. officials who are complaining about election fraud in Ukraine applied the same standards in Ohio, then our own presidential election certainly was stolen.
...

But if the Ukraine standard were applied in Ohio -- as it should be -- then the late lamented U.S. election certainly was stolen. In Ohio, the secretary of state in charge of the elections process was co-chairman of the Bush campaign in the state. He obstructed the vote count systematically -- for instance, by demanding that provisional ballots without birth dates on their envelopes be thrown out, even though there is no requirement for that in state law. He also required that provisional ballots be cast in a voter's home precinct, ensuring that there would be no escape from long lines. Republicans fielded thousands of election challengers to Democratic precincts, mainly to try to intimidate black voters and to slow down the voting process. A recount, demanded and paid for by the Green and Libertarian parties, has been stalled in court, so that it won't possibly upset the certification of Ohio's electoral votes.

In Franklin County, Ohio, there was rampant abuse, with voting machines added in Republican precincts and taken away in Democratic ones, as documented by the Columbus Dispatch. The result was a crippling pileup at the polls; many thousands did not vote because they simply could not afford to wait. I witnessed this with my own eyes. And Sen. Lugar could have, too, for much less than the price of airfare to Kiev. ...

Posted by Siva at 09:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A Pentagon report accessible here concludes:

'Muslims do not hate our freedom, but rather they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the long-standing, even increasing, support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan and the Gulf states. Thus, when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy.'

The NYT describes the report here. The Christian Science Monitor weighs in here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 05:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Salon.com:

Nov. 29, 2004 | PITTSBURGH (AP) -- Imagine being denied a passport for, of all things, your teeth. It could happen, but not because they're crooked. Under new rules for visa photographs that began this summer, the State Department doesn't want to see them at all, according to a story published in Sunday's Pittsburgh-Post Gazette.

So why does the State Department frown on smiles? Smiling "distorts other facial features, for example your eyes, so you're supposed to have a neutral expression... The most neutral face is the most desirable standard for any type of identification," said Angela Aggeler, spokeswoman for the State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs, which handles travel-document guidelines.

A photograph of a person's face is considered the international standard for a "biometric" or physical identifier by the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations agency that sets international aviation safety standards. Last year, the organization announced standards for machine-readable passports which would include physical characteristics that computers could use to confirm people's identities.

"I'm the only photographer that says, 'Don't smile,'" she said.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When it became politically beneficial to pose as a paragon of morality, "Second Lady" Lynne Cheney distanced herself from her novel "Sisters." If you'd like to see why, click here, where "Mrs. Tarquin Biscuitbarrel" has posted every steamy chapter. Thanks to Rittenhouse Review for bringing this, um, masterpiece (mistresspiece?) to the world's attention.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 09:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the hilarious Jesus' General:

Posted by Ann Bartow at 08:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Treasure Chest was a monthly comic book published by the Catholic Guild from 1946 to 1972. Each issue featured several different stories intended to inspire citizenship, morality, and patriotism." Read the series about "Godless Communism" courtesy of the Authentic History Center here. The second page is an endorsement by J. Edgar Hoover. The Communists move the nation's Capital to Chicago for some reason at page 5, and "lawyers are no longer needed" by page 6.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 07:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I like it when judges have a sense of humor, but inserting jokes into a judicial opinion is bad form. A recent example of such "cleverness," reported here and here, comes from Judge Roberto Gigante, in the case of Dr. Gil Lederman, the physician who allegedly asked former Beatle George Harrison to autograph a guitar for his son while Harrison was dying and bedridden. Gigante agreed to give Lederman a requested change of venue, writing:

"Something in the folks he treats
Attracts bad press like no other doctor
He's in our jurisdiction now
He gets Beatle autographs somehow
And all I have to do is move this trial
Somewhere they don't know George Harrison
If this case I were to keep
Defendant would gently weep."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Atrios' Eschaton has a very astute critique of today's Nicholas Kristof column in the NYT which begins: "Iraqis are paying a horrendous price for the good intentions of well-meaning conservatives who wanted to liberate them. And now some well-meaning American liberals are seeking a troop withdrawal that would make matters even worse."

Here is Atrios:

Poor Kristof. There are always these well-meaning liberals doing and saying things he doesn't like. Frequently they're unnamed. Now, it is true of course that there are perhaps some well-meaning liberals who are calling for a troop withdrawal. There are also probably some well-meaning conservatives calling for the same. And, there are also some batshit crazy conservatives who got us into this mess in the first place who still actually have some power and influence over our foreign policy who are... calling for a troop withdrawal.

Now, if you had a column in the Times which would you write about? Unnamed, unspecified "well-meaning liberals" who, as always seems to be the case, are causing serious death and suffering according to Kristof. Or, you know, the people actually responsible.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 08:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Are you fed up with bringing bananas to work or school only to find them bruised and squashed? Our unique, patented device allows for the safe transport and storage of individual bananas letting you enjoy perfect bananas anytime, anywhere.

The Banana Guard was specially designed to fit the vast majority of bananas. Its other features include multiple small perforations to facilitate ventilation thereby preventing premature ripening and a sturdy locking mechanism to keep the Banana Guard closed. The Banana Guard is of course dishwasher safe for easy cleaning.

Frequently Asked Questions
Q: "Not all bananas are the same size or shape, so how can the Banana Guard fit them all?"
A: The Banana Guard was specially designed to accommodate the majority of banana sizes. Our testing indicates that over 90% of commercially available bananas will fit into the Banana Guard. Highly curved bananas can be straightened ever-so-slightly without harm to fit the Banana Guard shape. The opposite holds true of very straight bananas....

Q: "Is there a battery attachment?"
A: No. The Banana Guard was designed for its intended purpose only as a device to prevent banana trauma during transport.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yes I know, wacky conspiracy theories, sore losers, blah blah blah, but just for fun, read it!

Online Journal link here:

November 25, 2004—According to informed sources in Washington and Houston, the Bush campaign spent some $29 million to pay polling place operatives around the country to rig the election for Bush. The operatives were posing as Homeland Security and FBI agents but were actually technicians familiar with Diebold, Sequoia, ES&S, Triad, Unilect, and Danaher Controls voting machines. These technicians reportedly hacked the systems to skew the results in favor of Bush.

The leak about the money and the rigged election apparently came from technicians who were promised to be paid a certain amount for their work but the Bush campaign interlocutors reneged and some of the technicians are revealing the nature of the vote rigging program.

There have been media reports from around the country concerning the locking down of precincts while votes were being tallied. In one unprecedented action in Warren County, Ohio, election officials locked down the facility where votes were being counted. The officials said this was in response to a Level 10 high-threat terrorist warning being issued by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI for Warren County. George Bush won 72 percent of the vote in Warren County, much larger than his percentage of victory statewide.

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative reporter. He was also the Operations Officer at Naval Facility Coos Head, Oregon from 1980 to 1982 and assisted the FBI and NIS in the investigation as a temporary special agent.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lots of facts and figures here. Very depressing, I expected as much from Wal-Mart and K Mart but I had higher hopes for Target...

Posted by Ann Bartow at 06:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From The Blue Lemur:

Declaration Of Independence banned!

In fact, Cupertino public school principal Patricia Vidmar banned documents relating to God because the teacher had been forcing students to listen to what some felt was Christian propaganda, a media watchdog site reports. According to the site, the school had told him to stop but he did not comply, at which point the principal required that he submit his lesson plans to her in advance.

The teacher, Steven Williams, sued for discrimination and is now being represented by a conservative Christian legal group, Alliance Defense Fund.

It does not, however, allow for forced religious dogma in public schools.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 06:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Ann Bartow at 01:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Geographical maps reflecting numeric results of dialect survey here. For example, what is the distinction between dinner and supper? It's mapped out here. The point of the enterprise? "The Dialect Survey uses a series of questions, including rhyming word pairs and vocabulary words, to explore words and sounds in the English language. There are no right or wrong answers; by answering each question with what you really say and not what you think is "right", you can help contribute to an accurate picture of how English is used in your community." Noticed it at Daily Kos.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 01:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thanksgiving is a great day to be a sentimental mushball. I give thanks for my wonderful family and friends, for good books, and movies, and art, and blogs, and a job I really truly love most of the time. Y'all might be surprised at how bright, energetic and kind-hearted my students are, by and large. And one more quick appreciative nod to John Kerry and John Edwards, two very special and courageous people. And thanks to Siva, already covered under "friends," but now specific thanks for allowing me to join this enterprise.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Gunning for funds at school

Parents group raffling off 2 rifles to raise money for some new fencing
Associated Press

LAMPASAS - Hoping to raise enough money to fence in a portion of a school in this Hill Country town, a local group is holding a raffle featuring a deer rifle.

"We're moms using guns as tools to protect our kids," said Marta Ellison, a member of the Hanna Springs Intermediate School parent-teacher-student organization and part of the trio that put the raffle together. They're trying to raise nearly $15,000.

"Bake sales are a thing of the past," she said. ...

Thanks to Michael Thomas in Houston.

Posted by Siva at 09:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Results of an Open Net Initiative study here (thanks to Abu Aardvark). Here is the summary:

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia controls the information its citizens can readily access on the World Wide Web through a sophisticated filtering system that draws upon commercial software from the United States (Secure Computing's SmartFilter) for technical implementation and site blocking suggestions, expert local staff for operations and additional site identification, and Saudi citizen input to suggest over- or under-blocking according to stated filtering criteria. The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) has tested filtering in Saudi Arabia over a three-year period. We found that the Kingdom's filtering focuses on a few types of content: pornography (98% of these sites tested blocked in our research), drugs (86%), gambling (93%), religious conversion, and sites with tools to circumvent filters (41%). In contrast, Saudi Arabia shows less interest in sites on gay and lesbian issues (11%), politics (3%), Israel (2%), religion (less than 1%), and alcohol (only 1 site). Unlike filtering in states such as China, the policies, procedures, and philosophy for Saudi Arabia's filtering system are relatively transparent and documented on the Web site of its Internet Services Unit (ISU). Users who try to access forbidden sites see a Web page informing them that the site is prohibited. Despite this openness about filtering, the system inevitably errs, resulting in overblocking of unrelated content.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This link courtesy of faithful Sivacracy reader and commenter Jardinero1. You can buy apparel bearing the "Evolution Disclaimer" stickers adopted by the Cobb County, Georgia, School District here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Silly holiday quiz with not so subtle subtext of promoting Jones Soda here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Friends of Lulu "is a national nonprofit organization whose purpose is to promote and encourage female readership and participation in the comic book industry." One FOL project is BROAD APPEAL, "an anthology of illustrated stories that engagingly showcase the diversity of female artsists writing and drawing comics today. From Dramatic mystery and humorous fantasy to insightful narratives, this unique, spirited collection offers something for everyone."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Also, Bobble-Head Jesus! Mother of God Air Freshener! Sweet Jesus Candy For Christians Psychedelic Crucifix Pops! Christian Panties! Nativity Fridge Magnets! Buy them all here, where the motto is "What A Trend We Have In Jesus."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Minty! Sheep sold separately. Buy some here. Link from Pen-Elayne.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 08:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We learn today from Ezra Klein at Pandagon that comparing citation numbers with competitors is "interblog dick-measuring" (see "We Beat Lileks" posting). We also learn from his citation source that Pandagon got cited less than both Wonkette and Michelle Malkin. Of course, Malkin gets a lot of citation action when other bloggers point out the odiousness of her writings, and now Pandagon has gotten two trackbacks from me for being sexist. Strange world.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 07:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This song has cuss words and everything, hope the FCC doesn't have jurisdiction over blogs.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 07:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Check out this photo. Unbelievable. The guy can't even put his clothes on.

Posted by Siva at 02:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What will you remember most about the 2004 election? Reports of software glitches, computer errors, irregularities disproportionately affecting minorities, machines counting backwards, curious predictions by Republican congressmen, the possibility of machines being hacked, bizarrely incorrect exit polls, people waiting in 3-hour long lines, machines recording votes for one candidate as votes for another candidate, uncounted provisional ballots, assorted other voter irregularities, apathy about voting irregularities, or the lack of attention paid by the media (linked-to articles excepted!)?

Thanks to the Democratic Underground for many of the links and much of the phraseology!

Posted by Ann Bartow at 02:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Ms. Magazine:Congress Passes "Back-Door" Abortion Gag Rule An anti-abortion provision with potentially widespread impact will remain intact as part of the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Bill for 2005, in spite of efforts by pro-choice Senators to block the measure. President Bush is expected to sign the omnibus spending bill.

On Friday, nine female Senators, including Olympia Snowe (R-ME), sent a letter to chair of the Appropriations Committee Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK), requesting that the language of the clause be changed and protesting the fact that the Federal Refusal Clause had not been discussed in committee, nor had it been put to a vote on the Senate floor. According to the women Senators, the clause, sponsored by Rep. Dave Weldon (R-FL), would “allow a broad range of health-care companies refuse to comply with federal, state, and local laws and regulations pertaining to abortion services. Should this provision become law, federal, state, or local governments may no longer require any institutional or individual health-care provider to provide, pay for, or refer abortion services. This will mean that medical providers in hospitals and clinics across the country will likely be victims of demonstrations and intimidation as this provisions allows that they be forbidden from providing abortion care to women who need it, and also to deny women referrals to another provider.”

Moreover, according to the women Senators, the provision “will interfere with the authority of Attorneys General to reject, approve, or impose terms on the sale or transfer of asset by nonprofit health entities as under current law. For example, an attorney General could no longer reject a merger proposal on the grounds that the result would be diminished community access to full reproductive health services.”

Posted by Ann Bartow at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ed Felten, the coolest computer scientist in the world, gave a tremendous lecture about digital copyright. It's posted in various forms here. Check it out. It's under a Creative Commons license. So do what you can with it.

Posted by Siva at 09:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A few days ago the wonderful feminist blogger Echidne of the Snakes posted something she titled They Don't Get It #1. She wrote: This is a new weekly series I'm planning to begin right now. The idea is to pick something I come across in my surfing on the net that shows why feminists are still very much needed. Not something big and obviously relevant, but something that might not even seem sexist, something that will make people tell me that I have no sense of humor or something more important to do. Something to put a little thorn under our collective fingernails. Why not?.... Ok. Here's number one. It comes from one of Saturday's Eschaton threads: Democrats: always on the defensive. Always worried about what other people will think, or how something will "look". Grow some balls and fight like a man.

I think her idea is great, so while watching for her future contributions, I'll be posting my own as well. Here is today's nominee. It is a posting by Ezra Klein at Pandagon on 11/22/04 called "Clear The Zone" that begins: "Democrats, we all know, have the message clarity of a coed at her first kegger." It inspired a comment exchange that reads in pertinent part:

Ezra, sometimes you have the best similes. :) "Message clarity of a coed at her first kegger" That conveyed the precise idea.
Posted by Ted at November 22, 2004 08:18 PM
....
Could we maybe lose the sexism? Co-ed at a kegger? Sheesh.
Posted by arna at November 22, 2004 10:57 PM

and like a coed at her first kegger the democrats always wake up the next day with their panties off and a vaguely familiar taste in their mouths.
Posted by pablo at November 22, 2004 11:00 PM

I rest my case.
Posted by arna at November 22, 2004 11:03 PM

Boy I can't wait for an entire productive discussion to get derailed over one goddamn simile.
Posted by agrajag at November 23, 2004 12:35 AM

Newsflash, fellows, there are more female Democrats than male ones and you do no service to party unity when you alienate people you otherwise might inspire and lead.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 09:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have been tinkering with the style of this site. Ever since I switched to Movable Type I have been learning some new things and making some mistakes.

Please use the comments tab below to tell me if this site is readable, if the RSS is working, etc.

Feel free to make constructive suggestions to make this site better.

Posted by Siva at 09:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Learn about "punctuation substitution" here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 02:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Article from CNN follows in its entirety:

A new video game to be released on Monday allows players to simulate the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. The release of "JFK Reloaded" is timed to coincide with the 41st anniversary of Kennedy's murder in Dallas and was designed to demonstrate a lone gunman was able to kill the president. ...

"It is despicable," said David Smith, a spokesman for Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, the late president's brother. He was informed of the game on Friday but declined further comment.

The game will be available via download for $9.99.

I'm guessing any sequel simulating the assassination of a REPUBLICAN President is the one that will provoke the "moral values" outrage...

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Excerpt from a review by Christopher Capozzola (in the 11.21.04 Washington Post) of the book PERILOUS TIMES, Free Speech in Wartime: From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism By Geoffrey R. Stone (Norton 2004):

On July 4, 1951, at the height of Cold War tensions, a reporter asked 112 people in a park in Madison, Wis.consin, to sign a petition containing nothing more than quotations from the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. All but one refused. ["Many Found Wary of July 4 Petition," New York Times, July 29, 1951, p. 43. Also reported elsewhere: Time, Washington Post, Nation.* yes, OK] Bitter ironies like this abound in Perilous Times, Geoffrey R. Stone's masterful history of free speech in wartime America. With clarity, moderation and some 2,000 footnotes, Stone explains how Americans could come to fear their own founding documents. We have long needed this book, though perhaps never as badly as we do today.
....
Stone provides a Profiles in Courage for the Sept. 11 generation. But he rejects a simple story of heroes and villains, perhaps because the ragtag assembly of wartime victims in Perilous Times includes some truly unsavory characters: doctrinaire Stalinists, American Nazis, and Northern Copperheads who opposed Lincoln not because war was unhealthy for children and other living things but because they resented the "Negro mania" of the Great Emancipator. Crusaders like Emma Goldman, Roger Baldwin and Fred Korematsu get their due, but Stone reserves his deepest respect for history's unsung heroes: second-tier Justice Department officials in World War I who reined in the Bureau of Investigation, and War department attorneys in World War II who questioned Japanese internment. Stone cherishes men and women with faith in the Constitution; with faith that the cure for bad speech is more speech; with faith, as Hugo Black noted in 1951, "that free speech will preserve, not destroy, the nation." ....

Read the whole review if you get the chance, and of course the book too!
Leaned about this at the Rittenhouse Review.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 09:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Site about North Carolina moonshine, which I learned about from Uncle Horn Head.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 02:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From "DeLay Rakes It In," by Michael Isikoff and Holly Bailey in Newsweek:
....
A NEWSWEEK tally shows that a special legal-defense fund created by DeLay in 2000 has collected more than $932,000, including $370,000 in the past four months alone. That's when Austin prosecutor Ronnie Earle began stepping up his investigation into allegedly illicit fund-raising by a political committee set up by DeLay to push a controversial redistricting plan through the Texas Legislature. A huge chunk of the new DeLay legal-defense cash, $200,000, comes from Republican House members who have new reasons to be especially grateful to the majority leader: the success of the DeLay-engineered Texas redistricting plan brought four new Texas GOP members to Washington this month, thereby consolidating Republican control in the chamber.

But much of the rest of the cash comes from a posse of corporate donors such as Texas horse-racing magnate Charles Hurwitz, who, along with his company, Maxxam, has chipped in $10,000 to pay DeLay's legal debts. (Hurwitz also has contributed an additional $24,000 to other DeLay campaign committees in recent years.) Hurwitz and DeLay have a long relationship: when Hurwitz was facing a suit by federal regulators for allegedly defrauding a savings and loan in 1999, DeLay interceded with the chief federal bank regulator in an unsuccessful attempt to get her agency to back off the case. Hurwitz later hosted a golf and marlin-fishing fund-raiser for DeLay at Palmas del Mar, a luxurious resort complex he owns in Puerto Rico.

Hurwitz's most recent cause is getting legislation in Texas to permit video lottery and blackjack terminals at his Houston racetrack. To that end, Maxxam donated $50,000 to the campaign coffers of Texas Gov. Rick Perry as well as an additional $5,000 to DeLay's Texans for a Republican Majority (TRMPAC), the committee at the center of Earle's probe into the improper use of corporate cash in Texas races. NEWSWEEK has learned that Maxxam's donation to TRMPAC, solicited by a DeLay fund-raiser, is among those now being scrutinized by Austin prosecutor Earle. Hurwitz declined to comment last week. DeLay spokesman Stuart Roy said he couldn't say if Hurwitz had sought DeLay's help for the Texas gambling legislation, but if he had, "it wouldn't make any difference." Why? "Tom is not supportive of the expansion of gambling, period." In any case, Roy added, contributors to DeLay "only get two things: good government and a good meal." Earle, who was denounced by one House Republican last week as a "partisan crackpot district attorney," declined to say whether he will ultimately indict DeLay or any more of his corporate donors. But he strongly hinted to NEWSWEEK there is more to come. "This investigation is a little like clowns coming out of a Volkswagen in the circus," he said. "There's always another clown coming out."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 02:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Paris Review presents "The DNA of Literature" here!
From the site:

Welcome to the DNA of literature—over 50 years of literary wisdom rolled up in 300+ Writers-at-Work interviews, now available online—free. Founder and former Editor George Plimpton dreamed of a day when anyone—a struggling writer in Texas, an English teacher in Amsterdam, even a subscriber in Central Asia—could easily access this vast literary resource; with the establishment of this online archive that day has finally come. Now, for the first time, you can read, search and download any or all of over three hundred in-depth interviews with poets, novelists, playwrights, essayists, critics, musicians, and more, whose work set the compass of twentieth-century writing, and continue to do so into the twenty-first century.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 01:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Below is an excerpt from: "Women vs. Wal-Mart" (at Salon.com), By Corrie Pikul, in which "Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights at Wal-Mart," author Liza Featherstone is interviewed.

Nov. 22, 2004 | In 2000, a 54-year-old Wal-Mart worker named Betty Dukes filed a sex discrimination claim against her employer. Despite six years of hard work and excellent performance reviews, Dukes said, she was denied the training she needed to advance to a higher, salaried position. Dukes was fed up -- and she wasn't the only one. The suit, Dukes vs. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., was eventually expanded to represent 1.6 million women, comprising both current and former employees, making it the largest civil rights class-action suit in history. The suit charged Wal-Mart with discriminating against women in promotions, pay and job assignments, in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (which protects workers from discrimination on the basis of sex, race, religion or national origin). This past June, a California judge ruled in favor of the women. Wal-Mart is appealing the decision.

In her new book, "Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights at Wal-Mart," journalist Liza Featherstone follows the Dukes case from start to finish. Through interviews with lawyers, plaintiffs and witnesses -- and analyses of reports from both sides -- she paints a picture of Wal-Mart as a hypocritical, falsely pious, exceptionally greedy corporation that creates a massive sinkhole for working women. (Wal-Mart officials refused to be interviewed for the book.) Female employees from stores all over the country tell of being repeatedly passed over for promotions, enduring sexist comments from male co-workers, and worst of all, getting paid significantly lower salaries for doing the same amount of work, or sometimes even more.
....

Salon spoke to Featherstone about the details of the Dukes case, red-state and blue-state retailers, and Wal-Mart's paradoxical relationship to the Republican Party.
....
The way that Wal-Mart underpays women and doesn't promote them, despite the fact that so many women who work there are supporting their families, is shockingly hostile. As one of the plaintiffs pointed out, "They don't even pay you enough to pay a babysitter." In their company culture, they've always had the idea that to move into management, people have to be willing to relocate. [Uprooting the family] can be tremendously disruptive to families for either men or women. It's clearly something that can be avoided, especially now that there are so many Wal-Marts everywhere. You hardly need to be sent to another state to work at a different Wal-Mart.
....
Now, when Wal-Mart says, "We're bringing low-cost goods to the community," it's hard to argue with that. Wal-Mart really will offer lower-cost goods than many small retailers. It's hard to counter that by saying the public costs don't always show up on the receipt, that there are hidden costs to Wal-Mart that you aren't always aware of.

I found Wal-Mart to be a really interesting analog to the Republican Party, in the way that party convinces ordinary people, especially in rural areas, that it shares their interests and embodies their culture. The Wal-Mart CEO has even said, "City people don't understand Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is for country people." That's so similar to the way that Republicans convince rural people that "we get you, we understand you, we support you." And it's really amazing and instructive how powerful that language is.
....

Posted by Ann Bartow at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today The New York Times style section has a nice summary/review of Neeraja Viswanathan's cool and funny new book, The Street Law Handbook.

... Nearly as practical as Ms. Ettus's "Experts' Guide" is Neeraja Viswanathan's lawyerly guide to sex, drugs and petty crime. She's a New York lawyer who has practiced corporate litigation and criminal defense. She's got a sharp tongue and a lot of trenchant answers for those who crave more legal advice than is on offer from "Law & Order."

It's good to know that thongs are sometimes O.K. on a beach, but not in an office supply store, and that mooning is outlawed in all 50 states. In fact, in Michigan, you don't have to be seen to be charged. Intent to moon is offense enough. (Well, it's more like an existential principle: if a man moons in a car and nobody sees him, is it a crime? Yes, if he's in Michigan.) It's also helpful to know that you won't be charged for having sex in your own house if you keep the shades down, and if you pay your spouse to have sex with you the exchange is not considered prostitution, except maybe in Washington, D.C.

California is probably the best place to be caught smoking a joint (first-time offenders are automatically sent to rehab and given probation). Las Vegas and Miami are probably the worst. The amount of drugs on your person — whether a marijuana seed or an ounce of cocaine — has no effect on the charge of possession, contrary to popular belief. And selling fake drugs carries the same penalty as an attempt to sell the real stuff.

Ms. Viswanathan's best lesson? A gentle prod to consider a career switch if you find yourself breaking the law — and getting caught — often.

Disclosure: Neeraja is my cousin. Buy this book. It's really good.

Posted by Siva at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Talking Points Memo:

"As you've probably heard, the congress is pushing through a big omnibus spending bill this weekend. And at the last minute, Republican leaders tried to slip in a provision that would give certain committee chairman and their staffers unlimited access to any American's tax return, with none of the standard privacy protections applying.

The Republicans are acting like it was all an innocent mistake. And it seems clear that there are Republican senators who didn't know anytihng about it and are pissed. But clearly this was no accident, unless provisions have started to write themselves."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to this UPI story, the U.S. is spending almost $200 million dollars a day on the Iraq war. Imagine if that money was being spent on education, or health care, or roads, or parks, or on the development of alternative energy sources...

Iraq War Topping $5.8 Billion A Month, United Press International, 11/18/04

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon is spending more than $5.8 billion a month on the war in Iraq, according to the military's top generals.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 02:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A newly declassified document vindicates counter-terrorism expert Richard Clarke from the slander of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, By Joe Conason, at Salon.com
Excerpt below:

Nov. 19, 2004 | Short memories confer immunity on politicians, who are rarely accountable for the opportunistic, irresponsible or dishonest remarks they so often utter. In Washington's fetid culture of personal destruction, the powerful and privileged can trash an adversary's reputation without concern that the truth will embarrass them when it emerges months or years later. Consider the case of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.

But now we know who was telling the truth and who wasn't, thanks to the release of a newly declassified document. That document is the transcript of Clarke's testimony before a closed, joint congressional hearing in June 2002, when he discussed "the evolution of the terrorist threat" leading up to 9/11 with members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. While the declassified text contains lengthy redactions, it also shows conclusively that Frist slandered Clarke last spring.

....
"Mr. Clarke has told two entirely different stories under oath," said Frist. "In July 2002, in front of the Congressional Joint Inquiry on the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Clarke testified under oath that the administration actively sought to address the threat posed by al-Qaida during its first seven months in office ... .[It] is one thing for Mr. Clarke to dissemble in front of the media. But if he lied under oath to the United States Congress it is a far more serious matter. As I mentioned, the intelligence committee is seeking to have Mr. Clarke's previous testimony declassified so as to permit an examination of Mr. Clarke's two different accounts. Loyalty to any administration will be no defense if it is found that he has lied before Congress."

Clarke reacted by urging the immediate declassification of the entire six-hour transcript of his secret testimony, confident that he would be vindicated. Eventually, Frist's own spokesman admitted that his boss hadn't read Clarke's testimony -- and that his only "evidence" was gossip from other unnamed legislators who had called the majority leader to complain that Clarke's "tone" differed from what he had said two years earlier. Some Republicans who had heard Clarke's testimony quietly suggested that Frist didn't know what he was talking about, including Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kansas.
....
Neither criticizing nor praising the administration's efforts, Clarke offered a dry factual account of the bureaucratic approach toward terrorism taken by the president's appointees and advisors during the months that preceded 9/11. Clarke allowed the lawmakers to draw their own conclusions -- if they chose to do so -- by contrasting the slow official process with his vivid recollection of CIA warnings during the summer of 2001, when al-Qaida was preparing an "imminent" offensive that might include "multiple, simultaneous attacks, some overseas and some in the U.S." He didn't say one word that was later contradicted by his far more dramatic testimony before the 9/11 Commission.
....

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With John Kerry! Learn more here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 09:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ted Rall argues Gonzales will be worse than Ashcroft here.

Below is an excerpt:

If Bush gets his way, the nation's chief law enforcement official will be a man whose warped interpretation of presidential power, contempt for due process and gleeful deconstruction of fundamental human values puts him at odds with every patriotic American.

The military's judge advocate generals (JAGs), not known for squishy liberalism, say that Gonzales is nuts. "It's really unprecedented," says a senior military attorney. "For almost 30 years we've taught the Geneva Convention one way. Once you start telling people it's okay to break the law, there's no telling where they might stop." ....

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Below is an excerpt from this essay by Howard Zinn called "The Optimism of Uncertainty":

We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. Even when we don't "win," there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope. An optimist isn't necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places-and there are so many-where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

I struggled with what to title this posting. "Fighting the Good Fight" came to mind but lately I'm wary of allusions to violence even in positive contexts, which similarly ruled out "Soldiering On." Finally, obviously, I just lifted Zinn's words. He is quite remarkable, a treasure really.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

That's the conclusion of this article in the Orlando Weekly about election irregularities. Time runs out December 12, 2004.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Access link via News From Me It's life, Jim, but not as we know it....

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

by Tim Grieve, from Salon.com on 11/18/04

"It’s not proof of voter fraud -- at least not yet -- but it seems that somebody has some explaining to do about the election results from Florida. In a report released this morning, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, say that George W. Bush received 130,000 more votes in Florida in 2004 than he should have received, and that the only real explanation has something to do with electronic voting machines.

Hout said the researchers applied their same tests to electronic voting in Ohio and discovered no such disparities. And even if the Berkeley researchers are right about Florida, their numbers don't change the overall result of the election there. As things stand now, Bush won Florida by about 311,000 votes. If the 130,000 "extra" votes the Berkeley researchers have found were "ghost votes" – that is, votes that were never cast but simply added to Bush’s total – then Bush's margin would drop to about 181,000 votes. But if the 130,000 votes were Kerry votes that somehow got switched to Bush votes, then Bush’s margin in Florida would drop to 51,000."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 04:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Reason Number 687: I like green tea.

According to this article, green tea was a problem for Kerry:

....During a luncheon speech Monday to the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches, CNN political correspondent Candy Crowley shared an early memory from the campaign trail that may explain why John Kerry will not be president next year. In January 2003, when his campaign was still young enough that Kerry would actually sit down with reporters in a relaxed setting, he and Crowley met for breakfast at the Holiday Inn in Dubuque, Iowa.

If the Democrats hope to regain the White House, she said, they will have to close the green tea gap.

As Hullabaloo points out (and that is where I became aware of the green tea "problem"), widely reported research suggests chemicals in green tea are useful in fighting cancer and may aid in keeping some cancers in remission. John Kerry's father died of prostate cancer and he is a prostate cancer survivor himself. He probably drinks green tea as part of an effort to stay healthy. If that puts him on the wrong side of the "green tea gap" there is something fundamentally and abhorently wrong with this nation. Or maybe it's just that "CNN political correspondent" Candy Crowley is a flaming idiot.

Additionally, Mediamatters.org notes:

...[G]reen tea may not be quite the highbrow delicacy Crowley seems to think. In fact, Lipton itself makes more than a half-dozen different varieties of green tea. Lipton's website even reveals that green tea accounts for 20 percent of all tea produced. And, according to Lipton's product locator, you can buy green tea in Dubuque, Iowa, at that gourmet market known as ... Kmart.

So, who is the real out-of-touch elitist -- John Kerry, for drinking green tea, or Candy Crowley, for assuming that simple Iowa folk couldn't possibly be familiar with the beverage?

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Steve is strange and rude, and also funny at The Sneeze.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 09:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to this article in the 11/15/04 NYT, the U.S. military claims to have killed 1,200 to 1,600 "insurgents" in Fallujah. Here is an odd development: Some portion of the 1,200 to 1,600 "insurgent" dead bodies have disappeared. The same article reports:

"American commanders said 38 American servicemembers had been killed and 275 wounded in the Falluja assault, and the commanders estimated that 1,200 to 1,600 insurgents - about half the number thought to have been entrenched in Falluja - had been killed. But there was little evidence of dead insurgents in the streets and warrens where some of the most intense combat took place."

And, the piece later follows up with the observation that: "The absence of insurgent bodies in Falluja has remained an enduring mystery." Let's consider two possible solutions to this mystery. Maybe the military is greatly exagerating how many people it killed. That is actually my preferred explanation, because otherwise I'd have to conclude that the military itself has disposed of the bodies to prevent observation and identification of the corpses. Why would they do this? Because they do not want it revealed that many of the dead are elderly, very young, and/or female, and/or obviously civilians, people with no history of violence caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A few days ago (11/13) the author of Baghdad Burning wrote: "People in Falloojeh are being murdered. The stories coming back are horrifying. People being shot in cold blood in the streets and being buried under tons of concrete and iron... " I hope that the stories are mistaken.

p.s. See also this Greg Palast posting, and the "Iraqi Body Count" site as well.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 04:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A book review ("Welcome to the New Cold War," by Andrew O'Hehir) at Salon.com notes:

...."The U.S. has fallen significantly behind the EU's Western European nations in infant mortality and life expectancy, despite spending more on healthcare per capita than any of them. (While 40 million Americans are uninsured, no one in Europe -- I repeat, not a single person -- lacks some form of healthcare coverage.)

Perhaps more surprisingly, European business has not been strangled by the EU welfare state; in fact, quite the opposite is true. Europe has surpassed the United States in several high-tech and financial sectors, including wireless technology, grid computing and the insurance industry. The EU has a higher proportion of small businesses than the U.S., and their success rate is higher."....

Posted by Ann Bartow at 03:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Comic book publisher Marvel Entertainment has sued NCsoft and Cryptic Studios for allegedly designing their massively multiplayer online game "City of Heroes" -- in which about 200,000 people play superheroes in a cyber-world in which "comic books come alive" -- to knowingly allow players to fashion their characters to look like and be named after famous Marvel icons like The Hulk, Captain America and Spider-Man, thereby "directly, contributorily and vicariously infringing upon Marvel copyrights and trademarks."

More here and here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Abu Aardvark:

In an interview with al Arabiya, Iyad Allawi renewed his attack on al Jazeera, claiming that it has continued its activities in Iraqi territory despite the ban imposed on it, and he threatened to take unspecified actions against anyone working for al Jazeera under the provisions of the recently declared martial law.

The Bush administration had no comment on the question of media freedoms in Iraq.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 01:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Delores Huerta of the United Farm Workers asks folks "to take a stand now to help the dairy workers at Threemile Canyon Farms who have been struggling to get a contract for the last 20 months, by signing their online petiton today. Workers have been the victims of harrassment, retaliation, discrimination and ongoing workplace abuse.

Of the 150 employees at this dairy, there are two women. It's hard to believe that's a coincidence. Last month, three women filed suit in Oregon against the dairies over sexual discrimination. They had all applied to work, but were never called for a job while men were hired. A fourth woman has joined the suit. These allegations of sexual discrimination are just the latest in a long list of abuses at Threemile Canyon Farms."
More information and petition available here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 01:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Download this NOW and distribute it before it goes dark. This is a brilliant video to match the Grey Album.

Posted by Siva at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Below is the opening paragraph of "Suffragette City" a review of a new PBS documentary that "looks behind the veil at the women of Afghanistan," By Dana Stevens, Posted to Slate.com Nov. 16, 2004. She notes:

"President Bush loves to talk about the 19-year-old Afghan woman who was the first to cast a vote in October's presidential election. In the last few weeks before the election, he could hardly mount the podium without getting dewy-eyed over the thought of this spunky, once-veiled young lady casting her vote, not just for the candidate of her choice, but for Western-style democracy. What the president neglects to mention (besides the fact that the election was widely regarded as troubled and fraudulent) is that the girl in question, Moqadasa Sidiqi, voted absentee. A refugee from Afghanistan's two decades of war, she has been living in Islamabad, Pakistan's capital city, since her family emigrated there twelve years ago. In an interview after voting, she said she had voted for peace in the hope that her country would one day be safe enough for her family to return."

Though I suppose Bush didn't *technically* lie about this, I certainly bought into an image of an Afghan woman voting IN AFGHANISTAN! She got to be the first voter because polls in Pakistan (for refugees!) opened before polls in Afghanistan, photos of her voting are here and here. But she and her family obviously feel Afghanistan it is not a safe place to live! In any event the documentary looks interesting.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Astute comments from Body & Soul about columns by David Brooks and Charles Krauthammer entitled "Values-Vote Myth," and 'Moral Values' Myth," respectively:

"....Neither one of them feels comfortable being part of the Christianist Party -- I admit, I sympathize -- and so they must insist that evangelical homophobes played a very small role in this election.

More important, you may not think the religious nuts won the election for you (and I pray you're right), but they think so. If those bigots in the party are both embarassing and insignificant, then it should be very easy for you to tell them flat out that there's no place for them in your party. You don't need their votes, right?...."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 09:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I believe this link is open to non-scubscribers.

Posted by Siva at 01:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ireland, Scotland, and now England will ban smoking in public places soon.

Now if we can only get the rest of the world to go along with this great idea. I was in Atlanta for four days last week. Minimal exposure to second-hand smoke has messed up my lungs and throat.

NYC has been a much better place to live since we banned smoking.

Posted by Siva at 12:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Soon after the invasion of Iraq, Paul Bremer rewrote the patent and copyright laws of Iraq.

Today we learn from news@uspto.gov (the Patent and Trademark Office newsletter):

USPTO Hosts Iraqi Delegation
Last Friday, the USPTO hosted a delegation of 33 high-ranking Iraqi government and private sector officials for an all-day seminar on the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs). The delegation comprises the Iraqi National Committee on WTO Accession and comes from 14 different Ministries: the Ministries of Justice, Planning, Trade, Finance, Industry and Minerals, Health, Transport, Science and Technology, Central Bank of Iraq, Foreign Affairs, Culture, Interior, Agriculture, Communications, as well as the Iraqi Industrial Federation and the Chamber of Commerce, two private sector organizations.

The USPTO has already been active in providing technical assistance to Iraq. In August, the USPTO co-hosted a judicial training program with the Jordanian Intellectual Property Association and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Amman, Jordan. In addition to several hundred Jordanian judges, Government officials, and private sector representatives, six Iraqi judges participated. This program provided an important opportunity for the Iraqi judges to exchange experiences with their Jordanian counterparts as well as with USPTO and WIPO experts.

I take it one is supposed to assume that the "delegation of 33 high-ranking Iraqi government and private sector officials" compris[ing] the Iraqi National Committee on WTO Accession and com[ing] from 14 different Ministries..." will still be in power (and will have some credible authority) after the elections, and will enforce the new intellectual property laws imposed by Bremer.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Scenes from Election Day 2004 from "Video the Vote" here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Actual "Letter to the Editor" published in the 11/14/04 London Times (located via 18minutegap.com):

Sir, It is not only children who need protecting from dubious internet sites (letter, October 15) — we adults could do with a little help, too.

A few months ago, I discovered that many online “school uniform suppliers” deal in more exotic apparel than grey woolly socks, and I had to resort to a restoratory gin. Searches for a particular mouthwash and various natural history topics led me down avenues best left unexplored and, in the interests of sobriety, I installed a safety filter.

Yours faithfully,
PAT EGERTON,
58 Waterloo Road, Wokingham, Berkshire RG40 2JL.
November 13.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

From the Daily Kos blog:

Here's a place were election machine shenanigans may actually have miscalled an election. From the subscription-only Roll Call:

Hill was the only Democrat incumbent outside of Texas to lose his election.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 08:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Found this link at Pandagon:

Hostettler mounting campaign to change the name of Interstate 69
By August Wayne, THG News

John Hostettler, the Congressman representing the 8th district of Indiana, has been convinced by local religious groups to introduce legislation in the House that would change the name of an Interstate 69 extension to a more moral sounding number.

The change will more than likely be introduced in committee when Congress convenes after the first of the year.

See also this.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hard to look at, easy enough to avoid if you read only the mainstream U.S. newspapers. Seriously, take a deep breath before you click here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 09:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Librarian.net

The Anarchist in the Library      by Siva Vaidhyanathan (2004)

read: 10 November 2004
rating: [+]

Since it’s November I think I can safely put this book on the 2004 top ten list. I read it on the plane on the way to a workshop on The Information Commons which was somewhat less interesting than this book. Siva is only sort of flirting when he talks about anarchism since his conclusion basically says “we don’t want anarchy, but we need something better than this” He’s a scholar but one who uses the tools he discusses. That, combined with a very readable style and a good sense of humor make this book a must read.

He goes deep into the models for sharing information and explains how our previous pathways to free and open sources of information are being shut down by people who want to be able to charge us for it. Not only that, they have been re-framing the debate, so that wanting to access this information in an easy and user-friendly way gets us branded as criminals ["anarchists"] by the powers that be. They basically make the argument that they’re keeping us safe by adding all these levels of copy protection and legislation when in reality they’re just protecting their own private proerty model and revenue stream that comes from that model.This is, of course, a horribly brief synopsis of a complex and wonderful book. If you’d like more from Siva, feel free to read the FAQ about this book, or just start reading his blog.

Posted by Siva at 02:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Enjoy here!

Posted by Ann Bartow at 01:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the 11/15/04 Washington Post, Page A01 :

Trouble Spots Dot Iraqi Landscape, Attacks Erupting Away From Fallujah By Karl Vick

BAGHDAD, Nov. 14 -- The fighting started in Mosul two days after U.S. tanks entered Fallujah. Armed men appeared in a sudden tide on a main street in Iraq's third-largest city, a wide avenue where so many American convoys had been ambushed that locals nicknamed it "Death Street."
....

"I believe the situation will continue like this, and Mosul will become another Fallujah," said Noofel Mohammed Amen, a shoe salesman. "And later on all the cities of Iraq will be Fallujah."
....

Posted by Ann Bartow at 01:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via Furdlog:

WN: What are your thoughts on the RIAA’s ongoing lawsuits against individual file sharers?

Tweedy: We live in a connected world now. Some find that frightening. If people are downloading our music, they’re listening to it. The internet is like radio for us.

WN: You don’t agree with the argument that file sharing hurts musicians’ ability to earn a living?

Tweedy: I don’t believe every download is a lost sale.

WN: What if the efforts to stop unauthorized music file sharing are successful? How would that change culture?

Tweedy: If they succeed, it will damage the culture and industry they say they’re trying to save.

What if there was a movement to shut down libraries because book publishers and authors were up in arms over the idea that people are reading books for free? It would send a message that books are only for the elite who can afford them.

Stop trying to treat music like it’s a tennis shoe, something to be branded. If the music industry wants to save money, they should take a look at some of their six-figure executive expense accounts. All those lawsuits can’t be cheap, either.

[..] Tweedy: A piece of art is not a loaf of bread. When someone steals a loaf of bread from the store, that’s it. The loaf of bread is gone. When someone downloads a piece of music, it’s just data until the listener puts that music back together with their own ears, their mind, their subjective experience. How they perceive your work changes your work.

Treating your audience like thieves is absurd. Anyone who chooses to listen to our music becomes a collaborator.

People who look at music as commerce don’t understand that. They are talking about pieces of plastic they want to sell, packages of intellectual property.
I’m not interested in selling pieces of plastic.

Posted by Siva at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The openDemocracy series continues.

What’s wrong with electronic voting machines? Bruce Schneier 9 - 11 - 2004 The United States election of 2004 reinforces a vital lesson: truly safe and accurate voting machines do not exist, says computer security expert Bruce Schneier.

In the aftermath of the American presidential election on 2 November 2004, electronic voting machines are again in the news. Computerised machines lost votes, subtracted votes, and doubled some votes too. And because many of these machines have no paper audit trails, a large number of votes will never be counted.

While it is unlikely that deliberate voting-machine fraud changed the result of this presidential election, the internet is buzzing with rumours and allegations in a number of different jurisdictions and races. It is still too early to tell if any of these problems affected any individual state’s election, but the next few weeks will reveal whether any of the information crystallises into something significant.

The US has been here before. After the 2000 election, voting-machine problems made international headlines. The government appropriated money to fix the problems nationwide. Unfortunately, electronic voting machines – although presented as the solution – have largely made the problem worse. This doesn’t mean that these machines should be abandoned, but they need to be designed to increase both their accuracy, and peoples’ trust in their accuracy.

This is difficult, but not impossible.

Before I discuss electronic voting machines, I need to explain why voting is so difficult. In my view, a voting system has four required characteristics:

• Accuracy. The goal of any voting system is to establish the intent of each individual voter, and translate those intents into a final tally. To the extent that a voting system fails to do this, it is undesirable. This characteristic also includes security: It should be impossible to change someone else’s vote, stuff ballots, destroy votes, or otherwise affect the accuracy of the final tally.

• Anonymity. Secret ballots are fundamental to democracy, and voting systems must be designed to facilitate voter anonymity.

• Scalability. Voting systems need to be able to handle very large elections. Nearly 120 million people voted in the US presidential election. About 372 million people voted in India’s May 2004 national elections, and over 115 million in Brazil’s October 2004 local elections. The complexity of an election is another issue. Unlike in many countries where the national election is a single vote for a person or a party, a United States voter is faced with dozens of individual election decisions: national, local, and everything in between.

• Speed. Voting systems should produce results quickly. This is particularly important in the United States, where people expect to learn the results of the day’s election before bedtime. ...

Posted by Siva at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This story tells it all. It's like Florida 2000.

Posted by Siva at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the newsobserver.com:
WUNC-FM sponsor can't say 'rights'
Station says underwriting announcement could be politically provocative
By DAVE HART, Staff Writer

CHAPEL HILL -- The use of a single word in a sponsor's on-air underwriting announcement has thrown a spotlight on a local public radio station's effort to remain politically neutral. WUNC-FM recently informed Ipas, a Chapel Hill-based international women's rights and health organization, that the phrase "reproductive rights" in the group's on-air announcement could be interpreted as advocating a particular political position. The station required Ipas to use "reproductive health" instead.

"This really was not an unusual situation except in the attention it's drawn," Rose said. "I have a duty to be a good steward of our FCC license, and we go over the underwriting announcements with all of our sponsors. Almost always, there's some language that needs to be changed for various reasons. And in just about all the cases, we find a way to do that in a way that's mutually acceptable."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Siva Vaidhyanathan, one of academe's best-known scholars of intellectual property and its role in contemporary culture, sits under a portrait of Elvis Presley painted on black velvet and talks about file sharing on campuses, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, pressures on libraries from the USA Patriot Act, and the ground that arts and culture are losing to corporations and governments in the digital age.

The file-sharing controversy, he says, offers a perfect opportunity to discuss how easily swapping songs, files, and ideas can benefit and strengthen society.

"I resent a legal system that makes it too difficult and too expensive for creators to play around with the culture," says Mr. Vaidhyanathan, an assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University. "I resent the fact that copyrights last so long that things that should be free and convenient to use are locked down and lost forever."

Mr. Vaidhyanathan, 38, first gained attention three years ago with the release of his book Copyrights and Copywrongs, a popular history of copyright law. It argues, in part, that although digital technology has allowed artists, librarians, and academics to advance and analyze culture in new ways, copyright law is hampering those innovations. He has been a vocal opponent of the recording industry's attempts to stifle file sharing and a proponent of the Creative Commons alternative-copyright project, co-founded by Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford University.

Mr. Vaidhyanathan's new book, The Anarchist in the Library, released in May, picks up similar themes, describing the digital revolution as a battle between those who would free culture and those who would use technology to lock it down.

"To participate in culture is to share," he says, "and now, all of a sudden, our laws are telling us that we may not be cultural."

From the issue dated November 19, 2004

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i13/13a02901.htm

In the Copyright Wars, This Scholar Sides With the Anarchists

By SCOTT CARLSON

New York

Siva Vaidhyanathan, one of academe's best-known scholars of intellectual property and its role in contemporary culture, sits under a portrait of Elvis Presley painted on black velvet and talks about file sharing on campuses, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, pressures on libraries from the USA Patriot Act, and the ground that arts and culture are losing to corporations and governments in the digital age.

The file-sharing controversy, he says, offers a perfect opportunity to discuss how easily swapping songs, files, and ideas can benefit and strengthen society.

"I resent a legal system that makes it too difficult and too expensive for creators to play around with the culture," says Mr. Vaidhyanathan, an assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University. "I resent the fact that copyrights last so long that things that should be free and convenient to use are locked down and lost forever."

Mr. Vaidhyanathan, 38, first gained attention three years ago with the release of his book Copyrights and Copywrongs, a popular history of copyright law. It argues, in part, that although digital technology has allowed artists, librarians, and academics to advance and analyze culture in new ways, copyright law is hampering those innovations. He has been a vocal opponent of the recording industry's attempts to stifle file sharing and a proponent of the Creative Commons alternative-copyright project, co-founded by Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford University.

Mr. Vaidhyanathan's new book, The Anarchist in the Library, released in May, picks up similar themes, describing the digital revolution as a battle between those who would free culture and those who would use technology to lock it down.

"To participate in culture is to share," he says, "and now, all of a sudden, our laws are telling us that we may not be cultural."

Pop-Culture Junkie

His arguments are tied both to personal convictions and to a love of popular culture and the arts, especially music and sports. He grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., but enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Texas in part to be near Austin's vibrant music scene, and his grades suffered for all the time he spent at clubs and Longhorn football games.

In his cluttered office at NYU, he has some 4,000 music files in his Apple computer, by artists as different as Bruce Springsteen and the rapper 50 Cent. A baseball with Presley's signature printed on it sits next to the computer on his desk. A letter rejecting his offer to become the commissioner of Major League Baseball hangs on the wall.

In the past, Mr. Vaidhyanathan has held down jobs as a journalist and as a volunteer on local and national political campaigns. He often works outside of the ivory tower, making the subjects of intellectual property and digital technology digestible for the masses. His byline has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, and the online magazines Salon, Slate, and openDemocracy. He is frequently in front of microphones, cameras, and crowds -- he has recently been on National Public Radio and ABC-TV's Nightline, and at conferences on copyright law at major universities.

Mr. Vaidhyanathan counts as friends both Mr. Lessig and Eric Alterman, a prominent media critic and professor of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. Like them, he runs a politically charged blog, although it tends to highlight developments in intellectual-property issues (when it's not trashing the Bush administration or bemoaning irregularities in the 2004 election).

His work draws mixed reviews. "What makes Siva special is that he is not a lawyer," says Gigi B. Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, an organization that pushes for copyright reform. "He comes at this from an artist's perspective and a librarian's perspective, and not a legal perspective. That really helps when you are trying to build a broad audience for copyright reform."

Joseph Turow, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania, says one of Mr. Vaidhyanathan's strengths is his ability to mix legal scholarship and humanistic research. "It takes strong beliefs and confidence to do that when you know that law professors will be looking over your shoulder," Mr. Turow says.

But Adam Mossoff, an assistant professor at Michigan State University's law school, says Mr. Vaidhyanathan's vehemence compromises his scholarship: "Siva has an agenda he is pushing. He wants to see substantive changes in how copyright is perceived and defined today."

Defending Hip-Hop

Mr. Vaidhyanathan came to his academic career in copyright not through an interest in law but as a fan of hip-hop music. In college he loved how rappers used samples of recorded music to form the backbones of their songs, which brought new meaning to both the rap lyrics and the sampled, looped tune.

Despite poor grades, he slipped into graduate school -- also at Austin -- and took a course on American music. At the time, hip-hop was getting "bum rushed," he recalls. Established songwriters were threatening rappers with copyright lawsuits, effectively stripping a whole creative element out of the music.

"I decided I had to read everything I could on copyright," says Mr. Vaidhyanathan. "I went looking for a clearly written book for laypeople to read, and I found that there wasn't one. I thought I should probably write one."

The history of copyright, it turned out, was a little-studied topic, which became a gold mine for a pop-culture junkie like Mr. Vaidhyanathan. He found that Mark Twain, a favorite author of his, was an early advocate of strengthening U.S. copyright law, and that important copyright skirmishes and battles had been waged over television, film, and even video games. As he was completing Copyrights and Copywrongs, record companies and music lovers were clashing over Napster, the original music-file-trading service. Mr. Vaidhyanathan included an early examination of file sharing in the book.

His argument is that while copyright was designed to give artists and other creators incentives to produce work and profit from it, the protection has limitations. The book shows how copyright was expanded as it moved toward the digital era, becoming what Mr. Vaidhyanathan says is a tool for monopoly, censorship, and -- in the case of rap artists versus white songwriters -- racial oppression.

A Book on 'Core Values'

Tracy B. Mitrano, who directs Cornell University's Computer Policy and Law Program, says Copyrights and Copywrongs is assigned reading in many of her courses.

"Much of American society may have never known, and our legislators don't seem to want to remember, that copyright was a policy balancing innovation between incentive and public domain," she says. "Copyright, in its American origins, was tied to a robust democratic republic. Now it seems to be locked in a debate about property in the way that we think about physical property. This book is important because in outlining its history, we are reminded of how important copyright is to the core values of our society."

In The Anarchist in the Library, a sharply written digital-age manifesto, Mr. Vaidhyanathan focuses on what he sees as a technological battle between anarchy and oligarchy, pitting the forces of freedom and liberty against those of ownership and control in realms as diverse as file sharing, digital television, terrorism, libraries, and academe. Those who want a free culture stand against those who want to profit from culture.

This battle between anarchy and oligarchy was contentious even when culture was distributed through word of mouth, paper, or vinyl. In the digital age, he writes, when an artifact of culture can be an easily duplicated file moving at light speed, the battle is frenetic and the stakes are high -- creating a technological arms race.

The "oligarchs," Mr. Vaidhyanathan says, favor setting up instruments of control, like encryption programs, copy-control technology, or even a whole new Internet that is subject to more surveillance. The "anarchists" are fighting back by hacking those controls.

Take, for example, the popularity of file sharing and music swapping at colleges. Entertainment companies have tried to stop sharing by encrypting the information on CD's and DVD's, but those encryptions are soon broken by hackers and computer-savvy students. Some colleges block parts of their networks to stop file sharing, but students are almost always able to find ways around those blocks.

That struggle between anarchists and oligarchs is spreading to libraries, which are "under increasing pressure to conform to a pay-per-view model," Mr. Vaidhyanathan writes. The model of database companies like Reed Elsevier and Thomson is oligarchic, he says: They maintain control of and access to information. If a library gives up a subscription to an electronic database of journals, it loses access even to issues published when the subscription was in effect. But libraries -- "leaks in the information economy," Mr. Vaidhyanathan calls them -- tend to follow the anarchist's model by making information cheap or free. They are, in a sense, hacking the established system as they talk about setting up their own publishing models, like online, open-access journals.

In the race to bottle up information and culture, Mr. Vaidhyanathan says, government and content holders are trying to use technology to solve problems that are essentially social. He says people tend to be afraid of the free flow of information and rush to create laws and write code to stop that flow. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which makes breaking digital protections on files illegal, is an example, he says.

"Those are the sorts of moves that we make, either in policy or technology, that are destined to fail," he says, "because we think that we can invent a machine to fix the problem that the last machine caused."

While many in academe sympathize with Mr. Vaidhyanathan's perspective on property and technology, his books have drawn plenty of criticism. Edward Rothstein, a cultural critic for The New York Times, wrote that Mr. Vaidhyanathan's approach to freeing and sharing culture in The Anarchist in the Library was too optimistic -- part of a rosy "countercultural romance" that unrealistically "yearns for a preindustrial world in which an unbounded terrain of entertainment and folk art is somehow made freely available."

Marshall Leaffer, a professor of law at Indiana University at Bloomington, says Mr. Vaidhyanathan is part of a group of scholars who subscribe to a "politically correct" and "libertarian" view of intellectual property that is in vogue in academe now.

"In their zeal to provide a libertarian notion of copyright, they sometimes overlook the real challenges of the digital age," Mr. Leaffer says. He does not sympathize with the "passionate hatred" that Mr. Vaidhyanathan and others have for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which the Indiana professor says still needs to be vetted by the courts but in the meantime provides needed protections for copyright holders.

"And I have never understood the romantic appreciation of Napster that was manifested in his book," Mr. Leaffer says. "You can take the [recording industry's views] with a grain of salt, but if you look at what file sharing has done, it has undermined the incentives to distribute records."

"He presents an extreme view, and his extreme view might in the long view might be merited," Mr. Leaffer says. "But it's too early to tell."

A Jeremiad

The Anarchist in the Library started out as a sequel to Copyrights and Copywrongs. It was intended as a jeremiad against the recording industry, modeled on an article on file sharing that Mr. Vaidhyanathan wrote for The Nation in 2000 called "MP3: It's Only Rock & Roll and the Kids Are Alright." In that article he called the file-sharing trend a "rational revolt of passionate fans" against expensive CD's.

He was an assistant professor in the library-science school at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and had finished two-thirds of the book when the September 11 terrorist attacks hit. After that he had trouble writing, as his whole perspective had changed. He no longer cared if the rock band Metallica was going to get money from a company that facilitated the illegal sharing of its songs, and he became embarrassed by the shallow "triumphalism" of his Nation article.

He leans back heavily in the chair behind his desk, which is practically buried in books about culture and politics, like Benjamin R. Barber's Jihad vs. McWorld and Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. "The things I used to get worked up about I could no longer care about," he says.

But in the months after September 11, he started to find a new theme. "There were all these panicky stories about terrorists using libraries," he says. He saw policy makers clamping down on technology with the USA Patriot Act and the proposed Total Information Awareness program, a huge database that would have tracked Americans' electronic lives. While working in a library, he says, "I started thinking about the role of libraries and the value of openness."

Mr. Vaidhyanathan says he is ready to give up his stake in intellectual-property scholarship and move on. But he plans to continue engaging the themes of politics, culture, and control well into the future -- his next book will be "a technocultural history of voting," to be published in time for the 2008 election. The book will very likely address voting in developing countries, the 2000 Florida recount, and the Diebold controversy, in which a voting-machine manufacturer tried to shut down Web sites that posted its memorandums about machines' security lapses.

"Voting technology fails all the time, but you never know it because most elections aren't close," he says, adding that his book will examine how Americans put faith in technology to mediate the country's most important decisions.

"I get frustrated sometimes with the fact that I spend way too much of my time worrying about the music industry, which I don't think has that much influence on the world," Mr. Vaidhyanathan says. "I see the ballot book as a nice meeting place of a variety of my interests -- democracy, technology, information control, software, all coming together in a way that has the greatest possible influence on the real world."

'CULTURE IS ANARCHISTIC IF IT IS ALIVE AT ALL'

Siva Vaidhyanathan, in his own words, from The Anarchist in the Library (Basic Books, 2004):

"The hacker ethic rests on openness, peer review, individual autonomy, and communal responsibility. Anarchism built the Internet. But the threat of anarchy has launched a decade-long effort to rule it and rein it in. The outcome of this battle is far from clear, but the battle itself has damaged the progressive potential of this powerful communicative network of networks."

"If books became streams of data rather than objects for sale, they could be metered, rendering libraries superfluous or relegating them to vendor status. There would be nothing 'public' about them. ... A patron would enter a credit card or debit card to access databases of text, music, video, or facts. The computer would charge the card by the minute or the megabyte. ... The emerging pay-per-view regime could signal the death of the liberal Enlightenment project and thus the public library itself."

"Culture is anarchistic if it is alive at all. ... Anarchists believe that culture should flow with minimal impediments. Oligarchs, even if they are politically liberal, favor a top-down approach to culture with massive intervention from powerful institutions such as the state, corporations, universities, or museums. These institutions may be used to construct and preserve free flows of culture and information, but all too often they are harnessed to the oligarchic cause, making winners into bigger winners and thus rigging the cultural market."

http://chronicle.com
Section: Information Technology
Volume 51, Issue 13, Page A29

Posted by Siva at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the BBC:

Eyewitness: Smoke and corpses
US troops, backed by Iraqi forces, are locked in a fierce fight to wrest the city of Falluja from rebel control. The BBC News website spoke by phone to Fadhil Badrani, an Iraqi journalist and resident of Falluja who reports regularly for Reuters and the BBC World Service in Arabic. We are publishing his and other eyewitness accounts from the city in order to provide the fullest possible range of perspectives from those who are there:

I saw some Iraqi government soldiers on the ground earlier. I don't know which part of the country these soldiers are from. They are definitely not from any of the western provinces such as al-Anbar. I have heard people say they are from Kurdistan. They are well co-ordinated. When the US forces pull back from an area, the Iraqi soldiers will take over there.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 05:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the Rittenhouse Review:

According to the Associated Press ("Paying for Santorums' School Costs Questioned," by Jennifer C. Yates), Sen. Santorum in 1997 bought a two-bedroom house in Penn Hills, a small town west of Pittsburgh, for $87,800.

Penn Hills school board member Erin Vecchio has asked school superintendent Patricia Gennari to conduct a formal review this week.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 04:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Use this to mess with a computer techie. Use this to serenade one.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 03:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

But it was a close call! Try it out yourself by submitting a writing sample here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 03:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

See e.g. this article, excerpt below:
...
The Palmetto State recorded nearly 800 murders, rapes, robberies and serious assaults per 100,000 residents in 2003, a State newspaper analysis of FBI and State Law Enforcement Division reports found. The state also had the highest per-capita violent crime rate in the U.S. in 2002, ranked fifth in 2001, and ranked second in 2000 and 1999, the data showed.

South Carolina’s violent crime rate last year was more than 1.5 times higher than the rates in neighboring North Carolina and Georgia, which ranked 20th and 21st, respectively, in the newspaper’s study. North Carolina and Georgia’s rates were nearly identical with the overall U.S. rate.
....

It's because we have better reporting! No, it is because of the Myrtle Beach tourists! Sheesh. So much for taking responsibility, "moral values" red state that we are.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 03:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Silly but funny song and dance here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 05:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A Question For Gonzales
About that juror disclosure form ...
By Timothy Noah
Posted Friday, Nov. 12, 2004, at 12:50 PM PT
Slate.com

Here's a question I'd like to see someone ask Alberto Gonzales at his confirmation hearing for the post of attorney general:

When Gov. Bush appeared that day for jury duty, he did not fill out the part of the jury questionnaire that asked him to list any previous convictions. When this was revealed in the press in 2000, Bush's presidential campaign claimed that the form had been filled out by a gubernatorial aide. My question is this: Did you instruct Gov. Bush, or one of his aides, to leave that part of the jury questionnaire form blank? If so, was that consistent with your duties as an employee not of George W. Bush, private citizen, but of the state of Texas?

Posted by Ann Bartow at 04:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Beyond "conspiracy theories," election irregularities get scant media attention
From Mediamatters.org:

On November 9, the Los Angeles Times reported a voting irregularity during the November 2 presidential election in Youngstown, Ohio, where equipment initially recorded a negative 25 million votes for one precinct. In the 24 hours following the story's appearance, only one television news show -- MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann -- mentioned the incident.

The glib answer, which is part of the truth, is I think everybody was tired after that election. And it was a grueling one. And so, since John Kerry -- and this is the second factor -- since John Kerry conceded, then there wasn't the great desire to run out to Columbus or wherever and try to figure this stuff out. And the concession is the key, because we're often wimps in the media. And we wait for other people to make charges, one political party or another, and then we investigate it. But this is the time to do this. There's still time before the results are certified. It doesn't mean it will change the outcome, but it is good, and I congratulate you for looking at some of these irregularities.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 03:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just read "Everything is Illuminated" by Jonathan Safran Foer (Perennial 2002) and it contained this interesting passage (p. 206):

God loves the plagiarist. And so it is written, "God created humankind in His image, in the image of God He created them." God is the original plagiarizer. With a lack of reasonable sources from which to filch -- man created in the image of what? the animals? -- the creation of man was an act of reflexive plagiarizing; God looted the mirror. When we plagiarize, we are likewise creating in the image and participating in the completion of Creation.

I posted this because one of the tenets of the "low barrier" copyright protection philosophy is that we all copy from others, that is a major part of the creative process, so the idea that God also "copied" is both amusing and instructive.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

High school students pose threat to President with Dylan lyrics
by Katharine Mieszkowski, from Salon.com:

There's nothing like sparking a hysterical visit by the Secret Service to your high school to confirm every worst suspicion that a teenager could have about the idiocy of adults.

....

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The rest of us might benefit too. Last Letters Home: Voices of American Troops from the Battlefields of Iraq, read by the families of ten men and women killed in action. More info here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 02:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This article from the 11/28/03 Boston Phoenix (accessible here) got circulated via e-mail quite a bit but is probably worth posting here:

BIBLICAL SENSE
Making marriage religious
BY MARY-ANN GREANIER

Since the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled last week that same-sex couples should be allowed to wed, many commentators have reiterated their belief that gay and lesbian couples should be excluded from marriage for religious reasons. But why stop there? If marriages recognized by the Commonwealth must be based on biblical principles, then it’s clear more changes to the law are needed. Below are seven suggested amendments to the Massachusetts Constitution that would bring Bay State family law in line with the Bible.

• If there are no acceptable men to be found in the town, a woman shall ply her father with wine and have sex with him in order to produce progeny to carry on the family name (Gen. 19:31-36).

No wonder so many of the "moral values" voters have such interesting personal lives!

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Text of an Associated Press article available at Salon.com.

Nov. 12, 2004 | GREENVILLE, S.C. (AP) -- Bob Jones III, president of the fundamentalist college that bears his name, has told President Bush he should use his electoral mandate to appoint conservative judges and approve legislation "defined by biblical norm.''

Bush came under fire for the visit but defended it. He later wrote Cardinal John O'Connor of New York to apologize.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 11:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bush doesn't seem to understand the structure of the government ostensibly being formed in Iraq. From Sadly, No (citing to article in the LA Times):

"Well, I'm confident when people realize that there's a chance to vote on a president, they will participate," President Bush said Wednesday when asked whether the participation of Sunni Muslims would be necessary to make the elections free and fair. [...]
As I reminded our citizens prior to the Afghanistan elections, there's a deep desire in every soul to vote and to be free, and to participate in the presidential elections," he said.

The article's headline is "Confusion in White House on Aim of Iraq Election," which seems to be a polite way of saying "President unaware of any facts about the upcoming elections in Iraq."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 08:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Years ago I was at a friend's house when a news report came on about the dedication of the Viet Nam War Memorial in Washington, DC, and the friend's usually stone quiet father cleared his throat and said, "I knew at least fifty people listed on that wall."

Here's to you, Mr. K, and to all veterans. "Thanks" is quite insufficient, but it is a start.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jack Balkin nails it:

... He is a team player. It is unclear what his deepest moral convictions are. But however fine a fellow he is, he has done something that is, in my mind, inexcusable. He commissioned and put his name on a series of despicable legal memos that justified torture and prisoner abuse and that tried to avoid America's obligations under international law. In ordinary times, this would in itself be disqualifying. But, alas, these are not ordinary times.

It is time for those who think the Bush Administration has gone too far to stand up to the President, to make the legal case against his Administration's policies and appointments. For years conservatives railed against judicial activism. It is time for liberals to start railing against government officials-- including judges-- who show disrespect for basic Rule of Law values, who flout basic protections of American constitutional law and international human rights law, and who seek to concentate ever greater power in an unaccountable executive. ...

Posted by Siva at 04:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In Warren County, Ohio, election officials took a rather unprecedented action on November 2: They locked down the building where the votes were being tallied, blocking anyone from observing the vote counting process. President Bush won 72% of the vote in the county. We speak with the reporter who broke the story. ...

Check out the transcript of this interview on Democracynow.org.

Posted by Siva at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

TV stations cancel "Saving Private Ryan"
By Leon Drouin Keith
Salon.com 11/11/04

Several ABC affiliates have announced that they won't take part in the network's Veterans Day airing of "Saving Private Ryan," saying the acclaimed film's violence and language could draw sanctions from the Federal Communications Commission.

....

"We're just coming off an election where moral issues were cited as a reason by people voting one way or another and, in my opinion, the commissioners are fearful of the new Congress," Cole said.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Threatmeter.com!

Posted by Ann Bartow at 09:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I can only hope this is satire.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 09:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In today's NYT, column entitled "A Moveable Feast of Terrorism," excerpt below:

The president is putting his own counsel, Alberto Gonzales, who wrote the famous memo defending torture, in charge of our civil liberties. Torture Guy, who blithely threw off 75 years of international law and set the stage for the grotesque abuses at Abu Ghraib and dubious detentions at Guantánamo, seems to have a good grasp of what's just. No doubt we'll soon learn what other protections, besides the Geneva Conventions and the Constitution, Mr. Gonzales finds "quaint'' and "obsolete.''

With the F.B.I. investigating Halliburton and the second-term scandal curse looming, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney want a dependable ally - and former Enron attorney - at Justice. But since the country is controlled by one party and the press has tended toward the pusillanimous, cowed by the special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald as he tries to throw reporters in jail, the White House may be able to suppress any second-term problems.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 08:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You can see the video here. You can also read about it at the MyDD blog or at Americablog. The tanks were deployed despite the fact that the protest was apparently peaceful.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 08:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the 11/8/04 Seattle Times:

Gripe-site case may craft limits of Web speech

By Charles Odum
The Associated Press

DALLAS, Ga. — When Alan and Linda Townsend were unhappy with the sprayed-on siding applied to their house, the frustrated couple launched a Web site to complain and to give other unsatisfied customers a forum.

"As long as this stuff is on our house, we're going to talk about it," Linda Townsend said. "You could say we're very idealistic about this."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 09:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The author of the Baghdad Burning blog reacted to the election as follows:

Well, what is there to say? Disappointment doesn't even begin to describe it...

I guess justice was too much to ask for.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 09:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While I don't expect the outcome to change no matter how many voting irregularities are uncovered, I personally hope there is a continued focus on election related issues, even if it gets loud and fractious. The idea that we should "put this behind us" incentivizes bad behavior in the future and is exactly the attitude vote tamperers are counting on. And I think there is evidence of tampering and manipulation that needs to be scrutinized and publicized, which will only happen if there is sustained interest and political pressure. Hopefully Republicans do not need need to be put on the defensive to engage in debate and assist in the disgorgement of data, but maybe they do.

So many pundits across the political spectrum have so eagerly and vociferously opined about what Kerry did wrong, and why Bush was so appealing, and what everything means, that they are almost as invested as the Republican Party in treating the election outcome as legitimate. Many interests are best served by raising questions and concerns in a measured and temperate manner, but I'd much rather rather have stridency and unsubstantiated conspiracy theories than silence on this issue.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 09:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A friend in Columbus asks:

Here at Ground Zero in Ohio, we developed a pretty big network for the election. The number of volunteers in my county was amazing. I had one of the leadership roles in the county Get Out The Vote Effort, and I would estimate that I had four times as many volunteers I needed. Now, of course, everyone is despondent, but in most cases, despondency is giving way to anger (I think sadness is no match for the fears of so many people that they will soon be living in Jesusland. Ashland U., here in Ohio, announced today that they will only hire Christians for all jobs). But now, the question has become what to do. The leadership had a meeting a few nights ago, where we were clearly split. Half the group thinks that this huge, out of nowhere collection of volunteers should be directed to joining the Democratic Club, a moribund arm of the county Democratic Party that sponsors, at least in theory, parties, raffles, charity works, etc. I oppose the idea, for various reasons that are not relevant, I suppose. But the big question to me then was, if we don't merge with the club, what do we do? We need to act fast, before the group falls apart. But where are the progressive organizations emerging from this election to coordinate a grass-roots movement? ACT is disbanding. MoveOn shows no interest. Democracy for America might work, but it is closely affiliated with Howard Dean, which might rub people the wrong way. So, we have a huge list of names and addresses of people who gave time and money to help defeat Bush, but no real organization for them. We could start our own group, some kind of county progressive group, I suppose, but there has got to be a better way.

So where are they? Where are the liberal leaders trying to coordinate this outpouring of mass support into a unified movement? Where is our answer to the Christian Coalition? Where do we go from here? Our group is meeting in a month to vote, and I am supposed to speak on behalf of not joining the Dems. But what alternative can I give them?

Posted by Siva at 08:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Ann Bartow at 08:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Found this link at the "Uncle Horn Head" blog. Reminds me of the "Schools Are Open" signs they post around here every fall, complete with stick-figures-in-circle-with-slash quite reasonably interpreted as "no little children with lunch boxes."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 08:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Farhad Manjoo correctly concludes:

In fact, it probably wasn't; Election Day 2004, like all national elections, saw its share of glitches, ineptitude, fraud and intimidation. The Election Incident Reporting System, a national database of election irregularities compiled by volunteers working with various voting-rights groups, lists 30,000 such incidents for 2004. They range from the tragic (a voter who "didn't know how to read") to the alarming ("Two African-American voters were arrested at the polling place before they had the opportunity to vote").

There's little question that the American election process is a mess, and needs to be cleaned up. But even if this particular election wasn't perfect, it was still most likely good enough for us to have faith in the results. Salon has examined some of the most popular Kerry-actually-won theories currently making the rounds online, and none of them hold up under rigorous scrutiny. For instance, there's an easy explanation for the odd results in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, where Olbermann insists there were 93,000 more votes than voters. According to Kimberly Bartlett, a spokeswoman for the county, the reporting software the county uses to display the unofficial summary of election results on its Web site is simply buggy. For some reason, the software combines absentee ballots from several voting precincts into one precinct, and therefore makes it appear as if there were more votes cast in a particular area than there were registered voters there. But this bug does not affect the final election results, because the more detailed "canvass" of all the votes cast in the county shows the correct count, Bartlett told Salon. For example, this canvass indicates that in Fairview Park, where Olbermann says there were 18,472 ballots cast by 13,342 registered voters, there were actually only 8,421 votes cast in the presidential race -- fewer than the number of registered voters.

Posted by Siva at 08:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As Ed Felten reminds us, offer no paper trail, and you can lose votes forever.

Posted by Siva at 04:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Available here, including the incomparable I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag. Give me an "F"!

Posted by Ann Bartow at 04:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click here, scroll down, and enjoy the fair use!

Posted by Ann Bartow at 04:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lawrence Lessig on the Exit Poll Problem.

Posted by Siva at 03:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Beckett, this time. And there is a good summary of parody-as-fair-use at the end of the site.

Thanks to Michael Thomas of Houston for hipping me to this.

Posted by Siva at 03:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I wrote some stuff.

Posted by Siva at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Watch this clip.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

CNN reports here that:

A [Texas] State Board of Education member called on textbook publishers to change the wording in health books being considered for use in Texas schools to clearly state that marriage is between a man and a woman.

The 15-member board is scheduled to vote Friday on whether to approve the books for middle and high schools. The decision could affect dozens of states because books sold in Texas, the nation's second-largest textbook buyer, often are marketed elsewhere.

....

Posted by Ann Bartow at 09:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Red-State PC: Why you can't call them "the Christian right."
By Timothy Noah
At Slate.com

Conservatives like to chortle about the ever-changing nomenclature for hypersensitive groups within the Democratic coalition. It's not Negro, it's black. No, it's not black, it's Black. No, it's not Black, it's African-American. It's not crippled, it's handicapped. No, it's not handicapped, it's physically challenged. It's not Hispanic, it's Latino. And so on. Those politically correct left-liberals! They're so busy thinking up new names for themselves that they don't have time to win elections!

That's the good news for liberals. The bad news is that according to exit polls, the large pool of "evangelical/born-again," which represents 23 percent of those who voted for president, went 78 percent for Bush. So maybe these distinctions are starting to break down. Even if they do, I don't see why we can't call these folks "the Christian right."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 09:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Eschaton nails things pretty well here, I think, saying in pertinent part:

"Yes, there are serious problems with the way we count the votes in this country. Yes, no electronic voting machines without paper trails should exist. Yes, all machine counted votes should have random audits to ensure their reliability even if the election isn't thought to be close. Yes, no one should stand in line for 4 hours to vote. Yes, the media should be demanding, and the authorities providing, answers to obviously legitimate questions about various anomalies, such as more people voting in a county than were apparently registered. And, yes, I'm sure I can think of a few more things.

A "smoking gun" may yet appear, but until that time we need to differentiate between legitimate questions and manufactured answers. And, the cause of improving things by '06 is not helped by turning legitimate questions into conspiracy theories."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 08:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A short film about the Ten Commandments here. I think an 11th should be added pertaining to thong underwear.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Votes Aren't the Only Thing Missing in Ohio
Media Black Out on Vote Fraud Allegations
By DAVID SWANSON

Below is an excerpt, the full article is here.

"Specific evidence of miscounting has been uncovered. And, despite the national media's near-blackout of the issue, local reporting has documented some of the problems. In fact, although you won't learn it from the corporate media, three members of Congress have asked the General Accounting Office to investigate irregularities with voting machines in the November 2 election. The Congress Members, John Conyers, Jerrold Nadler, and Robert Wexler, cited a few of the problems that have already arisen, including a machine in a single Ohio precinct awarding Bush an extra 3,893 votes, machines in North Carolina losing 4,500 votes, machines in Florida miscounting absentee ballots, and voters in both Florida and Ohio reporting machines registering votes for Bush that were intended for Kerry.

More troubling than these problems and others like them is the fact that much of the electronic vote counting is in the hands of private companies, produces no auditable record, and can easily be tampered with. A leading investigator of this problem, BlackBoxVoting.org, appeared in 23 "mainstream" media articles or transcripts in the weeks leading up to the election, according to a Nexis search, but only one since then, and that was a mention by a caller to a radio show. BlackBoxVoting has not vanished from the media because it's ceased activity. Rather, it's launched the largest series of FOIA requests in history and announced that it believes fraud took place in the election."

Posted by Ann Bartow at 10:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Needed: Careful E-Voting Correlation Study

Tuesday’s election created lots of data about voting patterns in places that used different voting technologies. Various people have done exploratory data analysis, to see how jurisdictions that used e-voting might differ from those that did not. See, for example, the analysis cited in Joe Hall’s entry over at evoting-experts.com.

As a commenter on Joe's entry ("Jon") notes, voting technology is not the only difference between Florida counties that might account for the observed differences. Counties that used e-voting tend to be larger, more densely populated, and more Democratic-leaning than those that don’t. Perhaps these differences explain the data.

To answer questions like these would require more sophisticated data analysis, probably performed by a person who does such analyses for a living. Such a person could control for differences in voter demographics, for instance, to see whether there is an e-voting effect separate from the kinds of differences cited above. Such a person could also tell us how big the remaining effect is, and whether it is statistically significant.

It would be great if some hotshot social science data analyst would agree to do such a study. I’m sure that the folks out there who have data would be willing to furnish it, and to suggest theories to test.

It’s also worth thinking about what a particular finding would tell us. It’s one thing to find an anomaly in the data; but it’s another thing to explain what could have caused it. If you can point to an anomaly, but you don’t have a plausible story about how a rational election-stealing strategy would have caused that anomaly, then you don’t have strong proof of fraud, no matter how much evidence of the anomaly’s existence you can present.

If real anomalies exist, I think it’s more likely that they’ll turn out to be caused by errors or technology failures than by e-voting fraud. Either way, a careful study of the data might be able to teach us a lot about how well various voting technologies work in practice.

Posted by Siva at 03:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Click here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Can anyone out there verify these claims? Just to be clear, it seems that "votes for president" does not mean "votes for THE president." It means the sum of Bush plus Kerry plus others.

According to this election problem site:

Broward County
Early Thursday, as Broward County elections officials wrapped up after a long day of canvassing votes, something unusual caught their eye. Tallies should go up as more votes are counted. That's simple math. But in some races, the numbers had gone . . . down.
Officials found the software used in Broward can handle only 32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the system starts counting backward. Why a voting system would be designed to count backward was a mystery to Broward County Mayor Ilene Lieberman. She was on the phone late Wednesday with Omaha-based Elections Systems and Software.

Volusia County
Voter Turnout was 209,052. 228,358 votes were cast for president.