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Wednesday, September 24, 2003
Why We Love Japan Post
Others may talk about service and good customer relations. But how about this? Just this morning my wife Ruth received a somewhat damp and battered looking letter to which was attached the following message (translated from the Japanese)
This postal item became wet while enroute from the country from which it was sent. Your local post office has made every effort to dry it, but we do extend our sincere apologies for the state in which this should-be-cherished-and-taken-good-care-of postal item has arrived.
One of those little things that occasionally makes life in Japan delightful.
posted by John
11:20 PM
Lest We Forget
The headline should have read "Thieves Fall Out." As it was it was all we read is, "Enron sues investment banks, brokerages"
The lead to this Salon story reads,
"Enron Corp. is suing a string of banks, brokerage firms and their subsidiaries that financed its deals and partnerships, accusing them of participating in deliberately murky transactions for millions of dollars in fees that helped create the failed energy company's facade of success.
"Defendants in the lawsuit filed late Wednesday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York include banking titans J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc. -- two of the country's largest banks and Enron's largest creditors."
Another wonderful day in the history of the folks who bring us GOP (Guns Oil Polution) .
posted by John
11:10 PM
Wonder If Anyone Has Told Him?
President Bush's job approval has dipped to 49 percent in an NBC-Wall Street Journal poll, the lowest level of his presidency in that poll. Shrub told Fox News the other night that he doesn't read newspapers and gets his news from his staff so he may not know he's tanking.
posted by Jerry Bowles
8:45 PM
You can’t democratize Islam
“Jihad means the conquest of the non-Muslim territory, the domination of Koranic law, from one end of the earth to the other…” Ayatollah Khomeini
Minority leader senator Tom “the senator from Citigroup” Daschle (D-SD) thinks our "donor fatigued" allies should be providing more troops and more resources for Iraq. Like Lord Cheney, Lord Rummy and the GOP war pimps in Congress, Daschle overlooks the cultural dimension of our unilateralist occupation. The world of Islam, overnight, has become the planet’s largest non-aligned political entity. As Jerry has said, “the bought don’t stay bought anymore.”
Didn’t anybody yesterday bother to listen to the speech of Megawati, the female leader of the world’s largest Islamic nation, Indonesia? No Saudi-bought shill she. If one takes this daughter of Sukarno seriously, the occupation of Iraq means, effectively, the occupation of Islam. And this woman drives her own car.
In metaphorical terms, Iraq is a wildfire and the Shrub Club took it upon itself to parachute in with their hotshots confident that they could contain the fire. Instead, their unilateralist, cowboy-like approach has caused the fire to spread beyond its containment to the entire world of Islam.
The longer we are the petro-colonial masters of Iraq, the longer we will fan the flames. Memo to Daschle and other nouveau ueberhawks: do you really want to sacrifice social security and Medicaid for this? If so, you are playing right into the cynical hand of Shrubby and his minders. Do your homework on Islam, dude.
Shrubby wants more drugs, not more ballots
Amount the White House wants to allocate to bribe the dope-pushing Turks into sending occupation troops to Iraq. You know, the same Turks that cost American lives by refusing to allow US forces transit through their nation that would have opened a crucial Northern Front in Iraq... $8.5 billion
Amount the White House is refusing to allocate to the states to help them rennovate the automated vote counting systems as mandated by the act enabling the Election Assistance Administration... $1.3 billion
posted by Groom
4:08 PM
Fire Rumsfeld
More than 196,000 people have already signed MoveOn.org's "Face the Facts" petition which demands a recall to private life for Don Demento. I've signed it. Have you? If not, go here forthwith.
posted by Jerry Bowles
3:04 PM
Common Sense
Come, let us reason together. You're a former Commander in Chief of NATO, Rhodes scholar, highly decorated and wounded Viet Nam vet, first in your West Point class kind of guy. Two days after you enter the race, the polls show you beating the incumbent President. But, you're not really a serious candidate--you're a stalking horse for the first-term junior senator from New York whom you actually don't really know all that well and have had limited communication with over the years.
All I can guess is that the Republicans are trying to energize the far right by dragging the Clintons into it. Otherwise, all the speculation is pure bullshit.
posted by Jerry Bowles
2:10 PM
Don't Ask, Don't Tell
Matt Drudge seems to have fallen in love with this picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger's ass. It's been up for two days now.
posted by Jerry Bowles
11:00 AM
My e-Voting Problem
Lawyers for Diebold Election Systems, one of the largest of a handful of suppliers of electronic voting equipment, have succeeded in forcing the citizens activist group blackboxvoting.org to take down links to "found" internal Diebold documents demonstrating that e-voting systems are a lot more susceptible to manipulation and fraud than most voters realize.
Back in July, a group of computer security researchers at Johns Hopkins University did a study and found a variety of ways in which Diebold Election Systems machines and software are vulnerable to major vote-tampering before, during and after elections.
In addition to vulnerable software, a major concern is that most of these e-voting systems do not create a "paper trail," a receipt that voters can look at and make sure their vote was recorded as they wished and a record that can be used in recounts.
"This is an epic error," writes Dan Gillmore, Technology columnist for the Mercury News and an Electronic Frontier Foundation big. "They're putting unwarranted trust in technology. They're believing that private companies, for the first time in recorded history, can produce perfect, tamper-proof electronic devices."
While I find the potential for manipulation of these increasingly popular voting machines truly scary, I'm more concerned about a larger issue. There are only a few companies that make these systems, most of them small and not publicly held (As a subsidiary of a much bigger company, Diebold Election Systems is an exception). Virtually all of them have documented ties to right of center Republican politics. For example, Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska is a founder and owner of Election Systems & Software, the company that counted the ballots in all of Chuck Hagel's elections.
Waldon O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold, is a major fundraiser for George W. Bush who has been under a lot of fire recently for a letter he wrote saying he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes for the president next
year."
True, Diebold Election Systems is a tiny little minnow inside the larger Diebold corporate whale and I'm certain that O'Dell has nothing to do with its day-to-day operation. He has the absolute right to raise money for the hopeless fool of his choice. But, the American voting system is far too precious to be in the hands of a very small group of corporate partisans whose business success depends on their ability to get contracts from highly placed cronies inside the political system. Something must be done and quickly before we start finding out who won the election before the polls open.
posted by Jerry Bowles
8:24 AM
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