Definitely no Monica.

People used to quip that Clinton was the first black President. Well, maybe it works both ways. Maybe we want the first black President to be Clinton.

These things are a time bomb. You think that 2000 was a mess? Imagine what it’s going to be like when there is no way to recount or verify.

UPDATE: A group of Princeton University researchers have made an extensive study of the Diebold machines we used. The results are not comforting.

Abstract This paper presents a fully independent security study of a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine, including its hardware and software. We obtained the machine from a private party. Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks. For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities — a voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab. Mitigating these threats will require changes to the voting machine’s hardware and software and the adoption of more rigorous election procedures.

(emphasis mine)

Election Update: Do-Over on First Ballot

By Ben Pershing
Roll Call Staff

Thursday, Feb. 2

House Republicans are taking a mulligan on the first ballot for Majority Leader. The first count showed more votes cast than Republicans present at the Conference meeting.

Ouch.

Election Update: Do-Over on First Ballot

[via Fark]

I agreed with the article anyway, but what really made my morning was this:

I received an email yesterday about AOL’s history with Beijing. It was sent confidentially from someone who was in a position to know. I can give any details without getting permission from the sender first, but let me say this: Offered a deal like Google got, AOL refused. Good on them.

Wow, way to go us. Google’s new slogan should be, “Less Ethical Than AOL”. Got a nice ring to it. It’ll look great on a business card.

As always, when searching for the perfect quote, I refer to Talmud. Thus spake the Great Rabbis:

Bart: “Way to go, Dad, I feel….what’s the opposite of shame?”

Marge: “Pride?”

Bart: “No, not that far from shame.”

Homer: “Less shame?”

Bart: “Yeah.”