Opening Salvo

I, and a lot of other people, have been yelling for a while about our shiny new computerized, touchscreen voting machines, and how they're totally unauditable and un-recountable. The vote is what the machine says it is. Period.

No problem, say the people pushing the machines. They've all been tested and certified. Uhh, by who? To what standards? What's really in there? Sorry, proprietary information.

Well, Diebold, for one, is getting their feet held to the fire. Their little security breach doesn't give anybody a warm fuzzy feeling; the Powers that Be in places like Maryland look to me like they're frantically covering their tails, after giving Diebold a boatload of tax money. I can't believe that the code that escaped was production code. Nobody uses Microsoft Access for anything more important than a Christmas card list

Well, anyway, this brings us to last Tuesday. Election Day in a number of places, including Fairfax County, Virginia. As well as having the slowest vote count on record, there were a number of severe irregularities. It seems that a bunch of machines malfunctioned, were taken offsite, repaired, and returned, in a gross violation of procedure. The woman who lost has gotten an injunction sealing the machines until they can be checked over Fat lot of good it'll do her.

Even more ominous, some voters noted that the machines seemed to reject votes for one particular candidate.

... it seemed to subtract a vote for Thompson in about "one out of a hundred tries"

... and she lost by less than 1% of the vote.

Oops.

Big oops. This time, something may actually get done. Both of the defeated candidates are Republicans ....

Now, I work professionally with systems like this. It would be perfectly straightforward to design a system where the hardware and software were available for inspection, with random audits to make sure that the checked software is actually in the machines and the hardware corresponds to the prints. Add in any amount of NSA-grade crypto. You can have any amount of testing before election day. And I could still make the results come out any way I want to.

The WaPo reference is from VerifiedVoting.org. They are the group that seems to be doing a lot of the nitty-gritty organizing in fighting these monsters.

Overdue

All the usual excuses. New job. Outrage overload. No time.

In any case, no updates.

One thing that is worth noting, however, is the new kid on the block in Baghdad. Riverbend is an acquaintance of Salam Pax. Pax has gotten a lot less active in the blogosphere, with his column in the Guardian and his book.

Riverbend is a lot sharper and more critical of the Americans than Salam ever was. Salam spoke very carefully, and tried very hard not to offend American sensibilities. Riverbend is less restrained, especially in her descriptions of how Americans, whether through ignorance or design, are stepping all over Iraqi cultural sensibilities.

Some of it seems like it's right out of Robert McNamara's "how to create terrorists" handbook, developed by much hard work in Vietnam. River, the word you're looking for is "defoliation"

Anyway, go read.

Bottom Line

So Iraq is going to cost us $87 billion. Well, if that's what it's gonna cost, we're stuck with it. We broke it, we bought it. We've had no luck getting the "Coalition of the Willing" to help us out, and asking the UN for help is just silly.

Now, how do we present this? The Government and the Press just hit us with the number, but it doesn't mean anything. The Democrats had this problem in 2000 and 2002. They'd say that Bush's tax cuts would go mostly to the top 1%, but nobody knew what they meant. So people making less than $40,000/year thought they were in that magic 1%. If anybody phrased it as "making over $300,000/year", I missed it.

So what's $87 billion? Wampum has a nice tabulation of what $87 billion is in terms of other Government programs:

In fact, the budgets of the departments of Energy ($19.8 billion), State ($11.0 billion), Interior ($10.4 billion) and Justice ($22.2 billion) combined ($63.4 billion) will probably come in less this year than operations in Iraq.

As Ev Dirkson put it, "Pretty soon you're talking real money".

Friendly Hints

Iraqi advice for Americans suffering from power blackouts. Hey, who should know more?

Maybe there are followers of Saddam Hussein who are sabotaging their power stations. That's what happens here.

Bandwagon

What the heck. Bandwagons are fun. At least for now, I've added the "Fair and Balanced" subhead to the blog title.

Seems that Leftie humorist Al Franken is coming out with a book called Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Problem is, Fox News claims a trademark on the phrase "Fair & Balanced", so they're suing Franken and his publisher. This is, of course, ridiculous. So somebody in the Blogosphere (Neil Pollack?) decided that August 15 should be "Fair and Balanced Day". Political blogs of all stripes are sprouting the phrase in question. So I'm jumping on too, in my inimitable day-late-and-dollar-short fashion.

Fox News should really know better. Lies promptly went to number 1 on Amazon.com's bestseller list, even though the book won't be out for a month. General consensus is that Franken is going to hand Fox News their arse on a plate. Reasons:

• Fox News's trademark is "Fair & Balanced". Franken's title uses "Fair and Balanced". Little things like this matter with trademarks.
• You can't copyright book titles. I dunno about trademarks here.
• It's a parody. There's lots of latitude for parody.

The Blogosphere's resident law professors Balkin, Reynolds, and Volokh all say that this is a crock. Should tell ya something -- they're not exactly left wingers, but law and sense trump politics for honest people.

I'm sure we can look forward to Franken's book being every bit as "fair and balanced" as Fox News.

What's with it with Franken and titles, anyway? The only title I've seen that's worse than Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them is Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, also by Franken. Al, playground taunts like these went out in the sixth grade. Titles like this aren't funny and just make you look like a jerk.

Conservative vs. Conservative

John Derbyshire over at National Review mentions the case of some Mexican immigrants who were burned out of their house by some people who don't like Mexicans very much.

Derbyshire's point is that the reporting of the incident never mentions whether the victims are legal or illegal immigrants. To him, this is a vital point -- sort of whether they should be considered human or not. I give Derbyshore credit -- he comes across as a normal, compassionate human who feels that he has to shoehorn his normal feelings into an ideological mold. There's far too much of that going on nowadays, and has been simce I got interested in politics in the 1960s.

The "illegal immigrant" business points up an interesting conflict among the various flavors of conservative. On one hand, the "classic" conservatives say "keep the immigrants out". California's Proposition 187 (which says basically "no state services for illegal immigrants") is a "classic" position. However, we also now have the "cheap labor conservatives", who just love illegal immigrants. Illegals work cheap and don't dare complain.

It's also a conflict of ideology vs pragmatism. Check who does most of the housekeeping, childcare, and lawn care. When it comes to getting their own lawn mowed, an amazing number of people jump into the "cheap labor" camp. Our immigration laws are a horrible mess and the enforcement is a disaster (made worse by shipping everything over to the "Department of Homeland Security") Nothing is going to get done until some of those "cheap labor conservatives" (some of whom consider themselves to be quite liberal!) get busted for employing illegals for child or lawn care.

(Link via TBOGG)

Telemarketing, Again

One of the raspberries that's been directed at the Republicans is that they have outsourced some of their telephone fundraising to India.

Republican spokesman Kevin Sheridan issued a carefully worded denial:

Any report that the Republican National Committee has hired HCL eServe -- the firm mentioned in the original Business Standard article -- is a case of bad reporting, bad business practices or both. The RNC has no affiliation with HCL. Any inference to the contrary is flat out wrong. The RNC has informed both HCL and rediff.com of the inaccuracy of this report.

Fascinating. This disclaimer is as narrow as it is possible to be. It also contains a gratuitous slap at the folks reporting this -- IMHO, uncalled for.

Look at what he didn't say:

• He didn't say that the RNC hadn't hired other Indian telemarketers
• He didn't say that RNC consultants, or firms working with the RNC, hadn't hired HCN or other Indian telemarketers
• He didn't say that the RNC had never hired HCN.
• He didn't say that the RNC had notified the Business Standard (original souirce of the report) that their report was incorrect.

Hmm. Looks to me like he missed a chance to do a bit of pro-America rahrah. If they're using only American telemarketers, why not brag about it? If they aren't using Indians, of course.

Yah, I know this is kind of old news. I just found the pointers, OK? Anyway, it goes with the previous item.

Telemarketing Fraud

Ah, the telemarketers are fuming and sputtering over the National Do Not Call List. It's expected. After all, the only reason that people sign up for the list is that they are so weak-willed that they are afraid that they'll buy everything that they're offered. At least according to the telemarketers. Couldn't be that people just don't like being pestered; everybody loves getting phone calls, right? Especially during meals.

Two million jobs lost, they claim. I think that number is rather wildly inflated -- I don't think that too many businesses will dry up and blow away if they have to find a new advertising channel. Even counting part-timers there can't be that many phone jockeys around. Doesn't matter that the people who are not on the DNC list are presumably more favorably disposed to the calls, or at least less likely to scream at the poor drelbs with the headphones. Gotta make it look like a coming bloodbath.

I got four telemarketing calls today. All the callers had strong Indian accents. One I assume was a telemarketer; he was simply incomprehensible. Another one got trapped in a "language loop":

HIM:

May I plis spik to Mister Lightning?

ME:

Speaking

HIM:

May I plis spik to Mister Lightning? (exact same inflection)

ME:

Speaking

HIM:

May I plis spik to Mister Lightning? (again, the exact same inflection)

ME:

<click>

Now, I've been in the computer business for a long time. There are a lot of Indians in the computer biz; always have been. Like anybody else, some are fireballs, some are jerks, and most are in between. Prejudice against Indians is something that simply doesn't fly, like prejudice against blacks in sports or Jews in law. When I say I can't understand somebody's accent, this is saying something.

Telemarketing isn't going away. It's moving to India. Many telemarketing firms are going to go away or become simple brokerages. No conspiricy here; just the latest quirk in the corporate outsourcing binge.

And the "do not call" list gets the blame for the loss of American jobs. Convienent.

Place Your Bets!

Much hoohah about DARPA's plan to try to predict terrorist activity by a "futures market". Supposedly, asking people to "bet" on things gives much more accurate results than simply asking them for an opinion.

Why?

It's an interesting question, and one I've noticed myself. Joe Blowhard will pontificate for hours, saying that, if we do "X", then "Y" is absolutely sure to happen. According to Joe, his result is as certain as the sun coming up in the West tomorrow morning. But just say "I've got twenty five cents, cash money, that says you're wrong. C'mon, put your money whare your mouth is. And no, I will not take your IOU. Cash. US currency." It's amazing how fast Joe will fade into the background.

What DARPA is assuming is that this "futures market" will somehow have a better result than other ways of using expert opinions. Personally, I doubt it. The problem depends on the nature of a futures market.

To those of the Libertarian persuasion, of course, markets are ironclad examples of Laws of Nature, not really different from the Law of Gravity. However, when you look at them more closely, markets are as artificial as the Infield Fly Rule. They are ruled by arbitrary social constructs and tradition that govern anything else. Futures markets, in particular, require a very delicate balance of information flow among the participants.

Let's look at the futures market in a commodity; say, coffee. Basically, what a futures trader is doing is making a bet that coffee will sell for a specific price at a specific time. Now, the actual price of coffee at the sale time is determined by all sorts of things like weather and local politics. The "futures price" is a guess. Now, as time goes on and the due date comes closer, the price of coffee starts to zero in on the final price, and the value of "futures" goes to zero. (The Chicago Board of Trade has a brief futures tutorial, if you want more info.) The gimmick for futures traders is that, the way margin requirements work, you can make (or lose!) a lot of money on very small price swings.

Now, look at the information required to make this work. Everybody has to know something about what's happening with the commodity, but there has to be some information that is confidential. If there was no information, or if there is full information, it reduces to a total game of chance. Professional brokers (and professional poker players) don't deal with games of chance. Keeping the appropriate amount of inside information makes the system work. (Technically, this is called "controlling transparency"). This is why, traditionally, the commodities markets are regarded as the fastest possible way to lose your money. The Big Guys have the information. You don't.

Now, how does this relate to terrorism? Durned if I know. In a commodity futures market like coffee, everybody knows when the due date is, when little pieces of paper get traded for sacks of beans. If we are trying to predict terrorism, there is nothing that has to happen. So what this will reduce to is simply a bunch of experts making their best guesses. How is that different from what we have now? Worse, I'd assume that they will all be working from the same intellegence assessments and listening to the same briefings.

So what we end up with is just another version of The Common Wisdom. But maybe the Blowhard Effect will kick in, and the experts will say what they really mean.

LATER -- Another little problem that I haven't seen discussed is that, to be useful, the "values" of the market have to be public. Otherwise, the whole thing degenerates into yet another Poll of the Experts, of which we already have a plentiful sufficiency. This means that the terrorists can track them too ...

STILL LATER -- WOOHO! Poindexter is going to resign over this mess. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy. However, he still has to go through the process of actually resigning. We'll see how honest he is -- my bet is he will either weasel out or find somebody worse to replace himself..

WMD, Again

Well, still no <echo_chamber>Weapons of Mass Destruction</echo_chamber>. Looks like we started a war, ticked off the whole world, got ourselves stuck in a no-win occupation, for something that wasn't there, and hadn't been there for years. What happened?

Well, Digby has a possible answer. It seems like all of our intelligence was based on data from 1998 or before. What happened in 1998? Well, that's when the UN inspectors left. Why did they leave? We were getting ready to bomb the crap out of Saddam. We did so at the end of 1998, in Operation Desert Fox.

Since the inspectors were gone, we didn't really have "on the ground" data on just how effective those strikes were. Digby's hypotheses is that we wiped out both the stored WMD and the facilities needed to manufacture them, to the level that it wasn't practical to rebuild them.

Why?

BushCo has this interesting blind spot. To them, the years between 1993 and 2001 seem to never have happened. Their hatred for all things Clinton blinds them to the possibility that he might, just possibly, have done something right.

"Wag the Dog, Wag the Dog" cried the Right at the time. "It's just to try to divert attention from Impeachment". It'd be really funny if this blind spot brings down Georgie. Face it, this situation ain't gonna get any prettier. It largely depends on the attention span the Press can muster.

Starting a War

"It wasn't all about the WMD" goes the bleat from the Right. "We rescued the Iraqi people from a horrible tyrant". Well, we did. But that's not an excuse for a war. Other places, like Burma, are worse (and the Burmese junta claims to be Communist, to boot!). In any case, the Right has never displayed any compassion for Oppressed Peoples before.

There are two reasons to go to war, in international law:

1. Clear and present danger.
2. A recognized international organization gives the go-ahead.

Bush & co failed miserably on reason 2. The runup to this war was, frankly, the most howlingly inept piece of diplomacy I've ever seen. Yeah, BushCo claims that the UN resolutions were sufficient. The rest of the UN disagrees -- and it's their opinion that counts,not ours.. This leaves the first. Now, not even the most deluded right-wingnut believed that Saddam was going to invade the US. The "clear and present danger" came solely from his possession of WMD. No WMD, no danger. No danger, no justification. And the continuing hoohah over the African uranium demonstrates that at least some of the data that we used to justify the invasion was known to be bogus.

"So what?" says the Right. Well, it's an established legal principal that you don't just make up evidence against Bad Guys, no matter how Bad they are. If you do, you'll get called on it. In a criminal case, the Bad Guy will propbably go free if you get caught at it. We had a case here locally where a cop perjured herself to lock up some Bad Guys. They walked. (So did she, but the damage was done.)

So what will the repercussions be? It's too early to tell, but it looks like the rest of the world won't give us a pass on this one. Enough groveling and arse kissing might get us some international cooperation, but it would be 'way out of character for BushCo.

We'll see.

LATER -- Here's an editorial on the bigger picture -- the whole "Bush Doctrine" of preemptive war. This is a much bigger issue than figuring out if Georgie was clueless, misinformed, or lying in his teeth in the State of the Union speech. (link via TalkLeft)