The voice in my heart

"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget." - Arundhati Roy

Go take a look at this page.

Thank you Susan at Easy Bake Coven

Army Times speaks out

Critics: Army holding down disability ratings

By Kelly Kennedy - Staff writerPosted : Monday Feb 26, 2007 7:33:36 EST

The Army is deliberately shortchanging troops on their disability retirement ratings to hold down costs, according to veterans’ advocates, lawyers and services members, and the Inspector General has identified 87 problems in the system that need fixing.

Read the entire article

Found at Cut to the Chase

Is there any doubt left that the bottom line...ANY bottom line is infinitely more important to the Bush Regime than a human life. These people are bottom feeders growing fat on the pain and misery of the population they are sworn to nurture and protect. The only redeeming thought about a slow pendulum is that these social leeches will possibly languish on the opposite extreme long enough for the world to be rid of every spewer and receiver of Bush seed that currently exists. Bless you Jesus!

Vets on the Street

Hundreds of U.S. soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are ending up homeless. How could this happen?


By Sarah Childress
Newsweek
Updated: 11:41 a.m. PT Feb 24, 2007

Feb. 24, 2007 - Kevin Felty came back from Iraq in 2003 with nowhere to stay, and not enough money to rent an apartment. He and his wife of four years moved in with his sister in Florida, but the couple quickly overstayed their welcome. Jobless and wrestling with what he later learned was posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Felty suddenly found himself scrambling to find a place for himself and his wife, who was six-months pregnant. They found their way to a shelter for homeless veterans, which supported his wife during her pregnancy and helped Felty get counseling and find a job. A year later, he's finally thinking his future. "I don't want to say this is exactly where I want to be—it's really not," he says. "But it's what I can get at the moment."

Young, alienated and often living on their own for the first time, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans increasingly are coming home to find that they don't have one. Already, nearly 200,000 veterans—many from the Vietnam War—sleep on the streets every night, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. But young warriors just back from the Mideast—estimated around 500 to 1,000—are beginning to struggle with homelessness too. Drinking or using drugs to cope with PTSD, they can lose their job and the support of family and friends, and start a downward spiral to the streets. Their tough military mentality can make them less likely to seek help. Advocates say it can take five to eight years for a veteran to exhaust their financial resources and housing options, so they expect the number to rise exponentially in a few years. "Rather than wait for the tsunami, we should be doing something now," says Cheryl Beversdorf, president of the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.

The problem is mainly a lack of resources, advocates say. There are only about 15,000 beds available in VA-funded shelters or hospitals nationwide, and nearly every one is taken. In some smaller cities there simply aren't many places for a homeless veteran to go. And as affordable housing units shrink nationwide, veterans living on a disability check of, say, $700 a month, (which means a 50-percent disability rating from the VA), are hard-pressed to find a place to live. Most shelters require veterans to participate in a rehabilitation program, but a "fair amount" of veterans just go back to the streets once they leave, says Ed Quill, director of external affairs at Volunteers of America, the nonprofit housing group for veterans that helped Felty.

The VA says it's making a concerted effort to reach out to vets before they hit bottom, says Pete Dougherty, the VA's coordinator for homeless programs. Intake counselors are trained to ask questions, especially of newer veterans, to seek out mental health or other problems that could lead to homelessness. "We're much more sensitive than we were 40 years ago for signs of problems," he says. And they have expanded some services. Last week, the VA approved $24 million to boost aid for the homeless, which will allow them to add about 1,000 more beds and increase the number of grants to help the growing population of homeless women veterans and those with mental illnesses.

Much of the work with new veterans is being done one soldier at a time. At New Directions in Los Angeles, a center that rehabilitates homeless veterans, Anthony Belcher, a formerly homeless Vietnam vet who now works at the center, looks out for one particular Iraq veteran who shows up at the center about once a month, filthy, drugged out and tortured by PTSD. "He's a baby," Belcher says. "You can see it in his eyes." So far, the young vet is too wary to accept more than a night's bed or a hot meal. But as Belcher says, at least he has a place to go. That's more than many of the thousands of vets on America’s streets can say tonight.

We need adult leadership

This is part of an email I received from Consumers Union recently:

Thanks to more than one thousand messages from consumers like you, the state of Washington came one step closer to requiring hospitals to report their infection rates to the public.
Now we need to keep up the momentum.
Please send a message to your representative and ask him or her to vote for HB 1106!

One in 20 patients contracts a hospital-acquired infection while being treated in the hospital for something else. You have a right to know whether your hospital is doing a good job preventing hospital-acquired infections.

The article below is a reflection of why we should be very concerned about the super-infections raging through our hospitals nationwide. After reading this, check out my previous post about the misuse of antibiotics, and the tragic results.

WFTV.com
Woman Becomes Quadruple Amputee After Giving Birth (click to see picture)
POSTED: 5:59 pm EST January 19, 2006
UPDATED: 4:06 pm EST January 20, 2006

ORLANDO, Fla. -- A Sanford mother says she will never be able to hold her newborn because an Orlando hospital performed a life-altering surgery and, she claims, the hospital refuses to explain why they left her as a multiple amputee.

The woman filed a complaint against Orlando Regional Healthcare Systems, she said, because they won't tell her exactly what happened. The hospital maintains the woman wants to know information that would violate other patients' rights.

Claudia Mejia gave birth eight and a half months ago at Orlando Regional South Seminole. She was transported to Orlando Regional Medical Center in Orlando where her arms and legs were amputated. She was told she had streptococcus, a flesh eating bacteria, and toxic shock syndrome, but no further explanation was given.

The hospital, in a letter, wrote that if she wanted to find out exactly what happened, she would have to sue them.

"I want to know what happened. I went to deliver my baby and I came out like this," Mejia said.

Mejia said after she gave birth to Mathew last spring, she was kept in the hospital with complications. Twelve days after giving birth at Orlando Regional South Seminole hospital, she was transported to Orlando Regional Medical Center where she became a quadruple amputee. Now she can not care for or hold her baby.

"Yeah, I want to pick him up. He wants me to pick him up. I can't. I want to, but I can't," she said. "Woke up from surgery and I had no arms and no legs. No one told me anything. My arms and legs were just gone."

Her 7-year-old son, Jorge, asks his mother over and over what happened to her. Neither she nor her husband has the answer.

"I love her, so I'll always stick with her and take it a day at a time myself," said her husband, Tim Edwards.

The couple wants to know how she caught streptococcus, during labor or after. She doesn't know. She knows she didn't leave the hospital the same.

"And why, I want to know why this happened," she said.

Her attorney, Judy Hyman wrote ORHS a letter saying, according to the Florida statute, "The Patients Right To Know About Adverse Medical Incidents Act," the hospital must give her the records.

"When the statute is named 'Patients Right To Know,' I don't know how it could be clearer," Hyman said.

The hospital's lawyers wrote back, "Ms. Mejia's request may require legal resolution." In other words, according to their interpretation of the law, Mejia has to sue them to get information about herself.

That's the sticking point, the interpretation of the Patients Right To Know act, a constitutional amendment Florida voters passed a little more than a year ago.
Mejia's other attorney, E. Clay Parker, said the hospital is not following the law
"We were forced to file this and ask a judge to interpret the constitutional amendment and do right," Parker said.

Mejia hopes the right thing is done. She said not knowing exactly why it happened is unbearable. She only hopes she'll be able to soon answer her little boy's question, 'What happened?'
"He told me everyday, 'What happened,' and I don't have any answers for that," she said.

ORMC said Mejia is requesting information on if there were other patients or someone on her floor with the streptococcus. They said, if they release that to her, that would be a violation of other patients' rights.

Isn't it completely insane that our genetically altered and chemically saturated food supply has turned our bodies into petrie dish incubators that are producing the bacteria that consumes our flesh and shuts down our immune systems? Wouldn't you like to prepare the meals for the boards of directors for Con-Agra and Monsanto?

Why organic is critical

Smoking-gun Proof That Misuse of Antibiotics Breeds Superbugs

By Penny MacRae
Agence France Presse,
Feb 9, 2007
Straight to the Source

From CommonDreams.org

Medical experts have long assumed that misuse of antibiotics breeds drug-resistant superbugs, but a newly released study has finally provided smoking-gun proof as to how this occurs.

Bacterial diseases that were once easy to treat, such as tuberculosis, gonorrhoea, typhus and pneumonia, are becoming ever-tougher challenges as germs evolve into strains that outstrip science's ability to keep up.

The new research provides hard evidence that antibiotics which are mismatched to the type of bacteria being targeted can hike this worsening resistance problem.

In the experiment, Surbhi Malhotra-Kumar and a team of microbiologists in Belgium and the Netherlands gave a partial course of two macrolide-class antibiotics -- clarithromycin and azithromycin -- that are commonly prescribed for bronchial infections to two randomly-selected groups of 74 people, one drug for each group.

They also gave placebos to a control group, which was to provide a yardstick for any changes observed.

The drug-taking subjects were not sick. The point was to monitor the drugs' effect on streptococci bacteria that were normal and harmless components of the flora in the mouth and throat.

The verdict was ironclad. Azithromycin swiftly created large numbers of bacteria that were resistant to macrolides, while clarithromycin encouraged the emergence of a highly resistant form.

This form was not only more resistant to macrolides, it also showed greater resistance to lincosamide, streptogramin B and tetracycline antibiotics.

The study, which is published by The Lancet, found that antibiotics had an enduring effect on this oral bacteria, of more than 180 days.

In other words, the harmless bacteria became a potential reservoir of drug-resistant DNA for pathogenic ones.

Penicillin is usually the weapon of choice for tackling harmful forms streptococci, but doctors often resort to macrolides if a patient is allergic to that drug.

In an assessment of the work, Stephanie Dancer, a microbiologist at Southern General Hospital in Glasgow, Scotland, said the finding provided crucial evidence to back a commonly-observed problem about misprescribed or misused antibiotics.

"All of us could see what was happening, but now we have proof," she told AFP in an interview.
The stakes could hardly be higher, said Dancer.

"It is an immense problem ... that is affecting every antimicrobial agent that Man has been able to find," she said. "We are squandering a precious resource."

She pointed the finger in particular at purchases of antibiotics over the counter or the Internet, and urged the launch of a public awareness campaign on the lines of "No drugs for bugs -- unless needed."

Push and Shove

I have been thinking about the situation we (the US) find ourselves in throughout the Middle East, and it continues to boggle my mind. The underlying current of reason that prompted the Bush White House to push the Nation into this untenable position escapes my ability to deduce. Where is our adult supervision?

All my life, I have wondered about the simple phrases to which “shock and awe” has been added in the recent past. “Push and shove, “give and take”, “go around and come around”, “do unto others”, and “an eye for an eye” have all been part of the language I was raised with, and I am finally able to understand exactly why. Each of these phrases are meant to imply consequences for each and every action taken as an individual or as a Nation. What they don’t adequately imply is the extent of those consequences when you are initiating an act on a less than moral basis (such as a pre-emptive attack against the civilian population of a country already struggling under your boot heel). Every now and then, I hear one of the media spinmeisters mention unintended consequences, and I simply nod my head. Who could’ve guessed?

I find it extremely interesting that we were forced to endure hour upon hour of “shock and awe” from the major (so called) news networks when this conflict was initiated, but now that we are ass deep in the mire, we are forced to endure hour upon hour of Anna Nicole Smith and other non-war content. It is almost as if someone is trying to manipulate our attention away from the issues that are extremely important to our ability to make critical decisions about our leadership… unless those issues reflect favorably upon that leadership.

We have been herded from one pre-election issue to another by the political cattle-prod of fear mongering by an administration that deviously thrust itself into power, and then used illegal means (manipulating electronic voting machines) to stay there. Their blatant disregard for the intelligence of the average citizen has finally caught up with them, and turned public opinion against their greed and avarice, but it is obvious that the last chapter of this horror story has yet to be written. I am hopeful that the plethora of hearings being conducted by the Democratic Majority will create a demand for justice that will provide a prison wardrobe for every official complicit in the corruption of the People’s trust (including those who have jumped ship or been removed because they aren’t devious enough to suit Cheney).

Regardless of the political and legal outcome of the Bush travesties, the concept of “what goes around comes around” will be a long time playing itself out in our relationship with the many small nations throughout the world suffering from the results of the Neocon playbook. I sincerely believe that our best hope to bring balance and harmony back into this world is to give the Democratic Party a super majority in both the House and Senate in 2008 with the understanding that we expect to see a vast overhaul of the institutions that are responsible for leading us away from the ideals of the American Dream.

This is what war is good for

Between October and December 1995, the U.S. Army's Depleted Uranium (DU) Project completed a series of training videos and manuals about depleted uranium munitions. This training regimen was developed as the result of recommendations made in the January 1993 General Accounting Office (GAO) report, "Army Not Adequately Prepared to Deal with Depleted Uranium Contamination."

The training materials were intended to instruct servicemen and women about the use and hazards of depleted uranium munitions. In addition, the training regimen included instructions for soldiers who repair and recover vehicles contaminated by depleted uranium.

Throughout 1996, these videos sat on a shelf, while U.S. soldiers continued to use and work with depleted uranium munitions. In June 1997, Bernard Rostker, The Department of Defense (DoD) principle spokesperson for their investigation of Gulf War hazardous exposures, stated that the depleted uranium safety training program would begin to be shared by a limited number of servicemen and women in July 1997.

STILL TODAY the vast majority of servicemen and women in the U.S. military, and likely in the armed forces of other countries which are developing or have obtained depleted uranium munitions, are unaware of the use and dangers of depleted uranium munitions, or of the protective clothing and procedures which can minimize or prevent serious short-term exposures.

Training video

Let's give the Dems another 18 Senate seats

A total of 43 Republicans voted today to deny the first minimum wage increase in a decade -- and 18 of those are up for reelection in 2008:

Lamar Alexander (R-TN)
Wayne Allard (R-CO)
Saxby Chambliss (R-GA)
Thad Cochran (R-MS)
John Cornyn (R-TX)
Larry Craig (R-ID)
Elizabeth Dole (R-NC)
Pete Domenici (R-NM)
Michael Enzi (R-WY)
Lindsey Graham (R-SC)
Chuck Hagel (R-NE)
James Inhofe (R-OK)
Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
Pat Roberts (R-KS)
Jeff Sessions (R-AL)
Gordon Smith (R-OR)
Ted Stevens (R-AK)
John Sununu (R-NH)

I picked this up from Kate over at Cut To The Chase.

Here is the complete post.

Another Rumsfeld legacy?

Aspartame Recall: A Message Congress Cannot Ignore
by Dr. Betty Martini, D. Hum

December 2006

(Excerpt:)

Aspartame interacts with drugs and vaccines causing thousands of deaths, but instead of looking for the problem Congress has passed a new law exonerating the pharmaceutical industry from any liability. In the United Kingdom, the Honorable Roger Williams, a member of Parliament, has demanded a ban. And Robin Goodwin petitioned for a ban in the Falklands after his wife sustained a brain tumor and his daughter suffered seizures for 18 years until he found out aspartame was the culprit, and removal stopped the problem. Not wanting to wait for delays due to politics, he simply wrote every single citizen of the Falklands and aspartame products now rot on the shelves.

Congress has failed us in three congressional hearings. Senators like Orin Hatch were given money by Monsanto. Now, Congress has let us down again, giving the pharmaceutical industry a green card to be unconcerned with disability and death because they are no longer liable for any such injuries. Congress should instead echo the courageous words of State Senator Ortiz y Pino, who put the problem of lobbyists and aspartame in vivid perspective.

At the same time, consumer organizations must educate the World as a counter to the blind eye that the FDA has turned to the issue. The FDA has all too easily adopted an anti-health position on aspartame ever since it became the pharmaceutical industry’s Washington Branch Office.

Read the entire article (especially as it pertains to children)

Found at Rense.com

Let's start getting it right

Have you heard about the outrageous electronic voting machine meltdown in Florida?

Voting machines appear to have flat-out lost 18,000 votes for Congress—votes almost certain to change the outcome of a close House race in Sarasota.

This election meltdown demonstrates the insanity of paperless voting machines. There's no way to recount the votes short of holding a new election. Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—along with Republican and Democratic leaders—are deciding now if Congress will tolerate this broken election or call for a new one.

Join me in signing this petition urging Congress to call for a re-vote in Sarasota, Florida and to repair our nation's elections. Take a look at:http://pol.moveon.org/floridaelection/

No matter what party you're for, we can all agree we need to repair our broken election system.

Thanks!

Proper perspective

The following is an excerpt from an article in Nation on-line, and it should be required reading for every American. My hat is off to Major Bill Edmonds, and my respect for him is immense. Please read the entire article...


A Soldier's Story
Major Bill Edmonds

For just a minute or two, step into my life. I am an American soldier in the Army Special Forces. I have just returned from a one-year tour of duty in Iraq, where I lived, shared meals, slept and fought beside my Iraqi counterpart as we battled insurgents in the center of a thousand-year-old city. I am a conflicted man, and I want you to read the story of that experience as I lived it. In the interest of security, I have omitted some identifying details, but every word is true.

Routine and Ritual

I wake in the cold and dark of each morning to the sound of a hundred different muezzins calling Muslim men and women to prayer. These calls reverberate five times per day throughout a city the size of San Francisco. Above this sound I also hear two American helicopters making their steady patrol over the rooftops of the city and the blaring horns of armored vehicles as they swerve through dense city traffic. As a combat adviser and interrogator, I find these contrasts very appropriate for the life that I now lead.

This morning, on the Iraqi base in which I live, I walk 100 feet from my bedroom to work and back again. These are the same 100 feet I will travel month after month for one year. During every trip I smile, put a hand to my heart, sometimes a hand to my head, and say to every passing Iraqi the religious and cultural words that are expected from a fellow human being. In Iraq, one cannot separate Islamic culture from the individual. They are intrinsically woven into the fabric of daily life, but for most Westerners, they seem abnormal. I sit in smoke-filled rooms and drink sugar-laden tea in small crystal glasses. I spray tobacco-scented air freshener, kiss cheeks three times or more, allow the Iraqi on the right to pass through the doorway first. I know never to inquire on the health of a wife or elder daughter. I even hold hands with other men.

Read the entire story

Turning "can do" into doo doo

Census Counts 100,000 Contractors in Iraq

Civilian Number, Duties Are Issues
By Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 5, 2006; D01

There are about 100,000 government contractors operating in Iraq, not counting subcontractors, a total that is approaching the size of the U.S. military force there, according to the military's first census of the growing population of civilians operating in the battlefield.

The survey finding, which includes Americans, Iraqis and third-party nationals hired by companies operating under U.S. government contracts, is significantly higher and wider in scope than the Pentagon's only previous estimate, which said there were 25,000 security contractors in the country.

It is also 10 times the estimated number of contractors that deployed during the Persian Gulf War in 1991, reflecting the Pentagon's growing post-Cold War reliance on contractors for such jobs as providing security, interrogating prisoners, cooking meals, fixing equipment and constructing bases that were once reserved for soldiers.

Official numbers are difficult to find, said Deborah D. Avant, author of the 2005 book "The Market for Force: The Consequences of Privatizing Security," but an estimated 9,200 contractors deployed during the Gulf War, a far shorter conflict without reconstruction projects. "This is the largest deployment of U.S. contractors in a military operation," said Avant, an associate professor at George Washington University.

In addition to about 140,000 U.S. troops, Iraq is now filled with a hodgepodge of contractors. DynCorp International has about 1,500 employees in Iraq, including about 700 helping train the police force. Blackwater USA has more than 1,000 employees in the country, most of them providing private security. Kellogg, Brown and Root, one of the largest contractors in Iraq, said it does not delineate its workforce by country but that it has more than 50,000 employees and subcontractors working in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait. MPRI, a unit of L-3 Communications, has about 500 employees working on 12 contracts, including providing mentors to the Iraqi Defense Ministry for strategic planning, budgeting and establishing its public affairs office. Titan, another L-3 division, has 6,500 linguists in the country.

more

Returning Veterans being thrown away

Excerpt from Steve Gillard

Why is there such a lack of compassion? Because no one wants to look in the mirror. If the Army admits they have a PTSD epidemic, they could be responsible for thousands of soldiers life long medical care, with 100 percent disability. Instead, they deny the problem, blame the victims and keep costs down. Years later, when these discharges are upgraded, many of these soldiers will have suffered for years.

Two years to "unfix" the system

Welcome to Election Defense Alliance

EDA Press Release / Nov. 17, 2006

Landslide Denied!

Major Miscount in 2006 Election: Were 4% of Votes "Misplaced"?

Read the Full Press ReleaseRead the ReportStudy the Exit Poll Data

Election Defense Alliance, a national election integrity organization, issued an urgent call today for an investigation into the 2006 election results and a moratorium on deployment of all electronic voting equipment after analysis of national exit polling data indicated a major undercount of Democratic votes and an overcount of Republican votes in congressional races across the country. These findings are an alarming indictment of the American election system in which 80% of voters used electronic voting equipment.

READ MORE

Non political request for help

RED LAKE, MINN. - Authorities believe they have ruled out an abduction by a relative in the disappearance of two young brothers.
Tristan White, 4, and Avery Stately, 2, disappeared the day before Thanksgiving after going to play outside their house on the Red Lake Indian Reservation. Major ground searches failed to find the boys.
FBI spokesman Paul McCabe said more than 200 leads have been pursued since the boys disappeared, with hundreds of interviews conducted.
"We feel fairly confident that no relatives have the children, as we've been able to track down all the immediate family and next-line relatives," McCabe said in an interview Tuesday on WCCO-AM in Minneapolis.
The FBI last week offered a $20,000 reward for information that leads to the boys.
The boys, both American Indian, have short brown hair and brown eyes. Tristan was described as 3 feet 6 and wearing a dark blue Spider-Man jacket with yellow trim, Levis jeans and black and gray winter boots. Avery was described as 2 feet tall and wearing a gray pullover sweatshirt that says "Timberland" on the front, faded Levi's jeans and Spider-Man tennis shoes.

http://www.rlnn.com/

The rabid dogs of war

A reckoning is coming on depleted uranium munitions because the damage done to our returning Veterans and their families is increasing exponentially with every passing day...yet the Pentagon is fighting hard to keep the truth covered up.

Ignore this issue at your own peril for none of us are safe from the fallout of a single exploded DU munition, and the US exploded 300 tons of this crap during the first Gulf War.

Entertain the possibilities by exploring this website. You might consider packing a lunch as it could be a long stay to absorb the entire story of the ruination of our most precious resource.

How can we possibly forgive?

The true value of a politician remains to be seen as the new Democratically controlled Congress is sworn in this coming January, and the pervasive evil inherent in the current ruling cartel is slowly exposed through investigations and hearings. I am hopeful that the incoming Congress will actually represent the interests and well being of the Nation and the World.

There are many reasons that “business as usual” must be drastically and forever changed as soon as possible, and I would like to emphasize two of them… the criminal lack of responsibility perpetrated on America and the World by the Military Industrial Complex and corporations like Monsanto.

Jeff Rense at rense.com exhibits a treasure trove of information that will never see the light of day in the main stream media as long as that media is under the control of organizations and corporations that are complicit in perpetuating the ills that plague our current society.

The issue of Depleted Uranium has been downplayed since the Gulf War instigated by Herbert Walker Bush, but has wreaked havoc on the health of the world.

This link will take you to a series of ten minute videos that shed an immense amount of light on the DU problem, and every citizen should take a vow to learn as much as possible about this issue. Watch the videos!

This link will take you to an article re-posted at rense.com about the additives that have been forced into our food chain by Monsanto and the politicians they obviously own. If you have children and/or grandchildren, you MUST become a knowledgeable activist regarding the safety of the food that determines the quality of life for our current and all future generations. Read the article!

It is my deepest desire that the incoming Congress will act quickly and decisively to reverse the trend of viewing the populace as a throw-away society to be used until no longer useful to the corporations, and then discarded with nary a backward glance. The list of criminal co-conspirators is longer than my imagination can conceive, and they all need to be brought to account…beginning with George W. Bush and his current Administration.

Setting up future elections: opinion or factual?

I find it extremely interesting that the cable news pundits (and others) are so capable of explaining why the results of the mid-term election finalized the way it did, with Democratic gains and Republican losses.

James Pinkerton (on Huffington Post) tries to explain his take on how “Reagan Democrats” will change the world with their voting patterns. For some reason, he doesn’t mention the fact that trends are not really creditable unless the election results are consistently accurate over a span of multiple elections.

Let’s assume that election confidence could be established with some simple steps, and realistic trends could then be established based on the true values and desires of the American voter. I seriously wonder how much we would continue to rely on the educated opinions of political pundits being paid high dollars for their work.

The following excerpt explains how to lay the foundation for getting to the trend phase:


AN END TO "FAITH-BASED" VOTING:Computer Security and Statistical Analysts Describe a Simple and Powerful alternative

Summary

Today the Election Defense Alliance released a report describing the practical implementation details of a simple, unimpeachable method for ensuring the accuracy of electronic voting systems by a public handcount of paper ballot records. This “Universal Precinct-Based Handcount Sample” (UPS) is a simple, feasible method of hand-counting a sample of paper ballot records in-precinct, on election night, by citizens themselves. It not only returns oversight of elections to the American people, where it rightfully belongs, the UPS is also far more accurate than alternative election audit proposals—where only a few percent of precincts are hand-counted, often in secret, and always after the fact. (Download the full report at www.electiondefensealliance.org/UPS.pdf )

The simple, practical UPS validation approach detects fraud or error from any source altering the electronic tally by as little as one percent (1%) with a minimum ninety-nine percent (99%) level of confidence.

In our current political climate, any challenge to a corrupt election must be timely and have very strong justification, or candidates risk being labeled “sore losers” and accompanying ridicule. The UPS validation, by virtue of being accurate to such a high degree of confidence, enables any candidate of any party to contest any Outcome-altering problems with the electronic tally. And since the UPS hand count is done in-precinct on election night, its findings would be available on election night, enabling candidates in federal or statewide elections to challenge a corrupted tally before the election’s outcome becomes a foregone conclusion in the mind of the public, and before the results are officially certified.

The report describes the specific means of effectively conducting a public hand count of 10% of the paper ballot records in 100% of the precincts in federal and statewide races. The UPS is to be conducted “in-precinct” on election night, by citizens representing all concerned political parties, and open to general public observation. Because it is conducted in-precinct, the UPS avoids the difficult task of protecting the chain of custody of paper ballot records in 180,000 U.S. precincts. In fact, all the alternative after-the-fact “spot-audit” schemes (such as HR 550, often referred to as the Holt bill) impose this monumental burden – since in all those protocols, all precincts must safeguard ballot records until just a few percent are “randomly chosen” some time after the election. Integrity of the chain of custody will be especially suspect, of course, in just those suspect elections which such audits are proposed to safeguard. Since a 10% hand-count sample would be drawn in 100% of precincts on election night, the UPS also eases the transition to decentralized, citizen-monitored hand-count verifications of elections, placing responsibility for the integrity of the vote count in the hands of the American people, where it rightfully belongs.

Most importantly, the UPS is inherently resistant to manipulation. The report describes how any attempt to systematically manipulate the UPS audit would be extraordinarily difficult to conduct and to conceal. Not only would it require a very large number of participants, any effort to skew the 10% paper hand count in favor of a candidate would be very likely to increase the overall discrepancy, not decrease it. The UPS provides a simple, effective, and vastly more powerful alternative for election validation than does the proposed HR 550 audit, and all such “spot-audit” proposals. The UPS provides a decentralized hand count, reduces chain of custody concerns and provides citizens and candidates a clear and timely warning of fraud or error. Therefore Election Defense Alliance recommends UPS as an alternative to the HR 550 audit.

In order to restore and maintain citizen trust in the integrity of American democracy, it is critical that wherever electronic vote tallying is performed, paper ballot records must always be produced and must always be checked by the best possible “security mechanism” – the American people, working together in public.

Read the rest

Feeling comfy about the mid-term results?

Now that the Democrats have regained control of the House and apparent control of the Senate, are you once again confused about the supposed voter fraud being perpetrated on the American voter?

You might think that the system has been repaired to the point that it finally reflects the will of the people because the Democratic Party has emerged victorious in a multitude of races, but how are you going to feel when the situation reverses in 2008…and another Republican candidate and his corporate cabinet forces their way into the White House?

I could actually deal with that scenario if I was confident that it accurately reflected the intent of the voting public, but it won’t… unless the return to paper ballots (optically scanned) with hand counted audits and precinct posted tallies becomes the new reality in every precinct in the Nation.

Check out this 18 minute video:

Help America Vote on paper


There is a desperate need to become even more vocal about returning the election process to the people, and removing it from the control of the corporations. You can learn much more here.

War Profiteering

Dear Brave New Supporters,
When we started in January, war profiteering was a subject that desperately needed attention. It was a story that wasn't being told and the issue cried out for exposing. And then this past Sunday November 12 the issue was front and center on page one of the New York Times and all over the news. In different and various permutations, the headlines all read that there will be hearings, there will be oversight, questions will be asked. The profiteers will be exposed.
Is amazing too strong of a word? It is a result of all your efforts.. Your support of Iraq for Sale and the issue of war profiteering has been remarkable.
So, thank you to the volunteer researchers who worked in secret to get us key information.
Thank you to the thousands of screening hosts who made over 4,000 official screenings happen.
Thank you to the Patriots Against War Profiteering who donated 8,500 DVDs to libraries, schools, and military installations around the country and around the world so this film can be seen by as wide an audience as possible. Read some responses from folks who received the film, like that of Army Medic Dan Walsh who wrote to us while serving in Iraq “This stuff needs to be known by the average American."
Thank you to Senator Dorgan, his staff and the Democratic Policy Committee who hosted hearings in DC on this issue- and invited people in Iraq for Sale to participate and share their stories. You can watch video of the hearings at the DPC website.
Thank you to the elected officials like Senator Harry Reid, Senator John Kerry, and Congressman James Clyburn who used the film to call attention to the issue and the need for oversight and accountability in the war.
Thank you to all the candidates who ran for office in last week's election - like Jim Webb, who saw the film and immediately agreed to introduce it at our DC premiere and then organized over 100 screenings in Virginia- and candidates across the country like Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders who used the film in their campaigns and urged voters to choose a new path.
Thank you to the folks at UNITE HERE who hosted hundreds of screenings across the Mid-West and reached thousands of union members with the film.
Thank you to the heroes and heroines in the military, like Sergeant Jon LaCore who wrote to us after watching the film in Iraq. In his letter he said, "I'm anxious to see if a change in the House and Senate will bring about a change here in Iraq." And, looking at the Sunday paper, it looks as though he may get to see change happen.