Live from Austin!

Guardian:

Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian president of Belarus, is to be banned from travelling to the EU and US after riot police in Minsk arrested hundreds of opposition activists protesting against the results of last weekend’s elections.

Meanwhile on Newsday:

“We are concerned that false police statements may have tainted hundreds of cases of people arrested at the two largest mass arrests during the convention,” NYCLU attorney Christopher Dunn wrote to New York Police Department Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau.

City law officials have said the arrests were justified.

The accusations stem from the tense standoff in 2004 between the nation’s largest police department and the tens of thousands of demonstrators at the GOP convention at Madison Square Garden, where President Bush accepted his party’s nomination for a second term in office. While anti-war and other demonstrations were mostly peaceful, sporadic clashes between police and protesters resulted in more than 1,800 arrests, mostly on misdemeanor charges like obstructing governmental administration.

Can’t…maintain…doublethink…

John McCain, official apologist for the Republican Party, has apparently decided that he backs Bush’s decision to operate above the law and let the NSA spy on Americans with no warrants or official oversight required.

He just, you know, wants to hear a good reason why Bush needed to ignore the law. Then it’ll all be all right.

Imagine: You’re a Republican party chairman at a taxpayer-funded ‘Town Hall’ meeting with the President. You notice that some of the people attending have a politically incorrect “No Blood For Oil” bumper sticker on their car. What do you do?

Answer: Since it’s an official event, you can’t legally have them thrown out–so you have someone pretend to be a member of the Secret Service and tell them to leave. Then, of course, you claim to know nothing about what just happened.

Something to remember next time you’re tempted to view John McCain as the acceptable face of the Republican Party:

A last-minute amendment added by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., would require the Department of Homeland Security to create an “integrated screening system” inside the United States.

McCain envisions erecting physical checkpoints, dubbed “screening points,” near subways, airports, bus stations, train stations, federal buildings, telephone companies, Internet hubs and any other “critical infrastructure” facility deemed vulnerable to terrorist attacks. Secretary Tom Ridge would appear to be authorized to issue new federal IDs–with biometric identifiers–that Americans could be required to show at checkpoints.

—ZDnet

Think you’re registered to vote? Better check, if you still have time…

An employee of a private voter registration firm alleges that his bosses trashed registration forms filled out by Democratic voters because they only wanted to sign up Republican voters.

[...]

Russell worked for a company called Voters Outreach of America, along with 300 other people. He says he got into a beef with the company over a pay dispute, and witnessed his bosses ripping up registration forms that had been filed by democrats.

“They were thrown away in the trash. I grabbed them out,” said Eric Russell. One of those forms belonged to Daren Gray, who was shocked to learn that the re-registration form he filled out was never turned in.

“I’m pretty mad, upset. I’m still gonna vote,” said Daren Gray. Russell doesn’t know how many democratic registrations were tossed in the trash but guesses the number could be very high since Voters Outreach of America operated in Las Vegas for more than two months.

[...]

The Republican National Committee acknowledges that it hired Voters Outreach of America to register voters, but in a statement said it had zero tolerance for any kind of fraud.

Local party officials said there is no way the GOP would instruct the company to trash democratic registrations. However, similar problems have been alleged elsewhere. In Washoe County, the registrar says he too has turned over information to the FBI about Republican backed registration efforts.

In Oregon, the same company that was operating here has been criticized for its tactics in signing up voters. There, it used the name America Votes, which is actually the name of a Democratic organization.

—KLAS-TV

The Black Box Voting web site has revealed that there’s an interesting ‘defect’ in the Diebold GEMS voting system’s central tabulator.

If you enter an appropriate two-digit code into a hidden part of the system, the software creates a second database of votes. The second set of votes can be edited without any safeguards, and the voting system will report the final tallies from the bogus database rather than the one containing the real votes.

A spot check against paper records will use the real data, and the machine will seem to be counting the votes correctly because the computer’s output will match the paper votes for all the votes checked. However, the totals reported for the district will be taken from the bogus database instead. This is, of course, exactly how you would want an election-fixing feature to work…

Interestingly, the dual-database ‘feature’ appeared in the Diebold system shortly after Jeffrey Dean was hired as senior programmer of the GEMS central tabulator. Who’s Dean? Oh, just some guy who pleaded guilty to 23 counts of embezzlement, performed by manipulating data in computerized accounting systems.

There are over 1,000 Diebold GEMS systems in place in over 30 states. They count millions of votes. The ‘problem’ was reported to Diebold in 2003, but they haven’t fixed it in any of their subsequent software releases. Now, isn’t that interesting?

Remember that last year, Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell wrote that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year”, and urged people to donate to the Republican party.

Here are some of the plots against the Republican party being planned by the evil liberal menace, according to Bernadette Malone, a columnist for the National Review and other right-wing publications:

• Releasing swarms of mice to terrorize delegates.
• Dressing up as RNC volunteers and giving false directions to old ladies.
• Hiring prostitutes with AIDS to seduce Republican visitors and persuade them that they don’t need to use condoms.

I hope Crystal remembered to pack the mice.

Well, the disaster is playing out as my black, pessimistic heart knew it would. Kerry the two-faced weasel has won a bunch more primaries, and Dean has yet to win any.

Why is this bad? Because I’m convinced Kerry is less electable than Al Gore. The problem is, Kerry picks up the votes of the DLC faithful, the ones who believe that the path to success is massive quantities of special interest money, preaching liberal values, and voting for whatever the opinion polls tell you to vote for. According to the exit polls, most of the people voting for Dean are first-time voters, or people previously so disgusted by the Democrats that they didn’t bother to vote.

So if Dean were picked, the DLC faithful would vote for him (because they’ll vote for anyone who has the word “Democrat” written next to his name), and he’d also get a chunk of votes from the disgusted majority of the population. If Kerry is picked, yeah, he’ll get the DLC faithful’s vote… but what chance do you think he has of getting any votes from the disgusted majority?

Kerry has had years in the Senate in a totally safe Massachusetts seat (75% majority). What better opportunity to vote with his conscience and try to make a difference? So we look at his actual voting record, and it shows a Clinton/Gore-like disconnect between what he says and what he does:

• He criticized Ashcroft and the “PATRIOT” act—which he voted for.

• He spoke out against the Iraq war—but voted for it. He now claims he wasn’t voting for what the act says.

• He spoke out in favor of making it easier for immigrants to become citizens—but voted for the infamous 1996 Immigration Act.

• He says he’s against the death penalty—but twice voted to expand it (1994 and 1995).

• He says that NAFTA is a problem that needs fixing it—but he voted for NAFTA, he voted for GATT, and he voted to permanently give China “Most Favored Nation” status.

• After 9/11 he complained about the CIA being underfunded—but he campaigned to cut its funding in 1997.

• He criticizes the Bush education bill—which he voted for.

• He votes for and against increasing spending on Medicare.

Don’t think I’m the only person to have noticed this either. The right-wing bloggers are already all over Kerry’s lying past, and you can be sure FOX News and the other media mouthpieces of the Republican Party will pick it up if he’s chosen.

Of course, Clinton too would shamelessly U-turn whenever the opinion polls told him the other position might be more popular. But Clinton had charisma, something Kerry definitely lacks.

To get back to actual policy, though, Kerry is “liberal” in all the wrong places. He votes in a liberal way on economic issues including the environment, and is conservative on issues like war and surveillance. In contrast, Dean is an economic conservative and liberal on social issues. The problem is, America doesn’t give a shit about the environment, and hates liberal welfare programs; and everyone left of Bush was against the war.

Kerry voted for the “Communications Decency Act” and Internet censorship. He voted for pumping tax money into churches. He voted for mandatory national ID cards. He voted for wiretapping with no court order required. He voted for the DMCA. He’s an unpalatable choice for everyone except the DLC sheep. If he’s picked, I predict we’ll get four more years of Bush.

That said, I’ve decided that if Kerry is the next Democratic candidate, I’m just going to do my best to observe a self-imposed silence on the whole election. Because after all, no matter how much he sucks, he can’t be any worse than Bush. But it’s gonna be really hard not to scream liar, liar, pants on fire…

I have some more general theory which explains why Kerry is popular, but it’ll have to wait, I really have to work now…

Ray Ozzie, one of the founders of Lotus, has been sighted standing obediently behind Bill Gates at the Windows XP media events. Obviously the fact that Microsoft paid Groove (Ray’s new startup) $51m is the reason.

Equally obvious is the fact that Groove will suffer the same fate as most of the other companies that have decided to let Microsoft invest in them. Expect to see Groove technology bundled into Windows and .NET, and a worthless husk spat out. If you don’t believe me, ask the people at LH or VIVO (say). The same would have happened to Real if they hadn’t been secretly working on RealPlayer G2 and keeping it out of the scope of their agreement with Microsoft.

It’s all business as usual for Microsoft; but somehow, it’s bothering me. It’s not enough for Gates to win; he has to humiliate his enemies. He couldn’t beat Lotus, so he needs Ray Ozzie up there on stage, dancing obediently like a little marionette.

Deconstructing the show, the message is clear: “We are unspeakably rich. We own you. We can buy your loyalty any time and make you dance for us. Submit now.”

The message to users of Windows XP is much the same. The new software license enforcement mechanism will attempt to force home users to buy a separate copy for every computer they use, and make them sign up with Microsoft Passport and hand over their personal data.

In not-unrelated news, the new judge assigned to the anti-trust trial by George W Bush turns out to have sold all her stock in Microsoft’s competitors right in the middle of a tech slump. Perhaps for some reason she doesn’t think they’ll go up? Attorney General John Ashcroft personally collected $10,000 from Microsoft, and over $1m to the Republican Party.

Dance, puppets, dance.