Awesome Time

Keith Olbermann had another of his magnificent Special Comments last night, this one on the current battle between Congress and the President over the renewal of FISA legislation.  I was going to write a post about this, but as is so often the case, Keith says it better than I ever could.

I hope these words haven’t fallen on deaf ears.  Chris Dodd successfully filibustered an earlier FISA bill containing immunity for telecoms, and has vowed to do so again.  Here’s hoping the Democratic leadership in the Senate backs him up, for once.  I realize it’s hard when the majority isn’t really a majority (we’ve got 51 seats, but you need 60 to get anything done), but even then, Harry Reid needs to stand up and explain why things don’t get done, rather than appearing to capitulate and then letting the Republicans control the storyline of it somehow being the Democrats’ fault for not getting anything passed.

I was combing through the piles and piles of coverage surrounding tonight’s State of the Union address (9pm ET, live on C-SPAN and I’m sure everywhere else too), which will be George Bush’s last as President, and I found this neat little clip put together by the Campaign for America’s Future:

(h/t DownWithTyranny and C&L)

It’s always amazed me just how brazen he can be with some of the things he says. You can bet that tonight’s speech will contain much more of the same.

Today is January 21, which means that there is now officially less than a year until the end of the Bush Administration.

Granted, a year is still a hell of a long time, especially given the fever pitch of this election cycle, but it’s nice to take a moment and reflect that we have less than a year until our long national nightmare is over.

Of course, now we just need to hope (and make sure, by voting) that the light we see at the end of the tunnel is actually sunshine, and not the front of a train…

I was going to write something longer about Gary Kamiya’s newest piece on Salon, but I can’t. Just go read it.

And while you’re at it, check out this piece at Group News Blog (which, again, I found through C&L) that deconstructs the Dem “Big Three” by their use of language.  Fascinating.

I came across an op-ed piece by William Poundstone in today’s New York Times that really opened my eyes on some methods for discouraging election fraud, especially when using electronic voting machines. Poundstone, author of the shortly-to-be-released Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren’t Fair (and What We Can Do About It), highlights a system proposed by Drs. Warren D. Smith, a math professor at Temple, and Ronald L. Rivest, a professor of computer science at MIT who helped invent RSA encryption (he’s the ‘R’).

With computing power increasing exponentially, it’s continually getting easier for someone with enough computer knowledge (and you don’t need much) to break into an electronic voting machine and alter the vote counts. Even more worrisome is that the manufacturers of these machines don’t seem to be taking the security of our votes as seriously as they perhaps ought to. Remember the Diebold e-voting scandal from a few years ago? Unfortunately, even a simple paper record of how you voted is no defense against a fraud-minded election worker. It also doesn’t comfort those who prefer to keep their votes secret, and the secret ballot is one of the cornerstones of a good democracy. Or your ballot could simply be lost…

Who better, then, than two of the country’s finest minds in the field of cryptography and information security, to talk about a way to keep our elections secure? What Rivest and Smith have come up with is brilliantly elegant, pleasantly democratic, and ironically simple.

You don’t encrypt the machines. You throw the doors open on the whole system and make everyone an enforcer.

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Here’s some minor food for thought:

The Iowa Caucuses, “silly” though they may be, are the first real look we have at how the American people may vote come November. Polls are all well and good, but this was the first time in this election cycle where people actually took time out of their weekday to go and vote for a candidate for President. Iowa has also often been talked about as something of a swing state, so I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to look at the results as a possible microcosm of how the rest of the country might vote.

Now, keeping in mind that this is to be taken with a big grain of salt, I combined the Democratic and Republican vote counts (according to Wikipedia) into a single chart, and the result is pretty startling:

(h/t Hubris Sonic at Group News Blog for giving me the idea, and C&L, always my first stop in the world of political blogs, for finding the post)

I realize it’s January, and it’s the Iowa Caucus, and every other caveat you can think of, but in a year where both sides were breathless about record voter turnout, the combined totals were roughly 2 to 1 in favor of the Democrats. That’s even more amazing when you consider the fact that the Democratic caucus’s process is much more time-consuming and arcane than the Republican caucus.

If these results from Iowa turn out to be any kind of indicator about how the rest of the country will vote in November, the Republicans are toast.

One can only hope.