Forwarded email propaganda.

Here is a forwarded email I received this morning. Following that is my reaction, that I just could not help but provide.

Father/Daughter Talk
A young woman was about to finish first year of college. Like so many others her age, she considered herself to be a very liberal Democrat, and among other liberal ideals, was very much in favor of higher taxes to support more government programs, in other words redistribution of wealth.
She was deeply ashamed that her father was a rather staunch Republican, a feeling she openly expressed. Based on the lectures that she had participated in, and the occasional chat with a professor, she felt that her father had for years harbored an evil, selfish desire to keep what he thought should be his.
One day she was challenging her father on his opposition to higher taxes on the rich and the need for more government programs. The self-professed objectivity proclaimed by her professors had to be the truth and she indicated so to her father. He responded by asking how she was doing in school.
Taken aback, she answered rather haughtily that he had a 4.0 GPA, and let him know that it was tough to maintain, insisting that she was taking a very difficult course load and was constantly studying, which left her no time to go out and party like other people she knew. She didn't even have time for a boyfriend, and didn't really have many college friends because she spent all her time studying.
Her father listened and then asked, 'How is your friend Audrey doing?' She replied, 'Audrey is barely getting by. All she takes are easy classes,she never studies, and she barely has a 2.0 GPA. She is so popular on campus; college for her is a blast. She's always invited to all the parties and lots of times she doesn't even show up for classes because she's too hung over.'
Her wise father asked his daughter,
'Why don't you go to the Dean's office and ask him to deduct 1.0 off your GPA and give it to your friend who only has a 2.0. That way you will both have a 3.0 GPA and certainly that would be a fair and equal distribution of GPA.'
The daughter, visibly shocked by her father's suggestion, angrily fired back, 'That's a crazy idea, how would that be fair! I've worked really hard for my grades! I've invested a lot of time, and a lot of hard work! Audrey has done next to nothing toward her degree. She played while I worked my tail off!'
The father slowly smiled, winked and said gently, 'Welcome to the Republican party.'
If anyone has a better explanation of the difference between Republican and Democrat I'm all ears.
----------------
This is stupid. To imply that all college professors are turning students into liberal tax-happy democrats is naive and narrow-minded. On top of that, to simplify democratic thinking to only the matter of welfare is insulting. I graduated from college a few years ago and I would consider myself a fiscal conservative, but how can I dare side with republicans when the federal debt has TRIPLED in the last 8 years under their leadership? Times have changed and the republicans are no longer a fiscally responsible party. This story should end with the dad saying, "Why doesn't Audrey go to the local recruiter and join the military so she no longer has to worry about bad grades in school? That way she can help our overstretched military and she can die for the noble country of Iraq, like every good young person should!"

The truth is that yes, welfare is poorly mismanaged and abused, and needs to be fixed. But the idea is a good one. People need help from time to time, especially when corporations are allowed to outsource all but minimum wage jobs to other countries. To affirm that anyone down and out should go without help and just die in a gutter is sickening and I really hate to hear anyone dip to that level just because they are disappointed at the incompetence of our government. There is no excuse for losing your compassion for your neighbor.

Anyway, the point is that even in its poor state, welfare is such a miniscule cost to our country compared to the 75% of our national budget we spend on WAR, and we could do incredible things within our own country, while lowering taxes, if not for our desire to rule the world and take over countries and, oh yeah, 'kill the terrrrrists'.

This kind of rhetoric in the email is spewed by someone who argues against spending money on civil programs like education, vilifies college education and professors, and then makes numerous spelling, capitalization, and punctuation errors in the email and doesn't even know to use double quotes around quotations.
This kind of rhetoric makes people vote George W. into 4 more years, because they're scared of a stupid little program like welfare. (Of which the republicans are in no way making an effort to reform or stop).
This kind of rhetoric will make people vote for McCain, because they're too scared at being seen as supporting welfare to bother stopping a war that has needlessly killed 4,000 soldiers and 500,000 Iraqis.

Please, consider all the issues and don't simplify party affiliations or presidential elections down to stupid shit like this. This is why we're in this mess now.

Some reasons to vote Obama.

Obama is the only candidate to have released his tax forms. (neither McCain or Clinton have)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/15/opinion/15fri1.html?_r=3&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin


Obama has released his earmarks. (Clinton has not)
http://obama.senate.gov/press/070621-obama_announces_3/

Hillary Clinton reigns as the Queen of Federal Pork
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=aXWIZU3DOyr4&refer=home

Obama was rated #1 in environmental policy by the League of Conservation Voters
http://presidentialprofiles2008.org/

Obama was right about Pakistan, back when Hillary was calling him "naive"
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/11/06/navarrette/?iref=mpstoryview

Washington Post gave Obama's economic plan an A- and gave Hillary's a C.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/22/AR2008012202614.html?hpid=opinionsbox1


Wall Street Journal preferred Obama's healthcare plan over Hillary Clinton's
http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB120234937353949449.html

Judge Obama by his legislative achievments, which are quite impressive, according to the Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/03/AR2008010303303.html

And don't even get me started on hemp.

The War on Pot: America's $42 Billion Annual Boondoggle

By Rob Kampia, AlterNet. Posted October 9, 2007.

What would you buy if you had an extra $42 billion to spend every year? What might our government buy if it suddenly had that much money dropped onto its lap every year?

For one thing, it might pay for the entire $7 billion annual increase in the State Children's Health Insurance Program that President Bush is threatening to veto because of its cost -- and there'd still be $35 billion left over.

Or perhaps you'd hire 880,000 schoolteachers at the average U.S. teacher salary of $47,602 per year.

Or give every one of our current teachers a 30 percent raise (at a cost of $15 billion, according to the American Federation of Teachers) and use what's left to take a $27 billion whack out of the federal deficit.

Or use all $42 billion for a massive tax cut that would put an extra $140 in the pockets of every person in the country -- $560 for a family of four.

The mind reels at the ways such a massive sum of money could be put to use.

Why $42 billion? Because that's what our current marijuana laws cost American taxpayers each year, according to a new study by researcher Jon Gettman, Ph.D. -- $10.7 billion in direct law enforcement costs, and $31.1 billion in lost tax revenues. And that may be an underestimate, at least on the law enforcement side, since Gettman made his calculations before the FBI released its latest arrest statistics in late September. The new FBI stats show an all-time record 829,627 marijuana arrests in 2006, 43,000 more than in 2005.

That's like arresting every man, woman and child in the state of North Dakota plus every man, woman, and child in Des Moines, Iowa on marijuana charges ... every year. Arrests for marijuana possession -- not sales or trafficking, just possession -- totaled 738,916. By comparison, there were 611,523 arrests last year for all violent crimes combined.

Basing his calculations mainly on U.S. government statistics, Gettman concludes that marijuana in the U.S. is a $113 billion dollar business. That's a huge chunk of economic activity that is unregulated and untaxed because it's almost entirely off the books.

Of course, the cost of our marijuana laws goes far beyond lost tax revenues and money spent on law enforcement. By consigning a very popular product -- one that's been used by about 100 million Americans, according to government surveys -- to the criminal underground, we've effectively cut legitimate businesspeople out of the market and handed a monopoly to criminals and gangs.

Strangely, government officials love to warn us that some unsavory characters profit off of marijuana sales, while ignoring the obvious: Our prohibitionist laws handed them the marijuana business in the first place, effectively giving marijuana dealers a $113 billion free ride.

All this might make some sense if marijuana were so terribly dangerous that it needed to be banned at all costs, but science long ago came to precisely the opposite conclusion. Compared to alcohol, for example, marijuana is astonishingly safe. For one thing, marijuana is much less addictive than alcohol, with just nine percent of users becoming dependent, as opposed to 15 percent for booze. And marijuana is much less toxic. Heavy drinking is well-documented to damage the brain and liver, and to increase the risk of many types of cancer. Marijuana, on the other hand, has never caused a medically documented overdose death, and scientists are still debating whether even heavy marijuana use causes any permanent harm at all. And then there's violence. Again, the scientific findings are overwhelming: Booze incites violence and aggression; marijuana doesn't.

Despite all that, we now arrest one American every 38 seconds on marijuana charges. And we do so at a staggering cost in law enforcement expenses, lost tax revenues, and staggering profits for criminal gangs.

The alternative is clear: Regulate marijuana just as we do beer, wine, and liquor. The only thing lacking is the political will.
--
Original story from here.

If you're interested in Obama's views on religion.

Now, normally I would be the first to get sick at any presidential candidate's speech on religious views, but I have to admit that this was a very well crafted and well delivered speech. I expected religious pandering and the view that you need religion to define morality. What was said was much more inclusive and reasonable a speech than I may have ever heard from a political candidate before. So, if you have the time, please watch.

Election can be stolen in “under a minute” with Diebold machines

By Michael Hampton at Homeland Stupidity.com

Researchers at Princeton University announced Wednesday that common electronic voting machines can be subverted by installing software which undetectably alters vote totals and, as a computer virus, spreads itself from one voting machine to the next.

Computer science professor Edward Felten, along with graduate students Ariel Feldman and J. Alex Halderman, published a paper in which they demonstrated the ease of installing malicious software onto a Diebold AccuVote-TS touchscreen voting machine which would alter vote totals in a real election, but be undetectable to election officials by allowing the logic and accuracy tests to pass, and by deleting itself from the voting machines at the end of the election.

“This report should finally put to rest the myth that the current generation of e-voting machines adequately protects the integrity of the electoral process,” said Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Matt Zimmerman.

And to add insult to injury, the team posted videos of the entire process of hacking a Diebold touchscreen voting machine.

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. — Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine

Diebold Election Systems marketing director Mark Radke said the researchers should have contacted the company, because they have since updated their system to address some of the issues raised.

“I’m concerned by the fact we weren’t contacted to educate these people on where our current technology stands,” Mark Radke said.

Radke also question why Felten hadn’t submitted his paper for peer review, as is commonly done before publishing scientific research.

Felten said he and his colleagues felt it necessary to publish the paper as quickly as possible because of the possible implications for the November midterm elections. — Associated Press

Considering that Diebold election equipment is about as secure as Swiss cheese, as confirmed by numerous reports over the last couple of years, that the company doesn’t care about election security, and that that’s why they were run out of North Carolina, I don’t think it will mean all that much that the researchers didn’t wait for peer review. You can peer review it for yourself by watching the researchers’ video of the process.

Now don’t you feel good about your vote last Tuesday? The Brad Blog has documented instances all over the country where elections have gone haywire and election officials have been sent scrambling to implement emergency security measures because of security problems such as this.

“The challenges presented by the introduction of electronic voting are systemic and require a systemic response,” Zimmerman said. “Paper trails, regular audits, and robust physical security are a good start, as are improved pollworker training and radically upgraded machine certification requirements and procedures. H.R. 550, making its way through the House of Representatives, would go a long way towards implementing many of these fixes on a nationwide basis.”

As for Diebold, one funny YouTube video seems to sum it up:

Update: Felten writes on his blog that the locks on the Diebold AccuVote-TS machines which allow access to the memory card slot can be opened with a key anyone can buy on the Internet, such as the key to a hotel minibar.

Planets and stars by size...

Lakota secede from the U.S.

From news.com.au:

THE Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the US.

"We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us,'' long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means said.

A delegation of Lakota leaders has delivered a message to the State Department, and said they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the US, some of them more than 150 years old.

The group also visited the Bolivian, Chilean, South African and Venezuelan embassies, and would continue on their diplomatic mission and take it overseas in the coming weeks and months.

Lakota country includes parts of the states of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.

The new country would issue its own passports and driving licences, and living there would be tax-free - provided residents renounce their US citizenship, Mr Means said.

The treaties signed with the US were merely "worthless words on worthless paper," the Lakota freedom activists said.

Withdrawing from the treaties was entirely legal, Means said.
"This is according to the laws of the United States, specifically article six of the constitution,'' which states that treaties are the supreme law of the land, he said.

``It is also within the laws on treaties passed at the Vienna Convention and put into effect by the US and the rest of the international community in 1980. We are legally within our rights to be free and independent,'' said Means.

The Lakota relaunched their journey to freedom in 1974, when they drafted a declaration of continuing independence -- an overt play on the title of the United States' Declaration of Independence from England.

Thirty-three years have elapsed since then because ``it takes critical mass to combat colonialism and we wanted to make sure that all our ducks were in a row,'' Means said.

One duck moved into place in September, when the United Nations adopted a non-binding declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples -- despite opposition from the United States, which said it clashed with its own laws.

``We have 33 treaties with the United States that they have not lived by. They continue to take our land, our water, our children,'' Phyllis Young, who helped organize the first international conference on indigenous rights in Geneva in 1977, told the news conference.

The US ``annexation'' of native American land has resulted in once proud tribes such as the Lakota becoming mere ``facsimiles of white people,'' said Means.

Oppression at the hands of the US government has taken its toll on the Lakota, whose men have one of the shortest life expectancies - less than 44 years - in the world.

Lakota teen suicides are 150 per cent above the norm for the US; infant mortality is five times higher than the US average; and unemployment is rife, according to the Lakota freedom movement's website.