A founder of the Venezuelean voting machine company that is (or used to be) the parent of the US voting machine company Sequoia — whose machines are having documented problems counting properly — died yesterday in an unusual small plane crash in Caracas together with a pilot who’d had drug trafficking convictions in both the US and Venezuela.

In other words, if you know something (that’s appalling) is going to pass, you hold your nose and vote ‘Yeah’, so that you are later in a position to ‘bring it back for reconsideration’ once you’ve rounded up new allies and brought new info into the conversation.

Let’s hope that is Whitehouse’s motive; it’s mere speculation on my end, but it’s logical and happens all the time in many legislative councils, commissions, and legislative arenas. (However, it’s only done if you take time to pay attention to the rules so you can figure out this ‘workaround’; some people never seem to figure it out, but it’s not complicated.)

Seems the simplest, most likely explanation.

We breed prisons as much as prisoners. We outsource their management and enrich their managers. Our politicians empower that and tell us they’re making us safer. Just as Mr. Bush outsources our privacy, our military, our tax collecting, and our public debt. He outsources his job to his deputy and calls that leadership. He confuses opportunism with leadership.

Off topic to encryption but funny to me:

Up until recently the feds, (places like DOJ, Homeland Security, CIA, were so dumb they put their backup servers on top literally of their regular servers) instead of off site.

A couple years ago in Ohio at an Ohio Nuclear Reactor site one of the “brain surgeons” at the top there took his laptop home to play games with his grandson, taking it outside their firewalls and doing nothing to compensate. He was hacked in 31 minutes, and had direct control of the reactors whch were fortnately off line.

bmaz, At TMP, a clip of Whitehouse talking about the firing of an EPA official in the Midwest, who tried to make Dow Chemical clean up dioxin. Firing reported in Chicago Tribune today: http://www.chicagotribune.com/…..5733.story

Highlighted at TPM, with a clip of Whitehouse on the Senate floor today:
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpoi….._firin.php

When it comes to chemical pollutants, there are no ‘Democrats’ or ‘Republicans’. Pollutants are non-partisan. Boxer to hold hearings next Wed via Sen. Comm on Environment.

Sara and kylnn have both alluded to this (or related problems) in past threads. Perhaps they have more info. Sorry about the OT, but this is a ‘head’s up.’

I use linux (Mandriva distro) and my tor manager is Tork which makes it easy. It includes an option to install mixminion and then provides a simple button to hit when you want to send a mixminion message. Encrypt the message via PGP or gnupg (on linux) and send it via mixminion and you have an email that is very hard to trace the origin of (particularly if the tor path you wind is appropriately broad – like passing through Europe and other continents before it goes to your recipient) AND is strongly encrypted. Of course, the recipient address can be had rather easily.

Tork also provides simple buttons for starting up an anonymized chat session, anonimized ssh, ftp, etc, sessions as well, starting up an anonimized mozilla (and/or add tor button mozilla extension and anonymize on the fly – but wipe your history and cookies to be sure).