What: Boulder County Canvass Kickoff

When: 10:30, Saturday, May 15th

Where: Collyer Park, Longmont, CO 80501

(1) Invoke a Terrifying internal and external ememy.

(2) Create a Gulag.

(3) Develop a thug castle.

(4) Set-up an internal surveillance system.

(5) Harass citizens’ groups.

(6) Engage in arbitrary detetion and release.

(7) Target key individuals.

(8) Control the Press.

(9) Dissent equals treason.

(10) Suspend the Rule of Law.

For more detail go to: http://www.huffington.com/naomi-wolf/ten-steps-to-close-down-a_b_46695.html

The Associated Press reported that consumer advocate and 2004 independent presidental candidate Ralph Nader is suing the Democratic Party, contending that Democratic officials conspired to keep him from taking votes away from nominee John Kerry. The lawsuit also alleges that the Democratic National Committee conspired to force Nader off the ballot in several states.

President Bush vetod the S-Chip expansion bill, the bill would have expanded the health care for children from approximately 6.6 million children to 10 million. The existing program is a state and federally funded program that supplies health care benefits to low and moderate income families with children. The cost for the program would be 35 billion over 5 years, or 7 billion per year. The Adminstation is now spending over 12 billion per month on the war on terrorism. Congress will attempt to override the veto in the next few days.

Why does the government pretend prices aren’t rising?

By Daniel Gross

Posted Saturday, Sept. 29, 2007, at 7:49 AM ET

Imagine that a cardiologist told you that aside from the irregular heartbeat, the stratospheric cholesterol count, and a little blockage in your aorta, your core heart functions are just fine. That’s precisely what the government’s cardiologist—Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve—has just done. The central bank is supposed to make sure the economy grows fast enough to create jobs and make everybody richer, but not so fast that it produces inflation, which makes everybody poorer. “Readings on core inflation have improved modestly this year,” the Federal Open Market Committee said in justifying its 50-basis-point interest-rate cut last month, while conceding that “some inflation risks remain.”

Catch that bit about “core inflation”? That’s Fedspeak for: Inflation is under control, unless you look at the costs of things that are going up. The core rate excludes the prices of food and energy, which can be volatile from month to month. Factor them in, and inflation is about as moderate as Newt Gingrich. In the first eight months of 2007, the consumer price index—the main gauge of inflation—rose at a 3.7 percent annual rate. That’s more than 50 percent higher than the mild 2.3 percent core rate. The prices of energy and food are soaring, at 12.7 percent and 5.6 percent annual rates, respectively, and have been doing so for years. As a result, the CPI—including food and energy—has risen 12.6 percent since July 2003, for a compound rate of about 3 percent.

Signs of inflation are evident throughout the economy. When investors fear a rising inflationary tide, they latch onto the driftwood of gold. The day Bernanke cut rates, the price of the precious metal soared to heights not seen since 1980, when inflation ran at nearly 12 percent! I read about this in The Wall Street Journal (whose newsstand price rose 50 percent in July), which I picked up in the lobby of a New York hotel (where the average nightly rate soared 12.5 percent in the first seven months of 2007 from 2006, according to PKF Consulting), while sipping on a Starbucks Frappuccino (whose price has risen twice since last October).

There are sound macroeconomic reasons to believe higher inflation may be a fact of economic life, according to former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who discusses the topic in his new memoir, The Age of Turbulence. (Apparently, the editors killed the original title: The Dotcom Bubble Wasn’t My Fault. Nor Was the Housing Bubble.) Greenspan notes that vast anti-inflationary forces in the 1990s—especially China’s emergence as a low-cost producer of goods—helped tamp down prices. But China’s rampant growth and rising living standards could encourage inflation. “China’s wage-rate growth should mount, as should its rate of inflation,” he writes.

Indeed. China’s CPI leapt forward 6.5 percent between August 2006 and August 2007, the highest rate in 11 years. One of the main culprits? An 18.2 percent year-over-year increase in the price of food. In still-poor China, food expenditures account for 37 percent of the CPI, compared with 14 percent in the United States. In a recent paper, Albert Keidel of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace warns of China’s “gathering inflation storm,” powered in part by “explosive price increases in key consumer categories” like noodles and pork.

China is bound to export its inflation—it exports everything else, after all—either in the form of higher prices for toys or in higher global prices for the commodities it consumes in increasingly huge gulps. The Wall Street Journal noted that iron-ore producers are about to ask for a 50 percent price increase for 2008, thanks to rising demand from Chinese steelmakers. Chinese car sales are up 25 percent through August, which helps support oil prices.

In the United States, companies are passing along higher commodity and fuel costs by boosting prices, slashing portions, and tacking fuel surcharges onto things ranging from deliveries to lawn service. And because food and energy prices are so visible—the prices are posted in public, and consumers buy these goods frequently—price increases have a disproportionate impact on perceptions of inflation. Each month, the Conference Board asks consumers what they expect the rate of inflation will be for the next 12 months. The figure has been above 5 percent since April.

China’s government is trying to deal with its inflation in predictably Orwellian fashion. “Beijing has instructed local provincial and urban statistical bureaus in a subtle form of denial—they are not to use the word ‘inflation’ to describe what is happening,” notes Albert Keidel. It’s easy to mock Beijing’s clumsy bureaucrats. But by focusing on core inflation, the Federal Reserve—along with the legions of investors who reacted ecstatically to the interest-rate cut—is practicing its own subtle form of denial.

Musgrave might be influenced to change her vote.

GUEST COLUMNIST

Recently the Bill Moyers Journal on PBS devoted a full hour to the subject of impeaching George W. Bush and Dick Cheney — the first such attention by a national network.

The remarkable thing about the response was not its size or intensity. After visiting more than a dozen states to address the issue, I have come to understand the depth of the public’s desire for accountability.

But it was only after Moyers invited conservative legal scholar Bruce Fein and me to lay out not merely the specific grounds for impeachment but the historical rationale for applying the “heroic medicine” — the Founders’ preferred cure for a constitutional crisis — that I fully understood the extent to which Americans recognize that this is about a lot more than the high crimes and misdemeanors of a regal president and his monarchical vice president.

The stakes are enormous: If Bush and Cheney are not held accountable, this administration will hand off to its successors a toolbox of powers greater than any executive has ever held — more authority, concentrated in fewer hands, than the Founders could have conceived or would have allowed.

Among the thousands of responses after the program aired in mid-July, there was a steady theme: This is no longer a partisan issue. Inside the Beltway, the calculus these days rarely gets beyond the next election; but outside it there are tens of millions of Americans worried about the next generation — indeed, about the fate of the republic. To be sure, there are Bush haters among their number, fierce partisans who — in an echo of the Republicans who a decade ago went after Bill Clinton — have adopted a “by any means necessary” approach to the goal of cutting short the Bush/Cheney tenure.

But the national conversation in which we engaged after the Moyers program aired suggested that they are a minority of the 54 percent of Americans who tell pollsters it’s time to open impeachment hearings on Cheney’s misdeeds, and the only slightly smaller number who favor the process for Bush.

The Washington elites still try to dismiss the impeachment movement as an ill-considered reflexive reaction to a president Americans don’t like and a vice president they fear — or, worse yet, as some sort of partisan payback. But the plain truth is that most of those who responded to the Moyers discussion recognize that the point of impeachment is not the transitory crimes of small men but the long-term definition of great offices.

Fein, an official in the Reagan Justice Department, and I come from different points on the ideological spectrum, but we agree that the Founders intended impeachment less as a punishment for officeholders than as a protection against the dangerous expansion of executive authority. If abuse of the system of checks and balances, lies about war, approval of illegal spying and torture, signing statements that improperly arrogate legislative powers to the executive branch, schemes to punish political foes and refusals to cooperate with congressional inquiries are not judged as high crimes, the next president, no matter from which party, will assume the authority to exercise some or all of these illegitimate powers.

The burgeoning movement for impeachment is a rational response to a moment when polls tell us that roughly three-quarters of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction. This administration has not just let Americans down; it has frightened them. A great many understand, intuitively or explicitly, that we are experiencing a constitutional crisis and that impeachment proceedings are the proper tonic. Unfortunately, key Democrats continue to mistake the medicine for the disease.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi still keeps impeachment “off the table”; she and her advisers fear that if they allow Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers to open impeachment hearings, it will rally the Republican base in defense of Bush and Cheney. History suggests she’s wrong: Opposition parties that have pursued impeachment in a high-minded manner have, in every instance, maintained or improved their position in Congress and have usually won the presidency in the next election.

Pelosi should step out of the way and let her colleagues restore the rule of law. More than a dozen have shown their desire to do so by co-sponsoring Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s articles of impeachment against Cheney.

Clearly, impeachment is not just around the corner; even Sen. Russ Feingold’s “relatively modest response” to the crisis — censure resolutions against Bush and Cheney –faces an uphill struggle. At this late stage, it will be difficult to turn the need for accountability into action on Capitol Hill. But even an impeachment effort that falls short lays down a historical marker; it tells Bush and Cheney and all those who succeed them that an executive branch that imagines itself superior to Congress and the rule of law will arouse popular fury.

Bush, it is said, has begun to worry about his legacy. The rest of us should, too. No matter how unsuccessful we may think his tenure has been, it will leave a mark on the republic. If that mark is of a presidency without limit or accountability, Bush and Cheney will have changed the country far more fundamentally than any of their predecessors.

Note: Also check out Dr. Mercuri’s views on H.R. 811 & US election security from her 3/7/07 interview on “Voice of the Voters!” http://www.voiceofthevoters.org/ (podcast & transcript available) Also, please telephone & fax/email your Representative in Congress and ask him/her to vote NO on H.R. 811. Urgent! Vote could be next week (For details see Why this MUST be voted down,

“H.R. 811 does more harm than good” Please send this to as many people as possible …and make those calls Monday! Mary Ann Gould, Coalition for Voting Integrity OpEdNews Original Content here)

July 13, 2007

Connecting the Dots? Rush Holt, HR 811, and Avante International

By Rebecca Mercuri

Consider this scenario: If Avante wins its patent lawsuit against the “big three” vendors, HR 811 could bring billions of dollars to Holt’s home district. Here’s how it could happen.

The latest version of HR 811, the “Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007 [1], amends HAVA’s Section 257(a) by adding an additional billion dollars for municipalities “to modify or replace its voting systems” in accordance with Section 2 of Rush Holt’s bill. Many election integrity advocates have (erroneously) looked to this bill as a mandate that will require voter-verified paper ballots (or “audit trails”) to be added to all of the nation’s Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting equipment.

But back in July 2006, I wrote an OpEd piece [2] describing a lawsuit by Avante against Diebold, Sequoia and ES&S that stands poised to derail much of the Federal and State VVPAT legislation. This case grinds merrily along and trial has been scheduled for May 2008. Should Avante win their suit, they have requested relief that could specifically include: 1) permanently enjoining the sale of all infringing equipment produced by Diebold, Sequoia, and ES&S; 2) recalling all infringing equipment; 3) destroying or delivering to Avante the infringing equipment; and 4) awarding infringement damages to Avante including treble damages for willful infringement.

In a one-two punch, Avante’s key patent, #7036730 “Electronic Voting Aparatus, System and Method,” also includes claims that pertain to “a Braille device,” “an aural device,” and “voice recognition apparatus.”[3] Conveniently, Holt’s bill happens to also include requirements that there be “at least one voting system equipped for individuals with disabilities at each polling place” that “allows the voter to privately and independently verify the individual, durable paper ballot through the conversion of the human-readable printed or marked vote selections into accessible form.”

So, Avante could be the “spoiler” in thwarting implementation of Holt’s bill, if the court rules in their favor and they (or the Judge) choose to recall or destroy all of the deployed and infringing VVPAT and disability accessible voting equipment, just a few months prior to the November 2008 Presidential election. Alternatively, all of HR 811′s $1B, plus a potentially large chunk of the prior $3B bonanza that voting system vendors had received from the 2002 HAVA legislation, may wander back to Holt’s election district, since Avante, as Mark Crispin Miller recently noted [4], just happens to be located in his “backyard.”

Indeed, this metaphor is considerably more accurate than even Mark had presumed. Avante’s website [5] shows a picture of their 52,000 square foot corporate headquarters, situated on 16 acres at 70 Washington Road, Princeton Junction, NJ. Rush Holt’s website [6] lists his District Office as 50 Washington Road, West Windsor, NJ. As it happens, these two properties are directly adjacent to each other (separated only by some landscaping and their buildings’ parking lots). I’ve posted a few photos on my website that show the juxtaposition of their office signs. [7] This is not a new development, Avante’s office has been “next door” to Rush’s for the entire duration of time since their parent company (AIT) entered the voting business.

But it doesn’t stop here. As Bo Lipari revealed a few weeks ago [8], Avante (along with Microsoft) was an active player in the recent attempt to rewrite New York State’s source code review laws. Their Vice President issued an email to all of the State’s election commissioners and officials [9], complaining that they do not have sufficient time, nor perhaps inclination, to comply with the law, while also mootly asserting that “there is no intent to reduce the integrity of the vote.” Although New York held firm in maintaining its source code escrow and review statutes, the spineless U.S. House of Representatives, apparently caved to “Microsoft and others in the proprietary software industry” according to Holt’s counsel, Michelle Mulder. Never mind the fact that Mulder had dissuaded many election integrity advocates from providing input, with her repeatedly assertions that the wording of the bill, as originally introduced, was a “done deal”; and never mind that she had also failed to warn these advocates that the wording was subsequently being co-opted by “the software industry” (including perhaps Avante?) while it was in committee.

Ultimately what emerged in Holt’s revised bill is a requirement that could potentially become the first Federal law to instantiate the use of nondisclosure agreements for voting systems (unless State laws waive them) and to further provide that such agreements “shall be governed by the trade secret laws of the applicable State.” Despite this explicit vendor-partisan language, various Holt support groups, such as the dubiously-named People For the American Way, have continued to falsely claim that “Rep. Holt’s bill requires … for ALL federal elections starting in 2008: … No Secret Source Code – ALL voting machine vendors MUST make the machines’ software available for inspection” [10] when, in fact, exactly the OPPOSITE is what this bill now says! Interestingly, Holt’s own FAQ sheet on the bill [11] entirely avoids mentioning that there’s been a complete reversal on his earlier “open source” stance and focuses on activist bashing along with hammering home the fact that the bill does not ban DRE’s (great for Avante, since they believe they hold the key patents on the VVPAT DREs).

If any of the above bothers you, try contacting Holt directly (even though you probably won’t be satisfied with the response), or better yet, spread the word and let your own congressperson know that this bad piece of compromised and potentially pork-barrel legislation for Holt’s “backyard buddy” is far worse than no legislation at all.

[1] HR 811 (as revised)

[2] http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/Avante_lawsuit

[3] http://www.google.com/patents?id=nwd3AAAAEBAJ&dq=AVANTE

[4] http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_mark_cri_070711_expose__3b_rush_holt_2c_.htm

[5] http://www.avantetech.com/company

[6] http://holt.house.gov

[7] http://www.notablesoftware.com/holtavantepics.html

[8] http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_bo_lipar_070629_voting_machine_vendo.htm

[9] http://www.nyvv.org/newdoc/RGleimEmail062007.pdf

[10] http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=24309

[11] http://holt.house.gov/pdf/hr_811_faq.pdf

Authors Website: http://www.notablesoftware.com

Authors Bio: Rebecca Mercuri has been in the forefront of the voting integrity movement since 1989. She provides expert witness services for elections and other forensic computing matters. Here’s bio we used on Dr. Rebecca Mercuri’s Voice of the Voter Interview on 3/7/07 … transcript and podcast of her views on H.R. 811 can be found at http://www.voiceofthevoters.org/ Dr. Rebecca Mercuri has been referred to as “one of the leading international experts on electronic voting.” A technology specialist, with degrees in computer science and engineering, Rebecca defended her doctoral dissertation, “Electronic Vote Tabulation: Checks & Balances,” at the Engineering School of the University of Pennsylvania, just eleven days before the 2000 U.S. presidential election. Subsequently, her testimony and opinions were sought in Bush v. Gore and referenced in briefs presented to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2002 she was contacted by Janet Reno and her legal team to help solve the mystery of the thousands of votes that vanished from the new touch-screen machines being used in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties. Since then, Dr. Mercuri has provided formal testimony and comment to the House Science Committee, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the Election Assistance Commission, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the U.K. Cabinet, and numerous U.S. state legislatures. Her advocacy work has directly influenced the wording of state, federal, and international election legislation as well as standards and best practices guidelines. Many of Dr. Mercuri’s views and papers on electronic voting appear on her website at http://www.notablesoftware.com/evote.html.