| So, far, it has not been a very merry season around our house this year, what with the deepening US recession. If you are sober when you read Paul Krugman's quantification of the economic losses associated with the US mortgage meltdown, "After the Money's Gone" here http://economistsview.typepad.... , well, you will surely want some eggnog when you are done. Then, we have recently had scientific news that the munitions of the US military-industrial complex actually already hit our family, due to the decades of sloppy manufacture of armour-piercing weapons in my Italian homegirl-ghetto-of-birth back in Colonie, NY-- believed by reputable scientists to be the half-mile-or-so with the densest depleted uranium pollution on earth. No, really, am not making it up: see this http://www.troyrecord.com/WebA... and this http://www.albany.edu/news/pdf... . Oh, and, of course, there were those poll numbers on Spitzer, too, indicating that most of NY was losing hope in the Great White Hope of reform in NYS government, as the 3 men in a room continued to wrangle over that most critical of NYS issues, control of horseracing.
Then there was a major snowstorm.... so, OK, I was primed for some good news. You, too? Well, folks, we got some here! First off, the highest-ranking Ohio election official has come out unequivocally for optical scan voting machines-- a bipartisan commission, teamed with a nonpartisan academic team, having found precisely what Bo Lipari and the NYers for Verified Voting have told us all along, see http://nyvv.org/. Any and all of those all-in-the-computer systems can be hacked, and are not secure for use in fair elections. See the story here http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12...
Not, of course, they carefully note, there is any evidence that any of Ohio's machines actually WERE tampered with.... naw, 'cuz, you know, that would imply that the crooked, corrupt, crony-enriching fool in the White House was not really the rightful president of the US.....
Which brings us to the other, even bigger, good news of the day. The guy who actually did win the popular vote back when this whole GW Bush nightmare started, what ever happened to him after he won the Nobel Prize? Oh, yeah, he went to represent the people of the United States at the UN Bali Climate Change Conference, gave a tremendously inspiring (presidential!) speech, and rallied a divided world to come to consensus to address, together, the most important issue of our times: keeping our world livable for humans. Read it here http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12...
OK, maybe I'll get that Christmas tree today.
Have a happy holiday season. |
