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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (308717)	11/2/2006 11:31:27 AM
From: bentway	Respond to of 1577135

Diebold's screens need closer look Oct. 31, 2006 12:00 AM azcentral.com ( There's smoke. Fire? Who knows for sure? ) Who's worried about the potential problems facing Diebold Inc. on Election Day? Not Wall Street. Shares in the dominant maker of touch-screen voting machines are closing in on their 52-week high, and it's hard to find an analyst who's bearish. To be sure, Diebold is a company with $2.6 billion in earnings, including those from its automated teller machine business. But the Canton, Ohio-based company expects its election-systems arm to contribute as much as $180 million to earnings this year. Electronic voting machines represent a growth opportunity. The government, responding to the "hanging chad" debacle of the 2000 election, has spent $3 billion on purchasing electronic equipment. Touch-screen voting will happen in 34 states, about one-third of all precincts nationwide, and Diebold's AccuVote system leads in market share. The business also has brought unaccustomed criticism to a company that built its reputation protecting bank customers and once hired retired "untouchable" Eliot Ness as its chairman. The T-man's distant successor, Walden O'Dell, vowed in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president." The company distanced itself from the remarks, and O'Dell said he only meant them as a Bush fund-raiser. He later resigned. Still, the bitterly close 2004 election in Ohio caused mistrust of Diebold to linger, even though most problems concerned long lines and the availability of voting machines. This spring, however, problems with Diebold machines plagued Cleveland. Now, revelations have emerged that Ken Blackwell, Ohio's stridently partisan secretary of state, who also was chairman of President Bush's re-election campaign, owned shares in Diebold. Ohio bought Diebold machines during Blackwell's tenure. While he has said he didn't direct his investments, the scandal is one more reason his gubernatorial campaign is sinking. It also underscores an interesting divergence in opinion. If Wall Street's not worried about Diebold, others are. Last week, a former Maryland legislator critical of electronic voting received an anonymous package. Inside were disks with key pieces of programming from Diebold software. The FBI is investigating. That electronic voting machines can be hacked, and elections stolen, has been the key criticism of the new systems. Even before the disks turned up, Maryland's Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich Jr. urged a return to paper ballots, saying he lacked confidence in the state's $106 million electronic system. Other officials nationwide have voiced similar concern. For example, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson backed away from electronic voting and maintained paper ballots. Twenty-seven states have passed laws requiring paper trails from electronic voting machines. (Most Arizona voters will use paper ballots.) Nor is the technology community so sure about Diebold. Princeton researchers found that they could hack into a Diebold machine, finding three ways to insert rogue programs that could, among other things, redistribute votes from one candidate to another. "Analysis of the machine, in light of real election procedures, shows that it is vulnerable to extremely serious attacks," the paper from Professor Edward Felten and his colleagues reads. Diebold has kept up a steady line of defense, saying its machines are secure. It blamed human error for the Cleveland debacle and downplayed the significance of both the Maryland disks and the Princeton study. It refuses to allow outside testing of its machines. A bipartisan bill in Congress would require machines to produce a permanent paper record and random hand-counts in 2 percent of all precincts. And maybe Wall Street knows something we don't. But close elections may only re-ignite the suspicions that Diebold still hasn't put to rest. Reach Talton at jon.talton@arizonarepublic.com. Read his blog at taltonblog.azcentral.com

To: Road Walker who wrote (308717)	11/3/2006 4:02:03 AM
From: tejek	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1577135

Early retirement ______________________________________________________________ If Congress won't impeach Bush, maybe we can persuade him to swap the Oval Office for golf games and volunteer work. By Garrison Keillor Nov. 01, 2006 \| It took me an hour to turn the clocks back an hour, coordinating all the watches and digital alarm clocks and oven clock and kitchen clock and car clocks to Central Standard Time, during which a man starts to question the entire concept of promptitude, meetings, appointments, etc., which leads to thoughts of retirement, the End of the Trail, Old Paint, the part of your life when it doesn't matter so much if it's 9:30 or 10:05, or even if its Tuesday or Saturday, when you drift along as most mammals do, eating when hungry, sleeping when sleepy, and meeting whoever you meet whenever you meet them. People my age are retiring one after the other, which scares the bejeebers out of me. It's like when I sat in Toni McNaron's Milton class wrestling with the first question of the final exam, which was about "Lycidas," which I had not actually read, so it was difficult for me to discuss how the form of the poem was integral to its meaning -- difficult, but not impossible, by any means -- and suddenly two women stood up and walked to the front of the room and turned in their tests. Done! Finished! And me still trying to get traction! It is tempting, the thought of escaping from these clocks and learning to savor ordinary life at a mammalian pace. It's November, the squirrels are fat, the frost glitters on the grass in the morning. Stunning fall days with a high blue sky over a landscape of grays and browns. A retired gent could stroll around and gaze on this and inhale the air and slip into the grocery to select a caramel apple from the big display next to the pumpkin cakes. The soup of the day in the cafe is creamed corn. That would taste good. I could volunteer at school. The fifth graders are in the midst of a unit on manners, learning how to say "Please pass the salt" and what to do with your napkin during a meal. (Put it on your lap, please.) Next week they will write letters to their pen pals in Denmark. I could help with that. And it would keep me out of the senior citizen center, where a nutritionist is scheduled to talk about the importance of diet and exercise, after which everybody will tuck into a lunch of meatballs and gravy, mashed potatoes, brown-sugared carrots, buttered rolls and apple crisp. No thanks. The Current Occupant, who is two years and three months away from retirement, was quoted last week as saying, "They can say what they want about me, but at least I know who I am, and I know who my friends are." A pathetic admission of defeat for one who has owned all three branches of government for the past six years -- did he seek power so that he could attain self-knowledge? If so, the price is too high. The beloved country endures a government that merges blithering corruption with murderous incompetence. Congress, which once spent an entire year investigating a married man's attempt to cover up an illicit act of oral sex, has shown no curiosity whatsoever about a war that the administration elected to wage that has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands and led our own people to commit war crimes and squandered hundreds of billions of dollars and degenerated into civil war. The contrast is deafening. Republicans haven't tolerated much dissent in their ranks, the voice of conscience has not been welcome, and now the herd finds itself on the wrong side of the river. It's discouraging seeing so many people go so wrong all at once. It makes you question the idea that each of us has unlimited potential for good. Washington is a city where a bill to relax air-pollution standards would be called the Clean Air Act and a bill to protect government officials from war-crimes prosecution would be called the Military Commissions Act, and so a man's statement that he knows who he is and who his friends are needs to be taken as meaning the opposite, a cry for help. You come to office as a uniter and you wind up doing the opposite. You stand for American values and you wind up defending torture and the waste of resources. Knowing who you are is a minimal adult requirement, and you don't get there by being an object of attention. Retirement is recommended. The sooner the better. (Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" can be heard Saturday nights on public radio stations across the country.) -- By Garrison Keillor tinyurl.com