TV News LIES

California Assemblyman Phil Ting has proposed AB 19, a bill to require the California Secretary of State to implement an Internet voting pilot project. They tell us Internet voting is secure. It's not. It's not secure, and can't be made secure, but that's not even the point.

The point is it's not transparent. The whole premise in our Constitution is that we self-govern. To do that, the public must be able to see and authenticate essential processes, like who actually voted and the vote count, and that is not possible with Internet voting.

Internet voting transfers all control to whoever runs the server. (The server is just a computer that sits in a room -- and one Internet voting company, Scytl, has its server physically sitting in Spain.)

Remember when the credit card offers came in your mail by the handful? Those days maybe about to return. Credit card debt backed securities (they call them bonds now) are now the hot investment with tens of billions being issued by the big banks.

The reason these new bonds are so popular is that investors are suddenly seeing credit card debt as a safe again. In fact they are so popular that they aren't paying returns all that much better than government bonds that pay hardly anything at all.

The civil right achievements of Martin Luther King are quite justly the focus of the annual birthday commemoration of his legacy. But it is remarkable, as I've noted before on this holiday, how completely his vehement anti-war advocacy is ignored when commemorating his life (just as his economic views are).

By King's own description, his work against US violence and militarism, not only in Vietnam but generally, was central - indispensable - to his worldview and activism, yet it has been almost completely erased from how he is remembered.

It's a chicken-and-egg sort of a situation, wondering how much language determines thought, and the amount that's the other way around.  Maybe there's no way to know which came first, or whether it's at all relevant -- or if "both" is the correct answer.

Somehow, I find it easy to get distracted by such chicken-and-egg considerations, especially whenever the feathers really get flying at the Congressional chicken coop, and when every besotted member of that prideful roost feels the urgent, imperious need to crow, squawk, cry, or flail around in the dirt and mud.

Scribbles on a page are just placeholders for errant thoughts and daydreams, drifting here and there, looking for anchor points of purchase.  These symbols and squiggles we call writing are feeble things, unable to hold a candle to personal observation.  It is a shame we haven't evolved the ability to directly share our observations with one another, whether singly or a few million at a time.

In a science fiction film, there would have to be wires, connections, and a massive control panel choked and jammed with clusters of lights and switches.  In my version, it would be accomplished without machines or equipment, but be done by a simple thought process one could learn early in life -- and be about as complex and demanding of you as having the inspiration to move across the room in order to get a drink of water, and then doing so.

The mega store chain Walmart, that one that likes to drape itself in Red, White and Blue in order to better sell its Communist Chinese goods, has announced it will 'create' 100,000 jobs for military veterans.

Why will it push 100,000 already poor people out of the way in favor of giving poverty wage jobs to the veterans of George Bush's imperialist follies? Because it will get hundreds of millions in cash from the government for doing so. They wouldn't do it otherwise, this isn't without risk. These people are trained in combat, and have served under fire...