Britt Blaser pulls together threads to explain why the network assembling around the Dean campaign is more important than it might seem.

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Prove that you are a better googler than me (not that that’s much of an accomplishment) by finding the famous photo of W in his flight suit walking across the aircraft carrier. Durned if I can find a copy of it anywhere on the Web…

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I spent the day at the Dean HQ in Burlington, which is always an energizing experience. There is so much going on there, and there are so few barriers between idea and execution.

TVs are strewn about, usually turned to “real” news channels. But at 6pm, guess what at least the Web folks are tuned to, at least last night? The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Any campaign that likes Jon Stewart can’t be all bad.

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Sheila Lennon interviews the hosts of a new liberal talk show, Outrage Radio that debuts Nov. 13. (I agree with her that the name stinks.) Excellent interview. E.g., one of the hosts says:

Reagan’s HUD and the Savings & Loan catastrophe: your taxes are higher by $50/month for the rest of your life because of that bailout.

Great factoid, if true.

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I’m at the Dean HQ in Burlington today where they actually make you sign in now – it’s getting so grown up! – but it still feels like the best entrepreneurial company you ever worked at.

I laughed at a “Soylent Dean” – “My God! His campaign! It’s made out of people!” – posted on Joe Trippi’s door. I’d missed it when it ran in the Dean weblog.

There’s also a link to the campaign to have Dean supporters write personal letters, by hand, to undecided voters in NH and Iowa. I did last week. It felt oddly good.

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Michael Cudahy writes on the speculation that W will dump Cheney and take Rudi Giuliani for his VP. He argues that the Democrats need Republican votes and that the Dean campaign has not been receptive to that imperative.

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Steve MacLaughlin has a good take on the brouhaha over Rumsfeld actually telling the truth in a memo.

And Mitch Ratcliffe is running a photograph that my spidey-sense tells me just may have been PhotoShopped.

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For Immediate Release: Tuesday, October 21, 2003

DIEBOLD TARGETED WITH ELECTRONIC CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Swarthmore, Pa. — Defending the right of a fair, democratic election, Why War? and the Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons (SCDC) announced today that they are rejecting Diebold Elections Systems’ cease and desist orders and are initiating an electronic civil disobedience campaign that will ensure permanent public access to the controversial leaked memos.

Earlier this week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced that it will defend the right of Online Privacy Group, the Internet service provider for San Francisco Indymedia, to host links to the controversial memos. Going one step further, Why War? and SCDC members are the first to publicly refuse to comply with Diebold’s cease and desist order by continually providing access to the documents.

“These memos indicate that Diebold, which counts the votes in 37 states, knowingly created an electronic system which allows anyone with access to the machines to add and delete votes without detection,” Why War? member Micah explained.

The documents are currently available here:
http://why-war.com/memos/

More information about the campaign of electronic civil disobedience:
http://why-war.com/features/2003/10/diebold.html

Electronic Frontier Foundation press release:
http://www.eff.org/Legal/ISP_liability/20031016_eff_pr.php

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On a mailing list, Kim Alexander points us to an article in the UK Independent about voting machines:

Something very odd happened in the mid-term elections in Georgia last November. On the eve of the vote, opinion polls showed Roy Barnes, the incumbent Democratic governor, leading by between nine and 11 points. In a somewhat closer, keenly watched Senate race, polls indicated that Max Cleland, the popular Democrat up for re-election, was ahead by two to five points against his Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss.

Those figures were more or less what political experts would have expected in state with a long tradition of electing Democrats to statewide office. But then the results came in, and all of Georgia appeared to have been turned upside down. Barnes lost the governorship to the Republican, Sonny Perdue, 46 per cent to 51 per cent, a swing of as much as 16 percentage points from the last opinion polls. Cleland lost to Chambliss 46 per cent to 53, a last-minute swing of 9 to 12 points.

The question is whether we can trust our voting machines. And this is a question that is going to get very big very soon, I believe.

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Dan Hughes of TheyBlinked points us to a story about his brother and his fiance. Here’s the intro to the article:

The love story of Trevor Hughes and his fiancee began in an elementary school in the Himalayan foothills.

They were “global nomads.” He was a diplomat’s son. She the daughter of missionaries. They lived in Asia, attended school together, fell in love and want to get married in June.

But when Hughes’ fiancee, a German national, tried to visit him on a six-month tourist visa Monday, she was detained in Atlanta, handcuffed, jailed—even stripped of her diamond engagement ring.

Then, after 20 hours without food, she was put on a plane and shipped back to Stuttgart.

“This isn’t the America I fought for,” said Hughes, who served in the Navy and U.S. diplomatic corps. “You don’t expect that from a great country like ours.”

It’d be easy to say this is an isolated instance if it were an abuse of the system rather than being the system.

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