The Shrine

The Vancouver Sun wrote:"I am confident that I made decisions based on principle, that I made calls as best I could, and I did not sell my soul," Bush told an audience of about 1,000 men and women at the $400-a-seat steak luncheon.

Is it just me, or is that, like, the most sinister Presidential legacy comment ever? Was Bush selling his soul on anybody else's mind when that shit flew out of his mouth?

I just find it funny that he actually had to say "I didn't sell my soul". Has any other president in history ever have to reassure anyone of that?

1. "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."—Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004

2. "I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family."—Greater Nashua, N.H., Chamber of Commerce, Jan. 27, 2000

3. "Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?"—Florence, S.C., Jan. 11, 2000

4. "Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB/GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across the country."—Poplar Bluff, Mo., Sept. 6, 2004

5. "Neither in French nor in English nor in Mexican."—declining to answer reporters' questions at the Summit of the Americas, Quebec City, Canada, April 21, 2001

6. "You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.''—Townsend, Tenn., Feb. 21, 2001

7. "I'm the decider, and I decide what is best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense."—Washington, D.C., April 18, 2006

8. "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."—Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005

9. "I've heard he's been called Bush's poodle. He's bigger than that."—discussing former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, as quoted by the Sun newspaper, June 27, 2007

10. "And so, General, I want to thank you for your service. And I appreciate the fact that you really snatched defeat out of the jaws of those who are trying to defeat us in Iraq."—meeting with Army Gen. Ray Odierno, Washington, D.C., March 3, 2008

11. "We ought to make the pie higher."—South Carolina Republican debate, Feb. 15, 2000

12. "There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again."—Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002

13. "And there is distrust in Washington. I am surprised, frankly, at the amount of distrust that exists in this town. And I'm sorry it's the case, and I'll work hard to try to elevate it."—speaking on National Public Radio, Jan. 29, 2007

14. "We'll let our friends be the peacekeepers and the great country called America will be the pacemakers."—Houston, Sept. 6, 2000

15. "It's important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It's not only life of babies, but it's life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet."—Arlington Heights, Ill., Oct. 24, 2000

16. "One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures."—U.S. News & World Report, Jan. 3, 2000

17. "People say, 'How can I help on this war against terror? How can I fight evil?' You can do so by mentoring a child; by going into a shut-in's house and say I love you."—Washington, D.C., Sept. 19, 2002

18. "Well, I think if you say you're going to do something and don't do it, that's trustworthiness."—CNN online chat, Aug. 30, 2000

19. "I'm looking forward to a good night's sleep on the soil of a friend."—on the prospect of visiting Denmark, Washington, D.C., June 29, 2005

20. "I think it's really important for this great state of baseball to reach out to people of all walks of life to make sure that the sport is inclusive. The best way to do it is to convince little kids how to—the beauty of playing baseball."—Washington, D.C., Feb. 13, 2006

21. "Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream."—LaCrosse, Wis., Oct. 18, 2000

22. "You know, when I campaigned here in 2000, I said, I want to be a war president. No president wants to be a war president, but I am one."—Des Moines, Iowa, Oct. 26, 2006

23. "There's a huge trust. I see it all the time when people come up to me and say, 'I don't want you to let me down again.' "—Boston, Oct. 3, 2000

24. "They misunderestimated me."—Bentonville, Ark., Nov. 6, 2000

25. "I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office."—Washington, D.C., May 12, 2008

http://www.slate.com/id/2208132/

This one ought to go on the list.

I swear to God, this is all gonna end in tears. You mark my words. Probably some time around the time the first draft of George G. Bushington's book gets to the publisher, tentatively titled "If I Did It, Here's How It Happened". Did you guys know he referred to himself as "George Washington Bush" once too? The real G-Wash is not amused, I would guess.

Replay wrote:12. "There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again."—Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002

The irony here is that he got elected twice, after saying this.

Another saying they have in Texas and Tennessee to justify voting Bush, "Electin a presidant is lak a box o' chocolates, you ain't never know what ye gonna get."

Julius Seeker wrote:

Replay wrote:12. "There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again."—Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002

The irony here is that he got elected twice, after saying this.

The "elected" part is highly debatable

And he only got elected once after saying it :P

I guess I should say, he got elected a second time.

Shrinweck wrote:And he only got elected once after saying it

The real question is: did he get elected at all?

The EVEN MORE IMPORTANT question is: Does Diebold/Premier still have the capacity to backdoor their voting systems, and if so, why is the government still using them?

Zeus wrote:

Shrinweck wrote:And he only got elected once after saying it

The real question is: did he get elected at all?

YES YES HE DID BECAUSE IF HE DIDN'T THE FIRST TIME HE CAN RUN AGAIN.

Shrinweck wrote:

Zeus wrote:

Shrinweck wrote:And he only got elected once after saying it

The real question is: did he get elected at all?

YES YES HE DID BECAUSE IF HE DIDN'T THE FIRST TIME HE CAN RUN AGAIN.

Shrin, you did hear about the controversy surrounding both of the elections, no?

It was the first time I voted, of course I followed it. I don't give it as much merit as the craziness in 2000.

Shrinweck wrote:It was the first time I voted, of course I followed it. I don't give it as much merit as the craziness in 2000.

There's a really good, supported article Robert Kennedy Jr wrote for Rolling Stone suggesting that the 2004 election was just as "fixed" or "corrupted" as the 2000. I'll dig it up for you when I have a minute

It's all suspect until the government terminates its Premier/Diebold contract for voting machines with Microsoft Access databases that I could possibly hack into from here, if I knew the codes.

Jesus, who uses MS Access for a professional DB, especially for voting machines?

/obligatory

Tessian wrote:/obligatory

That's a great comic that makes the point very, very well

Zeus wrote:

Shrinweck wrote:It was the first time I voted, of course I followed it. I don't give it as much merit as the craziness in 2000.

There's a really good, supported article Robert Kennedy Jr wrote for Rolling Stone suggesting that the 2004 election was just as "fixed" or "corrupted" as the 2000. I'll dig it up for you when I have a minute

Well, that didn't take long. Put in "Rolling Stone Robert Kennedy" and it is Google's first link

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/ ... ion_stolen

What's really excellent about this article is that it references 208 sources for 10 pages of content as support for his conclusions (look for the red link just under where it says "Pg 1 of 10"). Kennedy didn't just say "damn these fuckers, I have a feelin' they did it again!". Looks like he wrote it knowing it'll have to stand up to severe scrutiny and tried to leave no leaks that the conservative think tanks could jump all over.

Just too bad no one read it and it just got buried. Probably because it was written 1 1/2 years after the fact and with peoples' short attention span these days, no one gave a shit that their political system failed them

I would not be surprised to find that both were true. I suspect the only reason they didn't try in 2008 is that they knew there would have been no way.

Thank god there are not that many states that use it, but the systems still need to be put to death.

Agreed.

SineSwiper wrote:Thank god there are not that many states that use it, but the systems still need to be put to death.

Hold on, you guys wanna put electronic voting down for the count? If anything, we should be moving to an electronic-only system (and online voting; but that's another argument). Problem is, we can't trust our corrupt politicians to instill proper oversight to ensure it's done properly and with fail-safes and proper monitoring in place.

So, what should we really be doing: eliminating electronic (or online voting) or forcing our politicians to do the job we're paying them to do? I personally would vote for the latter as we would be treating the disease as opposed to the symptom

Zeus wrote:Hold on, you guys wanna put electronic voting down for the count? If anything, we should be moving to an electronic-only system (and online voting; but that's another argument). Problem is, we can't trust our corrupt politicians to instill proper oversight to ensure it's done properly and with fail-safes and proper monitoring in place.

Zeus, all of the techies agree that electronic voting is too dangerous, as there is not a way to individually count the votes if something goes wrong. Diebold appears to be the worst programmers I've seen, too, so it's the worst possible situation. Online voting? Are you daft?!

There has been some talk about an open source system, so that the code is available for the public to view and debug. However, unless it is implemented right so that individual counts can still be tallied, it's still a sham.

The ones we have where you fill in a paper ballot (via fill in circles, not fucking chads) and count them on an electronic machine work just fine.

SineSwiper wrote:

Zeus wrote:Hold on, you guys wanna put electronic voting down for the count? If anything, we should be moving to an electronic-only system (and online voting; but that's another argument). Problem is, we can't trust our corrupt politicians to instill proper oversight to ensure it's done properly and with fail-safes and proper monitoring in place.

Zeus, all of the techies agree that electronic voting is too dangerous, as there is not a way to individually count the votes if something goes wrong. Diebold appears to be the worst programmers I've seen, too, so it's the worst possible situation. Online voting? Are you daft?!

There has been some talk about an open source system, so that the code is available for the public to view and debug. However, unless it is implemented right so that individual counts can still be tallied, it's still a sham.

The ones we have where you fill in a paper ballot (via fill in circles, not fucking chads) and count them on an electronic machine work just fine.

Hey, I'm not sayin' it'll be easy or even implemented correctly within the next 20 years (it could be feasible within 1 technically; it'll take a couple generations to make it happen properly politically). All I'm saying is the proper implementation of an electronic - and eventually, online - voting system is not only inevitable, it's superior and something we should be striving towards.

To me, the word "impossible" is not something we should be using so frequently, it portrays a defeatist attitude and gives people an excuse to give up and be lazy. When I'm faced with an "impossible" task, I prefer to use it as a motivation with a simple mentality: we set an "impossible" goal and then we work towards it. That's how we advance our society instead of being stuck as a "first-world country" (I used that term lightly when referring to the US and often Canada) that loves to keep itself in very, very third-world ways (you can extend that to our race as a whole as well). What seems impossible now doesn't mean that it needs to be impossible later. If we as a race ever kept a mentality like that, we would never have gone into space. Now we have people spending half a year or more living in a space station with the eventual goal of extra-terrestrial colonization. One "impossible" goal down and now working towards another. Should we give up on colonization of other planets just because it seems "impossible" within the next 100+ years?

To address some of the concerns you raised, I agree, for some time (I don't know exactly how long, that's TBD), we should have a paper trail so individual counts can be done. So why not have the machine print out on a half-sheet of paper a confirmation ballot that people physically check then hand in to someone on the way out? That way, they're not filling out a physical piece of paper but there still is something to count in case of a discrepancy. Also, since the voting is all done without anyone accidentally filling out the wrong circle or punching the wrong chad and the person is simply verifying, it's actually a superior system to what we have now. It's a marriage of both worlds to me and should be easily implemented with very little training and confusion on the part of the voter. Hell, you could even have a copy of the ballot confirmation to give to people that they can verify just in case. A system like this would actually allow for far superior auditability and make the system even better than it is now. And we can realistically implement something like that in what, 1 year tops? The only real "downside" I can see to all of this would be cost (well, that and people having to face their greatest fear: change) which is always the excuse used by politicians to instill doubt in the public mind and never do anything of any substance (those two things essentially killed the superior proportionate representation system possibility up here in Ontario).

Think of it as a bridge between where we are now and where we want to be in the future as opposed to a compromise. It's just a temporary measure ("temporary" could refer to 20+ years, who knows?) that's in place until we can prove we don't need it anymore. Once that electronic voting part is worked out properly, do you think it would be "impossible" to move it to an online system? If you're going to argue against that, please leave out one aspect of the counter argument that is just retarded and has absolutely no empirical evidence: security. It's a scare tactic used by opposers to an open political system. If we can conducted hundreds of trillions of dollars of business online or even file our taxes online (the Canadian Revenue Agency actually prefers that you file online since it allows for far superior auditing techniques to be used) with all that confidential information in there, I'm sure we can find a way to cast a simple A-B-C-D vote.

Um, if it's a Windows machine, a parallel universe version of me with a goatee and a penchant for evil would be drooling over the thought of jackbooting the fucker behind the scenes to boot from an external source and go in with a hex editor if I had to. These things won't be safe unless the votes are NEVER stored on the hard drive prior to transmission, or with serious oversight, or both.

Even then...dude, Access databases in Diebold machines? We obviously need better machines, but I"m not sure the world is ready. I salivate over the thought of obtaining a Diebold machine and attempting to run some tests and squirrel away some votes and make the evening news (not in a real election, obviously). From what I've read, those things are not well protected in the least. And really, most hackers can hack the shit out of anything given enough time.

I personally think there are a LOT of valid arguments for paper or other physical ballots.

Replay wrote:I personally think there are a LOT of valid arguments for paper or other physical ballots.

Now, yes. But what about in 20 or 30 years?

Most especially in 20 or 30 years.

Replay wrote:Most especially in 20 or 30 years.

Sorry, no offense, but to me that's a very backwards mentality. We have an opportunity here to better our system and make it more visible and accessible to the general public the system is supposed to serve and you're arguing that we maintain our obsolete ways simply because the solution requires long term effort and diligence. Just doesn't make sense to me at all

Replay wrote:Even then...dude, Access databases in Diebold machines? We obviously need better machines, but I"m not sure the world is ready. I salivate over the thought of obtaining a Diebold machine and attempting to run some tests and squirrel away some votes and make the evening news (not in a real election, obviously).

Already been done. Watch "Hacking Democracy". They eventually show that a Diebold machine could be tricked into counting "negative votes".

Zeus wrote:

Replay wrote:Most especially in 20 or 30 years.

Sorry, no offense, but to me that's a very backwards mentality. We have an opportunity here to better our system and make it more visible and accessible to the general public the system is supposed to serve and you're arguing that we maintain our obsolete ways simply because the solution requires long term effort and diligence. Just doesn't make sense to me at all

Give me your system. I will make sure nothing bad ever happens to America ever again and that the GOP stays in the penalty box for a long time, maybe forever! It would be so benevolent. Ignore that box of spare hex values behind the desktop icons...

Seriously, Zeus, the problem with electronic votes is that whoever's in charge can flip bits and laugh with no physical evidence. It's like board meetings. They are going to be conducted in person for a long time, at the higher levels, because it is going to become FAR too easy to fake a video or teleconference as 3D rendering technology becomes available to anybody.

I want a paper or other physical trail for my country's ballots, for a long time. With bits, there IS no record. You talked about printing a paper trail, but that's FAR less secure than scannable ballots, IMO, esp. as scanning gets better - which it is - I just see no reason that a vote should ever be "wholly electronic", because hackers will salivate over the thought. No matter how good the security is - it can be very, very good - it can still be gotten through, physically or electronically, really. 128-bit encryption falls to a corrupt voting machine operator with access to the databases and enough knowledge to flip hundreds of votes simultaneously.

Again, just think about this - bits can be flipped with no traces ever detectable, especially while in RAM. A physical ballot, however, can be audited.

Replay wrote:Again, just think about this - bits can be flipped with no traces ever detectable, especially while in RAM. A physical ballot, however, can be audited.

I don't disagree, which is why I suggested a hybrid system (electronic voting that prints off a paper confirmation ballot that is filed for auditability purposes) until we can make it completely air tight. That may take 20 years or more but by no means does should we do anything but begin implementing this ASAP. We need to move away from the 50's and drag ourselves kicking and screaming into the new millennium. And (far) down the road will we then move into the full electronic/online voting.

Think of it like hybrid cars. We found out that pure electric wasn't going to work on a full-scale basis right away, so we're doing the hybrids first, get people used to it, and then eventually move away from gas completely, a few decades down the road. What I'm suggesting is a very similar path.

Of course, there are lots of highly supportable conspiracy theories that the electric car was killed off and the future possibilities are being stunted through artificial means. I know this sounds crazy, but do you think that maybe the Diebold system was purposely designed to fail? I can't imagine why any politician or powerful business people could possibly want to decrease the access and visibility of the political system to the masses. It's crazy talk, no such evidence exists of any such actions in any election in the past......

Zeus wrote:Of course, there are lots of highly supportable conspiracy theories that the electric car was killed off and the future possibilities are being stunted through artificial means. I know this sounds crazy, but do you think that maybe the Diebold system was purposely designed to fail? I can't imagine why any politician or powerful business people could possibly want to decrease the access and visibility of the political system to the masses. It's crazy talk, no such evidence exists of any such actions in any election in the past......

No, the Diebold system was purposely designed to be hacked. Both times, they were used to elect President Bush. I think they were even used in 2008 to try to elect McCain.

Speaking of Hacking Democracy, here's the link to the full video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 4822130737

Watch it!