rigged elections

The British are asking a good questions today – Is America much longer for democracy? The UK paper The Independent looks into the potential for election tampering with the new touch-screen voting systems being rolled out across the US, such as the Diebold Inc model used in Georgias midterm elections last November. The Independent looks into the results of that election in Georgia (where the Republican challenger won a Senate race in spite of polling and other factors that indicated the Democratic incumbent would hold the seat), and raises a number of troubling issues. For instance, did you know that a private company counted the votes, and that there was no paper record? Heres a clip from the article:

Georgia was not the only state last November to see big last-minute swings in voting patterns. There were others in Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois and New Hampshire – all in races that had been flagged as key partisan battlegrounds, and all won by the Republican Party. Again, this was widely attributed to the campaigning efforts of President Bush and the demoralization of a Democratic Party too timid to speak out against the looming war in Iraq.

Strangely, however, the pollsters made no comparable howlers in lower-key races whose outcome was not seriously contested. Another anomaly, perhaps. What, then, is one to make of the fact that the owners of the three major computer voting machines are all prominent Republican Party donors? Or of a recent political fund-raising letter written to Ohio Republicans by Walden O’Dell, Diebold’s chief executive, in which he said he was “committed to helping Ohio to deliver its electoral votes to the president next year” – even as his company was bidding for the contract on the state’s new voting machinery?

Im glad that we have the British press to ask the hard questions.

Meanwhile, here in America, people continue to grow larger.

Heres the story of a 400-pound man that just fell though the floor of his trailer home.

That was sent in by a man in Portland named Dave. I believe he sent it to me because he was concerned. My many mentions of the Old Country Buffet and Cracker Barrel must have sent up the red flags Perhaps I should refrain from walking on anything but reinforced cement slabs and steel.

I had a weight-related idea yesterday. What if I could gain one pound a day for the rest of my life? I wonder how long I could live Could I make it two years?

I wonder if I could gain a pound a day for one year and then lose a pound a day for one year. I wonder if thats possible Could I get grant money for something like that?