Some Saturday Links

The new Harper's index presents some statistics of interest at

http://harpers.org/MostRecentIndex.html

Some samples:

Aid that U.S. leaflets dropped on Fallujah in July threatened to freeze if insurgent attacks continued : $102,000,000 [Coalition Press Center (Baghdad) ]

Number of insurgent attacks in Fallujah in the week before and after the leafletting, respectively : 21, 36

Ratio of the minimum number of beheadings by the Saudi government last year to those by Saudi terrorists so far this year : 50:1 [U.S. State Department/Amnesty International (N.Y.C.) ]

Date on which Turkmenistan added questions on the president’s spiritual writings to its driver’s-license test : 6/12/04 [BBC Monitoring International Newswire, August 3, 2004/Neytralnyy Turkmenistan ]

Percentage of Mississippians who have failed their written driver’s-license test since it became computerized last year : 60

And here's some more Florida Election Humor

http://334578.com/Media/Voting_Machine.wmv

And some George Bush Amusement

http://uk.download.yahoo.com/ne/fu/attachments/buildabetterbush.htm

More Election stuff:


Steven Rosenfeld writes in The Perfect Election Day Crime

Across Ohio’s minority-rich cities, there were fewer voting machines than during past elections, including March’s presidential primary. As the number of voters grew by as much as 50 percent in some precincts, according to pro-Kerry field organizers, the number of voting machines on Election Day shrank by a third. Precincts that usually had five machines only had three.

The lack of voting machines was a disaster.

“I don’t think this story has been told,” said Miles Gerety, a public defender from Bridgeport, Conn., who went to Ohio as a legal observer and discovered this trend by overhearing elderly voters talk about fewer machines. “The press and election protection people weren’t looking for this. They were looking for poll challenges. But this is the perfect way to suppress the vote.”


You can read the whole piece dated 11/12/04 at http://www.tompaine.com/articles/the_perfect_election_day_crime.php

Don't forget to sign the petition at:
http://www.moveon.org/investigatethevote/

That's it for now.

-Peter