reality-based educator: Webb Now Leads By More Than 11,000 Votes In VA: “Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Webb Now Leads By More Than 11,000 Votes In VA
Still more absentee votes to be counted and some provisional ballots to be counted tomorrow.

Tomorrow, lawyers from both sides will canvass all the precincts to see if they were any glitches or problems.

We’re waiting on Montana. The race is tightening. Dem Tester has a 7,000+ vote lead with 72% of the precincts counted.

Wow – what a night. It looks like it will come down to VA and MT.”

Shreddin’ With Dick ” Spotted on 10/19, by an eagle-eyed Wonkette reader: The Mid-Atlantic Shredding Services truck making its way up to the Cheney compound at the Naval Observatory.
Fun fact: Mid-Atlantic Shredding Services has been contracted by the Secret Service for our Executive Branch’s record-not-keeping needs.
The present contractor providing Pickup & Destruction of Sensitive Waste Material services is Mid Atlantic Shredding Services and the current rate is $0.095 cents per lbs.
You better get crackin’, Dick — that evidence won’t destroy itself!”

Crooks and Liars: By: Jamie Holly @ 8:18 AM – PST
Keith Olbermann and Jonathan Alter discussed the attempts to suppress voters in Virginia last night. Today it has turned into a much bigger story:
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into the possibility of voter intimidation in the U.S. Senate race between Sen. George Allen, a Republican, and Democratic challenger James Webb, officials told NBC News.
State officials alerted the Justice Department on Tuesday to several complaints of suspicious phone calls to voters who attempted to misdirect or confuse them about election day, Jean Jensen, Secretary of the Virginia State Board of Elections, told NBC’s David Shuster….read on
Between corrupt Republicans, the robo-call scandal and now this, investigators are going to be busy for a very long time.”

Poll Workers Struggle With Vote Machines: “Poll Workers Struggle With Vote Machines
– By ANICK JESDANUN, Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, November 7, 2006

(11-07) 11:52 PST , (AP) —
Programming errors and inexperience dealing with electronic voting machines frustrated poll workers in hundreds of precincts Tuesday, delaying voters in several states and leaving some with little choice but to use paper ballots instead.
In Virginia, state election officials called in the FBI after several voters complained about getting phone messages that sent them to the wrong precincts.
Many of the voting machine problems surfaced as the polls were opening.
In Cleveland, voters rolled their eyes as election workers fumbled with new touchscreen machines that they couldn’t get to start properly.
‘We got five machines — one of them’s got to work,’ said Willette Scullank, a trouble shooter from the Cuyahoga County, Ohio, elections board.
In Indiana’s Marion County, electronic optical-scan machines that read paper ballots initially weren’t working right in more than 100 precincts. Poll workers had trouble using a computer port to connect those machines to new touchscreen models, which handicapped voters use, County Clerk Doris Anne Sadler said.
Election officials in Delaware County, Ind., and Lebanon County, Pa., extended polling hours because of early machine troubles blamed on bad programming.
In Colorado, Democratic Party officials said they would ask a state judge to keep Denver polling places open an extra two hours Tuesday because of long lines. Power failures in the area had knocked out laptops used to verify voter registration, forcing workers to call the central office for information.
Jonah Goldman of the La”

Might today’s elections be the last that matter in America? This is, I know, a gloomy and apocalyptic idea. But we live in gloomy and apocalyptic times, and I believe that if the Republicans do well enough this year they will destroy all faith in democracy on the left. No one will believe that the election was not stolen with the aid of crooked computers. Hell, I won’t believe in a pro-Bush result, knowing how easy it is to break into one of the Diebold voting machines. There are already stories spreading across the net that signal this has been spotted, from such commentators as ‘the thoughtful Baptist’, the journalist Fred Clark.
Even the Miami Herald has reported ‘a story’ about voting machines that mysteriously registered a press on the Democratic candidate as a vote for a Republican one. Similar stories have come from Texas.
So all the materials for a first-rate conspiracy theory are there. The means, the motive and the opportunity are all in place; and no one who has watched the Bush government over the last six years could believe that they have any scruples whatever about – God save the mark – fairness or the rule of law. They know nothing more about democracy than they know about competence. This is obvious to everyone now, even to the neocon supporters of the invasion of Iraq, who have filled the papers, in the run up to the expected Republican defeat, with ‘rat-like chitterings’ of ‘It wasn’t me!’
Well, it was them and it was Bush, too. The one overwhelming justification of democracy is to punish such mistakes. It cannot ensure that the right people are elected.

Crooks and Liars: By: David @ 8:12 PM – PST

Bill Clinton provides the star power at tonight’s campaign rally for Webb. He delivers the famous Clinton stump speech and seems to enjoy to ripping Republican campaign tactics.
Video – WMP Video – QT “

Crooks and Liars: By: Steve @ 7:05 PM – PST
Alas, the story late last week about the Bush administration accidentally publishing nuclear secrets in Arabic on the Internet did not cause quite the stir that I had hoped for. Perhaps if John Kerry had told a joke about it, and left out a word, the story could have received wall-to-wall coverage on TV.
That said, there has been some interesting follow-up. For example, one of the people who convinced the Bush gang to publish the materials is now publicly criticizing the administration for its poor judgment.
House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra criticized the Bush administration on Sunday for its handling of a trove of once-secret documents from Saddam Hussein’s covert nuclear program disclosed on a federal Web site.
Hoekstra, R-Mich., complained the U.S. intelligence community hadn’t properly declassified the documents.
‘Well, you know, we have a process in place. It looks like they screwed up,’ he said on CNN’s ‘Late Edition.’
That’s great, but Hoekstra does realize that this whole scheme was his idea, right?”

Crooks and Liars » 2006 » June » 23:By: John Amato @ 3:25 PM – PDT
Steve raises a good point:
‘Do you wonder like me why Santorum and Hoekstra chose this week to embarrass themselves, at a time when Santorum is heading for a huge drubbing in November? Guess who helped these two roll out this ridiculous claim this week? Our Director of National Intelligence.
So let me get this straight. Negroponte is now using his position to play a partisan role in the 2006 election? He is politicizing intelligence? Or does this go higher?…read on'”

Jon Stewart, Enemy of Democracy?

Crooks and Liars: “Those Dirty Republicans
By: Jamie Holly @ 10:43 AM – PST
Seems like the Republicans still love their dirty tricks. From Matt Stoller:
Terry Nelson, an unindicted co-conspirator in the TRMPAC Tom Delay scandal, and the boss of Jim Tobin, the convicted felon in the NH phone-jamming case, is the head of opposition research for the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee. So it’s not a surprise that these kinds of unethical dishonest tactics are being used.
Sources in Bergen County are reporting that an autodial robocall is being made that starts out sounding like a positive Bob Menendez message. If you hang up, it repeatedly calls you back. If you listen all the way to the end, it finishes by saying that Menendez is an embezzler and under criminal investigation.
This is a voter suppression tactic being used nationwide by the GOP. Initially callers will think they are hearing a call from the Menendez campaign asking for support. If they hang up, it will repeatedly call them back. The intention is to annoy the voter so much that they no longer support the candidate. For those who actually listen to the entire call, they are presented with a series of lies and smears against Menendez, also with the intention of suppressing turnout. It’s a win-win tactic for them.
The NRCC is doing the same exact thing in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and at least 53 other races across the country.
Terry Nelson is a key GOP operative, a senior advisor to John McCain and someone heavily involved with both Tom Delay and Karl Rove. This guy breaks the law and gets rewarded for it. Democrats should make election reform a very core part of their agenda for a lot of reasons, but the rampant criminal nature of the Republican operative class is a pretty good rationale…read on
Josh Marshall has also been on top of this story.”