Beautiful Salon story on a play in a ruined theater in Baghdad.

Listening to: Okinawan Pop band, Shoukichi Kina: "Peppermint Tea House" (1994).

How the Next Election will Be Stolen. "Letter from actor Peter Coyote to Senator Barbara Boxer:

Dear Barbara,

I'm writing to you about a situation of the greatest urgency.
Last year, I narrated a film called "Unprecedented" by American journalist
Greg Palast (currently writing for the London Guardian). This film documents
the illegal expunging of 54,000 black and overwhelmingly Democratic voters
from the Florida rolls just before the presidential election. We
interviewed the computer company that did the work, filmed their explanations of
the instructions they received and their admissions that they knew
that their instructions would produce massive error. That figure has now
been revised to 91,000.

Jeb Bush was sued, and was supposed to have returned these
voters to the rolls, and did not, which explains his last re-election. The
Republicans have something far worse in mind for the next presidential
election and Democrats need to be prepared. The recent elections of Nebraska
Republican Chuck Hagel, the loss in Georgia of Max Cleland, wildly popular
Vietnam vet, and the victory of Alabama Governor Bob Riley, along with a
handful of other Republican victories, (all predicted to have been losers by
straw polls which our nation has refined to a high-art) points to an ominous
source: corporate-programmed, computer-controlled, modem-capable voting
machine, recording and tabulating ballots.

You'd think in an open democracy that the government--answerable
to all its citizens, rather than a handful of corporate officers and
stockholders--would program, repair, and control the voting machines. You'd
think the computers that handle our cherished ballots would be open and
their software and programming available for public scrutiny. You'd think there
would be a paper trail of the vote, which could be followed and audited if
a there was evidence of voting fraud or if exit polls disagreed with
computerized vote counts. You'd be wrong.

The Washington, DC publication The Hill has confirmed
that former conservative radio talk-show host and now Republican U.S.
Senator Chuck Hagel was the head of, and continues to own part interest in,
the company that owns the company that installed, programmed, and largely
ran the voting machines that were used by most of the citizens of Nebraska.
When Democrat,Charlie Matulka requested a hand count of the vote in
the election he lost to Hagel, his request was denied because Nebraska had a
just-passed law that prohibits government-employee election workers from
looking at the ballots, even in a recount. The only machines permitted to count
votes in Nebraska, he said, are those made and programmed by the
corporation formerly run by Hagel.

When Bev Harris and The Hill's Alexander Bolton pressed the
Chief Counsel and Director of the Senate Ethics Committee, (the man
responsible for ensuring that FEC disclosures are complete), asking him why he'd
not questioned Hagel's 1995, 1996, and 2001 failures to disclose the
details of his ownership in the company that owned the voting machine
company when he ran for the Senate, the Director reportedly met with Hagel's
office on Friday, January 25, 2003 and Monday, January 27, 2003. After the
second meeting, on the afternoon of January 27th, the Director of the
Senate Ethics Committee resigned his job.

Hagel's surprise victory is a trial-run for the presidential
election. Election 'reform' laws are now prohibiting paper ballots (no
trail) and exit polls, effectively removing all trace and record of votes,
making prosecution of voter fraud virtually impossible. For whatever
reasons, the Democrats decided not to pursue the issue of fraudulence in the
last Presidential election. The three Supreme Court Justices who
should have recused themselves (Scalia, Thomas and O'Connor) were allowed to
stand unchallenged and pass a bizarre one-time only ruling. That they
were in place long before the election demonstrates how clearly the
end-game of such moves was thought out.

Unless the issue of voter fraud is elevated to an issue of
national importance, not only is it highly probably that Democrats will
lose again and again, but eventually voters will "sense" even if they
cannot prove, that elections are rigged, and the current 50% of those
boycotting elections will swell to the majority. Privatization of the vote is
tantamount to turning over the control of democracy to the corporate sector. I
urge you to use your considerable powers and influence to address this
issue." (via Buffalo Poetics List)

Zompist compares English as She is Spoke with Babelfish (Yes, Babelfish is worse!)
.