Time to just have some fun with some cool music videos I've been digging:

Mercy by Duffy.

Rockferry by Duffy.

I think I'm in love by Beck.

Disco Lies by Moby.

Gamma Ray by Beck.

I just watched this nice Blueprint for Change re-edit outlining part of Obama's big plan for change.

Yay! Immigration reform! Yay Data Transparency! Go Team!

Ok so now that that's all out of the way, I'd like to talk seriously about putting pressure on the new congress coming in to
end the war immediately.

I was updating the words to my anti-Iraq war song, In the Spirit this morning...

It started out with "30,000 faces disappear" - I was referring to the Iraqi civilians that were killed in our first sweep of invasions in 2003.

Well, since that time, five years have passed, and a lot more people have been killed. And I make a point to say "killed" rather than "died," because I want it to be clear that none of these people died from anything that would have happened to them had their not been a war.

This was also the point of a report published by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which stated:

As many as 654,965 more Iraqis may have died since hostilities began in Iraq in March 2003 than would have been expected under pre-war conditions, according to a survey conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. The deaths from all causes—violent and non-violent—are over and above the estimated 143,000 deaths per year that occurred from all causes prior to the March 2003 invasion.

(Washington Post Story - NY Times Story)

Let's put pressure on this new congress to pass a bill on its first day back in session.

The first act of this new congress should be to declare:

1) The war is over.

2) No more troops will be sent.

3) The troops start coming home now.

Whaddaya say people? Let's make the new Democratic congress show us what they're made of, right away.

Let's make this a priority now, or I fear we're going to find ourselves spending another year protesting this new government just to get them take action to stop the war.

Let's insist that congress deal with the war as its first order of business!

Whew! What a relief. My favorite scenario has actually come to pass.

People voted. Votes were counted. Obama won. I look like chicken little a little. The end.

Well not quite the end, in the sense that, in my state, Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriages passed, which I think is quite unfortunate, and makes the progressive Obama victory just a little bittersweet...

It also made me change my "gay rights" category to "equal rights "civil rights" because this isn't about the right to be gay, it's about the right to marry whomever you wish. It's a pretty big part of that whole "pursuit of happiness" thing, if you ask me.

Update: 11/07/08 - (And yes, I just changed again. I remembered what happened with the whole ERA thing in the 80s, and how saying "equal rights" instead of "civil rights" seems to water the concept down somehow. Being able to marry whomever you wish is a CIVIL RIGHT. Ok, now I can move on...)

But alas! Time to move forward and keep up this momentum we seem to have going.

Thanks for all your information, love and support, during these past 8 years of hell.

There were some times in there when all we knew we had was each other - over the internet.

Now we are making our presence felt in the "real" world too. Good job!

Onward!

Lawrence published this message last night from New Zealand:
Winning Tuesday: An urgent plea to Obama supporters.

I awoke in New Zealand today to an article in the New Zealand Herald, and I had a strange sense of deja vu. It is still Monday in America. And like the Monday before the 2004 election, and the Monday before the 2000 election, there is enormous confidence among Democrats that we are going to win this.

But as with 2000, and 2004, I have become a bit terrified about where
we'll be Tuesday. For as presented by the New Zealand Herald, however
optimistic the static view of the swing states is, the dynamic view —
what is the trend — is sobering, to say the least. As this graph
shows, only Florida is trending in the right direction. Every other
critical state is trending away from Obama.

Now of course, maybe not quickly enough. Of course, the advantages are
significant, especially relative to 2004. And of course, McCain would
have to move mountains to overcome the enormous machine that the Obama
campaign has built.

But here's the weird deja vu I feel. In 2004, I got on a plane Tuesday
to fly to London. When I got on the plane, I watched every pundit, as
well as Kerry's daughter, speak about how all the polls were with
Kerry. The "exit polls" indicated a clear Kerry victory. But then when
I landed, I sat it utter disbelief in the United lounge at Heathrow,
watching the Ohio numbers go against us, and therefore, delivering 4
more years to Bush.

We Democrats have trouble closing the deal. We have trouble continuing
the push to the very last moment. We have repeatedly been blindsided
by the fact that the other side votes regardless of the expected
result, while we're more contingent — making the effort if it seems
necessary, relaxing when it doesn't.

Please, don't let this happen again. Please, if you're an Obama
supporter, do absolutely everything you can in the next 24 hours to
make sure every single possible Obama vote turns out to vote...

There is an energy I have never imagined could be behind any
politician. I have known for more than a decade that this man is the
real deal. And it gives me enormous hope for this democracy that we
are about to vote to make him President.

Unless we don't. Unless we let this slip by, again. Unless we sit in
our comfortable cubicle, and let politics be run by the other side.

Don't do this. Do something this time. Please at least help spread
this message. Make sure everyone who could matter here knows what you
believe. And don't stop until the clock runs out.

As I mentioned in my last post, I've been thinking a lot about what we can do this time around to protect ourselves against another repeat performance of either the 2000 or 2004 elections. We were tricked both times in different subtle ways, and it is my hope that whoever might be planning to tamper with this year's elections will realize that it's a bad idea to do so with everyone watching.

I've had this little anthem (lullaby version) in my head this last week, and I thought I'd share it with you.

It's based on some things I learned from my own archived news footage from the 2004 election about strange things going on with the actual vote count in relation to the exit polls. The Bushies tried to tell us it was the exit polls that were incorrect. But that didn't make sense then, and it makes less sense now.

This clip is a re-edit from a clip within the documentary from Dorothy Fadiman's Stealing America - which was released a few months ago across the country. (The movie uses a lot of footage from my and thePete's video archive from the 2004 election.)

(Video - 11 MB)

From Judy (to Wolf Blitzer): "Well, we're trying to figure all this out right now Wolf. Apparently, what has happened is that the Associated Press, they were feeding numbers into us, and then suddenly, those numbers changed."

High Res version of this video clip - 230 MB (Sorry there is no hi-res version of either song recording.)

This year, let's stay up and watch until we know the votes have been counted correctly -- which, we know from the polls, could only mean a huge win for Obama.

Here's a sorta "traditional" version of the song:
Staying Up All Night (campfire version)

Here's a lullaby version of it for my biggest fan :-)

Here are the words (roughly, depending on version):

Stayin up all night
stayin up all night
and you'll be there with me
and it'll be alright
you can call us crazy
and we hope they're right
until the race is called
I'm stayin up all night

Stayin up all night
Stayin up all night
and we'll all watchin
cause we've seen the light
what happened last time
it just wasn't right
until the race is called
we'll be staying up all night

and you can call us crazy
and we hope you're right
until the race is called
we'll be stayin up all night

RE: Plan B

Well, if they try to tell us that Obama has lost in "another close race," I say we demand a recount and hit the streets - Ukranian style.

So it might be a good idea to try to take Wednesday off work if you can, to:

1) rest up after being up late Tuesday night

and

2) be available for a protest, if we need to have one

So again - the main plan is to just watch and win :) - which should be easy enough. But if the bullshit hits the fan in the middle of the night again, let's be ready to deal with it head on Wednesday morning (Plan B) - by emailing phoning our representatives endlessly - and, hittin the streets!

Although Obama is currently WAY ahead in the polls, I remain cautiously pessimistic until the race is safely over, and I urge you to come to your polling place with a notepad and camera in hand, to take note of anything strange that may happen when you are voting. My report from December 2004 on the voting irregularities in Ohio.

Here's why: whoever was messing with our elections in 2000 and 2004 is still in control of them. Very little has changed between now and then in the voting accuracy and/or recount department. Everything that we learned from Ed Felten and his team at Princeton University still holds. All the dangers from not having a voter verifiable paper trail are still in place -- for instance, as a protection against "vote-switching" software, which has apparently reared it's ugly head again.

These dangers have become so widely understood, and become such a part of our American culture, that the Simpsons even parodied it for a laugh.

We're laughing now, but are we going to be laughing when McCain somehow beats Obama, in the end, in what we're supposed to believe is another close race?

There's a recently-released documentary on this subject, Stealing America, by award-winning film maker Dorothy Fadiman. The film uses a great deal of my and my brother in-laws' archived news footage from the 2004 and 2006 elections.

In the 2004 election especially, it was amazing to me how the news footage was able to illustrate the strange sequence of events that took place in the middle of the night with both the voting count and the exit poll numbers. There was evidence of the vote-switching too, although, at the time, most of it was explained away as "glitches."

This clip from "Stealing America" interviews numerous individuals from all walks of life who had this vote switching happen to them.

Sure, the Republicans are in charge of these particular elections in Putnam county, but the point is that the Republicans, the Democrats, or anyone else that wanted to, without much effort, could hijack these voting machines and change the outcome of our elections.

As you will see in the clip from Stealing America, many of these people first blamed themselves when something odd occurred -- either blamed their own lack of expertise with computers, or their own unfamiliarity with the voting process in general, and so they weren't questioning what was happening.

Here's a classic example of "blaming the voter" from the Charleston Gazette:

Three Putnam County voters say electronic voting machines changed their votes from Democrats to Republicans when they cast early ballots last week.

This is the second West Virginia county where voters have reported this problem. Last week, three voters in Jackson County told The Charleston Gazette their electronic vote for "Barack Obama" kept flipping to "John McCain".

In both counties, Republicans are responsible for overseeing elections. Both county clerks said the problem is isolated.

They also blamed voters for not being more careful.

"People make mistakes more than machines," said Jackson County Clerk Jeff Waybright.

Shelba Ketchum, a 69-year-old nurse retired from Thomas Memorial Hospital, described what happened Friday at the Putnam County Courthouse in Winfield.

"I pushed buttons and they all came up Republican," she said. "I hit Obama and it switched to McCain. I am really concerned about that. If McCain wins, there was something wrong with the machines.

"I asked them for a printout of my votes," Ketchum said. "But they said it was in the machine and I could not get it. I did not feel right when I left the courthouse. My son felt the same way.

"I heard from some other people they also had trouble. But no one in there knew how to fix it," said Ketchum, who is not related to Menis Ketchum, a Democratic Supreme Court candidate.

Ketchum's son, Chris, said he had the same problem. And Bobbi Oates of Scott Depot said her vote for incumbent Democratic Sen. John D. Rockefeller was switched to GOP opponent Jay Wolfe.

"I touched the one I wanted, Rockefeller, and the machine put a checkmark on the Republican instead," Oates said of her experience Thursday.

She said she caught the mistake, called over a worker in the county clerk's office and was able to correct her vote. But she worries other voters may not catch such a mistake.

This time around, we need to take the opposite approach. Pay very close attention, and report anything strange to the various groups set up to help document what took place immediately.

Another important thing to remember is not to blame yourself if something screwy happens at the polls when you go there to vote. Bring a camera, notepad, and a keen eye. And let's stay up and make sure the votes are counted this time.