Last night, I was listening to the gubernatorial debates on Kansas Public Radio while running errands (I can drive now, hooray!). One of the “hot button” issues was illegal immigration: what to do about all those brown people coming in and taking our jobs? Both candidates, our Democrat incumbent and the Republican challenger, had strong isolationist stances on the border issue. Sebelius talked about how we need to move more troops onto the border (!), while placing more pressure on businesses who actively hire illegal immigrants to stop; Barnett took that even further and ranted about how we need to institute an English-only policy and stop those illegal immigrants from illegally voting at our polls (:?: All right dude, didn’t think that was a huge epidemic, seeing as you have to register to vote…ahh, rationality be damned, they’re takin’ our votes!).

The crowner came after they had both spoken, and the moderator was asking a panel of commentators to weigh in on the responses. The commentators were just figures from the community, two from regional newspapers, and the third I don’t remember. The moderator turns to one of them and says, “Now Tim, you’ve been in Mexico. What do you think?”

I don’t know whether to cry or laugh (probably both).

Funnily enough, the election nonsense is closely related to another relationship saga involving people I know. This time it stars Tess, a girl I know through the boy, who was always sweet and affable enough in high school, but one of those types that you could never have a terribly good conversation with (perhaps the boy might say otherwise, since they were friends). Since leaving high school, they lost touch with each other, and she subsequently converted to a highly fundamentalist evangelical sect of Christianity. I want to say she is some flavor of Baptist, but I’m not sure.

At any rate, she began sending him a flurry of increasingly offensive emails, under the guise of caring about his well-being (and the well-beings of the hundreds of other people included in her mass emailings). He got particularly angry after one of the emails she sent demonized Arabs and Muslims (this was pre-Iraq invasion, I believe), and responded with a scathing email calling out the racist, fear-mongering assumptions behind her obnoxious mass-email. Particularly since, as she well knows, he’s Lebanese. She stopped sending him the emails, but called him up and talked to him - oddly enough, not bringing up the angry email he had sent, or apologizing for anything she’d written. Well, at least the ridiculously offensive emails stopped.

Recently, they’ve started back up again. He’s been forwarding them on to me for my amusement. One of them had this message at the end: “As always, let us know of threats to freedom in your area by calling (757) 226-xxxx!” We joked that he should call regarding Tess’ threatening emails. “Excuse me, operator, there’s a concerted effort to prevent me from marrying another dude!” I’m sure that would go over splendidly.

Now, being the snoop that I am, I noticed that one of these emails was sent to a ‘Suzie’ at ‘jimandsuzie.com’, prior to mass emailing. Tess had run a draft of the email by Suzie before sending it out to her Address Book of Heathens, and neglected to detach the draft before doing so (I guess they don’t teach you to cover your tracks in Fundie Technology School). Curious, I looked up jimandsuzie.com, and saw a link to several photo albums. The boy and I perused the photo albums, until we came across a familiar face: it was Tess! And an older man standing next to her. She wore a spaghetti strap white dress that ended mid-thigh, and wedge shoes. She smiled and he looked a bit dour, wearing an untucked denim shirt over wrinkled trousers. Youth pastor, maybe?

The next photo showed a wedding cake, posed elegantly in front of a Hermann-Miller (a cubicle wall). Odd, they seemed to be rather under-dressed for this person’s wedding, which appeared to be taking place in a shadowy office building. Then the next photo showed them at the altar…oh. Finally, the two stood bowing their heads in prayer, holding hands with two children! The oldest boy looked to be at least 11 or 12. Eee….erp. We internet detectives deduced that she had married her youth pastor, and that he was waaaay older than her.

While we were puzzling over this latest bit of gossip, she sent another doozy:

Vote for Freedom!!

Oct. 18th- Nov. 7th

House of Representatives- Marc Rhoades

Treasurer- Lynn Jenkins

Secretary of State- Ron Thornburgh

Insurance Commissioner- Sandy Praeger

State Attorney General- Phill Kline

Lt. Governor- Susan Wagle

Governor- James Barnett

Your VOTE matters!!

The media say that Values Voters won’t show up at the poles this election year. Prove them wrong on Nov. 7th and take a stand for your children (pro-life/no over-state boundaries abortions for under-aged girls), family (traditional marriage), and faith (the right to pray, believe, and worship God publicly & privately).

Remember- When you don’t VOTE, you are giving up the right that our fore-fathers fought for…your right to voice your opinion.

God Bless You

Hahaha. Looks like someone’s got a case of party-lines (and doesn’t realize that Praeger actually supports abortion rights :twisted:)

Trying out a tactic that had worked previously, the boy sent her a friendly response:

I Vote Against FREEDOM.

I HATE FREEDOM. I THINK alL BaBIES SHOULD BE ABOrted!

ONLY gay people should get HITCHED!!!

MY forefathers were Liberals…And I’ll be damned if’n my kids aint too.

I want my kids to grow up loving all cultures and respecting all peoples, regardless of faith, gender, ethnicity etc etc more hippie liberal anti-God crap.

Oh yea, and I totally support Republicans, especially when they want to do little boys in the ass. Hard. I like that.

Oh yea, I met Phill Kline once. He talked about Muslims and how he likes the Quran better than the Bible. And Jesus.

And Susan Wagle. She’s great. She likes having sex on her office desk.

Sincerely,
(redacted)

P.S. God does bless me. And he sends his regards, says you’re not holding up your end of the bargain too well.

Well, ahaha, perhaps he was a touch on the crude side, but it worked before, right?

One thing I’ve noticed about strong fundamentalist type folks is a shared faulty sarcasm detector. Here’s part of her response:

I simply find that Republicans hold up the right values, even if a they don’t live the lives they should. They vote for what I believe in and I haven’t found any democrats who do or any independant parties either, save one. God created us all and He loves us all. If Kline prefers another religion, I do not think less of him for it. [emphasis mine] I still see that he has helped those girls from continuing abuse from their father in KS.

Mein gott! The boy, I love him, though he has the subtle finesse of a sledgehammer at times. I guess there are people dense enough to withstand blunt trauma.

At any rate, it worked again - she sent him an email apologizing for losing touch, though perhaps she didn’t get the point that it’s a bit rude to send people highly-politicized spam when you haven’t bothered to speak to them in two years. In the process of catching up, she sent this bombshell: the guy in the denim shirt and trousers? Not her youth pastor, as we had guessed, but in fact, her dead sister’s husband! Her sister had died of cancer two years ago, and she had been very broken up about it. During the process of healing, she and her (former) brother-in-law became rather close, and began courting about six months ago, a year and a half after her sister’s death. “The kids are getting used to having a mom who used to be their aunt, but we’re doing fine.”

So, when exactly did Kansas become the new Arkansas? And why is this happening within the small circle of People I Know? I love this state - the people are friendly and the prairies are beautiful, but why does it seem like it’s shrinking?

- P.S. - Don’t forget to vote! And, if you’re like me, don’t vote for anyone on that quoted listed except for Praeger. Heh heh.

- P. P. S. - Ahahaha. So true.

- P. P. S. S. (P) - Good heavens, a machine bug has cropped up as predicted, though in a slightly different way than I’d expected.

Last night, a documentary called ‘Hacking Democracy’ aired on HBO. I haven’t seen it, since I do not get regular cable, let alone HBO. There’s a detailed review of it online at Computerworld, and I’m hoping that it will be posted online or available to rent sometime soon. It will be re-aired Sunday morning for those of you who can watch it.

From the looks of it, this documentary is more frightening than any horror film. I’d heard the rumors and allegations of the insecurity of Diebold voting systems before, and its suspiciously strong ties to the Republican party, but like many others, I’d kind of half-dismissed it from my mind as mere tinfoil-hattery. ‘Hacking Democracy’ dispenses with rumors, directly demonstrating to the viewer the security flaws inherent in the system. As well as the coverup on the part of Diebold representatives, who swear up and down that their machines are secure. Many counties have bought the company’s line, to the extent that 87% of votes cast are tallied using Diebold machines.

Yet these security flaws are nothing short of astounding. The entire source code to the Diebold electronic voting system was discovered sitting on an open, unsecured FTP site - not by an expert, menacing hacker, but by Bev Harris, a grandmother, no less. Numerous experts then tested the system and discovered multiple flaws in the design that could allow a person to easily manipulate output. Not only affecting the results, but also erasing any trace that such a manipulation ever happened.

A demonstration of the stellar security of voting systems by Bev Harris, aforementioned grandmother and now executive director of Black Box Voting. She rocks.

Notice that no fancy ‘hacking’ is required, really; she simply opens up an Access database. An unsecured Access database containing the votes, sitting on the local disk of a central PC. Aghgahgha.

A demonstration of how to hack the voting machines themselves, put on by PhD students from Princeton. Turns out it’s actually easier than pie!

Diebold responded to this video, and you can read the Princeton students’ reply to Diebold at http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/.

A documentary like this can’t help but have a political slant (is it ever really possible to discuss politics in a neutral manner?), yet the producers take pains to illustrate that everyone, across the political spectrum, ought to be alert and concerned:

Setting a tone of partisan dread early in the film are the fruits of a Dumpster dive early in the film outside the McKinney, Texas, headquarters of Diebold Election Systems Inc., where BBV’s Harris discovers a line item and unexplained accounts receivable from the “8th District, Republican Committee.” But another segment reveals a Republican candidate from Louisiana going from touch-screen machine to touch-screen machine in the bowels of a county elections warehouse demonstrating that on each one, her attempts to vote for herself result in a vote registered at the bottom of the screen for her opponent.

Point is, even if there is a serious flaw in the election system that happens to benefit your party (*ahem*), the fact remains that there is a serious flaw, infecting the very core of our supposedly cherished democracy. It can be abused and manipulated by anybody, rendering honest votes useless. Nobody should sit for this, not the moderates, not the liberals, not the conservatives. Thinking of all the long, painful battles for enfranchisement fought by generations of minorities and women, it seems ridiculous and downright sad that in the 21st century, we still face disenfranchisement of a more subtle, sinister nature.

Other external reports confirming the unreliability of Diebold electronic voting systems:
Johns Hopkins/Rice
RABA Technologies
Compuware