A big "thank you" to all the Kossack techno geeks and IT folks who helped me with hand-holding and troubleshooting last Friday and who took pity on my plaintive diary titled "Help!"
(more below the fold)

Help all you techie and IT-support Kossack geeks out there!  Please any help you give me will be most appreciated.  I'm a techno-ignorant average Jane who doesn't know how to fix this problem beyond what I've tried so far.  And please be patient with the probably wrong language I use to describe what's happening :-)

Here's the problem:  I click on a site, or try to go to a URL, and instead I get routed to a Gateway page that says it can't find this:

(below the fold)

Currently on Yahoo news there is a story running about a recent poll of Americans, attempting to gauge US awareness of the death toll of Iraqi civilians, and sound the depths of US support for criticism of the war in Iraq in the face of those numbers:  

http://news.yahoo.com/...

I read this story and became very, very angry. I was incensed because the part of the poll that asks whether one is more or less likely to support criticism of the war in Iraq if one has had an Iraq-related military death in the family or if one has a servicemember currently in Iraq seemed disingenuous at best (poorly worded on the part of the poll preparers) and, at worst, a manipulative leading of respondents down a path of ahistorical and unAmerican superficiality in the matter of our first amendment rights.

The poll seems to assume that if x percentage of Americans don't think it's right to criticize the Iraq war, then the other x percentage should think better of it out of respect for those Americans who, having loved ones on the field of battle, don't want to speak out.  

Follow me below the fold.

Why is it okay for oil and gas to be at the highest levels in years, the highest EVER-- and yet for BP to be making $55,000 a minute profit for the past year?

Why would our President think it is okay for oil companies like BP to make 30% HIGHER profits than they did last year-- about 1000% the cost of living adjustment your average American gets in his or her wages if they rise.  30% higher profit-- most of it a boon to only a few executives and high shareholders of the oil company.  

Here's the link; more on the flip:  

http://www.nytimes.com/...

Please forgive my posting this as a diary but I am desperate.  I cannot find a copy of "Social Stories," nor one of "Taming the Recess Jungle," both by Carol Gray, anywhere.  They are out of print everywhere.  (more after the jump)

Please note: This is NOT a repeat of Zackpunk's current diary on Kerry's donation! Please read below the fold! Thank you!

I got an email from John Kerry today, asking me to "fund the grassroots" by making a donation to "build the party" supposedly from the ground up.  It was a plea for funding that seems oriented toward funding progressive, grass-roots groups on the ground level-- until you hit the button where supposedly you can "help" the grassroots, and you get the following page:

https://www.democrats.org/support/index.html?dsc=NETA330

(more)

I am really alarmed about this.  That is why I am spreading the word here.  I think everyone here who lives in Ohio, has family or friends in Ohio, or has a child or relative studying at an Ohio university needs to know about this proposed law that has been introduced in the Ohio senate and that is about to be debated by the Ohio State University senate.

The bill is SB 24:

http://www.legislature.state.oh.us/bills.cfm?ID=126_SB_24

It is a law that seems innocuous enough in its title: The "Academic Bill of Rights for Higher Education."  And yet when you begin reading the provisions of the bill, you see that one of its express intentions is to muzzle freedom of inquiry on the part of "liberal" professors in the higher education institutions of Ohio.  McCarthyism redux.  (more...)

I am on an Ohio recount update listserve, and this was sent around to the list recently. It's compiled by Richard Hayes Phillips, of New York; he has done an exacting and fascinating series of calculations analyzing wards, precincts and voting machines with various ratios and runnings of the data.  The calculations indicate that the refusal to supply adequate voting machines to democratic and minority areas was a deliberate strategy.  The information is worth reading in its entirety.

Something of interest at the bottom of the calculations is the call for the investigation of Mr. Damschroder, who is a bigwig Republican in Columbus who worked closely with Kenneth Blackwell in vote suppression on election day.

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OHIO RECOUNT
STEALING VOTES IN COLUMBUS

The Free Press on Election Day posted a disturbing
story, later confirmed by the Columbus Dispatch.  

I live in Columbus.  Yesterday I was a poll runner for K/E at a working-class precinct, where there were far more democrats registered, and as the day wore on it became clear that those good people were getting out to the polls to vote.  Some of them were voting for the first time, or for the first time in years.  During late afternoon phone banking so many people I reached in pretty underprivileged neighborhoods were reporting that they had indeed voted-- for K/E.  (more...)

According to an article just posted on the web New York Times, the nation's largest voting machine companies have made a gesture of revealing millions of lines of code to the National Software Reference Library, but they are REFUSING to submit their proprietary source codes and copies of the software patches, updates and upgrades used to format and set up computing systems for the upcoming national elections.  (there's more...)