Listening to NPR this morning, I caught a fraction of an interview with the usual foreign policy sound bite artist -- I didn't catch the name clearly, but I think it was Walter Russell Meade of the Council on Foreign Relations. The reporter asked him to explain the "big picture" meaning of Saddam's capture. His response, and I quote:

"Ding, dong, the wicked witch is dead!"

I didn't stick around to listen to the rest of the interview, so I don't know if Meade(?) was being sarcastic. But it struck me that that isexactly how the American public is likely to react to Saddam's capture, and they won't be sarcastic. To them, like to Bush, and to most ignorant people, everthing is about personalities: If we've nabbed Saddam, then we must have won the war. It's the People magazine school of geopolitics.

But if you recall, the Wicked Witch's death was actually part of the plot mechanism whereby Dorothy discovered the Wizard of Oz was a fraud, and couldn't really send her back to Kansas. The Middle East isn't the Emerald City, and there's no Good Witch of the North to tell us to click our heels together and say "there's place like home."

Now here's the really interesting part.  Forgetting for a moment Diebold's voting machines, let's look at the other equipment they make.  Diebold makes a lot of ATM machines.  They make machines that sell tickets for trains and subways.  They make store checkout scanners, including self-service scanners.  They make machines that allow access to buildings for people with magnetic cards.  They make machines that use magnetic cards for payment in closed systems like university dining rooms.  All of these are machines that involve data input that results in a transaction, just like a voting machine.  But unlike a voting machine, every one of these other kinds of Diebold machines -- EVERY ONE -- creates a paper trail and can be audited.  Would Citibank have it any other way?  Would Home Depot?  Would the CIA?  Of course not.  These machines affect the livelihood of their owners.  If they can't be audited they can't be trusted.  If they can't be trusted they won't be used.

Now back to those voting machines.  If EVERY OTHER kind of machine you make includes an auditable paper trail, wouldn't it seem logical to include such a capability in the voting machines, too?  Given that what you are doing is adapting existing technology to a new purpose, wouldn't it be logical to carry over to voting machines this capability that is so important in every other kind of transaction device?

This confuses me.  I'd love to know who said to leave the feature out and why?

Of course, propaganda from both the right and the left serves to advance political aims and agendas and has nothing whatsoever to do with Truth, but in light of recent cries for honor and integrity, and the oft-repeated question, "Where is the outrage?" some right-leaning pundits -- and those who parrot them -- have taken hypocrisy to new heights.