Florida Prepares To Unplug Touchscreen Voting Machines

When you go to the polls next week for Florida's primary, it'll be the last time you use those highly touted touch-screen voting machines. After less than six years, the state is pulling the plug on most of its 25,000 touch-screen voting machines, once heralded as a way to prevent messy, embarrassing elections........here

Miami-Dade County alone must cast aside 7,200 touch-screen machines, for which it paid $24.5 million and still owes $15 million. Statewide, the debt is estimated at $32 million.

Litbrit: I Love My Country Part One

The French have Liberté, égalité, fraternité. Americans can choose from a broad selection of slogans, from the boisterous YOU-ESS-AAAY! to the beautiful and dignified The land of the free and the home of the brave, and everything in between. But what do we Brits have to say about ourselves--what can we say about ourselves?.........here

Linda Saul-Sena Pissing Off Ikea

How long do we have to wait in Tampa for the public to demand its city government be something better, something innovative, something sustainable? How long do we continue to accept mediocrity and laziness? If the hipper, cooler businesses won’t go green, won’t try innovation, how in the hell can we expect to force the Wal-Marts and chain restaurants of the world to do likewise? Saul-Sena and colleague Councilman John Dingfelder have been more strident than the Pam Iorio administration about moving toward greener, more environmentally friendly designs in urban planning and construction.........here

The Coast Of Florida Is Still Clear

Enviro-leftists who oppose drilling in the gulf should know that none other than Fidel Castro is taking advantage of the Outer Shelf. Cuba has gleaned $1.7 billion from oil and gas drilling as close as 60 miles from the Florida coast since 2004, according to Rep. John Peterson of Pennsylvania, and "is drilling closer to sovereign American property than we are."........here

The story did not mention higher fuel standards and mass transit as other options to achieving energy independence.

"Sicko" Gets The Oscar High-Five

Of course, every reporter who's called me in the past few days wanted to know if I plan on giving an "anti-war" or "anti-Bush" speech, should "Sicko" win, as I did when we won the Oscar for "Bowling for Columbine" in 2003. (As you may recall, it was the 5th day of the war when those Oscars were held, and I said from the stage that, while I enjoy making nonfiction films, we live in fictitious times with
a man of fiction in the White House.......here

Ron Paul Only Sane Person At GOP Debate

No Delegates? We Don’t Care.

For Democrats, the number of returned absentee ballots in Florida so far exceeds the total number turned in in the 2004 general election, and the number of Democratic early voters plus the number of absentees requested is more than the number of actual voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada combined........here

Off Rob Lorei's Bookshelf

Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

Chalmers Johnson

Like ancient Rome, America is saddled with an empire that is fatally undermining its republican government, argues Johnson (The Sorrows of Empire), in this bleak jeremiad. He surveys the trappings of empire: the brutal war of choice in Iraq and other foreign interventions going back decades; the militarization of space; the hundreds of overseas U.S. military bases full of "swaggering soldiers who brawl and sometimes rape." At home, the growth of an "imperial presidency," with the CIA as its "private army," has culminated in the Bush administration's resort to warrantless wiretaps, torture, a "gulag" of secret CIA prisons and an unconstitutional arrogation of "dictatorial" powers, while a corrupt Congress bows like the Roman Senate to Caesar.........here

Thanks For Trying Mr. Kucinich

Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio is dropping his second long-shot bid for the Democratic nomination for president, he told his hometown newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He said he would announce the decision officially in a press conference Friday......here

John Edwards On the Late Show