Saturday, April 7, 2007

Comparing Clinton Attorney Firings to Gonzales

eA lot of conservatives have brought up the fact that Clinton and Reno fired 93 U.S. attorneys at the beginning of Clinton's Presidency. I'm not sure what this has to do with the Gonzales firings. There is no comparison here what-so-ever.

I'll explain why. It is the President's right to fire attorneys whenever he wants. It is customary to make changes when a President first takes office. When Clinton fired the 93 attorneys it wasn't because he fabricated a lie and said they did a poor job, he wanted to start with a clean slate. That's a far cry from pressuring attorneys to persue cases more aggressively and then fire them when they don't succomb to that pressure. That's unethical tampering.

It is still within the President's rights to fire any attorneys at any time. But please, don't lie about the reasons. It isn't right to soil someone's reputation by saying they didn't preform well when the real reason for the firings were all political. It is also unethical to have someone fired for not persuing the cases you want prosecuted more aggresively. Ethics seems to be something the Bush administration is lacking when it comes to government duties. Clinton lacked ethics in his personal life, but at least he had a higher standard for the way he ran his administration.

The real issue here is the pressure the Bush administration has been putting on their attorneys to persue their political goals.

Thursday, April 5, 2007

Electronic Voting Bill Introduced

Rush Hold (D-NJ) introduced a bill meant to deal with the problematic issues having to do with computerized voting. One of the main issues from the last election was a lack of paper trail and printed verification. As it stands, states that have the electronic voting and no paper trail are also states that will no longer have any recounts or challenges to the computer vote. There is no way to isolate the problems because an electronic recount will give the same results as the first count.

The new bill called the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act would ensure that paper trails are mandatory and that PAPER RECORDS become the final decider in any kind of recount. It also requires automatic audits which I think is another welcome check on the voting process.

The fact that there is no paper trail or ability to track back any possible tampering is a blow to democracy. These machines are touted as tamper proof and reliable, which in my opinion is never 100 percent guaranteed. Somebody somewhere will find a way whether it be attaching something to the outside of the machine to throw it off or getting into the hardware itself.

I'd rather rely on a more imperfect system that uses paper with built in checks than a sealed unchallengeable computer system.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070401-congress-finally-considers-aggressive-e-voting-overhaul.html