Hey send me any thanksgiving videos you know of (that ya like :-) and I'll keep adding them all day.

Today I realized that, yes, there will be a wireless network in every household that I'll be celebrating at today (I'm hopping around a bit), and, no, I wasn't too proud to bring my laptop along with me and add videos to this playlist all day.

Thanksgiving 2006 Playlist

If it's not rude to watch football or whatever it certainly can't be too rude to watch videos on my laptop :-)

Email me with your vids at lisa@dabble.com or send me a dabble message after you register for your own dabble account.

thanks and

gobble! gobble!

This is really what you might want to circulate a bit over the holiday weekend.

A UCLA student was tazered while in handcuffs

This playlist documents the events themselves (a student recorded almost the whole thing on a cell phone) and interviews MSNBC's Keith Olbermann conducted with a reporter from UCLA's Daily Bruin and the student's attorney, Stephen Yagman.

You can see it for yourself, and hear the students get threatened when they ask for the officers' information.

I'm learning more about these tazers and that they are as lethal as guns or clubs or any other "lethal weapon," and the various police protocols, state and local laws, and federal civil rights that were violated in the course of these events.

Using a lethal weapon, numerous times, on a restrained civilian (that has already assumed passive resistance by laying down on the floor) is effectively assaulting an unarmed individual.

I think we're all going to need to know a lot more about the law in these areas, so we can protect ourselves against rogue officers in the future.

Yeah this year was a mixed bag to say the least.

(I know it's not over for another month, but it always feels like the year's already over by the time Thanksgiving rolls around.)

Somehow, William S. Burroughs was able to make me feel a little better:

This monkey can really do Karate!

And, of course, I already got the best present (s) ever on Wednesday :-)

Hey I just got another present -- we just took control of the Senate!

Rummy and Mehlman are history too. wow.

Saves us the trouble of having to do it through congress, I guess.

This new guy, Bob Gates, is another old guy that used to work for his dad, with CIA connections.

So it's not like there a new good guy coming in that's going to help us sort out the mess over in Iraq or anything.

I'm too tired to enjoy this really -- (having had to wake up every two hours to record MSNBC on VHS tape because I couldn't get either my Tivo or my PVR working well enough with my new cable set up to be of much use before the election) -- but I did want to make sure that those still wondering and those abroad knew that there was good news - it looks like they decided not to cheat this time - or at least to pick and choose which races to affect.

How nice to be put in a position of looking like a crazy conspiracy theorist again. It's like waking up after a bad dream or something.

more soon,

lisa

It was very interesting to wake up at 4:50 am to Tim Russert on IMUS in the morning talking about exit polls:

The organization that's in charge of the exit polls used to provide the first wave at noon or one o'clock.

Now, a representative can come from each of the subscribers and come in to a dark room with no windows, no telephone, no tv, and they are "quarantined."

They are put in this room. And no one from the networks can see anything till 5pm.

I stuck in a video tape and reset my alarm.

When I awoke again at 7:15, the reports of voting machine problems were in full swing:

MSNBC On Bogus phone calls giving false information to voters.

MSNBC On Early Voting Problem in Florida

Everything in this post, and more, as a single playlist is located here:
Election 2006 - Same Day Coverage

Election 2006 - Republican's Dirty Tricks playlist

http://video.lisarein.com/election2006/

Please spread the word. There's a bunch of great stuff in there already. I'm still working on making proper posts for it, but the point is that voter machine troubles have been coming in since the early hours and that the Republicans have already been caught making illegal "Robocalls" and using intimidation tactics.

Also of interest is Tim Russert on IMUS in the morning (dabble record) (About 4:50 am, when I had just woken up to start taping), explaining how the Exit Polls were gonna be all top secret now until later in the day, so as to be more sensitive to keeping the data secure, confidential and accurate.

Hey guys, remember that we don't have to have another four years of Arnie!

There IS an alternative: Phil Angelides

People forget that only a year ago, Arnie wasted millions of dollars on a special election we asked him not to have.

I have friends and family that have met him and dealt with him that say he's a real democrat and he'll be better than Arnie. (So that's good enough for me.)

If you feel you just have to vote for Arnie, for whatever reason, you can still vote for John Garamendi as Lt. Governor, to help keep Arnie in check.

Thanks!

OK. Almost time to start rolling everybody. At 8:00 am Eastern tomorrow - the polls are open and the future is up for grabs.

I have 24 two hour tapes that will start rolling at 5:00 am tomorrow morning (and keep going for 48 hours).

Time to charge/replace your camera batteries and make sure the cable's working and all that.

Tomorrow we'll need every one of us to tape as much election footage as they can, from wherever they are, all over the country.

This means BOTH capturing everything we can from the television AND shooting our own interviews with people at the polls and at large about their experiences.

Email me at lisa@lisarein.com, and let me know what you shot or collected.

I'll compile a list of locations, channels and times, and publish the list, and host whatever video people need me to host, and just link to the rest, and then, hopefully, we'll have whatever footage we might need when the time comes to get the word out.

So as not to drive your self crazy, just label the tape or dvd accordingly, turn the tv on, turn to any news channel, hit record, and forget it (like when you leave for work in the morning perhaps? and then maybe another one when you get home...)

Label it like this: Election/CBS/8:00 am

The footage I kept from the 2004 Election proved very useful to a lot of people in the years that followed.

Let's try to document this year even more!

Thanks everybody!

I've posted three clips from last night's HBO broadcast of "Hacking Democracy."

I have made a playlist containing all three clips in order to make it easy to bookmark and send to friends.

Directors - Simon Ardizzone and Russell Michaels
Producers - Simon Ardizzone, Robert Carrillo Cohen and Russell Michaels
Executive Producers - Earl Katz, Sarah Teale, Sian Edwards and Sheila Nevins
Editor - Sasha Zik
Supervising Producer -John Hoffman

It's really an admirable thing for HBO to do.

I called my cable company and subscribed to HBO last weekend as a good will gesture towards the company (and, of course, so I could receive the program to bring it to you).

I encourage every one of you to do the same. Let's make it good business to bring this kind of programming to people.

There are some other special things that I did for these clips, in the interests of giving HBO and the film makers proper attribution in a way that could travel with the clips as they move around the internet.

1) (and probably the most important thing)

I edited all three clips with the HBO logo and opening credits for the film at the beginning, and the HBO logo again at the end.

2) The filenames all say "hbo-hackingdemocracy" etc.

3) As I mentioned earlier, I am advocating that everyone watching the clips calls their cable company and subscribes to HBO (even if they plan to cancel next month :) as a good faith gesture of supporting broacasting networks that take a chance in distributing content like this that is so important to the future of our country.

4) I am, of course, paying to host the clips myself. So I have not misrepresented to any hosting site that I own the copyright to these clips.

5) I am including complete credit information everywhere the clips are linked.
(Please do the same if you link to these clips from your site.)

My ISP, Ctyme, understands what I'm doing and also believes that it is my fair use right to do so. (Since I am only showing clips, not the complete film, and that this information is critical to get out to people -- preferably during these last few days before election day, so that irregularities can be recognized and duly noted and dealt with accordingly, rather than being swept under the carpet like in 2000, 2002 and 2004.)

Please show your support by subscribing to HBO this month guys!

Thanks!

I'm looking forward to recording as much election footage as I can again this year - as I did in 2004.
Much of that footage became the basis for the new Stealing America: Vote By Vote movie (work in progress) that has been circulating a bunch these last few weeks. (I still have some copies left if you need one.)

Here's a clip from it:

Exit Polls vs. Official Count in 2004

This is a clip from Stealing America: Vote By Vote, a work in progress about voter disenfranchisement in the 2004 United States Presidential Election.

In this sequence, several witnesses discuss the discrepancies between the exit polls and the "official" election results. Also included is news footage documenting the "official" vote count suddenly and inexplicably, changing in the middle of the night.

Included are interviews with: Bob Koelher, Journalist (Times Tribune Services), Jonathon Simon (Attorney, Political Survey Research Analyst), Victoria Lovegren (Mathematician/Data Analyst, Case Western Reserve, Cleveland, Ohio), and Pat Leahan (Director, Peace and Justice Center, Las Vegas, New Mexico).

I've started a playlist for
Steven Colbert clips for November.

There's a great clip on Google's YouTube aquisition.

This is just cool:
Frank Zappa on David Letterman.

One of my readers found this for me.

I still have to investigate further, but I didn't want to waste any time passing the info on to you.

At least one such system exists: EIRS from the Verified Voting Foundation. I have no idea how many, if any, poll workers know about it.

866-OUR-VOTE

https://voteprotect.org/

The Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS) is an integrated set of computer tools for recording and analyzing information about voting problems before, during, and after elections. Since 2004, hundreds of organizations and thousands of individuals in the United States have used EIRS to help protect our right to vote and assure that every vote is counted as cast.

EIRS is a project of the Verified Voting Foundation, in cooperation with other Election Protection Coalition member organizations, including the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and People for the American Way Foundation.

The Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS) is an integrated set of tools to assist Election Protection Organizations and their members in carrying out a number of activities, including:

* Collect background and testing information from state & local election officials * Compile and track election irregularity data before, during, and after election day * Organize and manage teams of people and tasks * Dispatch attorneys and technologists rapidly to resolve election day incidents at voting places * Provide an on-line collaborative environment for rapid communication among advocates, attorneys, technologists, election officials, media professionals, and others * Support subsequent research for election policy-making

It seems so obvious, but I hadn't really thought about it until now.

In the Daily Kos:

From the Miami Herald:

Glitches cited in early voting
Early voters are urged to cast their ballots with care following scattered reports of problems with heavily used machines.

The problem is just the "glitches" themselves, but this:

n Broward County, for example, they don't know how widespread the machine problems are because there's no process for poll workers to quickly report minor issues and no central database of machine problems.

Do we need to create a central database for such issues...nationwide by state?

Can we do it by Tuesday?

If such a system already exists...do all the pollworks know? Can we organize some kind of reporting process where poll workers can call in errors to those online?

Or set up wireless stations at the polls themselves? (probably not easy since most won't have dsl around)

So back to the phoning into internet stations idea...

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/local/states/florida/counties/broward_county/15869924.htm

Glitches cited in early voting
Early voters are urged to cast their ballots with care following scattered reports of problems with heavily used machines.
BY CHARLES RABIN AND DARRAN SIMON
dsimon@MiamiHerald.com

After a week of early voting, a handful of glitches with electronic voting machines have drawn the ire of voters, reassurances from elections supervisors -- and a caution against the careless casting of ballots.

Several South Florida voters say the choices they touched on the electronic screens were not the ones that appeared on the review screen -- the final voting step.

Election officials say they aren't aware of any serious voting issues. But in Broward County, for example, they don't know how widespread the machine problems are because there's no process for poll workers to quickly report minor issues and no central database of machine problems.

In Miami-Dade, incidents are logged and reported daily and recorded in a central database. Problem machines are shut down.

''In the past, Miami-Dade County would send someone to correct the machine on site,'' said Lester Sola, county supervisor of elections. Now, he said, ``We close the machine down and put a seal on it.''

Debra A. Reed voted with her boss on Wednesday at African-American Research Library and Cultural Center near Fort Lauderdale. Her vote went smoothly, but boss Gary Rudolf called her over to look at what was happening on his machine. He touched the screen for gubernatorial candidate Jim Davis, a Democrat, but the review screen repeatedly registered the Republican, Charlie Crist.

That's exactly the kind of problem that sends conspiracy theorists into high gear -- especially in South Florida, where a history of problems at the polls have made voters particularly skittish.

A poll worker then helped Rudolf, but it took three tries to get it right, Reed said.

''I'm shocked because I really want . . . to trust that the issues with irregularities with voting machines have been resolved,'' said Reed, a paralegal. ``It worries me because the races are so close.''

Broward Supervisor of Elections spokeswoman Mary Cooney said it's not uncommon for screens on heavily used machines to slip out of sync, making votes register incorrectly. Poll workers are trained to recalibrate them on the spot -- essentially, to realign the video screen with the electronics inside. The 15-step process is outlined in the poll-workers manual.

''It is resolved right there at the early-voting site,'' Cooney said.

Broward poll workers keep a log of all maintenance done on machines at each site. But the Supervisor of Elections office doesn't see that log until the early voting period ends. And a machine isn't taken out of service unless the poll clerk decides it's a chronic poor performer that can't be fixed.

Cooney said no machines have been removed during early voting, and she is not aware of any serious problems.

In Miami-Dade, two machines have been taken out of service during early voting. No votes were lost, Sola said.

Joan Marek, 60, a Democrat from Hollywood, was also stunned to see Charlie Crist on her ballot review page after voting on Thursday. ''Am I on the voting screen again?'' she wondered. ``Well, this is too weird.''

Marek corrected her ballot and alerted poll workers at the Hollywood satellite courthouse, who she said told her they'd had previous problems with the same machine.

Poll workers did some work on her machine when she finished voting, Marek said. But no report was made to the Supervisor of Elections office and the machine was not removed, Cooney said.

Workers at the Hollywood poll said there had been no voting problems on Friday.

Mauricio Raponi wanted to vote for Democrats across the board at the Lemon City Library in Miami on Thursday. But each time he hit the button next to the candidate, the Republican choice showed up. Raponi, 53, persevered until the machine worked. Then he alerted a poll worker.

Miami Herald staff writer Linda Topping Streitfeld contributed to this report.