Eric Alterman has fun with Richard Perle.

Richard Perle said:

“But it’s a house of cards. He rules by fear because he knows there is no underlying support. Support for Saddam, including within his military organization, will collapse at the first whiff of gunpowder. “

In Jingo, Terry Pratchett writes:

“Won’t last long. Lot of cowards, the Klatchians,” said Colon. “The moment they taste a bit of cold steel they’re legging it away over the sand.”

Sergeant Frederick Colon of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is rather Falstaffian. No one should assume that Klatchians are Arabs, or that this novel, copyrighted in 1997, has anything to do with the Iraq War. That would be wrong. This is a fantasy novel. It is terrible of me to be comparing a neocon advisor to the Shrubbery to a character in a fantasy novel, and Donald Rumsfeld is not Lord Rust, really.

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Cris Regan of Mythstory on the debut of the elephant as the symbol of the Gee-Oops: November 7th, 1874: Never Forget The Elephant

New stickers this time, and they look pricey, but they are big enough to be noticed and they really stick.

Steady traffic at the polls, which is unusual, but then I usually vote mid-morning.

Tom Hilton is guest posting at No More Mister Nice Blog and points to a post by Deborah at If I Ran the Zoo, his primary blog, about Dirty Tricks. Deborah reports that someone hacked MoveOn.Org while she was making calls.

I know something was not right with MoveOn last night, because for the very first time since I installed it, Firefox 2.0 locked up solid after I clicked through from Duncan’s place. I had to manually kill the process to get back control. It looked like something was attempting to download onto my machine while Firefox, Norton, and my firewall were fending it off. All of my resources were pegged.

The Reptilicons are not going to obey the rules, so let’s just forget about any “bi-partisan initiatives”: they don’t believe in cooperation, only in co-opting.

CBS reports: Reports Of Problems Pepper Election Day

But voting equipment companies said they hadn’t seen anything beyond the norm and blamed the problems largely on human error.

Excuse me, but the high school kids at fast food restaurants generally get your order right with their computer terminals, so why isn’t your user interface simple enough for almost anyone to use?

If you can’t devise a system to make selections from a menu and record those selections without an IT tech standing by, you really need to find another market.

When dozens of the systems fail in the same way, you have obviously not produced a competent product.

For human error you can look to CNN: “I sure hope my vote counts,” says OH congresswoman, Republican Rep. Jean Schmidt.

The main reason those scanners reject a ballot is over-voting, marking too many candidates in the same race.

The new voter ID laws lead to this: Don’t Leave Home Without It – South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford had to go to an election office and get a replacement voter registration card, because he arrived at the polls without his, and they wouldn’t let him vote. There’s no room for common sense in the rules.