According to the Black Box Voting forum article, the company that designed our voting machine, E&SS, experienced a break-in three years ago, and it appears that the thieves were trying to get the software that runs the machine.

http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/73/44661.html

If you have HBO and care about voting, you will want to watch Hacking Democracy, about how the new electronic voting machines can be used to perpetrate undetectable vote fraud. Bev Harris started researching voting machines in 2002, when her county got touch screen machines. She stumbled upon a server at Diebold that accidentally exposed the computer software that ran the machines. She sent the code to a computer scientist, who said that the voting machine's software was not secure against fraud, and then proceeded to cast fake votes. Harris then started the website Black Box Voting to expose these facts.

In a move reminiscent of the pseudo-community groups that Wal-Mart created in Rosemead, Wal-Mart's PR company, Edelman, apologized for creating two fake pro-Wal-Mart blogs.  Blogs (like this one) are supposed to be genuine journalism or opinion writing by people who are (somewhat) independent of external influences.  It lets everyone be an op-ed columnist.

Edelman sponsored a pair of blogs that were pro-Wal-Mart, but were pretending to be genuine people who supported Wal-Mart for sincere, personal reasons.  They were lying.  Here's the Media Post take on it:

A pro-Wal-Mart blog called "Wal-Marting Across America," ostensibly launched by a pair of average Americans chronicling their cross-country travels in an RV and lodging in Wal-Mart parking lots, has been reduced to a farewell entry. One of its two contributors was revealed to be Jim Thresher, a staff photographer for The Washington Post.

There's new software on the site. It's the new version of CivicSpace, which is very similar to the old software, which is called Drupal. There are some odd differences, though, so, things may be a little weird for a while until it is all fixed up.

I'll upload a better logo soon.

If you like to read pundits railing on about stuff, the Huffington Post has a big Wal-Mart themed week. Lost of articles.

@ the Huffington Post

I'm just wondering: why isn't there a Rosemead website?

I have to wonder, too: why don't cities use email to send out City Council agendas?

There's something like a million online listservs for everything from bamboo collectors to tattoo art. I've seen websites for street gangs and dead people. Nice ones too! (Websites, I mean. Not the gangs or deceased.)

You can find all the shady massage parlors, tire shops, and liquor stores near you, just by typing your address into a website. You can find out how much the houses in your area sold for. Yet, local voting precincts are nowhere to be found. Do you know how many pages I had to click through to find out my representative in Congress?

Wal-Mart the high cost of low price is a new documentary film to be released on November 13th. They're organizing local screenings, where you can just show the video and have folks come over to watch it. (Get where I'm going with this?)

Wal Mart in American Canyon Stalled

This excerpt discusses the issue of "breaking ground" and the psychological effects of starting a construction project.

On Monday, the group's attorney Brett Jolley cited the case of a Wal-Mart Supercenter project in Bakersfield that was halted by the courts after construction started. The result was a half-finished building and others that were actually occupied but are now left in legal limbo.