How the vote will go in '04. The Bushistas don't have to worry.

The American vote-count is controlled by three major corporate players -- Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia -- with a fourth, Science Applications International Corporation, coming on strong. These companies -- all of them hardwired into the Bushist Party power grid -- have been given billions of dollars by the Bush Regime to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines nationwide by the 2004 election. These glitch-riddled systems -- many using "touch-screen" technology that leaves no paper trail at all -- are almost laughably open to manipulation, according to corporate whistleblowers and computer scientists at Stanford, Johns Hopkins and other universities.

The technology had a trial run in the 2002 midterm elections. In Georgia, serviced by new Diebold systems, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called "amazing" upsets, with results showing vote swings of up to 16 percent from the last pre-ballot polls. In computerized Minnesota, former Vice President Walter Mondale -- a replacement for popular incumbent Paul Wellstone, who died days before the vote -- was also defeated in a large last-second vote swing. Convenient "glitches" in Florida saw an untold number of votes intended for the Democratic candidate registering instead for Governor Jeb "L'il Brother" Bush. A Florida Democrat who lost a similarly "glitched" local election went to court to have the computers examined -- but the case was thrown out by a judge who ruled that the innards of America's voting machines are the "trade secrets" of the private companies who make them...

The unelected Bush Regime now controls the government, the military, the judiciary -- and the machinery of democracy itself. Absent some unlikely great awakening by the co-opted dullards of the corporate media, next November the last shreds of a genuine American republic will disappear -- at the push of a button.

The kinds of things you won't be able to prove in '05 because you won't be able to do a paper audit.

There were about 95,000 voting precincts in the 2000 presidential election, and at each, ballots were counted locally and recorded in a "protocol." So the most basic way to audit the process was to go to the local level and obtain copies of protocols -- and then see if they were reported accurately higher up the chain.

Only the Communists could come close to fielding observers in 95,000 precincts, so we asked them in particular to share. They obliged with a tiny handful of documents from Dagestan (we had some of the same documents, so we knew they weren't forgeries). But when we asked to see more, we were told Zyuganov kept the rest with him "in a folder," and so we were out of luck.

Yet even with less than one-fifth of Dagestan's protocols in hand, we were still able to identify definitively 87,000 votes subtracted from other candidates and given to Putin (or 3.9 percent of his 2.2 million-vote victory margin).

Flying laundry, 3 squares at 4-star restaurants. The wily Iraqis are said to be taking their case directly to Congress, but it seems clear they are really taking it directly to the American people. Nothing will turn the average Joe and Jane against the Bush Administration that concrete examples of the luxury and opulence of the lavish-living conqueror proconsular staff.

In a 6,000-mile end run around American and British occupation authorities, leaders from the Iraqi Governing Council say they will go to Congress this week to argue that U.S. taxpayers can save billions of dollars on Iraq's reconstruction by granting sovereignty more rapidly to the council, the 25-member interim government here.

In interviews, the Iraqi leaders said they planned to tell Congress about how the staff of Paul Bremer, the American occupation administrator, sends its laundry to Kuwait, how it costs $20,000 a day to feed the Americans at Al Rashid Hotel in Baghdad, how American contractors charge large premiums for working in Iraq and how, across the board, the overhead from supporting and protecting the large American and British presence here is less efficient than granting direct aid to Iraqi ministries that operate at a fraction of the cost.