Hi Howard,

I had a few bad days and occasionally slip into gloom, but I think if I keep active in the fight against this growing power of the Republican religious right to control America I will come out of it. I e-mailed NY Times today regarding an article in Sunday's paper and it felt good.

I am a Catholic on a crusade of my own to oppose a return to the old hell and damnation church, which with the inspired dedication of Pope John XXIII, was changed by Vatican II. The Catholics who have held on to old traditions were a big factor in defeating John Kerry, a really fine Catholic who could have made a change for the better for America.

I want to congratulate you on all of your hard work and was happy to hear you are keeping in touch with those others who put so much of themselves in trying to save our country from another four years of Bush. I hope the U.S. can survive it. I want to keep in contact with "seniorsforamerica".

Thanks again for all of your prompt e-mail returns to my requests. We have a lot of work to do in the next four years. Be happy about all the time and effort you devoted to the cause of our country. The people like you were my inspiration.

Nancy Brannigan

Hi Howard-

I got this email today from a lawyer friend who is totally freaked out about this monster becoming AG. It's the letter he wrote to his Senators:

"Ashcroft was bad enough, but even he claimed to have fleeting second thoughts about the erosion of our civil liberties. Gonzales is a war criminal. His was the final signature on the memos leading to the authorization of isolation and torture in Guantanimo. Even in this "time of war" the Supreme Court has rejected his extremist "reasoning." If you cave on this war criminal the right wing forces will be emboldened to bring even more outrageous Supreme Court nominees before you. Stopping government is a bad alternative, but it is a better alternative than allowing people such as Gonzales to be appointed. It is time to send a message that you will not stand idly by and allow war criminals to sit in high office. I hope you will realize that history does not judge favorably those who do not oppose immoral action."

Gonzales is the man who edited Bybee's memos authorizing holding prisoners incommuncado and torture at Guantanimo. This is the man who's opinions led to the abuse at Abu Ghraib. This is putting the lead torturer in charge of Justice. What does this say about America?

Please ask members of Seniors for America to contact their Congressional representatives about this man's record.

Jack Krooss
San Francisco

The media are buzzing about whether the electronic voting systems used in this election really worked as "smoothly" as they appeared to work. Is it possible that some machines malfunctioned in ways that skewed results? Could problems like the 4,530 votes lost in North Carolina due to a data storage error be only the tip of the e-voting iceberg?

The good news first: From what we can tell, it is unlikely that the problems with touchscreen machines changed the outcome of the presidential race. But that doesn't make it impossible, and EFF is still looking into some problems in Ohio and elsewhere that could be very important.

The bad news: Let's suppose for a moment that the picture of the presidential race stays unchanged. Does this mean, as some vendors are claiming, that the machines "passed the test"? In a word, no. If the election had been closer in such key states as Florida, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, or even Ohio, the problems we saw could easily have thrown this election into chaos, and that chaos could have affected either candidate.

It will take some time to analyze the information collected in the Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS), but regardless of what we find, the current figures show that machine malfunctions were the third most common voting problem reported. And recent reports demonstrate that not all problems were obvious. EFF is therefore moving to examine the machines that exhibit the most troubling malfunctions, with the goal of determining whether what we've seen indicates even more serious or widespread problems.

Which brings us to the ugly news: There's one story about this election that we'll never know - what happened inside the machines that do not have a paper trail. It's somewhat reassuring that, in most instances at least, final exit polls and other external systems give us roughly the same picture that the election results do.

But suppose that wasn't the case? This is what audit trails are for. The figures in cooked books often look perfectly fine; so would a cooked vote tally. In this election, we are forced to take it on faith that our votes were recorded in the way that we intended. But as the late former President Ronald Reagan noted long ago, when important issues are at stake, we need to both "trust" and "verify." That's why the battle continues to persuade election officials nationwide to adopt systems that are 1.) verified by the voter, and 2.) can be audited after the fact.

To learn more about the e-voting problems that have been reported so far and EFF's concerns, check out the links below, including the audio recording of the joint EFF and Verified Voting Foundation (VVF) press tele-conference held on Election Day.

CLICK HERE or the original version of this article online.

They Said/We Said: EFF E-voting Conference on MP3.

The Nation: "A Stolen Election?"

Donna Wentworth
The Electronic Frontier Foundation
San Francisco CA

First, I want to thank each of you for the support you have given to John Kerry and John Edwards. You gave it in a thousand ways: coming to our events, volunteering to set up and clean up, working the phone banks, knocking on doors, contributing, blogging, standing on corners with signs, whatever it took. Your strength carried us through.

You may have heard that I have been diagnosed with breast cancer. Your strength is carrying my family through too in this latest struggle, and this is a fight we will win. We have (and I say we because John has been with me every minute) started chemotherapy with tremendous confidence, confidence in our doctors, in our ability to face obstacles, and in our friends far and near who we know give us their thoughts and prayers and support today and will continue to do so in the months ahead.

So many of you have tried to reach me recently with your support, and I know that the Senate office and the Wade Edwards Learning Lab have been flooded with calls and e-mails. No complaints there, but in order to take a little pressure off of them, I have resurrected my old e-mail address at , where you can reach me. I will e-mail periodic updates to you about my progress from there, if you would be interested in getting those. Treatment should last until about next June with follow-ups every three months or so.

I hope you understand how much your support has meant to us. This thank you is to our new and expanded family.

Elizabeth Edwards

Those crazy neocons! They are just irrepresible. Last week, the giddy crew of pundits at William F. Buckley's National Review declared ­ between their ritual bashing of the "Michael Moore/Howard Dean/Al Franken extremist fringe" and their calls for the Patriot Act to be made permanent ­ that Bush now has a mandate to fight and win what they call "World War IV." They casually note that we should expect military actions and "regime change" against both Iran and North Korea in W's second term, with stepped up military pressure on China.

The same is planned for Cuba. The Bush administration has funneled $59 million in federal money to a White House "Commission For Assistance to a Free Cuba" that is working to topple Castro. In the lead up to this election, friends of the Commission were running around south Florida handing out "Iraq today, Cuba tomorrow" bumper stickers, and the Commission is actively drawing up plans for Castro's overthrow during W's second term.

While I will admit there is a certain comic exuberance at work in the excited prattling and planning of these chirpy neocons, there is also the grim reality that their overlords in the White House are now armed not only with another four years, but with a freshly minted pre-emptive first strike military doctrine. Additionally, the administration's Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) of January 2002 has taken this doctrine to a dangerous new level by authorizing first use of "tactical" nuclear weapons.

There was shock the world over in 2002 when details of the NPR were leaked to the press. The Review explicitly called for the development of tactical nuclear weapons for first strike use and included a list of target countries that included China, N. Korea and Iran. Democratic Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island captured the prevailing view when he said, "We have tried for 50-plus years to make these weapons unthinkable, and now we're talking about giving them a tactical application. It's a dangerous departure."

The NPR is given extra punch by a crash development and testing program for tactical nuclear weapons (euphemistically referred to in the NPR as "low-yield, precision-guided nuclear weapons") including nuclear bunker buster bombs. At the Bush administration's urging, this crash development program was approved by both the House and Senate in early 2003. The administration insisted the program was essential for the full implementation of the NPR's recommendations.

The legislation authorizing the program also mandated that the normal 24 to 36 month development time be compressed to 18 months, meaning tactical nukes could be ready for production in early 2005. In practical terms, this means that Bush could have new tactical nuclear weapons available for use midway through his second term. Make no mistake, Bush and Cheney would not hesitate for one moment to use these weapons, either in Iran or N. Korea, possibly even in Iraq or Afghanistan. At a minimum, they are itching to test them under actual field conditions.

During the 2004 Presidential campaign, John Kerry explicitly called attention to this tactical nuclear weapons development program. His exact words were: "I¹m going to shut that program down, and we¹re going to make it clear to the world we¹re serious about containing nuclear proliferation."

Now that he is essentially freed from any political constraints, one would hope that Senator Kerry will become George W. Bush's nemesis on this issue and lead the opposition during the remainder of his term. He could not find a more important job as he returns to the Senate.

Michael Meurer
Los Angeles CA

Dear friends,

Questions are swirling around whether the election was conducted honestly or not. We need to know -- was it or wasn't it?

If people were wrongly prevented from voting, or if legitimate votes were miscounted or not counted at all, we need to know so the wrongdoers can be held accountable, and to help prevent this from happening again.

Members of Congress are demanding an investigation to answer this question. Join me in supporting their call, at:

http://www.moveon.org/investigatethevote/

Thanks,

Gwen Curran
Oregon

President Bush has nominated White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales (a "relatively moderate" Latino/Hispanic son of migrant farm workers) to succeed John Ashcroft as U.S. Attorney General. In spite the fact that Gonzales would be the first hispanic U.S. Attorney General, he is bad for this country and we should encourage Progressive members of the Judiciary committee to oppose his nomination.

Gonzales is a Bush confidante who helped craft some of the administration's most controversial anti-terrorism strategies. As reported today in the Washington Post, Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, pointed out that Gonzales is "right in the middle of where this administration went off the page of the law and into chaos. They're promoting someone who was one of the legal architects of the abuse."

According to the Post, in a draft memo in January 2002, Gonzales argued that the war on terrorism made the Geneva Convention's limitations on the treatment of enemy prisoners "obsolete" and "renders quaint some of its provisions."

His office is also remembered for its role in drafting an August 2002 memo on behalf of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel advising that torture of alleged Al-Qaeda terrorists in captivity abroad "may be justified" and that international laws against torture "may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations" conducted in the U.S. was on terrorism.

Gonzales has publicly defended the administration's policy of detaining alleged "enemy combatants" without access to lawyers or courts, a position rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court in June.

Please take action to stop Gonzales.

¡Juntos, Sí Podemos!

Ralph Miller
National Director
Latinos for America
Kentfield CA