Over on the Global Voices list, two things worth of note.
They are proposing legislation which would make repressing information on the Internet more difficult, as follows:

* No US company would be allowed to host e-mail servers in a ‘repressive’ country (as defined by a State DSepartment index of freedom of speech); this would require that legal moves to obtain email content or identity would have to be done in US courts.

* No search engine hosted in the US would be allowed to block a list of key words like “freedom” and “democracy.”

* No US Internet company would be allowed to host servers originating content in a repressive country.

* No US company would be allowed to sell filtering technology without holes for the above list of protected words.

* Exports of Internet surveillance technology would require a Department of Commerce approval (much like weapons).

* Training foreign nationals in techniques to censor or surveil on the Internet would require Department of Commerce approval as above.

Personally, I can think of some highway-sized holes in this, and that the likelihood of something like this passing Congress – and the standing up in the courts – is vanishing small. But these aren’t bad principles at all, and I’d love to see some way of pushing toward them.

Microsoft and Yahoo are very bad corporate citizens for what they have done, as is Cisco (and I’m sure a host of other Internet names). As I make purchasing (and surfing) decisions in the future, I’ll be keeping that in mind.

I’ll make a suggestion; local governments (Los Angeles, San Francisco and Berkeley come to mind here in California) are notorious for wanting to pass symbolic foreign-policy measures. Here’s one that could have some real impact: Don’t buy products from vendors who do bad things for freedom. Any local activists want to take this on?

Next, there’s also a discussion in which pro-free expression activists are uncomfortable accepting aid from Spirit of America, which is perceived as problematic because of its ties to the Bush Administration and some unfortunate conflicts of interest by the founder.

I’m generally supportive of SoA and the Bush Administration, so that kind of falls on deaf ears here, but I’ll suggest a broader and simpler rule when deciding on projects and allies:

“When we’re done, will more people’s voices be freely heard?”

Kind of a one-step test.

I’m just swamped, as Humperdinck once said; work, family, a major house project, and a production of the Ring (that I actually have very little to do with except worry about).

But that’s not necessarily a good excuse.

Over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin dings us, as I think he should have, for not mentioning the Administration’s bizarre decision not to fund Iraqi reconstruction in the current cycle.

There may be a valid and reasonable explanation for it that I just haven’t seen (if you’ve got it, please feel free to put it into the comments); but just as I noted on the NSA issue, it’s horrible optics at a time when appearances matter a lot. And that’s forgetting the very real and negative consequences of projects that won’t get done because there are no funds for them.
I don’t get it. I think that Bush is a masterful politician who has badly misplayed the domestic hand on the issue of this war. I can’t help imagining that a President more worried about victory, and less worried about midterm political advantage could have coopted much of the Democratic Party and left the Kossacks out on a limb by themselves. But we go to war with the President we’ve got, as they say.

We’re involved in card game where the size of our poke matters; as soon as it becomes obvious that we lack the political means to see the game out and simply outsit the other bastards in the game, we’re likely to lose very damn quickly.

Losing in this case would, I believe be catastrophic (I know there are some who will disagree).

So it matters a lot that we not only plan stick it out, but are widely seen to plan to stick it out.

That doesn’t speak to exact troop levels, or the mechanics of our negotiations with the various factions within Iraq. But a few hundred million more right now would send the clear message that we’re in the game, for the rest of the night, and not counting our chips and nervously looking at our watch.

I’ve seen am important part of our role here as keeping the President’s butt in the chair, and I certainly don’t think that now is the time to stop.

OK, I take back everything bad I’ve said about the L.A. Times.

They’ve just put up a laudatory article about the Ring production I’m peripherally involved in, so they’ve bought a bunch of goodwill. Until Hiltzik writes something silly again.

Call it an opera-tizer. With an intimate, condensed version of Wagner’s ‘Ring’ cycle, Long Beach Opera aims to please purists and tempt the wary as it ushers in a series of Southland stagings of the saga.

Yes, it’s a “Ring”-let, a pocket “Ring,” the Short Cycle, the Semi-Cycle. And the condensation — which will be performed twice in its entirety, in English instead of German, over two weekends, next Saturday and Sunday and Jan. 21 and 22 — is, of course, a great way to Ring in the new year.

But then, untold opera fans have deemed “The Ring” a life-enhancing experience since 1876, when it was first performed in its entirety at the theater in Bayreuth, Germany, that Wagner built specifically to showcase it.

So I guess I’ll keep my subscription for another month or so…seriously, click over to the Long Beach Opera website, and if you have any interest at all, order some tickets. There aren’t many of them, and I think with this it will sell out.

Democratic blogger Josh Marshall is wondering about the tepid Democratic reaction to Abramoff.

As a political party, you can’t run on corruption if you’re not running for reform. But as near as I can tell there is no Democratic reform proposal in Congress. Maybe this or that representative or senator has some proposal, but nothing that the opposition party in any way, as a whole, has gotten behind.

So where’s the plan?

Today, the Democrats made a proposal – for an investigation.

Rep. Louise Slaughter, a New York Democrat, said lobbyists had multiplied by the thousands in recent years to the point where there were now 63 of them for every lawmaker. She said they were using their campaign donations to influence policy and even write laws.

Slaughter called on the House ethics committee to investigate corruption cases involving lawmakers with links to Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist who pleaded guilty this week in a U.S. corruption probe.

“The House ethics committee, after a year of inaction, must get to work immediately to investigate pending ethics and corruption cases in the House, including those involving members with ties to Jack Abramoff,” she said in the Democrats’ weekly radio address.

Let me make a few suggestions. I do think that this is an opportunity for the Democrats – as the party out of power – to make a stand. I don’t delude myself enough to believe that they will make enough of one to radically change the dysfunctional, corrupt system in place.

But there is an opportunity to make things better.

How do they get enough public support? Simple. Make it clear that it is a sea change in the way the Democrats do business, and that it isn’t simply a convenient stick to get Democrats closer to the trough.

Start by picking the most corrupt members of the Democratic party and busting them.

John Moran (D-MBNA) comes immediately to mind.

Once they show a willingness to clean their own house, they’ll own the political high ground and will be able to make a case that what they are interested in is drying up the rivers of cash, not just getting themselves a bigger spot on the bank.

Michael Yon, the citizen-journalist, has a call out on his website for volunteers.

…what I can do is provide the groundwork to assemble a group of retired military personnel who can read the stories, with their radar for embellishment and operational security set high, and select which submissions to publish. Over time, a more comprehensive and accurate picture of what is happening on the ground can emerge.

The Veteran Volunteers would need to organize themselves, as I will neither moderate nor provide any assistance other than making a forum available. A few key volunteers can assist with building the virtual organization that will be need to be in place before we can issue that Call for Stories.

Now is the time to Call for Volunteers. There will be no reward for anyone other than to know that important information is flowing, and that our troops on the ground will finally have their own voice in a forum that is widely read. It is important that the volunteers have much military experience so that they can better judge what sounds credible and most important to publish.

If you meet his requirements, drop him an email at michaelyonmagazine@hotmail.com with “Volunteer” in the subject line.

I can’t wait to see what comes out of this.

I just saw it. I’d blogged about him two Veterans Days ago, and tried to explain the impact that learning his story had on me.

In case you’ve forgotten, he was the hero of My Lai – arguably the darkest day in the history of the modern U.S. military.

He put himself and his men between American troops and the villagers they obviously intended to murder. He threatened American troops with his own crew’s weapons, and arranged for the other helicopters in his flight to evacuate a group of villagers, and then for his own crewman to rescue an uninjured small child from a pile of bodies.

When he returned to base, he reported the massacre; his reports were covered up.

On the worst day in modern history for the U.S. military, a few soldiers covered themselves with honor.

As I noted in the post, reading his story changed my attitude toward the U.S. military, and indirectly, probably started me on the part to where I am today.

I owe him an immense debt, both personally and as a citizen.

[Note the update at the bottom.]

I wasn’t nearly hard enough on Michael Hiltzik (at least I can try and spell his name correctly – I guess I’m missing my four layers of editors).

I read Part Two of his – there’s really no other word for it – venomous screed, and a few phrases just leapt out at me. Here are some highlights from both parts…

“conservative blogger who calls himself Patterico”

“a remarkable 11,000-word work of propaganda”

“Self-congratulation is a common characteristic of partisan blogs, like snouts on dogs.”

“Among those who have made it their personal business to ferret out “liberal bias” at the Los Angeles Times—the existence of which bias I have in the past described as an “ignorant partisan trope””

“As any student of history knows, these are tools and techniques that were used to great effect during the Stalinist show trials of the ‘40s and ‘50s.”

“Whether deliberately or by sheer indolence”

“reveling in ignorance of one’s subject”

“a chorus of mendacious commentary and rhetorical cant.”

“Uncritical readers, wishing to have their ignorant preconceptions reinforced without straining a brain cell, are no doubt gobbling it up.”

“how easily they can be punctured”

“it takes more time and effort to deflate a lie than to propound it in the first place”

“proved upon inspection to be similarly gaseous”

“to make his case stick he requires an uncritical, credulous audience that will repeat his claims endlessly without bothering to examine them”

“then there’s a juvenile tone to much of Frey’s posting”

“who combines a conservative viewpoint with an incoherent style of argument”

Go read both of the parts yourself. Take a few moments, this’ll still be here.

For now, I’m going to skip over the substantive arguments he presents – which I’ll suggest are as full of holes as Emmenthaler – as an exercise best left to Patrick, others, or myself if I’m bored this weekend.

But I want to go back to Hiltzik and the Journalist In The Hat in my original post. What’s flatly missing from Hiltzik’s piece?

Hmmm. Respect for his opponent, for the dialog, for the essentially political (as in the praxis-laden) relationship between you and someone you’re arguing with. Instead, Hiltzik means to drive Patterico from public dialog, to shame him into silence.

That’s contemptible. Ironically, Hiltzik made the same accusation toward me, in the first email he sent me after I criticized him and compared him unfavorably to Dan Walters:

“I just had the pleasure of reading your post on Winds of Change.net, which indicates you want to take away my job for speaking the truth. Nice.”

I didn’t really want to take his job away then, but I’d say that I do now.

Here’s why.

I’m a member of a mailing list for Global Voices, out of the Berkman Center at Harvard, which attempts to encourage local folks to blog both as a way of communicating within their own communities and to bring the events in their communities to wider attention.

Recently, there was a mild discussion on the list (it’s a list that encourages polite yet passionate interaction) about what the media choses to cover – 12 miners dead in West Virginia, or 200 dead in a mudslide in Java?

This showed up in my inbox (posted with the permission of the author):

From: Kevin Anderson-Washington XXXXXXXXX@bbc.co.uk
Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2006 16:30:18 -0000
To: XXXXXXXXX@eon.law.harvard.edu
Subject: RE: Best of Both Worlds Continued

OK,

I’ve been meaning to contribute to this discussion because I come from the mainstream media world – the other world so to speak. And the editor of the programme I work on at the BBC World Service, Mark Sandell, has been following this discussion.

Our programme has asked several of you to join us to talk about what is going in your part of the world, and we use Global Voices as a way to broaden out our agenda. What stories are you talking about that we should be aware of?

I still am considering my thoughts about the ways in which blogs and traditional media complement each other. I definitely am not of the view of an adversarial relationship between bloggers and traditional media although being from the US, I have definitely seen this in action.

But, I just wanted to flag up a little note from our editor Mark Sandell, about our thinking in covering stories. We had a discussion yesterday about the mining tragedy in the US, although we expanded this to deal with mine safety elsewhere, including China and South Africa. We had a lot of e-mail comments about why we weren’t covering the landslides in Java or returning to cover the plight of quake victims in South Asia.

Mark posted his thoughts here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/world_have_your_say/4584506.stm

Right now, it’s at the top of the page, but it will shift to the middle after our day-end update. Look for the Note from the Editor. Let me know what you think. We’re trying to be more open about why we do what we do.

best,
k

Kevin Anderson
BBC World Service and Five Live

Notice a difference in tone?

I’ve slagged the Beeb on this blog in the past few years, but count me a fan if this is the direction they are moving in – of engaging their audience, offering up discussion of the hard choices they make in covering stories, and accepting transparency (and, inevitably, accountability – you can’t be visible and not be accountable).

Let’s go back to the Journalist In The Hat. What I said then was:

Then I went to Brian’s party, and met a journalist (sadly didn’t get his name or affiliation).

I’ll skip over his arrogance and rudeness; he was in a hostile environment, and maybe he was nervous. But watching the discussion, I realized something that brought the Times issue into clearer perspective for me.

…that while I have (violently at times) disagreed with other bloggers in face to face discussions, I always had the feeling that there was a discussion going on, a dialog in which two people were engaged and trying to understand each other’s points, if for no other reason than to better argue against them. But in dealing with The Journalist In The Hat, no such dialog took place. He had his point to make, and very little that I said (or, to be honest, that others who participated, including Howard Owens, who pointed out that he had worked as a journalist) was heard or responded to. He had his points, and he was going to make them over, and over, until we listened.

Because that’s his job…to talk. And ours is, of course to listen.

Let’s listen to Kathleen Parker, whose bio says:

Kathleen Parker has contributed to more than a dozen newspapers and magazines during her 20 years as a journalist. She began her twice-weekly commentary column in 1987 as a staff writer for The Orlando Sentinel. After entering into syndication in 1995, her column rocketed in popularity and now appears in more than 300 papers nationwide.

Here’s what 20-year journalist Kathleen says:

Schadenfreude – pleasure in others’ misfortunes – has become the new barbarity on an island called Blog. When someone trips, whether Dan Rather or Eason Jordan or Judith Miller, bloggers are the bloodthirsty masses slavering for a public flogging. Incivility is their weapon and humanity their victim.

I mean no disrespect to the many brilliant people out there – professors, lawyers, doctors, philosophers, scientists and other journalists who also happen to blog. Again, they know who they are. But we should beware and resist the rest of the ego-gratifying rabble who contribute only snark, sass and destruction.

We can’t silence them, but for civilization’s sake – and the integrity of information by which we all live or die – we can and should ignore them.

“ego-gratifying rabble”?? Where do I get my membership card?

The point of both Hiltzik’s plaintive whine and Parker’s outburst is simple – we’re trained professionals, dammit! Where’s your respect? And pull up your pants! (apology to Dennis Leary)

Frey can’t possibly be a useful of effective critic of the Times because – wait for it – he doesn’t have the depth of experience in doing daily journalism with the pressure! and stress! and hard choices that entails.

When bloggers criticized CBS News for trying to tank an election with fraudulent documents, the goal wasn’t to set the record straight, it was to embarrass the practitioners in the media.

When I criticize my betters in the media, I’m marking myself as “rabble,” and fit best to be ignored by people of substance.

What a pile of crap. Get over yourselves.

Co-blogger Trent once suggested that I was out of my depth in criticizing Bush’s strategic planning for the War on Terror – “The net assessment of national security requirements and its translation into grand strategy is a highly specialized field of academic study who best practitioners are currently working on or are consultants for the National Security Council and the Department of Defense,” Trent said. My reply was simple:

…the genius of the American system is that there certainly are experts on game theory, diplomatic history, and policy who have substantive and valuable expertise in these areas.

And they all work for guys like me. Our Congress and our President are typically business men and women, lawyers, rank amateurs when it comes to the hard games that they study so diligently at ENA (Ecole Nationale d’Administration). And that’s a good thing, in fact, it’s a damn good thing.

Michael Hiltzik and Kathleen Parker work for me, and for folks like me. It’s our eyeballs that sell the ads, and the advertiser money and our twenty-two fifty a month (or whatever it is) that puts food on their table.

I don’t ask for obsequiousness. But – like the waiter at the trendy WeHo restaurant who finally gave me too much attitude, at which point I asked him to come over and quietly told him:

“I’m paying to eat here and you’re being paid to work here. I’m not going to ask you to kiss my ass, but I’m going to tell you to start treating me like a human being” – Hilzik and company need a swift, enlightening, Zen-master slap to the head to get them to open their eyes.

In a way, I’m sorry for them. For hundreds of years, the guild they are members of had the only megaphone in town. Now, they’re one of many, and they will stand or fall not on whether they’ve made it into the club or not, but on what they do, and – most important – on how they manage to make the change from monologuing to having dialog with other human beings.

Kevin Anderson gets it. Michael Hiltzik doesn’t. Unless he starts to, I’d say the Kevin Andersons will wind up working for the Times instead. And we’ll all be better off.

[Edited title.]
[Update: In comments, Patterico is concerned that I want to see Hiltzik fired. No, certainly not because of his rudeness or this interaction. I’ll suggest that there are better business columnists out there, but the core of my point is that people with attitudes like Hiltzik’s to their audience are a) not the future of media; and b) damaging to the parent brand.

I’d love to see Hiltzik step out of his bubble (denoted in part by his blogroll) and join the rest of us rabble in a conversation about the issues important to him.

I’d also love to have an intimate dinner with Uma Thurman, which may be slightly more probable (TG says is she shows up at the door, I get to go, in case you’re concerned).]

(after I was gone…even the figures in scandals are younger than I am nowadays…), and somewhere there is a post or two in riffing on the notion of how little my cohort has done with the advantages we were dealt. Instead we got the kind of tawdry Babbitry Abramoff so ably represents…

But this post isn’t about that, it’s about the rare opportunity this presents to those of us – Democrat and Republican alike – to try and crack the deathgrip that law bought and sold has on our national politics.

The GOP – that bastion of strict morality, values, and propriety – is reduced to the plaintive “she did it too” of a five-year old caught hitting his sister in the back seat of the family car. The Democrats, with their own cast of bagmen, are left saying “we may have got millions from his clients, but he only gave his own money to Republicans!”

They’re both pathetic and shameless, and somehow the one thing I’d like to see is the reintroduction of shame into our national politics. Or better still, the reintroduction of people capable of feeling shame into national politics.

Let’s identify a few of them and start supporting them.

….as a partisan hack.

Quite a while ago, I criticized him here and here for his belief that the sole remedy to the structural fiscal crisis in California – caused by legislators who spend like drunken sailors and taxpayers who want services but no related costs – was to raise taxes, as he suggested in two columns.

We corresponded, and I appreciated the notion that a journalist was reaching out to critics, and I resolved to look at his efforts with a more open mind.

He’s recently begun a blog for the Times, and reading it moved my opinion of him back to Square One. He’s a reliable source of Democratic talking points, which ought to be OK with me (I’m a Democrat, after all) but isn’t because the Democratic Party as constituted in California is headed off a cliff. The only thing saving it has been gerrymandering, the huge amounts of money available from the blue regions on Los Angeles and the Bay Area, and the fact that the California Republican Party is functionally retarded.

A few weeks ago, I popped over and read his blog; I don’t recall the post, except that it – as noted – kicked me back to “he’s a press agent for the Teacher’s Union.”
I did note his blogroll with amusement (here it is as of today)…

Blogroll

* Political Animal
Washington, D.C., meets Irvine, CA: Progressive reporting and analysis from the indispensible Kevin Drum.

* Talking Points Memo
Joshua Micah Marshall assembles the goods on Social Insecurity, Plamegate, and the infamous Gulf Coast Wage Cut.

* L.A. Observed
Kevin Roderick. Can’t say it better than this: “Los Angeles media, news, and sense of place.”

* James Wolcott
Vanity Fair’s best writer: Edgy, direct, hilarious take on media, culture, and politics.

* California Stem Cell Report
The go-to site for the latest on California’s boondoggle-in-the-making.

* Brad DeLong
From Berkeley, first-class economic and political analysis, and proof that I didn’t take his negative review of my PARC book personally. (See below.)

* Radosh.net
Found items from all over.

And today, he takes on Patterico, and by extension, defends the Times.

I’ll let Patrick handle the heavy lifting, but I’ll suggest two framing points in response to his:

Hiltzik says:

None of these critics appears to be genuinely interested in correcting factual errors or improving this newspaper’s, or any newspaper’s, performance as a journalistic institution—which are certainly legitimate goals. Their main purpose is to hunt down deviations from a political orthodoxy that they themselves define.

That – in the case of Patrick – is simply not true.

Patrick offered (and I’m talking off the top of my head, so I’m sure there are others) substantive corrections to factual errors by the times as regards – among other things – the three strikes law, “imminent threat”, the Sgrena shooting, and local stories such as the shooting of Devin Brown.

I’ll note in passing Michael’s attempted takedown of Patrick’s criticism of the Sgrena shooting, and suggest that he misses the core point – yes, all the later information suggests that the car was approaching the checkpoint at ~50mph. The point of the controversy over incident was that the car was approaching the checkpoint at high speed – hence the shooting – and the only point of information that suggested that in the original story was the excised line. So yes, cutting that line did change the entire sense of what happened, and the culpability for it.

Patrick wrote one of the first (and few) “Outside the Tent” pieces – and what was it about?

The Correct Way to Fix Mistakes

Has anyone ever said something about you that wasn’t true? Something that, if people believed it, would significantly damage your reputation? How would you feel if you saw that falsehood printed on the front page of the Los Angeles Times? Would it make things right if the paper later retracted the false statement — with a brief correction buried inside the paper?

In this published piece (disclosure: I looked it over when he was writing it), Patrick takes the Times to task for its reluctance to publicly correct what it acknowledges are errors, and for the manner in which it does so when it finally decides it has to.

So, Michael – how is Patrick not “interested in correcting factual errors or improving this newspaper’s, or any newspaper’s, performance as a journalistic institution”?

I’ve criticized the Times as well, during the recall elections:

And here’s my point. As someone who reads the Times every day, along with a lot of other media, the clear tilt of the paper couldn’t be more transparent to me.

I’m not going to go too deeply into the news portion, although I’ve started saving clips. But it took me about 30 minutes last night to go through all the columns available on the Web. I’ve got links and clips below, but let me give you a summary count (methodology was simple: I went to the Times web site, clicked on ‘columns’ in the left bar, and went through each of the listed columnists and pulled anything that had to do with Davis, Arnold, or the recall. Note that ‘balanced’ doesn’t mean pro-Arnold or pro-recall; it means looks at both sides and tries to present analysis):

Al Martinez: 1 column, violently anti-Arnold and recall.

Ronald Brownstein: 1 column, balanced.

Patt Morrison: 10 columns, 8 violently anti-recall and anti-Arnold, 2 moderately anti-recall and anti-Arnold.

Dana Parsons: 1 column, mildly anti-Arnold

Tim Rutten: 7 columns, 6 mildly anti-Arnold, 1 anti-Bustamente

David Shaw: 4 columns, 2 mildly anti-recall and 2 mildly anti-Arnold

George Skelton: 10 columns, all balanced

Steve Lopez: 9 columns, 4 violently anti-Arnold, 1 moderately anti-Arnold, 3 anti-recall.

In my same post, I talked about another encounter that was eerily preminiscent of Hiltzik’s column:

Then I went to Brian’s party, and met a journalist (sadly didn’t get his name or affiliation).

I’ll skip over his arrogance and rudeness; he was in a hostile environment, and maybe he was nervous. But watching the discussion, I realized something that brought the Times issue into clearer perspective for me.

In the discussion, I had substantive issues with his points, which were essentially that journalism is superior to blogging because it has an editorial process which drives it toward ‘fairness’ (he felt that objectivity was impossible and not necessarily even desirable), but a fairness informed by the moral sensibilities of the institution (I’m pulling a short argument out of a long and somewhat rambling discussion). Bloggers obviously don’t.

I tried to make the suggestion to him that individual blogs weren’t necessarily good at driving toward fairness, but that the complex of blogs – the dialog and interaction between blogs – was, and might in fact be better than mainstream media, isolated as they are from feedback. (Note that Perry from Samizdata got this point before I finished the sentence).

And what was interesting to me was this – that while I have (violently at times) disagreed with other bloggers in face to face discussions, I always had the feeling that there was a discussion going on, a dialog in which two people were engaged and trying to understand each other’s points, if for no other reason than to better argue against them. But in dealing with The Journalist In The Hat, no such dialog took place. He had his point to make, and very little that I said (or, to be honest, that others who participated, including Howard Owens, who pointed out that he had worked as a journalist) was heard or responded to. He had his points, and he was going to make them over, and over, until we listened.

Or until we said ‘bullshit’ too many times and he walked away in a snit.

Sadly, Hiltzek seems to be fitting himself for a hat.

I’ll suggest that he listen to Jeff Jarvis, and begin to understand that news is now a dialog; and that the kind of conversation-ending comments Hiltzek makes – that obviously, without a deep understanding of the journalistic process (which I assume can only come from working as a journalist or studying journalism) no criticism of journalistic practice and outcomes is possible.

Riiight.

I’ll make a simple suggestion to Michael – stop thinking of yourself as a West Coast James Wolcott; he’s a laughable buffoon – kind of an Oscar Wilde with the words but not the wit. Start thinking about how to encourage dialog with your audience.

[forgot to give a hat tip to ex-Timesman Kevin Roderick at L.A. Observed]

I’ve blogged for a while about voting machines and my concern about the mechanics of our democracy. The issue is best expressed to me by Tom Stoppard’s great quote from ‘Jumpers‘:

George: Furthermore, I had a vote.

Dotty: It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting, Archie says.

Which is, of course, a rehash of Josef Stalin’s insight:

“It is not the votes that count, but who counts the votes.”

Today the L.A. Times had an article on voting machines, and it descends into a fine, Patterico-worthy, mess.The article opens:

Five years after the vote-counting debacle in Florida suspended the election of a new U.S. president, California and other states are embroiled in a contentious debate over how voters should cast their ballots.

The maligned punch cards that snarled the 2000 count are all but gone. But with electronic machines under attack as unreliable and vulnerable to hackers, there is little consensus about what the new technology should look like.

That has left many counties nationwide in turmoil as they struggle with unproven technology while state regulations remain in flux and the federal government offers minimal guidance.

In some places, voters are facing their third balloting system in five years.

Note that the story simply states the claims that the systems are unreliable and vulnerable to hackers…classic “he said, she said” journalism.

The problem is that the vulnerabilities are real, well documented, and put forth by serious people whose claims have not been meaningfully refuted. The article just flat skips over this point…bad writing, or bad editing?

Adding to the difficulties was the unexpected emergence of security as a central issue in the modernization debate.

Soon after 2000, a cadre of activists and computer scientists began raising alarms that electronic systems could be breached by hackers who could change election results with just a few keystrokes.

Critics focused much attention and suspicion on Ohio-based Diebold, the industry leader, whose chief executive had written in a fundraising letter that he was committed to helping President Bush carry Ohio in 2004.

Many elections officials and manufacturers initially dismissed the activists, arguing that the new systems were more reliable and tamper-proof.

“There was a level of trust with vendors, who said, ‘Don’t worry; it’s a computer,’ ” said Pam Smith, nationwide coordinator for the Verified Voting Foundation, one of several advocacy groups.

“It would have been good for people to recognize that these were computers. And as such, they were subject to all the glitches and errors and vulnerabilities,”

To date, there has been no verified tampering with an electronic voting system during an election. But the controversy has had an effect.

Two years ago, California’s then-secretary of state, Democrat Kevin Shelley, announced that electronic voting machines would be required to produce a paper record of each vote. Today, more than half the states require such records, according to Verified Voting.

It would have taken the reporter – Noam Levey – about an hour with Google to find reputable computer scientists who have legitimate, profound concerns about the state of voting machine technology, as well as a core set of concrete recommendations about how to fix them.

Take Avi Rubin, of Johns Hopkins (pdf).

Or Douglas Jones from the University of Iowa.

Or Bruce Schneier.

I could go on, but breakfast is waiting…

There’s an interesting post on what this shows about the media in general, but I’ll leave that for Jeff Jarvis. There’s an interesting post on what this shows about the Times, but I’ll leave that for Patrick.

The real issue here is that the Times has laid out the problem with e-voting as though it was a simple issue of diligent government workers facing competing interests, rather than making any effort to dig into the facts.

I do computer stuff for a living, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that no business accounting system with the kind of vulnerabilities documented in a variety of e-voting systems – not just Diebold – could be used for corporate finance or controls, because the officers involved would have major liabilities under Sarbanes-Oxley.

And we want to run our country with this stuff?