X-Tra Rant

Just got an email that had a virus in it and I hadn’t seen this trick before.

It was delivered to my old xtra-rant.com account and it appeared to be from “postmaster@” my domain name. Now i’ve never set up an email like that so I was dubious. The email goes on to say:

it then has a zip attachment, supposedly with “instructions.”

Scanned it and it contains a MyDoom virus. This scam is trying to masquerade as the “support team” for your mail server thinking people will think it is genuine because it appears to come from an “official” source.

So just a heads up to anyone who might see anything like this. DON’T open it!

Non-Political:
Mount St. Helens Cam. There’ve been a number of shallow earthquakes in the top of the mountain. Might be interesting to keep an eye on the cam.

Kevin Smith to helm a new Star Wars TV series? Maybe.

And Political:
We expected rose petals hmm?

A 20 year non-com Army vet tells why we cannot win in Iraq. And by “win” I mean George W. Bush’s definition of “win” as in “defeating the evildoers.” It’s a very good, straightforward article.

Unfortuantely, he’s now facing the possibility of court martial. Shoot the messenger, eh?

Dick Cheney has done the biggest flip flop in the history of flip flops. Dick Cheney on why they didn’t go on into Baghdad in Iraq War I:
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Apparently our esteemed representatives in congress want to make it legal to extradite terrorist suspects to countries like Syra to do our torturing for us.

A great post at Obsidian Wings has the details.

Go read the whole thing and then call your congressman. No matter your political leaning, the legalizing of the export of torture in our names should be repulsing.

John’s entry about using a Google Bomb for a current situation in his town of Floral Park got me thinking about my own use for a Google Bomb.

I posted earlier about Mitch Daniels (candidate for Governor of Indiana, former Eli Lilly VP, former W Budget Director) and his links to the IPALCO scandal (Indiana’s own little ENRON). See, Mitch Daniels was on IPALCO’s board when it approved the sale of the company to an in-debt out-of-state company. The board members promptly sold their IPALCO stock (in all netting around $72 mil). Mitch Daniels was one of the top 12 insider sellers of IPALCO stock during this time. IPALCO employees were not given this opportunity and IPALCO stock dropped 90% in around 18 months after the sale. Mitch Daniels left IPALCO employees holding the bag while he made off with the loot. Don’t let Mitch Daniels do the same to the state of Indiana. Vote Joe Kernan for Indiana governor.

(If you didn’t catch it, please link Mitch Daniels to IPALCOFacts.com, a Kernan website set up to expose Mitch Daniels‘ disregard for working Hoosiers. I and my fellow Hoosiers would be much obliged

Via John P. Hoke’s Asylum who got it from a bunch of other people.

200 Things You Should Do…
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One of the sentances you never expect to read….

Somehow I just can’t picture Ron Artest, “bad boy” of the Pacers, NBA Defensive Player of the Year, owning a toy poodle.

We’re holding a simple photography contest at work. Apparently there was enough interest. Anyway I submitted a couple pictures I took in NYC. Hopefully they do well. I converted one to black & white and and did some cropping and it looks really good (I think). It’d be cool to win something, especially since a couple of the entrants do photography as more than just an occaisional point and shoot like I do.

If it goes well, I’ll post what I entered on here. If it goes badly we wont’ ever speak of this again.

via Tom Tomorrow

And before anyone says “But Teddy Roosevelt passed…” or “But Eisenhower passed…” or “But Nixon passed…” Roosevelt would be considered a liberal today, and he split with the Republican Party in 1912 when it began its shift to corporate masters under Taft. Eisenhower would probably be a moderate and hell, Nixon could almost be considered a moderate conservative in many ways, even liberal on issues such as the environment.

This article (unsure where it came from originally) is not about Democrat vs. Republican. It’s about progressive/liberal vs. regressive/conservative no matter what party they belong to. It’s about this myth of how evil and no good government is that has been perpetrated by the right since Reagan is a smokescreen for the GOP drive to please its corporate donors via the elimination of any regulation of any sort, common man be damned.

Update: Bad Jason! I forgot to give a tip o’ the Rant Cap to John Hoke for pointing me in this direction.

Demonstration of 5 voting system hacks using real software | Black Box Voting

Haha funny right. No way they trained a chimp to hack into a Diebold vote counting machine and mess with an election, right?

Not to mention Dr. Thompson showing how to rig the election with an implanted virus on a Diebold machine, Jeremiah Akin demostrating manipulating a Sequoia Voting System while an election is in progress and Andy Stephenson of Black Box Voting showing how to “sabotage an election with two mouse clicks”.

And the chimpanzee? Heck, if you can hack it with two mouse clicks that should be easy.

Folks, this is scary stuff. Diebold and the other black box voting makers have made their voting software a secret. Sure, a third party reviews it but there’s no guarantee that the code that gets reviewed is the same code that ends up on the machines during the election.

And remember, Diebold is the company who’s CEO said he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president.”

All voting software… ALL OF IT.. should be open source running on open source platforms. The open source community could do what they have done for Linux - make it as safe and secure as possible, much more so than its closed source competitor Microsoft.

By putting profit motive into the development of voting software, the software that will control the most essential part of our Democracy, we are putting the tempting lure of Greed in a place where it could wreak the greatest damage on our country and on our confidence in elections.

You thought the idea that Bush lost the popular vote but was appointed President tarnished his legitimacy? Wait until after the election if all sorts of accusations (and heaven for bid evidence) comes out that our election was hacked. The legitimacy of and confidence in our election system is at a crossroads.

Write your representatives about this. Urge them to look into ways to protect our right to vote, ASAP.

Update: This entry was corssposted and expanded in my Daily Kos Diary.

I heard a radio ad for Gov. Joe Kernan on the local ESPN radio affiliate, and it was outright attackign Mitch Daniels for his involvment in shady business deals and stock sales of the company IPALCO (Indianapolis Power & Light Company).

Anyway, the Kernan campaign set up IPALCO facts.com as a sort of clearinghouse for facts about Daniels’ involvement in Indiana’s own little Enron.

The basics are that Daniels was on the board and had “a key role in the effort to sell IPALCO, a 75-year-old Indiana power company, to AES, an out-of-state corporation.” AES was in debt, but IPALCO execs had a deal that they’d get a windfall if the company was sold.

So they sell IPALCO to AES, sell their stock and also get a windfall, encourage IPALCO employees to keep their stock and put more in AES and left IPALCO employees holding the bag. AES stock dropped 90 percent in the first 18 months after the stock swap for IPALCO.

400 Hoosier jobs were eliminated by AES once IPALCO was sold.

And to top it off

My Man Mitch indeed. Don’t let Daniels’ little RV tour and folksy-image ads fool you. The only people who can truly call him “My Man” are his fellow IPALCO directors who fleeced Hoosier IPALCO employees and left them without jobs and retirement savings.

Vote Kernan for governor!