One of the newsletters I get is from the Association for Global New Thought, a group of churches who are part of the modern metaphysical spiritual movement. Unity, Religious Science and other such churches belong to the association.

Following is a letter from a well-known Italian peace and interfaith worker-activist about the election of Barack Obama to be our next President. Perhaps it helps explain a little bit of why I am so completely taken with the concept of having this man as our leader for the next four or eight years. It's been a long time since an American President evoked this kind of overseas response.

As I was mentioning to you earlier, about the enthusiasm for President elect Obama being great everywhere. We keep on seeing wonderful images of people throughout the planet celebrating this victory. I do not recall ever having happened before! We see people in Russia as well as in all capitals cities of Europe, in different parts of Africa and Asia, in South America, everywhere, even in China, just happy, as if relieved and hopeful for a better future. It is as if a wave of confidence and new hope has reached at the same time all corners of the world!

I was able to follow live, together with millions of Italians, until 5 A.M. the long night which led us to the great news: that President Obama made it, and in an incredible way! I could follow three TV national channels as well as BBC and CNN simultaneously and every now and then we were connected with people watching the same program live in different places of the five continents. Amazing!!

By noon today we could hear in TV and read in the papers the wonderful messages sent to President Obama by all the world leaders, including our President Napolitano, Pope Benedict XVI, our Premier, our head of the Senate, our head of the Parliament, all top political Leaders. And the same from the Leaders of most nations . Our TV news programs lasted more than one hour, instead of the usual 15 or 20 minutes; special talk shows are going on in sequence, almost nonstop, in every TV channel throughout Europe.

I can assure you that something like this never happened before!

This shows the great impact that President Obama's victory has on the entire planet.

What impressed everybody, also, is the new spirit of involvement, of interest, of personal participation of so many millions and millions of American Citizens, so many young ones, who revealed an authentic image of the vitality, the true spirit of Democracy, which is one of the best characteristic of the United States of America!

It was touching to see the painstaking work of millions of volunteers who truly gave all their best energies to guarantee that all this could happen!

We are proud of being not only spectator, but "actors" of an important historical moment! We shall not stop short here, just rejoicing of an important, historical event. We shall keep working hard for that "new world" we all dream of, knowing that, united, "WE CAN"!!

I was wiping tears from my eyes as I read this. It just feels good.

Laurence Rozier of the Meshverse Journal jogged my memory this morning and caused me to go re-read Sen. Barack Obama's technology plan.

While I don't agree with everyting he says here, it is encouraging and refreshing to find a candidate who has given such obviously deep and considered thought to these important issues. Compare his policy statements to those of Sen. John McCain, whose positions are broad and sweeping but not terribly substantial or focused on technology. McCain seems to be interested in technology only as part of a bigger puzzle of business and economics where he has demonstrated repeatedly a lack of expertise.

Salon.com's Farhad Manjoo says he's highly skeptical that Tuesday's New Hampshire Presidential primary was rigged. That conclusion is not a surprise to folks who follow U.S. elections, history and technology. As uncharacteristic as it is for a Salon staffer to side with the Establishment and question the positions taken by activists, Manjoo has almost 100% consistently done so on this topic. With one exception (a big one: the Bush machine's outright thievery of the 2004 election over the real winner, Al Gore), he has dismissed every concern raised about vote fraud through technology.

Manjoo does suggest that the electorate is or should be entitled to more certainty about election results, more transparency. He agrees with vote fraud blogger Brad Friedman who asks simply, "Why can't they just count the damn votes?" But he offers a weak -- though not unreasonable -- argument against the New Hampshire vote rigging charges. In essence, he says that demographic differences between hand-counted paper ballot precincts and optical-scan machine-counted precincts could (and, he seems to say, does) account for the wide discrepancies reported in results between the two.

That's a plausible explanation but it does not, by its existence or pronouncement, out of hand dismiss the possibility that machine fraud is at the root here.

More troubling for me as I read and assess Manjoo's case, is his flip dismissal of the value of exit polling as an indicator of voter fraud. "Regular readers might know that I've long been skeptical of efforts to use exit polls -- surveys of voters as they leave voting booths -- as a forensic tool to detect fraud," he says. Never mind the fact that -- at the insistence of our country -- international bodies attempting to ensure the honesty and integrity of elections in "less advanced" nations than ours have been using this same technique for quite a number of years. Apparently, what is good enough for Iraq voters is not a useful tool for juding the fairness of American voting.

I can't prove the NH elections were rigged. But neither can anyone else prove that they were fair and honest. And that, at the end of the day, is the troubling truth. Manjoo agrees with that assessment. And he applauds Dennis Kucinich's call for a recount.

As a member of the non-mainstream media, I believe Manjoo would better serve is readers if he would adopt a big more skepticism about official government lines and stories on issues that are so central and vital to our democracy.

Dennis Kucinch is asking for a vote recount in New Hampshire and some liberals think that's not a good idea.

Sure, a recount could backfire the way it did for Ralph Nader. But it could also turn out to be an eye-opener. It's hard to see how it could make the situation any worse. Define "worse".

Go, Dennis!

Bev Harris, of the highly respected voting watchdog organization Black Box Voting, recently wrote that the Diebold 1.94w optical scan machines used in some 55 percent of New Hampshire precincts (representing more than 80 percent of the state’s voters) are “the exact same make, model and version hacked in the Black Box Voting project in Leon County (Florida)” a few years ago. They haven’t been upgraded; the security problems haven’t been fixed. (Full story)

Ron Paul's site breaks votes down by hand count and machine count and by town size for some very interesting results. In the overall Democratic field, Clinton won the machine-counted votes 39% to 36% but in hand-counted precincts, it was Obama 39% to Clinton's 35%.

"A good statistician can provide precise confidence levels, but for practical purposes the answer is clear enough: the electronic machines were programmed to record more votes for Hilary than she received and to record fewer votes for Obama than he received. The pre-polling was accurate." (Full Story)

"Perhaps, after a half-century of fine-tuning exit polling to such a science that it's now used to verify if elections are clean in Third World countries, it really did suddenly become inaccurate in the United States in the past few years and just won't work here anymore. Perhaps it's just a coincidence that the sudden rise of inaccurate exit polls happened around the same time corporate-programmed, computer-controlled, modem-capable voting machines began recording and tabulating ballots." (Full story)

"Votes that are recorded and counted in secret only and always produce inherent uncertainty. There’s no way around it. It’s why election experts from around the globe, when describing democratic elections, call for a secret vote and a transparent vote count." (Full story)

"They [LHS] program every single voting machine in New Hampshire, Connecticut, almost all of Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maine. But did state officials in five New England states ever do a criminal background check on this company's executives? Do the laws of these five states even ALLOW them to hire convicted criminals for services paid for by the state? What about over 500 local towns and municipalities?" (Full story)

"If Democrats intend for one of their own to be sworn in as President on January 20, 2009, one thing is certain: they need a candidate who will pursue swift and thorough investigation of election irregularities. Barack Obama pulled a 'John Kerry' Tuesday night, conceding first place to Hillary Clinton before the balloons began their descent from the ceiling." (Full story)

Many people are scratching their heads over the results of Tuesday's New Hampshire Presidential primary election. In an unprecedented turn of events, both pre-election polls and exit polls were dead wrong in their modeling of the outcome of the election.

While pundits have searched for answers as to why this should happen -- and pollsters and and media stand in a firing circle blaming each other -- a quiet storm of investigative results is beginning to see a pattern emerging in the discrepancies.

Simply put, WE WUZ ROBBED!

The first organization to bring this increasing evidence to my attention was one of my favorite liberal news and opinion blogs, OpEdNews.com. Chief editorial honcho Rob Kall rallied his editorial troops and at this writing has published no less than a DOZEN stories outlining specific voter fraud, apparent or potential ballot-counting "mistakes" and a number of other irregularities.

Over at the Election Defense Alliance, some very specific charges are being leveled. Some of these show that there are huge, statistically significant discrepancies between the election results in districts using optical scan ballots (where Hillary Clinton held a 53%-47% margin) and hand-counted paper ballots (where Obama held an identical lead, 53%-47%) when votes for only those two candidates are counted.

This is a huge story that the corpstream media will likely ignore, that the Democratic and Republican parties are ignoring, and that has staggering implications for the so-called Tsunami Tuesday elections in a couple dozen states on Feb. 5.

You owe it to yourself to become informed on this vital topic and, more importantly, to act on what you learn. Don't take my word for it. Check out the sources, starting with the ones I've linked to above.

UPDATE

Today's (Monday, 12/17) newspapers carried a story out of LA that said, "Dozens of striking writers are negotiating with venture capitalists to set up new companies that would bypass the Hollywood studio system and reach consumers directly with video entertainment on the Web."

I'm finding myself increasingly intrigued by and sucked into the so-called "Digital Convergence" technology trend. Not that the trend is new but it seems to me to be gathering steam on a lot of different fronts, prodded by a number of different initiatives.

One current development I think could have a tremendous impact on the acceleration of the video-over-Internet as a replacement (in some part at least) for broadcast TV is the current writers' strike. The media companies that are resisting paying the deserving writers anything for their contribution to the success of the digital distribution of their wares may find themselves looking at the rear end of a rapidly vanishing bus if they keep up their greedy ways.

I can envision a number of new Internetworks coming together and hiring these writers to produce original content for which they are handsomely rewarded. Then, when the broadcast TV industry finally comes to its senses and does the right thing by the writers, the latter won't really care to work for the slave wages and under the exploitative conditions they have been content with for far too long.

I'm surprised, as I reflect on it, that Net video hasn't already supplanted even more of broadcast TV, given its tremendous advantages:

• Everything is or can be on demand.
• Length of shows is content-driven rather than time-slot driven.
• Interactivity comes along almost for free.
• The ability to create successful narrow vertical networks that build around and enhance community is almost unfettered.
• "Subscription" models can guarantee revenue levels.

I'm sure I'm overlooking dozens more. This is a space that is set to explode in the next six months and if the writers' strike continues, I think it accelerates the process enormously.

Former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney may be a great human being for all I know. He may be an intellectual giant capable of operating at the strospheric heights of geopolitics that our next president will need to be able to do. Even though he's a conservative and would therefore never get my vote in any event, it would never have occurred to me in the past to suggest he be disqualified because of his religion.

But I must do so, based on deep personal experience.

There's a raging battle going on in Monterey County over which of two competing comprehensive general plans should be adopted for the next many years. One proposal was prepared by the elected County Board of Supervisors after years of study, environmental impact reports, and 18 public hearings and workshops. It's called GPU4. The other plan, CGPI (Community General Plan Initiative) was put together by a collection of citizens' groups who felt the county board's process was flawed because of the influence of a small number of developers and land-owners. I would characterize the CGPI as slow-growth and the GPU4 as moderate-growth, though I'm sure I will be criticized by both sides for mischaracterizing their approach.

That's OK because an essay about the plans isn't my objective today. Today, I'm writing to express my grave concerns about the local chapters of the venerable League of Women Voters (LWV). The League recently released a five-page chart analyzing the two plans (a Good Thing) and then publicly endorsed the CGPI (which I deem a Bad Thing even though their endorsement happens to coincide with my probable final position on the issue).

Read more if you want to know why I see this endorsement as a mistake.

A number of forward-thinking Congresspeople are using some cool technology to host tens of thouands of people in tele-town meetings. This is a marvelous use of technology to empower people and to let legislators take the pulse of a community.

I'll be anxious to see how the use of this technology unfolds.