Bad Deeds for 8-3-2007

Bill O’Reilly Explodes at Senator Chris Dodd for Telling the Truth, Then Has Dennis Miller Come on to Ridicule and Tell Lies – On the O’Reilly Factor on 8/2/07, after Senator Chris Dodd (D. Conn.) made O’Reilly look weak, dishonest and foolish, Afterward, O’Reilly put right-wing comedian Dennis Miller on to try to ridicule Dodd. Miller called Dodd a “hack” and said, ” This guy had nothing!” Miller described the YearlyKos as a ” loserfest” and claimed that O’Reilly’s website gets 8 times more traffic than the DailyKos. However, the website traffic monitoring site, Alexa, shows that, over the past 6 months, DailyKos.com reaches about .03 percent of all web traffic, but Billoreilly.com only reaches about .002 percent of all web traffic. In other words, DailyKos gets about 15 times the traffic that O’Reilly’s site does.

 

 

 

Congress Setting the Stage for More Katrinas – The House initially passed a $14 billion version of the bill, the Senate a $15 billion version. Somehow, the two chambers compromised on a $20 billion bill. The House and Senate versions both had $31 million for a marine terminal in Portsmouth, Virginia, but the final version had $356 million, because Senator John Warner of Virginia served on the House-Senate committee that drafted it. It’s true that the bill includes some projects to help restore Louisiana’s vanishing coastal marshes and cypress swamps, which provide natural protection for New Orleans. (It’s also true that Vitter had pushed to help timber firms to log those cypress swamps.) The bill’s main Louisiana project — a 72-mile levee for some bayou towns — is a giant step in the wrong direction, accelerating the wetlands losses that left New Orleans exposed to Katrina.

Administration Official’s Testimony Shows White House Violating E-mail Policy – J. Scott Jennings, who serves as Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of Political Affairs in the White House, testified that he continues to use his Republican National Committee e-mail account heavily for a variety of official government business, such as hiring and firing US Attorneys.

Review of Voting Machine Software Shows a Pervasive Lack of Good Security Engineering – The California Source Code Review Reports on the Diebold, Sequoia, and Hart Intercivic voting systems have been released. The lead researcher for the Sequoia source code team, referring to the reviews of all three systems, states, “I was especially struck by the utter banality of most of the flaws. Exploitable vulnerabilities arose not so much from esoteric weaknesses that taxed our ingenuity, but rather from the garden-variety design and implementation blunders that plague any system not built with security as a central requirement. There was a pervasive lack of good security engineering across all three systems, and I’m at a loss to explain how any of them survived whatever process certified them as secure in the first place. Our hard work notwithstanding, unearthing exploitable deficiencies was surprisingly — and disturbingly — easy.”

Regards,

Jim