I am temporarily resident in the City that has voted for Barack Obama by a wider margin than any other city in America -- with the possible exception of Chicago.  Tonight it was a joy to wander among the growing crowds in Times Square as the first results came in from CNN on giant screens there; to negotiate the well-dressed press at the New York State Democratic Party bash at the Sheraton on Seventh Avenue and 53rd Street.  But when Obama broke the 200-electoral vote barrier, I knew it was time to head for Harlem.  

On the ride over, those of us on the subway car heading for Harlem found one another and the vibe of community just grew stronger as we got off and walked out and down the long avenues, our many rivulets joining into streams joining into rivers.  In the plaza outside the Adam Clayton Powell State Office Building where Bill Clinton minds his post-presidency, at 125th Street and Seventh Avenue (better known there as the corner of Martin Luther King and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevards), another two-story television screen had been put up, and a stage, and the place was so jammed it was almost impossible to move, and the crowd's growing overflow was running ten deep along MLK's far bank.  The crowds were so packed that for the first few minutes I thought I may have made a mistake to leave Times Square, where the crowds though bigger had more room to spread out and more screens and better viewing angles -- but that notion soon vanished.  

As Barack's count moved closer to the magic number the joy in the crowd just grew.  Every race and ethnicity under the sun could be found there, in goodly numbers and every shade and shape and phys, it was a rainbow of humanity and it felt like a rainbow too, so many happy strangers newly minted brothers and sisters -- an awesome feeling, an awesome experience to see that fellow feeling overflow when the screen lit up and held on the words "Barack Obama Elected 44th President."  There was a long beat before we reacted, as if everyone had to read it twice, and then the cry went up, and from that moment it seemed all the rest of Harlem that hadn't yet arrived at that intersection began hoofing it there at that moment, all traffic was diverted as the people took joyfully to the streets, the cops were great, they went with it, they ceded the ground and facilitated the redirection of traffic away, traffic honking like crazy everywhere.  A brass band pressed through the people, trumpets singing "O-ba-ma," leading chants.  Bands of drummers were everywhere.  CNN and MSNBC with their talking heads and long views of the huge crowd at Chicago's Grant Park awaiting Obama alternated with feeds from our own stage, as the greatest black politicians of New York's recent past and present came out to talk to us, Charles Rangel and David Dinkins and several African-American members of the state assembly and senate, rap stars and Baptist minsters, a Moslem cleric and a rabbi, and finally New York Governor David Paterson, who spoke eloquently about how African peoples that had first come to this continent as chattel had now centuries later produced a man who had just been elected president of the United States, that a long-lingering wound was finally starting to heal; Paterson said it was only a matter of time before the first woman was elected president, the  first Hispanic, the first Asian-American.  And just as he finished, on the big screen Barack Obama and his family came out, and the roar we let was of such delight and relief and collective affirmation, affirmation of Obama but even more of one another, that very sense was most palpable of all, you could see it and hear it in every face -- we had done this thing together, and that was the foundation of meaning that would inflect anything and everything that Obama does from now on.  Listening to Barack deliver a speech that bore no whiff of triumphalism or self-congratulation but was humble and thankful and calmly serious and full of eloquent reminders that the need for our collective work had not ended but only begun -- was to cry (for me and for others) and to shout and to listen, with full hearts.  The inspiration is ours -- everything crucial to what we can create together is ours, and Obama's potential as a leader lies wholly in his ability to bring that out in us, something already innately in us, bring it out not for him but for us, for all of us, for the good we can make together, which is something we have long and often lost sight of.  Let us find it again, in the making, in our uncommon common effort.

Afterwards the huge crowd streamed down the middle of Harlem's Martin Luther King Boulevard, block after block of it, laughing and hugging and high-fiving and shouting and beaming, so many glorious lovely human smiles, upturned and lit.  And down in the subways, cheering at the passing trains, train conductors honking with us, and slowly the great human river breaks into streams which split into rivulets, and here now in the wee hours of a restored America, in the solitary tributary of living blood pulsing through me ten thousand foremothers sing, I hear them once again: ten thousand foremothers sing.  And in their song are days to come, the myriad ways we modulate with dawn, the myriad ways dawn modulates in us: belong, they sing: be long.

Will Pennsylvania be this year's Florida?

It seems unlikely on the surface.  Obama is currently leading McCain 52-40 there.  Yet McCain is concentrating huge efforts in Pennsylvania, which given that he's down by 12 points in the latest polls is downright creepy -- he's officially given up on states with a greater combined electoral vote and where the race is much closer and he has a far better chance of closing the gap. Why? Unlike those states, Pennsylvania's voting machines are almost all electronic, with no paper trails, thus eminently open to hacking. If the election's going to be stolen electronically, Pennsylvania will be ground zero.

Here's some background.  Today electoral-vote.com, the best and fairest electoral-map website, carries this telling news item:

McCain Concedes Colorado, Iowa, and New Mexico
CNN is reporting that McCain is making those tough decisions that politicians love to talk about. According to CNN, McCain is abandoning Colorado (9 EVs), Iowa (7 EVs) and New Mexico (5 EVs). If Obama wins these three he gets 21 EVs. Add these to the 252 EVs Kerry won and he has 273 and becomes President. McCain's strategy at this point is to win Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, Missouri, Nevada, and--get this--Pennsylvania. The first six are arguably swing states, but our three-poll average puts Obama 12 points ahead in Pennsylvania. McCain is effectively betting the farm on a state which looks like an Obama landslide. It is a strange choice. Colorado looks a lot easier than Pennsylvania. James Carville once famously said that Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama sandwiched in between. Maybe McCain is going to go all out to win the white working class men in the Alabama section of Pennsylvania. McCain can't possibly do it on the economy. What's left? Maybe run against the Wright/Ayers ticket? Any way you look at it, this has to be a desperation move.

As it happens, the big untold story of this election is and quite probably will continue to be the profound hackability of the electronic portion of the national vote.  Every cybersecurity expert you care to consult will confirm that the electronic voting machines in use in this election are easy to hack, and if hacked it's difficult to detect and all but impossible to trace or even confirm once it's been done.  Which is why cyber-savvy monitoring of all electronic voting machines -- including careful logging of all hard- and software maintenance and I.D.ing of all individuals with access to the machines -- and of all vote-reporting trunklines in the days leading up to the election and while voting and vote-reporting are in progress on election day is essential to there being even the slightest chance that any vote-hacking efforts will be detected, or to achieving even a bare-minimum level of confidence that the vote was not hacked.  

Is such cyber-savvy monitoring in place anywhere in this country where electronic voting machines without paper trails are being used?  I am not aware of any, anywhere.  Why is this monumental, national-security-level breach of election security not being talked about everywhere in the media?  

No, at this point there is no verifiable unfolding story of electronic hacking in progress, but there is a thoroughly verifiable story of the existence of a profound risk that such hacking can occur without detection, and as renowned cybersecurity expert Stephen Spoonamore points out in a series of interviews posted to YouTube last month, if an election of such profound consequences for our nation and for the world can be stolen that easily (for a few million bucks, says Spoonamore, and several score people, at least to pull off coordinated trunkline hacks, though insider jobs like Diebold's last-minute distribution of the "software glitch" correction patch that stole the 2002 Georgia election would be much easier), then why wouldn't any number of unscrupulous powers-that-be, including foreign governments, try to do it?  It's a no-brainer.

Another crucial source is Verified Voting's "Election Equipment 2008" page (www.verifiedvoting.org/verifier), which has election maps showing what kind of voting machines are being used where, nationwide, state by state and county by county.

As of today, according to electoral-vote.com, if you combine all states that are leaning either strongly, weakly, or barely for Obama, he has 364 electoral votes; for McCain, 171; and South Dakota's 3 are tied.  

McCain has now narrowed his campaign focus to just seven states, six of which are barely leaning towards Obama and thus are arguably still in play: Nevada, Missouri, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida.  The seventh, Pennsylvania, appears to be far out of play, all but locked up by Obama.  But if McCain were to pull off a miracle, or a miracle plus a theft, then those seven states' combined electoral votes, together with all the others where McCain leads, would give him 272 electoral votes and the presidency.  Yet a much more likely path to victory for McCain would be a strategy that focussed not on Pennsylvania but on Colorado, North Dakota, and Iowa (two of which McCain has abandoned) instead of Pennsylvania -- those three would put him over the top at exactly the required minimum of 270.  So again, why Pennsylvania, when these other three states are already much closer races that would be far easier for McCain to legitimately win?  It's simple:  North Dakota and Iowa exclusively use paper-based voting systems, and of those Colorado counties that use electronic voting, all but one require paper verification.  Whereas the vast majority of Pennsylvania's counties, including Pittsburgh and Philly, use electronic voting machines with no paper trail at all.  

Of the other states that are amenable to electronic hacking, all of them are either already leaning towards McCain or, if they're leaning towards Obama, they do so by huge margins and lack the kind of "secret Alabama" that James Carville claims for Pennsylvania's vast rural center, and what's more none of them match Pennsylvania's electoral clout.  

It seems clear from the above that if there's an attempt to steal the election for McCain by hacking the electronic vote, Pennsylvania is where it will happen.  In the likelihood that no cyber-savvy governmental or other monitoring is put into place there in time for the election, and Pennsylvania ends up going for McCain, the surest sign that a hack is the likely cause will be if both the final opinion polls and the exit polls show Obama winning by a statistically significant margin; if the exits polls have him winning by 5%, say, and the official results show him losing by 2%, you can pretty much guarantee something's screwy.  

To further test the situation, once the results are in nationwide, compare the discrepancy between the exit polls and the official results in Louisiana, Georgia, and South Carolina with the discrepancy in Maryland, New Jersey, and Delaware.  All six states use 100% electronic voting with no paper trails; the first three states listed above are all solidly red, the latter three solidly blue.  If there's little discrepancy between exit polls and final results in the red, but great discrepancies in the blue, or vice versa -- there's your story.

And so what of hacks in Obama's favor?  It could happen, though given his increasingly commanding lead nationwide, the effort would likely be superfluous; I trust it goes without saying that it would be every bit as despicable as hacks in McCain's favor.  But if you really want to go there, you can create your own analysis by comparing the maps at electoral-vote.com and verifiedvoting.org.

The ultimate point of all of the above is simply this:  we need comprehensive inspection and oversight of all paperless electronic voting machines and vote-reporting trunklines before and during the election, and not just after-the-fact analysis when it's too late.  Yet we don't appear to have it anywhere, and there's little chance such monitoring will be put in place in time for the election.  That the Department of Homeland Security would honorably police the situation seems questionable; who would monitor the monitors?

The mainstream media remains all but utterly silent on these issues.  Who will raise the alarm?

Opponents of gay marriage in California and elsewhere might do well to refamiliarize themselves with the Ninth Amendment:

"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

The Bill of Rights did not grant us any rights, rather, it recognized and enumerated some (but not all) of the rights we already have by virtue of being human beings. Far from granting any rights, the Bill of Rights affirms that the government cannot take the People's rights away. The Ninth Amendment's purpose is to acknowledge that there are other rights which are not mentioned in the Bill of Rights, and to affirm that the people still have those rights, even though they aren't mentioned in the Bill of Rights.

Given this, it seems clear to me that one crucial measure of whether a right is protected by the Ninth Amendment is this: would such a right infringe on the rights of others? If it inherently constitutes, or is likely in and of itself to cause, an infringement of the rights of others, I think it's safe to say that it would not and should not be recognized as a right.

If you are married, then your marriage is between you and your partner and your god (if any). Period! Its your mutual responsibility. Anyone who claims that another couple's marriage somehow infringes on their own marriage is a coward as far as I'm concerned -- how dare you blame your own marital problems on the fact that a gay couple somewhere got married because they love one another? The "integrity of marriage" is only as good as the marriage you and your partner are a party to.

To deny other adult human beings the right to marry one another because they share gender is to infringe on their rights, which means the so-called "right" of an individual or government to enforce such a denial fails the test stated above and thus should not be recognized under the Ninth Amendment -- and is therefore no right at all.

To repeat: denying the rights of gays to marry is itself not a right under the Constitution, and thus all anti-gay marriage laws should be struck down by definition.

The format was less conducive to productive give and take than the first debate.  McCain was smart to keep the character assassinations under wraps.  He had more than a few effective jabs at Obama, but more often than not Obama's comebacks laid them firmly to rest.  McCain really looked petulant whenever he went out of his way to rag Obama at the expense of answering a question, and what struck me several times was that McCain's demeanor kept switching back and forth between that of a tough guy and that of a spoiled child.  And his constant pacing and the sheer unpredictability of his movements struck me as accurately reflecting his character.  At his best McCain was commanding in a good way.  If only he could be so consistently, but he can't,not that I've ever seen -- he's always erratic whenever you watch over any significant length of time.  Not stable or even-keeled.

Obama passed up numerous opportunities to make pointed turnabouts on McCain.  But he was very steady, sensible, authoritative, calm, articulate, the very definition of "even-keeled".  I was really struck by the question from the retired Navy petty officer -- Obama's answer was distinctly better than McCain's, and you could see by the ex-Navyman's reactions that he thought so too.  That was the very moment that Obama won the debate.

John McCain has gone so far around the bend that he appears to fully believe his own lies, as is chillingly demonstrated in his Sept. 30th interview with the editorial board of the Des Moines Register.

The way McCain insists, with barely contained rage, that he is and always has been an honest man, pure and unsullied in his truth-telling -- which is tantamount to claiming that he has never told a lie in his entire life -- is a clear sign he is utterly disconnected from reality. It's sad that McCain's torturers in Vietnam broke him; it's sadder still that he remains broken. His rage coupled with the profound shamelessness of his lying clearly demonstrate this. He is a tyrant in waiting; his is the incipient psychosis of the profoundly megalomaniacal.

I do not say these things lightly. I used to have a lot of respect for McCain. But his hiring of the very people who smeared him out of the 2000 race for the Republican nomination and his use of those same smear tactics against Obama made me lose a lot of the respect I once had for him. McCain was a different man as recently as the primaries, but ever since he hired Karl Rove's cronies to run his campaign everything has gone rapidly down hill. The Register interview made me realize that I was seeing a man who lives entirely in a reality of his own invention, a man full of wrath and with no sense of proportion or humility, a man who is borderline psychotic. I wish it were not true, but I am dreadfully afraid it is.

McCain could have used his own brokenness as a source of positive power and vision, a source of compassion and understanding, but instead he has allowed its darkness to overwhelm him, its hunger for aggrandizement to seize him for its own ends.

God help us all.

Stephen Spoonamore is a lifelong Republican and McCain supporter who also happens to be a cybersecurity expert.  He has worked on election campaigns for Giuliani and Bloomberg.  Spoonamore has come forward in recent weeks  to warn the public about the danger of  the election being stolen through the hacking of electronic voting machines in battleground states, and claims specific knowledge (apparently diagnostic in nature) of an attempt to steal the election on behalf of John McCain.  A ten-part interview with Spoonamore can be found on YouTube.  Here's one part of that interview:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lrFkRHrRDI

Based on the research I've been able to conduct thus far, I'm inclined to believe that Spoonamore is credible and is every bit the expert he appears to be.  A new blog post by columnist Sharon Machlis at ComputerWorld supports this. 

Spoonamore's comments are positively terrifying.  He warns not only of domestic hackers but the very real possibility that the election result could be altered by a foreign government.

One thing is undeniable:  the evidence that electronic voting machines are easily hackable is overwhelming, and these hackable machines are being used in a number of states, enough states that a concerted effort could in fact change the outcome of the election. Until the vote is secured nationwide, we cannot even begin to consider the basis of our democracy to be secure. I think it behooves us to be vigilant and to monitor the situation closely to insure that the election results are accurate and fair.

I have several questions: 

Why are Stephen Spoonamore's concerns not being reported more widely?

What, technically, can be done to monitor those locales that use electronic voting machines so as to determine whether what Spoonamore calls MIMs have been used in the reporting of electronic voting results, and to protect against their use?  And to detect other forms of hacking?

And what is the official position of the Department of Homeland Security on this major threat to our national integrity?

Is Barack Obama really destined to lose even if he wins?  Are we?