McFreedom

Great blog story about the bizarre Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang. It's 1,000 feet tall, has no windows, and looks like Dr. Evil's mountain fortress. And hasn't been finished. It completely dominates the skyline of Pyongyang (and I recommend checking out the really big version of the picture of the skyline for some impressively depressing totalitarian architecture/city plan), yet it doesn't appear on city maps and "[g]uides claim not to know where it is."

A number of Republicanish blogs are very concerned about attempted voter fraud by Democratic advocacy groups.

The basic storyline goes something like this: "In the important battleground state of [Florida|Ohio|Michigan|New Mexico], Democratic advocacy group [The New Voter Project|Public Interest Research Group|Project Vote|Some Other Shadowy Group] has been hiring [felons|naive activists|cynical activists] to register voters to vote [without id|absentee]. Local officals are deluged with applications, [all in the same handwriting|from dead people|all on the same street with the street mispelled the same way|from people already registered to vote]. While the local officials are concerned about the situation (unless they're in Chicago), [corrupt|incompetant] state officials plan to do nothing. Clearly, the Democrats are planning massive voter fraud to steal the election!"

Guess what guys? The Democratic party is not planning on casting [10,000|100,000|1,000,000,000] nonexistant votes to swing the election (ill-advised cracks by Ms. Heinz Kerry notwithstanding).

When I was much, much younger, I had a job (for all of two days) literally selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door. Kirbys, to be exact. I didn't have a vacuum cleaner - what I did was, I knocked on your door and offered you a free rug cleaning. If you accepted, I took down your name, address and phone number. I got paid a (small) bounty for every name and phone number I turned in, and a real salesman called them later to arrange their demonstation of Kirby rug-cleaning technology.

My first day, I trudged through the Savannah, GA August heat in uncomfortable shoes and a tie, knocking on doors. I'd done some small number of houses - maybe thirty - and basically no one had been at home, and those who'd been at home hadn't been interested. I came back to the office for lunch to discover the other fellow who'd been doing this for at least a few months putting the finishing touches on stack of filled out cards.

I, of course, wondered what his secret was. He explained to me that he'd drive out to his assigned neighborhood, write down the address ranges on the streets - and spend the rest of the day in the air conditioned office, filling out the cards from the phonebook, asking for a free cleaning for people he'd never talked to. I wasn't comfortable doing that (and hated the job already anyway), so I quit.

But I have little doubt that what's happened here is that these organizations have hired people of dubious moral character, and put a lot of pressure on them to "get out the vote" - either monetary or peer. And these people have figured out, much like my coworker so many years ago, that it's a heck of a lot easier to just copy this stuff out of the phonebook than it is to actually pound shoe leather on pavement talking to them. And you get paid the same whether the people actually vote, or not, so, what the heck? And who would ever know? There's no auditing of this stuff - you just turn in a bunch of bogus paperwork, some poor schmoe gets a request for proof of ID for a registration he never filed - which he'll no doubt throw away - and who'll ever be the wiser?

This will, in the end, have two main results: A bunch of people who never really registered to vote simply won't vote in November. No one else will vote in their stead, either - it'll just be a dead issue. And a small number of idiots who didn't realize what "under penalty of perjury" meant are going to go to jail. Because unlike in the selling of Kirbys, there are actually laws around this stuff.

But don't lose sleep over "voter fraud" from this. The only fraud going on here is the plain-old kind, and the victims are actually those Democratic advocacy groups who are paying people to collect registrations and actually just getting the phonebook one card at a time.

I'm Watching the NASA TV coverage of the SpaceShipOne/X Prize attempt (and, hey, mad props to NASA for covering the competition, even if they're just dropping Ansari's feed on their satellite link). I was amused to note that the Virgin logo has already been applied to SpaceShipOne's tail.

The AP reports on concerns that CBS's memos from a Bush superior in 1972 were forged. CNN gets the top story right with their front-page headline, "Authenticity of Bush Guard memos questioned." But the story begins:

President Bush began flying a two-seat training jet more frequently and twice required multiple attempts to land a one-seat fighter in the weeks just before he quit flying for the Texas Air National Guard in 1972, his pilot logs show.

Yeah, that's important. A guy whose job does not actually involve flying a plane had trouble landing thirty years ago. It's not till the fourth paragraph that the AP gets around to mentioning, "Meanwhile, questions were raised Thursday about the authenticity of newly unearthed memos purporting to have been written by one of Bush's commanders in 1972 and 1973."

So, Kerry's campaign issued a press release that accused all the Reupublicans of lying at their convention. It was a tedious, 143-item list mostly of things that can't be verified. It's not clear to me if, for example, number 135, which quotes Bush as saying "To make health care more affordable and accessible, we must pass medical liability reform now," is supposed to be precisely a lie, mischaracterization, distortion or half-truth.

Regardless, the Kerry campaign has since decided to pull the press release from their website. Some are speculating that it was because they called McCain a liar in it (or maybe a mischaracterizer, distorter or half-truther), others because it wasn't effective.

The thing that annoys me about this whole episode is, if W did this, there'd be angry screams about the memory hole and how he was trying to revise things so we wouldn't notice. But if Kerry does it, he's been nuanced.