I have closed access to the WTC archive. I’ve moved the server to a new location and the bandwidth used is effecting other sites that I host. If someone is interested in setting up a mirror of it (preferrably a virtual domain so that wtc.libertynews.org could be pointed there) let me know.

ed.

UPDATE: I have the archive open again, being served up by a cache. You can view it here.

LA Election workers take a page from Washington State’s recent election debacle. Instead of using black pens they are re-marking their ballots using highlighter pens so that the counting machines could read ones that were too faint. Even though the InkaVote system is supposed to be able to pick up faint marks.

“I’ve never heard of anything like this before,” said Bob Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies. “It’s unprecedented. You don’t tamper with the ballots.”

I’m sure that my fellow Washington State voters wish that our election workers had used hilighter pens. Instead they went ahead and filled in the ballots themselves.

Thanks to MichelleMalkin’s Blog for the link to this story

Here’s a case where doing the right thing ended up being the wrong thing. A student named Michael Beam realized that he had accidently brought his BB gun to school, so he reported it to the principal (just like he’s been trained to do) and what happens? The so called authorities rip him from his family and place him into a group home for reeducation. He would have been better off leaving it in the bottom of his bag and going about his business.

You can read the ‘full’ article here.

I suspect there may be more to this story, but since this is a MSM site the article is a bit short on details and history. When are they going to learn that with the Internet you now have the Time and Space to deal with a subject appropriately, not trim it down for a 60 second news-bite or 5 column inches.

Thanks to Italy, we may find out. In stark contrast to Fabrizio Quattrochi’s final words to his kidnappers – “I’m going to show you how an Italian dies”, they have reportedly been paying off Terrorists who kidnap their citizens. Possibly as much as 15 million dollars in the last year according to this Michelle Malkin article. Some reports are saying that they paid as much as $15M for last week’s release of Giuliana Sgrena.

We should be thankful that the Italians have fielded 3000 troops to asist in Iraq, but they need to be told stop undermining our efforts to defeat these terrorists. That money will very likely be used to kill Iraqi citizens, American and even Italian soldiers in future months and extend the time it takes to win this war.

I live in the United States of America. I think that we are the most free country in the world, with the best hope of sustaining our god given liberties. I am a stong believer in the Constitution and the wisdom of the Founding Fathers. I am also a supporter of President Bush and his war on terrorists. And I believe that the largest threat to a free people does not come from foreign enemies, but from those that we have elected, the bureaucrats that they appoint and abdicate their power to.

A free country cannot survive when it has secret police, secret courts and secret laws. Doing so prevents the people from operating with the full set of facts. It allows corruption to creep into the fabric of government and hide from the light of truth. One example of this is illustrated by the efforts of EFF Founder John Gillmore. It started when he asked a simple question – ‘What law says I must show ID when boarding a plane?’ no-one was able to answer this, but they kept him from flying anyway.

Read the full story here.

If we want to remain a free society our government needs to operate in the open, no matter how inconvenient it may be for them to do so. There is very little information that the government truly needs to keep hidden from public view (there is some), remember the security adage – “Security through obscurity is no security at all”.