From the Miami Herald:

The same electronic ballot design flaw implicated in more than 18,300 Sarasota nonvotes might have caused problems for South Florida voters in two well-publicized Cabinet races. Both Broward and Miami-Dade counties recorded more than 34,000 nonvotes in their elections for attorney general and chief financial officer, according to election results from each county's Supervisor of Elections office. The problem was worse in precincts with many older voters. In both counties, the two Cabinet races appeared at the bottom of a voting screen with the higher-profile race for governor and lieutenant governor -- a contest in which seven sets of candidates nearly filled the screen. All races on the page were listed under a general heading.

QED in my estimation. Not software issues is Sarasota - ballot design issues.

Tommy Munford hired Guy Tobias LeGrande to kill Munford's wife. A friend of Munford's knew of the plan and supplied the murder weapon. After the deed was done, prosecutors made a deal with Munford: he could avoid life without parole by testifying against Munford in a death penalty prosecution. Munford's friend who supplied the weapon wasn't even charged.

Munford and his friend are white. LeGrande is black. He's also mentally ill. He insisted on representing himself at trial, and he did so while wearing a Superman T-shirt. Despite his mental illness, North Carolina plans to execute him on December 1.

During the crucial penalty phase of the trial, LeGrande's incoherent ramblings reached a pinnacle when he goaded the all-white jury to "Pull the damn switch and shake that groove thing." The jury sentenced him to death after only 45 minutes of deliberation.

This will be an unpopular post with my Democratic brethren. It is about who is to blame for frustrating the voters' intent in the House race in Florida's 13th Congressional district (Katherine Harris's old seat). While it seems absolutely clear most voters wanted the Democrat Jennings, that votes did not register for her is mostly the fault of Democratic Party officials and the Jennings campaign imo. Today Paul Krugman writes:

Reporting by The Herald-Tribune of Sarasota, which interviewed hundreds of voters who called the paper to report problems at the polls, strongly suggests that the huge apparent undervote was caused by bugs in the ES&S software. About a third of those interviewed by the paper reported that they couldn’t even find the Congressional race on the screen. This could conceivably have been the result of bad ballot design, but many of them insisted that they looked hard for the race. Moreover, more than 60 percent of those interviewed by The Herald-Tribune reported that they did cast a vote in the Congressional race — but that this vote didn’t show up on the ballot summary page they were shown at the end of the voting process.

I must say, as a fan of Paul Krugman, I find this passage to be incredibly well - NOT good. Fully a third interviewed said they could not find the race on the screen. not surprising when one considers the ballot design in the FL-13 race on the ESS machines. The Fl-13 race ballot is clearly flawed in design. The Sentinel reporting shows a third of those reporting problems as having not seen the race. This is not strong thinking by Paul Krugman. More.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law won a major victory against Fresno, California in federal court this week.

They are asserting that police and sanitation workers violated the rights of the homeless for the past three years by defining their property as trash and bulldozing their encampments.

The federal judge assigned to the case, Oliver W. Wanger, ruled:

U.S. District Judge Oliver W. Wanger, calling Fresno's policy regarding homeless people's property "dishonest and demeaning," granted a preliminary injunction Wednesday ordering the city to stop seizing and destroying homeless people's property without warning while the civil rights lawsuit winds through the courts.

"Persons cannot be punished because of their status," the judge said. "They cannot be denied their constitutional rights because of their appearance, because they are impoverished, because they are squatters, because they are, in effect, voiceless."

Mamaroneck is a suburb of New York City, near Larchmont and New Rochelle, in affluent Westchester County. Last week, in a 72 page opinion, a federal judge ruled the village discriminated against Latino day laborers.

The ruling cited evidence that following the Mamaroneck Village Board’s resolution earlier this year to close a day labor hiring site in Columbus Park, police applied a “virtual zero tolerance policy” to contractors seeking to hire Latino day laborers near the park but issued no tickets to parents dropping off children at the nearby day care center and schools, even if they blocked traffic. Police were observed ticketing Latino drivers for not wearing seatbelts, but merely gesturing at white drivers to buckle up.

The New York Times has a terrific editorial today on the case.

You cannot abuse people through selective enforcement of the law. You cannot single people out for special punishment without cause. You cannot instruct the police to harass people for being Latino and poor. Cities and towns across the country have overlooked these basics in their eagerness to punish those they presume to have violated federal immigration laws. But thankfully for all of us, the Constitution still has the final say.

The full text of the ruling is here (pdf).

Vis Susie Madrak at Suburban Guerrilla:

• Maxspeak, you listen.

• Atrios and the best Thanksgiving post ever.

• The full 18 minute version of Alice's Restaurant on YouTube.

War, Children, is just a shot away.

The Rolling Stones live in Twickenham Stadium, England with an amazing solo by the incredible Lisa Fischer (she starts rocking about 2:12 in.)

I saw them perform this live in Denver on Thanksgiving night last year and was just blown away.

Steve Clemons is a very smart man and he wrote a very stupid post on Marshall Wittman of all people. Steve needs to get out of Washington more if he believes this:

What those heaping scorn on Wittman are missing, however, is what his employment by Lieberman really means. When political giants tie up, it's not an accident.

Lieberman's acquisition of Marshall Wittman, who is very close to John McCain, signals a calculation by some that McCain and Lieberman might tie up for the 2008 Presidential run. The progressive left will start choking at this point, coughing and convulsing uncontrollably -- but reason needs to be gripped for a moment.

McCain and Lieberman would be a formidable challenge for any Democratic opponent because even though both are now self-described neoconservatives and strongly supported America's botched war against Iraq, to many pundits they would "seem like" the very epitome of centrism.

John McCain is having enough trouble convincing the GOP base he is one of them. Marshall Wittman does not help. And neither does Joe Lieberman. David Broder does not decide who the GOP nominee will be. And I guarantee you that McCain is not a fool who will run as an independent. Lieberman and Wittman may be stupid enough to believe he will. It surprises me that on this narrow point, Clemons seems as obtuse as they.

The rest of Clemons fluff piece on Wittman is frankly embarrassing to Steve. I think the less said the better. I'll prefer to forget Steve wrote this clunker.

Who deserves the thanks of Iraqis for this?

Three suicide car bombs and two mortar rounds struck the capital's Shiite Sadr City slum Thursday, killing at least 150 people and wounding 238, police said. The attack by suspected Sunni Arab militants was the deadliest in the sectarian bloodshed that has engulfed Iraq since last winter. Shiites responded almost immediately, firing 10 mortar rounds at the Sunnis' holiest shrine in Baghdad, the Abu Hanifa mosque in the Azamiya neighborhood, killing one person and wounding 14. Fighting also flared in another part of Baghdad when 30 Sunni insurgents armed with machine guns and mortars attacked the Shiite-controlled Health Ministry.

More.

Ok, I won't repeat my numerous posts about how Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant is the national Thanksgiving anthem on radio stations across the country.

The Boston Globe today does it for me.

And if you are in New York Saturday night, you can hear Arlo sing it live:

ARLO GUTHRIE. So it's the Saturday after Thanksgiving: Do you think the Guthrie fanatics went to Alice's Restaurant on Thursday? Ah, to be a hippie. (8 p.m., Isaac Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage, Carnegie Hall, 57th Street and Seventh Avenue, Manhattan, 212-247-7800. $35-$60.)

Where's Alice? You can find her here (link fixed.) But she's also been in my kitchen for 30 years, where her cookbook from 1969 is prominently displayed and always in use.

I'm not in a particularly upbeat mood this Thanksgiving. I know we just won an election and hopefully have started on a path to end the War in Iraq and take back our country from the right-wing extremists who have ruled since 1994. I'm thankful that the days of appointing right-wing ideologues to our federal courts and the Supreme Court may be behind us.

But I live in a peculiar world, one that is filled with days spent visiting mostly non-violent prisoners in jails, and it saddens me that for them and their children and parents, I see little hope.

O.J. Simpson's price for his book with a hypotheical confession was $880,000. Of that, $100k went to the ghost writer and the rest to his children.

His rationale: He had bills (including taxes) to pay.

His gripe: He has received more criticism that News Corp.

One final note: He tells the AP his book was not a confession. He didn't write the hypothetical chapter nor select the name of the book.

'It's all blood money and unfortunately I had to join the jackals,'' Simpson told The Associated Press, referring to authors of books about him. ''It helped me get out of debt and secure my homestead.''