I got a kick out of this article in the NY Times today.

---

Senate Moves to Protect Military Prisoners Despite Veto Threat

WASHINGTON, Oct. 5 - Defying the White House, the Senate overwhelmingly agreed Wednesday to regulate the detention, interrogation and treatment of prisoners held by the American military.

The measure ignited a fierce debate among many Senate Republicans and the White House, which threatened to veto a $440 billion military spending bill if the detention amendment was tacked on, saying it would bind the president's hands in wartime. Nonetheless, the measure passed, 90 to 9, with 46 Republicans, including Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, joining 43 Democrats and one independent in favor.

More than two dozen retired senior military officers, including Colin L. Powell and John M. Shalikashvili, two former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, endorsed the amendment, which would ban use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" against anyone in United States government custody.

---

The President wants to veto a bill banning the use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" That speaks volumes about this administration. seriously, what kind of America is this guy from?!?!

I'm rather picky when it comes to websites and web-design, being a designer myself I quickly notice holes and flaws in design. Also I am currently taking a class at UB called Interface Design, which looks at websites from the perspective of the user, and it has made me even more critical of sites that are difficult to navigate or understand.

That being said, I really like the New Buffalo Rising site It looks slick, but more importantly you can navigate freely through the content and find what interests you without a problem. They have given the articles categories and subcategories which allow you to find exactly the stuff that interests you, no matter when they were published. and the site is updated often, like 6-12 new articles per day.

I just realy like it I couldn't have come up with a better design myself. check it out

Sheriff Howard is lashing out at WNY Media.net for a negative story they published about him.

The story was about Sheriff Howard of Erie County, and where he is getting his campaign money. He didn’t like these facts being exposed to the public so in response Howard has decided to get revenge on the website and the writer.
The article on WNY Media focuses on a recent fundraiser for the Sheriff that was cosponsored by Delacy Ford. Coincidentally Delacy Ford has been doing business with the Sheriff’s department since at least 1999, with contracts totaling at least $733,917 of taxpayer money.
This is all public information, but I guess the good Sheriff didn’t like this being exposed on WNY Media, which is a popular alternative news website like SpeakupWNY. The Sheriff feels threatened by the story, which is good, it means that WNY Media is doing their Job. The media is supposed to ask tough questions that those in power do not want to answer, they are supposed to bring facts into the light that those in power don’t want people to know. But Sheriff Howard doesn’t like people rocking his boat (or yacht), so he is lashing out against the website and it’s owner. How? He targeted their place of employment. Someone called the website owner’s place of work and said enough mean things to get that person Suspended from their job. Suspended until further notice. We speak truth to power and power reacts by threatening our source of income
We can’t let media be intimidated for doing their job, WNY Media is simply asking tough questions that the public deserves answers to. It’s $733,917 of our tax money that is being played with, we deserve to know what is going on behind the scenes. Attacking the media like this is beyond improper, any lawyers in the house?
I want everyone to be aware of the dirty tricks that are going on with the politicians in this county. Please Read the article.


“The fundraiser was hosted by the wives of Sheriff Howard's political appointees, as well as Smith Boy Marine Sales and Delacy Ford. To say the least, it’s unusual for a company with county contracts to sponsor a fundraiser. Usually they just give money. But when you want to give more money than legally allowed, what do you do in New York State? That's right, hold a fundraiser:”

More….

There was a protest this weekend in DC. there were between 100,000 and 300,000 people there. it was the largest anti-war protest in DC since the war in Iraq began 3 years ago. but if you sneezed you might have missed the news coverage.
our news media is beyond disappointing. I don't even have the energy to go into it now. but I'll give you one example from this latest protest.There was an anti-war protest of up to 300,000 people, and there was a counter "pro-war" protest of around 100 people on the side of that protest. In almost every major American news outlet that I checked, the protest with 100 people was given more prominent coverage then the protest with 300,000 people. I checked Yahoo News at about 9:00 last night, and this was the first news story about the protest I saw, it was talking about the pro-war rally, and only made some abstract refferance to the real protest in about the 8th paragraph. about six lines below that was a story about the real protest.
go to democracy now if you want to hear what the protest was about. the entire monday show is replaying excerpts from speaches at the protest. the show can be downloaded at their website.

[size=l]A Critical Look at the Race for Mayor[/size]
By: David Coffee
September 19, 2005


After hearing the results of last week’s Mayoral Primary, I couldn’t help but feel frustrated. In the beginning of the race we had over eight candidates, many of whom were political outsiders who were simply interested in helping improve their beloved community. They entered the race simply because they felt an obligation to do their part to help all of Buffalo. After the primary we lost our inspiring candidates, and we found ourselves immersed in the same old political nonsense, complete with name-calling and devoid of issues. We need to free ourselves from ‘politics as usual’ and the way to do it is to change our voting system so that it more accurately reflects the will of the people.

The Buffalo news on Friday described the Brown-Helfer mayoral contest as a battle between “two political heavyweights.” Now I’m not a gambler but I’m willing to bet that nobody in this city would describe their ideal mayor as a ‘political heavyweight’. That says a lot about the trap that we find ourselves in. Our system has lead us down a narrow hallway, and at the end we find two candidates that nobody truly wants. The system is not working, so the responsible thing to do is change the system. I’m not talking about getting a candidate elected, I’m talking about changing the rules that we use to elect our public officials.

There are many ways to translate democratic intent into political representation, and statistically our Winner-take-all plurality system is the worst. Elections like ours use a very simple method to select the winner, the candidate with the most votes wins. This is fine when there are only two candidates, but with three or more there is a possibility that the most favored candidate will lose. A candidate who would normally win in a two-way race might have their votes ‘stolen’ by a third candidate and therefore hand the election to a candidate who doesn’t actually have the support of the majority. This is the dilemma that led Steve Calvanesso to drop out of the primary early. He didn’t want to steal votes from Kevin Gaughan thereby helping Byron Brown win the nomination. If we had used a system of Instant Runoff Voting this problem could have been avoided entirely, voters would have three choices, and they could vote for their favorite candidate without fear of helping their least favorite candidate.

It is very possible to deal with this problem. The most efficient and democratic way is through Instant Runoff Voting. It works like this: After the votes are cast, the least favored candidates are eliminated from the ballot until someone achieves a majority of the votes. Voters rank the candidates in order of preference, if their first choice receives the smallest number of votes and is eliminated from the ballot their second choice is used. This process is repeated until one candidate has a majority. If Brown Gaughan and Calvaneso were competing and Gaughan ended up with the least number of votes he would be eliminated and his voters would use their second choice vote instead. The result would truly express the will of the voters, instead of making them frustrated.

Unlike the Runoff election used in the New York City Democratic primary, Instant Runoff Voting is much less costly or time consuming. The New York City Runoff election requires everyone to come back and vote again if nobody receives a majority in the first round of voting. Instant Runoff voting allows voters to rank their candidates so that they only need to vote once. If a voters first choice is eliminated they will use their second choice instead.

Why does it matter? What difference will it make? In this case, Calvaneso wouldn’t have dropped out. And voters would have been able to choose freely between three candidates without worrying about ‘wasting’ their vote or ‘spoiling’ the election by allowing someone to win with less than 50% of the vote.

We could easily use Instant Runoff Voting in our Democratic primary, or in any City or County election. It doesn’t take a federal or state law to change our system of voting, our community decides how we want to elect our own officials.

Think about it, does our current system elect the candidates that people want? What would happen if voters could record their true preference, rather than strategically voting for the lesser of two evils because they were scared of wasting their vote on a third candidate? And what about the candidates, would more people run? With additional candidates, would we talk about other issues and hear more diverse solutions? And what would happen to Buffalo if we had a vibrant public discourse led by the many candidates in each election? And what if our citizens could vote for any of those eight candidates without fear of their vote not counting, would thousands more people turn out to vote? I’m willing to bet that the change would be dramatic.

It’s not that we don’t have honest, qualified people running for office, the problem is that they are squeezed out of the race before the general public gets a chance to vote for them. Or they show up on the ballot as a third party that nobody acknowledges because we don’t want to waste our vote. We are all tired of the political machines, empty promises, and incompetent public officials, but we can’t seem to overcome them. We have good candidates but our system makes them so hard to elect. The most important thing we can do to get ourselves out of this mess is to change the rules of the system.

___________________
More info on Instant Runoff Voting