The Hightower Report

---

NEW YORK'S GOOBERHEAD MAYOR

Time for another Gooberhead Award – presented periodically to those in the news who have their tongues going 100 miles an hour ... but who forgot to put their brains in gear.

Today's Goober is Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor of the Big Apple. Hizzoner was in the national spotlight during August's Republican National Convention in New York City – and the glare revealed some very ugly wrinkles inside his soul. Bloomberg showed himself to be stunningly callous to our country's most fundamental liberty – the right to assemble in public and speak out about any and all policies with which we disagree. He used the New York police as a bludgeon to crack down on dissenters who were engaged in totally lawful protests; then, he asserted that "every NYPD officer did a great job."

Alex Pincus definitely disagrees. He wasn't even a protester – just a city resident who went out to a deli for some matzo ball soup and innocently walked into a police dragnet that was indiscriminately scooping up hundreds of people. Pincus asked an officer how to get out of the way, was told "follow me" – then was grabbed by cops, handcuffed behind his back, forced to kneel for an hour before being tossed into a filthy makeshift cage topped with razor wire, where he was held for 25 hours without access to a lawyer. Bloomberg's police kept saying to him and all the others, "This is what you get for protesting."

Oblivious to America's hard-won constitutional rights, the mayor later admitted that innocents were abused, but the Gooberhead blamed the victims: "If you go to where people are protesting and don't want to be part of the protest," he haughtily sniffed, "you're always going to run the risk that maybe you'll be tied up with it." Yeah, literally tied up!

Our liberties are not taken from us in one big bang of a coup, but slipped out from under us inch by inch by autocratic Goobers like Bloomberg.

---

THE OOPS OF ELECTRONIC VOTING

Trust us, plead the makers of electronic voting machines – our touch-screen systems are state-of-the-art, foolproof marvels!

But – oops – in a couple of recent, high-profile tests, the computers glitched and the makers of the machines had virtual egg all over their faces. First up was Sequoia Voting Systems. Boasting that its machines deliver "nothing less than 100% accuracy," it held a demonstration of its newest technology for California senate staffers in August.

Imagine Sequoia's 100% embarrassment when its machine balked during demonstration votes on a Spanish-language ballot. The testers punched in their votes on the touch screen ... but – oops – the machine did not record the votes, apparently having lost them somewhere in cyberspace. Luckily, this was a test of Sequoia's new system that includes a paper record of every vote – and the paper trail revealed the computer's error, which otherwise would have been undetected, disenfranchising the voter.

The lesson is obvious: These machines must have a paper backup.

You could ask U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski about that. At a festival in her state of Maryland, the public was invited to try the Diebold electronic voting machines that will count Marylanders' votes this November. The senator was there, gave the machine a whirl, and – oops – it erred! Touching the screen to vote on a sample referendum question, she apparently "brushed" the question below it, and the machine recorded a wrong vote.

Curiously, Diebold and Maryland election officials have refused to allow an independent examination of this flawed demonstration machine, arguing that any such test might undermine "public confidence" in the technology that will count the public's vote in November.

Who do they think they're fooling? Not Sen. Mikulski. After her experience, she promptly signed on as a co-sponsor of legislation in the U.S. Senate requiring a paper trail for all electronic votes.