Saw this earlier tonight while exploring Chinatown with TheWife.

I would LOVE this for our living room (minus the graffiti, of course).

So, here’s some good news for folks worried about the future of the US economy!

The Dow didn’t drop as far today as it did yesterday! YAY!

Well, you should still be worried, but hey, you can be worried a little bit less!

See, the Dow (the prime index to judge the entire American stock market) only dropped 128 points from where it was yesterday. That’s a drop of 1.49% to 8451 points.

Of course, those numbers are all relative, being compared only to yesterdays panic-inducing digits which were arrived at after a 680 point drop.

Aaaand you can see, when you look at the graph, that the Dow spent most of the day fighting with gravity.

The idea to take away from this post, and also the stock market’s performance today, is that the drop slowed, in the big picture. Will the it continue to drop tomorrow? Who knows? Today’s graph looks MUCH more volatile than yesterday’s (here: http://thepete.com/…o-can-tell ) so I’ve got no idea.

Still, it’s nice to see that it wasn’t so bad today.

Gotta think positive, right?

RIGHT???

I’ve blogged on US Army troops serving on American soil before (here: http://thepete.com/…-inside-us and here: http://thepete.com/…de-the-us/ ) and on Tuesday of this week (here: http://www.democracynow.org/…it_will_be ) Democracy Now covered the topic as well. They had a mini-debate on the topic of the Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Team serving under US Army North, which, Amy Goodman explained, is "the Army service component of Northern Command". She had on Army Col. Michael Boatner, future operations division chief of USNORTHCOM, and Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive magazine to discuss the issue.

The transcript does make for good reading and, to be fair, Boatner does assuage some fears about a unit of active duty soldiers functioning on American soil. However, what the debate doesn’t discuss is the slippery slope argument. There’s another phrase that can describe the danger more accurately: Mission Creep.

This is when your mission is to achieve one goal, but along the way you see something else you can do so you just do it, rather than getting permission or get any other feedback about it. This is fine if you’re doing chores around the house, but when you’re a soldier trained to kill insurgents (and have just came back from doing exactly that) I don’t think even an inch of mission creep is acceptable.

In the Democracy Now segment, Boatner assured us that soldiers wouldn’t be bringing their "heavy weapons and combat vehicles" with them on this domestic service but that "They would bring their individual weapons, which is the standard policy for deployments in the homeland."

Now, think about this–do you really want to have some guy with an M-16 patrolling the streets during a disaster? What if he makes a single mistake and mis-identifies someone as a threat who really isn’t one? During Katrina I remember members of the press identifying black people wading through flood waters with garbage bags in their hands as looters. Meanwhile, white people wading through the water with suitcases were identified as refugees.

Any human is capable of this kind of mistake. What makes this mistake even more dangerous is when someone trained to defend themselves with a gun makes it.

This all reminds me of how the US Constitution doesn’t really talk about having a standing army in the first place. Article 1, Section 8 says, in part, that it’s the Congress’ job: “To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

To provide and maintain a Navy;

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;” (source: www.usconstitution.net/const.html#A1Sec8 )

So, it seems like the USC says we shouldn’t have a standing army. Yes, on the navy, but no on having an “Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;”

Looks like our modern leaders get around this by simply making sure to spend each appropriation within two years.

To me, this part of the USC is clearly putting a limit on how long a US army should exist. The Founding Fathers didn’t foresee the Military Industrial Complex, it would seem.

Regardless, the use of US Mil troops in any capacity on US soil beyond border defense (and we have the National Guard for that) seems like a very bad idea.

And boy does it bug me when Boatner keeps using the phrase “the homeland”. This is America–ethnically, we all come from other places. Our “homelands” are elsewhere. Only the Native Americans can really call this their homeland.

America is our country, but calling it “the homeland” suggests a blind loyalty to a plot of dirt that I don’t want to have. “America” is not the dirt under my feet. “America” is a word that represents a union formed by every single citizen who lives within certain borders. The kind of phrasing Boatner uses appeals to our more base instincts to belong to something bigger than ourselves. However, we can’t belong to anything without critical thought.

Look where a lack of critical thought has gotten us:

Two lost wars, hundreds (thousands?) dead or displaced thanks to hurricanes, and an economic system that is crumbling before our eyes.

We need to get back to being real Americans–standing up to authority and demanding proper representation and proper leadership. Putting the military anywhere close to common contact with the citizens is dangerous and, in my opinion, unAmerican.

Got the above screencap from here: http://is.gd/3MTw (a live graphic of the Dow at NYTimes.com).

Now, I can’t remember where I read this, but apparently that bailout bill that got passed won’t kick in until after the election. So, all those billions of dollars won’t go anywhere until it’s too late. Now we watch as the Dow, the NYSE’s main guidepost, nosedives to just above 8,000. So, no, this isn’t the bailout at work, it’s the bailout not existing for another month. Why should the market care about what will happen in a month’s time if businesses can’t function now?

It seems like no matter what the USG does it just can’t follow it’s own rules. First, the free market is supposed to be fine on its own. Then the bailout is supposed to help save the free market. And now… ?

OK, just checked the latest and now, at closing, it’s back up to 8711. That puts the Dow down nearly 6% from yesterday. Specifically, it’s down 547 points.

Can you say "weeee!"?

In case you’re wondering, the Dow does not represent the market as a whole. It’s just a chunk of it–the most important chunk. According to Wikipedia.org’s entry for the Dow Jones Industrial Average (here: http://en.wikipedia.org/…l_Average), the DJIA is an average value :

…of 30 of the largest and most widely held public companies in the United States.

In short, when it goes down, people panic. Ultimately, though, the Dow usually climbs the day after a spectacular drop. However, it’s kind of like how you feel so much better after you puke. It’s not that you legitimately feel good, it’s just that after your previous ordeal ANYthing feels better.

Then again, these days, everything’s screwy and hard to predict, so who knows?

I mean, hey, the USG said that we had to move quickly, so why is all of that bailout money sitting around doing nothing during all of this? What was all that rush and lack of public discussion for?

Oh and it looks like I had my numbers wrong above–just checked the numbers again and while it looked like the Dow had rebounded a bit, it just went ahead and dropped again, making it down to 8579–that’s a percentage drop of over 7% and a point drop of almost 680.

I guess that was the last drop of a really good rollercoaster ride–just when you were thinking "Oh, that was quite a ride! There’s the exit coming up–WAHHHH!!!"

It’s times like this when I ask just what the hell are our leaders up to?

Well, maybe YOU shouldn’t be, but that guy next to you? Or that woman over there by the door? Yeah, they maybe should be concerned. What if *you* are that woman by the door? What if you are the guy sitting next to the person reading this post? Well, you might want to be concerned about your vote counting. Or, I should say "you should be concerned about your vote being counted".

See, not everyone will be immediately impacted by this. Plenty of folks will actually have their vote counted. However, many won’t.

It turns out that a few different states are going through voter purges. This is basically when the state’s election officials decide that they should "reduce voter fraud" by trimming down the voter rolls (the list of voters in that state). The thing is, there isn’t a federally standardized way of doing this. As a result, some state officials seem to be using questionable tactics to remove people.

Now, I’m not advocating that there should be a federally sanctioned way to do this, but maybe a federal oversight committee might be a good idea, to make sure this process isn’t being abused.

Back in 2004, according to journalist Greg Palast (his site: http://gregpalast.com/ ), Republicans would send registered mail letters to low-income areas in certain states asking for registered voters to confirm their addresses. If they never heard back from these people, their names were challenged and many were removed.

This means that anyone who doesn’t take the time to sign for registered mail, or sees the Republican party return address and blows it off, or is serving overseas, or is on vacation, or whatever, could have had their vote challenged.

Now, it’s happening again–right now, in fact. CBSNews.com is reporting (here: http://www.cbsnews.com/…0682.shtml ) on a new study from the non-partisan public policy and law institute, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law:

calls the nationwide process "chaotic," "shrouded in secrecy", "riddled with inaccuracies", "prone to error" and "vulnerable to manipulation."

"What’s wrong with the process is it’s happening in secret. It’s happening with no accountability," Michael Waldman, the center’s executive director, told CBS News.

Nice, huh?

Here’s a bit more from the article:

‘Officials are making tons of errors, and voters aren’t given a chance to correct the errors,’ he said.

Waldman also says some voters will show up on Nov. 4 who are supposed to be registered to vote and will be told they are not listed that way. If that happens, he says, ‘don’t take ‘no’ for an answer. Cast a provisional ballot and call a voter hotline.’

I’ve actually heard that provisional ballots are no good, either. They don’t get counted until after the other ballots and I’d be concerned that they might not get counted at all–I mean, it’s not like our system doesn’t have plenty of flaws. In fact, I’m a little surprised that I haven’t heard much about electronic ballot machines lately.

There is nothing secure about electronic ballot machines–nothing. As an amateur hacker, myself, I can tell you that anything electronic can be hacked–anything. I once hacked a camcorder into an Altoids tin. I’m not kidding.

Think a paper trail fixes things? Not quite. The machine can just write one thing on your receipt (you voted for Obama) but then record something else (a vote for McCain). The only way a recount would be required is if the election was a tie. What if the machine got the vote intentionally or even accidentally wrong for a few thousand voters in each county?

Yeah, kinda makes you think about the 2004 election wen somehow Americans were stupid enough to vote for Bush again.

However, this isn’t about Republican operatives manipulating the vote–this is about each American voter being able to confirm their vote.

**Computers screw up all the time.**

I think we can all agree on that.

Yet, many states are trusting the votes to computerized ballot machines.

I wish I could provide a solution beyond suggesting you contact your state and local officials and find out what they’re doing about this. You can educate yourself with one of the many documentaries out there. I recommend the one I helped with: “Stealing America” learn more about it at StealingAmericaTheMovie.org. Check out the trailer here:

I’ll be posting more on problems with our election system in the coming days. Just an FYI for any new readers, I’ve been writing about election irregularities for years. It’s hard to cover everything you want to cover.