Tag: Criticism

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US MOVE TO SECURE ELECTION SYSTEMS MEETS CRITICISM

vote for me

BY TAMI ABDOLLAH
ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) — A last-minute decision by the Obama administration to designate election systems as critical infrastructure drew intense criticism from state and federal elections organizations on Monday.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson announced the move Friday with 30 minutes’ notice to the National Association of Secretaries of State and U.S. Election Assistance Commission, an independent bipartisan federal agency that develops voluntary voting guidelines and certifies voting systems.

Officials at both agencies are criticizing the department for what they said was a failure to work with state officials to fully answer their questions about the designation before making the change.

“We’re having trouble understanding exactly what they’re going to do, that we’re not already doing,” Connecticut Secretary of State Denise W. Merrill, who heads the national secretaries association, told The Associated Press. “States were already doing much of this (security work) themselves using very different products.”

https://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_ELECTION_HACKING_HOMELAND_SECURITY?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2017-01-09-17-14-46

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Reader says Criticism from this blog eventually unmasked the intentions of Aronsohn, his adoring supplicants, and his friends in the media such as The Record’s Stephen Borg

civility

The ironically-named “Civility Forums” were, collectively, a thinly- (because that’s usually all that is needed to avoid scrutiny) disguised attempt to re-define, as aggressive “incivility”, civic involvement, occasionally taking the form of mild pushback, by ordinary village residents and taxpayers not invested or interested in advancing a freakish, spawn-of-alinsky, progressive political agenda. Criticism from this blog eventually unmasked the intentions of Aronsohn, his adoring supplicants, and his friends in the media such as The Record’s Stephen Borg. The wind having been taken out of their sails, they mercifully ended that baleful series of foolish public/private meetings. Their jihad against normalcy is sure to arise again in some other form in the near future which is why we need to support small-entity actors like James who are willing to throw stumbling blocks in their path.

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Reader says Criticism and the resulting public discourse, I believe, does much more good than harm

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Reader says Criticism and the resulting public discourse, I believe, does much more good than harm

I am a strong believer in free speech no matter how stupid, hateful, or unpopular that speech is, but I suppose if you twisted my arm I could compromise and allow bans on one form of speech. That would be blowhard elected officials singlehandedly defying the New Jersey State Sunshine Law by egotistically grabbing the public microphone (!) and executing one of the most exquisite, hypocritical, logic-twisting, irony-defining, triple-twister-with-a-backflip dives into the capacious pool of numbnutted man-child foolishness imaginable by breezily calling for censorship and limits on free speech – which I find hateful and “excessively objectionable.”

I’m just kidding of course, because by allowing people to express their wrongheaded opinions at imprudently-convened unofficially official privately public meetings, you are giving others a chance to respond to and criticize those ideas (see: these comments). The resulting public discourse, I believe, does much more good than harm. And although some mistakenly claim that restrictions on free speech are unlikely to be abused in Orwellian and Authoritarian ways in the USA (what with our infallible government and all), you’ll find plenty of such instances from the last century of American history alone.

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