News websites and political resources thread

[Pelranius]

antiwar.com Paleolibertarian and paleoconservative, with occasional populists and liberals putting in their two.

counterpunch.org fairly left wing, attacks both conservatives and liberals. Some of the material is pretty far out by my standards, though.

[Dominus Atheos]

Complete vote-by-mail resource guide:

Cheesy Video.

Oregon Elections Commision's complete resource for vote by mail.

The Mechanics of Vote by Mail:

When are ballots mailed?

Ballots are mailed between 20-22 days before election day.

They are mailed bulk and ballots are not forwaded.

What is in the ballot envelope?

Your ballot envelope also contains two envelopes - a return envelope and a secrecy envelope. And of course your ballot.

What do you do with the ballot?

Well vote obviously. But HOW?

Ballots are filled out with a #2 pencil and are the optical scanner variety (like the SAT test - you fill in ovals next to your candidate).

You fill out your ballot and then place it in the secrecy envelope.

You place the secrecy envelope in the return envelope. You sign the back of your return envelope swearing you are who you are.

You then can either mail the ballot in or drop it off at county elections offices or the numerous official drop off sites around the county like libraries, public squares, supermarkets etc.

For those looking for a more traditional voting experience can head to their county elections office where actual ballot booths are still available. The mechanics of the voting system are the same.

You have to have RETURNED your ballot by 8:00 p.m. on election day. Postmarks do not count.

Great you voted, but what happens then?

When your ballot is received at the elections office they first check your signature. All voter registration cards in Oregon are scanned into a statewide voter file. The county elections staff call up each ballot received to check the signature versus the registration card.

How do they know who you are? Next to your signature on the back of the return envelope is your basic info and a barcode so that they can quickly pull up your registration card.

If the signature matches then you are marked as voted in the system and the secrecy envelope containing your ballot is removed and stored in a secure location. The secrecy envelopes are NOT opened until election day.

If the signature does not match then the county elections officials calls you and ask you to come down to the elections office to double check your signature and verify the ballot.

When are the ballots counted?

As I previously stated they are stored in a secure location until election day. On election day they begin counting ballots at 8:00 a.m. This means that many times by the times "polls" close at 8:00 p.m results are almost immediately available.

The Vote-By-Mail Project, an organization created to implement vote-by-mail in every state.

[Dominus Atheos]

Ghetto Edit: Forgot to add this:

Vote-by-Mail: The Real Winner Is Democracy

While many states were embroiled in fights over touch-screen voting machines and provisional ballots and struggling to find enough people to staff polling places, Oregon once again quietly conducted a presidential election with record turnout and little strife.

Oregon's vote-by-mail system has proved reliable and popular. Critics said that vote-by-mail is prone to fraud. But signature verification of every voter before a ballot is counted is an effective safeguard against fraud.

Curtis Gans of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate contended that vote-by-mail would suppress voter participation. But record numbers of Oregonians registered to vote, and almost 87 percent of them cast ballots.

Critics argued that vote-by-mail eliminates the communal experience of voting on Election Day. But community activities promoting voting were readily available to Oregonians on Election Day and in the days leading up to it. With two weeks to conduct public education and get-out-the-vote efforts, Oregonians were surrounded by civic engagement reminders. Oregonians have also started a new communal experience: voting at home, showing their children the ballot and talking to them about how important it is to vote.

Vote-by-mail is voter-friendly, and high turnout in every vote-by-mail election shows that voters like the convenience. Oregonians receive ballots in the mail two weeks before Election Day, allowing ample time to research issues, review and mark the ballot, and eliminating the need to stand in long lines waiting for a polling booth.

Voters are busy, but voting fits their schedule if they may return their ballot at any time during those two weeks and up until 8 p.m. on Election Day. Voters may mail their ballots or save a stamp by dropping them off in person at any of the official sites located throughout the state. The earlier that ballots come in, the more time election officials have to check for any problems and to process the ballots to ensure that every vote counts. With a large number of ballots received before Election Day, the first tally released on election night contained nearly 50 percent of the vote and proved to be an accurate predictor of the final numbers.

Vote-by-mail provides an automatic paper trail. Every vote-by-mail ballot is read by reliable optical scan machines, and the paper is available should a hand recount become necessary. Mailed ballots are not forwarded by the post office, and the constant updating of voter rolls provided by returned ballots allows Oregon to have accurate and updated voter rolls without the risk of partisan purges.

Without polling places, vote-by-mail eliminates the expensive and time-consuming recruitment and training of poll workers. As a result, the cost of a vote-by-mail election is nearly 30 percent less than the cost of a polling place election.

Centralized supervision and control of ballot processing by elections officials in county elections offices, instead of dispersed polling places, maintains uniformity and strict compliance with law throughout the state.

An impressive percentage of Oregon's registered voters cast ballots in this election. Each of those voters can be confident that the mechanism of democracy in Oregon suits their needs, runs smoothly and fairly, and, most importantly, protects their votes.

The answer to the nation's voting anxiety is not a national standard that imposes new rules on an outdated system of polling places. The answer is a low-tech, low-cost, reliable and convenient system that makes it easier to vote and easier to count votes. The answer is vote-by-mail.

[metavac]

Here's some links relevant to the mortality studies of pre- and post-war Iraq by the British medical journal The Lancet

2004 study

2006 study

Wikipedia article

[Darth Massacrus]

site with information on just about thousands of dead and former politicians in America (excellent category selections)

http://www.politicalgraveyard.com/

[Sikon]

Most news website make one wade through pages of extra formatting, pictures, video, and ads. In contrast, my favorite site efficiently links to the top several dozen stories all on one page.

It is like the firefox or google of the internet news world with 30 million visits a day: The Drudge Report

[Bounty]

It is like the firefox or google of the internet news world with 30 million visits a day

If Google was run by a conservative conspiracy nut and admitted 20% of its stories were bullshit. Drudge is about as reliable as the shouting hobo down the street.

[Sikon]

If Google was run by a conservative conspiracy nut and admitted 20% of its stories were bullshit. Drudge is about as reliable as the shouting hobo down the street.

The bulk of the stories are the same as almost any other news site minus extra frames and ads. There is no simply "reliable" website anywhere for all stories to be mindlessly trusted, but one should read everything with a little bit of questioning considering sources and outside support. (Although a tangent for another thread, I could give a few examples from BBC). Sometimes a few stories are published on Drudge Report which would not be seen somewhere like this board, but there would be little intellectually healthy about a sheltered mind pained merely by glimpse of such. Even in some cases where I disagree with an implicit focus, understanding what some are hearing doesn't hurt.

[The Yosemite Bear]

yes, but most people won't listen to the crazy guy screaming on the street corner.

[SirNitram]

I'm just going to say this: Drudge was pimping a Nickelodeon Kid's Poll on his site and proclaiming how terrified the Obama HQ was. An online, non-scientific poll, of people who can't vote.

[ray245]

Perhaps we should compile a list of news source to avoid? Fox News is one such news source, although I have no idea why did Yahoo! continue to treat Fox News as a credible news source.

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

Perhaps we should compile a list of news source to avoid? Fox News is one such news source, although I have no idea why did Yahoo! continue to treat Fox News as a credible news source.

Add Chycho to that list too, apparently.

Lesson Learned: RTFA before instaposting based on seeing a screaming headline.

[ray245]

I think we need to add 'The Sun' to the list as well. They have 'reported' many news without any sort of verification at all.

[Crown]

Respectively; if this is the proper thread could I have the following added to Einy's OP;

Who reads the papers?

From Yes, Prime Minister. It's a handy guide for judging the bias of anything posted from a British paper. And funny too!

[Force Lord]

This is a rather interesting site:

World War 4 Report

They basicaly debunk any irrational ideas, be it from neocons or what they call the idiot left (basically communists) and analyze news that that the mainstream media sometimes ignores.

EDIT: Eliminated the copy-pasted Site Mission section, so I would not look as promoting this site.

[Force Lord]

EDIT 2: Checked the site, and I found that it also subscribes under the anti-nuke bullshit. That's one flaw I've found up until now.

[TimothyC]

AFCEA Nightwatch, Prepared most weeknights by Editor John McCreary. A significant American slant, but a useful aggregator of global geo-political news.

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

Reddit for news found on the internet. There are hundreds of subreddits; Science and Politics being particularly noteworthy. World News is very enlightening as well.

[Force Lord]

EDIT 2: Checked the site, and I found that it also subscribes under the anti-nuke bullshit. That's one flaw I've found up until now.

EDIT 3 (Very belated): I meant anti-nuclear energy, if anyone misunderstood what I meant.

[Razorgeist]

Wasn't sure where this should go but Jon Stewert had Marc Theissen on the daily show last night.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/

You can check out the full 3 part intereview at the website. I think Jon should have been harder with him . Wasn't it effectivly debunked that water-boarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed stopped any further terrorist attacks?

[The Yosemite Bear]

yes, and we got better intel from him, before we violated international law at a rate of 46 times in one month.

[General Mung Beans]

Let's see here.

New York Times-The American newspaper and usually is a notch higher in detail than most other news sources. http://www.nytimes.com/

Los Angeles Times-Another American national newspaper. http://www.latimes.com/

The Economist-An international news periodical and largely beats Time in that respect. http://www.economist.com/

PBS NewsHour-The best television news show in America although it isn't updated much. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/

National Review-Centre-right periodical and often drives in some sense to conservatives (ie over the issue of the Federal Reserve) http://www.nationalreview.com/

[Zaune]

http://churnalism.com/

What is churnalism.com?

Churnalism.com is an independent, non-profit website built by the Media Standards Trust (charity number 1113680) to help the public distinguish between original journalism and ‘churnalism’.

...

How does churnalism.com work?

The site compresses all articles published on national newspaper websites, on BBC news, and Sky news online, into a series of numbers based on 15 character strings (using a hash function) and then stores them in a fast access database. When someone pastes in some text and clicks 'compare', the churn engine compresses the text entered and then searches for similar compressions (or 'common hashes'). If the engine finds any articles where the similarity is greater than 20%, then it suggests the article may be churn. Churnalism.com is powered off the back of the database of over three million compressed articles in journalisted.com.

In a nutshell, it's an adaptation of the technology used in anti-plagiarism software applied to news articles.

[Soontir C'boath]

http://www.aljazeera.com/ I suppose it can be said it is the BBC of the Arabic world.

[General Mung Beans]

http://welections.wordpress.com/

Excellent blog offering detailed demographic and geographic analysis of elections all over the world. One of my favourite websites of all time.