Voting Machines Are Insecure Says Government Group

    Here we come folks! Remember those inept voting machines that we all love so dearly?  The National Institute of Standards and Technology has issued a report saying that the machines can't be made secure.                                                                                                                  In a report hailed by critics of electronic voting, NIST said that voting systems should allow election officials to recount ballots independently from a voting machine's software. The recommendations endorse "optical-scan" systems in which voters mark paper ballots that are read by a computer and electronic systems that print a paper summary of each ballot, which voters review and elections officials save for recounts.

  From WaPo

A Paltry Pay Raise For Federal employees

About 1.8 million federal employees would receive a 1.7 percent increase in their basic pay and a 0.5 percent average increase in their locality pay next year under a plan that President Bush sent to Congress yesterday, administration officials said.

    This would be the smallest pay raise that the federal employees have had in 18 years!  Of course, the percentage that they get will depend on where they happen to be living. New York  area employees would get the highest increase at 3.02 percent while  Washington-Baltimore area would get 2.64. the rest would get 1.81 percent.

    That is par for the course is it not? The Senators and the rest of the dopes have gotten much more in their raises every year and we all know that other than  kissing Bush's ass, they have done nothing worth mentioning. Yet the real workers in our government are reduced to the scrapes. there's a surprise!

      Here is the story from WaPo