New Hampshire Recount: Already Worth It w/ poll
is frontpaged in a provocative post on Brad Friedman's site, www.bradblog.com,
with the poll results from earlier today reproduced.  
(Scroll down the bradblog page, it's now the second item.)

In case you don't know bradblog, it's a site devoted to election integrity news.  Brad has been reporting on election integrity stories since November 2004, his bio is here.  He's now doing daily reports on the New Hampshire recount.

Citing the poll results in rjones2818's diary -- 86% as of Brad's writing, now 87%, of those responding to the poll think that the NH recount is a good idea -- Brad questions whether Kos is out of touch with Kossacks on the issue of election integrity, and asks whether we and Kos deserve to be called 'progressive.'  Which is not a question we should be afraid of asking, I think.  But my favorite part of Brad's piece is in the comment section, reproduced below.

There's that nice Chevron ad again, well . . . .

Here's a nice Chevron story that dates back to at least 1972, when Texaco (since acquired by Chevron) started drilling in the home of the indigenous Cofan tribe in Ecuador.

The Cofan tribe is still pursuing justice and the clean-up of oil residue polluting their land and water, now via a $12 billion lawsuit against Chevron.

As recently reported for the BBC by Greg Palast -- you can see the video here

The Cofan’s leader, Emergildo Criollo, tells Palast that when Texaco Oil, now part of Chevron, came to the village in 1972, it obtained permission to drill by offering the Indians candy and cheese. The indigenous folk threw the funny-selling cheese into the jungle.

Criollo says his three-year son died from oil contamination after, "He went swimming, then began vomiting blood."

Saw the Chevron ad this am, so as the 59% majority voted in my poll recently, here's a bit of news on Chevron.

The Chevron Richmond Refinery in Richmond, California, (map) just north of Berkeley, is one of the oldest and largest refineries in the United States.   Built in 1902, (wonder how much it's been updated since...) the refinery sits on nearly 3,000 acres of land. To refine its capacity of 87.6 million barrels of crude oil per year  – 240,000 barrels a day – the refinery produces over two million pounds of waste a year.  These stats are from the Chevron website.
And what else?

According to Burmacampaign.org:

Since its 2005 takeover of Unocal, US oil giant Chevron has been one of the joint venture partners developing the Yadana offshore gas field in Burma, which earns the military regime millions of dollars.

It's unforgivable that both The New York Times and the Washington Post persist in misreporting the key Iraq oil law benchmark.  These two leading print news sources, with the resources to have full-time reporters throughout Iraq and in Washington, continue to superficially describe the oil law benchmark as a law 'ensuring the equitable distribution of energy resources' (the New York Times today) (see pop-up chart, Iraqi Progress on Benchmarks) and "a law governing the distribution of oil revenue, an area of deep division among Iraqi factions"  (The Washington Post today)

These descriptions are misleading and give us no indication as to why . . .

Visits by top Bush administration brass to Baghdad in the past 2 weeks have been billed as strong pressure urging Maliki to make 'political progress' in  his government, and to get a consensus among Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites on oil-revenue sharing so that the new oil law can be passed by the Iraqi Congress, and a key 'benchmark' made.  All sounds very reasonable.  You can read for yourself:
NYTimes June 11:  Admiral Fallon, top American commander for the Middle East
NYT June 12: Deputy Secy of State Negroponte
NYT June 15:  Defense Secy Robert Gates

But what's the other view? Two Iraqi Union leaders - the General Secretary of the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions, and the President of the Iraqi Electrical Utility Workers Union - will be speaking in NYC tonight.  I'm sure they'll have much to say about this benchmark so mightily desired by the Bush administration, and approved by the Democrats in the recent supplemental funding bill.

Palast, who uncovered the Bush/Cheney 'caging list' scam in October 2004 for the BBC
met with Conyers yesterday.  Among the matters they discussed - Monica Goodling's testimony about Griffin's role in the caging lists, which can be found at judiciary.house.gov.

Dalia Lithwick at Slate reported yesterday on the growing scandal, linking to RFK Jr's comments on Palast's investigation of the scheme.

And late yesterday - Griffin resigns!  

So here's one for the good guys.  Wonder what excuse Rove will offer?  That Griffin was needed to run Thompson's campaign?

With only last-minute notice, Bush is coming to New York today, to visit a charter school in Harlem and then go on to an RNC fundraiser at the Park Avenue home of Stephen Schwartzman, Blackstone CEO.

Details below.

At this point in the US, there is no independent exit poll conducted for election verification purposes.  The main national exit poll is commissioned by a media consortium (ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX, AP) and is used for commentary and analysis, not for verification of the official count.  

The consortium releases only the overall results, which have been adjusted to match up with the official count.  The consortium owns, and does not release, the base data from the exit poll (including precinct-level data).

The Vote Count Protection Project is trying offer an alternative, and is planning a pilot poll for November 7, with the goal of developing a national election verification exit poll for 2008.  They are working with long-time pollster Kenneth F. Warren of St. Louis University and the Warren Poll.  Steven F. Freeman of U Penn is a co-director of the Project.  For the do-it-yourself version, see below.