On the surface it appears that the latest Bin Laden video has had little effect on the presidential contest. But I've noticed a swelling chorus on rightwing sites pointing to a purported re-translation of a key passage on the tape that supposedly has the al-Qaeda head specifically threatening to attack any American state that votes for Bush.

Here's the translation of Bin Laden's conclusion, from the Washington Post:

"I tell you in all truth that your security is not in the hands of Kerry, nor Bush, nor al-Qa'ida. No, your security is in your own hands. And every state that doesn't play with our security, has automatically guaranteed its own security." [my emphasis]

And here it is from MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute, a translation service with a distinctly rightwing tilt: "Any U.S. state that does not toy with our security automatically guarantees its own security." Note the insertion of the adjective "U.S."

BlackBoxVoting reports that there's evidence that an election in King County, Washington, was hacked 6 weeks ago. The site urges election officials to unplug the modems from the voting machines now:

There is no down side to removing the modems. Simply drive the vote cartridges from each polling place in to the central vote-counting location by car, instead of transmitting by modem. “Turning off” the modems may not be sufficient. Disconnect the central vote counting server from all modems, INCLUDING PHONE LINES, not just Internet.

Despite cautions against leaking exit poll data before polls have closed, Slate has made an editorial decision to publish what they've got, and Jack Schafer is posting updates, including (at the moment) Kerry barely ahead in Florida and Ohio, Bush slightly ahead in Nevada and North Carolina, Kerry taking New Mexico and Bush taking Colorado.

Meanwhile, Zogby is projecting a solid electoral margin for Kerry and a slight popular edge for Bush.

Dave Farber's list has circulated a message from an anonymized someone citing the "growing evidence of major problems with electronic voting machines." The msg points to an AP story, and to reports on BlackBoxVoter.ORG and BlackBoxVoter.COM.

According to Daily Caucus, Senator-elect John Thune of South Dakota paid two bloggers, Jon Lauck and Jason Van Beek, $35,000 over a five month period:

Nowhere on [the] "Daschle v. Thune" [weblog] was there a disclaimer that he was being paid $5,200 per month by a candidate.... These guys spent every day attacking Daschle and promoting the "Rock Star" Thune. They had perfect timing on issues like the last minute Daschle lawsuit. How could they have known? Because Dick Wadhams had hired them! Lauck admitted that he had access to information he wouldn't have otherwise.

The heart of the last panel of the day, which was focused on how the Internet affected the outcome of Election 2004, was in the divergent presentations from Zack Exley and Chuck Defeo, who had parallel jobs running the Kerry and Bush Internet campaigns.

Exley was a tad defensive, given the complaints from the left that Kerry's online effort was too top-down and fundraising-obsessed and didn't do enough fostering of grassroots conversation or power. He parried those critiques by pointing out that they used the net to get thousands of people on the ground talking to voters, and given the Bush campaign's expected fundraising advantage, they felt it important to raise the money needed to keep pace in the ad wars. "We did listen to our base," he noted, describing how the campaign solicited stories from its supporters on how they had been affected by the Bush economy. "We got 100,000 responses which were put into a database. So when you saw people standing at a Kerry rally telling their life stories, those were real people telling real stories," he said.

Quoting from Editor: Myself - Hoder, No more blogging and net-socializing:

Friends in Iran, journalists and technicians, are saying that judiciary officials have ordered all major ISP to filter all blogging services including PersianBlog, BlogSpot, Blogger, BlogSky, and even BlogRolling. They have also ordered to filter Orkut, Yahoo Personal and some other popular dating and social networking websites.

Joi Ito posted this question about Six Apart's two hosted blog services:

Anyone know if TypePad or LiveJournal are being blocked? Is Google doing anything about this?

...and then this update from the #joiito irc channel on freenode:

[Catspaw] Joi: Livejournal and Typepad both accessible form the major Iranian ISPs

In a post called Ethics, Kos addresses the recent Zephyr / Dean / WSJ / Armstrong-Williams-equivalency flap:

So to recap, if I write about something in which I hold a financial stake, I will disclose it. If I don't, then it's nobody's business. If other bloggers follow that rule, then great. If they don't, then great. If they have their own rules, then great. I could care less. This talk about ethics bores me, so I'm done discussing it.

As for the academic weenies -- I've told them to go to hell, I've given them a middle finger... that should do the trick. For now.

Rick Heller has an important post about a guy named Ricky Vandal 'taking' the name 'New Democrat' for his blog despite the protestations of a blogger who already used the name 'New Democrat'. Vandal claims that it's too late to change the name of the blog because people have linked to it. This is obviously a transparent excuse, because it turns out he's a right-wing operative with no respect for copyright or honesty. And yet Instapundit, Andrew Sullivan, and Wizbang approvingly link to him, juicing his traffic and google ranking.

This is pollution of public discourse, informal fraud perpetrated by the highest members of the online right-wing echo chamber. I'm in a conversation about the nature of our partisan wars, and how they are really centered around control over the public's right to participate politically. The strategy of the right is not to argue, but to pollute discourse so that the public has no choice but to delegate its decision-making role to a small group.

Last week, I had the opportunity to join PDF contributor Brian Reich on a panel on blogging, media, and campaigns at a conference organized by Campaigns & Elections Magazine.

I left with a lot to think about, but one thing that's stuck in my head is a raft of questions about how blogging - especially within active communities or so-called blogswarms has changed the field and demands of opposition research.

It's always been an iron law in political campaigns that not only is research on your opponent valuable - but research on your own candidate is critical. In the wake of the Dan Rather affair and the Jeff Gannon/James Guckert story - political campaigns should take notice - you cannot and will not hide anything anymore. You cannot assume that your opponent simply won't find that embarrassing picture or boneheaded quote from the bombastic column you wrote in college - and the most important part? Your opponent won't have to dig it up themselves. If they have even a semblance of a netroots community close to them, the enterprising Googler will ferret it out, just for fun.