This morning, in a local news article on NPR, the anchor said something like this:

Centre County has decided to replace their touch screen voting machines with optical scanning voting machines. Critics believe that the touch screen voting machines lack a paper trail.

No. Critics don't believe that they lack a paper trail, these machines DO lack a paper trail. The manufacturers state it quite clearly.

Critics think that the lack of a paper trail could potentially be exploited to steal an election.

But that's the state of media today, instead of debating something based on the facts they actually confuse the facts so that the public can't even get informed.

My wife and I went on a whirlwind New England/New Jersey concert tour this weekend. We went to see "The Mighty, Mighty Bosstones" and the "Dropkick Murphys" in Portland, ME; Pawtucket, RI and Sayreville, NJ.

We had a lot of fun, and the Bosstones were great as usual. They played a lot of their older songs as well as the newer favorites. They closed the show with an amazing ska/punk rendition of "The Impossible Dream" (from Man of La Mancha, one of my favoritie musicals), ended with a huge Barack Obama banner with the words "DREAM" underneath. It was a huge hit overall, but there were a few boos, of course.

Which I find odd, actually. Both the Bosstones and the Murphys sing songs about collective action and the uselessness of war and fighting...and the benefits of drinking, of course. It would seem logical, then, that the crowd would be somewhat predisposed to Barack Obama.

But the reason was obvious: A significant section of the Murphys fans came from the sports crowd. A little history: The Dropkick Murphys rose to prominence after releasing a song called "Tessie" specifically addressing the Red Sox curse, after singing it for a year the Red Sox won a world series. Now a Murphys song can regularly be heard at the end of any Red Sox victory game on television. The result is that there is now a Celtic Punk band that many sports fans have embraced - the Dropkick Murphys.

As my wife puts it "These are the guys who were beating up the punks in high school." It seems very true. They stride in with their head high and slightly angled upward, chest out, arms (when not holding a few beers) angled outward as if they had just finished pumping iron. All with very serious faces and none of them with any patience for the more lighthearted bosstones fans with their plaid clothes and (often) funny hats.

Which leads to an odd conclusion for my wife and I: While we love the Murphys songs (she more than I), we will probably not go to another Murphys concert. The fans are just jerks ... or, at least, a large enough percentage of them are jerks to make it less fun.

...unless the bosstones are playing. They're just too freaking great to miss.

Three men got under my skin this week.

Mike Norman, down in Marietta Georgia, decides to sell a shirt with a cartoon monkey and "Obama ‘08" under it. He claims he isn’t racist, he just thought it was funny. But we all know that he’s a racist, right? I mean, we aren’t fools here, are we? That’s a pretty obvious example in this day and age.

More locally, Tunkhannock Borough Mayor Norm Ball spread the racist and untrue allegations against Obama that everyone by now has seen in their email box or heard in whispers from coworkers who are either liars or easily duped.

Is Norm Ball racist? That’s a bit more difficult, because he could just be a buffoon that actually thinks it helps Hillary Clinton to push this erroneous information. Perhaps he thinks that getting people to believe a litany of lies is worth it if it gets them to vote for "his" candidate. Or maybe it’s even worse – perhaps he is actually so incurious and gullible as to just believe whatever anyone tells him. If this is true, Norm should know that if he gets a phone call that asks him for his credit card number and/or social security number he should not give it to them. That’s a scam, sir. Kind of like the Obama smear.

Then there’s columnist/radio host Steve Corbett, who insists that if Hillary isn’t the Democratic candidate, then he isn’t going to vote for anyone. His reasoning is that (a) he believes Hillary is a stronger candidate, (b) he doesn’t like that his personal feelings aren’t being taken into consideration by the DNC. On his show, he is attempting to drum up the support of having Hillary Democrats not vote en masse to show their displeasure.

Barack Obama has won more pledged delegates, more states, and will probably win the popular vote by the time this is done. Obama is not asking Hillary to exit the race. Most of the folks demanding Hillary step down are media pundits. Even if Corbett believes that Hillary is a stronger candidate, the truth is that the American Democratic voters will have chosen Obama by any measure of the statistic. I have not heard Corbett claim that McCain is a stronger candidate than Obama, only that he prefers Hillary. If Hillary isn’t an option come election day, what’s his point in not voting?

The other thing is Corbett’s problem with the DNC. The first thing I wonder is where was he when these rules were created decades ago? What complaints did he have with these rules when Bill Clinton got the nomination twice? Superdelegates have been around for a long time.

Or maybe it’s the Michigan/Florida debate. Hillary – who originally agreed not to campaign in either state and also agreed that their votes would not count – now wants all of her delegates seated. This despite Obama’s name not being on the Michigan ballot (40% voted for "someone else") and despite the fact that many democrats didn’t vote in these primaries because they were told it wouldn’t matter.

But honestly, Obama can win even if Hillary gets her delegates from Michigan and Florida – so what will Corbett’s reason be then? Ultimately, it would end up, I hope, being "I don’t like him enough to vote for him."

That’s a fair stance. Though as I mentioned before Obama’s position on most of the issues isn’t much different than Hillary’s…and Corbett is concerned about the issues, right?

If not, the alternative is that Corbett is not voting for someone either because the DNC did things that made him mad, or because he only votes for candidates that fit 100% into his world view. It seems to me that that couldn’t be the reason, as Corbett usually seems to understand that we are living in the real world, where bureaucratic systems don’t work exactly as we wish, and where no one presidential candidate could possibly embody everything every individual desires.

(As someone who’s preferred candidate is almost always voted out fairly early, I understand that we have to go with the best choice available, and not stamp my feet and whine until the entire system is destroyed so that I can get what I want.)

I imagine these three men – the racist, the partisan politician and the whiner – are just espousing old ideologies.

Back when skin color was considered more important than the content of one’s character, Mike Norman could probably have been governor of Georgia. The fact that people are still proud to walk into his bar should be enough to give us pause.

If we continue with the old view that it’s more important to attack an opponent than it is to represent your constituency with dignity and honesty, Norm Ball need never worry about losing his mayoral seat.

If there can be no change in the United States without obeying completely the demands of the Baby Boomers – who have dominated the political landscape for decades - then Steve Corbett and the rest of his inflexible peers will – either purposely or tacitly – bring about more needless wars, more horrible economic decisions and more disastrous environmental policies. Because their need to be obeyed outweigh the needs of the country.