After reading and later listening to a speech by Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, I felt for a brief moment a feeling that had lain dormant within me for a long time–a sense of the greatness of America’s foundation.

What inspired this “special comment” from Keith was a speech by Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, in which Rumsfeld implies that his administration’s critics suffer from “moral or intellectual confusion about who or what is right or wrong”.

In a truly inspiring turn-around, Keith warns of leaders like Rumsfeld who expect everyone to “fall in line” without thoughtful dissent.

Here is Keith’s speech, straight from YouTube.

In case there was any doubt that electronic voting machines are a “potential risk” to our democracy, listen to the testimony of Clinton Curtis at a U.S. House Judiciary hearing in Ohio.

For those of you familiar with the 2004 vote fraud in Ohio, this may not come as a surprise to you: a short instructive video on How to Hack a Diebold Voting Machine. (There is a short advertisement prior to the 2-minute video.)

This vulnerability has been admitted by Diebold, although they would like to downplay its implications.

On a more positive note, I support BlackBoxVoting.org and Just6Dollars.org as two organizations that can make your vote matter. BlackBoxVoting exists to reduce or eliminate voter fraud, while Just $6 is on a campaign to extinguish the out-of-control influence that corporations are achieving in politics.

I’ve begun experimenting with the new Edge Rails code that includes built-in support for REST. (The code that was once in the simply_restful plugin is now a part of Edge Rails.) With the capability to generate multiple types of output per action, it has become more and more useful to test actions on the command-line using cURL. Here are some useful cURL parameters I’ve used:

• -X [action]: Allows you to specify an HTTP action such as GET, POST, PUT or DELETE.
  Example:

  curl -X DELETE http://localhost:3000/books/1

• -d [parameter]: Lets you set variables as if they were POSTed in a form to the URL. Note that this automatically makes the request a POST HTTP action type (no -X necessary).
  Example:

  curl -d "book[title]=Test” -d “book[copyright]=1998″
  http://localhost:3000/books

• -H [header]: Gives you the option of setting an HTTP header such as Content-Type or Accept. This is particularly useful for requesting text/xml as the Accept type.
  Example:

  curl -H "Accept: text/xml"
  http://localhost:3000/books/sections/1

Putting it all together, here’s a cURL command that updates the title of a Book object using the PUT action and expects an xml response:

curl -H "Accept: text/xml" -X PUT -d "book[title]=Testing Again”
http://localhost:3000/books/1