We're leaving for a trip to New York City tomorrow morning. We'll be spending three days seeing the sights of most of Manhattan and part of Brooklyn when we go see They Might Be Giants on Friday.

Here are some of the things I'll be thinking about while flying:

• Whatever happened to Haiti? Could or could not John Kerry knock George Bush completely off-guard in the debates if he responded to a terrorism/democracy question by talking about Haiti?
• Conventional wisdom right now is that Karl Rove may have made a mistake by scheduling the Republican Convention so late, that Bush may be in too big a hole by then to climb out. However, openly claiming that they expect to be down 15 points after the Democratic Convention was brilliant. No modern convention can provide that type of bounce, not with the broadcast networks taking entire nights off of covering it. The post-Convention spin, no matter what the actual bounce is, will be that Kerry didn't meet the expectations.
• You think it's bad that Georgian voting machines went down as soon as they went up? Miami-Dade County, FL, lost the results of the 2002 gubernatorial primaries. The machines used in these elections were not backed up until over a year later, some months after the results were lost due to a series of "crashes." Look, I am by no means an expert in systems design or computer security, but I am former professional network adminstrator and a high-level user of any number of computerized devices. The simple fact of the matter is that the people designing and implementing these systems either don't have the first clue what they're doing or are malaciously attacking our system of open democracy. Please go to Verified Voting to find out where your Congressional representatives stand on this issue, and let them know they need to be on the right side of it.