The Senate had teetered at 50 Democrats, 49 Republicans for most of Wednesday, with Virginia hanging in the balance.

Webb's victory ended Republican hopes of eking out a 50-50 split, with Dick Cheney, the vice president, wielding tie-breaking authority.

Earlier on Wednesday the Democrats had their victory confirmed in Montana, one of the two remaining poll results.

Jon Tester, the Democratic candidate, beat Conrad Burns, the incumbent Republican by fewer than 5,000 votes, according to US television networks.

Earlier Democrats had reclaimed the House of Representatives in the nation's midterm elections.

The party had picked up seats in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri and Rhode Island.

Jim Webb, a Vietnam veteran who once was a Republican, defeated incumbent George Allen in the bitterly contested Virginia race.

According to the Associated Press, Webb and Allen were separated by 7,236 votes with over 2.3 million counted. Virginia has had two statewide vote recounts in modern history, but both resulted in vote changes of no more than a few hundred votes.

An adviser to Allen, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Associated Press that the senator was disinclined to request a recount if the margin didn't change substantially within the next several hours, and that a concession speech was possible as early as Thursday.

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The result would leave the Senate with 49 Democrats and 49 Republicans. Two Independent senators, Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, will caucus with the Democrats.

A major upset

The defeat in Virginia was a major upset for a candidate who early in the year was talked about as a possible Republican leadership candidate in the coming years.

But the son of the Hall of Fame football coach of the same name courted controversy during his campaign, using an obscure racial slur to describe one of Webb's volunteers.

Later, he cited depictions of sex and war in novels written by Webb in the 1970s, as well as comments made by his opponent in the same decade about female naval officers, as evidence of his attitudes towards women.

Exit polls conducted in Virginia seemed to suggest that Webb won the women's vote by a sizeable margin.

Meanwhile, Republican incumbent Conrad Burns lost by about 3,000 votes to Democrat Jon Tester in a tight battle in Montana that was decided earlier Wednesday.

Problems with a voting machine in one county delayed the count.

(On Wednesday, Bush admitted he had lied to reporters because of political considerations.)

The move also came two days after an editorial ran in the Army-, Navy-, Airforce- and Marine Corps-Times newspapers calling for the Secretary's head. "When the nation's current military leaders start to break publicly with their defense secretary," the unusually blunt editorial argued, "then it is clear that he is losing control of the institution he ostensibly leads."

The administration hopes that the move will deflect criticism from its policies in Iraq, move the national discussion away from the Democrats' blow-out in the midterms, blunt any investigative zeal that Democrats might feel in their new majority position and, possibly, lay a trap for Democrats going into the next election cycle.

It's unlikely to work. Without a fundamental change in policy, the departure of "Rummy" is a piece of political theater, a transparently meaningless gesture made in an attempt to mollify a restless public.

It's meaningless because while the administration may have abandoned the phrase "stay the course" during the lead-up to the midterms -- it polled badly -- Bush has made it clear that he will continue the bloody occupation of Iraq and leave the mess for the next president to try to clean up (what's less clear is whether either the Iraqis or his own party will allow him to do so).

The Wall Street Journal's John Harwood said yesterday that Rumsfeld's departure won't be enough to change Americans' increasingly negative view of Bush's Iraq policy. "We have asked this question several times in our Journal/ NBC poll," he said on MSNBC, "and found it would be a symbolic gesture. Really, American people want to see results. They want to see casualties down..."

According to former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, co-author of the soon to be published book, The Impeachment of George W. Bush: A Practical Guide for Concerned Citizens, Rumsfeld was jettisoned primarily in an attempt to defuse increasing calls for investigation into the administration's conduct of the Iraq war and occupation. "The president thinks that Rumsfeld is the bad public face of the Iraq war," she told me by phone on Wednesday. "In the wake of elections that were a huge repudiation of the administration's policies, I think it's clear that Americans are angry with the corruption, with the direction the administration has taken, with the arrogance, and they threw Rumsfeld to the wolves."

Holtzman cited a recent Newsweek Poll that found a majority of Americans want investigations into Iraq contracting and the way the country was led into the war to be a "top priority" of the new Congress, and that a majority now favor calls for impeachment. She added: "I can't say for sure what the president was thinking, but it's possible that impeachment was explicitly on his mind."

It's also possible that the administration cut Rumsfeld loose in favor of former CIA Director Robert Gates, Bush's nominee to replace him, with the specific intention of provoking a bruising confirmation hearing. That would allow the Republicans to reinforce two of their favorite narratives about Democrats: that they're insufficiently belligerent to govern -- "soft on defense" -- and that Senate Democrats are "obstructionists," a key charge in the defeat of former Majority Leader Tom Daschle in 2004.

Because while it's possible that Bush thought the nomination of Bob Gates -- a long-time government official who's been through the confirmation process before -- would get a smooth sail through the Senate, the truth is that Gates will have a very hard time being confirmed, and he should. The reason is simple, and important to understand: Robert Gates is Donald Rumsfeld -- or at least a body double in experience, ideology and temperament.

Rumsfeld is a hawkish ideologue whose long career in government has been broken by dips into the private sector. He's known for his secrecy, his loyalty, his ability to win internal political fights and his eagerness to manipulate intelligence to support a desired policy objective. He has shown that he is not above breaking -- or at least stretching -- the law when he feels it's necessary to do so.

Gates has a remarkably similar profile. Like Rumsfeld, Gates served stints in the Nixon and Ford administrations -- he also advised Carter's hawkish National Security Advisor Zbigniew Bzrezinski and served on Bush 41's National Security Council. After his nomination by Ronald Reagan to head the CIA was blocked by the Senate in 1987, Gates eventually got the job in 1991 under the first Bush. According to Thomas Powers, writing in 1996 in the New York Review of Books, Gates is an "unusual figure" -- the first Director "to come out of the analytical side of the organization, which had been dominated for its first thirty years by the ethos of the covert operators of World War II."

Gates, like Rumsfeld, was a dedicated Cold Warrior. Powers recalls that during his 1987 confirmation hearing, Gates was accused by former CIA colleague Mel Goodman (who Gates called "one of my oldest friends in the Agency") and Harold Ford ("another old friend and colleague") of pressuring "CIA analysts to exaggerate Soviet involvement in the plot to kill Pope John Paul II and in international terrorism and ...suppress[ing] and ignor[ing] 'signs of the Soviet strategic retreat, including the collapse of the Soviet empire.'"

And like Rumsfeld -- whose picture warmly greeting Saddam Hussein in 1983 has become legendary -- Gates, who served on the Iraq Study Group headed by former Secretary of State James Baker, has a sordid past with Iraq and the deposed strongman.

In announcing his decision to vote against Gates' confirmation in 1991, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MASS) said that "the record also shows" Gates "was integrally involved with the secret sharing of intelligence to Iraq and our sharp tilt toward Iraq in its war with Iran. But Mr. Gates hid that action from Congress... It is important to keep in mind that this shift toward Iraq in its war with Iran began our ill-fated cozy relationship with Saddam Hussein."

But it was Gates' propensity to manipulate intelligence that really bothered the Massachusetts' Senator:

[Gates] quashed dissenting views and helped craft an inaccurate 1985 intelligence estimate that Soviet influence in Iran could soon grow... He personally insisted that State Department officials drop footnotes from the report which did not support his viewpoint. These actions had consequences far beyond mere intellectual debates. In recommending that United States allies be permitted to sell arms to Iran, the report helped lay the foundation for the ill-fated arms for hostages deal in Iran.

Iran-Contra, which followed the arms for hostages deal with Iran, is the source of Gates' worst baggage. In the 1980s, as the illegal arrangement was being put together, Gates was then-CIA Director William Casey's Chief of Staff. The Independent Counsel investigation of Iran-Contra found insufficient evidence to charge him with a crime, but that was in large part due to the refusal by Clair George, the CIA's former deputy director for operations, to cooperate with the investigation (George was indicted for his role in 1991).

Gates has denied knowledge of the Iran-Contra affair. But as Thomas Powers noted, "The problem, of course, is that Gates, working for Casey, North's enthusiastic backer, was in a very good position to know about [Iran-Contra] and a great deal else besides."

Gates' former colleague at the CIA, Tom Polgar, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1991. Powers recalls that "Polgar's testimony... [was] a careful detailing of Gates's passage through many meetings and encounters when even the furniture, Polgar argues, must have grasped what was going on."

And Gates is an ideologue. According to Ted Kennedy, "His public speeches actively promoted the Reagan doctrine and exaggerated Soviet advances." He added, in a comment that would describe Rummy and his Office of Special Plans to a tee: "Rather than an objective professional dedicated to ensuring that the President receives the best intelligence possible," Gates "became an enthusiastic promoter of President Reagan's policies."

As the CIA's Tom Polgar testified in 1991:

His proposed appointment as Director also raises moral issues. What kind of signal does his renomination send to the troops? Live long enough, your sins will be forgotten? Serve faithfully the boss of the moment, never mind integrity? Feel free to mislead the Senate-Senators forget easily? Keep your mouth shut-if the Special Counsel does not get you, promotion will come your way?'

Those questions are as appropriate today as they were 15 years ago.

And while the administration will portray the replacement of Rumsfeld with Bob Gates as a sign that it's responsive to criticism coming from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle -- as evidence of Bush's new-found desire to work with Congress as a partner -- it's hard to see the nomination of someone with such a checkered history as anything but a challenge to Congressional authority and a preemptive strike against the body's expected oversight of the Bush White House.

You can find copies of the VoteHere lobbying forms here

I can't get them to save to pdf, perhaps you can. Enter search terms in both "registrant" and "client" fields and put in terms "Rhoads" "Livingston" and "Votehere" (one at a time.). Then look at the gravy train while it was in the process of derailing American democracy.

I first became acquainted with VoteHere when I met a source, Dan Spillane, who is the wonderful guy that identified the Diebold source code modules for me after I found the Diebold files. He is the person who introduced me, and subsequently everyone else, to the odd role of The Election Center and R. Doug Lewis in the elections industry.

Spillane filled me in on The Livingston Group, VoteHere lobbyists, run by Bob Livingston -- the fellow that Hustler publisher Larry Flynt outed during the Bill Clinton blow job days. Larry Flynt offered a million dollars to anyone who could out a Republican congressman for adultery, and out popped peccadillos by Livingston.

Livingston couldn't live that one down, so he resigned his post as House Speaker-Elect and became a lobbyist -- but that's not all! He also launched a group called "Center for Democracy" which was going to "monitor elections." This group also featured several good old boys from the tobacco industry and some mining companies.

Former VoteHere test engineer Dan Spillane was looking into all this because he had been fired after he questioned the certification process on a touch-screen system in which he had identified 250 flaws. It was way back in November 2002 that Spillane told me, "The voting machine industry is a house of cards. And the certification and testing process is the bottom card in the house of cards."

But don't run out of the room to take a shower yet. There's more.

VoteHere, a company shilling cryptographic solutions and filled with NSA types (another director was Admiral Bill Owens), for some reason claims they were unable to prevent themselves from being hacked. In this alleged hack, VoteHere claims that someone stole their source code. Said source code was offered to me, an obvious attempt at entrapment which I refused to touch with a 10-foot pole.

Nevertheless, VoteHere claimed to the newspapers that they had supposedly "tracked" the hacker and had identified the hacker as an activist in the election reform community.

For some reason, it was decided that I should be investigated for this "hack" of VoteHere -- nevermind that I can't remember how to change the password on my own laptop. Therefore I was interviewed by the Secret Service several times about this. Curiously, they never seemed to ask any questions about VoteHere, only my role in finding the Diebold files and publishing the Diebold memos.

This nonsense eventually culminated in a gag order and a letter from the U.S. Attorney to appear in front of a federal grand jury with information on all the visitors to the Black Box Voting Web site. (As if they couldn't get that in less dramatic ways in post-Patriot Act America).

Attorney Lowell Finley went to bat for me on this. A reporter named George Howland from the Seattle Weekly got wind of it. When it hit the press, the investigation stopped.

VoteHere never sold any voting machines that I can find, but apparently did set up some deals to embed its cryptography into some voting systems. We found memos in the Diebold trash about VoteHere's crypto-crap, and Maryland Director of Elections Linda Lamone shows up in VoteHere-related letters. Sequoia Voting Systems signed an agreement with VoteHere, but its not clear to me whether they ever did anything about it.

Robert Gates stepped away from VoteHere shortly before he showed up in Chapter 8 of my book, Black Box Voting, in a short bit about the VoteHere company history. You can read that here: http://www.blackboxvoting.org/bbv_chapter-8.pdf

I don't know about you, but I'd rather use a paper, pencil, and count by hand at the polling place than have former CIA director Robert Gates fooling around with my vote.

But that's just me.

"I'm going to give it a fair and fresh look," said Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, which is expected to consider the nomination soon.

Gates, 63, who directed the CIA from 1991-93, was first nominated as CIA director in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan but withdrew amid questions over his and the CIA's role in the secret sales of arms to Iran and the diversion of profits to Nicaragua's contra rebels.

In Senate hearings in 1991, when Gates was renominated as CIA chief by Bush's father, he admitted mistakes in what became known as the "Iran-Contra" affair and said he should have done more to get at the truth. The Senate confirmed him 64-31.

Levin opposed Gates 15 years ago. "I think it had to do, in part, with his recollection, or failure of recollection on Iran-Contra," Levin said in telephone call with reporters.

But "a lot of time has passed," Levin said. "His views and recollections may have become sharper or they may have changed and I want to consider those views in a very fair way."

Sen. Joe Biden, a Delaware Democrat who also opposed Gates in 1991, said he had done so to make a point about how the Reagan administration had "politicized" intelligence.

During their stay in Poland, the delegation is to hold talks with journalists, politicians and representatives of non-governmental organizations.

The delegation, sent by a European Parliament special commission in charge of looking into the alleged CIA prisons, earlier visited Washington, Berlin, London and Budapest.

The Polish authorities denied that the CIA had established any secret prisons in the country to imprison suspected terrorists. Last November, the CIA was accused of conducting illegal flights and running secret prisons in Europe.

Dick Marty, a member of the European Council, said in a report in July, 14 European nations had agreed that the CIA could transfer suspected terrorists or operate secret jails on their territories.

Before she was arrested, she joined the protesters in hailing the outcome of Tuesday's elections and chanting "Stop the War" outside the gate.

"It was taking too long for them to decide whether to accept them or not, so we just delivered them," said Sheehan, who waited about 15 minutes with other protesters before tossing the petitions over the fence.

The petitions opposed use of military force to resolve the dispute over Iran's nuclear program.

Sheehan, 49, and other grieving families met with Bush about two months after her son died, before reports of faulty prewar intelligence surfaced and caused her to speak out. She has tried repeatedly to speak with the president again, including a 26-day vigil last year outside Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas.

Wednesday's protest came as Republicans lost control of the House and the White House announced the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

"He's being offered as a sacrificial lamb," Sheehan said.

He said that Iran's response to the package of incentives offered by the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany was "logical."

The rejection of the logical response under pressure from Washington showed that they did not want to "logically settle the issue" through continued negotiations, Larijani said.

"The Islamic Republic of Iran will respond appropriately to any move by the West against it," he said.

Larijani said that he would visit Russia later this week for talks on his country's nuclear energy program.

The United States has been seeking to impose sanctions on Iran through the UN Security Council on the grounds that Tehran is developing a nuclear-weapon program under the guise of a civilian-use program.

Iran has insisted that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes and voiced hope for talks on the nuclear standoff. But the Islamic Republic rejected a prerequisite of suspending nuclear work for such talks.

In a draft presented earlier this month, the United States reluctantly agreed to European proposals to exempt Bushehr from sanctions, in attempts to placate Moscow and gain its support for sanctions meant to punish Tehran's refusal to freeze uranium enrichment.

But U.N. diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the Russian amendments had not been officially announced, said the Kremlin wanted no mention whatsoever of Bushehr. That stance was meant to reflect Russia's view that the plant should not be linked to international concerns that Tehran might be trying to develop nuclear arms.

Much of Moscow's 11-page document consists of passages in the original Western draft struck through by Russian negotiators, reflecting Moscow's insistence on reducing sanctions to the minimum needed to directly target enrichment, which can generate both nuclear energy or be used to make the fissile core of warheads.

John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said he did not want to discuss specifics of the dispute but told reporters: "There are a lot of differences, no doubt about it."

"Obviously we've got to get some direction from capitals, given the disparity," he said, adding that the five permanent U.N. Security Council members - the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France - planned another meeting later in the week.

Other senior Security Council diplomats also acknowledged the divide.

"Clearly, I think in a number of difficult areas the differences cannot be bridged, so I believe there should be more reflections in the capitals," China's Ambassador Wang Guangya said Tuesday.

In contrast to the Russian amendments, the European draft resolution orders all countries to ban the supply of material and technology that could contribute to Iran's nuclear and missile programs and to impose a travel ban and asset freeze on companies, individuals and organizations involved in those programs.

It would exempt from restrictions the initial nuclear power plant being built by the Russians at Bushehr but not the nuclear fuel needed for the reactor. It also would limit assistance to Iran by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, to food, agriculture, medical and humanitarian programs. And it would ban countries from teaching or training Iranians in disciplines that would contribute to Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

Sharpening the dispute with Russia, the United States has proposed amendments that would strengthen the measures proposed by Britain and France.

In September, Russia agreed to ship fuel to Bushehr by March 2007, adding to concerns of the U.S. and others over Tehran's nuclear ambitions.

Moscow's draft also was lenient on Arak, an Iranian heavy water research reactor scheduled for completion in 2009.

One of the byproducts of heavy-water reactors is plutonium, which can be used in building nuclear weapons. In the Western draft, the council "decides that Iran shall suspend work" on the Arak facility. The Russian version instead "calls upon Iran to reconsider" its construction.

Similarly, while the Western draft "decides ... that Iran shall without delay" implement its Additional Protocol with the IAEA, the Russian version only "urges" Iran to implement the agreement that would allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to more thoroughly probe Tehran's nuclear program.