falling supply of crops will drive up the price of gold and cause inflation.

This is false as the printing of money out of thin air causes inflation. It would be more accurate to look at the price of food compared to gold or oil or better yet a basket of commodities. The reason these LDC countries get hit with price inflation the hardest is the inflation(currency creation) is done by the first world and the newly created dollars take a while to circulate out to LDCs. Think of the reverse, the people who get this money first benefit from higher then average salaries and company valuations (government contractors, banks, etc.)

My conclusion after reading this. They didn't pay enough on lobbyists. This of course is scary once you see how much they already pay for lobbying and how fast its grown. Here's the question I pose to you. Is Google, the company of do no evil, doing evil by putting this many resources towards these efforts or is that just par for the course when you get that big?

I think there is a good chance there was no deliberate fraud in NH. Exit polls matched up and a few misreported numbers do not make a smoking gun. What I think the tech community of Slashdot does need to discuss is the fact we have a closed proprietary system used to count votes that offer no means to audit the results. Search Youtube for the Dan Rather special on voting machine fraud and you'll see holes in the system that probably half of Slashdot's readership could manipulate to alter results. Diebold and other proprietary systems are a step backwards not forward. A voting system is a simple piece of technology. Why not have an open source system designed by some independent group that can audited by anyone and produce a paper slip that can be used for recounts?