The new statewide database of registered voters contains as many as 77,000 dead people on its rolls, and as many as 2,600 of them have cast votes from the grave, according to a Poughkeepsie Journal computer-assisted analysis.
A Swede who delights in giving speeding cameras the finger while driving past at high velocity in a car without license plates has been caught.
The man, who has been recorded three times while giving the camera the finger at a speed high enough to qualify for automatic loss of license was taken by police on the E6 highway near Sarpsborg on Sunday night.
Foreign Affairs Chairman Richard Lugar, R-Indiana, with an 88 ACU rating, could yield to Joseph Biden, D-Delaware, with an eight.
On Intelligence, Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, who earned zeros from the ADA and AFL-CIO, might swap with West Virginia Democrat Jay Rockefeller, who received 100 and 79 from those groups.
Today's GOP House speaker, majority leader, and the chairmen of Ways and Means, Budget, Appropriations, Judiciary, International Relations and Intelligence average a 91 ACU rating. Their Democratic counterparts score seven. Conversely, compare the GOP's average ADA rating of four with a 95 for these Democrats.
Syracuse University professor Arthur C. Brooks is about to become the darling of the religious right wing in America — and it’s making him nervous.
The child of academics, raised in a liberal household and educated in the liberal arts, Brooks has written a book that concludes religious conservatives donate far more money than secular liberals to all sorts of charitable activities, irrespective of income.
In the book, to be released next month, he cites extensive data analysis to demonstrate that values advocated by conservatives — from church attendance to two-parent families to the Protestant work ethic and a distaste for government-funded social services — make conservatives more generous than liberals.
Casey was three dimensional and had hopes and dreams. He wanted to finish college and teach elementary school. He wanted to marry and have babies. I wanted him to marry and have babies. I wanted to hold his children and spoil them and love them like a grandmother should.
I am sorry that the leader of our once great nation is so callous towards the people whose lives he has destroyed. If one agrees with President Chavez of Venezuela, or not, it is inherently evident in our country and the world that we should agree with him when he says democracy is not imposed by "bombs and Marines." Democracy rises from the people. Great Britain did not go to war with our forebears to impose democracy, but to stop it.
Mona Shazli, Presenter: Sheikh Safwat Higazi is one of the most well-known people to appear on TV who talks about religious matters and fatwas. He is one of the most well-known preachers, and he has a show on Al-Nas TV.
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He said, among other things, that if he saw an Israeli on the street, in Egypt, he would kill him. This may give the impression of being a fatwa to kill any Israeli Jew walking down the street.
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Safwat Higazi: I did not call upon people to kill Israelis in the streets. I never said such a thing.
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When I said what I said, I was dreaming a beautiful dream, which I hope will come true, and that we all agree upon it. I dreamt that we are the Arab Islamic States, not just Egypt, Lebanon, and Palestine. I was truly dreaming that we are the Arab Islamic States. Get a map of the Arab homeland, and erase the borders... Or maybe these can be borders between counties or states, like the USA, in which 49 [sic] states were united into one country. I had a dream that we were one country, called the Arab Islamic States. The capital of this country is Egypt, and the president of Egypt and its government head this country. This is the dream I dreamed.
Producers and fans of Italian Prosecco are up in arms over plans by an Austrian company to market the sparkling white wine in a can.
The wine in a can is called Rich Prosecco and American heiress and jetsetter Paris Hilton has been hired to be the product's pitch girl.
Makers of quality Prosecco, which is produced in the northeast zones of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene, are very worried that the reputation of their wine will suffer from the marketing of an inferior product.
We applaud the ACLU’s recent fundraising successes, but they cannot compensate for or justify persistent breaches of principle or the abandonment of honesty when those breaches are revealed. The ACLU now stands exposed, and widely ridiculed, for repeatedly acting in contempt of its own core principles, and for chilling and even attempting to prohibit dissent within its own ranks.
Over the past three years, these breaches of principle include the ACLU’s approval of grant agreements that restrict speech and associational rights; efforts by management to impose gag rules on staff and to subject staff to email surveillance; a proposal to bar ACLU board members from publicly criticizing the ACLU; and informal campaigns to purge the ACLU of its internal critics.
All of these breaches, as well as others, violate the ACLU’s historic commitment to free speech. We take little comfort from the fact that some were reversed after bad publicity and donor complaints.
When you call yourselves the “Christian Coalition” and savagely attack members of Congress for their point of view, implicit in that attack is the message that those who disagree have taken an un-Christian position.
In recent election seasons, many preachers have proclaimed not the Good News, but the Bad. They have told faithful members of their congregations that they cannot be Christians.
"Christians," they declare from the pulpit and beyond, "cannot be Democrats!"
We also prayed together before meals. I don't recall us ever eating at home without saying what Dad called "Grace" or Mother called "The Blessing." Mother and Dad, having been through the Depression, always were thankful. And they knew Whom to thank. My parents knew that they and our family and many neighbors had survived the Depression through the grace of God. And, quite frankly, through the policies of the Democratic Party.
A SENIOR German intelligence official has arrived in Beirut in an attempt to mediate a prisoner exchange between Israel and Lebanon, an issue that threatens to rekindle hostilities unless speedily resolved.
Ernst Uhrlau, head of Germany's foreign intelligence service, BND, was involved in the last such swap two years ago, when Israel released 429 Arab prisoners for an Israeli businessman captured by Hezbollah and the bodies of three soldiers.
When we say 'this is a fact' we then imply a certain ability of the fact to 'stand up to' a wide range of different kinds of testing. Thus, the fact is established, i.e. it is shown to be stable, in the sense that it is not liable to collapse, or to be nullified at any moment, in a subsequent observation of the general sort that has already been carried out. Of course this stability is only relative, because the fact is always being tested again and again, both in ways that are familiar and in new ways that are continually being explored. So it may be refined, modified, and even radically changed, through further observation, experiment, and experience. But in order to be a 'real fact', it evidently has, in this way, to remain constantly valid, at least in certain contexts or over a certain period of time.
Unlike The Washington Post, which has put much of its editorial and business energies into dominating its local market, the Times's strategy—a doomsday scenario, foreseeing a one-newspaper nation, a last-man-standing paper—has been to make the paper national. Hence, The New York Times is no longer principally a metropolitan paper. With a daily circulation of 260,000 in the five boroughs, it's no longer even creditably a New York paper. (Its two tabloid competitors, the Daily News and the New York Post, have far more readers in New York City.) It's an Everyman suburban daily.
As a rule of thumb, if you can’t pitch your company in ten slides or pitch yourself in one page, your idea is stupid and you suck, respectively.Any questions?
Warner, the world's fourth-largest music company, is in the final stages of securing technical licenses that will enable it to sell a bundle of music and extra features on a single DVD, according to people familiar with the matter. The DVD would include a music album that plays in both stereo and surround-sound on a standard DVD player -- plus video footage that plays on a DVD player or a computer. There will also be song remixes, ring tones, photos and other digital extras that can be accessed on a computer.
The company plans to make the new format available to its subsidiary record labels for product-planning purposes as early as next week and to introduce the discs to consumers with a handful of titles in October. A full-blown launch is planned for early next year. The hope is to fuel increased sales of both new product and catalog titles, in the process lifting the industry just as the 1982 introduction of the CD boosted sales as consumers replaced cassettes and vinyl albums.
Amarillo Power is proposing the plant that, pending regulatory approval, could be completed and online within a decade, according to a copyrighted story in Tuesday's Amarillo-Globe News.This approximately $5 billion project is the second sign of a nuclear revival following a June filing by NRG Energy to add 2,700 MW of nuclear generation capacity (not to mention a thousand jobs) at its existing South Texas Project.
The proposal calls for a two-unit, 2,700-megawatt advanced boiled water reactor designed by General Electric, documents obtained by the newspaper through the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and other sources show.
A megawatt is enough power to serve between 700 and 1,000 homes.
"I was disappointed that every time we came out of the huddle, it seemed like my friend Joe had the other team's uniform," Sharpton said, calling Lamont "a man I don't know as well, but he's on the same team."
In the alleys, people carried the weak and the old on their shoulders or cradled them like children. Hezbollah activists helped evacuate 80-year-old Mariam Saghir, her foot crippled, on a ladder turned into a stretcher. One of the activists carried a walkie-talkie, another a pistol. Someone then brought an orange stretcher, propping her head on two bags stuffed with her clothes.At least it’s internally consistent: 1.) Good is evil; 2.) Up is down; and 3.) Terrorists who invite shelling on their human shields by firing rockets from residential areas are “activists” because they help people around the body parts and teddy bears.
"How much farther?" she pleaded. She rolled to the side, flies gathering on her face. "I want to stay here."
"We're almost there," one of the men reassured her.
The cabal of fanatical mullahs ruling Iran has lost its patience, not only with the unbelievers, but also with the Mahdi as well. They aim to force his arrival. The mullahs believe they have the means to make it impossible for the Mahdi to tarry any longer by causing unprecedented death and destruction—conditions deemed essential for his coming. The world must hit the very bottom, before the Savior of the world comes to the rescue, so they firmly believe.Read the whole piece.
The US Air Force's research lab in New York is developing a system will allow fighter planes to be rearmed, as well as refuelled, in mid-flight.
A supply plane, such as a C-141 or C-17 would incorporate a telescopic boom that extends from its rear. This boom would boast its own miniature wings, to give it stability and lift while deployed. And mounted on top would be a looped conveyor belt to move bombs and missiles from the supply plane to the boom's end.
Nitrogen dioxide pollution and construction dust may not smell great, but it can give Beijing an appealing Hound of the Baskervilles look.
But the program has run into resistance from lawmakers concerned it could increase the risk of an accidental nuclear war. Under the Pentagon plan, both non-nuclear and nuclear-tipped variants of the Trident-2 missile would be loaded on the same submarines.It wouldn’t be “hard to determine,” as Reed (2005 ADA rating: 100) knows, but impossible. Fortunately, the success of the program wouldn’t hinge on the rapid discrimination of Reed's impossible test, but on: 1.) quick notification of other nuclear powers (implementing telephone hotlines with all ICBM-armed countries would be desirable); and, 2.)whether other countries' command, control and communications could reliably get the message out in a compressed time frame.
"There is great concern this could be destabilizing in terms of deterrence and nuclear policy," the newspaper quoted Senate Armed Services Committee member Jack Reed as saying.
"It would be hard to determine if a missile coming out a Trident submarine is conventional or nuclear," the Rhode Island Democrat said.
Senor Chavez said that Western countries needed to have a good look at their energy consumption, as there was not enough oil to supply the world’s population if global economic development followed the US model.Yes, Hugo, a car for everybody. Walk all you like, but everyone rides in a Cadillac once.
"The planet can’t take a car for everybody," he said. "This model, the so-called American way of life, will end the planet if we carry on this way. It is a crazy waste of energy."
BIBLES have been banned in Victorian hospitals and some schools out of concern of offending non-Christians.Infection control measure?!? What in the -- I think Hillary has found her White House Press Secretary.
Almost all Melbourne's main hospitals have withdrawn Bibles and several schools no longer hand out free Bibles.
Royal Melbourne spokesman Rod Jackson-Smith said the Bible was not banned, but said: "We don't (have Bibles in each room) any more."
"Because we have so many people from different religious backgrounds it is considered inappropriate. It is also an infection control measure."
Expressing concern over what he said was an annual decline of nearly 700,000 people a year, Putin said that childcare benefits should be increased and other incentives created to raise the birthrate.The excuses he wheels out are a red herring, as these factors are often worse in other countries. Russia’s 2-to-1 ratio of abortions to live births (still the world’s worst) needs the trajectory change.
``We must at least stimulate the birth of a second child,'' said Putin, lamenting that concerns about housing, health care and education and income prompt many families to stop at one.
It is often said that Ahmadinejad is more dangerous because he is a millenarian, i.e. he believes in the near advent of the messianic Twelfth Imam, the promised one of the Shiites. But in fact, most millenarians are fatalists, and are willing to wait passively for God's will to intervene in history. So, his belief in the near advent of the last days may actually make him less dangerous than a practical, hardnosed secularist might be. Besides, he cannot be dangerous if he is not a commander of the armed forces, which the president in Iran is not.Putting aside the notion that someone who might one day supply nuclear material to terrorists can't be dangerous because he is not a "commander of the armed forces," I'll grant Cole that many millenarians are indeed passive fatalists. However, Ahmadinejad’s history of incendiary rhetoric immediately excludes him from their number. Even on his best behavior (and meds?), the guy is more Shoko Asahara than Joachim of Fiore.
So a Holocaust-denying, virulently anti-Semitic, aspiring genocidist, on the verge of acquiring weapons of the apocalypse, believes that the end is not only near but nearer than the next American presidential election. (Pity the Democrats. They cannot catch a break.) This kind of man would have, to put it gently, less inhibition about starting Armageddon than a normal person. Indeed, with millennial bliss pending, he would have positive incentive to, as they say in Jewish eschatology, hasten the end.
A few years ago I visited my daughter in Spain while she was an exchange student. One of our tour guides was politically savvy and asked me why the rich and powerful in America are insensitive to the needs of the masses. He explained to me that after the death of Franco in 1975, the emerging socialist movement gave the wealthy classes two possible choices. Plan A was an insurrection in which they would lose all their property. Plan B was that they pay higher taxes to create the safety net needed by the masses and more fairly redistribute the wealth. Given that choice, the wealthy in Spain chose plan B.It’s not the scariest threat, is it? I mean, even if it weren’t so vague, the idea of our socialist knuckleheads organizing a “massive grass roots effort” to scare “the wealthy class” just makes you giggle.
I am afraid that in our country, it may come to the fear of losing everything through an insurrection that will finally convince the wealthy class that it is time to make a change. But, it will take a massive grass roots effort to make that happen. Hopefully the very wealthy will recognize this before they self-destruct.
The Democrats' real problem is that they have failed to show that their critique of the Republican status quo is the essential first step toward an alternative program.Okay, in other words, they need to get off of angry. But anger is not only the central concept of modern anti-Bush lefties -- it has become an essential attribute that cannot be removed without destroying its host.
This failure has made it easier for Republicans to cast anti-Bush feeling (aka, ``Bush hatred'') as a psychological disorder. The GOP shrewdly makes the president's critics look crazed and suggests that opposition to Bush is of no more significance than, say, the loathing that many watchers of ``American Idol'' love to express toward Simon Cowell, the meanest of the show's judges.With Gore yelling, Dean screaming, Kennedy blathering, and Hillary shrieking, who needs the GOP to make the president’s critics look crazed? The American People can diagnose each disorder by symptoms presented. But I guess if you’re crazed, marveling at The Scream amounts to dirty trickery on a par with forcing Dukakis into that tank with the big helmet on. Or making Kerry crawl around in that powder blue bunny suit. That Rove! He's behind it all.
The president's critics need to identify precisely why they oppose him, not only so they can make clear that they are not psycho basket cases, but also to convey that they know what needs to be put right.But that gets right back to not having any ideas, doesn’t it? Dionne's conclusion that fighting bad policies can be constructive is fine, but in practice the Democrats' oppositionism is perceived as both reflexive and transparently calculated for political effect.
FEMA said no. The law allows FEMA to provide housing only "on a temporary basis," and the Gulf Coast residents who qualify for one of the 10,000 trailers currently parked and going to rust and ruin on an abandoned muddy airstrip in Arkansas can have one for 18 months. So Ocean Springs will soon have a trailer park, with 600 trailers to replace the 700 houses destroyed by the storm. "FEMA," the mayor says, "is creating trailer trash."Your community can’t have permanent housing it likes, but it can have rusting blight -- for 18 months. Rules are rules.
If you've got a Microsoft Fingerprint Reader hooked up to your PC and thought you had the latest and greatest in biometric security, you're out of luck. A Finnish researcher has discovered that the reader -- which Microsoft has said shouldn't be used to protect sensitive data (meaning, we assume, you should just use it to check out those wild whorls) -- sends fingerprint info to the PC unencrypted, which could enable anyone with the right tools to snag your fingerprint image, and use it to log into your PC. Strangely, Microsoft licenses the technology from another company, Digital Persona, which does encrypt fingerprint data. For some reason, however, Microsoft chose to disable encryption in its product, making it less secure than the passwords it purports to replace.This is less secure than the passwords for another reason, as well: If consumers trust that an authentication product is secure, they may tend to relax about other security measures.
NEC introduced its Generation laptop for the education market, but it looks like it’s aimed at somebody who lives in a really bad neighborhood. It’s loaded with security measures that are so extensive they border on paranoia. First, the notebook is password-protected and login is done with via a hardware fingerprint security chip, great for schoolkids because they won’t have to remember a password. There’s an NEC security control panel, which allows administrators to disable USB or optical drives, keeping that unauthorized software out of the picture. Is also has a Kensington lock slot, a Stoptrack anti-theft label and Webtrack geographical tracking software. Of course, the thing is loaded with antivirus protection and to top it all off, it’s covered by three years of antitheft insurance. Just reading this feature list make you wonder exactly what awful thing happened to this notebook’s designer. Pricing starts at $1138.Maybe the State Department should price a few, too.
An 11-year epoch of increasingly severe solar storms that could fry power grids, disrupt cell-phone calls, knock satellites back to Earth, endanger astronauts in space, and force commercial airliners to change their routes to protect their radio communications and to avoid deadly solar radiation could begin as soon as this fall, scientists announced Monday.Power grid disruptions such as the Quebec example above are caused when these storms introduce DC into AC power lines, tripping circuit breakers and/or causing transformers to overheat and fail.
When the solar cycle reaches its peak in 2012, it will hurl at Earth mammoth solar storms with intense radiation and clouds of high-speed subatomic particles millions of miles across, the scientists said.
A storm of that magnitude could short-circuit a world increasingly dependent on giant utilities and satellite communications networks. Such a storm in 1989 caused power grids to collapse, causing a five-hour blackout in Quebec.
Touting ethanol is certainly good politics - particularly in Midwestern corn-growing states that already welcome significant taxpayer subsidies for ethanol. But ethanol isn't necessarily good economics.An energy source can be promising without positive net energy, but to use politician-speak, we can do better.
Researchers from Cornell University and the University of California-Berkeley analyzed energy input-yield ratios and reported last July that producing ethanol from corn requires 29 percent more energy than can be derived from the resulting fuel - the switch grass and wood chips ratios are worse (45 percent and 57 percent.)
"Our army is in danger," he said. "If all-out civil war breaks out, we could lose our army. If Sunnis and Shiites take to the streets by the thousands, it could literally be impossible to get [the soldiers] out. ... I know that sounds apocalyptic, but it's not out of the question. We need an exit strategy. We have no choice. We're making things worse. Ninety percent of the insurgents are Iraqis who don't like the fact that we have occupied their country. ...The self-described “Renaissance man of new ideas” (Can anyone name just one? Anyone?) has a lot of experience with exit strategies, but evading Miami Herald reporters doesn’t add much to urban combat doctrine.
"I know we can't just pack up and leave right away, but we're still acting as if we hold all the cards over there. We don't. We're losing control of the situation. ... The British occupied Iraq for 35 years and finally had to leave because there was a constant insurgency against them. We haven't learned anything."You’d think after 35 years, they’d have figured out that all they have to do is go outside by the thousands...
Make no mistake about it. What is going on right now on television news channels, newspapers and the Internet is simple. It is called Islamophobia.Kudlow should be able to take his shots at xenophobes without suggesting that people concerned about the deal’s oversight are racists. If the due diligence was sound (and I believe a second round will show that it was), let the arguments lead the undecided to that conclusion. No kicking should be necessary.
Despite soaring oil revenue in the Middle East and the uproar over the attempt by a Dubai company to control seaport terminals at several American ports, Arab countries have made little effort to acquire hard assets in the United States, confining their investment mostly to holdings in real estate, oil refining and financial services.
Middle Eastern countries account for less than 1 percent of the $1.5 trillion of foreign direct investment in U.S. businesses and real estate, according to a recent report by the Congressional Research Service. That lags far behind the largest foreign investors: Britain, Japan, Germany, the Netherlands and France.
Q: How does the speed of information and the way we obtain information impact our culture and politics?
A: As a global society we are performing a great experiment on ourselves. Half of the world population wants to race faster into the future. Go visit China and India. They're ready to go. And half of the world wants to drag us into the past. The problem is both sides have guns. I think there really is a reaction. A lot of people are saying enough is enough.
Q: What else does technology force us to rethink?
A: Digital technology is the solvent leaching the glue out of all of our traditional institutions.
San Francisco -- Google today announced a new "feature" of its Google Desktop software that greatly increases the risk to consumer privacy. If a consumer chooses to use it, the new "Search Across Computers" feature will store copies of the user's Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets and other text-based documents on Google's own servers, to enable searching from any one of the user's computers. EFF urges consumers not to use this feature, because it will make their personal data more vulnerable to subpoenas from the government and possibly private litigants, while providing a convenient one-stop-shop for hackers who've obtained a user's Google password.
Because freedom of expression and freedom of speech are bedrock values in any true democracy. Because external forces that try to control what a Danish paper chooses to publish in Denmark are misguided. Because we all have a stake in protecting democratic freedoms.
The function took some getting used to. After setting the system to maintain a distance of about 170 feet from cars in front of me, it took a lot of nerve not to apply the brake manually when I was humming along at over 90 mph and saw that traffic had come to a dead stop just a few hundred feet away. But in time I learned to trust the Distronic system enough to force myself to keep my feet flat on the floor while the car gently decelerated from high speeds to a dead stop -- without plowing into the car ahead of me.
Of course the faster you go, the more time and distance it takes to stop. For example, at 70 mph, perception and reaction distance equals 154 feet, and braking distance equals 188 feet, for a total of 342 feet (5.2 seconds). And we won't even talk about 80 mph and above, since our readers are law-abiding citizens who never break the speed laws. It wouldn't interest you to know, for instance, that at 80 mph it takes over 422 feet (5.7 seconds) to bring your vehicle to a halt, and at 90 mph more than 509 feet (6.2 seconds) -- nearly a tenth of a mile.
French critic of Mosanto [sic] and genetically modified crops is denied entry into U.S. Apparently critics of Big Business are now considered terrorists as well.
One should be wary of talking on end about such subjects as learning, morality or folklore in front of elders or people of rank. It is disagreeable to listen to.
