BIPARTISANLY YOURS: COAKLEY WON THE HAND COUNTS

Diebold’s results are 51.42% for Brown, with 791,272 Republican votes counted by Diebold, vs. 47.61% for Coakley, with 732,633 Democratic votes counted by Diebold, for a spread of 3.81% favoring Brown.
LATE-REPORTED RESULTS
It’s always interesting to watch hand counts beat machine count results to the newspaper.
In the Massachusetts special senate election, results from six of 71 hand count locations were reported about 2 1/2 hours after the polls closed, with the remaining 65 hand count locations in right away. The slower hand count results represent 8.45% of all hand count locations.
These latecoming hand-counted results favored Coakley very heavily (she got 55.68% of these, earning 4,610 votes to Brown’s 42.9%, representing 3,552, a 12.78% margin) Whether the reports came to the media late or the media posted them late is unclear.

Read more at oped news or go right to black box voting.

http://www.blackboxvoting.org

Bev Harris is executive director of Black Box Voting, Inc. an advocacy group committed to restoring citizen oversight to elections.

Cruise ships still find a Haitian berth

Luxury liners are still docking at private beaches near Haiti’s devastated earthquake zone for holidaymakers to enjoy the water

Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines faced a difficult decision over whether to dock as per itinerary at Labadee Beach, Haiti after last week’s tragic quake. Photograph: Daniel Morel/AP

The Florida cruise company leases a picturesque wooded peninsula and its five pristine beaches from the government for passengers to “cut loose” with watersports, barbecues, and shopping for trinkets at a craft market before returning on board before dusk. Safety is guaranteed by armed guards at the gate.

To their credit, some of the cruise ships passengers were uncomfortable with their situation.  Read on:

The decision to go ahead with the visit has divided passengers. The ships carry some food aid, and the cruise line has pledged to donate all proceeds from the visit to help stricken Haitians. But many passengers will stay aboard when they dock; one said he was “sickened”.

“I just can’t see myself sunning on the beach, playing in the water, eating a barbecue, and enjoying a cocktail while [in Port-au-Prince] there are tens of thousands of dead people being piled up on the streets, with the survivors stunned and looking for food and water,” one passenger wrote on the Cruise Critic internet forum.

“It was hard enough to sit and eat a picnic lunch at Labadee before the quake, knowing how many Haitians were starving,” said another. “I can’t imagine having to choke down a burger there now.”

The Underwear Bomber: More to the story. Kurt Haskell describes The Well Dressed Man and the Man in Orange.

Mr. Haskel reports that he and his wife were sitting on the floor in a crowed room playing cards when he witnessed the so called “sharp dressed man.” Haskel, who speaks carefully as an attorney, states that “While Mutallab was poorly dressed, his friend was dressed in an expensive suit”. He says the suited “Indian” man asked ticket agents whether a supposed “Sudanese refugee” (the terrorist, Mutallab) could board without a passport”. “The guy said, ‘He’s from Sudan and we do this all the time.’” Mr.. Haskel makes clear that this does not mean that Mutallab did not have a passport, only that the well dressed man attempted and evidently succeeded in getting him on a plane with out displaying a passport. Haskel has clarified that the Indian looking man could have been Pakistani or other, that he would not been able to discern nationality. Mr.. Haskel has confirmed that normal surveillance video would have been taken in this crowed departure area. This is the essence of Haskel’s testimony, until the flight landed in Detroit.

According to Haskell, upon landing the FBI prevented passengers from leaving the plane for 2 to 3 hours, and then they were moved to a crowded customs room. Haskel’s states that “During this time period, all of the passengers had their carry on bags with them. When the bomb sniffing dogs arrived, 1 dog found something in a carry on bag of a 30 ish Indian man. This is not the so called “Sharp Dressed” man. I will refer to this man as “The man in orange”. The man in orange, who stood some 20ft away from me the entire time until he was taken away, was immediately taken away to be searched and interrogated in a nearby room. At this time he was not handcuffed. When he emerged from the room, he was then handcuffed and taken away. At this time an FBI agent came up to the rest of the passengers and said the following (approximate quote) “You all are being moved to another area because this area is not safe. I am sure many of you saw what just happened (Referring to the man in orange) and are smart enough to read between the lines and figure it out.”

The story takes on importance when Haskel notes that “The FBI has, since we landed, insisted that only one man was arrested for the airliner attack (contradicting my account). However, several of my fellow passengers have come over the past few days, backed up my claim, and put pressure on FBI/Customs to tell the truth. Early today, I heard from two different reporters that a federal agency (FBI or Customs) was now admitting that another man has been held (and will be held indefinitely) since our flight landed for “immigration reasons.” Notice that this man was “being held” and not “arrested”, which was a cute semantic ploy by the FBI to stretch the truth and not lie.

Then, Customs agent Ron Smith went further, denying that the man arrested was on flight 253 at all.

The Real Terror Is at Home

It wasn’t the customer service representative at the counter. They would get fired for allowing someone like this onboard.

It wasn’t the Obama Administration. They needed this incident like they needed a hole in their heads. It provides mud for Fox News to sling at them.

The companies that make the machines that can detect the kind of underwear bomb this person used stand to make a profit. But they did not likely have the opportunity to get the man on the plane.

Who had the opportunity?

Someone who could pressure the intelligence and security leaders not to put the man on a “No Fly” list in spite of a call from the man’s father warning the CIA about his son’s “radicalization.”

Someone who could talk the airline to “make an exception” for the man.

Someone familiar with using people as scapegoats to cause a scene that would embarrass Obama.

It would be logical to form an idea about a suspect for this case. But while political pundits talk about the suspect on the plane, our logic is suspended because the real culprit is out of our reach, helping to misdirect the investigation.

The truth loses again because the real terror is our own right here at home.

For more than a decade, a fierce debate about peak oil has been raging between those who think a peak in global oil production is at hand and those who think the world is not close to running out of oil. The debate is moot for two reasons. First, the growing threat of global warming requires deep reductions in national and global oil consumption starting now, peak or no peak. Second, relying on unconventional oil like tar sands and liquid coal to make up a supply shortage, as the oilmen say we must, would be climate catastrophe. More supply is not the answer to either our oil or our climate problem — reducing consumption of oil is. And right now we have two feasible solutions: greatly increase our vehicle fuel economy and find alternative fuel sources that are abundant, low-carbon and affordable.

Sea levels will rise by twice as much as previously predicted as a result of
global warming, an
important international study has concluded.

The Scientific Committee on
Antarctic Research (SCAR) calculated that if temperatures continued to
increase at the present rate, by 2100 the sea level would rise by up to 1.4
metres — twice that predicted two years ago.

Even if the average global temperature increases by only 2C — the target set
for next week’s Copenhagen summit — sea levels could still rise by 50cm,
double previous forecasts, according to the report.

The IPCC report predicted that the melting of ice sheets would contribute
about 20 per cent of the total rise in sea levels, with the majority coming
from the melting of glaciers and the expansion of the water as it warms. It
said that it was not able to predict the impact of melting ice sheets, but
suggested this could add 10-20cm.

In the race to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, scientists have been looking to forests and oceans to absorb the pollution people generate.

World’s oceans, forests becoming less able to absorb CO2

Relying on nature to compensate for human excesses sounds like a win-win situation — except that these resources are under stress from the very emissions we are asking them to absorb, making them less able partners in the pact.

“What our ocean study and other recent land studies suggest is that we cannot count on these sinks operating in the future as they have in the past and keep on subsidizing our ever-growing appetite for fossil fuels,” Khatiwala said.

TARUNA JAYA, INDONESIA — Across a patch of pineapples shrouded in smoke, Idris Hadrianyani battled a menace that has left his family sleepless and sick — and has wrought as much damage on the planet as has exhaust from all the cars and trucks in the United States. Against the advancing flames, he waved a hose with a handmade nozzle confected from a plastic soda bottle.

Amid often-acrimonious debate over how to curb global warming ahead of a critical U.N. conference next month in Copenhagen, “peat is the big elephant in the room,” said Agus Purnomo, head of Indonesia’s National Council on Climate Change. Dealing with it, he said, requires that the world answer a vexing question: How can protection of the environment be made as economically rewarding as its often lucrative destruction?

In 354 days, the dead will rise. Or so believe Republicans.

They believe that their suffering and forbearance in the face of an overzealous, hyperliberal left will culminate in a 2010 resurrection of the battered Republican brand.

Case in point: After G.O.P. victories in Virginia last week, Representative Eric Cantor, the House Republican whip, exclaimed that voters are “looking for change. … The Republican resurgence begins again tonight!”

Cantor is also right that the people want change — still. They trusted Democrats to deliver. The Democrats haven’t, not yet at least, and pleas for patience come at a price. If voters’ thirst remains unsated, they will change politicians until politicians change policies.