Tag: politics

politics

Super Sheldon to West Side Stadium: Drop Dead

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State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, one of the 3 most powerful politicians in NYS, has effectively killed the West Side Stadium project by stating that he will vote no at tonight’s Public Authorities Control Board meeting. This little known (before the stadium debate that is) board has only 3 people on it – the others are Governor George Pataki and Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno – and all 3 need to vote yes in order for the project to move ahead.

At a press conference today he said, “This plan is at best, premature” and, because he feels that the new retail and office development planned for the area around the stadium might hamper redevelopment at the World Trade Center site, which sits a few miles to the south and is part of Mr. Silver’s district, he said, “Am I supposed to sell out thee community I have fought for and I have represented? Am I supposed to turn my back on Lower Manhattan?” Mr. Silver said rebuilding Lower Manhattan was a “moral” issue and dismissed the stadium plan as simple “ambition.”

I heard the speech live and was very impressed on how he hit on all the points that I care about and how he was able to successfully issue a rebuttal against all arguments for the stadium. He offered better reasons that I have ever been able to articulate and from now on I am going to say to anyone else who is in favor of the stadium, “Just go read Sheldon’s D-Day speech” instead of debating them because I can’t do it better than Mr. Silver.

As an aside, I was sitting in bumper to bumper traffic caused by an afternoon Yankee game on the GWB 2 weeks ago when everyone in the car at the same time asked, “And they want to put a stadium on the West Side?! What are they nuts?!” I’m glad that one elected leader, especially a very powerful one, is still, in my opinion, sane.

politics

It’s Now Councilman Fulop Thank You Very Much

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Fulop wins! Fulop wins! In Jersey City’s Ward E yesterday, my good friend Steven Fulop successfully raged against the Hudson County Democratic Organization machine and won the Ward E Councilman position. It’s about time that something good happened in the world of politics, especially NJ politics (which is about 5x more dirty than the rest of the country).

Here is part of what the Jersey Journal had to say:

“Some political observers called it a message to the Democratic Party, both local and county. Councilman-elect Steve Fulop ran not just against Maldonado, but attacked the Hudson County Democratic Organization and its de facto leader, U.S. Rep. Robert Menendez, D-Hoboken. This resonated with the Puerto Rican voters, who were supposed to be Maldonado’s strength. Instead, they believe that the Dems, and Maldonado, have done very little for them because the incumbent was more interested in putting family on the payroll, according to several Hispanic politicians. What the Dems found out is that Puerto Ricans are not only Hispanics but American citizens and some were even reluctant to go against the former Marine, Fulop.”

I don’t have any hard data to back this up but exit polls suggest that the snazzy web site designed by the good folks at Keymaster Productions (namely moi) won it for him.

Congrats Steve – I hope this is just the first stop on a long and exciting political journey. Like I have been already, I intend to be there for every step of the way.

politics

Secret Wars

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I have abstained from talking too much about politics recently because it just gets me too angry. However, this little nugget was one I felt was worth sharing:

The Pentagon has secretly been operating a clandestine espionage branch for the past two years after reinterpreting U.S. law to place more power directly in the hands of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Yes, you read that correctly. TWO YEARS! That is a loooong time to keep something hidden from Congress, the CIA, hell, everybody. According to an explosive new article in yesterday’s Washington Post, the group, called the Strategic Support Branch, is “designed to operate without detection and under the defense secretary’s direct control” in collecting human intelligence (or HUMINT, in intelligence-speak). Not only does the group operate outside the public view, Rumsfeld has also hidden it from Congress and is not coordinating with the CIA. Already, it has been operating in places like Iraq and Afghanistan – as well as in unnamed “friendly countries” with which the United States is not at war. The group has been working with the elite U.S. Special Forces, such as Delta Force, as well as recruited outside agents, including “notorious figures” whose “links to the U.S. government would be embarrassing if disclosed.” The Defense Department has also engaged in legal tricks, redefining the rules to support its claims that the intelligence group is subject to less stringent oversight than similar operations within the CIA.

Thanks go to the Center for American Progress’s Daily Progress Report

politics

Don’t Fuck With Kremlin

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Medical experts have confirmed that Viktor Yushchenko, Ukraine’s opposition leader, was poisoned with dioxin in an attempt on his life during election campaigning. See the before and after pics below:

His face changed that much in 5 MONTHS

For specifics on how the rest of his body (and not just his face) is just plain old messed up, I got this bit from the Times Online:

Mr Yushchenko fell ill on September 6 and was rushed to Rudolfinerhaus four days later with severe abdominal pain and lesions on his face and trunk. His liver, pancreas and intestines were swollen and his digestive tract covered in ulcers, but doctors could not explain the symptoms. Against their advice he went back on the campaign trail after a week, but returned to the clinic two weeks later with back pain.
Again he returned to campaigning, with his face half paralysed and a catheter inserted in his back so that doctors – still baffled – could inject painkillers into his spinal column.

Note to self: don’t fuck with the Kremlin. About anything. When you need a catheter in your spinal column, you know its bad, regardless of what you look like.

ramblings

Virgin Mary seen on a Grilled Cheese Sandwhich

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My co-workers alerted me to this auction for a grilled cheese sandwhich that has an image of the Virgin Mary on it. At first eBay yanked the auction thinking it was a joke but the woman protested and proved that yes, she has been sleeping with a grilled cheese sandwich on her bedside table for 10 years. It just has to be the Virgin Mary – look, no mold!

This is from the actual description: “The item has not been preserved or anything, It has been keep in a plastic case, not a special one that seals out air or potential mold or bacteria, it is like a miracle.”

The funnier part is this: go to eBay and type in “Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese” into the search box. There are now tons of auctions with Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese in the description title – they are all trying to take advantage of this crazy auction. There are non-holy grilled cheese sandwiches for sale, pics of the virgin mary for sale and even “Sexy Pantyhose NOT Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese Sandwich” for sale. As my co-worker Jason just mentioned, “Why when someone sees a woman’s face on a food item, in a window, etc does that person automatically think its the Virgin Mary. What about other women, like Pat Nixon?”

Thanks Jason and Chris for illuminating my day

politics

Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked

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Reading this article has further infuriated me – I was pissed off that Kerry threw in the towel and went down without a fight the day after Election Day but now I’m really pissed off. I keep reading more and more info about how the election would have been rigged and while at first I thought it was one or two isolated incidents, now I’m starting to believe a bit in a conspiracy here. Yes, I know its easier to think that “we were hacked” instead of “we lost” but the facts are the facts. After the jump, read an article I grabbed from CNN.com on 11/05/2004 about one such “interesting anomaly.”

Thanks Chris for making my blood boil…

Glitch gave Bush extra votes in Ohio

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said.

Franklin County’s unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry’s 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.

Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct, Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told The Columbus Dispatch.

State and county election officials did not immediately respond to requests by The Associated Press for more details about the voting system and its vendor, and whether the error, if repeated elsewhere in Ohio, could have affected the outcome.

Bush won the state by more than 136,000 votes, according to unofficial results, and Kerry conceded the election on Wednesday after acknowledging that 155,000 provisional ballots yet to be counted in Ohio would not change the result. (Full Ohio results)

The Secretary of State’s Office said Friday it could not revise Bush’s total until the county reported the error.

The Ohio glitch is among a handful of computer troubles that have emerged since Tuesday’s elections. (Touchscreen voting troubles reported)

In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because officials mistakenly believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. And in San Francisco, a malfunction with custom voting software could delay efforts to declare the winners of four races for county supervisor.

In the Ohio precinct in question, the votes are recorded onto a cartridge. On one of the three machines at that precinct, a malfunction occurred in the recording process, Damschroder said. He could not explain how the malfunction occurred.

Damschroder said people who had seen poll results on the election board’s Web site called to point out the discrepancy. The error would have been discovered when the official count for the election is performed later this month, he said.

The reader also recorded zero votes in a county commissioner race on the machine.

Workers checked the cartridge against memory banks in the voting machine and each showed that 115 people voted for Bush on that machine. With the other machines, the total for Bush in the precinct added up to 365 votes.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, a glitch occurred with software designed for the city’s new “ranked-choice voting,” in which voters list their top three choices for municipal offices. If no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes outright, voters’ second and third-place preferences are then distributed among candidates who weren’t eliminated in the first round. (E-vote goes smoothly, but experts skeptical)

When the San Francisco Department of Elections tried a test run on Wednesday of the program that does the redistribution, some of the votes didn’t get counted and skewed the results, director John Arntz said.

“All the information is there,” Arntz said. “It’s just not arriving the way it was supposed to.”

A technician from the Omaha, Neb. company that designed the software, Election Systems & Software Inc., was working to diagnose and fix the problem.

politics

More Election 2004 Info

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I have a feeling that I’m going to be posting info about the 2004 election for a long, long time. I still need to post about how both the Red Sox and George Bush won this year – I mean, what else will happen? Will the magnetic poles flip sometime before New Year’s Eve? That isn’t supposed to happen for another 10,000 years or so but who knows, it’s been that kind of year.

Here are two things that I was sent today that I would like to share, the first is funny and the second will really make you think:

>> A proposed cover of Time Magazine that probably won’t be published anytime soon.

>> An interesting comparison of maps. In one corner, a map of the U.S. Pre-Civil War. In the other corner, a map of how the country voted this year.

Thanks Phyllis for sending