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Hillary’s the final cylon

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Press reports on the recent New Jersey voting discrepancies have been a bit vague about the exact nature of the evidence that showed up on election day. What has the county clerks, and many citizens, so concerned? Today I want to show you some of the evidence.

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Above you can see the vote totals on this machine for each candidate. On the Democratic side, the tally is Obama 182, Clinton 179. On the Republican side it’s Giuliani 1, Romney 13, McCain 40, Paul 3, Huckabee 4.

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Above is the “Option Switch Totals” section, which shows the number of times each party’s ballot was activated: 362 Democratic and 60 Republican.

This doesn’t add up. The machine says the Republican ballot was activated 60 times; but it shows a total of 61 votes cast for Republican candidates. It says the Democratic ballot was activated 362 times; but it shows a total of 361 votes for Democratic candidates. (New Jersey has a closed primary, so voters can cast ballots only in their own registered party.)

What’s alarming here is not the size of the discrepancy but its nature. This is a single voting machine, disagreeing with itself about how many Republicans voted on it. Imagine your pocket calculator couldn’t make up its mind whether 1+13+40+3+4 was 60 or 61. You’d be pretty alarmed, and you wouldn’t trust your calculator until you were very sure it was fixed. Or you’d get a new calculator.

It sure explains why Sequoia doesn’t want their machines reviewed…

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New data from M:Metrics for the month of January confirms that folks who own an iPhone tend to do more entertaining things on their devices — such as watch video and visit social networks — than those who own smartphones. However February data from mobile ad network AdMob points out that iPhone users are still a relatively small part of the overall mobile phone market in the U.S. Good thing, otherwise we’d never get anything done.

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A longtime opponent of subscription music services, Apple is reportedly exploring the possibility of charging extra for iPhones and iPods in exchange for unlimited iTunes Store access.

Allegedly tipped off by senior officials close to the matter, the Financial Times suggests that Apple is in talks with music labels to follow an approach first pioneered by Nokia and Universal Music Group.

Dubbed Comes With Music, the upcoming service has customers pay more for a cellphone in return for as many a la carte music downloads as the customer likes over the course of a year. In this implementation, customers can either renew a subscription once it expires or else keep the tracks they’ve downloaded, even if they switch to competing phones or music services.

This would eliminate common reservations about subscription services whose copy protection automatically invalidates downloaded tracks as soon as the subscription ends. Apple chief Steve Jobs famously attacked this latter concept as “renting music” upon introducing the iTunes Music Store in 2003.

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GMAC Bank is suing mortgage company HTFC for selling improperly secured loans, which lead to the hilariously blue and aggressive deposition from HTFC CEO Aron Wider. Wider dropped the f-bomb 73 times, frustrating the opposing counsel’s attempts to get him to answer difficult questions like “Where are you currently employed?

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Portfolio.com notes that the classy Mr. Wider got hit by a $29, 000 sanction for his performance, despite his lawyer’s claim that his abusive language was caused by an anxiety disorder.

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Q: This is your loan file. What do Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald do for a living?
A: I don’t know. Open it up and find it.
Q: Look at your loan file and tell me.
A: Open it up and find it. I’m not your fucking bitch.
Q: Take a look at your loan application.
A: Do it yourself. Do it yourself. You want to do this in front of a judge. Would you prefer to [do] this in front of a judge? Then, shut the fuck up.
Q: Sir, take a look–
A: I’m taking a break. Fuck him. You open up the document. You want me to look at something, you get the document out. Earn your fucking money, asshole. Better get used to it. You’ll retire when I’m done.

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People who believe in God are happier than agnostics or atheists, researchers claimed yesterday.

A report found that religious people were better able to cope with disappointments such as unemployment or divorce than non-believers.

Moreover, they become even happier the more they pray and go to church, claims the study by Prof Andrew Clark and Dr Orsolya Lelkes.

It’s nice to have someone to blame your problems on that doesn’t talk back.

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While there was a lot of stiff competition for the dumbest commentary regarding the Obama speech yesterday, I think I have settled on a winner- the assertion that Obama somehow threw his grandmother under the bus. The Powerline:

When seeking to extricate himself from the tight spot in which he has been placed by his long association with the spiritual leadership of Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama hauled in his (living) maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham.

Steve Sailer (of VDARE fame):

But Obama is so superb with words that it’s perfectly reasonable to hold him accountable for choosing to slander his own living grandmother for his political advantage.

The Gateway Pundit:

Barack Obama threw his ailing grandmother who raised him under the bus today.

You can see where this is going. What did Obama say:

I can no more disown [my evil black angry Amerikka hating minister] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

Only in the minds of the fringe right can expressing a shared unconditional love with your grandmother be considered “throwing her under the bus.” It is almost as if the right-wing has thrown their collective minds under the bus, run over them, backed up for good measure, peeled out, and left reason and logic in a ditch for dead.

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There’s a reason why Hillary Clinton has remained relatively silent during the flap over intemperate remarks by Barack Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. When it comes to unsavory religious affiliations, she’s a lot more vulnerable than Obama.

You can find all about it in a widely under-read article in the September 2007 issue of Mother Jones, in which Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet reported that “through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the “Fellowship,” aka The Family. But it won’t be a secret much longer. Jeff Sharlet’s shocking exposé, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power will be published in May.

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The Family avoids the word Christian but worship Jesus, though not the Jesus who promised the earth to the “meek.” They believe that, in mass societies, it’s only the elites who matter, the political leaders who can build God’s “dominion” on earth. Insofar as the Family has a consistent philosophy, it’s all about power — cultivating it, building it, and networking it together into ever-stronger units, or “cells.” “We work with power where we can,” Doug Coe has said, and “build new power where we can’t.”

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“My wife wisely indicated that this is a potentially stressful situation, running for president,” Obama said.

“And she wanted to lay down a very clear marker. She wants me healthy throughout any process.”

Is is hard to quit, he was asked.

“It’s one of those habits. You quit for awhile an then you start back up. Actually, Nicorrete works pretty well.”

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But as a public relations exercise, so far, the Olympics are turning into a disaster. The violence and destruction in Tibet tower gloomily above all else: Recent accounts written by James Miles for the London Times and Howard French for the New York Times cannot be spun as anything else but the abject failure of Chinese rule in Tibet. For those whose memories of Tiananmen are still fresh, the news that Tibetans are rising up in anger inspires a shudder. It is hard to see this ending well.

But Tibet isn’t the only headache for China’s leadership. The ongoing efforts to ensure (or pretend) that Beijing’s air is clean enough for world-class athletes to breath is a daily reminder of the ghastly environmental price China is paying for its astounding economic progress. When a world champion long-distance runner like Ethiopia’s Haile Gebrselassie bows out of the Olympic marathon — citing fears that Beijing’s polluted air will aggravate his asthma, the message sent to the rest of the world isn’t one of Chinese success, but failure — a failure to balance economic growth with the maintenance of a basic quality of life. Earlier, the resignation of Steven Spielberg as an artistic advisor, on the grounds that China wasn’t doing enough to deal with the horrors of Darfur, was embarrassing, but survivable. A full-fledged boycott — by individual athletes or by entire nations — incited by a brutal crackdown in Tibet, would be an unthinkable loss-of-face.

China’s leaders are adamant that sports and politics shouldn’t mix. Anyone who remembers the futile boycotts of the Moscow and Los Angeles Olympics might be inclined to support such a thesis, if it weren’t for the fact that China’s hosting of the Olympics is fundamentally a political act. China wanted the Olympics to demonstrate to the world that it was a first-class power. Now the citizens of the world are watching, and large swaths of them don’t like what they see.

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Mrs. Clinton’s advisers said they had spent recent days making the case to wavering superdelegates that Mr. Obama’s association with Mr. Wright would doom their party in the general election.

That argument could be Mrs. Clinton’s last hope for winning this contest.

Indeed.

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MORAN: Well, let me press you on that. If I went to a church where white supremacy was preached, what would you think of me?

OBAMA: Well, but, see, I disagree with you, though, Terry. That’s not what’s preached at Trinity. And that, I think, that is an easy equivalence that is not at all what is taking place there.

If you look at the sermons, even the most offensive ones that are at issue, he is condemning white racism, as he defines it, but he is not condemning the white race. He is not suggesting that blacks are superior. What he’s saying is, is that this — that white racism is endemic in the society.

Now, that’s something that I disagree with and I said in this speech today. And it’s reflective of, I think, an anger and bitterness that is part of the black community’s experience. It is a legacy of our past that isn’t going away anytime soon. But in each successive generation, it hopefully lessens its grip.

And he has, in some ways, he has reason to be angry and bitter. I mean, here’s somebody who grew up in the ’50s and the ’60s. He’s gone through things that you and I never went through.

And so I think what was revealing in this whole episode was the degree to which I think large portions of white America were shocked or surprised that a lot of black people are still really angry about slavery and Jim Crow and segregation and discrimination, absolutely.

And I pointed out in the speech, that anger isn’t necessarily healthy. In fact, often times it’s self-destructive. More often, it is internalized in all kinds of ways. I mean, that’s part of what we see in the inner city, where that anger and bitterness is turned inward, and kids shoot each other and take drugs and end up in jail sometimes.

Sometimes it expresses itself outwardly in ways that are offensive to the larger community. You remember when, during the O.J. trial, there was a similar moment when the culture — you know, black and white culture just had these completely opposite reactions and nobody understood it.

And, by the way, I’m somebody who was pretty clear that O.J. was guilty. And I was ashamed for my own community to respond in that way, but I also understood what was taking place, which was that reaction had more to do with a sense that somehow the criminal justice system historically had been biased so profoundly that a defeat of that justice system was somehow a victory.

Now, that is an example of how unproductive that anger is and how we have to get beyond it, but it’s there. And so that’s why I said during the speech, in some ways for me to completely disown Rev. Wright is for me to disown the African-American community, because he embodies all the contradictions.

You know, this is why, during the course of this campaign, there have been moments where people say, “Well, I like Barack Obama, but not Al Sharpton. I like Colin Powell, but not Jesse. I like Oprah, but,” you know, those of us who are African-American don’t have that luxury.

And so what I can do then is to say, “Here’s what I believe. Here’s what I think. Here’s where I think America needs to go.”

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This is why you basically never see the Clinton campaign touch the Wright story. (I was on a Clinton conference call this weekend; I thought I heard tumbleweeds blowing when a reporter brought up Wright.) There’s almost no way they can actively exploit it, particularly after Obama’s speech. They just have to hope it does the job on its own–or, to put it in less cynical terms, that Democratic voters think Wright is as big a problem for Obama as the Clintonites presumably think he is.

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Theory #1

The Dalai Lama clique knew all along that now was the time to take advantage of the Olympic moment. Had they done the same thing a year ago, the impact would be less because the Olympics was still far away. If they tried it next year, the Olympics card would no longer work. Earlier in the year, Dalai Lama visited Europe and United States where he tested support for his planned action. The decisive moment would be March 10, on the 49th anniversary of the first Tibetan uprising and eventual exile. On that day, lamas and Tibetan civilians were ordered to hold demonstrations. The Chinese public security personnel and armed police officers failed to react aggressively, the provocative actions had to be escalated over the next few days. On March 14, the order was given to conduct a widespread race riot and ethnic cleansing against all Han Chinese people. In this CCTV video clip below (around 0:15), a lama dressed in the crimson garb dealt a flying kick to knock open the front door of a Han Chinese shop.

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Theory #2

In Chinese, the term for “crisis” consists of two component words: “Danger” and “Opportunity.” While there was a danger posed to the Beijing Olympics by the Tibetan separatists, it was also an “opportunity” to deal with them. Everybody knows and expects the Tibetan separatists to cause trouble in the lead-up to the Olympics. In terms of timing, now is the moment when the strike should be made to leave room for public pressure to build and work. The Dalai Lama had no intention of starting any violent uprising. In fact, he has stated that he supported the Beijing Olympics. If the followers of the Dalai Lama will not demonstrate, then the Chinese government would do it for them. On March 14, Chinese government agents would stage an apparent riot.

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The owners of the domain donotreply.com get a lot of mail.

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This Is Charley. Charley is a cat with cerebellar hypoplasia.

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11/15/2104
At 14:52:28, FreedomFighter69 wrote:

Reporting my first temporal excursion since joining IATT: have just returned from 1936 Berlin, having taken the place of one of Leni Riefenstahl’s cameramen and assassinated Adolf Hitler during the opening of the Olympic Games. Let a free world rejoice!

At 14:57:44, SilverFox316 wrote:
Back from 1936 Berlin; incapacitated FreedomFighter69 before he could pull his little stunt. Freedomfighter69, as you are a new member, please read IATT Bulletin 1147 regarding the killing of Hitler before your next excursion. Failure to do so may result in your expulsion per Bylaw 223.

Go read the whole thing…

I just went back to 1995 and switched a few things around. Altavista Ron Paul if you don’t believe me.

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“This is a summary of a documentary that aired recently on Dutch national television. The documentary was based on a script made by an economist who was assigned the task to make a ‘what if’ scenario about how the dollar could crash within 24 hours.”

Sometimes I think Pixar is the only studio that still has some creativity..

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The French woman who made headlines across the world due to her battle with a horrifying facial cancer has been found dead at her home today.

Chantal Sebire was left so distresingly disfigured by the rare esthesioneuroblastoma (ENB) - an uncommon malignant neoplasm of the nasal vault - that she appealed for the legal right to end her own life.

Earlier this week a court in Dijon, eastern France, rejected Sebire’s request to be “accompanied to her death with dignity”.

The practice of euthanasia is not authorised by French law as it is in other European countries such as Belgium, the Netherlands or Switzerland.

The court decided Monday to side with the prosecution which argued that current legislation does not allow the doctor of the 52-year-old former schoolteacher to prescribe lethal drugs.

So they let her suffer instead. They are barbarians. I applaud Chantal for waiting so long, and giving France a chance to learn from her. May she rest in peace.