[Quote:]

The group of nearly 18,000 voters that registered no choice in Sarasota’s disputed congressional election solidly backed Democratic candidates in all five of Florida’s statewide races, an Orlando Sentinel analysis of ballot data shows.

Among these voters, even the weakest Democrat — agriculture-commissioner candidate Eric Copeland — outpaced a much-better-known Republican incumbent by 551 votes.

The trend, which continues up the ticket to the race for governor and U.S. Senate, suggests that if votes were truly cast and lost — as Democrat Christine Jennings maintains — they were votes that likely cost her the congressional election.

Republican Vern Buchanan’s 369-vote victory was certified by state officials Monday. His camp says that, although people may have skipped the race — intentionally or not — there is no evidence that votes went missing.

But the results of the Sentinel analysis, two experts said, warrant additional investigation.

“Wow,” University of Virginia political analyst Larry Sabato said. “That’s very suggestive — I’d even say strongly suggestive — that if there had been votes recorded, she [Jennings] would have won that House seat.”

Aren’t voting computers great?

[Quote:]

From now on, Omar Shahin won’t be praying at the airport while waiting for a flight.

“This was humiliating, the worst moment of my life,” Shahin said Tuesday, a day after he and five fellow Muslim imams were escorted off a US Airways jet at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

“To practice your faith and pray is a crime in America?” he said.

[..]

Bushra Khan, spokeswoman for CAIR’s Arizona chapter, said, “All these men did was pray, and it was misunderstood. The bottom line is that they were Middle Eastern-looking men … and that scares some people.”

US Airways said that it will fully investigate the matter and that passenger safety is paramount.

The religious leaders were heading home after a three-day North American Imams Federation conference in Bloomington.

The pilot ordered the men off the flight after their praying, conversation and behavior alarmed several passengers and flight attendants.

The imams denied that they did or said anything that could be considered threatening. They were released without charges after being questioned for five hours by federal law enforcement officials.

Shahin, president of the imams’ group, called for a boycott of US Airways after an agent and his supervisor, without giving a reason, refused to sell him replacement tickets Tuesday morning.

“I’m not going to stay silent,” Shahin said. “I came to this country to enjoy justice and freedom.”

I guess you came to the wrong country, then.

In a way it’s a pity you hardly see any Hara Krishna at the airports anymore…

[Quote:]

While Microsoft Corp. may cast the Nov. 2 patent cooperation agreement it pushed on new partner Novell Corp. as a way to protect corporate users of the SUSE Linux operating system from potential lawsuits, CIOs today said they weren’t worried in the first place.

[..]

“Like many IT executives, I took great offense to Ballmer’s comments,” Strasnick wrote in an e-mail. CitiStreet uses Red Hat Linux widely in its data centers. “If Microsoft really thinks there is some code in Linux that violates their patents, they should publish those lines of codes immediately instead of just posturing in the press. [Fear, uncertainty and doubt] may have worked for IBM in the 1970s (some of us are old enough to have been around then), but not today.”

[..]

And Microsoft’s assertions might be even backfire. “There were some applications I had been thinking about moving to a Microsoft platform, but this has now totally alienated me from Microsoft,” Strasnick said.

[Quote:]

A study commissioned by Pope Benedict on the use of condoms to fight AIDS has passed its first hurdle and is now being reviewed by top theologians for possible use in a Papal document, a cardinal said on Tuesday.

“This is something that worries the Pope a lot,” said Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Health Pastoral Care.

The Catholic Church opposes the use of condoms and teaches that fidelity within heterosexual marriage, chastity and abstinence are the best ways to stop the spread of AIDS.

It says promoting condoms fosters immoral and hedonistic lifestyles and behavior that will only contribute to its spread. It teaches that homosexual acts are sinful in the first place.

“Following the wishes of Benedict, we carried out a careful study on condoms, both from a scientific and moral point of view,” Barragan told a news conference.

Welcome to the 19th century, Bennie. Two more centuries of growth and you’ll catch up with the rest of the world.

Met dichtgeknepen neus zojuist het stemburo bezocht…

Het lijkt elke keer lastiger te worden om een stem uit te brengen. De campagne was vrijwel inhoudsloos, de verzuiling in Nederland is definitief bij het grofvuil gezet, dus hoe selecteer je waar je op stemt?

De eerste schifting die ik gemaakt heb was op punten die ik “onbespreekbaar” vind. Ik zal nooit kunnen stemmen op een partij die zijn grondslag in religie vindt, ongeacht andere standpunten van een dergelijke partij. Daarna zijn er punten die “belangrijk” zijn – een partij die bijvoorbeeld zegt dat bestrijding van het terrorisme belangrijker is dan persoonlijke vrijheden scoort aanzienlijke minpunten. Als ik al deze “belangrijke” punten op een rijtje zet is er eigenlijk geen enkele partij meer over die mijn stem kan krijgen, en dat is lastig. Een gewogen lijstje maken leverde een paar partijen op die het “minst rampzalig” waren.

Vervolgens heb ik de persoonlijke websites bezocht van de vrouwen op de kandidatenlijst van de betreffende partijen, op zoek naar iemand waarvan de persoonlijke standpunten het meeste tegenwicht kunnen gaan bieden op de partijstandpunten waar ik problemen mee heb. Veel van de persoonlijke websites lijken gewoon ingericht door het partijburo en zijn dus voor dat doel waardeloos, maar een groeiend aantal heeft ook een weblog dat daadwerkelijk door de kandidaat geschreven lijkt te zijn.

Veel leeswerk, dus. En uiteindelijk met frisse tegenzin een stem uitgebracht.

Maar u snapt: het enige bindende stemadvies dat ik u kan geven is: Ga!