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The presidential election in 2000 woke us up to the reality that elections aren't perfect. On Election Day 2004, Cuyahoga County became a battleground, scrutinized by voting rights advocates, filmmakers, the media and just about everyone else.
So, with all the extra attention on how we vote and a new electronic-voting system in place, how did Cleveland's election system fall apart in May? (Choose one.)
At high noon, the protesters snaked through torn-up concrete, orange barrels and flimsy plastic fencing and besieged the Board of Elections. They filled the steps of the brutally ugly building, then spilled onto the sidewalk and newly poured pieces of street, toting "Respect Our Vote" and "Vu Must Go!!!" signs.
"We're not doing this because of the problems in 2004," union leader Mike Murphy announced into a megaphone. "We're not doing this because of all the employee morale problems.
"We're doing it because we believe the director does not have the ability to lead this organization," Murphy said. "And what's at stake here is the very confidence of the voting public!"
Michael Vu, Cuyahoga County's elections director — the most embattled public official in Cleveland — heard the protesters chanting from his fourth-floor office. He was meeting with his staff, weighing a response to a special report that detailed the hundreds of ways that he, his employees and their contractors had bungled the May primary election, all the ways Greater Cleveland's voting system had failed.
"Who must go?" the protesters chanted. "Vu must go!"
Vu looked out the window, trying to see the protesters' signs.
Should he try to talk with the crowds, brave their catcalls, tell them he was listening to them, declare he'd shake up the elections office and get it working right?
"Look, I already know where their position is," he told himself. "I need to do the work." He finished his meeting.
That's the kind of guy Vu is. When he came to Cleveland in 2003 to run our county's elections at the shockingly young age of 27, after doing the same for Salt Lake City since he was 22, he was praised for his technical skills, his sharp intelligence, his youthful enthusiasm for figuring out the new technologies of electronic voting that would save us from the dangers of hanging chads. His fresh talent and nonpartisan problem solving would help him rise above all the cronyism, viciousness, old systems and obsolete thinking that had dragged down the county's elections office.
After Vu's first big test, the 2004 presidential election, held under all the pressures of our role as a swing state, the press and Vu's bosses declared our vote a success. Any problems at the polls were minor, they assured us.
But our May election was a nightmare, an embarrassment. It took a week to count the vote. The absentee ballots were flawed, so all 17,000 had to be counted by hand. Poll workers weren't trained properly to run our new electronic voting machines. Hundreds of them didn't even show up on Election Day. Long lines clogged some precincts, even though it was a low-turnout election. Memory cards, carrying votes, disappeared. Ten percent of the machines' paper trails — the official records used in recounts — were damaged. So were many machines themselves.
A review panel hired to find out what went wrong blamed problem after problem on Vu and his deputy. Two of the four members of the county board of elections voted in July to fire or demote him. A third board member said he would replace Vu if the November election weren't coming up so soon. Meanwhile, three county election workers face a criminal trial on felony charges that they rigged the 2004 presidential recount — and more indictments may be coming, because both the prosecution and the defense say at least some of the workers' mistakes were based on instructions from their bosses.
Word of Cleveland's bungled voting has spread. The left-wing magazine Mother Jones just named Cuyahoga County one of the nation's "11 worst places to vote."
Today, everyone still says Michael Vu is smart and skilled. Yet smart and skilled, it turns out, is not nearly enough to pull off a good election in Cleveland in the 2000s.
Florida's Bush vs. Gore electoral meltdown in 2000 stripped away the safe, bland facade of every elections office. We've learned the terrifying secret that our elections have a margin of error, that it's larger than we think, and that really close elections will be decided by obscure bureaucrats, systems and rules — some competent, some not; some fair, some susceptible to brute political force. So Congress and the states have rushed new laws into action, some vague, some complicating things, some pushing unproven technology on voters. Meanwhile, activists have packed those once-quiet board meetings, questioning everything, cheering angry Democrats and booing every mention of Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell and voting-machine maker Diebold Inc.
Since Ohio decided the 2004 election, and Cuyahoga is Ohio's biggest county, activists nationwide have been scrutinizing the elections office at East 30th and Euclid. Reporters, filmmakers and international observers watched us vote, amateur statisticians eyeballed our precinct results, and electronic-voting opponents, concerned about security flaws, tried to talk Vu and his bosses out of buying our new machines.
Under pressures like these, what does it take to run a successful election? Intelligence and skills, sure. Farsighted planning, definitely. And something more: the ability to listen, to accept advice and scrutiny, and use them to come up with better ways to run elections.
Vu and the board of elections members reacted instead by turning defensive. By assuring us they had everything (or almost everything) under control. By mostly ignoring the warnings they heard from activists and other observers after 2004: Voters were disappearing from our voting rolls thanks to human error. Badly trained and badly performing poll workers were costing people their votes. Election Day support systems for poll workers were failing. The board had approved illegal recount procedures. Electronic voting would require yet more poll-worker training to avoid chaos at the polls. All those mostly ignored warnings have been proven right, catastrophically, in 2006.
Now Vu and the board say they're working hard to turn the elections office around in time for November's vote. They'd better be right.
Because imagine this nightmare: As Ohio counts its votes late on Nov. 7, Democrats gain U.S.
Senate seats in several other states. With control of the Senate hanging in the balance, the race between Sen. Mike DeWine and Rep. Sherrod Brown is too close to call. DeWine comes out ahead by a few thousand votes, close enough for a recount. Democrats cry that long lines and breakdowns at polls in Cleveland kept their supporters from voting or being counted. When the recount starts, just like in May, many of our paper trails can't be read. Lawyers swarm in, file suits and poke and prod our elections office's every mistake.
If something like that happens, the whole country will be watching Cleveland. And the whole country will know Michael Vu's name.
When Michael Vu walked into his office in August 2003, he found a big '70s-style leather chair sitting across from his desk. The chair haunted him, a symbol of everything in the agency that needed changing: the voter-registration system, the outmoded equipment, the hiring through political patronage. "The whole concept, attitude and the way we worked needed to be updated," he says.
Three years later, a month after July's "Vu Must Go" protest, Vu's talking with me across a light table where the leather chair used to sit. His job is safe, for a while. His bosses compromised by appointing ex-lottery commissioner Tom Hayes as a project manager for the November 2006 election. Hayes — a member of the review panel that severely critiqued Vu's leadership, but also Vu's friend and Saturday running buddy — is either Vu's special aide for the next few months or his overseer, depending on whom you ask.
Vu's intelligence is obvious. His mind is full of nuances of election law, the mechanics of each department he oversees, the pros and cons of electronic voting. Ask him a question and he'll likely have a thoughtful answer, making it hard to dismiss him as incompetent.
Yet he's no stiff technocrat. He laughs, heartily and a little nervously, when asked questions with political implications — about his past disagreements with Secretary of State Blackwell or the pressures politicians put on the elections board. Running the tensely bipartisan board of elections office, he's trying to be nonpartisan.
Naturally, he'd rather talk about his family: how his father, a desk worker in the South Vietnamese Army, put his wife and Michael's older brother and sisters on a motorcycle in early 1975, just before the fall of Saigon, sped to a military airport, and flew away on one of the last planes out as Communist forces bombed the airfield. The Vus, a Catholic family, took refuge at a mission in St. Michael's, Ariz. Michael was born in March 1976, in a New Mexico hospital just across the border, and named after his first hometown. His godmother, a nun, suggested that Utah was a good place to raise a family, so the Vus moved to Salt Lake City. The first time Vu's mother saw snow, she thought it was salt.
Vu was 19 and in college when he took a part-time job with the Salt Lake County clerk's elections department. The clerk kept hearing what a great worker he was, so she hired him to run her new geographic information systems department. He taught himself the GIS program on the job while finishing college and helping his parents communicate with the doctors caring for his younger sister, who was dying of leukemia.
"He's brilliant, a very fast learner," says his old boss, Salt Lake County clerk Sherrie Swensen. "His work ethic is unmatched from anyone I've ever seen." She named Vu her elections manager in 1998, when he was 22. Her staff still calls him for advice.
In 2003, Vu started interviewing for new jobs. He was a finalist for the elections supervisor job in Miami-Dade County before getting hired in Cleveland.
"He understood the election process and had a great background," says board of elections chairman Bob Bennett. "We have a tendency in this county to chew up and spit out directors, so we conducted a national search to find one of the best and brightest."
Vu took over an agency known for its bitter office politics and partisan bickering. In Ohio's bipartisan elections system, each county elections board is made up of two Republicans and two Democrats, and even many office jobs are divided equally between the parties. That's led to an especially sour atmosphere at Cuyahoga's board of elections, since it brings Cleveland's contentious politics into the workplace. Many of Vu's employees got their jobs thanks to political patronage.
When Vu started his new job, he was shocked at how political the board of elections was. (Salt Lake County's clerk is elected, but her staff is all nonpartisan civil servants.)
"In Ohio, everyone has a stake in the board of elections," Vu says. After six months, he felt like he knew almost all of Cuyahoga County's countless elected officials.
Vu cleaned house. Ditching the leather chair was just the easiest part. He doesn't have the power to fire his employees — under state law, the board of elections members do — but he convinced the board to fire five workers he felt were unqualified and bad at their jobs. When new registration cards came in, the staff was photographing them with huge, antiquated camera equipment. He replaced it with a scanner. Since the board members had all but decided to buy electronic voting machines to replace the county's old punch-card machines, Vu helped them research the technology, take bids from vendors and hire North Canton-based Diebold Inc. in February 2004 to provide several thousand touchscreen machines.
And from his first day on the job, Vu had 15 months to get ready for one of the biggest challenges any election official in the country faced: running the election in the biggest county in the state that would decide the presidency.
"Vu, we got a holy mess out here," Councilwoman Fannie Lewis says into her cell phone as a camera watches. "I done talked to everybody in your shop but you."
It's Election Day 2004, and Lewis is at a library in Hough, where restless, upset voters are stuck in a 1 1/2-hour line. Lewis has been on her cell phone all morning, trying to get more voting equipment and poll workers, being transferred to phone lines that go unanswered. New machines arrived, but they're missing their punch-card inserts, so they're useless. Meanwhile, local filmmaker Laura Paglin is shooting Lewis' every move for what will become the documentary "No Umbrella: Election Day in the City," which screened this winter at the Sundance Film Festival and Cleveland International Film Festival.
Now, 4 1/2 hours after her first call, Lewis is talking to Vu. He tells her elected officials aren't allowed in polling places. "Don't tell me where I'm supposed to be!" she snaps. "You do your job and I won't have to do it!" More workers arrive soon after. The inserts don't come for another two hours.
Right after Election Day 2004, Vu received compliments for his work. Sure, voters waited in long lines, The Plain Dealer conceded — its reporters found one that was 2 1/2 hours long — but the paper declared the election a success.
"As far as 2004 goes, I think for the most part, everything went well," Vu says.
Give Vu this much: He managed the most overwhelming election in Cuyahoga County's history. More than 687,000 of us voted in 2004, almost 100,000 more than in 2000. A massive registration drive deluged the elections office with more than 350,000 new registrations and changes-of-address. The board office handled 26,000 phone calls on the last day of registration alone. Predictions envisioned Cuyahoga County leading Ohio into a Florida-like electoral collapse.
A lot of people "anticipated we'd fail," Vu says. He thinks proving those predictions wrong is one of his biggest accomplishments.
Liberal activists, who'd hoped a huge surge of Democratic Cleveland-area voters would make John Kerry president, even had reason to admire Vu in 2004: He defied Secretary of State Blackwell's two most controversial election rulings. When Blackwell told county election officials they could only accept voter registrations on postcard-thick paper, Vu ignored him. (Blackwell rescinded that ruling a few weeks later.) When Blackwell released strict rules about when to give voters provisional ballots — issued when a voter's eligibility is unclear — Vu announced he'd issue one to any voter who insisted on it. Blackwell sent an angry "cease and desist" letter threatening to remove him from his job — but just before the election, an appeals court ruling set provisional-ballot rules closer to Vu's position than Blackwell's. A few months after the election at a U.S. Elections Assistance Commission hearing, Vu even criticized Blackwell for issuing late and confusing elections directives — while Blackwell was sitting nearby.
Still, voting-rights activists were not as impressed with Vu's performance. They knew firsthand that under the stress of 2004's high turnout, Cuyahoga County's election system strained and sometimes broke down — and lost thousands of votes.
Long lines drove an unknown number of people from the polls without voting. No one measured waiting times at Cuyahoga County's polls or tracked where lines were longest, but some polls in Cleveland had waits of two hours or more, and many had 45-minute lines. (Vu says he heard of long lines in suburbs such as Strongsville, too.) The huge turnout is the simplest reason, and Vu bought more punch-card machines just for the 2004 election. Unlike Columbus' Franklin County, which ended up with outrageously long lines in Democratic precincts, Vu allocated the machines based on September 2004 registration figures, to try to account for all the new voters.
Another reason for long lines is that the county's poll workers get little training and little Election Day support. Regular citizens run our polling places; they work only one or two days a year after only a few hours of instruction. Their job was harder in 2004 because important court rulings about election law, including provisional-ballot rules, were issued in the last days before the election.
The poll workers' only backup is a phone number for the elections office. But for years, only four to five elections office workers manned those phone lines on Election Day, according to a recent elections staff memo. That's only one person for every 1,000 poll workers.
All over the county, people had the same experience as Fannie Lewis on Election Day — repeatedly calling the elections office to report a problem at the polls, getting busy signals and slow response. "At several of the polling places I went to, I called in to the board of elections," recalls U.S. Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, "saying, 'People cannot get through to you. You need to give them another number.' There were not enough lines."
Candace Hoke, a Cleveland State University election law professor who was working as an elections inspector, also called the board office on behalf of overwhelmed poll workers.
Many poll workers Hoke saw in action were also poorly trained. "They did not understand what provisional ballots were for," she says. After the election, activists warned Vu and his bosses that they needed to better train their poll workers. They didn't get very far. "The attitude of the board of elections staff was that they were doing just fine, thank you very much," Hoke says.
When poll workers don't know the law, voters lose their vote. About 1,200 provisional ballots were rejected as cast in the wrong precinct, even though they were cast at the right polling place.
"You could be in the right church but the wrong pew," Tubbs Jones says. Democrats blame Blackwell's provisional-ballot rulings for that, but it's also a combination of voter and poll-worker error: People got in the wrong line and weren't pointed to the right one. Also, almost 700 Kerry votes and a handful of Bush votes were lost in Cleveland when poll workers directed voters to either the wrong precinct's voting machines, where candidates' names were listed in a different order, or the wrong ballot box. Their votes ended up going to third-party candidates.
As early as summer 2004, The Greater Cleveland Voter Coalition, a group funded by liberal organizations, figured out that voters it had registered were disappearing from the county's rolls.
Clerical errors, made easier by user-unfriendly software, were the culprits. The coalition's figures suggest that at least 1,700 Greater Clevelanders lost their vote in 2004 due to lost registrations, while other errors put another 8,000 or more people's votes at some risk.
The coalition sued to restore the voters to the rolls before the election, but lost. After the election, they gave Vu the names of more than 600 voters who filled out lost registrations, tried to vote and had their provisional ballots rejected. "We asked them not to certify the election unless those voters were re-enfranchised," says coalition study leader Dr. Norman Robbins. But they were left out.
Vu says he looked for the missing registrations but couldn't find them. "When you're processing 350,000 cards, you're bound to have human error," Vu says. Beyond that search, he and the board didn't take serious action about the missing voters for two years. Finally, this July, when the panel reviewing the May 2006 election declared that the registration mistakes were real, board members Edward Coaxum and Bob Bennett apologized for not understanding the problem earlier.
This August, Coaxum and Bennett told Vu's staff to try to retrieve deleted voters' records from the database. But software fixes that'll make it harder to delete more voters won't be installed until after November.
The board and Vu were also warned not to make their worst mistake of the 2004 election. That December, Hoke testified at a board meeting that the county's longtime procedure for recounts was illegal.
The Libertarian and Green parties had asked for a statewide recount of the presidential race. Ohio law required a hand recount of 3 percent of the county's votes, using randomly chosen precincts. If the hand count and machine count didn't match, the staff would have to recount all 687,000 of the county's ballots by hand.
But for years, Cuyahoga elections staff had hand picked the precincts for the sample recount instead of choosing them randomly. The board's lawyer, from county prosecutor Bill Mason's office, warned that changing procedures just before such an important recount would invite lawsuits. It was disastrous advice.
Cuyahoga County's December 2004 recount was the most scrutinized in local history. The 2000 Florida election had exposed the high failure rate of punch-card ballots, so the recount advocates wanted the elections office to thoroughly inspect all 13,500 punch cards in the county that registered no vote for president. Some left-wing activists were even convinced that Republicans had stolen the presidential election in Ohio, in part by suppressing the Democratic vote in Greater Cleveland — even though Bush's statewide margin of victory was a hard-to-fake 118,000 votes, and though Kerry got 88,000 more votes in Cuyahoga County than Al Gore had in 2000.
So on Dec. 16, 2004, dozens of activists watched like bird-dogs as Vu's staff counted their sample precincts. Vu, talking to a Plain Dealer reporter, dismissed Hoke's warning, sounding cynical and defensive about all the scrutiny. "When we conducted this recount, we knew that anything we did, there were going to be critical remarks," he said.
But when long, unbroken stretches of Kerry votes were counted, followed by long, unbroken stretches of Bush votes, the activists smelled a rat. They confronted a staff member, who allegedly admitted the staff had counted the precincts in advance. An attorney for the Kerry campaign complained to Mason's office, which forwarded the complaint to an out-of-town prosecutor for a neutral review.
Erie County Prosecutor Kevin Baxter responded by having three members of Vu's staff indicted on felony charges. They're accused of violating elections law by precounting selected precincts, then "excluding precincts which would not balance" — not to steer the election, but to avoid spending days or weeks on a costly full recount. Their much-postponed trial is still pending. The defendants' lawyers say their clients were just following orders, and that they didn't exclude unbalanced precincts. The prosecutor has warned that more indictments are possible and that "there is suspicion that others, higher in management, were involved in this miscarriage of an election recount."
Vu says he believes the three indicted workers acted "in good faith." Though they aren't allowed to count votes anymore, all three are still working for the board of elections.
In the middle of the night, hours before May's primary Election Day dawned, Michael Vu called the board of elections members with bad news. The optical-scan readers for absentee voting weren't reading the ballots. All 17,000 would have to be counted by hand.
That day, dire reports flooded the elections office. It was the debut of the county's new electronic touchscreen voting machines, and poll workers were struggling. Many workers hadn't shown up. Polls opened late after trouble setting up. Machines weren't working. Lines were growing.
That night, memory cards from some voting machines went missing. Machines came back to the elections office bruised and battered. Paper trails for recounts were torn, folded like accordions, blank. It took a week to hand count the absentee ballots.
All the same weaknesses from 2004 — problems with training and Election Day support for poll workers, overconfidence in the face of warnings — had combined with the extra stress of a new voting system to create a breakdown.
Cuyahoga, like counties throughout the country, had to replace its punch-card voting system this year to meet a deadline set by Congress. Teaching the new touchscreen voting system to poll workers is a huge task in a lot of places, but especially in large counties such as Cuyahoga, which has 5,000 poll workers. Our average poll worker is 66 years old and used to the old punch-card system. Many were not ready to operate unfamiliar touchscreen computers without personalized training.
Vu and his staff handled the training poorly, concluded a panel the board of elections hired to find out what went wrong: Cleveland Municipal Judge Ronald Adrine, former state lottery commissioner Tom Hayes, and Candace Hoke, the CSU election-law professor.
First, Vu made a principled but ultimately bad decision. A deal with the state requires Diebold, the touchscreen vendor, to provide free manuals for its machines and free training for county poll workers. Instead, Vu told his staff to develop their own manuals and training lessons. He had Diebold trainers sit in and assist trainers the county hired. "We would be irresponsible if we did not learn to conduct the election for ourselves," Vu insists.
But Vu's staff didn't start working on the manuals and lesson plans in earnest until February, even though federal funds for poll-worker training had been available for eight months and Vu's staff got a copy of Diebold's manual in October. In March, Vu discovered the first draft of the county's manual was a poorly written mess. He took command of the rewriting himself, and made his top managers devote dozens of hours to working on it in March and April.
The county's training lasted three short hours, with too many poll workers in one class and too little time for them to try out the machines. Trainers spent almost all of their time discussing the machines, and only 10 percent of it on the administrative tasks many poll workers had struggled with in 2004.
After the first wave of training sessions, Vu had his staff ask poll workers if the training had prepared them, the panel noted. Eighty percent said no. But Vu says trainers were telling his staff that 99 percent of their trainees were ready to work on Election Day.
Several hundred of the county's 5,000 poll workers didn't show up for the election. Of those who did, a survey found about two in five reported problems setting up the machines, problems taking them down and struggles with paper trails — loading them, tearing them by accident, dealing with paper jams. An audit found that 10 percent of the paper trails — the official voting record in recounts — were "either destroyed, blank, illegible, missing, taped together or compromised in some way." If that happens again, the audit warned, the risk of a legal challenge to a future recount is "exceptionally high."
Election Day support for the beleaguered poll workers was still poor. Half of the 5,000 poll workers tried to call the elections office for help, a survey says, but only a third could get through on their first try. Many staffers manning the elections office's phones were not well trained for their jobs, the review panel found, and some reports of problems were logged but not acted upon. Vu and his deputy, Gwen Dillingham, knew that the "telephone queues and busy signals [were] a persistent problem on major elections, but they have not moved decisively to solve the problem — despite its existence on every major Election Day for several years," the panel wrote. Vu claims his staff did act on all the calls — but admits it often took too long. The manager in charge of the call center in May — one of the three indicted workers — wrote in a staff memo that management tried to add more workers to the call center, including top managers, but they were called away to handle other problems and attend the board meeting about the hand recount.
May's chaos also revealed weaknesses in the elections office's security for voting machines — weaknesses hackers could conceivably exploit. Memory cards, which hold votes and can be tampered with, disappeared, and a few were never recovered. (The elections office recovered those votes from hard drives.) A single key, with 1,000 copies, opened all the county's machines, allowing access to the memory card slot.
Also, an auditor discovered so many poll-worker errors that it could not judge the voting machines' accuracy. Alarmingly, 78 percent of the audited paper trails did not match the electronic totals — but Diebold insists poll workers caused the discrepancies by switching memory cards, and elections officials in other Ohio counties using Diebold machines found no such discrepancies during several recent recounts. Vu agrees it's human error, but he's open to having another testing agency look into the issue further after November.
The panel report laid most of the blame for May's collapse on Vu and Dillingham. It depicted Vu as ignoring warnings for too long — then panicking, making staff work punishingly long hours to deal with emergencies. Staff morale may be at an all-time low, the panel said, thanks to many factors, including the long hours and a sense that Vu was "arrogant" and lacked "people skills."
Workers described the office's atmosphere as "poisonous, toxic, backbiting, vicious, vengeful, mean, nasty, vicious, hierarchical, exploitative, oppressive, a sweatshop," the panel reported.
In early January, a contractor for Diebold had sent Vu and his staff an e-mail warning of 13 ways the May election could break down. Many came true, including warnings that the absentee ballot scanners might fail, poll workers might not be well prepared and the plan for collecting the memory cards on Election Night might break down.
A day after the panel report came out in July, Vu's Democratic bosses, board members Edward Coaxum and Loree Soggs, called for Vu and Dillingham to resign or be fired. The Republicans, Bob Bennett and Sally Florkiewicz, argued that firing an elections director three months before a major election would be disastrous. By state law, it takes three votes to fire an elections director, so Vu stayed. Instead, the board hired two of the three panel members to help carry out the panel's recommendations: Tom Hayes as project manager and Candace Hoke as the board's monitor.
Now the question is, can Vu and his staff accept the criticism and improve fast enough for November?
"I made mistakes, frankly," Vu says of the May primary. "I take responsibility." He didn't need the report to start making changes, which he's been doing since May, he says. Poll-worker training will be more professional, support for poll workers will be better, absentee-ballot testing more thorough, he says.
Vu says some of the review panel's criticisms are inaccurate, such as its description of how well he communicated problems to the board. But Bennett, the board chairman, asked Vu to focus on the upcoming election instead of challenging the report in writing, and Vu agreed. He says he tries to listen to his staff, not manage arrogantly. He says they've told him the "toxic, backbiting" workplace was that way before he arrived. Vu's not sure why — maybe rules about partisan balance breed suspicion, he says.
Not all of Vu's problems are his doing. He's had to contend with huge changes in everything from politics to technology. "There's nothing wrong with Michael Vu's ability," insists board chairman Bob Bennett. "We just had a perfect storm with this election."
(As for the board members' accountability, Bennett says they tried to improve poll-worker instruction before May. "We pretty consistently asked the director and deputy director how training was going," he says. "There were a number of things we spent additional money on.")
It's gotten harder to run an election since 2000, Vu says. "I think you have a lot of good elections officials out there that no longer have that love of conducting elections." If "some group doesn't like how the results came out," they'll question the voting process, he says. Well-meaning federal and state voting reforms, such as complicated rules about provisional ballots, are sometimes impractical and need a lot of interpretation. "We've made elections too complex to conduct," Vu says — and harder for voters, too. "We've got to get back to the basics."
All that's true — but it's not the last word. After all, our biggest problem isn't that we expect too much of our elections system — it's that, until now, we haven't paid it enough attention. Now, people such as Hayes and Hoke, Robbins and other activists, colleges and county commissioners are all trying to help Vu improve our elections and reduce their margin of error to as close to zero as possible.
Is Vu accepting their help? Candace Hoke says yes. In August, Vu invited local activists to help him screen the bidders vying to conduct poll-worker training. "Michael — very briefly, but I thought in a very effective way — said poll-worker training was one of his two top focuses, that its importance could not be understated, that he was grateful for the community participation."
Robbins, of the Voter Coalition, says he hopes Vu takes community groups more seriously than in the past, but he's not convinced yet. He's taking his concerns about November to Hayes, the new project manager, not Vu. "The board seems genuinely to have taken a lot of this [criticism] to heart."
At a late August board of elections meeting, Vu and his staff presented their plan for the November election — and the board members nudged them to do still more to address the review panel's most crucial advice.
For instance, the review panel recommended aggressively recruiting new poll workers from county and city government, colleges and businesses. Vu's staffers rely heavily on ward leaders to choose poll workers based on patronage, the panel wrote, and don't work creatively to recruit new workers because they assume the public isn't interested in the jobs and "that any 'warm body' is all one can expect." The staff "should cease thinking of poll worker positions primarily as jobs for those who are unemployed," the panel added.
So Bennett and Coaxum told Vu his staff's goal of recruiting 650 new poll workers was too low. Poll-worker manager Dane Thomas resisted: "It's a new program. I want to be realistic."
"We're not going to go the traditional route," Bennett said. For the first time, trainees will be tested and rejected if they don't understand the job, he noted. He told Thomas to approach a pool of 7,500 people.
Thomas laughed. "You're talking pie in the sky, sir. That's not going to happen in November. I'm very pessimistic."
Vu has to get beyond defensiveness—and get his staff to do the same.
Another troubled election in November, and Vu will surely be fired. He won't have much leeway for mistakes. With a gubernatorial and U.S. Senate race on the ballot, turnout could be huge. A new state law requires voters to show ID, which will make lines even longer and poll workers' jobs even more complicated. On the other hand, "a good, seamless, flawless election certainly raises Michael's stock," says Loree Soggs, who voted to fire him.
"I'm probably more motivated now than ever before to make sure we have a good November election," Vu says. After that, does he want to stay? If November were to go badly, he says, he'd resign. "If it goes well, I think it's going to be 50-50," he says. Even if a good election redeems his standing, he says, "I'll always look back at what was said and what wasn't said" in July.
Vu may be talented, and he may even have a bright future in managing elections. But is he really ready to work with his critics? Is conscientiously contentious Cleveland the right place for him?
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Anonymous asks:
How can I help at home? With my 8 year old step son
My step son is 8 and he just started 3rd grade. He does not live with us full time, but on the weekends and one night during the week that we have him we look over his school work. After 1st week of school my husband and I were concerned when we saw his writing which looked like a pre schoolers. After contacting the teacher with no real feedback I have cont to work with him and notice that he is not reading well is unable to comprehend or sound out words that a Kindergarten child can read. Please help give me some pointers on how to help!!! It is obvious that his mother does not help him or encourage him at home and she has admitted to this. What do I need to do?In Topics: Parenting / Our Family, Blended families
> 60 days ago
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Has there been a time where you accidentally deleted a file from your Mac but tried to stop the process at the last minute? Fortunately all is not lost because file recovery apps are available and arguably the best is Disk Drill.
Disk Drill, from Dallas-based Cleverfiles, is a very powerful utility that can recover damaged and deleted data from internal or external hard drives, memory cards and even an iPod. This means files such as Word docs, PDFs, photos and videos may be recovered.
While I recommend Disk Drill after undergoing a rigorous inspection over several hours and days, it's very important for novice users to carefully read and understand the online information, particularly from the Features tab. Nevertheless, Disk Drill does do a remarkable job of recovering files you thought were lost forever, even though the scanning process with Deep Scan will take some time. In fact Disk Drill says "recovery can take days!" and "A 500 GB can take around six hours and a 1TB drive can take around 30 hours to scan". Despite the time it takes, the end result is well worth the wait. For the record, it took far less than half the estimated time with my iMac with a 500 GB hard drive and 32 GB RAM.
Disk Drill is offered in two main versions – Disk Drill Basic, available as a free download that can recover lost data from Mac disks and Disk Drill PRO, featuring a number of advanced scanning modes for data recovery of HFS/HFS+, FAT, NTFS and other file systems. Drill Drill also offers some free protection features, including Guaranteed Recovery and S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring to protect future data loss in event of another mishap and as Cleverfiles describes, gives you an "Undelete" option even after emptying the trash bin.
Cleverfiles just released Disk Drill PRO 2.2, offering a new interface, new features and performance improvements and was the product used for this week-long review review. The other two versions - Expert and Enterprise are for commercial purposes. Notable clients include Silicon Valley's Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Stanford University, which adds a tremendous amount of credibility to Cleverfiles and their remarkable file recovery app.
The biggest difference between the Basic and PRO versions is the ability to recover files, in that if you can view the file in Basic but if you want to recover the file, you would have to upgrade to the Pro version. Disk Drill PRO 2.2 retails for $89, but Cleverfiles is offering a 20 percent discount through this review using this coupon code: MUGDXDD-CF. Furthermore, if you have lost an important file, the ability to recover can possibly offset the price, with or without a discount.
Final Analysis: Despite the lengthy scanning process, the Disk Drill PRO 2.2 definitely lived up to expectations. At $89, it's a little pricey, yet coupled with a 20 percent discount, it's that much better. Regardless of the way files were lost - through accidental deletion, disk error or data corruption, Disk Drill PRO 2.2 is more than capable of recovering them.


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TC TO JOHN A. CARLYLE; 25 November 1823; DOI: 10.1215/lt-18231125-TC-JAC-01; CL 2:479-480.
Kinnaird House, 25 November 1823—
My dear Jack,
After considerable higgling and hesitation, I have at last resolved to write to you announcing the day of my arrival, that you may try to get some accommodation made ready for me, against that event. I am so pressed with want of time, that I must keep by the strict matter in hand and nothing more. This is of less consequence, as you are very soon to see me.
I am to set off from this place on Thursday morning:1 I shall be with you on Friday night, most probably some time after the close of day. I purpose at least partly purpose staying with the "speculative skite,"2 on my first night; and his place is forty good miles (including a ferry) from your city. Any clean and quiet bed-room will do for me; I shall need nothing more, but a clean shirt and neckcloth or two, which you will very easily contrive to supply me with.
You will find me, Jack, a poor heart-worn irritable atrabiliar as melancholy as a cat in rainy weather, and nearly as yellow as saffron. Alick I have just been commissioning to come up for the pony. When we are all three together, we must straitly advise what is best to be done: for it seems very possible that the day after to-morrow, I may take my final leave of Kinnaird. In fact I am to consult Geo: Bell surgeon, and shape my course accordingly. I suppose he will "throw mercury into the system":3 I fear the system will not care a doit about all his mercury. At all events, I must be rid of this horrible condition of body: it absolutely torments me till my soul is dark as the pit of Tophet. I have had no good sleep for above a week. Judge ye in what a pleasing frame of mind I am!
Frank Dickson is to meet me in Edinr: he may perhaps call before I arrive; you will tell him how it is. I have finished the "Life Part II." and sent it off to London: the last Part I shall not meddle with till I am settled somewhere. If I were well, how I could dash it off! When ill, how I hang upon it!
I am glad you have taken Duncan4 (to whom my compliments); it is not meet for man to be alone. "One loves company, " says the German, "tho' it were but the company of a burning tallow candle." Any letters &c for me you do well to keep. Be of good cheer, Jack! Let us depend on one another: einst werden wir triumphiren [one day we will triumph]!
The post is here. Good night my kind Doil!
I am ever thy Brother, /
Th: Carlyle—


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Kirk Maltby, Dominik Hasek and Kris Draper participate in pregame warmups wearing Steve Yzerman jerseys as part of the ceremony for Yzerman's number retirement. Maltby and Draper wear Team Canada jerseys while Hasek wears a 2002 Detroit Red Wings jersey.
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The Jazz.com Blog
September 10, 2009 · 0 comments
Jazz Café - Emerging Talent at Tanglewood
This large tent, whose irregular tuffets resemble the sails of a surreal schooner in the green sea of Tanglewood's manicured lawns, staged lunch and dinner shows with young performers during the weekend. Generally speaking, they were highly accomplished, representing the full spectrum of jazz from ragtime to post-modern, from handslapping to the effects pedal. What they all had in common was their birthdays – it's unlikely any of them were born before 1985—and their looks. They all would look very good on album covers—in today's image—conscious market, that's high up on the list. Luckily, when you closed your eyes, by and large you liked what you heard.
This blog entry posted by Roanna Forman. For links to the rest of Forman's coverage of the festival, click here.
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Carrot Soup
By: Shelbey Snyder
Carrot Soup is about Little Bunny who is trying to get Mama Rabbit better by making her carrot soup. He goes on a journey to find the missing ingredient in the carrot soup recipe. Little Bunny is helped by many different types of animals that help him to the missing ingredient.
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Texas Hotel Reservations
Hotels in Athens, Texas
Located in eastern Texas, just southeast of the Dallas/Fort Worth metropolitan area, Athens is charming city full of attractions. Less than 40 minutes from Gun Barrel City, and an hour from Dallas, Athens is known as the Original Home of the Hamburger, and is the Black-Eyed Pea Capital of the World.
Along with a thriving community of bird watchers, and ideal for military families, Athens also has something for the sports fan. Be sure to check out the Dallas Mavericks at the American Airlines Center, or visit the Dallas Zoo – the largest zoo in Texas.
BEST WESTERN Plus Royal Mountain Inn & Suites
1814 Highway 31 E, Athens TX 75751
Phone: (903) 292-1750 | Fax: (903) 292-1751 | Hotel Details | Reservations
Local Area Favorites
- 17 Texas Golf Courses
Enjoy the golf in Texas.
Travel across Texas with your clubs and shoot for par at any of these exemplary golf courses. Tee it up in Dallas to El Paso.
- 36 Things To Do With Kids in Texas!
Texas Carnival
Visit Texas with the family and experience a wide range of kid-friendly activities. From pro sports, to zoos and museums.
- 8 Must-Go Events in San Antonio!
Dia de los Muertos, La Villita
Check out eight annual events throughout San Antonio – from the Stock Show & Rodeo and Fiesta to celebrating mariachi, jazz, and folk music.
- Best Things to Do in Austin
State Capitol Complex
An unbeatable itinerary for your visit to Austin – covering everything from museums and parks to indie bookstores and more.
- Texas Gulf Beaches!
Galveston Island
Check out awesome beaches along the Texas Gulf Coast, including South Padre Island, Mustang Island, and Galveston Island.
- 11 Roadside Attractions in Texas
Be Sure to Explore the Dallas World Aquarium
Visit Texas and hit the road. Check out any of these 11 roadside attractions when you're touring the Lone Star State.
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Photos: Jimmie Johnson Wins Texas NASCAR
Jimmie Johnson regained the lead on the final restart, beating Brad Keselowski in an ending two-lap shootout to win Sunday at Texas and add to his NASCAR Sprint Cup points lead with two races left.
Photos: Jimmie Johnson Wins Martinsville NASCAR
Jimmie Johnson raced to his seventh career victory on NASCAR's trickiest oval Sunday, and the triumph helped him erase a seven-point deficit and supplant Brad Keselowski as the points leader with three events remaining.
Photos: Keselowski Takes NASCAR Chase Lead
Brad Keselowski is off to a fine start after an impressive victory over Jimmie Johnson on Sunday, September 16, 2012 at Chicagoland Speedway.
Photos: Biffle Wins Michigan 400
Greg Biffle won the Michigan 400-and took over the NASCAR Sprint Cup points lead-on Sunday, August 19, 2012.


text: This is the moment Fernando Cruz took a horn halfway through his abdomen, at a Madrid bull ring on Wednesday. Cruz received a couple of gores, to his stomach and abdomen, with both horns. If you're not a fan of killing animals for sport, maybe you're applauding this news. We're not about to call you evil for it.


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Montezuma's Revenge is a classic game that was developed for many different systems, originally published in 1984 by Parker Brothers. It is an action game that combines platforming, with puzzles, treasure and adventure. The title refers to a term describing an intestinal disorder that originates within Mexico. This is exactly the opposite of the game, which leaves you feeling fulfilled and craving more adventure.
The main character of the story is Panama Joe, a picturesque Indiana-Jones type character. The story takes place within a series of labyrinths beneath the palace of Montezuma II, the ancient Aztec emperor.


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- Departments
- Centers & Specialties
- Clinical Interests
- Lung cancer
- Targeted therapies for the treatment of lung cancer
- Medical Education
- MD, PhD, Albert Einstein College of Medicine
- Residency, Brigham and Women's Hospital
- Fellowship, Dana Farber Cancer Institute
- Board Certifications
- Medical Oncology
- Locations
- Boston: Massachusetts General Hospital
- Insurances Accepted
- Aetna Health Inc.
- Beech Street
- Blue Cross Blue Shield - Indemnity
- Blue Cross Blue Shield - Managed Care
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- Cigna (PAL #'s)
- Fallon Community HealthCare
- Great-West Healthcare (formally One Health Plan)
- Harvard Pilgrim Health Plan - ACD
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News & Events
MGH Cancer Center receives second Stand Up to Cancer Dream Team award
Stand Up to Cancer (SU2C) and the American Cancer Society (ACS) announced the formation of a new Dream Team to tackle the problem of lung cancer during the annual meeting of the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) held April 20 in Philadelphia.
New SU2C-American Cancer Society Lung Cancer Dream Team Announced
Jeffrey A. Engelman, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of thoracic oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, will be leader of a $20 million Dream Team to attack the number one cancer killer in America, lung cancer.
Direct drug screening of patient biopsies could overcome resistance to targeted therapy
A new screening platform using cells grown directly from tumor biopsy samples may lead to truly individualized treatment strategies that would get around the problem of treatment resistance, which limits the effectiveness of current targeted therapy drugs.
Cancer Center physicians honored
The Henri and Belinda Termeer Center for Targeted Therapies in the MGH Cancer Center has three new endowed leadership positions.
New drug successfully treats crizotinib-resistant, ALK-positive lung cancer
A new drug called ceritinib appears to be effective against advanced ALK-positive non-small cell lung cancer, both in tumors that have become resistant to crizotinib and in those never treated with the older drug.
Combination therapy may benefit patients with specific genetic subtype of non-small cell lung cancer
Even when their tumors are shrinking in response to therapy, some non-small cell lung cancer patients have a scattering of cancer cells that are undeterred by the drug, causing the tumor to resume its growth.
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Millicent B. StolkMarch 27,2013
Millicent B. Stolk
BROOKFIELD Millicent Blanche Dolly Danciger Stolk, 90, died Wednesday, March 20, 2013, at Gifford Medical Center in Randolph.
She was born May 21, 1922, in Leonia, N.J. She resided in Vermont since the early 1960s.
She enjoyed traveling, skiing, cooking, reading, art, politics and her pets.
She was preceded in death by her husband, Air Force 1st Lt. Martin J. Stolk, and her son, Jon Martin Stolk.
Survivors include four grandchildren; several nephews and nieces; and a close friend, Elaine Keeler.
Private burial will be held at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va. There are no calling hours.
Online condolences may be left at www.dayfunerals.com.
Arrangements are by the Day Funeral Home.MORE IN ObituariesBARRE TOWN A well-attended Mass of Christian Burial and celebration of life for Michael P. Full StoryNORTH DUXBURY Helen Burbank Davis, 93, passed peacefully in the comfort of her family at the... Full StoryBERLIN Gretchen (Haag) Payne died on June 13, 2016. She was born Nov. Full Story
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[SMH | Text-only index]
Date: February 08 2013
'Blackest day in Australian sport'
Peptide import seizures soaring
Former AFL club president and Victorian premier Jeff Kennett has called for an immediate ban on the promotion of sports betting and a zero-tolerance policy on drugs in the AFL.
Kennett said he was not aware of a great deal of match-fixing in AFL, but he was worried by the clear influence of money and betting on sport.
"I have argued for a long time now, and I've written to federal members of parliament, I would like to see an immediate ban on the promotion of sports betting, the immediate ban throughout the country on sports betting," he told ABC 24.
"Because we are now educating a whole group of young children, not only to bet on sport, but during a game of football you might have multiple bets as the game's fortunes swing from one side to the other.
"Now if the federal government's serious, they have a role in this too, and while some have argued 'ban sports betting'.
"I'm not sure you can do that, but you can certainly ban the promotion of sports betting."
Kennett said he was extremely disappointed, but not surprised, by a 12-month Australian Crime Commission report that found coaches, sports scientists and support staff of elite athletes have orchestrated the use of prohibited substances and that match-fixing may have also occurred.
The former Hawthorn Football Club president said the AFL drug code was unenforceable and "obviously abused and evaded and misused" and it was time for a major change.
"The only policy that will work in the interests of the clubs, the AFL and the players, is a zero-tolerance policy to drugs, be they illicit or be they performance-enhancing," he said.
Kennett said if a player tested positive to illicit or performance-enhancing drugs, they should be suspended for a year, rehabilitated and their salary reduced to a recruit level.
After a year they can return to the game but if they produced a second positive test they should be banned for life.
This material is subject to copyright and any unauthorised use, copying or mirroring is prohibited.
[ SMH | Text-only index]


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We breathe in knowing that our pain is shared; there are people all over the earth feeling just as we do right now. This simple gesture is a seed of compassion for self and other. - Pema Chodron
From the lineage of Chogyam Trungpa, the renowned Tibetan meditation master, Pema Chodron is resident teacher at Gampo Abbey, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and the author of best-selling books. (See the Recommended Books list for titles)
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clear blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
-Mary Oliver


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The Feed
By Stephanie March
Foodie File
By Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl
The Host
Harvest Beer Festival
Mpls.St.Paul Event
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Have a Flash Dinner Party with Caviar Delivery
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By: Stephanie March | Posted: 03/13/2009
Tomorrow marks the end of the road for Fugaise. Read More
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By: Stephanie March | Posted: 03/06/2009
It's Fresh Forkin' Friday, and I don't know about you, but I've had some spectacular food for cheap this week. Read More
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By: Stephanie March | Posted: 03/02/2009
Last week, for some reason, the stars aligned, and I got to eat two of the best gyros/shawarma sandwiches from two very different establishments. The gyros I had are arguably the best in town for very different reasons. Read More
Stephanie March is Mpls.St.Paul Magazine's food and dining editor. See bio
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Contact our moving company today in Wyckoff, New Jersey, to request a free estimate for our services to get your belongings to your new home.
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Whether you're moving across town or across the Tri-State area, let our experienced and licensed crew make your move on time and on budget. Our moving company has built a solid reputation on customer satisfaction, which was achieved through quality work, attention to detail, and reliable service.


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North Hendren Cheese Cooperative
Black River BlueA classic American blue from the North Hendren Cheese Cooperative which has been making cheese for 80 years. The recipe for this blue is well-guarded, and for good reason! The texture is slightly softer than butter- a nice creamy backdrop for the bright blue flavor. Read More
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Cambozola Black LabelIf you like your blues as creamy as can be, look no further. That knobby grey rind adds another layer of complexity to the triple-cream wonderland underneath. Evenly distributed blue veining means pleasant, but not overwhelming, blue flavor. Read More
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Chiriboga BlueEcuadorian man falls in love with Bavarian woman. Cheesemaking ensues—not the typical ending to a fairytale, but a pretty delicious one, resulting in a cheese that resembles rich, cultured butter more than a peppery, assertive blue. Read More


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Oct 20, 2011 10:40 AM
We're notorious under-salters when it comes to our dishes. Padma, Gail and Tom would kick us off of Top Chef in a heartbeat for not using enough of the simple seasoning. In preparation for our Top Chef tryout (we're aiming for 2022), we've picked up a copy of Salted: A Manifesto on the World's Most Essential Mineral, with Recipes ($23) and are learning more about the crystal and how it can spice up our cooking.
If you've got a product or service that you'd like to promote on Outblush, click here to find out about our advertising opportunities.
Outblush is a blog for girls who love to shop. Our staff digs up the best clothes, home stuff, beauty items, and more. New items are posted every day — bookmark us and check out:


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Calls for Immediate Release of Funds at Last Year's $5.1 Billion Level
Programs, Heating Vendors, in Limbo as Nov. 1 Fuel Assistance Start Date Approaches
Fuel Assistance program managers at Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD) and fuel programs across Massachusetts are a week away from the program's November 1 opening date with no funding commitment from Washington, D.C.
"We have 14,000 fuel assistance applications in-house," said ABCD President/CEO John J. Drew. "But we can't designate benefits to these families because there is no funding commitment from Washington. The whole program is in limbo."
Drew called on the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services to immediately release full fuel assistance funding of $192 million for Massachusetts at the $5.1 billion national level that was provided last year. "With home heating oil prices up eight percent and other heating fuel prices also increased, and with poverty and unemployment in America at record highs, the LIHEAP program must be fully funded with immediate release of funds so that oil trucks can roll with deliveries to people who desperately need this assistance to survive the cold Northern winters," he said.
Drew emphasized the importance of releasing the full 2011-2012 allocation immediately, not in piecemeal amounts over the course of the winter.
Every year the federal Low-income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) provides a lifeline for seniors and working poor families who struggle to heat their homes through the bitter Northeast winter and still purchase food, medicine and other essentials in an economy that has hit them hard from every side. Last year ABCD served 22,000 households, up from 17,000 in previous years. Across Massachusetts, 250,000 households received fuel assistance. This year programs anticipate a 10 percent increase in applications.
Drew thanked Senators Kerry and Brown and Congressman Markey for their advocacy for immediate, full LIHEAP funding, as well as a host of other Senators and Congressmen across the nation for their intensive efforts to bring this critical issue to the attention of the administration.
In an October 13 letter to President Obama urging release of the full $5.1 billion in fuel funding, Senator John Kerry said: "Those who need assistance from LIHEAP the most are often our 'Greatest Generation seniors' who have contributed to our country all their lives and now live on fixed incomes, in addition to low-income working families struggling to pay rent and keep their heads above water in a difficult economy."
Administration's failure to act cripples program
Because HHS has not established the 2011-2012 funding level and released fuel assistance funds to the states, ABCD and other Massachusetts fuel programs and client-families are encountering a domino-effect series of problems just a week before the program's official start:
• There is no contract with the state agency that dispenses the funding;
• No benefit levels for client-families have been established;
• Oil dealers cannot plan deliveries for the program's official November 1 start, deliveries desperately needed by tens of thousands of families who qualify for the program;
• Fuel assistance advocates do not have the client benefit information they need to work with utility companies to get families who have had their gas and/or electric shut off turned back on before the November 15 winter "moratorium" on shut offs. If utilities are not turned on by that date, families will go into the winter without heat or electricity.
Last year's full funding provided a top benefit of $1,050 in Massachusetts. At this year's oil prices that will provide only about one tank of oil. Most households require 4-5 tanks to get through the winter.
Cold a "natural disaster"
Drew called the winter cold of the Northern states a "natural disaster" equal to the hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and forest fires" that hit other parts of America. He called on the federal government to ensure that people at risk are protected from it.
The very young and old are particularly susceptible to hypothermia where the body loses the ability to regulate its temperature with often deadly results. In addition, families at risk for cold may resort to unsafe heating methods such as space heaters or stoves. Every year families across America die in house fires from such use.
A cost-effective program
Fuel Assistance helps to keep at-risk families on their feet, working, going to school, staying out of emergency rooms. Families in "no-heat" situations may end up leaving their homes and turning to the state's over-extended shelter system, where they could be placed in hotels and motels at great cost to taxpayers. Children who are cold and hungry cannot do homework effectively and may do poorly in school, at great cost to their futures. Seniors and others may end up in costly emergency rooms due to hypothermia or other cold-related illnesses.
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UMass Postgame Notes vs. Miami
Dec. 1, 2012
Recap | Box Score | Quotes | Photo Gallery
* Miami improved to 4-0 all-time against UMass with today's victory. UMass is now 37-46 against current members of the ACC and 1-7 under coach Kellogg.
* UMass shot a season-low 28.6 pct. (18-63) from the floor Saturday.
* UMass attempted 32 3-pointers today, one shy of its season-high 33 from the Siena victory on Wednesday. They made seven 3-pointers in both games.
* UMass continued its strong play on the offensive glass, pulling down a season-high 15 rebounds. The Minutemen have tallied at least 12 in all six games this season. UMass had 12 second chance points.
* UMass recorded season highs in both free throws made (19) and attempted (26). It also attempted more FTs that its opponent for the first time this season.
* UMass recorded one Miami turnover as a result of its full court pressure, bringing its season total to 17 through six games.
* Terrell Vinson finished with 14 points and 11 rebounds for his seventh-career double-double and first this season. His rebounds were a season-high, with nine coming in the first half. His previous 2012-13 high was seven against NC State.
* Chaz Williams had 11 points and 10 assists for his seventh-career double-double and second this year (Harvard). He now has nine career double-figure assist games.
* Prior to UMass bringing in substitutes with 27 seconds left, all eight players who had played for the Minutemen had scored.
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OLDMANS TWP. — In an effort to bring families together, a local organization recently hosted a free family fun event.
WATCH (We Aspire to Capture Hope) hosted the first of a series of free family time events sponsored by the Family Enrichment Network.
Families gathered at the Edward W. Dorn Community Center in Pedricktown and participated in board games, family dinner, a video presentation on manners and a variety of prizes that were raffled off.
More than 100 representatives of Salem, Cumberland and Gloucester counties attended the event.
Valerie Spence-Lacy and Deyanna Bradley worked to put the event together, focusing on family and fun.
According to Spence-Lacy, more events will be held throughout the summer.


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Mitt Romney is front page news right now after his announcement of his running mate, Paul Ryan. Which is unfortunate for me as when I see Mitt Romney, I can't help but recall a story that breaks my heart. It's about Romney's dog, of course. Perhaps some of you remember the original story, which broke in 2008, about the Romney family vacation with their dog Seamus. The Romney family elected to place Shamus in his crate strapped to the roof of their vehicle for the 12 hour drive to Ontario from their Massachusetts home. I'll pause for a moment to let you digest the full implications of that. A family pet strapped to the roof of a speeding vehicle exposed to severe wind and any elements or debris that exist at the time. But that's not even the worst part. At one point, one of the Romney boys noticed that there was fecal matter streaming down one of the windows of the car. Poor Seamus had soiled himself on the roof of the car and it was running down the windows. They stopped and cleaned the car, Seamus and the crate but placed him back on the roof for the remainder of the trip.
Now that's just stupid. Who in their right mind thinks that placing a beloved pet on the roof of the car is a good idea? Who thinks after said pet defecates in utter terror that placing him back on the roof makes sense? Given that this happened nearly 3 decades ago, you would think that Romney would have taken the time to realize his mistake and be ashamed that he was ever so stupid. You'd be wrong. The Romney family instead has chosen to make the insane statement that their dog enjoyed being strapped to the roof of their station wagon! When Ann Romney said, "The dog loved it" I nearly died. Obviously. I mean Seamus literally defecated with glee – that's not really a sign of joy in my book. But have no fear, she had an explanation for that too. She explained he "ate turkey" and "had the runs" but continued to vigorously defend that he liked to be strapped to the roof in a crate. I feel incredible pity for their publicist who has probably begged and pleaded for them to simply apologize and acknowledge their mistake. But no, they defend it. When asked by Diane Sawyer if he would place Seamus on the car roof again, Romney's only response was, "Certainly not with the attention it's received". Perfect. It's not about treating your beloved Irish Setter humanely, it's about not creating political fall out. Treating an animal like that demonstrated a lack of emotional connection, a cruelness and a coldness that exemplifies a persons character. Scary.
But have no fear my Republican friends, Obama is not much better when it comes to treatment of animals. I personally found it heart warming when he promised that he would adopt a dog from a shelter once elected. I found it equally heart breaking when he didn't do that. He had an incredible opportunity to demonstrate to America as a whole that we don't breed and buy while homeless pets die. He could have been an advocate for animals simply by following through on his promise. But he didn't. I understand that cross culturally dogs aren't revered as beloved pets across the world. However, I also understand that as a guardian and advocate of animals, they are to me as an American. It was documented in Obama's memoir how he ate dogs as a child. Therefore, I found his joke years ago concerning pit bulls and Sarah Palin to be offensive to say the least. The joke was "Do you know the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? A pit bull is delicious.. with a little soy sauce!". Not funny. Especially given the tumultuous state for pit bulls in the news media and society at large. Do we really need any more suggestions, even tongue in cheek, as to what other despicably cruel things we can do with that breed?
The Humane Society has given Obama a C- rating concerning his positions on animal welfare issues. In fact, last November, he signed an agriculture bill to allow horses to be slaughtered on US soil. Yucky. The administration pledged to take action against internet sellers of puppies and to ensure that the USDA was inspecting these facilities, however, this has yet to come to fruition.
It saddens me that come November the choice for President of the United States is between two men who can't even manage to be kind to animals. Both men have demonstrated that they can be completely dispassionate and lack any emotion in making decisions, which can be a positive or a negative. That quality remains to be evaluated.


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Eamonn's of Brooklyn Closed by New York Supreme Court
When will the blues jams and bangers and mash return?
Financial-district pub Eamonn's of Brooklyn has been closed by order of the New York Supreme Court — the orange sticker attached to the door this morning doesn't give a reason, but we've left a message with the bar's sister location in Brooklyn Heights (ironically enough, a hangout for judges and lawyers) to find out if and when the blues jams and bangers and mash will return. This is just the latest bit of ill fortune to fall on the address: A couple of years ago, owner Seamus O'Toole died after falling down a flight of stairs at the bar.


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Photos of pumpkins... funny, magic, beautiful... on street, in window, in garden, in restaurant... Perfect for autumn lovers.
FotoBodega project has been designed to display achievements of past and contemporary photographers and to help following recent developments in this area. It is a place where photoghraphy tastes best. It is a cellar where old vintages require a long test and young ones go to your head fast. It is a place full of delicious images and its atmosphere is created by friends. Wojtek Łukowski, FotoBodega's owner, creates and studies the surrounding reality with the lens of his camera. He takes his inspiration from the urban atmosphere and observations of everyday life. He materializes his visions both in his artistic activities – by capturing places, people and events in a photographic composition – and in his professional work – by providing services to his customers. He is an author of articles on marketing in photography business and use of photography in marketing. Author took part in 30. exhibitions in Spain, USA, Poland, Croatia, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, France, Argentina, Sweden.
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Skip to comments.(Vanity) middle finger pain (need advice)
Posted on 06/06/2011 9:13:50 PM PDT by ak267
For the past two weeks I've noticed some discomfort clasping/clinching my left hand whenever I grip a pole or piece of equipment. The base knuckle (left side of the knuckle) on my left, middle finger feels a little sore. When I massage the left, forarm tendons, the pain from clinching or gripping is almost gone.
When I bend my left, middle finger to the right (towards my thumb) there's discomfort. If I bend it up, down or to the left (towards the my pinky) there is no pain.
Sometimes the hand can feel a little stiff in the morning.
Arthritis? Tendonitis?
Have your doctor check it out. They can generally do something to help you if they catch it early enough.
Depends on age. If past 60 could be Arthritis. If younger could be Carpel tunnel. Likely not Tendonitis which is usually in the upper arms.
Sounds like it could be a little of both. Baby the finger as much as you can. Heat is soothing, and topical analgesics should work well. I always use Blue Emu. It's expensive, and I don't know how it works, but it does. No smell, no grease. Just, a few minutes later, you realize the pain is gone.
Stop flipping off 0bama when he says "let me be clear"?
Stop giving people the bird.
You might have pulled it. Or, you might have a small cramp that's sticking around. See a doctor if it persists.
Get a clavicular resection on the affected side. If you're over 40, you'll feel new. It's a lot of chiseling of bone, grinding, and reseating of you tendons, but it's where almost all wrist, hand, arm, pain originates from due to nerve entrapment in the shoulder. To know for sure, does the rotation of your arm seem to affect the pain?, such as twisting a doorknob and pulling / pushing at the same time? Do you feel stiff when pulling a shirt on?
You win
Middle finger pain? Give it a rest, stop picketing the White House for awhile!
BTW - I went to my doc for a pain in my rest, he said carpal tunnel and I got a brace. A few months later I went o my chiropractic type guy for my feet/knees. He asked about my brace and I told him, but said it didn't seem to be helping much. He did his goofy tests - turns out my elbow was out of it's socket! That was awhile ago and it does okay now, until I try to lift a heavy car battery or something. I take lots of things the doc says with a grain of salt now.
Canucks' bad behavior earns 8-1 spanking!
The muscles that largely move your fingers are in the lower arm. So this probably isn't a muscle issue.
Probably nerve or joint damage. You mentioned "equipment." Do you use heavy equipment that vibrates? You may have bruised the cartilidge on one side of that joint. Or caused trauma to a nerve on the side that hurts.
Or it could be something else entirely.
Short version: You need an xray of the joint at issue.
Sheesh, you've run out the warranty and now you expect better living through chemistry? ... Hang in there, zork, it only gets worse with age.
I do a lot of data entry
Some other posters have mentioned shoulder issues. Possibly. There is a lot of tension and force transmitted through the arm when you grip something, and a slight misalignment up top could express in your hand.
If the pain persists, see a doc...
You may well have trigger points in your forearm. Trigger points in the forearm refer pain to other places and can refer pain into the hand. For example, many instances of carpal tunnel pain actually turn out to be TPs in the forarm in both the flexor and extensor muscles. Of course, you could also have tendonitis and/or arthritis in those knuckle joints too, as you state.
I suspect you may have TPs in the flexor digitorum muscles. TPs in this muscles can send fairly sharp pains (almost a burning pain) to the inside of the fingers. This TP can be caused by overuse of grasping things, just as you mention.
Look for TPs in the upper forearm and they'll usually be fairly deep. Using the thumb of your other hand, push inward/massage any really sore spots you find. Don't over do this. Massage for a couple of minutes about six times a day. It may take a day or three to remove the TPs.
Let me know how you do.
Take two Advil and call me in the morning.
If it doesn't affect your trigger finger or your shooting, don't worry about it.
I'm not a doc, but have some knowledge of the mechanics and engineering.
If you type a lot, maybe your bruised one side of the joint via repetitive stress.
Or if your posture isn't good, your shoulder is tweeked, and the muscles are torquing the joint.
Rest the hand. Take (OTC pain med of choice). Use a topical. Give it two or three days. If the symptoms persist at the same level, see a doc. Right then. If they lessen but don't go away in 7-10 days, still see a doc.
I am reminded of that image of a frog crushing the throat of the Egress .. don't ever give up. There's nothing in the Bible about it being a bad thing to leap into St Peter's presence screaming at the injustice. Don't let the bastard demons have a victory. Fight this crap until the botter end!
Thanks for the advice. The main things are:
(1) Massaging forearm relieves some of the pain when clasping
(2) Middle finger hurts when I either grip an item or pull it to the right (left, up and down are okay).
I'll give it some time (I'll take some Motrin) and do some massaging. If it doesn't go away, I'll see my GP or a specialist (what kind of specialist?).
Make that 'bitter end'. Time for my medication, obviously. Only aspirin, just aspirin.
Reduce the amount of tennis you're playing ...
There are many different forms of arthritis; I have osteoarthritis.
What I find helps is keeping the joints strong through exercise. Since the major affected joint is the sacroiliac (which I never heard of until I got arthritis in it), I do back exercises to strengthen the lower back muscles and support the joint.
I rarely take pain medications.
I think the exercise is best for osteoarthritis; other forms of arthritis may not be so easily managed. Also, the amount of exercise is important; too much makes the pain worse.
And if the symptoms get worse despite rest, see a doc right away.
What type of doc? Preferably an orthopedic surgeon or hand specialist. Why not an immunologist or some such to look for arthitis? Because an ortho or hand surgeon can rule out mechanical issues, so you'll know that it's something else. An immunologist or some such can't do the same thing the other way. There are too many non-mechanical issues that can cause joint pain to screen easily.
Try some Blue Emu, I use for back and neck pain, it works for me. It's worth a try.
Also harvest some stinging nettles and apply the sting around the affected finger and pain areas, you can google "medicinal use of nettle" for further info.
Nettle is distinctly different from diuretic drugs. These drugs are often used to reduce high blood pressure and edema (swelling from excessive fluid), but studies have not shown nettle to help either of these conditions. It's unclear why this is the case. It may be that the herb works differently than diuretic drugs, or it may simply be that the correct research has not yet been done.
Nettle leaves can also help reduce the pain of arthritis. In one preliminary study, nettle leaf juice was as effective at reducing the pain of various types of arthritis as anti-inflammatory drugs. In another study, nettle leaf juice enhanced the effects of the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac in people with osteoarthritis.
In addition to drinking nettle leaf tea or juice, an old tradition for relieving the pain of arthritis is to apply fresh leaves over aching joints. Though this initially causes increased pain from the stings, it ultimately relieves inflammation and pain. This effect may be the result of something known as the "gate phenomenon."
When the skin over a painful joint is stung, the spinal cord reduces pain signals coming from the joint underneath. Two studies have now shown that the application of topical nettle stings is in fact helpful for relieving arthritis pain for those who can tolerate the initial discomfort. Taking nettle by mouth in any of its forms, including capsules or tinctures, is also helpful for arthritis.
And if you ever eat poisoned mushrooms by mistake....make a solution of ground milk thistle seeds and drink it ASAP
Burdock root will also clean the kidneys.
Stop flipping off 0bama when he says let me be clear?
You beat me to it. I was going to say something like that.
I used to have the same problem.
I quit playing with myself (and the problem disappeared)
Just kidding.
I had the same problem and someone suggested that was the cause but it was probably because I slept on it wrong some night or sprained it at work and it just lingered for a couple of months.
Some sprains actually take longer than others to heal.
I still have that T shirt. I think the full title was "The last great act of defiance."
Other T shirt shows three vultures perched on a tree looking downward, with one saying, "Patience my ass. I'm gonna kill something!"
"Since the major affected joint is the sacroiliac...)
Just wondering if your doctor checked you for ankylosing spondylitis. Sacroiliac problems are indicators of that disease.
I don't know if you have carpal tunnel symptoms, but FWIW, here's my experience with typing on a computer keyboard to completely avoid carpal tunnel:
When typing, keep the angle formed between the back of your hands and your forearms either 180 degrees (straight) or not much less, but preferably more than 180 degrees. To clarify, place both hands on the keyboard on the home row, with the tips of the fingers touching the keys on the home row, the normal starting position for typing. Move both wrists up while leaving the fingertips on the keys. That's the comfortable angle you want between your hand and forearm.
If you lower the wrists and lift your fingertips off they keys, that's the painful hand-forearm angle. Twenty years ago, doing heaving typing, I started getting carpal tunnel symptoms and figured this out by accident through just doing what was less painful to be able to work. People tip their keyboards up facing them, and they position the keyboard lower than their elbows. Both of these keyboard positions force the hands to bend back. You want your hands to bend forward, so keep the keyboard no lower than your elbows; higher than your elbows works nicely. You can also tip the keyboard away, i.e., top rows of keys lower than the spacebar.
I have never experienced any problems since adopting these positions, even to the point of typing all day. If one is tired, not hunching forward with the head and neck is important to avoid a stiff neck.
Nix the arthritis theory. Look down the connective tissue pathway (tendons, etc.)
You might try applying lemon oil where it hurts. Lemon oil contains limonene, which has been shown in animal studies to relieve pain and inflammation. When nothing else worked, I used lemon oil for relief from shingles pain and it seemed to also spur healing.
Lemon oil is available in a small bottles at the aromatherapy rack of a vitamin or health food store. It is a thin oil that absorbs quickly into the skin and can be applied repeatedly to good effect. Be careful as it will sting if you get it into any scratches or sores or into your eyes.
Did you know you were in for all the jokes when you asked for advice? (I could see it coming from your title)
Poor dear. Well, hope your finger gets better.
I do agree with the trigger points being a great cause, and relief for, the pains you are describing. Find some good charts on the net, and you can really help that stuff. Or else find a physical therapist who can teach you how to find and fix them. There is a guy on the net who has a video that shows you how to release in your arm. Good stuff! Really helped my hands.
Some time ago I assisted someone with a database of a fairly large sampling of arthritis studies.
What I thought I noticed, not really focused on by the studies or the person assisted, afaik, was the importance of lubrication, that is, I wondered if we are not drinking enough water on a consistent lifelong basis. I don't know if it is possible to catch up once you realize you need it, but I do know it is important for brain health as well.
Or ... Go to the veterinarian get some dmso an crush some aspirin to a fine powder mix the aspirin an dmso to make a nuclear strength version of analgesic ointment.
I don't have much mileage on me but a boatload of sudden stops. Old injuries induced arthritis.
Little bit of that topical on the source of the pain works perfect.
Three pieces of advice:
1. See a doctor.
2. Seriously, see a doctor.
3. Did I suggest seeing a doctor?
That's what happens when you say, "Pull my finger".
Sticking it up too much at liberals?
Seriously, it is most likely tendons or nerve ( sub as carnal tunnel syndrome or similar) related. Does it improve with rest? Does it go numb or tingle at all?
Have a link handy?
(sorry about the pun:>)
Thank you for the concern. I believe my osteoarthritis may have been caused by untreated scoliosis putting pressure on the joint. Kids are screened for that, but somehow, I wasn't diagnosed until well into adulthood.
I have had a mild nerve entrapment in the shoulder, however, surgery was not necessary. I was given a set of exercises to strengthen the muscles in such a manner where the shoulder was lifted off the affected nerve. The non-invasive route worked in this case, so the surgical route was not necessary. I had been using a sports medicine doc at the time.
Blackdog - is this now a arthroscopic procedure?
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8/30-9/2: Free Fitness Classes
8/30: International Coffee Hour!
8/30: Farrand Field Movie Night
8/31: CU International Potluck Picnic
9/2: Labor Day- No classes. University closed.
9/3: Bread+Belonging | Welcome Back BBQMore Events »
Peace Corps Master's International Info Session, Sept. 9
Learn to dance Argentine Tango!
Are you a Sexually Active Female Undergrad?
Canterbury Episcopal Campus Fellowship meets Tuesdays at 6 p.m.
AmeriCorps scholarships for volunteering!
Progressive Christian worship Sundays 5 p.m.
Open Mic Night! Tuesday, Sept. 3, 8 p.m.
Peanut-butter N' Luvin' community service Saturdays
Chancellor's Reception for International Students
Participants wanted for social science experiments
Participants needed for research at University of Colorado ages 12-21
Volunteer for an all-women's cycling rideMore Buff Bulletins »
CBS4: DeGette's Bill Would Help Vets Exposed To Airborne Hazards
The Denver Post: Obama college tuition plan is appealing, but ...


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The Hakone Open Air Museum
Spend a spiritually rich time surrounded by huge field sculptures and nature of Hakone
The Hakone Open-Air Museum opened in 1969 as the first open-air art museum in Japan. It is located in grand nature of Hakone that was once called one of the most rugged paths in Japan. The garden with a view of the mountains of Hakone and changing four seasons provides an ideal outdoor setting to show oversized sculptures.
There is a permanent exhibition of about 120 masterpieces of modern and contemporary sculptors in the world. The Picasso Papillion exhibits in series one of the world's best collections of Picasso consisting of about 300 items. There are four other indoor exhibition halls: main hall gallery, multi hall, art hall and Ryokuei gallery to guarantee a day to appreciate works of art in a relaxed manner even when it is raining.
The museum's collections include about 100 masterpieces of Rodin, Bourdelle, Miro, Moore and others in the garden; and Brancusi, Morie Ogiwara, Boccioni, Lipchitz, Modigliani, Shin Hongo and others inside. Enjoy huge artworks up-close in the open air. Strolling in nature you may unexpectedly come across an inspiring sculpture under a green shade. Children are playing energetically among sculptures. This is a place to spend such a wonderful time. Hakone is also famous for foot bath. It is another pleasure to relieve the fatigue of walking with a footbath in the museum.
Address: 1121 Ninotair, Ashigarashimo-gun Hakone-machi, Kanagawa
Phone: 0460-82-1161
Hours open to visitors: Open year round. 9:00-17:00 (admission until 16:30)
Admission Fee: 1600 yen (adults); 1100 yen (aged 65 and older, university and high-school students); 800 yen (middle and elementary school children)
Directions: (Train) At JR Odawara Station (35 minutes by Tokaido Shinkansen from Tokyo Station), take the Hakone Tozan Line to Chokoku-no-Mori Station. From there the museum is a 2-minute walk. (Car) 30 minutes from Gotenba Interchange on the Tomei Expressway.


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Barbara Walters exhibited her journalistic instincts last Thursday on daytime program, "The View." She was asked about Russian former anchorwoman Liz Wahl's on-air resignation protesting the Russian government's pro-Putin propaganda on the network.
A noticeably angry Walters said, "She is working for a Russian network, therefore, she is protesting the Russians!"
The former ABC anchor and "20/20" host admitted it was Wahl's "personal choice Walters went on to say that while she can understand Wahl's "personal choice.", But she also said, "She urges not to "make her a hero for protesting. She is working for the government."
Walters was greeted by her colleagues at "The View" with strong disagreement. Panelist Sherri Shepherd vigorously stood up for Wahl.
Shepard told Walters, "Even though she was working for the government, it was Russian, but she's saying 'it's still every day I've got to do this, I'm not feeling good inside. It's violating what I'm feeling, so it's okay.'"
The debate ended in a stand-off.
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Anticipation has been steadily building with regard to the Breaking Bad spinoff Better Call Saul since the first announcement that there would likely be a new show centered around that lovably larcenous lawyer, about a year ago.
Breaking Bad mastermind and co-creator of Better Call Saul, Vince Gilligan has had a lot to say about the concept for the new show and by now we know that it will be a prequel of the BB time frame in which Walter White and Saul Goodman enter into an unholy alliance to serve their mutual monetary interests with regard to Walt's methamphetamine business. We have also learned that it will deal with the aftermath of said alliance and even include some sequences that overlap with the Breaking Bad years.
It will either be a comedy with significant dramatic elements, or a drama with a high comedic content. The balance there seems to be yet to be determined. There will be some new as well as some familiar faces besides Bob Odenkirk as the much beloved title character. (And by the way, we have recently also learned that Saul's pre-Goodman name was Jimmy McGill. A promotional billboard in New Mexico has hipped us to that factoid.)
We also know that the start date for Better Call Saul has been pushed back to sometime in early 2015. Gilligan addressed this at the annual summer meeting of TV critics tour in Los Angeles. "I am slow as mud as a TV writer. I always have been. It was my big fear when I got the job on The X Files. I had been writing movie scripts, and I didn't know if I could write at a TV pace. I still feel I'm very slow for television. We had a pace, thanks to AMC and Sony, on Breaking Bad that was deliciously stately for television, and it was nothing that they wanted," Gilligan says. "We have a way of doing things that is slower than most TV shows."
With all the multi-determined concepts involved and the elevated degree of expectations for a spinoff from one of the most highly regarded shows of recent memory, it is more than understandable that Gilligan and co-creator Peter Gould want to take the time required to get it right.
Hardcore Breaking Bad fans will be willing to wait for a show that lives up to its predecessor.