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Source: Lanza studied previous mass killings
NEWTOWN -- Anders Behring Breivik was not the only mass murderer with whom Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter Adam Lanza was obsessed, according to a law enforcement source.
State Police investigators who executed search warrants at the Yogananda Street home where the 20-year-old Lanza lived recovered reams of documents related to "virtually every mass murder" in the United States and abroad, the source said.
Lanza exhibited particular interest in the October 2006 shooting at a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pa., in which gunman Charles Carl Robert IV took hostages and shot 10 school girls, five of them fatally, before killing himself.
"There was a lot of material on the Amish case," the source said.
Hearst Connecticut Newspapers previously reported that police had uncovered evidence leading them to believe Lanza was attempting to surpass the Norwegian killer's total.
Breivik murdered a total of 77 people, eight of them by setting off bombs in downtown Oslo before he shot and killed 69 others, many of them teenagers, at a summer camp on Utoya island in July 2011.
The latest disclosure, coupled with evidence of how Lanza expertly deployed his AR-15 Bushmaster rifle in murdering 20 first-graders and six adults at the school after earlier attempting to destroy his computer hard drives, lends credence to the belief that he had been planning the deadly Dec. 14 assault for some time.
The source said that Lanza used what law enforcement professionals call "tactical loading" in firing the semi-automatic rifle, putting a fresh magazine into the weapon before completely emptying the previous one.
Although the technique is commonly used in the violent video games that Lanza reportedly spent endless hours playing in his basement, he exhibited a proficiency at it that make investigators believe he had previously done it with a real weapon.
"It's one thing to do it by pushing a button on a computer," the source said. "It's different in a shooting. You have to practice that to be as proficient as he was that morning."
Estimates are that Lanza fired more than 150 rounds from the rifle in less than five minutes before committing suicide with a pistol he was also carrying as police closed in.
Earlier, Lanza had killed his mother, Nancy, at the home they shared.
The source also said investigators have had some success in tracing Lanza's movements prior to the shooting by using cell phone technology. Of particular interest, the source said, was a number of trips he made to the Danbury Fair mall the previous April and May.
"For someone who almost never left his house, it was really out of character," the source said.
Investigators had been handicapped in determining a possible motive for Lanza's rampage because he destroyed the hard drives of the two computers he used before driving to the school. Another source familiar with the probe told Hearst last month that FBI technicians were able to glean some data from one hard drive but that reconstructing the other hard drive may take another six months to two years.
Meanwhile, Danbury State's Attorney Stephen Sedensky III said he is hoping to have a report on the shootings by June.
firstname.lastname@example.com; 203-731-3342


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This World Economic Forum report examines the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of "high-impact entrepreneurs" whose companies deliver strong internal metrics while driving job creation and shareholder value. The report's case studies spring from Ernst & Young's surveys of companies competing in its Entrepreneur of the Year campaign. The statistics reveal how various sectors advance through corporate life-cycle stages, and the report ably analyzes these progressions as well as recounting inspiring tales of how individual "bold ones" get the job done. getAbstract suggests this report to general business readers, investors and entrepreneurs.
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On the flight from Washington to New Hampshire to cover last Wednesday's Democratic presidential debate, I was joined by a Hillary Clinton staffer who was headed for Hanover to prep her for the encounter with her seven rivals. "I expect fireworks," he said, anticipating that the challengers would try to shake up the race at one of the last confrontations before the January voting.
It didn't happen. There were several jabs - from Joe Biden, John Edwards, Bill Richardson and Mike Gravel - but Barack Obama, who is her closest pursuer in the polls, had lost his voice to a bad cold and mostly stood mute. And Clinton smothered every question with a blanket of conditional responses, so reluctant to take a clear stand that she frustrated NBC's Tim Russert.
Her posture during the debate was the classic front-runner pose: Don't make waves. The question is whether she can go through the next three months saying little or nothing.
The highly regarded Granite State Poll released just before the debate showed Clinton had expanded her advantage, drawing 43 percent of the support, to 20 percent for Obama, 12 percent for Edwards and 6 percent for Richardson.
During the debate, she rarely came out of a defensive crouch. Answering the first question, she said her goal would be to withdraw all American troops from Iraq by 2013, but "it is very difficult to know what we are going to be inheriting" from the Bush administration, so she cannot make any pledge - as Richardson and others feel free to do.
Angering utter long shot Gravel and disagreeing with Biden and Chris Dodd, she voted earlier Wednesday for Sen. Joe Lieberman's resolution designating Iran's Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization. Edwards claimed that President Bush could use that as a pretext for war and said it showed Clinton had not learned the lesson of her "mistake" in authorizing the use of force in Iraq. But she calmly replied that the Revolutionary Guards had provided weapons to kill Americans in Iraq and promoted terrorism - so the designation was justified.
When Russert asked what her attitude would be toward an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, she refused to answer such a "hypothetical." He insisted it was a real possibility, but she would not play. Instead, she endorsed the Israeli attack on Syria - a safe stand.
Clinton joined the others in endorsing "sanctuary cities" for illegal immigrants, but couched it as a step toward law enforcement rather than protection for people here illegally. And when challenged on the failure of her 1993-94 health care initiative, she said she was "proud" to have waged that "lonely" fight, and rejected Russert's claim that her stubbornness had blocked a bipartisan agreement back then.
Her greatest evasiveness occurred on the volatile issue of Social Security. Biden, the first to answer Russert's question about steps to save the system from bankruptcy, said he would lift the cap on payroll taxes and raise additional millions from people making more than $97,000 a year.
But when it was Clinton's turn, she argued that sound fiscal policies and economic growth could eliminate the problem - claiming that her husband's experience proved that point. Russert knew better, and corrected her math, but she was adamant: "I'm not putting anything on the proverbial table" - meaning no painful tax increases or benefit cuts - until the budgetary and overall economic fixes are attempted. That is a position that would be hard to maintain in office, but it offers maximum protection for the campaign.
It went on like that through several more topics, until a final question about baseball fandom. Clinton identified herself as a Yankees fan, saying she knew it would not help her with the Red Sox nation supporters in New Hampshire. But what if it is the Cubs vs. the Yankees, Russert asked. "I guess I would have to alternate," she said, triangulating once again.
This dodginess got her through the two hours. Whether it can get her through the next three months is a different question. The same poll that gave her a 2-1 lead over Obama and almost a 4-1 lead over Edwards found that only 17 percent of New Hampshire voters have a firm choice of a candidate, and 55 percent said they are still deciding. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum.
Contact David Broder at The Washington Post, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071; e-mail email@example.com.


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Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were joined by their children Maddox, 12, Pax, 10, Zahara, 9, Shiloh, 8, and Knox, 5, at the premiere of Disney's Maleficent in Hollywood, CA on Wednesday (May 28). Brad and Angelina's 5-year-old daughter Vivienne, who stars as a young Aurora in Maleficent, was noticeably absent from the premiere.
Hayden Panettiere and Wladimir Klitschko are expecting their first child together!
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Nashville star Hayden Panettiere and her fiance boxing world champion Wladimir Klitschko are expecting their first child together Us Weekly reports. "Hayden is totally pregnant!" a source tells the magazine. Hayden, 24, and Wladimir, 38, first began dating in 2009 and broke up in 2011 only to get back together in 2013.


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Resources - celiac disease
If you have celiac disease, it is very important that you receive counseling from a registered dietitian who specializes in celiac disease and gluten-free diets. An expert can tell you where to buy gluten-free products, and will share important resources that explain your disease and treatment.
A dietitian can also provide counseling on conditions that commonly occur with celiac disease such as:
The following organizations provide additional information:


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Two coalition soldiers and four Afghans killed in in Maruf district of Kandahar province attack claimed by the Taliban.
A suicide attack has killed at least six people including two coalition forces members and four Afghans in southern Afghanistan, international and local officials have said.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, according to their spokesman Qari Yousif Ahmadi on Saturday, after the blast that targeted a group of foreign soldiers and Afghan intelligence agents in Maruf district of Kandahar province.
The International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said in a statement the attack also wounded several coalition civilian members and Afghan National Security Forces.
"ISAF can confirm that one coalition forces service member and one coalition forces civilian, along with several ANSF service members, died today in southern Afghanistan," ISAF spokesman Adam Wojack told the AFP news agency.
"The injured personnel were evacuated to ISAF medical facilities for treatment," he said.
The attacker was on foot and detonated his explosives-filled vest at a checkpoint close to an office of NDS, the Afghan intelligence agency, according to Kandahar provincial spokesman Jawed Faisal.
"The foreign and Afghan officials were standing at the checkpoint when the attacker blew himself up.
"The blast killed four NDS agents and wounded three others.
There were some casualties among foreigners too." he said.
The Taliban said the attack killed six foreigners and several Afghan security forces.


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Notes to reader:
1. You can view two versions of this Power Act, identical except as described below. You can jump between them with a link at the top of every section.
2. This is a long document, so it is divided into these sections:
16 United States Code Chapter 12H (1994 & Supp. I 1995). Act of Dec. 5, 1980, 94 Stat. 2697. Public Law No. 96-501, S. 885.
To assist the electrical consumers of the Pacific Northwest through use of the Federal Columbia River Power System to achieve cost-effective energy conservation, to encourage the development of renewable energy resources, to establish a representative regional power planning process, to assure the region of an efficient and adequate power supply, and for other purposes.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
Short title and table of contents
This Act, together with the following table of contents, may be cited as the "Pacific Northwest Electric Power Planning and Conservation Act".
[see contents above]
839. Congressional declaration of purpose
The purposes of this chapter, together with the provisions of other laws applicable to the Federal Columbia River Power System, are all intended to be construed in a consistent manner. Such purposes are also intended to be construed in a manner consistent with applicable environmental laws. Such purposes are:
839(1). to encourage, through the unique opportunity provided by the Federal Columbia River Power System--
839(1)(A). Conservation and efficiency in the use of electric power, and [Pacific Northwest Electric Power Planning and Conservation Act, (Northwest Power Act), §2(1)(A), Dec. 5, 1980, 94 Stat. 2697.]
839(1)(B). the development of renewable resources within the Pacific Northwest; [Northwest Power Act, §2(1)(B), 94 Stat. 2697.]
839(2). to assure the Pacific Northwest of an adequate, efficient, economical, and reliable power supply; [Northwest Power Act, §2(2), 94 Stat. 2697.]
839(3). to provide for the participation and consultation of the Pacific Northwest States, local governments, consumers, customers, users of the Columbia River System (including Federal and State fish and wildlife agencies and appropriate Indian tribes), and the public at large within the region in--
839(3)(A). the development of regional plans and programs related to energy conservation, renewable resources, other resources, and protecting, mitigating, and enhancing fish and wildlife resources. [Northwest Power Act, §2(3)(A), 94 Stat. 2697.]
839(3)(B). facilitating the orderly planning of the region's power system, and [Northwest Power Act, §2(3)(B), 94 Stat. 2698.]
839(3)(C). providing environmental quality; [Northwest Power Act, §2(3)(C), 94 Stat. 2698.]
839(4). to provide that the customers of the Bonneville Power Administration and their consumers continue to pay all costs necessary to produce, transmit, and conserve resources to meet the region's electric power requirements, including the amortization on a current basis of the Federal investment in the Federal Columbia River Power System; [Northwest Power Act, §2(4), 94 Stat. 2698.]
839(5). to insure, subject to the provisions of this chapter--
839(5)(A). that the authorities and responsibilities of State and local governments, electric utility systems, water management agencies, and other non-Federal entities for the regulation, planning, conservation, supply, distribution, and use of electric power shall be construed to be maintained, and [Northwest Power Act, §2(5)(A), 94 Stat. 2698.]
839(5)(B). that Congress intends that this chapter not be construed to limit or restrict the ability of customers to take actions in accordance with other applicable provisions of Federal or State law, including, but not limited to, actions to plan, develop, and operate resources and to achieve conservation, without regard to this chapter; and [Northwest Power Act, §2(5)(B), 94 Stat. 2698.]
839(6). to protect, mitigate and enhance the fish and wildlife, including related spawning grounds and habitat, of the Columbia River and its tributaries, particularly anadromous fish which are of significant importance to the social and economic well-being of the Pacific Northwest and the Nation and which are dependent on suitable environmental conditions substantially obtainable from the management and operation of Federal Columbia River Power System and other power generating facilities on the Columbia River and its tributaries. [Northwest Power Act, §2(6), 94 Stat. 2698.] (94 Stat. 2698, 16 USC §839)


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Teresa Sharp is fifty-three years old and has lived in a modest single-family house on Millsdale Street, in a suburb of Cincinnati, for nearly thirty-three years. A lifelong Democrat, she has voted in every Presidential election since she turned eighteen. So she was agitated when an official summons from the Hamilton County Board of Elections arrived in the mail last month. Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati, is one of the most populous regions of the most fiercely contested state in the 2012 election. No Republican candidate has ever won the Presidency without carrying Ohio, and recent polls show Barack Obama and Mitt Romney almost even in the state. Every vote may matter, including those cast by the seven members of the Sharp family—Teresa, her husband, four grown children, and an elderly aunt—living in the Millsdale Street house.
The letter, which cited arcane legal statutes and was printed on government letterhead, was dated September 4th. "You are hereby notified that your right to vote has been challenged by a qualified elector," it said. "The Hamilton County Board of Elections has scheduled a hearing regarding your right to vote on Monday, September 10th, 2012, at 8:30 A.M. . . . You have the right to appear and testify, call witnesses and be represented by counsel."
"My first thought was, Oh, no!" Sharp, who is African-American, said. "They ain't messing with us poor black folks! Who is challenging my right to vote?"
The answer to Sharp's question is that a new watchdog group, the Ohio Voter Integrity Project, which polices voter-registration rolls in search of "electoral irregularities," raised questions about her eligibility after consulting a government-compiled list of local properties and mistakenly identifying her house as a vacant lot.
The Sharp household had first been identified as suspicious by computer software that had been provided to the Ohio Voter Integrity Project by a national organization called True the Vote. The software, which has been distributed to similar groups around the country, is used to flag certain households, including those with six or more registered voters. This approach inevitably pinpoints many lower-income residents, students, and extended families.
True the Vote, which was founded in 2009 and is based in Houston, describes itself as a nonprofit organization, created "by citizens for citizens," that aims to protect "the rights of legitimate voters, regardless of their political party." Although the group has a spontaneous grassroots aura, it was founded by a local Tea Party activist, Catherine Engelbrecht, and from the start it has received guidance from intensely partisan election lawyers and political operatives, who have spent years stoking fear about election fraud. This cohort—which Roll Call has called the "voter fraud brain trust"—has filed lawsuits, released studies, testified before Congress, and written op-ed columns and books. Since 2011, the effort has spurred legislative initiatives in thirty-seven states to require photo identification to vote.
Engelbrecht has received especially valuable counsel from one member of the group: Hans von Spakovsky. A Republican lawyer who served in the Bush Administration, he is now a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank. "Hans is very, very helpful," Engelbrecht said. "He's one of the senior advisers on our advisory council." Von Spakovsky, who frequently appears on Fox News, is the co-author, with the columnist John Fund, of the recent book "Who's Counting?," which argues that America is facing an electoral-security crisis. "Election fraud, whether it's phony voter registrations, illegal absentee ballots, vote-buying, shady recounts, or old-fashioned ballot-box stuffing, can be found in every part of the United States," they write. The book connects these modern threats with sordid episodes from the American past: crooked inner-city machines, corrupt black bosses in the Deep South. Von Spakovsky and Fund conclude that electoral fraud is a "spreading" danger, and declare that True the Vote serves "an obvious need."
Mainstream election experts say that Spakovsky has had an improbably large impact. Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine, and the author of a recent book, "The Voting Wars," says, "Before 2000, there were some rumblings about Democratic voter fraud, but it really wasn't part of the main discourse. But thanks to von Spakovsky and the flame-fanning of a few others, the myth that Democratic voter fraud is common, and that it helps Democrats win elections, has become part of the Republican orthodoxy." In December, Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, wrote, "Election fraud is a real and persistent threat to our electoral system." He accused Democrats of "standing up for potential fraud—presumably because ending it would disenfranchise at least two of its core constituencies: the deceased and double-voters." Hasen believes that Democrats, for their part, have made exaggerated claims about the number of voters who may be disenfranchised by Republican election-security measures. But he regards the conservative alarmists as more successful. "Their job is really done," Hasen says. "It's common now to assert that there is a need for voter I.D.s, even without any evidence."
In Hamilton County alone, the new citizens' groups have challenged more than a thousand names since March. Some challenges, such as those aiming to disqualify college students who failed to include their dorm-room numbers on their registration forms, were tossed out immediately. But the board accepted nearly two hundred challenges, including those to twenty-six voters registered at a trailer park that no longer existed.
In Ohio, if voters whose eligibility has been challenged come to the polls in November, they may be forced to use a provisional ballot, which will be counted only if officials sanction it—after Election Day. Some experts worry that voters who have been needlessly challenged will feel too intimidated even to show up. "People have other things to do with their lives than respond to inaccurate complaints accusing them of being criminals," Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said.
Alex Triantafilou, a Republican member of the county's Board of Elections, maintains that the challenges have been nonpartisan. But Caleb Faux, a Democrat on the board, says, "I don't buy it. The True the Vote people are clearly going after Democratic voters: African-Americans, students, and other groups they think are likely to vote Democratic."
Von Spakovsky recently sat down with me in a conference room at the Heritage Foundation, wearing rimless eyeglasses and a sports jacket with a crisp white pocket square. In our conversation, and in later phone calls and e-mails, he expressed himself with lawyerly reserve. He said of True the Vote and its affiliates, "They're doing a great job." Earlier this year, he noted, the Pew Center on the States found that more than 1.8 million people who had died were still registered to vote in America, and that 2.75 million people were registered to vote in multiple states. How many of these errors translate into fraudulent votes? "It is impossible to answer," he said. "We don't have the tools in place." But he cited a 2000 investigation, by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, of voting records in Georgia over the previous two decades; the paper reported that it had turned up fifty-four hundred instances of dead people being recorded as having voted. "That seems pretty substantial to me," he said.
He did not mention that the article's findings were later revised. The Journal-Constitution ran a follow-up article after the Georgia Secretary of State's office indicated that the vast majority of the cases appeared to reflect clerical errors. Upon closer inspection, the paper admitted, its only specific example of a deceased voter casting a ballot didn't hold up. The ballot of a living voter had been attributed to a dead man whose name was nearly identical.
On the appointed day this fall, Teresa Sharp drove to Cincinnati and appeared before the Board of Elections. Dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, and accompanied by six family members, Sharp moved to the front of the room when her name was called. She then "slammed her purse and papers on the table," according to Faux, who was present.
Sharp told me, "It was like a kangaroo court. There were, like, ninety-four people being challenged, and my family and I were the only ones contesting it! I looked around. The board members and the stenographer, they were all white people. The lady bringing these challenges, she was white, and reminded me of Gladys Kravitz"—the nosy neighbor on the sitcom "Bewitched."
When Sharp heard her house described as a vacant lot, and learned that Marlene Kocher—the member of the Ohio Voter Integrity Project who had filed the challenge against her—had not bothered to visit her address, she exploded. "This lady has nothing else better to do?" she said. "I think she needs to get a life!"
Faux recalled that Kocher "apologized and kind of shrunk back."
"We made a mistake," Mary Siegel, a leader of the Ohio Voter Integrity Project, who has been involved in a local Tea Party group, told me. "We're just here to protect the voter. We have no idea when we look at the registrations what color or creed or party you are. We just look at where your property is and how many people are living there."
Sharp said, "I think they want to stop as many black people as they can from voting. I won't even know until Election Day if I got the right to vote. But if they tell me I can't vote—it is over. They are going to have to call the police. I am going to jail!"
At the Heritage Foundation, von Spakovsky emphasized that his devotion to safeguarding voter integrity had nothing to do with racial discrimination or partisan gain: "I'm not in this because I'm on a team. I believe in having fair elections, and I would never be willing to do anything that would encourage or allow cheating in an election. My interest is in making sure that the person who people vote for the most wins."
Yet many Democrats see his cause as a voter-suppression effort in disguise. Thirty-three states have passed some form of voter-I.D. law, the most severe versions of which demand government-issued cards with photographs and expiration dates. A driver's license typically qualifies, but many students, elderly people, and poor urban residents do not have one.
According to a study by the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal nonprofit institute at N.Y.U. Law School, eleven per cent of the voting-age population lacks the kind of I.D. cards required by the strictest states. Eighteen per cent of Americans over the age of sixty-five do not have such documentation; among African-Americans the figure is twenty-five per cent. Von Spakovsky criticized the study for focussing not on registered voters but on all Americans who are eligible to vote. He cites rival studies indicating that the number of registered voters without I.D.s is negligible.
The vast majority of the lawmakers who have pushed for voter I.D.s have been Republicans. As Bill Clinton has put it, "This is not rocket science. They are trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like the 2010 electorate"—when many young and minority voters stayed home—"than the 2008 electorate." Clinton said that the "effort to limit the franchise" was the most determined "since we got rid of the poll tax and all the other Jim Crow burdens on voting."
Republicans who support tighter voter security say that they are not seeking political advantage. But last summer Pennsylvania's Republican House Leader, Mike Turzai, was caught on tape boasting to colleagues that the state's new I.D. law was "going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania." Earlier this month, a state judge suspended the controversial law's implementation until after the 2012 election; a federal court has done the same with South Carolina's new I.D. law.
Congressman John Lewis, the Democrat from Georgia, says of recent efforts to tighten voting requirements, "I thought we'd passed this long ago. But it seems we must fight this fight over and over." In the nineteen-sixties, Lewis was beaten by police while demonstrating in support of civil-rights legislation, including the Voting Rights Act. He said of von Spakovsky, "He's been the moving force behind photo I.D.s. I don't know if it's something in the water he's been drinking . . . but over the years he's been hellbent to make it more difficult—always, always—for people to vote. It's like he goes to bed dreaming about this, and gets up in the morning wondering, What can I do today to make it more difficult for people to vote? When you pull back the covers, peel back the onion, he's the one who's gotten the Republican legislatures, and the Republican Party, to go along with this—even though there is no voter fraud to speak of. He's trying to create a cure where there is no sickness."
Earlier this year, at a panel sponsored by the conservative organization Judicial Watch, von Spakovsky said that it was "preposterous" for anyone to liken the nationwide crackdown on voter irregularities to "the restoration of Jim Crow." In support of his views, he cites a liberal icon: the former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. In 2008, Stevens helped uphold Indiana's strict voter-I.D. law in the face of a challenge from Democrats. He wrote, "Examples of such fraud in other parts of the country have been documented throughout this Nation's history by respected historians and journalists," demonstrating "that not only is the risk of voter fraud real but that it could affect the outcome of a close election."
Nearly all scholars of America's system of locally run elections acknowledge chronic problems, including administrative incompetence, sloppy registration rolls, unreliable machinery, vote buying, and absentee-ballot fraud. But Robert Brandon, the president of the Fair Elections Legal Network and a longtime reformer, says that the current debate, "which is about people impersonating another voter, is silly." He adds, "You can't steal an election one person at a time. You can by stuffing ballot boxes—but voter I.D.s won't stop that."
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Von Spakovsky offered me the names of two experts who, he said, would confirm that voter-impersonation fraud posed a significant peril: Robert Pastor, the director of the Center for Democracy and Election Management, at American University, and Larry Sabato, a political-science professor at the University of Virginia. Pastor, von Spakovsky noted, had spoken to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights about being a victim of election fraud: voting in Georgia, he discovered that someone else had already voted under his name.
When I reached Pastor, he clarified what had happened to him. "I think they just mistakenly checked my name when my son voted—it was just a mistake." He added, "I don't think that voter-impersonation fraud is a serious problem." Pastor believes that, compared with other democracies, America is "somewhere near the bottom in election administration," and thinks that voter I.D.s make sense—but only if they are free and easily available to all, which, he points out, is not what Republican legislatures have proposed. Sabato, who supports the use of voter I.D.s under the same basic conditions, says of the voter-impersonation question, "One fraudulent vote is one too many, but my sense is that it's relatively rare today."
Hasen says that, while researching "The Voting Wars," he "tried to find a single case" since 1980 when "an election outcome could plausibly have turned on voter-impersonation fraud." He couldn't find one. News21, an investigative-journalism group, has reported that voter impersonation at the polls is a "virtually non-existent" problem. After conducting an exhaustive analysis of election-crime prosecutions since 2000, it identified only seven convictions for impersonation fraud. None of those cases involved conspiracy.
Lorraine Minnite, a public-policy professor at Rutgers, collated decades of electoral data for her 2010 book, "The Myth of Voter Fraud," and came up with some striking statistics. In 2005, for example, the federal government charged many more Americans with violating migratory-bird statutes than with perpetrating election fraud, which has long been a felony. She told me, "It makes no sense for individual voters to impersonate someone. It's like committing a felony at the police station, with virtually no chance of affecting the election outcome." A report by the Times in 2007 also found election fraud to be rare. During the Bush Administration, the Justice Department initiated a five-year crackdown on voter fraud, but only eighty-six people were convicted of any kind of election crime.
Hasen, who calls von Spakovsky a leading member of "the Fraudulent Fraud Squad," told me that he respects many other conservative advocates in his area of expertise, but dismisses scholars who allege widespread voter-impersonation fraud. "I see them as foot soldiers in the Republican army," he says. "It's just a way to excite the base. They are hucksters. They're providing fake scholarly support. They're not playing fairly with the facts. And I think they know it."
Von Spakovsky is the son of a German mother and a Russian father who met in Bavaria, just after the Second World War, at an American-run camp for displaced persons. They immigrated to the United States in 1951. His father, Anatol, was a White Russian who fought Communism twice: first against the Bolsheviks, in Russia, and later against Tito, in Yugoslavia, where he lived before heading to Bavaria. "He escaped death many times," von Spakovsky recalled. "He taught me to stand up for what I believe in, no matter what the cost, and I have taken that to heart." Von Spakovsky says that his heritage has made him especially appreciative of American democracy and sensitive to what he calls its "fragility."
In America, his parents settled in Huntsville, Alabama, where his father taught philosophy at a local college and wrote poetry. "He was the most intelligent and cultured person I have ever known," von Spakovsky said, adding that family dinners were more stimulating than the local schools he attended. Although the civil-rights movement created tumult in Alabama during his childhood, he says that he has no memory of it.
After graduating from M.I.T. and Vanderbilt Law School, von Spakovsky became the in-house counsel at a life-insurance company in Atlanta, and volunteered to become a Republican poll watcher at an inner-city housing project. "I was expecting a very boring day," he says. Instead, he observed election officials asking voters which party they belonged to, "which, of course, you're not supposed to do in a general election. So the very first time I'm a poll watcher, I walk in and something illegal is going on."
It was 1992, a turning point in American election law. Throughout the nineteen-eighties, civil-rights groups brought discrimination cases against local election officials, particularly in the South, alleging that bureaucratic barriers—such as requiring people to register at local clerks' offices—served mainly to intimidate new voters, many of whom were minorities. Voting-rights activists pushed for national legislation that would encourage mass enfranchisement, such as permitting people to register when they got a driver's license, or to register by mail. Congress passed a bill with these provisions, but President George H. W. Bush vetoed it. Soon after Bill Clinton took office, in 1993, he signed the bill, which became the National Voter Registration Act—also known as the motor-voter law. As minority-voter registration surged, conservatives began warning that permitting more lenient forms of registration opened the door to fraud.
In 1997, von Spakovsky agitated against the National Voter Registration Act and in favor of strict requirements, including the presentation of birth certificates, for voter I.D.s, in order "to prevent impostors from voting." He became a Republican appointee to an election board in the Atlanta area, which had a fast-growing, increasingly black population. Writing for the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a conservative research center, he warned that aspects of the National Voter Registration Act might "destroy the security and integrity of the voter-registration system." The article also recommended regular purges of voter rolls.
By 1999, von Spakovsky had begun attracting national attention. He was the chairman of the Fulton County Republican Party, and served on the advisory board of the Voting Integrity Project, or V.I.P.—a new group, based in Arlington, Virginia. V.I.P. called itself a nonpartisan election-reform group, but it had deep ties to the Republican Party and to the national conservative movement. One of its founders, Helen Blackwell, was married to Morton Blackwell, a former Reagan aide and the founder of the Leadership Institute, an organization that trains ultra-conservative young activists. (In 2009, one of them, the guerrilla videographer James O'Keefe, took undercover footage meant to suggest pervasive criminality at ACORN, the progressive nonprofit group, some of whose employees had pleaded guilty to voter-registration fraud. Although the footage was widely condemned as misleading, the controversy helped lead to ACORN's demise.)
V.I.P. embraced von Spakovsky's call for voter-roll purges. In 1999, the group met with and gave an award for "innovative excellence" to a company called Database Technologies, which was designing the State of Florida's procedure for scrubbing its voter rolls of felons and other ineligible people. In 2000, Database's process led, notoriously, to the erroneous disenfranchisement of thousands of voters—most of them Democrats and many of them black. Asked about this, von Spakovsky said, heatedly, "I was in Atlanta, and I had nothing to do with the company that Florida hired to clean up its election rolls."
Von Spakovsky did, however, get directly involved in the infamous recount of the Presidential vote in Florida. Serving as a volunteer observer for the campaign of George W. Bush, he spent time in Jacksonville, where black leaders protested that their voting rights had been denied, and in Palm Beach County, where twenty-eight thousand ballots went uncounted, because examiners concluded that they had not been filled out properly. According to the Palm Beach Post, nearly half of those discarded ballots came from predominantly black and elderly precincts. Von Spakovsky, for his part, recalled the drama on the ground as less than thrilling: "It was a lesson in how really boring vote counting can be."
After the recount trauma, the Bush Administration announced its crackdown on election fraud, and hired von Spakovsky as a lawyer in the Justice Department's newly invigorated voting section, which enforces the Voting Rights Act. He was soon promoted, becoming counsel to the assistant attorney general in charge of the civil-rights division.
The crackdown was infused with partisanship. In 2006, the Justice Department fired two U.S. Attorneys, in part because top Administration officials felt that they were too soft on potential Democratic voter fraud in New Mexico and Washington. In 2008, documents unearthed by an inspector general revealed that the push to prosecute had as much to do with political gain as with the pursuit of justice. Republican officials in New Mexico pressured David Iglesias, the U.S. Attorney for the state, to prosecute Democrats before the 2004 election. A lawyer for the state Republican Party wrote that the voter-I.D. "issue should be used (now) at all levels," adding, "You are not going to find a better wedge issue." But an election-fraud task force that Iglesias formed with the F.B.I. found no crimes to prosecute. Because of his failure to find fraud, the inspector general concluded, Iglesias was fired. (He is now a prosecutor in Guantánamo Bay.) John McKay, the U.S. Attorney in Washington State, was also fired after failing to find prosecutable voter fraud.
In 2006, President Bush appointed von Spakovsky to the Federal Election Commission while the Senate was in recess. When he came up for confirmation, six career lawyers in the voting section wrote a scathing letter of protest, saying that he had a "cavalier" disregard for legal precedent. They noted that a federal court had struck down Washington State's attempt to implement his recommendation that eligible citizens be kept "off the rolls for typos and other mistakes by election officials." They accused von Spakovsky of overruling their judgment that a strict voter-I.D. law in Georgia would result in substantially fewer black voters, and of using a pseudonym to publish an essay in support of voter-I.D. laws while the department was weighing the case. A judge in Georgia struck down the law, likening it to a poll tax. (After considerable modifications, the law was authorized.)
Joe Rich, the former chief of the voting section, repeatedly clashed with von Spakovsky and his allies. "I worked at the Justice Department for thirty-six years, twenty-four of them under Republican Administrations," Rich told me. "The disdain and antagonism that they had for the experience, expertise, and dedication of career civil-rights attorneys was something I had never experienced before. It was just awful."
Among the lawmakers who spoke out against von Spakovsky's appointment to the F.E.C. was Barack Obama, then a Democratic senator from Illinois. He put a hold on the confirmation, effectively blocking it. After two years in limbo, von Spakovsky withdrew his name from consideration, and joined the Heritage Foundation, where he continued to inveigh against voter fraud.
In the spring of 2008, as Obama was clinching the Democratic nomination for President, von Spakovsky issued a lengthy report on electoral fraud, titled "Stolen Identities, Stolen Votes." In an op-ed piece on the Fox News Web site, he argued that "one doesn't have to look far to find instances of fraudulent ballots cast in actual elections by 'voters' who were the figments of active imaginations." Yet the most recent evidence he cited in his report was decades old: a grand-jury report documenting criminal collusion, from 1968 to 1982, among Brooklyn election officials and local machine politicians.
Richard Hasen asked to see the grand-jury report, but von Spakovsky did not respond. ("What am I—his research assistant?" he asked me.) Hasen has another explanation for von Spakovsky's refusal to produce the document: "He must have known it was weak." Hasen eventually hunted down his own copy. On his blog, he observed, "Most of this fraud took place forty years ago," adding, "When election officials collude with those committing fraud, a voter-I.D. requirement would not help in the slightest." Asked about this, von Spakovsky said, "That's not what the grand jury said. They recommended voter I.D.s." The report recommends nine specific procedural changes to help prevent corrupt behavior by election officials, but says of voter identification only that it should be studied as one of several "possible remedies."
The election of 2008 was a milestone in terms of turnout. The percentage of African-Americans who voted (sixty-five) rivalled the percentage of whites who voted (sixty-six). Penda Hair, the co-director of the Advancement Project, a progressive voting-rights advocacy group, says that this statistic discomfited Republicans. "Conservatives were looking at it and saying, 'We've got to clamp things down,' " Hair said. "They'd always tried to suppress the black vote, but it was then that they came up with new schemes."
After Obama took office, von Spakovsky expanded his campaign for voter-I.D. laws and other ballot-security measures. One receptive forum, where he spoke repeatedly, was the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC—a conservative, corporate-funded group that drafts legislative models for thousands of state lawmakers. In 2009, after the Supreme Court upheld Indiana's voter-I.D. law, ALEC drafted a sample voter-I.D. bill for other states to copy. An accompanying essay in the organization's newsletter explained how to frame such restrictions so that they would pass muster with the courts. Copycat bills emerged in state legislatures across the country. In 2011 and 2012, Republicans proposed sixty-two such laws, in thirty-seven state legislatures. News21 has reported that more than half of these bills were sponsored by associates of ALEC. Lisa Graves, the executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, which runs a Web site called ALEC Exposed, says, "Unlike a think tank, ALEC operationalizes the agenda, nationally."
Von Spakovsky said, "The idea that there's some deep conspiracy is just laughable." His own work, however, has suggested that liberals engage in conspiracies. "Who's Counting?" opens with an insinuating account of how Al Franken, the Minnesota Democrat, was elected to the Senate in 2008. According to the book, there is "compelling" evidence, compiled by a citizens' watchdog group, that "1,099 ineligible felons voted illegally" in the contest—"more than three times" Franken's victory margin. The subhead of the chapter is "Would Obamacare have passed without voter fraud?"
Fox News and other conservative media outlets have promoted this argument. However, Mike Freeman, the Hennepin County Attorney, who oversees Minneapolis, told me, "Those numbers are fraudulent. We investigated, and at the end of the day, out of over four hundred allegations in the county, we charged thirty-eight people. Their research was bad, sloppy, incredible. They are just liars." Some of the targeted voters weren't actually felons; others were on probation and hadn't realized that they remained ineligible to vote. To be convicted of voter fraud, a suspect needs to have criminal intent.
Von Spakovsky told me, "It doesn't matter whether they"—the felons—"intended it or not. The point is they did vote." The subject of electoral fraud is now front and center in Minnesota: in November, the state will have a referendum on a state voter-I.D. law.
Von Spakovsky has also presented a more recent case as a scandal. Last year, in an op-ed piece that was nationally syndicated, he wrote, "A 2010 election in Missouri that ended in a one-vote margin of victory included 50 votes cast illegally by citizens of Somalia." He told me that these voters "could only speak Somali, even though to become a U.S. citizen you must learn English." Once again, when the case was examined by a judge, no fraud was found. Although the judge's ruling had been issued before the column appeared, von Spakovsky didn't mention it. He told me that the omission was justified, because the judge hadn't investigated "the citizenship issue." Yet the voters' citizenship was never in doubt. Translation assistance is available at the polls—citizens sometimes have shaky English—and the court had found merely that election officials had not made the voters take an oath before receiving help, as state law required. The judge determined that such a mistake "should not result in the disenfranchisement of the voters."
With legions of citizen watchdogs on the lookout for fraud, voters confused about the documents necessary to vote, and the country almost evenly divided politically, von Spakovsky is predicting that November 6th could be even more chaotic than the 2000 elections. He will play a direct role in Virginia, a swing state, where he is the vice-chairman of the electoral board of Fairfax County. Joining us at the conference table at the Heritage Foundation, John Fund, von Spakovsky's co-author, told me, "If it's close this time, I think we're going to have three or four Floridas." Von Spakovsky shook his head and said, "If we're lucky only three or four." If there are states where the number of provisional ballots cast exceeds the margin of victory, he predicts, "there will probably be horrendous fights, and litigation between the lawyers that will make the fights over hanging chads look minor by comparison." Pursing his lips, he added, "I hope it doesn't happen." But, if it does, no one will be more ready for the fight.


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I realized that we have very talented ladies in the blogging circuit and I'm not talking about makeup skills or photography flair. I'm talking about ladies who are gifted with deft fingers to handcraft works of wearable art like this colorful nest of what looks like eggs but are really skittles! Delicious looking? You bet! And no, you can't eat those skittles because they're baked from clay with no sugar added. Ha!
So who's the blogger behind this piece of handmade necklace? It's Xin of Pretty Beautiful! She started an online store based in Malaysia awhile back, selling cute and delicious looking accessories handmade from raw clay. She sent me these for X'mas and I realized she's added so many more designs to her collection since I last checked.
Besides necklaces, earrings, bracelets, bag charms, her store, Cute Little Craft, now features bookmarks and lanyards! Some of the designs are cute, others are sweet, and you have some others that are delicately handmade with rustic charm. And her prices start from RM10! International shipping is also available if you ask nicely. Go check it out already!
So the answer to my question in my title is pretty obvious. Anyway, I was wondering how Xin knew that green is my favorite color and she was so pleased that her guess was spot on. And yes, I do love that heart-shaped toggle clasp too!


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So much news passes before our collective eyes every day that we couldn't possibly cover it all. Mostly because much of it isn't worth covering! But here are a some borderline tidbits we passed on, just in case.
Psychiatrist Says Text Messages Make His Patients Happier
A psychiatrist has found that his patients reported feeling less depressed and more engaged when he sent them regular text messages. Although honestly what else are they going to say? Who's brave enough to tell off the guy who dispenses their Xanax? [Telegraph]
Image credit: Shutterstock/Marcelo Sanchez
Google Made Lots of Money
We tend to cover earnings reports for one of two reasons: a record amount of money was made, or somebody said something silly and/or interesting during the earnings call. In this case, Google made very much money but not CRAZY money, the call was boring other than a few Google+ deflections, and that's about it. But hey, enjoy all that money, guys! [Google]
New iPad 2 Slightly Better Than Old iPad 2 But Still Worse Than New New iPads
If you bought an iPad 2 recently, you'll be pleasantly surprised to find that its A5 processor was built on the same 32nm process as the new iPad's guts. As opposed to previously, when it carried a 45nm footprint. What's this mean in practice? Nothing! Not a thing. Benchmarks are essentially identical, and while you may see very slightly improved battery life it's not enough of a difference that anyone should actually care. [Cult of Mac]
Left Behind is our daily collection of chaff we didn't think was quite good enough to post on its own, and why.


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CodingJack's 3D Carousel
- Real 3D using CSS3 3D Transforms
- 3D Carousel will be shown on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, iOS and Android
- A grid style fallback will be displayed for IE (see screenshot below or test the preview in one of these browsers to view a live preview of the grid fallback)
Tablets and Phones with Touch Swipe
The carousel is supported on iOS and Android and includes touch swipe functionality. It looks great on a tablet and will even work on a smartphone. But because the carousel can appear small on smaller screens, I've included two special options for smartphones:
- Option to display a thumbnail grid instead (the "fallback" presentation)
- Option to transform the grid fallback into a responsive layout. View either preview from your phone for an example.
Customizable Options Include
- Choose to "auto spin" the carousel.
- Toggle the initial "zoom/spin" animation on and off
- Toggle the HTML5 Canvas "shine" hover effect on and off
- Choose to use image reflections
- Customize the 3D values shown in the previews
- Set the autoplay speed as well as the mouse interaction speed
- Item captions are optional
- Choose to auto-show item captions
- Hyperlinking is optional
Grid Fallback for IE
Technologies Used
- jQuery
- Jacked
- HTML5 Shiv
- Icons courtesy of Navdeep Raj
Special Notes
- CSS3 3D is still considered experimental technology by the major browsers. The settings that can be adjusted in the preview shown here demonstrate the different looks you can create. But if you wish to create a look that can't be recreated in the preview (i.e. have a carousel with 100 items, etc.), please keep in mind that we're bound by the technology's limitations, and that there is no guarantee the particular settings you wish to use will allow for a smooth carousel experience.
- Although IE10+ supports some parts of CSS3 3D, important parts that are needed for the carousel to work are not supported (specifically, transform-style: preserve-3d;). When IE10+ adds support for this I'll update the carousel. Until then all versions of IE, including IE10+ will display the fallback grid.
- The preview shown here on CodeCanyon with all the carousel controls is not included with the download source, but if for some reason you think having those controls is important for your website visitors, feel free to send me an email from my profile page and I'll send you the preview's source files.
- Images used in the preview are for demonstration purpose only and are not included in the download source
- This is NOT a WordPress Plugin


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Presidential visit
It takes a village to protect and coordinate for a Presidential trip.
Commentator Bill Emory puts up a new photo nearly every day at billemory.com/blog.
(ONLINE BONUS #1: More Bill Emory pix from around the event: here)
(ONLINE BONUS #2: Tom Daly pix from inside the event: here)Read more on: barack obama
15 comments
Complete with rooftop snipers! Great shot (so to speak), Bill!
Unfortunately this type of security is necessary with all the hate and threats being directed at him by fascist swine.
They even posted a picture of a billboard of armed SEALS saying that they removed on threat to America(bin Laden) and now they need to remove another.
In the first place, that is disrespectful and insulting to our military saying they should engage in a coup or assassination.
Though I did not support him I was just as sad and horrified when President Reagan was shot as I was when the 60s assassinations occurred.
Its fine to call for voting a President out of office, or impeaching him, but violent threats go far far beyond what is acceptable in a free society.
You want everyone to have guns you pay the cost of protecting our president.
HollowBoy, every American president has had numerous and serious threats. This is nothing new and aimed only at the Obama presidency. Security is needed for all presidents..... past, present and future.
But even so, the fact that Reagan was shot from such a close distance proves that all the security in the world doesn't seem to work very well. I hate seeing any President walking along shaking hands with people in crowds. I'm sure the Secret Service hates it too, it's probably the worst part of their job.
How much safer would the world be if only the criminals had access to guns?
Who knows who the criminals are. Well, after they use their guns we do.
@HollowBoy...To quote a great president--Ronaldus Maximus--"Well, there you go again." This delusional, self-important liberal idea that, for some reason, this president is hated more than--shall we say--Bush 43--is ridiculous. Where were you when commentators on TV actually showed a picture of our former president with a target on him?
All presidents have threats against them on a daily basis. Wherever they go, there are both overt and covert security people all over. He is--or should be--the most powerful person in the free world. (Did I just say that? Smack my knuckles for being an exceptionalist!)
Your use of the word "fascist" amuses me. That is the word most commonly used in comedy sketches when squatters are being rousted by authorities; libs use it like race merchants use the term "racist." At least the crowd there Wednesday can feel good knowing they can ride daddy's health care plan until they are approaching 30 years of age.
If anything, that photo captures the essence of the abomination that is Capshaw's ARB-Compliant Pup Tent.
R.I.P.: J. Edgar Hoover
Outstanding photo. Love the guy on the right looking right at the camera! Those guys are really trained well to notice every minor details.
A village that want to waste a lot of our tax dollars.
And have nothing but strong disapproval of those putting a target on Bush!
The difference between the anti-Obama extremists of today, and most of the 60s peace protesters(yes there some that wanted to emulate Mao and Che) is that the latter never showed up armed at their rallies. I was at a few peace rallies in those days and I know. Anyone with a gun would not have been welcomed.People believed in the message of Gandhi, King,and Baez as the way to bring about change.
And we had a sense of humor.Listen to Country Joe McDonald singing about "Superbird"(LBJ) and Tricky Dick.
Yes, many of the positions of the extreme right today do resemble fascism, the attacks on gays and feminists a prime example.The Republican conservatism today is not that of Barry Goldwater.
Perhaps though the most ludicrous attacks on Obama have been those that compared him to Hitler. A member of the Nazi movement would be insulted, seeing what they would regard as a member of an "inferior, mongrel race" being compared to their beloved Fuhrer
How could he have come on Wednesday of all days , speaking to the privileged people of Charlottesville and the privileged students of UVA , on this absolutely beautiful summer afternoon ? When there was a hurricane bearing down on the gulf coast. People were drowning, homes flooded, levees overflowing, and he wasn't there...oh ! that's right.....he's gets a pass....he's a Democrat.
@hypocrisy ... really? And what size was the party in Tampa? It didn't get postponed.
Great allocation dude you have posted there..!! Actually I enjoyed this post very much. A big thank for sharing this with us. Thanks and keep it up...
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@simply said
It was not and indictment of Obama - it was an indictment of the media and the "reality" the media makes.
@HollowBoy...Yes, silly comparisons of Obama to Hitler are uncalled for. Actually, there is a stark difference: Hitler believed in Aryan supremacy at the expense of the rest of the world; he was a strict and delusional nationalist. Obama is the polar opposite: he believes all should receive equal benefits and the his nation (the U.S.) has no exceptionalism and wants a more equal international community at the expense of our country.
As for Goldwater...yes, the party is quite different today than in 1960. However, it is clear that the Dems' party is much different than JFK's or Truman's Dems in the middle of the last century. It's funny, but if you read about Rep. versus Dem. in the late 1940s-1950s, they did have the same arguments. For example, when housing was at a shortage after WWII (the "big one," as Archie Bunker called it), Dems favored more public housing while Reps favored less government influence on home building and the supply of homes in America. Same kinds of arguments today.
I think both parties have radicalized somewhat for different issues. Like the guy on FoxTV--Napolitano--said: both parties are for big government. Dems for goodies for the lower classes so they can insure their vote; Reps for goodies for business interests.
R.I.P.: Tony Snow


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|VC@SUANPAAK Boutique Hotel and Serviced Apartment
is a fabulous location and welcoming area , only 10 minutes, walked to Chiangmai International Airport
and a couple minutes to the big shopping center. This fully furnished property includes quality amenities
and every convenience to ensure you enjoy a comfortable "home away from home"
No matter if the stay is for a night, a month or longer, there will always be an apartment to suit your requirements.
Hotel Room
One & Two Bedroom Apartment
Breakfast included : from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m.
Famous for our Salads and Noodle dishes, especially Yen-Ta-Fo, Suan Paak literally "Vegetable Garden", is a complex of Three Restaurants. The original Suan Paak Restaurant serves salads, organically grown in their Hydroponic garden, various Western dishes, and Thai dishes. There is also a Thai Restaurant, and the newer Noodle Restaurant on the premises. Whatever restaurant you end up going to, you won't miss out on the food from the other places, because you can order from all three!
|Swimming Pool
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|Clay House


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FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. -- Marshawn Powell had season highs of 21 points and 10 rebounds as Arkansas rolled to a 89-60 win over Florida A&M.
Powell, who missed all but two games last season with a torn ACL in his right knee, was 8 of 14 shooting in 22 minutes of action Tuesday. The junior had four dunks and a pair of blocks to help the Razorbacks (3-0) remain undefeated.
Rickey Scott added 13 points as five players finished in double figures for Arkansas, which held the Rattlers (0-4) scoreless for nearly seven minutes in the second half to put the game out of reach. The Razorbacks scored 32 points off 22 Florida A&M turnovers.
Reggie Lewis led the Rattlers with 15 points, while Muhammed Abdul-Aleem had 14 and Jamari Bradshaw 13.


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Backhanded Compliment
Seems the "J-Fed" moniker is now accepted practice at the Sun Times. Nice to see we helped start a trend.
And of course, the typical media slander regarding overweight cops. On the whole, we've noticed that CPD doesn't seem out of line with the general population in terms of body types. What seems to convey a sense of "overweight" is the bulletproof vests, the tons of crap carried in vest pockets, a 25 pound duty belt that pulls already shapeless polyester into a saggy mess and people using the cargo pants pockets for anything that doesn't fit in the vest.
Are we (and our readers) the only ones starting to feel this so called "fitness" spiel as a piss-poor distraction to the real problems of rampant cronyism, political favoritism and general all around unprofessionalism in the face of rising crime rates and a death spiral for morale?
Labels: media


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Our Progress
Since 2003
Mo Bros and Mo Sisters
Number of donations
Movember 2019
Funds raised
$102.9 million
Thank you to all the Mo Bros and Mo Sisters who made this possible.
Since 2003, millions of men and women worldwide have joined the men's health movement, enabling us to fund over 1,200 men's health projects. Together we're helping men live happier, healthier and longer lives.


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Thursday, September 12, 2013
Get the F*CK OUT If You Don't Like Costa Rica
The, 'Get the F*CK OUT of Costa Rica If You Don't Like It' video was one I wanted to make years ago for the sole reason I got sick of listening to 'gringos' continuously BASH Costa Rica. I know, weird right? So as these gringos would whine and cry in their beer, I'd be thinking, if you hate it so much, 'don't let the door hit you where the good Lord split you'. But I wanted to do something more than just, 'think', so I finally made a video. Anyway, I already posted this video in a few places and it's received a TON of comments, mostly positive btw, so thanx. But for some of those who didn't really get it- a couple points I'd like to clarify. First, I'm not making fun of 'old' people- listen carefully to what I say. Second, I'm not angry, it's a video for god sake, just being a little dramatic for effect and really, so what if I was, are the points valid or not? So, without further ado-
TONS of Costa Rica Tavel Info and VIDEOS on our websitc: Travel Costa Rica NOW and if you want to visit our YouTube Channel: iCostaRica24 ENjoY!
Labels: Commentary/Editorial and Rants, Expats
Get the F*CK OUT If You Don't Like Costa Rica
Commentary/Editorial and Rants|Expats|
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Denim Fabric
Denim is widely used for making your own jeans, denim jackets, skirts, shirt dresses, shirts, upholstery, cushions and accessories such as handbags. Minerva Crafts stock denim fabrics in various weights, which are suited to different projects. Our heavier weights such as the 14oz indigo denim tend to be used for upholstery, cushions, jackets, jeans and handbags. Our lighter weights such as our washed denim are used mainly for skirts, shirts and summer clothing.


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Job Information
Anthem, Inc. Health Educator in Montebello, California
SHIFT: Day Job
SCHEDULE: Full-time
Your Talent. Our Vision. At Anthem, Inc., it's a powerful combination, and the foundation upon which we're creating greater access to care for our members, value for our customers, and greater health for our communities. Join us and together we will drive the future of health care.
This is an exceptional opportunity to do innovative work that means more to you and those we serve at one of America's leading health benefits companies and a Fortune Top 50 Company.
Health Educator
Location: Remote (within 40 miles of an Anthem office location preferred)
Shift: Monday - Friday, 2:30 p.m. 11 p.m. EST, plus every 4th Saturday 11 a.m - 7:30 p..m. EST with an alternate weekday off when working Saturdays.
Your knowledge of chronic health conditions and enthusiasm for health education and wellness is just what our members are seeking! Emphasizing the importance of health and wellness among our members means healthy living as well for our employees. That's why we seek Health Education professionals who embody our commitment to living well, who share a passion to influence others and advocate healthy living. The knowledge and information our health educators provide to our members positively impacts healthy life choices, provides a sense of well-being, helps prevent chronic and/or preventable conditions, and helps them to access the numerous resources available to them.
As we add Health Educator staff for our call center's Health and Wellness telephonic Coaching Programs, we look for individuals who share in our beliefs. If you are enthusiastic about helping others live healthier lives and a rewarding career, this unique opportunity is just for you!
As a Health Educator within a call center environment, you'll be focused on:
Making enrollment calls to members who are eligible for telephonic wellness programs.
Assessing health information for members with various coaching needs that may include chronic conditions, lifestyle management, weight management, and smoking cessation.
Setting up goals and providing coaching as well as telephonic follow up calls to members to continue to work on health goals.
Encourage members to get connected to resources that are available to them through their insurance, which could include participation in additional or different coaching programs.
Here are just a few ways in which your clinical knowledge and expertise may be utilized:
Utilize motivational interviewing skills to provide health coaching for members with chronic conditions or other identified health needs.
Implementing and/or coordinating coaching care plans and discussing clinical health recommendations and preventative recommendations.
Assist with increasing participant's motivational level by addressing barriers and assessing needs.
BA/BS in appropriate field of specialization (health educator, public health, nutrition, exercise physiology, RT, SW, or other related field);
2 years of medical health coaching related experience; or any combination of education and experience, which would provide an equivalent background.
Medical Health coaching with adult population is strongly preferred.
PC skills within a windows environment are required.
Prior call center or telephonic health education/clinical coaching experience a plus.
CHES certification an added plus.
Bi-lingual English/Spanish a plus.
Anthem, Inc. is ranked as one of America's Most Admired Companies among health insurers by Fortune magazine and is a 2019 DiversityInc magazine Top 50 Company for Diversity. To learn more about our company and apply, please visit us at careers.antheminc.com. An Equal Opportunity Employer/Disability/Veteran.


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Jenina Smith, January 15th , 2019.
Dabs and gems are great increases without making a lot of a sprinkle. These come in glass, gem, precious stones, and other material also and can be included diverse territories around the hair to give a rich look. Barrettes will likewise contain globules or gems, some of the time in lovely course of action like flower designs. These adornments for the most part come in sets and are the least expensive things accessible.
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Hi guys,
if you wander what is inside of Carafino boards here are some photos, this is 4-5 year old board hoping new one are bit better.
If someone has idea what to do with this board apart of scraping it weary welcome.
How to repair and strengthen this board?


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Ixtab Ring
18 KARAT WHITE GOLD WEDDING RING with diamonds - 4608WR
Bridal Rings Company550 South Hill St. Suite 620, 6th FloorLos Angeles, CA 90013


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The competition continues to heat up in today's Male Prancersize Competition. Full bodysuiting, jazz hands, and leaping may, in fact, make this the hottest event yet. Meet your contestants:
Ryan "I Have A Shot" Purdy
strong>And Jack "I Fell At The End" Rabbit
Watch the full competition NOW:
Watch the previous Cosmolympics challenges here:
The beautiful nail-painting competition:
The fast-paced sex position drawing competition:
The blindfolded lipstick competition:
The office-wide cartwheeling competition:
The best mirror-free cat-eye competition:
The running super-fast in heels competition:
Director/Writer/Producer: Liz Lanteri
Assistant Producer: Lee Havlicek
Shooter: Kristina Carucci & Sara
Edit Coordinator: Luke Versalko
Figure Skating Costumes Courstesy of Paul Ginandes and Scott Smith.


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Five fighters are contenders for the cover of UFC Undisputed 3's cover when the game releases in January. Fans will vote on the honor, selecting from a pool of Georges St. Pierre, Cain Velasquez, Jon Jones, Anderson Silva and Frankie Edgar.
MMA fans may vote here beginning now until Sept. 30. Statements by both Danny Bilson, THQ's chief of core games, and the UFC's Dana White, said they trust voters' decisions and feel confident they've offered five of the sport's most popular fighters. Additionally, casting a vote enters you in a sweepstakes awarding tickets for future UFC events. Legal residents of all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, plus all Canadian provinces except Quebec, are eligible.
You can contact Owen Good, the author of this post, at firstname.lastname@example.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.


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Thank Goodness for Christmas
1. Thank goodness for Christmas!
It's then that we do
The nice things we should do
The busy year through
Like writing to friends,
And keeping in touch,
And helping all people
Who need friends so much.
2. Thank goodness for Christmas!
It makes us reflect
On thoughts we are sometimes
Inclined to neglect
Like peace on the earth,
And love for all men.
It's good to have Christmas
Again and again.
Text: Vanja Watkins
Music: Vanja Watkins
Artist: Watkins
Album: Music Published in the Church Magazines: New Era
Composition Date: 1977-12-01
More Info: New Era


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Bake the Book: Sambuca Kisses
Get the Recipe
"Baci" is Italian for "kiss". Flavored with Sambuca, these little baci from Nigellissima taste lightly of aniseed and orange zest. Whole-milk ricotta gives them a creaminess that's lightened when they're fried.
Tips: Let the ingredients come to room temperature before beating them together. Leave the ricotta out on the counter while assembling the rest of the ingredients, and dip the egg in a bowl of warm water for a couple minutes before cracking. It brings everything together more smoothly.
Tweaks: A vanilla bean, split and pushed into powdered sugar, makes it into vanilla powdered sugar, which would be delectable sprinkled over these kisses. Make sure to add the bean at least a few days before making the kisses.
Get the Recipe
As always with our Bake the Book feature, we have five (5) copies of Nigellissima to give away.
All products linked here have been independently selected by our editors. We may earn a commission on purchases, as described in our affiliate policy.


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Universal Orlando Resort announced that its next blockbuster attraction will be Transformers: The Ride – 3-D. The ride, created under license from Hasbro, Inc., and based on its Transformers brand, will bring the intergalactic battle between the Autobots and the Decepticons to Universal Studios Florida next summer.
Universal worked closely with Michael Bay, the director of the Transformers film series and the ride's creative consultant, to create an authentic experience that brings the non-stop action of the films to life. The attraction combines the larger-than-life Transformers characters and an exciting storyline with life-like HD CGI media, state-of-the-art 3-D technology, and special effects to place riders right in the middle of an epic battle between good and evil.
For more information about Transformers: The Ride – 3-D, visit www.prepareforbattle.com. Check out the video below for a message from Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots.


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Flash Intro
Budget $20-100 USD
Looking for someone to develop a short introduction for a company that does computer based training.
75 freelancers are bidding on average $82 for this job
I am a german flashdesigner and want to create the intro for you. I worked in an company, which developes CBTs for a half year. If you like, i can create a mook up for free, but i need more information.
Dear Sir; We have great Flash designers. They can do your job with 100% accuracy. albayessolutions
please check my work on my site [login to view URL] I have three years exp with flash so I can give u a very cool intro
Consider Leoncore Designs for this job. We'll work closely with you to deliver an exceptional and professional quality in what you're looking for. Thank you for your time.
[login to view URL] --- see through portfolio and make your decision
Bid includes entire project: Photoshop/Illustrator work, Flash programming and/or Dreamweaver/HTML work. [login to view URL]
Send me all details and you I create a professional flash intro for your co.
hello we can do this work easily fast and cheep we have done many such works once given a chance we will be more than happy to show you all our work


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Salzburg Airport is located 4km (2.5 miles) west of Salzburg city centre, and 2km (1.2 miles) east of the German border.
Innsbrucker Bundesstraße 95
5020 Salzburg
Dialling Code: +43
Telephone: (0662) 85800.
Lufthansa at the airport
Lufthansa Lounges
You can relax, take forty winks or get down to some work before your next flight in the Lufthansa and Star Alliance partner lounges at all major international airports.
To the loungefinder
How to get there
Driving Directions
Salzburg Airport has its own motorway connection on the junction of the A1 and A10, to the west of the city centre. From the city centre, head west on the B1 (Innsbrucker Bundesstrasse), which leads to the airport.
Coming from the west, travellers should take the Salzburg West A1 exit and then take the airport exit shortly thereafter.
Arriving from the south, it's best to follow the A10, turn onto the A1, and then choose the airport exit.
From the north, head southwest on the A1 and take the airport exit.
Public buses run regularly between Salzburg Airport and various destinations in the city; buses 2 and 27 run every 10/20 minutes between Salzburg's main railway station and the airport; bus 10 runs every 10 minutes between the city centre and airport (journey time: 15 minutes; fare: €2.30). These services are operated by Obus SLB (tel: (0662) 4480 1500; www.salzburg-ag.at).
A number of taxis, shuttle and ski bus services operate from the rank in front of the terminals, including Taxi Erlbacher (tel: (0) 3687 81915; www.taxi-erlbacher.at) and Taxi Jäger (tel: (0) 6453 8273; www.taxi-jaeger.at). The journey time to the city is around 15 to 20 minutes. Fares vary according to the provider.
Car Parking
There are two short-term car parks (P1 and P2) opposite the terminals. A further 1,920 spaces can be found in the long-stay multistorey car park, which is connected to Terminal 1 by a covered walkway.


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Vivian - A Revolutionary Mama, A good Daughter, A welfareQUEEN
Dedicated to Vivien, Jasmine, Zosia, Janina, Mama Dee and all us mamaz and daughters in struggle across Pachamama
"Ya know how it is, we mamaz do what we got to do." Vivian Flaherty Thorp, Xicana mama of three girls, fellow hip hop poet with the welfareQUEEN's, Poetas POBRE's of POOR Magazine, and revolutionary advocate fo all peoples, said to me with her usual San Francisco chola meets Vallejo punch the other day as she explained the loving care she provided for one of her many"clients at her job at Homeless Action Center.
The first time I met my sister in family at POOR Magazine, she was sitting quietly in our first meeting of the welfareQUEEN's at Mamahouse in 2006 – a home I had started for poor single parent women and children like myself who dealt with isolation, racism and poverty every day in Amerikkka. One of the fall-outs from the lie of capitalism which we speak on and teach on everyday at PeopleSkool (a poor people-led multi-generational, multi-lingual skool which me and mama launched at POOR Magazine)-is the cult of independence. In other words, the myth, perpetrated through media, US skkkooling and Eouro-centric therapy, that we are stronger, saner, better, happier, healthier if we are alone, doing it alone, working alone, living alone, independent and free of the "burden" of the people that brought us into this world and the people we raise and care for. This myth fits perfectly into the necessity for consumption, gentriFUKation, globalization and separation locally and globally.
There are many brutal and violent problems with this myth but one of the deadliest is that isolation kills-. For single parent families like my mama and me - it did almost kill us, until we slowly became decolonized which in turn saved our life and many more mamaz and daddys and children and elders who became part of our family at POOR, the poor people-led organization me and mama started while still houseless n in struggle.
The myth includes the idea that we should separate from our indigenous roots, our belief systems of togetherness, our physical spaces, our shared homes, our shared economies, our elders, our traditions, our medicine, our food, our languages our educations.
Me and Vivien are the daughters of strong, often angry, PTSD-wrought , colonization destroyed women of color, Our mamaz, internalize and perpetrate pain, depression and anger on their own poor bodies of color, bad-food- eating, unexercise-getting bodies. And then we, their daughters, are encouraged by the same colonizers, and Euro-centric, western belief systems who destroyed us and our indigenous ancestors, to "leave our broken families, our broken mamaz, to let go of that burden. To do activism and revolutionary work and organizing and art, for other peoples, but most of all "to go on with our lives" for own self-interests, oddly enough the same message given in the Child Protective Services (CPS) that steal children away from families in struggle rather than support the poor parents to raise their own children.
Vivien, never did, she listens to mama, cries for her mama, holds her mama and cooks for her mama, she gets put down and yelled at and accused by mama too. This is the deep struggle of love and eldership in our post-colonial, deconstructed communities
I never did either, holding my poor indigenous mama's broken body til the day she transitioned far too young, dying of heart disease directly related to the torture she suffered as an unwanted of color in Amerikkka foster homes and orphanages and subsequently bad food and poor people medicine access available to poor wombyn of color in the US, We lived together, we collaborated, we worked together, we struggled together and we decolonized together and one of the things I am the most proud of, no matter how hard it got, was that for a short moment of philanthro-pimed love I was able to create a revolutionary social work job for my fierce and brilliant mama.
These values of holding our elders, maintaining our multi-generational homes and rebuking capitalist separatist values so vehemently taught in this capitalist society are some of the things we teach and practice at POOR Magazine's PeopleSkool to our young people raising up in the 21st century reality filled with the propaganda of US media, racist and classist laws against poor and disabled children and families and communities
Vivien is a fierce single mama with three beautiful daughters who began her youth as a singer with a powerful 80's rock/ska band, and has since struggled to raise her babies through houselessness, domestic violence and welfare scarcity models. Vivien fought those scarcity models, like my mama Dee did, by any means necessary so she could acquire a degree (the paper) from a formal institution of learning and eventually work to give back to her community in full force as she does now at the Homeless Action Center in Oakland, while still contributing her love and time and art and poverty skolarship with all of us skolaz in residence at POOR Magazine/Prensa POBRE and our newest revolution of HOMEFULNESS.
Vivien is a powerful mama, an amazing auntie, a deep and strong sister and a very good daughter, Together Vivien and I and all us welfareQUEEN's and caregivers in struggle tryin to survive and resist Capitalist lies are teaching ourselves back what was stolen from us. It isn't easy. Inter-Dependence Never is.
Is Vivian. She is an inspiration to all of here, and helps me remember why we do this work. Happy mothers day!


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Like a lot of people, I learned about relationships at a young age by watching movies and TV shows. Only now in my adult life do I realize how much influence Cheers and Woody Allen and L.A. Story had on me: They helped to create a sense that love was this melancholy thing that rarely lasted, no matter how hard you tried. Before I was in any relationships myself, this warped impression of romance was imprinted on my brain. For a long time after, I was following a self-fulfilling prophecy: Sam and Diane didn't end up together, Woody rarely got the girl, so what chance did I have?
Whether it's Casablanca or Sleepless in Seattle, films tell us about how relationships work. Most of them either promise that love can fix everything or celebrate unrequited love as the purest, most powerful emotion of all. No matter how the story ends, it's not a lot of help as dating advice.
This weekend, we get The Lucky One and Think Like a Man. From different angles, both are ostensibly going after the date-night crowd, and they're prime examples of how terrible Hollywood is at offering a how-to guide to relationships. Forget searching for your true love: After watching these two films, you may want to give up on talking to people altogether.
The Lucky One, as you probably know, is the most recent movie based on a Nicholas Sparks book. He's basically got two plots: Old people fall in love (Nights in Rodanthe, Message in a Bottle) or young people fall in love (The Notebook, Dear John). The Lucky One is in the latter category. The Male Young Person is a former Marine (Zac Efron) who while in Iraq found a photograph of a beautiful woman that he believes kept him safe during battle. When he gets home, he decides he has to find this Female Young Person. Because this is a Sparks movie, the guy's obsession isn't creepy like it would be if it happened in real life. It's Zac Efron: He's dreamy.
Just like all romantics do, Efron journeys on foot to find this woman, played by Taylor Schilling. But once he tracks her down, he feels too weird about why he's come to see her, so he tells some lies and ends up working alongside her at her kennel. And so the idiot plot goes into effect and we sit around waiting for her to figure out what we in the audience already know: The photo of her had been carried by her brother, a Marine, who died in Iraq.
People who eat up stuff like The Lucky One will say that it's harmless, sappy fun and that you shouldn't take it too seriously. Which would be fine if The Lucky One didn't take everything it does very seriously. Efron and Schilling don't simply fall in love—they are joined together by fate. This is what happens in Sparks's movies.
Romantic dramas have always depended on destiny and coincidence; if Ilsa doesn't happen to walk into Rick's cafe that night, Casablanca is a movie about a solitary guy who cracks wise and looks good in a suit. But movies like The Lucky One try to elevate their stakes by making it seem like these plot points are the harmonies of the cosmos. Trust me, nothing cosmic goes on in The Lucky One: It's simply a story about The Nicest Guy Ever courting The Nicest Gal Ever while hiding The Dumbest Secret Ever from her. In the world of The Lucky One, love doesn't just mean never having to say you're sorry—really, it means never having to do anything. Fate will take care of it all. (Still, as a helpful hint, you definitely want to make nice with the woman's adorable son. It shows how sensitive you are.)
So you think to yourself, "Screw movies like The Lucky One. I'm not falling for those moldy romantic cliches. I want a film that explores the cynical underside of dating in the 21st century." What a strange thing to think to yourself! But you are in luck, because that's precisely what Think Like a Man is offering. Where The Lucky One is all about old-school sappiness, Think Like a Man is the sort of sourness that's meant to be the antidote.
Think Like a Man is based on a book as well: Steve Harvey's Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man. I haven't read Harvey's nonfiction advice book, but after seeing the movie I don't need to, because Harvey helpfully shows up on camera to recite passages directly to the audience. Essentially, Harvey's philosophy is that women need to realize that men are dogs. Once women have figured this out, they can use Harvey's book to beat them at their own game. So the film follows a bunch of young ladies as they read his book and conquer the men in their lives, who in turn read his book secretly so they can figure out how to get back at them.
OK, sure, Preston Sturges, Woody Allen, and Albert Brooks all had a field day with gender differences. But knowing banter between the sexes has given way to depictions of open warfare. In Failure to Launch, Sarah Jessica Parker was hired to get Matthew McConaughey to fall in love with her so that he'd move out of his parents' place. In The Ugly Truth Gerard Butler and Katherine Heigl spend the entire movie bickering at each other to convince us that, deep down inside, they're in love. To find your soul mate in this day and age, it helps if you can't stand or trust the person. Otherwise, you're just a sucker.
So where The Lucky One tells us that people are basically decent and nice—except for your ex-husband, who's a total jerk all the time—Think Like a Man argues that the dating world is made up entirely of horrible human beings. Over at Jezebel, author Chloe Angyal argued this week that modern-day romantic comedies teach women the false lesson that love can help transform a misogynist into a gentleman. I don't think that's entirely right. The hip, "sassy" contemporary rom-com basically lets everybody in the theater know that his or her date has a secret agenda and that the only way to keep her or him in line is by manipulating or outsmarting the other party. True love doesn't redeem anyone, because true love doesn't exist. You fool (or wear down) your significant other until he or she submits.
(You may have noticed I'm only talking about opposite-sex relationships in movies. As far as mainstream Hollywood films are concerned, gay relationships—if they appear at all—are usually portrayed as either being "adorable" or "bitchy." Very progressive of them.)
I'm not under any delusion that romantic movies from my younger years were much better than what we've got now. Now happily married for almost six years, I see few movies that capture the complexity of a real relationship. So I'm not that annoyed that romantic movies like The Lucky One and Think Like a Man are somehow "inaccurate." They're movies. But I'm depressed by how bleak a portrait they paint. If you go to both this weekend, you'll learn that your love will last only if fate wants it to last. Good luck! But if your relationship does fizzle, don't worry: It was your manipulative partner's fault. Love is a battlefield? Hollywood love looks more like a suicide mission.
Grierson & Leitch is a regular column about the movies. Follow us on Twitter, @griersonleitch. Top image by Jim Cooke.


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My project is ArcGis extension, which uses a specific set of tables and feature classes. I want that this structure to behave like single geodatabase object, so user cannot delete part of it's schema. In ArcGis this functionality is present in Cadastral Fabric. It contains several feature classes and tables that are not visible to user. This is clearly seen in "New Relationship Class dialog".
What ArcObjects interfaces/Workspace extensions do I need to implement to achive such behavior?


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Photosynthesis (Botany)
photosynthesisfō˝tōsĭn´thəsĭs [key], process in which green plants, algae, and cyanobacteria utilize the energy of sunlight to manufacture carbohydrates from carbon dioxide and water in the presence of chlorophyll. Some of the plants that lack chlorophyll, e.g., the Indian pipe, secure their nutrients from organic material, as do animals, and a few bacteria manufacture their own carbohydrates with hydrogen and energy obtained from inorganic compounds (e.g., hydrogen sulfide) in a process called chemosynthesis. However, the vast majority of plants contain chlorophyll—concentrated, in the higher land plants, in the leaves.
In these plants water is absorbed by the roots and carried to the leaves by the xylem, and carbon dioxide is obtained from air that enters the leaves through the stomata and diffuses to the cells containing chlorophyll. The green pigment chlorophyll is uniquely capable of converting the active energy of light into a latent form that can be stored (in food) and used when needed.
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The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
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