Thursday 10-28-10

More political Junk, another surprise voter fraud, unbelievable lol



Nevada voting machines automatically checking Harry Reid's name; voting machine technicians are SEIU membersBy: Mark Hemingway
Commentary Staff Writer
10/26/10 6:12 PM EDT
Clark County is where three quarters of Nevada's residents and live and where Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's son Rory is a county commissioner. Rory is also a Democratic candidate for governor.

Since early voting started, there have been credible reports that voting machines in Clark County, Nevada are automatically checking Harry Reid's name on the ballot:

Voter Joyce Ferrara said when they went to vote for Republican Sharron Angle, her Democratic opponent, Sen. Harry Reid's name was already checked.

Ferrara said she wasn't alone in her voting experience. She said her husband and several others voting at the same time all had the same thing happen.

"Something's not right," Ferrara said. "One person that's a fluke. Two, that's strange. But several within a five minute period of time -- that's wrong."

Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax said there is no voter fraud, although the issues do come up because the touch-screens are sensitive. For that reason, a person may not want to have their fingers linger too long on the screen after they make a selection at any time.

Now there's absolutely no independently verified evidence of chicanery with the voting machines (yet), but it is worth noting that the voting machine technicians in Clark County are members of the Service Employees International Union. The SEIU spent $63 million in elections in 2008 and is planning on spending $44 million more this election cycle -- nearly all of that on Democrats. White House political director Patrick Gaspard is formerly the SEIU's top lobbyist, and former SEIU president Andy Stern was the most frequent visitor to the White House last year.

Just in Nevada, the SEIU has given a lot to groups that are heavily vested in the state -- in just one prominent example, the SEIU gave $500,000 to the Patriot Majority PAC, which has spent $1.3 million against Reid's opponent Sharron Angle. They've and have dropped large sums directly on candidates:

NV-3
Joe Heck (R)
Oppose
$140,000.00

NV-3
Dina Titus (D)
Support
$344,984.00

NV-Senate
Sharron E. Angle (R)
Oppose
$225,000.00


Now the county voting technicians aren't unique here -- many of Clark County's employees are also represented by the SEIU. But it is worth mentioning, the SEIU is hyperpoliticized and has seen its fair share of corruption. (It certainly seems more questionable than Diebold, the voting machine manufacturer with Republican ties that was at the center of many conspiracy theories on the left during the Bush administration.)

Unions increasingly have a major financial stake in election outcomes, both as a matter of their own election expenditures, and as a function of what they stand to gain if their legislative agenda is enacted. Should they really be responsible for tabulating the votes? That's certainly something voters ought to think long and hard about.

Below is Clark County's SEIU contract -- On Page 75, in Appendix A, voting machine technicians are listed as positions represented by SEIU.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Voting-machines-in-Clark-County-Nevada-automatically-checking-Harry-Reids-name-Voting-machine-technicians-are-members-of-SEIU-105815608.html

Electromagnetic pulse impact far and wide One EMP burst and the world goes dark
The sky erupts. Cities darken, food spoils and homes fall silent. Civilization collapses.
End-of-the-world novel? A video game? Or could such a scenario loom in America's future?

There is talk of catastrophe ahead, depending on whom you believe, because of the threat of an electromagnetic pulse triggered by either a supersized solar storm or terrorist A-bomb, both capable of disabling the electric grid that powers modern life.

Electromagnetic pulses (EMP) are oversized outbursts of atmospheric electricity. Whether powered by geomagnetic storms or by nuclear blasts, their resultant intense magnetic fields can induce ground currents strong enough to burn out power lines and electrical equipment across state lines.

The threat has even become political fodder, drawing warnings from former House speaker Newt Gingrich, a likely presidential contender.

"We are not today hardened against this," he told a Heritage Foundation audience last year. "It is an enormous catastrophic threat."

Meanwhile, in Congress, a "Grid Act" bill aimed at the threat awaits Senate action, having passed in the House of Representatives.

Fear is evident. With the sun's 11-year solar cycle ramping up for its stormy maximum in 2012, and nuclear concerns swirling about Iran and North Korea, a drumbeat of reports and blue-ribbon panels center on electromagnetic pulse scenarios.

"We're taking this seriously," says Ed Legge of the Edison Electric Institute in Washington, which represents utilities. He points to a North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC) report in June, conducted with the Energy Department, that found pulse threats to the grid "may be much greater than anticipated."

There are "some important reasons for concern," says physicist Yousaf Butt of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. "But there is also a lot of fluff."

At risk are the more than 200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines that cross North America, supplying 1,800 utilities the power for TVs, lights, refrigerators and air conditioners in homes, and for the businesses, hospitals and police stations that take care of us all.

"The electric grid's vulnerability to cyber and to other attacks is one of the single greatest threats to our national security," Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said in June as he introduced the bill to the House of Representatives.

Markey and others point to the August 2003 blackout that struck states from Michigan to Massachusetts, and southeastern Canada, as a sign of the grid's vulnerability. Triggered by high-voltage lines stretched by heat until they sagged onto overgrown tree branches, the two-day blackout shut down 100 power plants, cut juice to about 55 million people and cost $6 billion, says the 2004 U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force.

Despite the costs, most of them from lost work, a National Center for Environmental Health report in 2005 found "minimal" death or injuries tied directly to the 2003 blackout — a few people died in carbon monoxide poisonings as a result of generators running in their homes or from fires started from candles. But the effects were pervasive: Television and radio stations went off the air in Detroit, traffic lights and train lines stopped running in New York, turning Manhattan into the world's largest pedestrian mall, and water had to be boiled after water mains lost pressure in Cleveland.

Simple physics, big worry

The electromagnetic pulse threat is a function of simple physics: Electromagnetic pulses and geomagnetic storms can alter Earth's magnetic field. Changing magnetic fields in the atmosphere, in turn, can trigger surging currents in power lines.

"It is a well-understood phenomenon," says Butt, who this year reviewed geomagnetic and nuke blast worries in The Space Review.

Two historic incidents often figure in the discussion:

• On July 9, 1962, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Defense Atomic Support Agency detonated the Starfish Prime, a 1.4-megaton H-bomb test at an altitude of 250 miles, some 900 miles southwest of Hawaii over the Pacific Ocean. The pulse shorted out streetlights in Oahu.

• On March 9, 1989, the sun spat a million-mile-wide blast of high-temperature charged solar gas straight at the Earth. The "coronal mass ejection" struck the planet three days later, triggering a geomagnetic storm that made the northern lights visible in Texas. The storm also induced currents in Quebec's power grid that knocked out power for 6 million people in Canada and the USA for at least nine hours.

"A lot of the questions are what steps does it make sense to take," Legge says. "We could effectively gold-plate every component in the system, but the cost would mean that people can't afford the rates that would result to pay for it."

"The high-altitude nuclear-weapon-generated electromagnetic pulse is one of a small number of threats that has the potential to hold our society seriously at risk," concluded a 2008 EMP Commission report headed by William Graham, a former science adviser to President Reagan.

The terror effect

In the nuclear scenario, the detonation of an atomic bomb anywhere from 25 to 500 miles high electrifies, or ionizes, the atmosphere about 25 miles up, triggering a series of electromagnetic pulses. The pulse's reach varies with the size of the bomb, the height of its blast and design.

Gingrich last year cited the EMP Commission report in warning, "One weapon of this kind that went off over Omaha would eliminate most of the electrical production in the United States."

But some take issue with that.

"You would really need something the size of a Soviet H-bomb to have effects that cross many states," Butt says. The massive Starfish Prime blast, he notes, was at least 70 times more powerful than the atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima in 1945, and it may have blown out streetlights but it left the grid in Hawaii intact.

One complication for rogue nations or terrorists contemplating a high-altitude nuclear blast is that such an attack requires a missile to take the weapon at least 25 miles high to trigger the electromagnetic pulse. For nations, such a launch would invite massive nuclear retaliation from the USA's current stockpile of 5,000 warheads, many of them riding in submarines far from any pulse effects.

Any nation giving a terror group an atomic weapon and missile would face retaliation, Butt and others note, as nuclear forensics capabilities at the U.S. national labs would quickly trace the origins of the bomb, Butt says. "It would be suicide."

Super solar storm

On the solar front, the big fear is a solar super storm, a large, fast, coronal mass ejection with a magnetic field that lines up with an orientation perfectly opposite the Earth's own magnetic field, says solar physicist Bruce Tsurutani of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Tsuritani and other solar physicists view such an event as inevitable in the next 10 to 100 years.

"It has to be the perfect storm," Tsuratani says.

"We are almost guaranteed a very large solar storm at some point, but we are talking about a risk over decades," Butt says. Three power grids gird the continental U.S. — one crossing 39 Eastern states, one for 11 Western states and one for Texas.

Solutions?

In June, national security analyst Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists described congressional debate over power-grid security as "a somewhat jarring mix of prudent anticipation and extravagant doomsday warnings."

Although the physics underlying the geomagnetic and nuclear pulses are fundamentally the same, they have different solutions. A geomagnetic storm essentially produces a long-building surge dangerous to power lines and large transformers. A nuclear blast produces three waves of pulses.

Limiting the risk from the geomagnetic-storm-type threat involves stockpiling large transformers and installing dampers, essentially lightning rods, to dump surges into the ground from the grid. Even if such steps cost billions, the numbers come out looking reasonable compared with the $119 billion that a 2005 Electric Power Research Institute report estimated was the total nationwide cost of normal blackouts every year.

"EMP is one of a small number of threats that can hold our society at risk of catastrophic consequences," Graham testified to a congressional committee last year, endorsing such mitigation steps.

Stephen Younger, former head of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, last year argued against the catastrophic scenarios in his book, The Bomb, suggesting the effects of a pulse would be more random, temporary and limited than Graham and others suggest.

The June NERC report essentially calls for more study of the problem, warning of excessive costs to harden too much equipment against the nuclear risk. "If there are nuclear bombs exploding, we have lots of really, really big problems besides the power grid," Legge says.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2010-10-26-emp_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip

Does this suprise anyone? It will be tied to the shooting of the Marine Corp recurting station, recently. It will not surprise me when it is tied back to a wantabee Muslim also. Just like the Beltway snipers.

FBI: Pentagon, museum shootings linked to same gun
WASHINGTON - Shots fired at both the Pentagon and Museum of the Marine Corps came from the same weapon, the FBI says.
The agency also is looking into whether another shooting Monday night at a Marine Corps recruiting station in a storefront off Lee Highway in Chantilly, Va. is related.

Marines who work there discovered the shooting Tuesday morning, the FBI said. Investigators are conducting ballistics tests to determine whether the recruiting station shooting is related to the previous incidents.

Investigators were at the station "trying to link anything they can to what has already been proven," FBI spokeswoman Lindsay Godwin said.

The station was unoccupied and under renovation. Like the other two shooting sites, it is near a major roadway.

No one was injured in each of the incidents. FBI officials say they will not be releasing the type of gun used or the caliber of the ammunition in the incidents "to preserve the integrity of investigative efforts."

Steven Calvery, director of the civilian Pentagon Force Protection Agency, has said the gun used in the Pentagon shooting likely was a high-velocity rifle.

Security at the Pentagon has not been elevated since news of the latest shooting. Though all three shootings have targeted offices with links to the military, Godwin said the FBI has not issued any specific advisories or warnings to recruiting stations or other military buildings.

Calvery initially described the Pentagon incident as "a random event." Tuesday, Pentagon protection agency spokesman Chris Layman said that initial description was preliminary, though officials still don't believe there is a specific threat against the Pentagon.

"We are still trying to pursue as many leads as possible," Layman said, adding that he did not have any details on the type of gun used.

Calvery told reporters that a number of his officers reported hearing five to seven shots fired at about 4:55 a.m. Oct. 19 near the south parking lot of the Pentagon, which faces I-395.

A search of the structure found fragments of two bullets still embedded in two windows on the third and fourth floors. The bullets had shattered but did not penetrate the windows, which were part of unoccupied offices that are being renovated.

Bullet holes also were discovered in windows at the museum, which is associated with the Quantico Marine Base about 30 miles south of the Pentagon.

A cleaning crew at the museum called police when they noticed the holes in a part of the building that faces Interstate 95.

A spokeswoman for the museum said it appeared to have been hit by at least 10 rounds -- five that struck glass and five marks on metal panels. Not all the bullets penetrated the glass, she said.

The museum did not receive any kind of threatening communication or messages before discovering the bullet scars. None of the museum's artifacts was hit.

In early March, a gunman opened fire at a Pentagon security checkpoint, wounding two police officers. John Patrick Bedell, 36, of Hollister, Calif., was shot by police and died hours later.

Anyone with information about the recent incidents can call Crime Solvers at (866) 411-8477 or text "TIP187" plus a message to CRIMES/274637.

http://wtop.com/?nid=25&sid=2094292

Pentagon: Equipment outage at Wyo. nuke site
WASHINGTON (AP) - An equipment failure disrupted communication between 50 nuclear missiles and the launch control center at Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming over the weekend, although the Air Force never lost the ability to launch the missiles.

Air Force spokesman Lt. Col. Todd Vician said the break occurred early Saturday and lasted less than one hour. The White House was briefed about the failure Tuesday morning.

There was no evidence of foul play, officials said Tuesday.

The Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles are part of the 319th Missile Squadron stockpiled at Warren Air Force Base near Cheyenne, where 150 ICBMs are located. The failure affected 50 of them, or one-ninth of the U.S. arsenal. ICBMs at Air Force bases in Montana and North Dakota were not affected.

The equipment failure disrupted "communication between the control center and the missiles, but during that time they were still able to monitor the security of the affected missiles," Vician said. "The missiles were always protected. We have multiple redundancies and security features, and control features."

The launch control center computers communicate through an underground cable, but Vician could not confirm the cable was the source of the problem.

Vician said base personnel inspected all 50 missile sites and found no evidence of damage.

One military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the incident publicly, said the equipment in the launch control center has been the subject of unspecified communications problems in the past.

The White House referred questions to the Pentagon.

The failure was first reported by The Atlantic on the magazine's website.

The communications failure is the latest in a series of nuclear mishaps that have plagued the Air Force in recent years.

In August 2007, an Air Force B-52 bomber was mistakenly armed with six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles and flown from Minot Air Force Base, N.D., to Barksdale Air Force Base, La. At the time, the pilot and crew were unaware they had nuclear arms aboard.

Then, in March 2008, the Pentagon disclosed the mistaken shipment to Taiwan of four electrical fuses for ballistic missile warheads and launched a broad investigation into the military's handling of nuclear related materials.

An internal report asserted that slippage in the Air Force's nuclear standards was a problem that has been identified but not effectively addressed for more than a decade. Those findings led to Defense Secretary Robert Gates' decision to fire Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne and Gen. Michael Moseley, the Air Force chief of staff.

http://www.wtop.com/?nid=116&sid=2094898