Free Republic

Hydroelectric reservoir burst, 4 cities isolated in China! The 200 m crack engulfed everything A state of emergency was declared when a dike crack at China's second largest freshwater lake, Dongting Lake in Huarong County, central China's Hunan Province, caused an emergency evacuation

"We are ready to fly."It was June 24, and William W. Parsons, NASA's shuttle program manager, was speaking to reporters on a telephone conference call from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla. Two and a half years of study and struggle, he told them, were over at long last. The shuttle Discovery could blast off in July. At a closed-door meeting that afternoon, senior shuttle managers had ruled that the chances that debris from the giant external fuel tank would strike the Discovery at liftoff - in the kind of accident that doomed the Columbia and its seven...

As we've mentioned before, hundreds of people in King County have registered to vote giving their "permanent residence" at an address where they obviously don't live. In addition to bona fide homeless people who are permitted by agency rules to register at government buildings, we also find people who own and live in real homes who have registered at government buildings, and hundreds of people who have registered at private mailbox services and storage rental facilities. Many of these people voted absentee from out-of-state and overseas addresses. Their standing to vote in Washington State is highly questionable. State law clearly...

King County is still unable to provide conclusive information to validate their vote count. The voter file, which I obtained earlier today, contains the names of only 895,660 voters recorded as voting on Nov. 2, a significant discrepancy from its hand recount certified total of 899,199. The Elections Office informed me that they're still doing "quality control" and adding in the names of some of the absentee voters. Even that wouldn't explain the entire discrepancy, as there appear to be discrepancies with the polling place and provisional vote counts as well. I've asked the Elections Office for further clarification and...

Add this to the list of King County voter irregularities. Hundreds of "Seattle voters" list as their residence address various private mailbox services and storage rental facilities. This would seem to be inconsistent with the state's legal definition of residence for voting purposes. A spokesperson for the Secretary of State's office seemed surprised to learn about the large number of mailbox and storage locker registrations. She initially suggested the explanation that these are mailing addresses. They are not. All of these voters are precincted at such addresses, and many have alternate mailing addresses, some of which are in other states...

Garbage In, Garbage Out One of the (many) reasons to set aside our tainted gubernatorial race is because King Ukraine County's voter information database is full of garbage. Leaving aside the thousands of questionable registrations that we'll continue to document, the database simply has so many errors in it that it would be folly to trust the county's data processing capabilities to give us the correct answer when the tolerance for error is as tight as it is in this race. The following example is not by itself a show-stopping smoking gun, but it is illustrative of the mess to...

FILE urges Ashcroft to rein in California Issue 167: September 23, 2003 +== TIME-OUT PROJECT ==+ Friends of Immigration Law Enforcement (FILE <http://fileus.com> ) is urging the U.S. Justice Department to challenge a new California law that will allow illegal aliens to obtain official California driver's licenses. In a September 23 letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft, FILE argues that the new law is in conflict with federal immigration law, and is therefore unconstitutional. Under Federal law, it is illegal to encourage a foreign national to reside illegally in the United States. The courts have held that "encouraging" includes actions...

Remember the Pentagon's $600 hammer? Its $1,000 toilet seat? Those 1983 revelations of profiligate defense spending touched off months of hearings and recriminations. Almost overlooked amid the hubbub was the man who started it all -- an unassuming Iowa farmer named Charles Ernest Grassley. Until the Pentagon follies, no one paid the junior senator from the Hawkeye State much notice. Nor did anyone have great expectations for this Republican who was labeled an Iowa bumpkin destined for a single term. But don't underestimate Grassley. Since acting on whistleblower complaints about defense spending 20 years ago, Grassley has taken on fraud...

I have a preventative for West Nile Virus, but repeated calls to the Center for Disease Control, the National Istitute of Health and the HHs are all in vain. I can find no one interested in the vast government burro-ocracies who is interested. Anyone got any ideas on how to get our stoooooooooooopid government to listen?