JACKSON, Miss. — Entergy officials have determined what caused three high-tension power lines to fall onto Interstate 20 on Friday, which closed the interstate for most of the day.

“A guy wire failed at the anchor rod in the ground,” Entergy spokeswoman Mara Hartmann said. “When it failed it broke and as it was under high tension, that caused a pole to snap. The part of the pole that snapped fell and broke another pole causing the high tension lines to sag over the highway. The line was hanging over the highway but was not low enough to touch cars or trucks but probably would have snagged on an 18-wheeler.”

http://www.wapt.com/news/18942…

Conservative “intellectual” John McLaughry on same-sex marriage this morning:

Marriage serves at least three important social functions: procreation and child rearing, mutual care and assistance, and reining in young males with raging hormones by linking approved sex to a serious and long-lasting social commitment.

It’s so hard to debate with people when they don’t even pretend to think, let alone think critically.

(We were raising some eyebrows at the numbers ourselves back a bit… – promoted by odum)

A question by an unnamed Vermont state official at an ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) implementation conference has  Earl Devaney* Chairman of the Recovery Act Transparency and Accountability Board questioning job estimates. Devaney said: “This whole thing has got me very nervous.”

*(Devaney was the former inspector general at the Interior Department, he helped unearth the Jack Abramoff scandal)

According to a press pool report from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Implementation Conference, an unnamed state official from Vermont asked if state job numbers on the recovery.gov Web site were made up.

Devaney, according to the pool report, pointed to the difficulty of defining a saved or created job.

“We need to all be playing off the same sheet of music,” Devaney went on. “If I’m going to be held accountable for this Web site, and there’s a graph in there that talks about jobs created or saved, it’s going to be as accurate as I can get it.”

Devaney, according to the pool report, pointed to the difficulty of defining a saved or created job.

And if anyone knows who the Green Mountain stater who asked the original question was,we would love to know .

http://www.propublica.org/ion/…

CAUTION: simple math with no fancy interpretations presented below!

(Unfortunately I still have to refer back to this site for numbers. My problem isn’t with their numbers, but the faulty, deliberately so I believe, interpretations made about the numbers.)

There is one caveat: I can’t account for every vote in my totals below. For example, if somebody had listed Kiss below 3rd ranking, I’d have no way to know. I also have no idea how many folks had somebody other than Kiss, Montrol or Wright as their first choice and also listed Kiss anywhere down ballot. I looked on the Burlington web site and couldn’t find any official breakdown. It should be noted that any ballots I can’t include would only increase the approval numbers I demonstrate below … thus at worst I underestimate the level of support for the final outcome.

These numbers seem to be the accepted official vote tallies for Burlington’s recent mayoral election:

Below seem to be the accepted count for those who voted for Kiss, Montrol or Wright as their first choice:

Add up all the ballots that have Kiss’ name on them … doesn’t matter where. Simplest interpretation is just about everybody with that name on the ballot will be okay to happy with Kiss as mayor.

I come up with 7,089 ballots that had Kiss’ name listed on them. In the last round of counting there were 8,374 ballots counted.

The simplest explanation for the above numbers: about 85% of the ballots cast in the final runoff round are fine with Bob Kiss being mayor! In total? 79% of all the ballots initially cast in the mayoral election listed Kiss as one of the preferences.

So take your pick … 85% or 79% approval of the outcome … it was a great day for Burlington and a huge success for instant runoff voting.

The only anomaly is folks using faulty interpretations of data in an attempt to thwart the election process that delivered what Burlington’s voters so obviously wanted.

There’s a nice little report from the Vermont Freedom to Marry Task Force.  

I strongly suggest everyone go and read the summary, but I’m writing with a whole other idea.  I think we might have a way to both address civil rights and save Vermont’s economy.  One paragraph from the summary struck me:

Brian Pearl, a vocal opponent of the freedom to marry from Grand Isle, testified graphically about sexual acts.

Is anyone else thinking that Vermont’s best bet is to start an internet pornography business?

Crossposted at P U L S E.

On March 16, 2003, I was a graduate student at the School for International Training in Brattleboro, VT. That morning I recall hearing on Democracy Now! that an Evergreen State College student was run over by an Israeli bulldozer. The girl’s name was Rachel Corrie.

Corrie was defending property belonging to Samir Nasrallah, a local pharmacist. Eyewitness accounts say the bulldozer ran over Corrie twice. The driver claims he didn’t know Corrie was there… That’s pure rubbish. We all know it was deliberate.

I remember going to my Assessment & Evaluation class that day knowing the news. Yet what I remember most were the reactions of two friends and classmates of mine, both of whom went to Evergreen State College with Rachel. Neither of them came to class that day. One wrote an impassioned e-mail to all my classmates about Rachel and the wonderful life she lived. The other was in our on-campus coffee shop. I will never forget her not crying but “wailing” upon hearing the news that Corrie was killed. That memory will forever haunt me.

The following interview was conducted on March 14, 2003… two days before Rachel Corrie was killed. As today marks the sixth memorial of Rachel’s death, I want to play back this YouTube so you can hear Rachel’s words and understand the oppression Palestinians experience on a day-to-day basis. It prides me that there are Americans out there who believe the Israeli occupation is an occupation of violence. We will never forget you Rachel!